Heiress without airs

Under the storied stone atrium of the Hearst Building in midtown New York a small pale figure emerged from the elevator the other day. Thin and casually chic with blond hair and young-Mariel Hemingway eyebrows, she could have been any glossy fashion editor in the building.

Except it was Amanda Hearst, a great-granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst and an associate market editor at Marie Claire.

And what was the young heiress thinking about? She was thinking about a puppy-mill raid in North Carolina that she would be participating in the next day with Georgina Bloomberg for the Humane Society of the United States and Friends of Finn, an organisation she started last year and named for her dog. It would be her second raid on puppy mills (typically overcrowded and unhealthy).

Staying out of trouble

Hearst became involved when she was a chairwoman of a benefit for the Humane Society in 2010. She speaks out every chance she gets.

"If I'm going to talk about an issue, I better know what it's about viscerally," she said, as she sat down for an interview.

Hearst, 28, has never been the kind of airhead heiress or celebutante who gets in trouble. In addition to being self-deprecating, she is cautious around the news media and careful not to push her luck, name or looks. "Whenever the subject of doing reality television comes up, I disregard it, because it's embarrassing," she said.

Let her stepfather, Jay McInerney, the bon vivant who married her mother, Anne Hearst, in 2006, make appearances on Gossip Girl, playing himself. She's not buying into it, and although she's aware that it was her own great-grandfather whom many blame for starting our tabloid culture, today's gossip pages and sites will just have to look elsewhere for now, thanks.

She learnt her lesson the hard way about a decade ago, when an article in Harper's Bazaar, where she was interning, tallied up her personal expenses — $136,000 (Dh499,120) annually — and published the embarrassing figure in an article about the cost of being a young socialite.

Hearst has spent the past ten years living it down, and asserts that the figure was inflated, based on dresses she liked but didn't actually buy, and vacations she didn't actually pay for, an assertion that has some merit, given her mother's home in the Hamptons and regular trips to Hearst Castle in California.

Does she invite friends up for castle parties that attract bad boys and paparazzi? Heavens, no.

"You see how far it can go in the news when someone misbehaves," she said, while being careful not to name any names. "So I try to stay in line."

She keeps her head down, even at work at Marie Claire, where, as the associate market editor since 2009, she has a tiny and cluttered workstation far from any window views. There, she picks products for her pages and on her blog that fit the description of ethical fashion (meaning sustainable, local and any number of other nice things that ease shopping guilt).

And although she's so attractive that she has modelled for Tommy Hilfiger and Lilly Pulitzer, and is featured in a new Assouline book, American Beauty by Claiborne Swanson Frank, she doesn't act out like an Alpha Girl on Glee or run around the Hearst halls playing princess.

Here's the bio in brief: She grew up in Manhattan as the only daughter of Anne Randolph Hearst, who was separating from Richard McChesney, Amanda Hearst's father, just before she was born. She has a half-brother, King Randolph Harris, from her mother's second marriage, to King Harris, which ended when Hearst was 7. She also has a famous aunt, Patricia Hearst Shaw, one of her mother's three sisters, who used to be called Patty and whose daughters are her cousins Lydia, the model, and Gillian, who works at Town and Country.

Independent for sure

She graduated from Choate and Boston College with a major in the history of art. She's also single at present, if you must know. "And that's fine with me for now," she added. "I'm definitely an independent person."

Then she had to go back to work and figure out what time to be at the airport next day for her puppy-mill raid. What does one wear to that? "Jeans and T-shirt," she said. "I'll probably have to wear a mask because the smell can be so bad, and the Humane Society makes you wear an orange safety vest."

Not the trendiest colour to wear, but for a very good cause indeed.