New York Social Diary - Social Diary

Looking south from the Lake in Central Park. 6:30 PM. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch.

Monday, August 5, 2013. A beautiful early August weekend in New York, with a lot of sunshine and little if any humidity. Sunday’s sky was filled with the tall, snow-white puffy, cumulus clouds.

I took the car out, put the top down and drove over to Zabars. So much more convenient. And cheaper if you don’t factor in the cost of the car, upkeep and garaging. So we don’t; for a day.

None of the streets going across town was very busy with traffic or pedestrians -- although there were a lot of people were out enjoying the weather. There was a crowd, as there always is, on Saturday afternoons along the four block facade of the Metropolitan Museum on Fifth Avenue and 81st Street; people going to and coming from. The front steps of the museum is a mecca for people congregating or just people watching.

Entering the Promenade along the East River, Sunday afternoon at 3.

Looking north toward the RFK (former Triboro) Bridge, following the sail boat on the lower left corner of the photo.

But first the Skyline Princess cruises by. It's a party; there's music I can hear up on shore.

Then the sailboat cruises South.

Directly across the 79th Street transverse which opens onto West 81st Street and Central Park West, is the vast complex of buildings (and architectural styles) that make up the American Museum of Natural History – another magnet for New Yorkers on their days off, and especially (although far from entirely) young families. These two great world class museums overlooking the verdant forests of Central Park were planned to be what they became for New Yorkers and its visitors more than a century ago. This was done long before the neighborhoods surrounding were much of anything. This was vision. With the community in mind.

The West Side had light traffic also, but a lot of people out strolling in their neighborhoods. It’s on days like these that you see what’s so great about living in New York. Because it’s quieter and more restful, the pace slows to a gentle stroll. You see all kinds of people, families, children, dogs, food shopping, ice cream shopping, banking, or just out walking and looking. It’s a cavalcade and never fails to impress.


	Southampton Hospital Gala co-chairs Jean Shafiroff and Audrey Gruss.

I wasn’t in the Hamptons, obviously, but there was a lot going on out there. Route 27 was its usual parking lot throughout the weekend. The destination for relaxation is a road test for many if not all those New Yorkers who leave behind the city’s relative calm to the likes of us.

In Southampton, the Southampton Hospital held its 55th Annual Summer Gala. The Southampton Hospital is the only major hospital on the East End of Long Island. Over the decades, the Summer People (many of whom are now year-round weekenders) have contributed to its growth and capacity.

This gala is their biggest fundraiser for the year and it is a local tradition. Because it’s been around for more than a half-century, re-inventing it annually is an enormous challenge. Also, unlike its first thirty or forty years, it has competition. There are always a half dozen or more large cocktail, fundraising parties across the East End on any weekend night. And just as many in the afternoons. You do enough of these and the whole idea of weekending in the Hamptons can get enervating. But not for everyone.

This year’s Southampton Hospital Gala co-chairs were Audrey Gruss and Jean Shafiroff, and they pulled it off with aces. The evening was a great success: they raised over $1.7 million. The hospital also received a gift of $5 million from Mrs. Gruss and her husband Martin.Adriann Swann covered the party for us on the Party Pictures page.

More from the Hamptons: The scene at The Rita Hayworth Gala Hamptons kick-off reception at Ashgrove Farm, the home of Anne Hearst and Jay McInerny in Watermill.

Lauren Bush Lauren, Sharon Bush, Ashley Bush, Michele Promaulayko, Laura Frerer Schmidt at Women's Health + FEED event at BridgeHampton Tennis & Polo Club.

Alec Baldwin, Hilaria Baldwin, Marilu Henner, and Dr. Neal Barnard at the Book Release Party and Fundraiser in Amagansett for Dr. Neal Barnard's Power Foods for the Brain.

Each year, Hamptons summers used to provide at least one good story or juicy marital scandal that occupied idle conversation throughout the season. You’d hear about it even in New York.

It was usually about New Yorkers having affairs or stealing someone’s wife or husband. The story usually carried into the following autumn season with divorces or reconciliations (not as often), new marriages and the old story of who got what and who didn’t. These days it takes a lot more than some marital infidelity to get people talking (or looking). Very little can survive the 140 characters of Twitter, and even then it’s swept away into the terminal morass of quadrillions of lost voices traveling across the universe.

However, there is one going on right now in the Hamptons that has got a huge coverage in the British tabloids but practically nothing over here, and even very little in the Hamptons. I asked one of the local hostesses about it, mentioning the woman involved, and she replied: Do we know her? It’s a reality TV scandal, if you will.

Lauren Silverman and Simon Cowell aboard his yacht.

It involves Simon Cowell, the British TV producer/ personality, and a woman who summers in Bridgehampton named Lauren Silverman. The possibly soon to be former Mrs. Andrew Silverman.

Mrs. Silverman is an old friend (more than a year) of Mr. Cowell. So is/was her husband. They were such good friends that evidently she is now pregnant with Mr. Cowell’s child. Mr. Cowell does not deny that he’s the father. He’s made it clear that he will cover his responsibility for the child’s welfare and well-being, but he did not indicate he was going to marry Mrs. Silverman, who is said to be in love with him and plans to divorce/dump her husband ... and run off to the Show Business Xanadu of Mr. Cowell....if she were writing the happy ending.

Lauren Silverman aboard Simon Cowell setting sail.

I’m one of those media-malnourished who’s never seen Mr. Cowell on TV except for a couple of clips where he tells some performer what he thought of their performance in no uncertain terms. This point of view has made him really rich.

The Daily Mail Online (the world’s greatest tabloid, at least on the internet) has pictures of the two of them aboard Mr. Cowell’s yacht. I wished they had pictures of the yacht itself as it’s always nice to see just How Big it is. After all in today’s yachting world, size matters even to us media voyeurs. Big enough, it is for Mrs. Silverman, that’s for sure.

Mrs. Silverman left, and Mezhgan Hussainy (Cowell's ex-girlfriend), and Mr. Cowell on his jetski.

More is better for some.

This is a story that almost needs to no words to explain it after you’ve seen the pictures. Mrs. Silverman looks at once unsure, yet gaga over the beefy Mr. Cowell who looks like he’s looking for his sunblock....or in some nearby mirror. There’s one of the two next to each other, leaning against the deck railing where she looks like she’s wondering what she should do next, and he looks like he’s wondering what’s for lunch.

The story being put out is that Mrs. Silverman has been lonely, was bored with Mr. Silverman who’s just a boring old real estate businessman who’s good enough to rent (at $150,000 a month) a place in Bridgehampton for his lithesome Mrs. and their young son.

Mr. Silverman knows Mr. Cowell too. Oh, he’s been on the yacht too. But so have a lot of people. Mr. Cowell is noted for inviting his old girlfriends to join the cruise too, so everyone gets to meet everyone.

Meanwhile back in Bridge. "He forgets me, he forgets me not, he forgets me, he forgets ..."

When and if the Silvermans actually get divorced, evidently Mrs. S. has a pre-nup which will bring her about $4 mill. Nice maybe for some of us, but chickenfeed for Mr. Cowell who’s filthy rich pulling down that (four mill) and more on any and every given week of the year.

Evidently Mrs. S. is in love with the media mogul. They’ve known each other for a few years, so this is no sudden coup de foudre. But the media mogul, who resides on this side of the Atlantic in Beverly Hills or thereabout has other fish to fry (or something like that). Last week he flew off in his fabulous private jet to St. Tropez for his “annual” visit with friends. Lots of friends.

Now the papers are running stories of the “pregnant” Mrs. Silverman dawdling around Bridgehampton husband-less and boyfriend-less, taking her little one out for an ice cream cone. Actually, she’s not really husband-less. Mr. S is said to be still residing in the summer house for the sake of their son.

Mr. Silverman, his host, and Mrs. Silverman. Notice how everybody's thinking something. Could it be: what's for lunch?

Do you think she’s a gold-digger someone asked? No, I think she’s starstruck. It happens all the time. Unfortunately, it’ll never be no Taylor-Burton or even Jen and Justin.

And Mr. Cowell, is he in love? I wouldn’t know of course, but it wouldn’t surprise me if, as someone suggested, this was just a convenient bit of ballyhoo for the old boy, now fifty-three and still a confirmed bachelor. Besides, at this age and with all that dough (a hundred mill a year, according to the Mail), why would he marry? Old dog, new tricks? Probably not. Besides, he's got a new season coming up, a whole new ball game in a world where you're only as good as your last....

You must remember this: a kiss is still a kiss ...

Contact DPC here.

Early evening outing in Central Park. 7:00 PM. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch.

Wednesday, August 7, 2013. Another beautiful Summer day, yesterday in New York. Perfect weather.

The Perfect Distractions. A friend of mine sent me a copy of “Serving Victoria; Life in the Royal Household” by Kate Hubbard. You’ll like it, he said when he told me about just having read it. I didn’t tell him that it didn’t sound interesting to me. I don’t have a fascination for old Victoria per se, although the era to which she gave her name, is a fascination since we’re its great-grandchildren though eons from its Victorian upbringing.

Click to orderServing Victoria; Life in the Royal Household ... Click to orderDark Angel ... Click to order The Unwinding; An Inner History of the New America.

Anyway, he sent me the book the next day. I almost felt obligated with that kind of speed of generosity. The cover was interesting: a tintype of a small group of 19th century men and women (they must have been members of the Queen’s staff) and Windsor Castle in the background. It sounded like another variation on the upstairs/downstairs theme. I put it aside anyway.

Then I read the Vidal interviews which I wrote about, and then the “Orson Lunches…” which, to borrow from Dorothy Parker was of such sweet hell (to read about) that I still kinda wisht it were longer. God knows Orson Welles could talk on into the next lifetime.

Before those two books, I read Linda Fairstein’s new crime novel, “Dark Angel” about a crime that took place in Central Park. A friend of mine who just finished it reminded me of all that we learned about Central Park and its hidden spaces and secret treasure pockets, besides the Alex Cooper mystery. Linda knows every nook and cranny.

And before “Dark Angel,” I’d read George Packer’s excellent and affecting “The Unwinding; An Inner History of the New America.” The “Unwinding” is a powerful account of contemporary American history. You are well aware of much of what Packer writes about the state of life in America today. But he sets it out in a montage of characters, places and situations. Like a documentary, and as effective.

I know people who won’t read it because they think it will depress them. I can understand that. Because if they’re averting their attention from what’s in front of us, it will. But there’s more to it than that. There’s the possibility of renaissance if enough of us will look at ourselves and our situation realistically. How that would come about, I do not know. That’s always a challenge in all our lives.

So. Having gone through the aforementioned volumes entirely for pleasure, and come through with a lot of other thoughts and ideas also, I was actually anxious to read something else. Something far away from Now and Us and We and They. So I picked up my friend’s gift about Queen Victoria. He was right. It’s quietly compelling. This real person emerges in this weird sort of life, so far from anything like our own. Maybe not the Empress of China. What an odd strange existence did have the Queen.

The 24-year-old Queen Victoria, painted by William Fowler in 1843.

She was nineteen or twenty when she came to the throne. There was no Regent for the girl who had been aware for awhile that she would succeed her uncle William IV. She seems like a rather simple girl, in the middle of a political swarm which included her mother’s ADC, an Irishman named John Conroy. Victoria hated Conroy. Ironically there exists among British historians that Conroy might have been the actual father of Victoria – her assumed father, the Duke of Kent having been quite well along when the Duchess got pregnant with Victoria. Furthermore he was not so inclined by his nature.


The young Victoria and her beloved Prince Albert.

But none of that is in this book – of which I’m half through. It’s about the staff that was very close to the Queen and her personal life – her ladies in waiting, her maids, her ladies of the bedchamber, her ladies who brought up the children (and she had a lot of them as you know). They were all upper-class girls, many titled, some very wellborn.
When asked to serve the Queen, it was not something that one turned down lightly. After all, she was their Soveriegn and it was policy, drummed into their heads that “Your first duty is to God; your second to your Sovereign; your third yourself.” Such thoughts would jam any engine nowadays.

They were paid rather well. But they had to be with the lady and her husband and her children all the time. They often lunched and dined with them and shared après diner in conversation or at games, although they had decent hours as they were not considered Staff but rather Her Majesty’s appointments.

They had nice rooms and sitting rooms of their own and were waited on by the palace staff (that numbered in the hundreds). They also served for specific periods of time interspersed by periods of a month or several weeks when they could see their families. Many of these women were married and so it meant they were separated from their own loved ones for long periods of time. It was very prestigious, however. And they did get to know Her Majesty and his nibs, the Prince (whom Her Majesty adored, and deferred to), the same way we all get to know the people live with day in and day out year after year.

