Lloyd Grove, Daily News gossip columnist.   (Photo: Leeta Harding)

For Grove, the contretemps between Dechert and Spiegelman was an opening he’d been hungry for. Nearly a year ago, Grove was recruited from the Washington Post, where he had written the fairly tepid but influential “Reliable Source” column. Before he started at the Daily News, he was the recipient of a fawning front-page story in the New York Times, though it included a comical threat from “Page Six” reporter Jared Paul Stern, who said, “We will not rest until we send you back to Washington on a stretcher.” Before he’d even taken the job, “Page Six” reported his salary at $250,000. In many ways, Grove seems too nice to be a gossip columnist. He approaches his job as if forced to dine on things he can’t stand. On a recent day at the Daily News, in his messy cubicle beside a cactus that had been sent as a gift—“Go Get Them, Mom,” read the card—Grove had been musing on the rumor that Britney Spears might be pregnant (Spears issued a denial). “I can honestly say that I don’t care!” he later declared proudly. “There are plenty of other people that can plumb that mystery.”

The first year in New York has taken its toll: Grove went to his first physical recently, where he learned the price of eating free food and drinking free drink every night. Now he’s running around the reservoir most mornings at seven. He has broken little news other than Gwyneth Paltrow’s pregnancy, and the tip on that came from Grove’s then-assistant, Elisa Lipsky-Karasz, who has since left for the Post. He’s still feeling his way around New York. “When I first came here, Hamilton South and Anne Reingold gave me a party at Il Cantinora,” he says brightly (the restaurant is Il Cantinori). “Aby Rosen was there, and Dionne Von Furstenberg—um, Diane, whatever her name is.” He even cites Thackeray’s Vanity Fair as a favorite book. “I’m constantly on the lookout for Becky Sharp,” he says. “Rising in society is a powerful and primal impulse. I don’t know if it’s as primal as sex, but it’s close.”

In a light, pleasantly wrinkled gray suit, with his grandfather’s signet ring on his finger, Grove still has an Ivy League bearing (he went to Yale, where he co-edited the Yale Daily News magazine with Times book critic Michiko Kakutani); he is 49 and divorced, with two teenagers from the marriage, one of whom is living with him on Central Park West for the summer and attending art classes. The night before, he and his son attended the premiere of King Arthur, where Grove introduced him to Keira Knightley, and then asked her a bunch of questions himself, about the hidden political implications of the movie (she declined to respond, he notes merrily). There were a bunch of other actors there, too. “I have to concentrate a lot to remember a name,” says Grove. “Including celebrities’ names. In fact, I can’t remember which celebrities’ names I can’t remember.”

Grove wasn’t such a naïf that he didn’t understand how to make a little bit of rain. He had created a feud of his own, with Tim Robbins, after printing an interview with Susan Sarandon’s Republican mother. Robbins warned Grove: “If you ever write about my family again, I will hurt you.” Now, as the new kid in town, Grove realized that there was tactical value in lashing out at “Page Six.” He printed the story of Spiegelman’s comments at the Learning Annex. He went after Paula Froelich, claiming that the column’s nasty items about Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush were motivated by an allegiance to Entertainment Tonight, where she has a contract as a talking head. He attacked them for lifting items off his page—“The master and commander of the New York Post’s Page Six column, Richard Johnson, must be stuck in the doldrums with nary a puff of wind . . . Hey, skipper, maybe you should throw somebody overboard.”

“Page Six” hit back, from time to time: “Earth to Lloyd Grove—the over-hyped columnist for the Daily News, who calls his pillar ‘Lowdown,’ showed how low he can go yesterday when, in his desperation to fill space, he picked up a story from Us Weekly about the inspiration for Apple, the name of Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin’s baby girl . . . Hey Lloyd, if you’re going to steal stories from magazines, take the fresh ones.” The column ran an item, penned by Spiegelman, about Howard Stern sounding off on his show about Grove: “This guy Lloyd Grove only wishes he could work for Page Six,” said Stern. At one party, I saw Grove duck out early when he realized Froelich was in the crowd.

These days, though, Grove feels emboldened. “Richard sent me an e-mail saying there would be reprisals after the Paula Froelich items,” says Grove. “So maybe there’s a poison pill out there, and I’m going to end up exploding.” Later, he says, “I feel that I’m at the good paper, working for people practicing journalism as opposed to pursuing an ideological and business agenda.”

“Lloyd,” drawls Col Allan, editor-in-chief of the New York Post. “I don’t want to be unkind,” he says, and then lets out a short laugh. “Do I? I simply don’t think the Daily News competes in gossip. The word war implies fair fight, and this is not a fair fight.”

A successful gossip column requires a steady inflow of dirt. And when you have to fill pages day after day—Grove one and Johnson two, usually—quantity is important. You can’t afford to be too choosy about whom you’re dealing with. And that provides an opening for peripheral players, Cassandras, sycophantic self-promoters. Motives can be difficult to sniff out, and perhaps at some point you stop caring. “I have a couple dozen people out there who when they see a story will say, That’s good for ‘Page Six,’ ” explains Johnson. “Doug Dechert has been one of those people. He was of some value because he goes to preppy venues and lives on the Upper East Side. It’s hard to quantify his worth over the years: Maybe Doug has a stack of clips.” (Indeed, he does.)

One doesn’t have to be a hugely sophisticated reader of “Page Six” to understand how it is composed. “We Hear” and “Sightings” are generally paybacks for good sources: A mention like “Nautica has donated towels and hats to the lifeguards of the Town of Southampton for the summer” seems on its face to be a thank-you for a juicier bit served up by someone on the Nautica payroll. Certain restaurants and clubs, like Lotus, Marquee, and Bungalow 8, have a way of popping up regularly here; gossips who choose to stop by are not always served a bill at the end of the night. Recently, Dave Zinczenko, the editor of Men’s Health, which hosted Johnson’s 50th-birthday bash at the Marquee nightclub this winter, was treated to an item about a recent party at Elaine’s for his new book, The Abs Diet. Readers would be happy to learn that his mother postponed foot surgery to be there.