Welcome to my website. I’m Frank DiGiacomo, and since 2004, I have been a contributing editor atVanity Fair magazine, where I write profiles and features—some of which are archived here—and post on the magazine’s blog VF Daily. You can reach me at frankdigiacomo.com@gmail.com.

If you’re an avid consumer of media, you might recognize my byline from my newspaper work as well. Before Vanity Fair, I worked on staff for almost 11 years at The New York Observer, a weekly Manhattan-based newspaper. Initially hired to write the paper’s literary gossip column The Transom, I eventually made the transition to feature writing and, later, editing.

Over the last 15 years, I’ve had the pleasure of profiling artists such as Leonard Cohen, Martin Scorsese, Sheryl Crow and Chris Elliott; covering the Vanity Fair and Miramax Oscar parties and for 10 consecutive years, writing about those breathtakingly profane spectacles of comic savagery, The Friars Club roasts. And in late 2001, my story on comedian Gilbert Gottfried’s unhinged performance at the Friars roast of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner brought a phone call from comic Paul Provenza, who invited me to appear in a documentary he was making with Penn Jillette called The Aristocrats. If you’ve seen the movie, I’m the bald guy sitting in the Masterpiece Theater-style leather chair. Please don’t tell my parents.

Appearing in The Aristocrats was a pretty wild experience, but the wildest would have to be the job I held as a reporter and, later, editor of Page Six, the infamous gossip column that’s been published since 1976 in The New York Post. Working at “The Page” was like having my head, which kind of looks like a light bulb, shoved into a gigantic light socket that was connected to the power grid that makes things happen in this country. There are benefits and liabilities to a job like this, and I wrote about some of them for my first Vanity Fair piece, an oral history of Page Six that appeared in the December 2004 issue. I plan to delve into the subject more in my personal blog, but I think it’s important to point out that though I made very little money during the four or so years that I worked at Page Six and though I often was frustrated by the politics that came with the job, I look back on it as an incredibly formative experience in my life—the moment where my fuzzy, small-town naivete about how things work was replaced by a grittier understanding of how power, fame and wealth are won and lost.

That small town is a place called Youngstown, the Ohio city that Bruce Springsteen sings about on his 1995 album, The Ghost of Tom Joad. I grew up in a suburb called Boardman that was a lot like the town depicted in Sofia Coppola’s evocative adaptation of The Virgin Suicides, but after graduating from the University of Pittsburgh in 1984, I moved to the New York City area. I currently reside on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.