The royal couple early in their marriage.

But it was work. Work. And massively dull dull dull after awhile (for those who had any imagination at all). The Queen was not a bundle of laughs. Also, she was always Your Majesty which tends to subdue one’s natural ebullience or opinion.

Because the Royal Household was conducted like a machine. Every part worked meticulously (when successful). And the Queen sat at the top of all these worker bees. And such is life in the hive, any hive that’s worth its honey. And such is the wonderfully intriguing document that author Kate Ubbard constructed of the way she lived -- Queen and Empress of the greatest empire in the world of her time and shortly thereafter. And the behavior that it elicited, that it demanded, that was displayed clarifies everything about that time and place. Always the behavior, for me; there’s the key.

The queen at a luncheon party with members of her family. Greatly interested in India, she eventually took the title Empress of India (she had Indian servants, one in particular whom she was very fond of).

Meanwhile, speaking of Linda Fairstein, she’s out there somewhere finishing up her book tour and promotion for the book that was published July 30.

She started out here in the city last week and her interviews and TV appearances were capped off with a party in the private dining room of PATROON, which if you follow the adventures of Alex Cooper, often figures in the story. The real Alex Cooper– world renowned architect – was also in attendance. The party was hosted by Patroon's owners, Ken Aretsky and Diana Lyne. Among the guests were Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, powerhouse literary agent Esther Newberg, Barbara Lyne and Mel Immergut, AOL's Susan Lyne, Louise Grunwald, Lisa Fairstein and Alex de Lucena, Linda’s website designer, graphic artist Marc Fairstein and Linda's publishing team at Dutton Ben Sevier, Christine Ball, and Jamie McDonald. Linda left the next day on her national tour and any minute now she’s going to set down in Martha’s Vineyard where she and her late husband Justin Feldman have summered for years.

Linda making friends in the green room of The Today Show.

While we’re on the subject, (and a little late with this one), a few weeks ago, our Shanghai and San Francisco Diarist, Jeanne Lawrence held a book party for Rochelle Ohrstrom and her new book – her first: “Ponzi & Picasso: Finance, Fraud, and Fine Art.” A novel. A roman a clef. Gail Blanke ,best-selling author of In My Wildest Dreams and Between Trapezes, wrote the following about it: “Fasten your seat belt and brace yourself for a wild romp through the best and worst of the art netherworld.” And you know there’s a lot of both in that part of the forest. Jeanne’s guests were already into “who” is “who” and what they didn’t know about that particular “who.”

Rochelle Ohrstrom, artist, photographer, patron, and collector, shows off her first novel, Ponzi & Picasso: Finance, Fraud, and Fine Art. Click to order.

Ponzi & Picasso is available at the Whitney Museum, New York's Crawford Doyle Bookstore on Madison Avenue, and online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. It has been chosen as the October selection for the Yale Book Club. Ohrstrom will be speaking at the Redwood Library in Newport in August.

Over 60 guests stopped by Lawrence's Park Avenue apartment to pick up an autographed copy of Ponzi & Picasso.

Former model Bonnie Pfeiffer Evans ran into Lizzette Pozzi, for whom she modeled when Pozzi was Editor-in-chief of Harper's Bazaar Italia.

Author Rochelle Ohrstrom with party host Jeanne Lawrence.

Enthralled by Ohrstrom's provocative point of view, guests joined in a heated discussion of the global art market and the ensuing scandals that appear almost daily in the New York Times.

Jeanne Lawrence and Keiko Nishida.

Rochelle Ohrstrom and Ava Roosevelt.

Susan Nagel, Anki Leeds, and Christine Biddle.

Joan Jakobson and Eleanora Kennedy.

Cathy Lawrence and Kristi Witker.

Christy Welker Sagansky and Jeanne Lawrence.

Rochelle Ohrstrom and Edwina Sandys.

Patricia Weeks Rekant and Rochelle Ohrstrom.

Anne Nitze and Rochelle Ohrstrom; Roberta Sanderman (center) assisted the author.

Ann Dexter-Jones and Kristi Witker.

Rochelle Ohrstrom and Saundra Whitney.

Rochelle Ohrstrom and Victoria Hansen.

Zibby Tozer, Lizzette Pozzi, and Jeanne Lawrence.

Susan Nagel, Diane Ackerman, and Judith Ehrlich.

Beatrice Pei and Barbara Georgescu.

Michelle Rosenfeld, Boo Grace, and Sharon King Hoge.

And now for something entire sunny and bright as well as wistful nostalia. My friend Beverley Jackson (also mother of my friend and NYSD contributor Tracey Jackson) sent me some snaps she took last week of Bullocks Wilshire, the former department store in Los Angeles that is now a national historic landmark as well as the Southwestern Law School. Beverley, who lives in Montecito is a born and bred Los Angeleno, had attended an “annual historic tour” there, and sent them to me knowing how much I love looking at pictures of Los Angeles. I asked her to tell us about the experience of that day, and here is what she wrote:

A Summer Day at Bullocks Wilshire is an annual event here in Los Angeles, hosted by the Southwestern Law School who now own the legendary Art Deco former department store on the 3000 block of Wilshire Boulevard.


	Tracey and Beverley.

I attended this year, totally enveloped in memories going back to early 1930s when I went there with my mother to shop. The little English smocked dresses that I wore came from Bullocks Wilshire. The Mary Jane shoes on my feet were from Bullocks Wilshire. As well as a big hair bow I hated in my hair! When I was older, a proper hat replaced the wretched bow.

Gripping my mother’s hand, all I could think of was the luncheon and fashion show in the Tea Room that would follow the shopping. For those of us who didn't like having our hair cut Bullocks Wilshire Barber Shop for children supplied small carousel animals for us to sit on during the ordeal.

As the years passed, my Westlake School for Girls uniforms came from BW — as did the oxfords on my feet and my plain cotton underwear as well.

Later when I graduated to lacey lingerie it came from BW as did the gowns I wore to the Bachelor's Ball and other galas. I remember particularly one peppermint stick ice cream-pink satin and silk tulle creation I felt like a royal princess in.

Eventually my wedding gown came from Bullocks Wilshire and later my maternity clothes followed by my baby daughter Tracey's baby clothes.

Bullocks Wilshire, today.

Seeing the store again last week I was thrilled to see the Art Deco-with-hints-of-Bauhaus elevator doors still in place. I did miss the friendly uniformed gentleman who directed us to the waiting elevators and the elevator operators in uniforms and white gloves. They called me Miss Beverley from three years old until that wedding gown went down the aisle. After that my old friends who had taken me on hundreds of trips up and down in those elevators insisted on Mrs. Jackson.

Stopping on the second floor brought so many memories of my late mother. The elegant French Room where models paraded the gowns she had requested to view has been kept very much as it was. Now it is available for rental for weddings and other events. Designer Irene's salon is much as I remember it. I spent long hours on fancy little chairs in these rooms swinging my Mary Jane clad feet back and forth as I waited for the trip to the tea room.

The Art Deco elevator doors.

Cactus in an Art Deco container at the desert-themed tea room entrance.

The mural on the ceiling above the porte-cochère.

The original drinking fountain.

Beautiful grillwork.

A fashion show always went on during luncheon, and I gulped down my hot popovers while admiring the gowns. The ladies at lunch all looked so nice in tailored suits, hats, gloves and of course the two strands of pearls around the neck. For dessert I always skipped the traditional lemon chiffon pie — which they served us again at our tour luncheon 2013. I always had a big dish of vanilla ice cream with hot fudge, whipped cream and cherries. Slivered almonds too.

It was truly a trip down memory lane for me: so much of my life interwoven with Bullocks Wilshire; so many memories came alive triggered by elevator doors, green porcelain 1940's pedestal sinks in the ladies room, and cactus in an Art Deco container.

Downtown LA from the top of Bullocks Wilshire.

Photographs by Teresa Lok (Ponzi & Picasso)

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Hats. 5:00 PM. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch.

Thursday, August 8, 2013. Rainclouds gathering yesterday afternoon into the evening, with thunderstorms predicted.

It was Wednesday. I went to Michael’s. What else? I was joined by my esteemed partner Mr. JH– making one of his rare outings that aren’t related to the golf course (and one of the rare times I actually see him) – and one of our esteemed contributors, Delia von Neuschatz.

Delia grew up in London and in Morocco where her parents were doctors. She’s married to a man in the financial world, and she’s a dedicated writer. She did that those great series on bookshops here in New York and in London. She recently wrote a piece on Anderson & Sheppard, the British suitmaker. You’ll never have to wonder again. And maybe you’ll make your way to them. I know I would if .... She also did a couple of pieces a while ago on visiting the Basque country and concentrating on the food. Dining out, lunching out. I’d never thought about the Basque country before, except in a political way. Delia’s piece changed all that. Another destination confirmed with the big if ...

DPC and Delia von Neuschatz. Photo: JH.

Michael’s seemed quiet for a Wednesday. It was full up but it was as if someone turned the volume down. Next door to us was Gillian Miniter and Steven Stolman; across the way Deborah Grubman was celebrating a birthday with Prudence Inzerillo. Across the aisle from them, Mr. Inzerillo with a guest. Across from them, Barry Frey; just beyond, Judy and Peter Price and guest. Moving around the room: Joe Armstrong with Warren Hoge, formerly of the New York Times and now Vice President for External Relations at the International Peace Institute; Chris Meigher; Ed DeYoung; Jack Kliger of TV Guide; Martin Puris with Linda Boff; Susan Silver and pals; Joy Tutela; SusanBlond; Michael Boodro of Elle Décor; Matt Blank of Showtime; Star Jones; Alexandre Chemia; Patricia Fili-Krushel, Chairman of NBCNews with Bob Barnett. At Table One, Dawn Ostroff; Roger Friedman with Norah Lawlor; Susan Duffy; Kim Hanju; Alexis Maule; Beverly Camhe with Bill McCuddy.

Today’s NYSD features the 25th chapter of Ellen Glendinning Ordway’s extraordinary archive of personal photos of a life and a society in America that is now entirely lost to vague memory. It is probable that Mrs. Ordway never imagined her photo albums would be seen a half century after her passing by hundreds of thousands of people all over the world.

She began her intense hobby with the camera, like a lot of her contemporaries, in the late 1920s. She was a serious amateur, with no sense or idea of being a professional. However, she was organized and methodical, and devoted to her avocation. For almost four decades she recorded the comings and goings of herself, her family and her friends. She created a photo-diary.


	Tucson. 1935. Ellen Glendinning Frazer Ordway led a remarkable life, photographing nearly every aspect of it. Whether Field Day at Watch Hill or the Arizona Desert School rodeo, Frazer especially seemed to enjoy photographing her children, Bettina, "Perkie" Persifor IV, and "Rippie" Robert.

Ellen Ordway was out of a world that was immortalized on the stage and screen by Philip Barry in his “Philadelphia Story” – their images characterized in the public mind by movie stars like Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart.

These were the new real American elite who inherited the 20th century from their elders of the Gilded Age. They did live in some ways like movie stars, or in the way that movie stars would have liked to live. For many, although far from all, it was a complete life of leisure and travel. There was a heavy psychic influence of the British aristocracy, no matter one’s religious or national background. They lived well, even very well. Some became celebrities such as the multi-marrieds, or major heirs and heiresses. But mainly they avoided publicity to the point of revulsion. The reason Ellen Ordway was able to get these shots was because she was one of them, and none of her friends ever dreamed they be seen by millions across the globe eighty years later.

They traveled, they entertained, they smoked a lot, drank a lot; they played cards, flew helicopters and planes, built large (but not too large) comfortable houses in sunnier spots (like Palm Beach), married, had children, divorced; frequently crossed the Atlantic by oceanliner (and much later by plane) and hobnobbed with the elite (and the celebrities) of that world.

Somehow Mrs. Ordway gets all of that into her pictures. Interestingly many of her descendents and her friends’ descendents are seeing these family albums for the first time just like the rest of us.

In this segment, taken in 1964, the main featured guests are the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. The Duke turned 70 that year. It is interesting to see his leisure costume. He’d got decidedly relaxed sartorially when visiting his friends Nicky and Bunny DuPont. The duchess, however, is her impeccable, best-dressed self, turned out in two shades of pink in an up-to-the minute designer – probably couture – dress.

The 68-year-old Duchess of Windsor at a luncheon given for her by Ellen Ordway at her Villa Bel Tramonto in Palm Beach, April 1964. She is talking to Ellen Yuille Blair, who was a school chum at Oldfields School in Maryland more than fifty years before.

