Oh, my God, leave me out of that story,” exclaimed Judy Taubman, the super-social wife of the shopping-mall-and-auction-house tycoon Alfred Taubman, when I told her I was writing an article on “the Ladies Who Lunch.” “People don’t do that anymore. Everybody’s too busy. Today I made a date with a friend, and I said, ‘Do you mind if we skip lunch and go directly to the Neue Galerie?’ ”

“I was never part of it,” insisted Mica Ertegun, the society decorator and widow of music-business king Ahmet Ertegun. “I was always blessing the ceiling that I had work to do, because the thing I loathed the most is having lunch with a bunch of women—even if they’re good friends.” But what about the countless photographs from Women’s Wear Daily in the 1970s of Ertegun and her late business partner, Chessy Rayner, dashing out of fashionable East Side restaurants with Pat Buckley and Nan Kempner? “Well, we had to eat,” the pencil-slim Ertegun explained. “But I never organized women’s lunches.”

“First of all, I don’t classify myself as a lady who lunches,” snapped Lynn Wyatt, the wife of Texas oilman Oscar Wyatt and a veteran of the New York-London-Paris-Gstaad social circuit, with a tinge of anger in her drawl. “I never have liked ladies’ lunches that much, because even in Houston I don’t like to waste my time.”

“I never went to lunch,” said Aileen Mehle, pointing out that she had to make deadlines for her “Suzy” column in the New York Post and, later, W magazine. “Well, I did for Nancy Reagan. I did for the King of Spain. But unless it was for someone terribly important, I didn’t do it. I always said, Anything I can learn at lunch, I can learn at dinner.”

And so it went. Princess Firyal of Jordan, Mercedes Bass, Louise Grunwald, Gayfryd Steinberg, Susan Gutfreund, and Deeda Blair all swore they were not now and had never really been ladies who lunched. I was beginning to feel like an investigator for the H...