She drolly described one party at which “Elizabeth Taylor and a flirtatious Richard Burton — he flirted with everyone but Elizabeth — stayed late.” And in 1986, she dropped a bombshell that shook the pillars of Nouvelle Society: Sid Bass, the Texas oil billionaire, was leaving his wife to marry Mercedes Kellogg. (They asked her to wait a day so Ms. Kellogg could tell her diplomat husband that she was divorcing him.)

After late nights of dogged merrymaking, Mrs. Mehle typically worked from her palatial Manhattan apartments, first on Park Avenue and later in an Upper East Side townhouse, preferring not to be disturbed before noon and delivering her columns to downtown newsrooms by messenger.

“What I do is somewhere between ditch digging and galley slaving,” she told Life in 1966. “It is a neck-swiveling, don’t-miss-anything job. When I walk into a party, while I’m saying, ‘Hello darling, hello dear, how are you?’ to everyone I haven’t seen since yesterday, I case the place. I have a fast eye.”

“I also listen, listen, listen,” she went on. “When I come home dog-tired at 1 a.m., I often haven’t a line to go on. I’ve even put my little head down on the typewriter and cried a few rusty tears. But then I snap out of it and get to work.”

She entered the crowded, fiercely competitive field of gossip columnists in the waning days of Walter Winchell (who was also at The Mirror), when high society still preoccupied mass audiences as passionately as Hollywood stars did, and when the rich still delighted in tattling on one another in print.

“No matter what I say about them,” Mrs. Mehle confided, “it can’t begin to compare with what they say about each other.”

She recalled an editor’s advice that “I’d be a success only when I could walk into a room full of people who whisper, ‘Here comes that bitch Suzy.’”