This picture was taken eight years before the duke’s death after which nothing went right for the duchess. For their “friends” and hosts, such as the DuPonts and the Arthur Gardners, these two people were the most famous “love story” in the world, of their generation. This somewhat delicate looking little man gave up the throne of the great British Empire in order to marry this woman.

Nobody ever did that before. Their friends and hosts were all aware of (what they thought of as) this sacrifice that the duke made for this woman. It probably occurred to only a very few that this woman had made a great sacrifice too. But she wore it with aplomb and what appeared to be great confidence. That confidence which she exudes in these photos was quickly stolen from her, beginning shortly after her husband’s death, taking her on a long dark road of final years. None of this could have been imagined by anyone in these photos, let alone the duke and the duchess.

The Duke of Windsor relaxing on the terrace with Wolcott Blair.

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A view from a widow's walk in the village looking out toward the harbor in Nantucket, Sunday morning at 8:30. I was fascinated by the frequency of these widow's walks which now also serve as sundecks for many who don't live right on the beach. Photo: DPC.

Monday, August 12, 2013. A beautiful Sunday in New York.

I went up to Nantucket for a long weekend to stay with my friend Joy Ingham who’s been a Nantucket summer resident for a long time. She once owned a house there, although she now prefers the luxury of renting. Nantucket is a luxury community, all the way. But that is always second, a far second, to the fact that Nantucket is a beautiful community on a beautiful island. We can thank our Creator (whoever it may or may not be for you) for that one.

I’d been twice before for a day, a lunch. I’ve written about it on these pages. We had an advertising client who was a private jet service and the owner Adam Katz invited me and JH, and other media people, for a ride up to Nantucket and lunch and then back to New York. It’s not a long ride. It was an interesting trip. The point of it was to experience the luxury of your own private jet taking you there. I don’t have to tell you, what is obvious: it beats the bus, the train and let’s not forget the airport. My memory of those trips to Nantucket itself is almost blank.

Wednesday evening along the East River. It was a beautiful night and I told myself that boat might just be headed for where I was heading on Thursday.

Thursday morning I took a 12:09 Jet Blue flight from JFK, arriving in Nantucket at 1:14. Actually we were on the runway at 12:09 and arrived at just about one. I'm told that it's basically a half hour airtime from JFK. My flight back yesterday, leaving at 1:50 and arriving JFK at 2:50 was not more than twenty minutes but we had to wait another fifteen for landing

My memory of this past weekend is rich. It’s such a beautiful place. You feel like you could just move in and stay. Those houses are all old. Or most of them. I grew up in a New England town, and it wasn’t as authentically “quaint” as Nantucket, but the vibe bore similarities to it, and similarities to a lot of New England communities of other eras.

There is a neighborliness of sorts. Not entirely -- because our world is no longer available or accessible to neighborliness – cars, planes, cell phones, remote control – have all but destroyed it. But on this small island with its main village with the centuries’ old cobblestone streets and brick sidewalks, and so many of its original 18th and 19th century houses and other buildings, a lot of people can’t help saying hello to each other when passing on the sidewalk. And there are a lot of people walking. Joy Ingham likes living in the village because she can walk everywhere. And she knows some of her neighbors, and vice versa.

Thursday afternoon Joy and I walked down Orange Street to the center of the village. This must have been a whaling shipowner's mansion back in the early 19th century. Notice the widow's walk between the chimneys. I was surprised to see how popular they've become. A great architectural idea revived.

Yesterday morning, I walked (about five or seven minutes) down to a place called the Hub where you get the Sunday papers. I passed people on the street who said “Good morning.” There’s something to that that we’ve all deprived ourselves of nowadays.

So that’s what you get in Nantucket. Now the other side of this is the irony. Although it still has much of the image, updated and restored and renovated, of course, of a fishing village of yore – Nantucket wears its frugal New England sensibility elegantly. That’s because of the rich. Make no mistake. This is what it is like to be rich and to live well, if you have the mind and the real sensibility for it. There are always many of the aforesaid who don't. I understand there are fantastic “estates” farther out along the beaches that are post-modern palaces of sorts and entirely separated from what I’m referring to. But I’ll bet even they come to town just to get some of the “old time” feeling, because that’s the real comfort zone for modern life.

Main Street. The white building with the pillars is a bank. The FedEx truck is parked in front of a shop called Murrays. Men and women's Nantucket clothes. The colors, green, Nantucket red/pink, orange, yellow, surfer-time; shoes, socks, shorts bathing suits, blazers, pants, skirts, children, and jammed. There was a line at 5:30 (I went into buy some socks) waiting to pay and the place was like a beach party on a rainy Friday afternoon. (It wasn't raining.)

This village is still standing so prosperously because 1. It reflects our heritage, and 2. It costs a fortune to keep up appearances. These beautiful Nantucket houses with their weathered shingles and saltair-eaten shingles and windowsills are preserved by community agreement. You can’t change them. You can only make them better. And better it is.

Its summer residents come from all over the country. I flew up sitting next to a man from Colorado who spends his Augusts on Nantucket. I flew back (JetBlue both ways) alongside a man who is from Houston but spends his summers “like a hermit” on the beach. I could vote for that. Who could ask for anything more?

I had no more conversation with either of the aforementioned, but I could make a good guess where they live without having been told. Some ideally quiet, simple, lovely little (or not so) house right in the village, or not far from, if not on, the ocean. However, the house(s) which most likely have been completely restored inside (and not touched except for maintenance on the outside – that’s the law), and might have cost two or three or four, or maybe none of the above, million, aren’t in the average homeowner’s budget.

This is what got to me. The flowers everywhere, reminding me of New England life – although maybe in a faux-Proustian sense because frankly I don't recall this kind of festive floral abundance back then. Look closely, and you can see why: it's been work and planning and real gardening expertise.

There are lots of restaurants, and from what I could tell they were all doing business. There are sandwich shops where people line up and take numbers and wait good waits for their order because business is so brisk. There are cheeseburg joints and there are first class places. My first night there, Joy invited me to a restaurant called Languedoc which she refers to as the “Mortimers of Nantucket” where only a mobile phone number to owner Alan Cuhna can get you a table for its excellent cuisine. We were joined by Sis Chapin and old friend of Joy’s. Sis, who is now a very lithe and limber over eighty (and hits the gym three days a week, plus walks everywhere morning, noon and night), has been going to Nantucket since she was first married in her twenties. She now lives in Sonoma, California although her late husband Roy Chapin was the President of American Motors in its heyday and automotive swansong, and then she lived in Grosse Pointe. But at heart, she’s a villager when summer comes and you can tell that she can’t stay away. It’s in her bones and in her spirit. And a lot of her friends are here.

Then Friday night we went to The Galley on the beach (don’t ask where). My half-brother Bob Flanagan who has been going to Nantucket since he was a very young boy had a summer job at The Galley as a kid, lo these many years ago. It’s still going not strong but stronger.

Victorian had entered the design books.

Along the walk to a late lunch (2:30).

I never knew the name of the place Joy took me for a burger and fries right near the harbor but we had to wait twenty minutes for a table at that hour (2:30). Ireland Galleries generously provided waiting seating as well as some good ideas for hanging in your saltbox.

Just sayin' ...

See what I mean? Your whole attitude changes with them.

My bedroom was on the third floor, which must have been the attic back in the day – long before 21st century sensibilities decided what a perfect guest room and bath (shower) should be like. It also had a steep, ladder-like staircase which led to the widow's walk which pleased me greatly. This is the view from my bathroom window. It's not an illusory image of the close proximity of the neighbors -- they are thisclose. However it is remarkably quiet and gently private in feeling. I should also remind that you are looking at several million dollars in real estate in this little corner of rooftops. I point that out because it is a significant fact besides being a significant amount for 18th century New England austerity.

Ahh, at last. View from the widow's walk. For this writer it is always fascinating to stand on the roof and look out a the world below.

This is what Nantucket flower boxes are for.

The secret of the Republic's historical success.

The entrance to an inn's garden. The inns look small, compared to a New Yorker's idea of an "inn." Although it may be that inside, as it is in many of these houses, there is much more space than meets the eye from the exterior. This garden path led to a patio where guests were at table having a little leisurely lunch. This is just off Main Street.

Another view of the rambling neighborhood with its steeples of houses of worship – as seen from the widow's walk.

And another ...

And looking in another direction.

On my walk down Orange Street to Main to get the Sunday papers.

Back at Joy's. The island is teeming with hydrangeas.

Just up the street.

Back home from dinner at the Galley with our hostess and friends Marianne and Steve Harrison.

The Petticoat Row Bakery delivers at 8 a.m. And the pastry delivers as much as you can consume. It's freshly baked and fulla delish.

For example, the blueberry muffin. Just adding a little more butter. Why not, I'm on vacation. Joy has provided other choices in abundance, as you can see.

Our table at the Galley waiting for our first courses.


	Our hostesses on Saturday night, Joy Ingham and Robin Kreitler.

Every year, The Boston Pops performs a concert on the beach for the benefit of the hospital. This is a charity event like those we see all the time in New York during the Autumn, Winter and Spring season in New York. This year they raised $2 million -- the tables for ten start at $15,000 and go to $50,000.

It is also traditional for a lot of islanders to go out in their boats and watch (and hear if the wind is on your side) the concert off in the distance. Many like this form of concert going because it is more relaxed.

This year Joy and her friend Robin Kreitler (from Charlottesville Vuhginyuh — I couldn't resist, it's too pleasurable to hear) rented a boat called Shearwater, captained by Blair Perkins, and invited 31 friends to join them on a buffet trip to the concert.

The Shearwater is a 47-foot catamaran that is used for whale watching expeditions. (for more info: go to explorenantucket.com). The food was provided by Michael Caffrey, owner of Island Chefs.

It's about a seven minute walk down to the dock to meet the boat (invitation said 5:30 departure). We walked down a side lane called Lafayette to Washington Street. These names were given not many years after those guys were the heroes in the new democratic republic when its inception and the motivation in its founding was fresh and unhindered.

The harbor comes into view. There were a lot of large yachts docked.

And scores of smaller boats of course.

This shot was taken by Ward Landrigan, the owner of Verdura. Susan Zises Green had hosted a cocktail reception/exhibition of many pieces in the Verdura collection ("Midcentury Masters – Fulco Di Verdura and Suzanne Belperron, Vintage jewelry) at her house the night before. Ward and his wife Judith are old friends of Joy and many others in town and they were up in this neck of the woods (Martha's Vineyard as well) exhibiting. The crowd you see are guests of the Pops concert who paid for the privilege of bringing a box supper/picnic and blankets on the beach a hundred yards from the concert shell.

This is a longshot that I took of the location. You can barely see it but the concert shell is a black box-shaped structure to the right of the white tent and another building. This was taken about 6:30. The concert was scheduled for 7 PM.

Ward Landrigan's close-up shot of the beach crowd gathering, about the same time.

Nearby.

Awaiting concert time and photographing too, of course.

Concert fans gathering before the concert.

A trifecta of Pops fans. Ward Landrigan's camera working.

The harbor light (Ward Landrigan).

Ward's camera on some of the guests partaking. That's DPC on the other side of the door window in blue also partaking.

The Sun about to set and painting the sky. Red sky at night, sailors' delight ...

Getting closer ...

Descending below the horizon glowing pink.

Waiting for the moon.

The concert began about this time. But the winds were strong and the music wasn't coming our way much. They opened the program with "Dancing Queen," its strains in the vague distance but just enough to revive the memory in everyone aboard the Shearwater enjoying the hostesses' bill of fare.

Then at about 9 p.m., the orchestra played "The 1812 Overture" and the fireworks began.

The rockets' red glare on the face of DPC, taken by Ward Landrigan.

One morning, Joy and I drove out to visit Daisy Soros who lives in Siasconset (pronounced "Scon—set") overlooking the beach. I asked her what we were looking at. She replied: "Portugal."

Ward and Judith Landrigan visited out there also and these are Ward's photos.

After their beach visit, the Landrigans went for some lunch at Summer House Beachside Bistro.

Lobster roll and caprese salad with iced tea.

We didn't have Sun when we visited Daisy that morning. The cloud cover highlighted the intensity of the land and her garden for us.

For example ...

Tango, the Soros four-year-old poodle. A beauty and a love dog too.

Inside the Soros' cottage.

Riding back home looking out on Mother Nature's canvas over the land called Nantucket.

Contact DPC here.

Tapping in traffic. 11:30 AM. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch.

Wednesday, August 14, 2013. Strong, steady rain yesterday morning with the clouds departing in the late afternoon leaving us a sunny day. Until late evening when it rained again briefly.

