The young woman who approached the table by the window at the Pinkberry on Eighth Avenue and 18th street was nervous, breathless. She was sorry to interrupt, sorry to be a bother, she said. It was just that she loved Taylor Momsen so much.

The just-barely-15-year-old Ms. Momsen, who plays aspiring queen bee Jenny Humphrey on the CW show Gossip Girl, gave the woman—who looked to be at least in her mid-20s, and was clutching a napkin and shaking like a whippet in winter—a warm, practiced smile and helped her locate a pen and piece of paper so she could sign the autograph on something suitable. Ms. Momsen scribbled her name with a girlish curlicue flourish, and offered a friendly wave goodbye as her fan skipped elatedly out the door.

It’s a regular occurrence now for Ms. Momsen (“The older girls get nervous. The younger girls, cry,” she said), who, over the summer, has become the obsession of a strange and ragged slice of New York. Even as her co-stars have ascended the ladder of gossip-worthiness—the golden-locked goddess Blake Lively and the impressively sideburned Penn Badgley have had a very public romance while dandy-dressing, secretly English Ed Westwick has hardly been shy about his carousing—Ms. Momsen has emerged as the show’s true It Girl: admired, lusted after and, of course, scorned. Girls and young women covet her style (which ranges from bright, simple and sophisticated to mix-and-match punk). Boys and men—in their teens and 20s and beyond—can’t help but be drawn to her coltish beauty (even as that fact could make them uncomfortable). And there are the requisite haters, too, so unnerved by Ms. Momsen’s uncanny poise and sudden ubiquity that they can’t help but snipe at her. As photographs of her—on location for Gossip Girl, making the rounds at parties and movie premieres, riding the subway around her newly adopted city—have cropped up on celeb-tracking blogs and Web sites, they’ve also collected captions and comments snarky and vicious enough to be straight from the cell phone of Gossip Girl’s eponymous blogger.
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Taylor Momsen’s star is on the rise. Although she’s only a high school freshman, the 14-year-old is already a veteran performer. Best known to teen-soap fans as Jenny Humphrey, the social-climbing little sister on the CW’s runaway hit Gossip Girl, Momsen took her first job at the age of three and has worked steadily since. “Acting is all about a kind of self-expression,” she says. “When you take on different roles and become different characters, you have to draw upon your own experiences.”

Momsen also appears in Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park as a self-obsessed cheerleader whose skater boyfriend accidentally murders a security guard. It was a long way from the passions of Manhattan’s Upper East Side wealthy teens, but she enjoyed developing the role. “On Gossip Girl, Jenny is just coming into her own. She’s the sweet, nice, shy kid. In Paranoid Park, Jennifer is the popular girl… It was such a change for me.” Asked whether her own high-school experience resembles the cutthroat atmosphere of her TV show, she laughs and says, “It’s the usual teenage dramatics, but it’s not that extreme. I mean, no one’s flying to France to run away.”

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