By Deborah Schoeneman

March 11, 2001 | 7:00 p.m

On Feb. 26, at 7 p.m., Jill Kopelman stepped out of a

chauffeured Mercedes station wagon at the School of American Ballet at Lincoln Center, where a black-tie awards dinner was honoring legendary ballerina Maria Tallchief and Richard S. Braddock, chairmanof Priceline.com. Ms. Kopelman, 26, and her mother, Coco, were there as longtime S.A.B. supporters, their matching Chanel bags and diamond Chanel rings flashing as they shook hands with friends in the receiving line. But tonight, Ms. Kopelman was also there to work. She was using the dull family outing-enlivened only by the presence of Chelsea Clinton-as fodder for her new column, "Eye Spy: The Whirlwind Diary of a Social Scribe," on Style.com, the joint Web site of Vogue and W that draws 11 million bored Condé Nast assistants, gossipy fashion addicts and Elisabeth Kieselstein-Cord stalkers to its pages each month. Ms. Kopelman's bimonthly column, which was launched in December and will go weekly this spring, is being billed as the Hilton-sisters-era answer to "Suzy," W magazine's high-society chronicle that has been written by Aileen Mehle since 1991.While Ms. Mehle, a society pet who once dated Frank Sinatra, goes out regularly to detail the social migrations of the rich and thin, Ms. Kopelman, the daughter of Chanel president Arie Kopelman, writes about how much she'd rather be under her duvet, inserting the boldfaced names of acquaintances between accounts of what she just scored from the hors d'oeuvres tray. In November, when Ms. Kopelman landed her job, editors at W nicknamed her "Little Suzy." But the seventysomething original, who has been writing under her pseudonym since 1951, didn't find the reference so amusing. So Suzy 2.0 was named after Ms. Mehle's "Eye" column in Women's Wear Daily. When called for a comment about Ms. Kopelman, Ms. Mehle said, "I'm not online," and hung up. Perhaps Ms. Mehle is miffed that anyone-let alone the daughter of a couple that appears regularly in her column-is being groomed as her heir. Then again, these days it's the offspring of society staples that are getting the most ink-or online hits-as they misbehave at corporate-sponsored events. Ms. Mehle endeared herself to her subjects by reporting on a dinner party's menu rather than the hosts' pending divorce. "People felt safe with her," said Dominick Dunne, who has known Ms. Mehle for decades. "She's part of it, but she's not part of it at the same time. The 'not' part of her is the writer of it all." Ms. Kopelman is a part of society, but she'd rather not be. The "not" part-plus her knack for social observation, teen-mag-inflected writing and a personality that's more Woody Allen than Beth Rudin de Woody-makes her an unusual yet almost logical choice as Little Suzy. "No one could ever replace Aileen Mehle," said Ms. Kopelman, who added that her column and Suzy's don't really overlap. "I'm covering a different scene; I try to mix in a drag show in the Village with something that's happening at the Frick. I don't feel at all that I'm stepping on her toes." Though she was born with gold interlocking C's in her mouth, Ms. Kopelman doesn't want readers to know it. Her column comes off as being written by the goofy girl lurking in the corner, amazed by the stupidity she's forced to endure. She may have been skimming the society pages of Vogue , Harper's Bazaar and Women's Wear Daily when she was in first grade, attending Spence with Gwyneth Paltrow (she helped fix Ms. Paltrow up with her godbrother, ketchup heir Chris Heinz, last summer) and spending spring breaks in the front row of the Chanel shows in Paris, but she goes to great lengths to differentiate herself. Rather than join Equinox, she walks from her East 76th Street apartment to Brooklyn to "touch Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe's gate" while listening to Howard Stern. Instead of borrowing a Burberry gown for the recent Tartan Ball at the Frick, she bought $6 worth of plaid fabric in the Garment District and pinned it to her cheap black dress. (She also paid $400 for two tickets, even though her press status would have gotten her in free.) While other socialites attend Memorial Sloan-Kettering's benefit parties, Ms. Kopelman visits cancer patients there every Monday. And she wasn't allowed to wear Chanel until she turned 21. ("I didn't want to spoil her," said Mr. Kopelman.) She's still only granted one Chanel outfit a year, and she can't borrow samples for events because she's proudly "not a sample size." "Sometimes I want to be Skeletor," she