Catching up. Last Thursday when I headed off to Nantucket for a long weekend, Connie and Randy Jones gave a small birthday dinner at their Sutton Place duplex for Arlene Dahl to celebrate her 88th birthday. I’ve known Arlene since I was a kid and saw her with Fred Astaire and Red Skelton in MGM’s “Three Little Words.” It was also the first MGM film for Debbie Reynolds. I actually got to know Arlene in the years that I’ve been writing the New York Social Diary.

The birthday girl.

Randy Jones and Arlene.

Mario Buatta and Connie Jones.

Sharon Bush and Marc Rosen.

She is one of those women whose personality doesn’t betray her famous beauty. She’s gracious and friendly, not shy but circumspect. She speaks with certainty but always with reserve – gentle and kind. She is one of those people who treats everyone with that grace.

The power and magic of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s image in American culture is long gone with the Studio System itself. But Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had a powerful influence on the American psyche of the last mid-century. It was the top of the crop of the film studios. Orson Welles, in the book “My Lunches with Orson,” which I wrote about on these pages several days ago, said that many of MGM’s movies (they turned out fifty features a year) were not as great as the image the studio produced for the screen but they left the impression because of their brilliantly thorough composition as film entertainment.

It was a ‘look” that inspired the “signature” look of many photographers of that era and in the years following in the 1960s and 70s. It was found in all aspects of their films – from the story, the costumes, art direction, the direction, and foremost: the talent.

Arlene with her first husband, MGM's Tarzan, Lex Barker

Today we would call it branding, for that is indeed what it was. You knew it was an MGM picture simply by the way it looked and its stars – who were among the biggest and most memorable of the so-called Golden Age of Film. The movie audience knew if it said MGM up there on the screen, it meant a visual quality that was closest to the make believe-reality that evoked the "dreams" in our culture. Its stars were groomed to reflect that.

Arlene Dahl reflected that. She was an MGM star and she exemplified that “look” of quintessential American glamour and style. (She and Debbie Reynolds are the last two remaining stars of the MGM roster which the studio publicity department described as “More Stars Than There Are in Heaven.”

With her second husband, Fernando Lamas.

Arlene and Fernando on the set.


	With Marc Rosen.

In keeping with the American fable of lives of movie stars, Arlene married several times (six), and to more than one of her leading men: Lex Barker (the MGM Tarzan) and then Fernando Lamas. Her first five marriages were comparatively brief although she bore a daughter and two sons (with three different husbands). Her sixth husband (and most devoted and enduring -- 30 years next year), Marc Rosen, a leading packaging designer and consultant (Marc Rosen Associates) has been creating award-winning brands for more than 20 years. He believes in the philosophy, coincidentally, of the late Louis B. Mayer, Arlene’s boss in Hollywood, glamour sells.

A little girl from Minneapolis, Arlene Carol Dahl made her first film (“Life With Father” based on the hit Broadway play) at 23. The last film she made was “Night of the Warrior” with her son Lorenzo Lamas, in 1991.

Carole Holmes DeLouvier, Lorenzo Lamas, Arlene Dahl, and Stephen Shaum at Alrene's birthday dinner in 2008. Photo: DPC.

In the meantime when she wasn’t working in film and television, she embarked on business ventures and also became a professional astrologer and columnist. I found Arlene’s chart and the details that go with it, if you’re interested in this sort of thing:


Arlene's astrological natal chart.

She was born on August 11, 1925 in Minneapolis at 4:10 AM under the sign of Leo. Her Ascendent is Leo, her Moon is in Gemini, and in Chinese Astrology she was born in the year of the Earth Dragon. Her Numerological Earthpath is the number 3.

Don’t ask me what it all means because I have only a vague idea, having listened many times to people who know with an expertise that I don’t possess. Although it’s always interesting.

People will often ask me if I “believe” in it. I don’t regard it so much as a “belief system” as a mathematically study based on the Ancients of the nature of life on this planet. Arlene, however, is an advocate of it and speaks of it with confidence and certainty. Naturally, I’m always willing to listen.

Meanwhile at the Jones’ dinner, the guestlist was: Liza Minnelli– whose mother was of course at MGM – and who has known Arlene all her life; TCM’s Robert Osborne, Barbara Taylor Bradford and producer husband Bob Bradford; Yanna Avis, Simone Levitt, Carole (Arlene’s daughter) and Philippe DeLouvier; Arlene’s son Stephen Schaum; Mario Buatta, Drew Butler, (Marc and Arlene’s godson), and their host and hostess Randy and Connie Jones. At each place setting was a photographs of Arlene from her days at MGM.

Daughter Carole's place setting.

Last Saturday night at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, they opened a revival of “A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum,” a musical farce with book by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart and music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. The Bay Street Theatre’s director and choreographer was Marcia Milgrom Dodge. It started Peter Scolari, Conrad John Schuck, Jackie Hoffman and featuring Stewart Lane.

The original Harold Prince production which opened in 1962 at the Alvin Theater (now the Neil Simon) deservedly won several Tony Awards including Best Musical and Best Book. Zero Mostel starred. It has since had several Broadway and (London) West End revivals as well as a successful film also starring Zero Mostel.

Also in the Bay Street Theatre Forum cast are: Glenn Giron, Grant Haralson, J. Morgan White, Nick Verina, Lora Lee Gayer, Tom Deckman, Laurent Giroux, Halley Cianfarini, Jen Bechter, Jessica Crouch, Shiloh Goodin, Phoebe Pearl, Terry Lavell and Nathaniel Hackmann. The show runs through September 1.

Jessica Crouch, Glenn Giron, Phoebe Pearl, J.Morgan White, Nathaniel Hackmann, and Ethel Will.

Shiloh Goodin, Laurent Giroux, Nathaniel Hackmann, J. Morgan White, and Jackie Hoffman.

Daryl Schaffer, Peter Scolari, Lauren Schaffer, Carol Roman, and Ellen Krass.

Nick Verina, Laurent Giroux, Terry Lavell, Nathaniel Hackmann, Stewart Lane, and down in front Lora Lee Gayer.

Daryl Schaffer, Lauren Schaffer, Ellen Krass, Carol Roman, and Bonnie Comley.

"Everybody Ought to Have a Maid," from Sondheim's "A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum," performed by Simon Russell Beale, Daniel Evans, Julian Ovenden, and Bryn Terfel at Stephen Sondheim's 80th birthday (produced by the BBC in London).

More catching up. On the Friday and Saturday of July 19 and 20, at Columbia County’s Copake Country Club in Craryville, New York, 5000 people attended the 3rd annual Hudson Valley Food Lovers’ Festival, Farm On! Proceeds from the Festival benefit the Farm On! Foundation in Partnership with Cornell Cooperative Extension, Questar III and 4H.

Chef Zak Pelaccio and Lady Jayne’s Alchemy of Fish & Game hosted a “Hootenanny” at the Farm Fresh Fundraiser Dinner on Friday. 60 local farmers and their families joined the 300 guests at table.

Kip Edick.

Jeremy Peele, Parker Posey, Tessa Edick, and Norman Greig.

At each table of 10, eight diners were joined by a local farmer and his wife, offering a firsthand experience to learn about the local food system, and eat with the people who are behind the food they were enjoying - most of which was sourced on the farms within five miles of the festival, providing guests with firsthand experiences with the people who make their food.

The "Hootenanny" also included a Hudson Valley cheese course, golf cart drive-in and movie sponsored by Whole Foods.

Ross Mauri and Billy Rae.

The following day was the 2013 “Friends of the Farmer” Festival, sponsored by fashion designer John Varvatos at the Copake Country Club. Its highlights include live performances by Lukas Nelson (son of Willie)and P.O.T.R., a robust farmer’s market including vendors with local libations and a wide range of kid-friendly activities such as a petting zoo, pony rides and more.

Founded and produced by the Culinary Partnership, a company specializing in launching food products and owned by Tessa Edick, the event raises scholarship money for students participating in Cornell University’sCooperative Extension, Questar III and 4H and brings awareness to consumers through the ”know your farmers, know your food” mission.

Lukas Nelson, Tessa Edick, and John Varvatos.

Thea Varvatos.

Donna Faircloth and Matt Charkow.

“I’m standing up for my farming community and my food choices, by meeting one farmer at a time!” points out Ms. Edick. “We want kids participating in Camp Farm On! to know farming is not only cool, it can be a highly profitable business. Pairing agriculture with an ROI business mentality makes for viable livelihoods and gives the next generation of farmers the tools to succeed today. Only then can we talk about succession and the future of farming.”

All funds raised benefit The Farm On! Foundation, offering Hudson Valley students an opportunity to visit local farms and gain an understanding of how they become viable businesses - fostering entrepreneurial spirit and encouraging the next generation of local farmers.”

Lukas Nelson performing.

Photographs by Rob Rich (Funny Thing).

Contact DPC here.

The Merchant's Gate sculpture at the southwest entrance to Central Park, on 8th Avenue next to Columbus Circle. 2:30 PM. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch.

Thursday, August 15, 2013. When I got up yesterday morning and opened my terrace door, there was a strong, almost — but not quite — chill breeze blowing outside, delivering just a whiff, but enough to remind you of what lay ahead for us: autumn.

It was like that all day, and full of sunshine. I’ve become so accustomed to the possible onslaught of extreme weather that days like these are like a great painter’s masterpiece. The city’s beauty is before you.

I am now hearing references in conversation to the Summer’s end just about upon us. All regarded with alas and alack. Last night in New York was equally as beautiful as the day. Shortly after sunset I took some pictures of the avenue, north and south. I was thinking of all that energy we experienced only six hours before at Michael’s and now in the process of being subdued behind those lighted windows in the towers along the avenue with the real lives, back home in their own spaces, probably often very quiet, or teeming with family life, the sounds of the television news bouncing off the walls, and blu-ing up the lights in the room with the night encroaching.

It was Wednesday; it was Michael’s which was going full throttle. Sometimes I stop talking and just listen to the room. The clatter just rolls and tumbles like a huge and boisterous energy machine. It’s a force of nature when taken as itself. Taken individually, we’re back to the Naked City and 9 million stories.

I was lunching with Judy Price who was the founder of Avenue magazine back in the '70s and ran it like a tight ship and sold ads like nobody’s business for twenty-five years. Or was it twenty-six or thirty? Anyway, it was a long one and she made her work known, and a name for herself and with her husband businessman/entrepreneur Peter Price, a good life. They have an apartment here in New York, another in Paris, and a beautiful house in Pound Ridge that once belonged to the great fashion photographer’s model of the 1940s through '60s, Mary Jane Russell and her husband Edward Russell, president of Doyle, Dane, Bernbach.

Mary Jane Russell in Dior Dress, Paris, 1950. Russell was a favorite of photographers Louise Dahl-Wolfe and Irving Penn. Mrs. Russell started her modeling career with Ford in 1948. This was the height of the post-War "New Look" that brought Dior international fame. Over the years Russell appeared frequently on the covers of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. Irving Penn said of her: "She brought to her posing as a model concentration and tenderness, rare in the fashion medium today."

Slim Aaron's visit to Mary Jane Russell at her house in Pound Ridge, autumn 1960.

I was the editor of Avenue for three years under Mrs. Price from ’97 to August 2000. JH came to work there the following year as my assistant. (We worked well together; we never worked in the same building at the same time.) In 2000, we left to launch the NYSD.

Judy always has lots of information and stories from her travels and her (not so) new business, the National Jewelry Institute. She’s already published three or maybe it’s five great books on the history of jewelry, as well as staged several exhibitions. No moss grows under those feet.


A new item: Gayfryd Steinberg and Michael Shnayerson.

She also loves a good piece of gossip like most media folk. Mine was that her also once-upon-a-time editor, Michael Shnayerson, who writes for Vanity Fair, is going out with Gayfryd Steinberg, the beautiful and gracious widow of Saul Steinberg.

Judy loved this story. Women, as you know, more than men, very often get a kind of thrill out of hearing about a couple dating. Men tend to keep their thrill to themselves. Especially as we all get older (and way beyond the former meaning of dating).

Judy wanted to know how I knew. I told her I never reveal my sources. Later in the afternoon she emailed me that she had corresponded with Shnayerson and he confirmed it. “Three months, they’ve been going out,” she reported gleefully. Some good news on this beautiful day.

