Blue bloods boiling over Tinsley Mortimer and Devorah Rose's reality-TV 'feud'

It was enough to make your monocle pop out.

Early one evening in November, the normally subdued cocktail- party chatter at 675 Bar was shattered by two stick-thin Manhattan women clad in short cock tail dresses and stilettos screaming at each other in a very public, unladylike spat.

New York City's most famous socialite, the gold en-tressed Tinsley Mor timer, 35, was having it out with Devorah Rose, editor in chief of the Hamptons society maga zine Social Life.

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Tinsley was flanked by her minions: her equally blond sister, Dabney; her acolyte Paul Johnson-Calderon; and a five-man camera crew.

The catfight -- which other partygoers said they tried to ignore -- was being filmed for Tinsley's new reality show, "High Society," which premieres March 10 on the CW.

During the showdown, Tinsley accuses Devorah of being a social climber. Devorah, in turn, told Tinsley that her new beau, Casimir Wittgenstein-Sayn, was a pauper despite his royal name.

Tinsley's friends join in the fracas, slamming Devorah for being so mean when "The Tinz," as she is known, is in the midst of a high-profile breakup with her husband and former high-school sweetheart, Topper Mortimer -- a descendant of the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Jay.

"Tinsley wasn't happy about the things I said about her. The fact that she doesn't live on Park Avenue anymore -- I mentioned that," Devorah recalls.

Just ignore the fact that guests at the event said the drama seemed staged, that the lines were fed to the socialites by producers desperate to create drama, and that the fight seemed to start on cue.

New York City blue bloods, meet reality television. Last year, the CW network decided that if "real" housewives and slap-happy Jersey guidos could grab ratings, the snobbery of Manhattan socialites would be advertising gold.

Finding their star wasn't so easy, however. Real socialites cling to the adage that you should be in the newspaper only three times -- when you're born, when you marry and when you die. Established socialites like Zani Gugelmann and Dani Stahl reportedly turned down offers to star on the show. Even Tinsley's half-brother from her husband's side, Peter Davis, wrote on Facebook that he had "zero interest in playing a warped, twisted version of myself on television."

It was left, then, to The Tinz, a socialite more by marriage to the Mortimer clan than her Virginia birth. The rest of the cast was filled by Davis' ex-boyfriend, man-about-town Johnson-Calderon; Jules Kirby, 27, a champagne-swilling party girl famous for hobnobbing with Prince Harry in London; and Tinsley's loyal sister, Dabney, as well as her mother, Dale Mercer.