said, reaching for a squash-and-mozzarella tidbit at the S.A.B. gala. "But it's not worth it." She insisted that she's a size eight by choice. Ms. Kopelman's use of the word "Skeletor"-the name of the bad guy in the cartoon series He-Man and the Masters of the Universe -is just one of many Kopelisms, a private dialect of pop-culture vernacular, abbreviations and dropped pronouns. "I'm like camel," she said as she took a second glass of water from a silver tray at Lincoln Center. In her column, Ms. Kopelman has invented words like "glamissima" to describe socialite Susan Fales-Hill and called herself a "roe ho" for loitering by a caviar table "avec toast points." (Food and body image factor strongly into her column, ranging from the boastful-"I jammed back one more of Susan Fales-Hill's delicious chocolate-chip cookies"-to the self-loathing: "Hey, can a normal Rubenesque [read: obese] girl get a drink around here?" she wrote after attending the launch party for Shoshanna Lonstein's swimwear line.) Readers over 40 might also trip over such terms as "social peeps," "cocktail rager" and "total nugget." "I find store openings very decaf," she wrote of a party filled with "overbred and underfed sprockets." And it's hard to imagine Suzy closing a column with, "All my crappy worries vanished, like hemlines on a Hilton sister." "She was our own private dinner theater," said Mrs. Kopelman, beaming as her daughter cracked jokes and dropped phrases like "Raging with the ex-Prezzie!" after Peter Martins, S.A.B.'s chairman of faculty and a family friend, said that he and Bill Clinton would be in Denmark at the same time, hitting the bars. Ms. Kopelman said she got her sense of humor from her father, who was once a Borscht Belt comedian. "We're always laughing and telling dirty jokes like weird wackos," she said. "I had a really great childhood. I didn't have any dark moments. So many writers, you read these beautiful things and you know they endured tragedies. I'm reading Pat Conroy's Beach Music and I'm just like, 'Oh my God, I have nothing to offer! Who am I to write a novel?' I never considered myself a journalist. I write little puff pieces, but I try to make them funny. I've always wanted to do comedy." In 1995, after Ms. Kopelman had graduated from Yale in just three years and moved in with her parents on Park Avenue and 65th Street, she would entertain them over dinner with stories of her surreal days as an editorial assistant at Interview , where her duties included writing about music and art as well as comforting editor in chief Ingrid Sischy when Gianni Versace died, and taking care of the $3,000 worth of roses that Elton John sent after he and Ms. Sischy had a tiff. When Ms. Kopelman would complain about her job to her father, he would simply tell her to "remember the Holocaust." Ms. Sischy described Ms. Kopelman as smart, funny and "a real social observer." She said it was no secret that Ms. Kopelman's father was the honcho of Chanel (an Interview advertiser), but she never let her sense of entitlement show. "She never wielded a mallet that said, 'Hey, my father is someone. You need to listen to me,'" she said. "She has always been discreet about that and acted like an editorial assistant." She might have responded differently had she seen Intern , the movie Ms. Kopelman co-wrote with her friend Caroline Doyle (whose mother, Kathleen Doyle, owns the auction house William Doyle Galleries) when they were practically still interns themselves. An early New York Times article about the project sent a chill through the magazines about to be blasted onscreen-by a couple of rich mail-openers, no less-but the movie bombed after brief openings in New York and Los Angeles last August. Intern takes one scene-in which an editor demands that the intern update his Rolodex, no matter whether the people are dead or alive-from Ms. Kopelman's experience at Interview . Ms. Kopelman also parodied her experiences at Mademoiselle , Harper's Bazaar and MTV, including a time when a fittings editor at Mademoiselle publicly vomited a cappuccino when she found out it was made with two-percent milk instead of skim. On a chilly February afternoon at the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue and 61st Street, Ms. Kopelman-wrapped in a frumpy black hat, scarf and sweater-described the experience of being on set during the filming of Intern as "horrible." "I was disappointed with the product," she said, sipping her hot chocolate and reaching for peanut M&M's. "They sort of pumiced out all the really true, New York-y, thorny moments." Ms. Kopelman