Michael’s (the restaurant) sounded like good news – all that noise of hundreds of boss-voices relishing the whole Noo Yawk Moment one way or another. In the center of the room, Bonnie Fuller, President and Editor-in-Chief of HollywoodLife.com, along with Gerry Byrne of Penske Media, presiding over a table of fourteen or sixteen. At Table One: Maria Bartiromo, Gayfryd Steinberg’s step-daughter-in-law was presiding. Nearby: The LeFraks, pere et fils – Harrison, Jamie, and friend; Matt Rich with writer Ava Roosevelt; Fred Davis of Davis, Shapiro & Lewit; the beautiful Maureen Reidy, former head of Donald Trump’s The Argus Group, now veep at the Paley Center; Martin Bandier, Chair/CEO Sony/ATV; Larry Kirshbaum, head of Amazon Publishing; Nick Verbitsky; Ed Adler; Arthur Sandor, VP Hustler; Bob Towbin; Fern Mallis, Wenda Millard, President and CEO of Media Link LLC, former co-CEO of Martha Stewart; Steve Mosko of SONY Pictures Television; Pete Peterson, founder of Blackstone; The Mayor of Michael’s Joe Armstrong with Dorothy Kalins, founding editor of Saveur, founding E-I-C, Metropolitan Home, cookbook writer and consultant; the distinguished William vanden Heuvel, businessman, attorney, diplomat, author and also founder and director of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. It was Bill vanden Heuvel, force of personality that actualized (with a lot of help from a lot of friends) the FDR Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island. Bill is also the father of Katrina vanden Heuvel, owner/publisher of The Nation. Moving along: Ralph Destino; Barry Frey.

Apropos of nothing but food in the subject of Michael’s, I’m reading Kate Hubbard’s fascinating study of a life — “Serving Victoria” the lady who gave her name to a century in Western Civilization.


	Click to orderServing Victoria.

It was no day in the country, so to speak, to be in service to the Queen, although most of it was spent in the country –— be it Windsor, the Isle of Wight, Scotland or making royal visits occasionally — because she didn’t like the noise of London. It was a big, tiny life in the gargantuan empire over which she reigned powerfully.

One chapter — Balmorality — chronicles the annual visit to Balmoral, possibly the dullest, most boring place on Earth for the Royal tenders, slaves to tradition of gilded servitude. By 1870 the Royal party — family, household (ladies and lords in waiting, etc.), and servants traveled the 600-mile two-day trip by Royal Train. Among other details that Hubbard reports was the various menus. The Queen was a robust eater as you might have guessed from the sight of her. According to author Hubbard:

“The journey was accompanied by some serious eating – a ‘sumptuous breakfast,’ (trout, salmon, scones, strawberries and peaches) at the Station Hotel in Perth on the outward journey, and a six-course dinner (soup, turbot in lobster sauce, fried smelts, foie gras, mutton cutlets, roast beef and turkey, pheasants, Sefton pudding, Madeira jelly and apple compote) on the return, not to mention a ‘hearty tea’ at Aberdeen. As back-up, hampers were supplied by the royal kitchens crammed with cold meats, stuffed rolls, grouse, cakes, biscuits, tea, cream, claret, champagne, sherry and seltzer water.”

Everything but the Zantec and the Pepcid. And of course the Tums.

Contact DPC here.

Checking for rain yesterday afternoon. 2:00 PM. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch.

Monday, August 19, 2013. Beautiful weekend in New York, overcast on Sunday, as if there might be rain (there wasn’t), but mild.

I stayed in the City, as is my wont. It was quiet. I got out my little black Mini convertible, put the top down and drove across town to Zabar's.

No problem finding parking. I usually take a bus or (better) a cab. The total bus ride is $4.50 and the cab one way is usually about $12 including tip. The parking, however, costs $3.50 an hour right across the street from Zabar's, giving me time to also visit Barnes & Noble, Laytner’s Linens (pillows — on sale) and peruse the book table outside Zabar's.

Dining al fresco on Saturday afternoon on the Upper West Side. Photo: JH.

On Friday I had an MRI. I’ve had CT-Scans a few times but never an MRI. All I heard about was that it was different. Was I nervous? Of course. Could I do anything about it? No.

JH had already told me that the machine was not great for claustrophobics. I’m not claustrophobic so that didn’t concern me. I was concerned about “what” they might find although I knew I wasn’t going to hear the “what” part right away, so I was able to put that out of my head. What assisted me was the process.

You go into a stall with a curtain, remove all your garments except your underwear (and your socks), put on a short cotton robe and go into “the room.”

The machine looks like a CT-Scan machine — a long, narrow, table-like bed with a place for the back of your head and for your feet (heels). The main device is round, like a large metal doughnut-shape, like the CT-Scan. You lie down, put your arms close to your side, put in ear-plugs and close your eyes.

The doctor/operator tells you it’s going to be noisy— hence the earplugs — but that it’ll take about twenty minutes; and you must keep your eyes closed.

I heard the doctor’s voice tell me over a speaker that we were beginning. The table/bed seemed to elevate and move backwards (into the center of the doughnut, I was presuming). Then the noise began.


	Fred Astaire and Hermes Pan dancing it up for the RKO publicity photographer, circa 1935. I was reminded that work for them (creating the dances) was long and intense but full of the fun (and laughs) that we see in this photo.

NOISE. Bang bang bang, beep beep beep BANG/whack-whack-whack, BANGBANG-buzz-buzz-buzz. Real racket and really loud, relentless, disturbingly loud. I was afraid that the shock of the incessant banging and buzzing and tooting and whacking was going to cause me to accidentally open my eyes. Fear? Fear of opening my eyes, forget what the machine might detect. It was very disturbing.

However. I needed to move my mind to another place in order to endure the 20 or so minutes without panicking. Time goes by very slowly when you’re measuring it, as you know. The banging, however, and the tap tap tap, whack whack whack, reminded me of: Fred Astaire and Hermes Pan.

Long time readers of the NYSD might recall that I wrote a book for Hermes Pan back in the early '80s when I was living in Los Angeles. It was intended to be a memoir and in the process of interviewing Hermes, we became friends and I got to know him quite well. Eventually I did put together a book, although we were not able to find a publisher (it was no tell-all and Hermes avoided controversy for several reasons even though he was in his 70s and his career had ended).

I called the book “The Man Who Danced With Fred Astaire.” Years later, about two or three years ago, some writer researching Hermes met his surviving family of nieces and nephews and came upon Hermes’ copy of my manuscript. The writer, whose name escapes me now, contacted me to interview me. I later learned that he’d lifted my title for his book — which infuriated me but his publisher insisted I had no rights to it. It was published and subsequently forgotten.

Hermes Pan’s life story is almost a fable, like the name he was given at birth (the Pans were Greeks and had a much longer name beginning in Pan ... but it was Anglicized by his father). The man was always a dancer from childhood, never trained but eventually became a seat-of-the-pants professional in the late 1920s in New York. He was working in the chorus of a Ruby and Kallmar Broadway musical called “Top Speed” when the ingénue, a young actress named Ginger Rogers told him she was going out to Hollywood because Talkies had come in and they were beginning to make musical pictures. This was 1930. She told Hermes he should consider the move because they needed singers and dancers for their movies.


Ginger and Fred dancing the carioca in Flying Down to Rio, 1933.

A few months afterwards Hermes and his sister and mother, in an old Ford they’d bought for $75 embarked on a trip across the country (this was long before interstates). Two years later by chance he got a job at RKO working as an assistant choreographer with a famous musical stage dancer Fred Astaire who was preparing for his first film (with Ginger), “Flying Down To Rio.” The Pan-Astaire collaboration turned out to be a karmic one — it lasted the lifetime of the men’s careers — almost forty years.

This is where my MRI business comes in. So lying there trying to keep myself calm with all this banging going on very loudly despite my lousy hearing and the earplugs, I hit upon Pan and Astaire.

All those numbers we’ve seen on the screen of Fred or Fred and Ginger, all the sound of those tap-tap-tapping that we see and hear, was done after they shot the sequence. Fred and Hermes went into a studio wearing their taps shoes and stood on a cement platform with a wooden floor, in front of the screen. When the reel began, the two men would be watching it and repeat all the steps taking place on the screen, (Hermes would be Ginger's steps) “setting the taps” recording them for the finished product.

There was no mistaking the steps because the two men rehearsed to the point (Astaire’s) of perfection. And, as I learned when Hermes recounted the experience often with a chortle or some laughter, the two men had a good time doing it. It was the ultimate challenge that was fun, and funny. “All dancers are children,” he once said, adding: “they have to be in order to let themselves move unself-consciously.”

So as I lay there on the MRI slab Friday afternoon, focusing on keeping still and keeping my eyes shut, I visualized Pan and Astaire and imagined them setting their taps to the sounds banging all around my head. They both loved percussion and these sounds would have given them inspiration for more fun. The more outrageous the better. This photograph Hermes gave me of the two of them (for RKO publicity) always reminds me of those moments. It also took me thorough a successful session.

Out and About; catching up. Out in Aspen, Ann Nitze gave a tea at the Explore Book shop to celebrate Stephanie Stokes' new book, “Elegant Rooms that Work, Fantasy and Function in Interior Design” (Rizzoli Publishers).

Christopher Walling and Stephanie Stokes.

Ann Korologis (former CEO of Aspen Institute) with the party's hostess, Ann Nitze.

About a hundred friends came for cookies and conversation including Leonard Lauder and Linda Johnson, Patty Phelphs de Cisneros (Stephanie's cousin), Carolyn Roehm, Christy Ferer, Lisa Schiff, Victoria Smith, Pat Patterson (Dallas), Susan Braddock, and others Manhattanites who summer in the Rockies.

There were also several Texans including Ann and Ed Hudson, Nancy Dunlop, Molly Lassiter, and Judy Allen. Stephanie's best Colorado friend, Sally Ranney, arrived. This week she and Ted Turner will be sponsoring an environmental event in Aspen. The beautiful Maja and Nicolas DuBrul, Elizabeth Paepcke's grandson, were also in attendance.

Susan Braddock (center with adored friend) and friends.

The Explore Book shop is a great Aspen institution owned by Sam Wiley and brilliantly run by John Edwards, an Aspen native. But Phoenix who handles all events is the shop's great heroine.

Bill Nitze, Ann’s husband, is the nephew of Elizabeth Paepcke. But it is Ann herself who is today the favorite hostess of Aspen. Ann and Stephanie went to boarding school together.

Stephanie, a New Yorker by choice, is a fourth generational Coloradoan. Her great-grandmother went West in a stagecoach. Each time a husband succumbed to TB, she went back East and got a new one, and wrote wonderful diary of the opening of the West. Stephanie's old family house, no longer in the family, is now the headquarters for Hari Krishna Hari Rama.

Maja and Nic DuBrul with Carolyn Roehm.

Also last week, Southampton Hospital broke ground at the site of its new Audrey and Martin Gruss Heart and Stroke Center. The occasion honored the Grusses for their great gift of $5 million for the new facility. When completed, the Center will provide stroke treatment and carotidstents as needed. It will consolidate a broad spectrum of new and sophisticated diagnostic and treatment capabilities with the hospital’s existing cardiovascular programs and services. The core components will include:

Audrey, who is President of their Foundation, reminded that, “The over-50 age group has the highest probability of experiencing a stroke or heart attack. With many of us spending months or weekends year-round in Southampton and the East End, Martin and I felt it was important that our local hospital have the capability to conduct stroke and vascular distress intervention.” She added, “We are gratified by this addition to Southampton Hospital, knowing that our family and friends will be able to get timely heart and stroke medical care they need, when and where they need it.”

Audrey and Martin Gruss breaking ground.

Cardiovascular Disease, of which heart disease and stroke are the most common diseases, is the leading cause of death nationally as well as in New York State and Long Island. Given a geographically remote location, compounded by excessive traffic during the summer, heart disease and stroke are a particular concern for the communities served by Southampton Hospital. The nearest similar programs are at Stony Brook University Medical Center, where during the busy summer months it can be a 2-hour trip from East End communities, where the population skews toward older residents and retirees.

Robert Chaloner, President and CEO of Southampton Hospital, said, “Creation of The Audrey and Martin Gruss Heart and Stroke Center will be transformational for us because it will will significantly advance the Hospital’s ability to diagnose and treat stroke and cardiovascular disease, and become a vital component of the care provided by our community hospital. This critically important initiative will undoubtedly save lives, and we are grateful for the Grusses’ generosity and commitment to quality healthcare in our community.”

Anna Thorne-Hoist, Debra Halpert, and Jay Schneiderman.

Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele and Barbara Poliwoda.

Jean Shafiroff and Jean Remmel Little.

Photographs by Mary Hayes ( Aspen).

Contact DPC here.

5:00 PM. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch.

