It was Rob Long who first told me about Cathy Seipp. My friends at the National Post in Canada were looking for a Hollywood insider to write regularly for them on tinsel town. They asked for suggestions. Rob Long couldn’t do it himself but suggested Cathy. She was a brilliant writer, he said, and she needed work to pay horrendous medical bills.

His second point tended, alas, to cancel out his first one. My cynical heart sank. But I was wrong to doubt Rob’s stern professionalism — and Cathy’s. The article she sent to the Post was wonderful — witty, shrewd, sharp, and utterly at home in Hollywood while observing it with a cool and wry detachment. If Raymond Chandler had been reincarnated in 1990s L.A. as a girl with a can-do attitude, the result would have been someone like Cathy Seipp (and not very like Raymond Chandler.)

So I was astonished to learn from her obituary that she was born in Canada and first arrived in southern California as late as her midteens. She had sloughed off her Canadian identity completely and she seemed to know more about Los Angeles than the Los Angeles Times (though, as she repeatedly pointed out in her media criticisms, that wasn’t very hard.)

A year or so later I remembered Cathy’s article when Claude Salhani and I were recruiting columnists for UPI’s lifestyle section. She agreed to write a regular column for us that would cover Hollywood in general and preview television sitcoms and series in particular. It was as brilliant as we both expected. Claude used to ring me on the office intercom to read passages aloud when her column arrived, both of us laughing uncontrollably. Eventually I asked him just to send her column to me as soon as it arrived. I didn’t want to wait even the few minutes needed for him to make the minor edits her work hardly needed. I suppose you have to be an editor to realize just how rare work of that quality is.

Cathy came to UPI’s Washington headquarters towards the end of my time there. She was accompanied by her precocious daughter, Maia, who even then had started her own blog. Claude and I took them out for a drink. I remember thinking what a marvelous contrast the two women made — Cathy blonde in a light yellow dress, Maia more serious in darker hues, but both youthful bohemian sprites, little immortals like Puck, making clever mischief in our workaday Washington. I sometimes wish I had asked Cathy to stay and devote to the Beltway the same suspecting glance that she directed at the glitterati. But this highly professional cobbler would probably have stuck to her last.

In any event, Cathy left UPI shortly after I did. We chatted on the phone about finding a new national outlet for her work. I put her in touch with Kathryn Lopez who immediately saw that a potential Pulitzer had landed unbidden in NRO’s lap and snapped her up. Some of Cathy’s best writing is to be found in her “Left Coast” column for the website. Look, for instance, at the two pieces she wrote on the Paris Hilton-Nicole Ritchie reality sitcoms. The first was a strong defense of the two starlets as surprisingly spunky and buoyant (especially as compared to Anna Nicole Smith whose own reality show Cathy found terminally dull); the second pointed out that the pair’s spunkiness often rested on an unpleasant aristocratic unconcern about the difficulties they were imposing on other people.

Both columns were funny and perceptive, but like much of Cathy’s work, they were more than that. In the guise of writing light critiques of television reality shows and media criticism, Cathy was developing the kind of serious social criticism pioneered by George Orwell in essays like “Boys’ Weeklies” and “Raffles and Miss Blandish.” One shouldn’t be too solemn about this; Cathy never was. Her columns show that she believed in hard work, self-reliance, duty — the vigorous virtues — but also in not preaching. Few can pull off that particular trick; Cathy could and did.

The last time I saw Cathy was when Roman Genn and I descended on her after short notice at her home. She was quite ill and would have been perfectly justified in setting the dogs on us. Instead, she invited us in, made coffee, and talked away several columns length of Hollywood gossip. Maia was present too but transformed from sprite to loving and protective guardian, making sure that her mother was not overly taxed by the visitors. When we left, I hoped to see Cathy again but I sensed it was unlikely. Now she has died at the unbearably young age of 49.

May she rest in peace. May Maia receive some consolation from the outpouring of respectful affection for her mother. And may mainstream American journalism learn to make better use of such unorthodox talents.