is particularly disappointed that she never got paid for Intern , which lost between $40,000 and $100,000, depending on whether you ask Ms. Kopelman or the film's producers. She's miffed because she wrangled many of the film's celebrity cameos (many of whom were family friends), including Ms. Paltrow, Kenneth Cole, Karl Lagerfeld, Frédéric Fekkai, Diane von Furstenberg, André Leon Talley, Cynthia Rowley and Tommy Hilfiger. "We never got paid, which is why we're probably going to litigation," she said. The film's producer, Galt Niederhoffer, 25, a friend of one of Ms. Kopelman's Spence classmates, said Ms. Kopelman was not suing her, though the two did file a complaint on JudgeJudy.com in January. "It is unfortunate that Jill is disappointed with the poor reception of her film and has resorted to such unprofessional and tasteless muckraking," said Ms. Niederhoffer, who sounded weary of discussing the film. "This movie has neither made money nor garnered critical praise; would that we all had the luxury of blaming someone else for its failure." Failure or not, Intern helped Ms. Kopelman land her current job. Last fall, W and Vogue editors familiar with her writing (and, some might sniff, with Chanel) asked her to interview for the "Eye Spy" stint. The next day, she dropped off a copy of the Intern script per their request. After writing four samples, her first column debuted in December. Robert Haskell, who edits Ms. Mehle's "Eye" column for W as well as Ms. Kopelman's column, said he knew Ms. Kopelman from Yale and thought she'd be perfect to write the young new society page for Style.com. "She's not cut from the same cloth, but at the same time she obviously grew up in a world full of fashion and society, so she knows what she's talking about, even though she tries to pretend she's just an outsider looking in," said Mr. Haskell. "I really don't go up to strangers and say, 'Hi, can I interview you?'" said Ms. Kopelman, who often reports-without notepad or tape recorder-from her vantage point "in the corner." She added: "I don't really consider myself as this journalist getting the scoops. I really just survey. I feel sometimes like a loner at these parties," she said. "I'm not into air-kissing everybody." Her Jan. 12 column moaned, "But even in my anti-social, let-me-stay-at-home-avec-remote-control state, I battled the piercing cold and hit a lovely soiree …." "I'm not a party girl," she said. "I get exhausted and am in bed by 11 p.m. to watch Law & Order every single night." Her favorite bar is Marie's Crisis, a piano bar in the West Village where she sings along to show tunes with her girlfriends. "It's like gay Cheers ," she said. Ms. Kopelman pokes fun at her world in "Eye Spy," but for those familiar with her connections, her choice of parties has raised more than one eyebrow. One week she mocked the "Muffies" at the opening of the Winter Antiques Show at the Armory on Park Avenue, though it's a committee her father chairs. (A photograph of her at the party also turned up in the March issue of Quest .) The previous column gushed about a Winter Antiques Show preview dinner, hosted at her friend socialite Marjorie Gubelmann's home. In an act of dizzying cross-nepotism, she covered the December event for S.A.B.'s junior benefit committee-which Ms. Kopelman co-founded in 1999-at the new Chanel boutique in Soho. This time she added a disclaimer, stating, "My dad works for Chanel, but I swear I'd rip on it if it was lame." And in the May issue of W , Ms. Kopelman will appear in an advertising spread for De Beers jewelers featuring "it girls" (read: celebrity offspring), including Kidada Jones, China Chow, Zoë Cassavetes and Kate Driver. She wore a Chanel gown for the shoot. In addition to her column, Ms. Kopelman, who works out of her apartment, is keeping busy with "10 jobs," which include writing editorial content for Polo.com and adapting a children's story for Nickelodeon. She's also writing a novel, tentatively titled Resilient Little Muscle , after the last line in Ms. Kopelman's favorite movie, Hannah and Her Sisters . Ms. Kopelman and Ms. Doyle have also finished three more screenplays, one of which, Delayed Reaction , was recently optioned by Indyssey, a film company owned by Katrina Pavlos, a socialite who appeared in one of Ms. Kopelman's columns. "I'm happy to do it for a while," Ms. Kopelman said of "Eye Spy" via e-mail. "I do totally feel like it's great for material. I always love parlaying over-the-top personalities into characters, because honestly, some people in New York are stranger than fiction."