August 19, 2013. Overcast and warm with the weatherman predicting some more of that ole time humidity that gets the A/Cs roaring in my neighborhood.

There was an article on the web about a 9-year-old kid who entered a library reading contest upstate, and read 63 books in a month. Evidently the librarian was not happy about this. She thought the kid’s speed was making it impossible for other kids to win, and therefore they might give up and read nothing.

Some readers of the article suggested the kid was reading below his reading level and therefore pulling it off easily. In other words, the 9-year-old was working it.

Someone else wrote that it was possible because he himself had once read 600 pages in two hours. I’m awestruck. It takes me days to read a book. Although I could imagine a little boy with the right frame of mind and imagination and emotional clarity being able to race through stories. I could also imagine a little boy being in on the game some way too. We get started very early with our way of thinking about life.


	The very young Victoria who became the monarch of the United Kingdom in 1837 at age 18. Granddaughter of George III, her name would one day lend itself to the age in which she reigned.

I’ve liked reading books since I was a kid of eight or ten going to the Atheneum (which is what the library was called in my town) on Saturday mornings. The library was quiet and serene and clean. Peace was the message for this boy — solace, a word I didn’t know but nevertheless recognized the feeling anyway — in the library.

On its shelves were other worlds to live in, to learn about. But I’m slow reader. I get distracted easily. Many times I find it hard to sit still. Or I’ll compulsively run off to the internet to check certain sites for the latest news or commentary. Other than writing, reading is the one thing that I like to do most with my time. I don’t read enough when I consider all the books I want to read and all those things I will love to learn. As well as the things I won’t love to learn.

Summertime is reading time for me. That’s the luxury. The calendar lightens up to the point where I have nothing to report, to write about. Over this past weekend, I finished the book, which I’ve already written about, “Serving Victoria.” It wasn’t compelling. You don’t wonder what’s going to happen next. Her actual day-to-day life was a deadly dull to be around. Yet I couldn’t put it down.

She was a strange figure to behold — so remote, so somber in her frivolousness, yet likeable. Despite her congenital selfishness and self-centeredness, she genuinely liked people. Because of that she could listen — if you could get her ear, and that was the hard part because she was barricaded by protocol. There were many times when she was wise and admirable, including times when she was forced to submit to those who would’t go along. But she could be easily self-deluding when it came to those (men) she favored. Complaints of her Highlands servant’s drunkenness was excused as “bashful” or “tired.”

Prince Albert and Queen Victoria and their brood.

She loved to eat, and had terrible indigestion, not surprisingly. She loved Tea (the tradition) — although despite her intake, it did not spoil her dinner. When she was at Balmoral, four times a week her confectionary at Windsor would send an order of: one fox of biscuits, one box of drop tablets, one box of pralines, sixteen chocolate sponges, twelve plain sponges, sixteen fondant biscuits, one box of wafer, one and a half dozen flat finger biscuits, one sponge cake, one Princess cake and one rice cake. Times four — all in a seven day period.

She had help of course, in consuming this vast sugar quarry, but Victoria was generous with herself, by habit. She was then in her mid-70s and not getting any thinner.


Munshi, Victoria's controversial Indian servant (who was never referred to as a servant). She was putty in his hands and his hands were deft and sly.

This was a rather plain, basically uneducated woman who lived all her life in castles and palaces, surrounded and waited on by hundreds. She was held in highest esteem and recognized for great political power by millions. But she was really just a woman living in a peculiar atmosphere of the Self at the center of world power. For any single individual — man or woman, it’s a bizarre reality. It points up again and again how strange Royalness is, and how unreal. Even today. She was not prepared for anything but the privilege. She deferred to her husband early on and had several children by him. When he died suddenly in his forties, she mourned him for the rest of her long life. And she owned her power, something that was clear to anyone and everyone who came in contact with her.

Most people communicated with her through a third person. You can see how easy it would be to fall into that mode of communication. She hated London and avoided it as much as possible. She spent the majority of her time away and unavailable to most people except by specific appointment. In modern terms it’s referred to as “isolating,” Victoria was a champ at it.

She had a lot of company though, at all times, night and day. Her doctor visited her at least three times a day. Her maids-in-waiting had to be there when she frequently awoke in the middle of the night. Attention had to be paid. When her doctor finally became engaged to marry at 50 she was outraged. It took months to bring her around to reality (that the man had a right to a life of his own), and to giving her approval.

Once there, she was fine. She could briefly put aside the child who wanted everything her way. But she nevertheless expected the complete devotion and attention from those who “served” her. She was the Sovereign. She kept herself unapproachable, so that people had to figure out to communicate with her effectively while not appearing to. It was stunning to learn that it wasn’t until after she died that the doc actually saw her unclothed for the first and only time in the decades that he served her!

Munshi when he had become the Queen's man at the beginning of his reign over the Queen's consciousness.

It made me laugh to think about it because when you read this book you get that Victoria was as ignorant as the rest of us but could behave thusly because she was Queen.

She wasn’t charming although there was something charming about her behavior. The part where her adored Munshi, the Indian servant (who saw to it that no one could refer to him as a servant) had run his course with the rest of the staff and must go, is an excellent document of the vagaries of personal political power in the presence of people who possess another kind of power – the power to attract.


	John Brown with some of the Queen's dogs. Brown was one of nine children and three or four of his brothers also joined the Queen's household in various servant positions. The Browns were big drinkers and rowdy. More than once they drew unfavorable attention with their bustin' up ways. The Queen was never perturbed by and made excuses for their behavior.

	Brown with his Queen at Balmoral. After he died she had a statue sculpted of him which she had placed on the castle grounds. After she died, her son had the statue removed to behind the cottage that was Brown's when he was at Balmoral.

Victoria was crazy about this particular member of her Household. She studied Hindustani daily with him. He was very handsome, and even at a late age, Victoria was still dazzled by the male animal. There were rumors that she and Munshi had a “thing” going on. True or not, it is immaterial to the drama: she was crazy about him. To him she dispensed power. Whereupon the Prime Minister might have to go through a third person to speak to her, Munshi said what he thought to her face all the time. And not all of it was pleasantries. There were even shouting matches with the old girl, Empress of India.

As Victoria got older Munshi's power and misuse of it became more and more of a problem for the household as well as the government. No amount of complaints registered against him could sway Victoria's complete trust in him. Finally after he contracted a severe case of gonorrhea, treated by her doctor – who reported it to the Queen, did she, very very reluctantly begin to listen. But Munshi held on almost to the end of her life.

The same was true with a previous man in her life after Albert:John Brown. A foreign temperament (to the Queen), Brown started out as one of Prince Albert’s gillies (a hunting/fishing guide) at Balmoral. Then he was promoted to the Queen’s “special servant,” with pony-leading duties. He is described as: “tall, powerfully built, firm-jawed and blue-eyed. He made the Queen “feel safe” with his “strong arm.”

He was brusque, disregarded etiquette, was fearless, and loyal. After Albert died, Brown took over the role of male protector to the damsel in distress. He had his say with the Queen and didn’t have a problem letting her know when he disagreed. Apparently Victoria hungered for that while at the same time disallowing such opposition among her staff and servants (and even her children), always playing Queen.

Brown was more than a "faithful servant" and a "good friend." He and the Queen slept in adjoining rooms. Victoria commissioned several portraits of him (and with her) and, after his death, she had a life-sized statue of him erected on the grounds of Balmoral Castle. After she died, Her son Edward VII had the statue removed to a place near the cottage that Brown lived in near the castle.

Queen Victoria, Empress of India, the most powerful woman in the world at the end of the 19th Century.

In many ways she never grew up. She was an inexperienced 18-year-old sheltered girl when she came to the throne of the most powerful nation of the 19th century. England grew more powerful as her reign progressed through the Industrial Revolution.

She learned about wielding political power from that peculiar unrealistic but nevertheless Very Real position of “majesty.” She remained childish when she felt like it. And although she had a kindness to her, she was habitually willful in her conduct with almost everyone around her except her men — Albert, Brown and then the scandalous, nefarious Munshi — all of whom possessed a power she could not replace. The power of sex. Does that still exist? Do we know it?

Click to order“Serving Victoria."

Contact DPC here.

Blue Moon. 12:30 AM. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch.

Thursday, August 22, 2013. Very warm, yesterday in New York; and sunny. Traffic was much lighter in midtown. The cabbies told me that it was because everything’s quieting down pre-Labor Day weekend. Next week Michael’s will be closed on Friday.

Yesterday Michael’s was busy but not the chatter/clatter you usually get in the mid-week pandemonium. At Table One, Norah Lawlor was hosting a lunch with Christopher Pape, the editor of The Resident— a local metropolitan paper that is distributed in the residential areas of the city. Also at table was Ernie Anastos, John Shavins and Jonathan Cheban.


	Cheban and Kardashian.

	The watch.

Mr. Anastos has an idea for a new news show, a “positive” news show. He’s had enough bad news. Like the rest of us, no? The question begs: will a new show of “positive” stories change things, or will we just be kidding ourselves?

Mr. Cheban — if his name is sounding familiar but you can’t place it — is a close associate of the Kardashians, the reality-TV tycoons. He made headlines all over the world earlier this week because he was seen in the Hamptons last weekend wearing a gold watch that cost $500,000. (“Positive news”) And someone almost tried to steal it. (Not so positive). Or almost stole it. Or tried. Something.

All this while Mr. Cheban was having a lovely surf ‘n’ turf while lunching at one of the million dollar coffee shops out there. Mr. Cheban’s sartorial splendor, ironically, begins and ends with his half million dollar wrist bling. But that’s the fashion these days: bling ‘n’ blah.

Eye traveling around the room: Gerry Bryne; Jimmy Finkelstein; Joe Armstrong with Patricia Duff; Sanford & Stein; Tom Rogers with Andrea Miller of Your Tango; Bob Barnett; Malcolm Macpherson; Jim Abernathy; Nancy Cardone; Barbara Tober (with this writer); Risa Drabinsky; Peter Gregory; Barry Frey; Katherine Farley with Nicole Seligman; Peter Price with Bob Bradford. Bob’s super-best-selling novelist wife Barbara Taylor Bradford has just handed in her latest manuscript to her publishers in London; Hugh Freund; Elihu Rose; Newell Turner of Hearst; Steven Rubenstein with Peter Lattman, Kelly Langberg; Chris Meigher of Quest; Cindi Berger; David Verklin with Maury Rogoff;Ted Moncrieff with Lynn Hirschberg; Andrew Stein; Rob Weisbach; Neil Lasher; Shelly Palmer; Philippe Salomon.

Today on the NYSD we’re publishing the 27th (and what may be the final) chapter of the great photo archive of Ellen Glendinning Ordway. If you haven’t seen them, and you love vintage photographs of life in American society in the 20th century, do have a look, this is a treasure trove.

Mrs. Ordway was a committed amateur photographer. Over the decades from the late 1920s through the late 1960s, she took thousands of photos of her friends, their houses, their trips, and their parties, and meticulously catalogued them in photo albums.


Bailey's Beach. The President of the United States, John F. Kennedy. September 16, 1962.

Bailey's Beach. John F. "John-John" Kennedy. Jr. Newport. August, 1964.

Each segment represents a photo diary of this woman’s life. It was a life of almost total leisure. Her social circle was wide and international but many members of it were people she knew all her life, even since childhood. That was the basic nature of society in this country.

A Philadelphian who always wintered in Palm Beach where her parents built a house in the early '20s, she married twice. Her second husband Lou Ordway, was son of a founder of 3M (Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing).

Life was simple in its leisure. Women openly smoked and drank at table. It was a generation that no doubt had cosmetic surgery although you can see by the faces that the pursuit was less intense so that women looked like themselves rather than many others.

Last week’s edition featured a shot of John F. Kennedy Jr. (known to the world as John-John) as a toddler at Bailey’s Beach Club in Newport. Several editions back, there was a very rare photo of President John F. Kennedy also at Bailey’s Beach wearing nothing but swim trunks – not unusual but unusual to be photographed.

In today’s we meet Nancy Lancaster, the famous British interior decorator who was an (American) niece of Nancy Astor. Mrs. Ordway attends the christening of the little baby Cornelia Guest in Palm Beach. I don’t think Cornelia’s ever seen these pictures, so she’ll be seeing them for the first time on NYSD. There’s the erstwhile famous maestro Thomas Schippers, considered a wunderkind of an orchestra conductor in the 1960s.

Schippers had made his debut at the New York City Opera when he was 21 (1951) and at the Met two years later. Movie star handsome, in his mid-thirties he married the beautiful young heiress, Nonie Phipps (whose parents and their Palm Beach house) are featured in this edition.

Tom Schippers and Nonie Phipps Schippers.

At the outset the Phipps-Schippers was one of the most publicized marriages of the decade. They were a glamorous culture/society couple. Schippers founded the famous Spoleto Festival in Italy with Gian Carlo Menotti. While he was known (in his set) to be gay although it was a time when the subject was never mentioned publicly outside of gay circles. However, Mrs. Schippers died of cancer only eight years after they married, in 1973. Thomas Schippers succumbed to the same cancer four years later.

Also featured in today’s is another popular and young musician and orchestra leader of the day, Peter Duchin who was married to his first wife, Cheray Zauderer.

Peter and Cheray Duchin.

Travel played a big part in the life of leisure that many of Mrs. Ordway’s friends shared. She goes everywhere with them, and with her camera, and doesn’t miss a building or a house or a site that has significance either personally or universally. She visits Lyford Cay in the Bahamas and stays in one of the villas at the Lyford Cay Club. She visits an old friend, a lifelong explorer Suydam Cutting. She goes to Paris and visits the American Ambassador, and to Florence to attend Spoleto. She visits Pompeii and photographs the surviving murals. Estee Lauder invites her to a dinner she is giving for her friends, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (black tie).

Unintentionally Mrs. Ordway became, in retrospect, an excellent photo-diarist of an age (early to mid-20th century America). Hers was a world of one and two degrees of separation for the rich, the powerful and the celebrated. The leisure class lived comfortably and well, even grandly at times. But it was not notable for its extravagance.

Miss Bey, Cornelia Guest, Woolworth "Wooly" Donahue, and his fourth wife, former Super Circus star Mary Hartline Carlson Donahue.

There was a code of behavior that the entire country, all social strata, lived by. Sunday dinner at the family dinner table, for example; also the perfunctory courtesy in one-to-one public relationships; the dress code for men and for women, and for children. It rendered a more conforming world but one that was safer than today’s.

People didn’t lock their doors (not all people of course), no matter where they lived. No doubt in Palm Beach, there was definite security for certain families, but back then Palm Beach was not unlike many small towns across America where “security” meant money in the bank and enough to cover your rent forever. People owned guns but no one talked about it. Many were neurotic and unhappy with whatever troubled them, but there were far fewer prescription drugs, so behavior was key to everyone’s daily life.

Ellen Glendinning Frazer Ordway demonstrates these realities of 20th century American life in her great archive.

Ellen Glendinning Ordway's photographs are from the Gayle Abrams Collection.

Contact DPC here.

Tiger Woods and downtown Manhattan at The Barclays Championship in Liberty National Golf Club in Jersey City, NJ. Sunday, 5:40 PM.

Monday, August 26, 2013. It was another beautiful weekend in New York, and expected to remain such as we enter what is ostensibly the last week of Summer of many Americans.

On Saturday I got the Mini out of the garage, put the top down, made the Zabar's run, and then drove down to 28th Street (between 7th and 8th) for what seems to be left of the Flower District (there’s probably more that I don’t know about).

We’re not allowed to have “gardens” on our terraces anymore because of the newly laid terrace flooring, so I bought a few houseplants that I can take inside when the weather cools. You can get good buys in the District. The large fern, for example, was fifteen bucks. Twelve for the smaller one, and four bucks each for the flowering plants that look like impatiens.

The city streets were sparsely trafficked. I was surprised to look up at the Empire State from such a close view (on East 35th Street). It looks more massive than tall. And of course, there is the inevitable new construction going on.

Driving home, up Park Avenue, there is a wonderful new exhibition of metal sculptures by artist Albert Paley. This one piece is on the southern side of the intersection of Park Avenue and East 57th Street.

The city is really beautiful on these summer weekend days. There are still lots of people out but the pace is more relaxed and so is the traffic. You have time to look around you, and can see that people are enjoying themselves just being here.

The Empire State doesn't looks so tall as much as massive from this view one block north and two blocks east.

One of those amazing construction cranes in front of a new building on East 28th Street.

The building close up with only part of its facade in place.

Albert Paley's sculpture on the southern side of East 57th Street and Park Avenue.

I stopped by Crawford Doyle bookstore on Madison between 81st and 82nd on my way home, and picked up “This Town” (“Two Parties and a Funeral plus plenty of valet parking! In America’s Gilded Capital”) by Mark Leibovich who is the Chief National Correspondent of the New York Times Magazine.

Leibovich has been on the case for sometime. He knows of which he speaks. He begins his book with the memorial service five years ago for Meet The Press moderator Tim Russert which was held at the Kennedy Center.


Click to orderThis Town.

The author’s focus (which seemed to be the focus for those attending) was on who was present. Celebrity funerals are not unfamiliar to me here in New York (and the occasional one in Hollywood/Beverly Hills). They are spectator sports as much as memorials in (not all but) many cases – the opportunity to see and be seen by those who are working the scene on one level or another.

Russert’s memorial was especially lively with the aforementioned because Tim Russert was a pivotal power point in the scheme of things. So the whole town (meaning the high mucky-mucks and their their lords and ladies in waiting) turned out including former President Clinton and his wife, Hillary, then soon-to-be Secretary of State.

Leibovich takes us through the inventory of “mourners,” describes the service, and explains the politics of such gatherings. He uses the event as a launchpad for his view of our nation’s capital today, and those who inhabit it and play in its fields of plenty – all provided ultimately by the likes of You and Me, Us Humble Taxpayers.

You can get the feeling reading this book that Y&MUHTs are really quite irrelevant to most of these characters who are on the take in a variety of ways. It’s nothing new. It’s like Wall Street, it’s like Hollywood, it’s like High School (but so is just about everything else in the power structures of contemporary America): it’s business as usual.

There is something kind of rotten about the way the nation’s business seems to be conducted where lobbyists grossed several billion dollars last year influencing our elected “representatives, etc.” for their clients which seem to be, in one form or another, corporate America and not the American people.

It is especially unctuous (to put it kindly) when we (the People – remember?) are constantly being told when discussing the Federal budget that we’re overlarded with Entitlement Programs which many American citizens allegedly (according to politicians) cheat.

Leibovich writes, describing the playing field as:

“A multilateral conga line of potential business partners… The biggest shift in Washington over the last forty or so years has been the arrival of Big Money and politics as an industry. The old Washington was certainly saturated with politics, but it was smaller and more disjointed.

“Over the last dozen years, corporate America (much of it Wall Street) has tripled the amount of money it has spent on lobbying and public affairs consulting in D.C. Relatively new businesses such as the Glover Park Group, founded by three former Clinton and Gore advisers – provide “integrated services” that include lobbying, public relations, and corporate and campaign consulting. “Politics” has become a full-grown and dynamic industry, a self-sustaining weather system all its own And so much of its energy is directed inwards.

Mark Leibovich (second from left) with Sen. Tom Harkin. (Photo By Tom Williams/Roll Call)

None of this is unfamiliar in this Age of Me, Myself, and I, and it is clear that the matter is Bigger Than All of Us. It is galling when you read the use of the word “patriot” when in many cases it’s more like “scammer.” Leibovich’s account is forthright and rarely does he pull his (often gentle) punches. But it is depressing because you realize there is nothing you can do about it. It is, to borrow from Mr. Trollope “The Way We Live Now.” Media plays a big part in all of it these days (hence the turnout for Mr. Russert’s memorial) and no small part of it seems to be dancing bears proffering bread and circuses. Not to mention Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.


	Victoria Eugenia Fernandez de Cordobo y Fernandez de Henestrosa, the 18th Duchess of Medinaceli, born April 16, 1917, died August 13th.

Meanwhile, it’s been a while since we’ve published one of those great obits from the Daily Telegraph of London, but this past week there was this one – someone I’d never heard of, and possibly you’ve never heard of either – a life very different from what most (although not all) of us know. A long life, surely full of extraordinary dramas at times, and one of great, great privilege – the kind some of those entrepreneurs in our nation’s capital might even be awed by.

From the Daily Telegraph of London:

The 18th Duchess of Medinaceli, who has died aged 96, was nine times a duchess, 18 times a marchioness, 19 times a countess, four times a viscountess and 14 times a grandee of Spain — as well as head of a family whose members included three saints and two Popes.

She inherited her titles in her own right on her father’s death in 1956, and could not remember how many castles she owned in her native Spain; her best guess was between 90 and 100.

On one occasion she was browsing through the pages of a magazine when a picture of camellias growing in the grounds of a beautiful castle in northwest Spain caught her eye. On reading the caption she discovered to her surprise that the Palace of Oca, in Galicia, and the camellias, belonged to her.

She did not, however, neglect her heritage, and in 1980 established the Ducal House of Medinaceli Foundation to manage and conserve the family’s property and historic assets scattered across nearly all the Spanish regions.


The Duchess of Medinaceli.

Her cousin, the Duchess of Alba in her youth.

The Duchess of Alba at her recent wedding.

The Duchess should, perhaps, have earned a place in the Guinness Book of Records as the most titled human being on earth, but instead the accolade went to her colourful cousin, Cayetana, Duchess of Alba — a woman known for her valiant efforts to hold back the depredations of time with cosmetic surgery. It is said that when the publicity-shy Duchess of Medinaceli discovered that she was to be listed in the popular reference work, alongside assorted freaks and daredevils, she petitioned the king to be allowed to pass on 17 of her titles to her sons.

She felt that the Duchess of Alba, “with her English blood” (the Albas are directly descended from the Duke of Berwick, the illegitimate son of James II by Arabella Churchill, sister of the Duke of Marlborough), would enjoy the publicity.

Victoria Eugenia Fernández de Córdoba y Fernández de Henestrosa was born in Madrid on April 16 1917, the eldest daughter of Don Luis Jesús Fernández de Córdoba y Salabert, 17th Duke of Medinaceli, and Doña Ana María Fernández de Henestrosa y Gayoso de los Cobos. The Dukedom of Medinaceli, one of the oldest in Spain, had been created in 1479 by the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella for Luis de la Cerda y de la Vega, Count of Medinaceli.

In keeping with her illustrious ancestry, Doña Victoria was baptised at the Royal Palace, with King Alfonso XIII and his wife Queen Victoria Eugenia (after whom she was named) as godparents. Before she succeeded to the Medinaceli titles, Doña Victoria was known as the 16th Duchess of Alcalá de los Gazules, a courtesy title granted by her father.

On her 14th birthday, following the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic, she and her mother, grandmother and sister left Spain on the same train that carried Queen Victoria Eugenia and her children into exile. Her father left with the King.

In 1937, however, the family returned to Spain, to the beautiful Casa de Pilatos, the family’s main residence in Seville, which had fallen to Francoist forces in the first months of the Civil War the previous year. In 1938 she married Don Rafael de Medina y Vilallonga, son of the second son of the 4th Marquis of Esquivel.

The Duchess and her husband had four children, and as well as working to protect the family heritage she devoted herself to cultural, social and educational projects.

After her husband’s death in 1992, the Duchess’s later years were overshadowed by a scandal involving the second of her three sons, Rafael Medina y Fernandez de Cordoba, Duke of Feria, who in 1994 was sentenced to 18 years in prison for kidnapping a five-year-old girl and bathing and photographing her in the nude, as well as for drug trafficking and corruption of minors.


	Casa de Pilatos, main courtyard.

The trial, which received widespread coverage in the Spanish media, highlighted the Duke’s sexual perversions, his cocaine addiction, his life in the Seville underworld, his failed marriage to a model, and his childhood, allegedly devoid of maternal love.

The sentence was subsequently reduced on appeal, and in 1998 the Duke was released on parole. In 2001 he was reported to have died of natural causes, aged 58.

The Duchess’s eldest son, Don Luis de Medina y Fernández de Córdoba, 9th Duke of Santisteban del Puerto, predeceased her in 2011, as did her daughter and eldest child, Ana, who died last year.

She is survived by her youngest son, Don Ignacio de Medina y Fernández de Córdoba, 19th Duke of Segorbe, second husband of Princess Maria da Gloria d’Orléans-Braganza. Marco von Hohenlohe y Medina (Prince Marco of Hohenlohe-Langenburg), the son of her daughter Ana, born in 1962, succeeds as the 19th Duke of Medinaceli.

The 18th Duchess of Medinaceli, born April 16 1917, died August 18 2013

Contact DPC here.

Looking across the Jacqueline Onassis Reservoir to the East Side. 5:00 PM. Photo: JH.

Thursday, August 29, 2013. Warm, somewhat humid, overcast and sometimes thundershowers, yesterday in New York.

I went down to Michael’s for lunch. Wednesday, the day and it was unusually quiet with none of the high decibel chatter that we usually get at Michael’s on any weekday, and even more on Wednesdays. Although very pleasant. The town’s deserted. Not so, of course, because this is New York – but there is a certain professional socio-economic element that has gone quiet anticipating this coming weekend, the Last of Summer.

I caught a cab home and quickly fell into conversation with the driver who told me when he picked me up at three that he was taking the cab back to the garage and heading home after he dropped me off. I asked him about business this week. “Quiet, very quiet,” he said. All August was, for him, unusually quiet. I’d been thinking the same thing but wasn’t sure it was just my perception. “Business is off 30%,” the cabbie told me.

Waiting out the rain in the rain in Central Park. Photo: JH.

Summertime in Manhattan is always quieter on the social scene because many depart for the resort climes of the Hamptons, Newport, the Adirondacks, Aspen. That’s not the majority of New Yorkers, but it is a large enough demographic that it shows up on the Upper East Side, Fifth Avenue, midtown.

Stops along the way; degrees of separation. Last night a friend sent me an email about having just seen the latest issue of Quest, and felt compelled to tell me how good it looked and how interesting the read. The August issue is the Annual Quest 400 List, and it’s mainly a List. We all love lists, admit it. They’re mindlessly interesting and easily dispensed with. And although they count for nothing in reality, we still assign them some odd kind of demi-authority.


	Gloria Braggiotti Etting, painted by her artist husband Emlen Etting, circa 1960.

This one I started nineteen years ago in Quest one month when I didn’t have or couldn’t think of anything to write about. I’d recently written a biographical piece on Vincent Astor, hence the “400” lists (which his grandmother the Mrs. Astor started back in the 19th century). Why not a new one, I thought. And so it was.

It all led me to considering those early days at Quest which I first wrote for twenty years ago this past March. The first assignment came about serendipitously. I was introduced to Quest’s founder and then owner, Heather Cohane at a cocktail party at the Chanel store one autumn weeknight in 1992. I complimented her on the magazine’s social histories and told her how Larry Ashmead, an executive editor at HarperCollins, used to send me copies when I lived in Los Angeles. I also told her we had a mutual friend, a woman named Gloria Etting who lived in Philadelphia. In hearing her name, Heather said, “oh I love Gloria. I’d love a story on her, would you like to write it?”

That question, in retrospect was a seminal question in my life and my future. I didn’t know that at the time, of course.

“Living proof that charm and experience will always matter more than money” was the headline in the completed piece.

Gloria Etting, who lived in Philadelphia most of her adult life, was brought up in Boston, one of several children of the socially well-connected (internationally) Italian family named Braggiotti.

The layout in Quest, March 1993 of the piece I wrote about Gloria Etting.

I met her in Los Angeles in the late 1980s, and we became friends almost instantly. She was a woman who easily befriended people everywhere she went, and she particularly liked gay men. Ragazzi she called them affectionately, a term that Italians use for "kids." It so happened that her husband was also gay. From what I came to learn in knowing her, it was a terrible marriage emotionally but she stuck it out. Her sister Francesca married John Lodge who was a movie actor and then became Governor of Connecticut. His brother was Henry Cabot Lodge.

Gloria grew up with the Cushing Sisters (later Babe Paley, Betsey Whitney and Minnie Astor Fosburgh) in Boston where their father was the distinguished neurosurgeon Dr. Harvey Cushing. Gloria was a lifelong friend of the sisters, especially of Betsey Cushing Roosevelt Whitney.

I think at the end of her life Betsey must have helped Gloria out financially because she was admittedly beholden to her. Although Gloria was also a naturally loyal friend. Therefore she could not talk to me about the Cushing sisters when I was working on a book about them. Although she once did tell me that "those girls did what they had to do."


Douglas Cooper and his adopted son, Billy McCarty-Cooper at Gloria and Emlen's summer house in Loveladies, New Jersey.

I first met Gloria at Billy McCarty-Cooper's house on Oriole Drive, in the Hollywood Hills overlooking West L.A. A fabulous L.A. house. It was built by a man named Peter Panaker who built several houses of the same layout/design. David Niven Jr. lives in the last one Peter built. This one of Billy’s was his biggest. It had a lap pool that ran the width of the house and extended into the master bedroom so that its master coud wake himself up with a few laps.

Billy had inherited almost all of Douglas Cooper's vast, premiere Cubist art collection. He sold a good portion of it on Cooper's death to Leonard Lauder for then a great price of around $26 million in the 1980s. That figure is arguable, but it was up there. It is the core of the great Lauder collection that he's giving to the Met.

Anyway, Gloria and I became friends in a pleasant but most casual way. I learned that she was one of those people who had a knack for befriending a great variety of people – artists, writers, actors, social people. The list was endless. Henry McIlhenny, Claudette Colbert, Truman Capote, Perry Rathbone, Isamu Noguchi, Isak Dinesen, (Karen Blixen), Jacques Tati, Tennessee Williams, Buckminster Fuller, Alexander Calder, Elizabeth Taylor, Tennessee Williams, Lady Sarah Churchill, George Balanchine, Salvador Dali and Gala, Picasso, Jackie O, Maxime de la Falaise, Martha Graham, as well as scores of people who were part of those different worlds these people occupied. The Philadelphia press wrote after her passing, that she was one “who gathered friends with the kind of passion others have for collecting stamps, art or butterflies.”

When I came to New York from living in Los Angeles, in ’92, we re-connected. I used to go down to Philadelphia to stay with her. Her husband Emlen was there but in his elderly sickbed with the door always closed. Like a ghost, I never saw him, but only knew he lay in the bed behind that door.


	Philip Barry's famous play, then film, "The Philadelphia Story," was based on the life of Hope Montgomery Scott of Ardrosson in Villanova, Pennsylvania.

They lived in a three story brick townhouse (with brick sidewalks) on Panama Street in the section known as The City. Gloria, then in her mid-70s, entertained at dinner parties frequently. There was a very active, entirely social life among her crowd. They all traveled frequently, many kept other houses in other climates. They had lifelong friends but welcomed the newcomers. They lived lives of leisure and lives of work. One of Gloria’s best friends down there was a woman named Hope Scott.

Hope Montgomery Scott was the model Philip Barry used for his Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story, the film that cemented Katharine Hepburn’s career in the pantheon of filmdom. Hope was in her late 80s when we met at a dinner one night at Gloria's. She had a disarming personality. A small, wiry woman, forthright in introducing herself, enthusiastically engaging, eyes almost twinkling in expressing her curiosity.

After that meeting she immediately started writing me -- befriending me. They were short notes to keep in touch. I was flattered and amazed by her energy. She was mainly a horsewoman who grew up on a huge estate, Ardrosson, built by her father on the Mainline with a house and outer buildings designed by Horace Trumbauer in the beginning of the 20th century.

Hope Scott in 1929.

Hepburn playing her a decade later in "The Philadelphia Story."

Hope, who was born in 1904, grew up in that house and on that property that is still there and famous. She had an effervescent personality that was still girlish (but not coquettish) at that late age, and a genuine liking of people. She also loved to gossip (almost on the edge of laughter in her telling). She was used to extra-marital affairs. She told me although she always loved her husband Edgar (who was still alive then too), she had had a few affairs including one with Jock Whitney, Betsey Whitney’s husband (before they were married). She thought it was all a hoot.

One night at dinner at her house (a smaller house on the property) I was surprised that the table napkins spread out on your lap were like smaller tablecloths -- enormous. They were ivory colored linen and they had a monogram in the same shade woven into the center.

I remarked about it to Hope: These are the biggest napkins I've ever seen, where do they come from?

An aerial view of the main house on the 1000-acre Ardrosson estate and the 38,000 square foot main house wtih surrunding stables and garages.

The entrance court to the house. It was said that when Hollywood was planning "The Philadelphia Story" they visited "Tracy Lord's" (Hope Scott's) house and found it so much bigger than their own model. Horace Trumbauer designed and built the house and it was decorated by Allom of Paris, then the leading decorators for the rich of that day. One designer remarked: "Think Buckingham Palace."

Ardrosson rear facade and interiors.

She said: “My grandmother bought them on her honeymoon in Paris in 1861.” It was 130 years later and they were like new. After the dinner, she asked me to go into the kitchen to thank her cook “because she feels I don’t appreciate her enough, so just tell her how wonderful her dinner was!” Which I did. The cook was a much older lady, although most likely younger than Hope. She was washing the pots and pans when I went in. I introduced myself and thanked her. She thanked me and almost blushed with the compliment.

Hope was such a number that it makes me laugh to just hear her friendly voice in my mind's ear today. Gloria Etting, true to her character suggested I do a biographical piece on Hope whom she thought was one of the most wonderful women she ever met.

Alas I never did. She died only a couple years after we met. She died at 91. One afternoon she was in her stables when she was accidentally kicked by a horse she was tending to. It hurt and she shortly went back to her house and to her bedroom to rest, and get over the slam. And she died.

Hope show jumping in 1940.

Hope rides the bull.

Billy McCarty-Cooper died in 1990, of AIDS. He had come into Gloria’s life when he was a student at Penn. Somehow he ended up being invited to her dinner table. It was there that he met a man named Henry McIlhenny, a very well known Philadelphia art collector and socialite. It was through Henry that Billy met John Galliher, an international social man about town. Johnny Galliher introducd Billy to Douglas Cooper, the aforementioned Cubist art collector. Cooper, who was thirty or forty years older than Billy, eventually adopted him and made him his sole heir.

When Billy died – only a decade after Cooper – he left both Gloria and John Galliher annuities of $50,000 a year for the rest of their lives, explaining that it was their friendships that made his life possible.

The man dancing with young Hope (circa 1930) is "Bertie," the 10th Duke of Marlborough, father of Gloria's friend Lady Sarah Churchill, and her brother "Sunny," the 11th Duke.

Emlen Etting died in 1993. Gloria, then in her mid-80s, met a man about her age, an Italian – a real Italian, from Italy – more a working class man than Etting in his presence, although possibly a professional. He was not gay. And he was quite bossy with her, although she didn't seem to mind. She seemed happy to have him. She sold the house in Philadelphia and moved to Sicily with him. I never saw her again. She died at 94 in 2005.

Gloria was my start as a social reporter in New York. She was a lovely woman, very kindly with a kind of rusty voice and a noble head and sad eyes. Very Italian looking. And elegant. Once I was having some pasta she'd made for me in her kitchen. When she served it, I asked if I could have a large spoon to go with my fork. She sat down with me as I began to eat. When I picked up the spoon to gather the pasta with my fork, Gloria remarked offhandedly in her kind, rusty voice and gentle tone, "It's not chic to use a spoon."

I loved that. I never used a spoon again. It's not chic. Gloria took photographs like Ellen Ordway whom she must have known because they traveled in the same world, although Gloria was a Roosevelt Democrat. Gloria had lots of photos she took of the Cushings Sisters at Hyde Park with all the Roosevelts. (circa 1935). All very homey and casual. Black and White. She took pictures all her life and kept them organized. The year that we met, she published a book of them, “By The Way,” with an introduction by Philadelphia Museum of Art director, Anne d’Harnoncourt. The subject is several hundred of Gloria’s closest friends, as well as others she met on her travels across the world.

Contact DPC here.

A man and his dog. 3:00 PM. Photo: JH.

Monday, September 2, 2013. The end of the last long weekend of the Summer. Sunday was off and on overcast in New York. I was up in Connecticut where they got torrents of rain in the late afternoon as we were driving back to the City where it remained dry as a bone.

NYSD readers may have seen the two re-runs from Ellen Glendinning Frazer Ordway’s great collection of personal photographs taken between the late 1920s through the 1960s this past Friday (edited and organized beautifully by Augustus Mayhew). This great collection is one of the rare personal documents of the history of American society in the 20th century. As it was accumulated purely as a personal hobby, to which Mrs. Ordway was devoted all her life, it achieved a rare sort of authenticity.

This past, Saturday, the day after we ran it, we received a message from a reader that one of the women who often appears in Mrs. Ordway’s photos, Lucille Balcom -- always known to her friends and family as Lulu -- had died last Thursday afternoon at her summer home on Fisher’s Island at the age of 100, only two months from her 101st birthday.

Lulu and Ronald Balcom.

Mrs. Balcom was born Louise Parsons in Montclair, New Jersey on November 1, 1912. Her father J. Lester Parsons founded the international re-insurance firm of Crum & Forster in 1896.

Lulu grew up on the family estate in Orange, New Jersey and attended Miss Porter’s in Farmington Connecticut. When she was 23, in 1935, she married her first husband, George Vanderbilt, the son of Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt Sr. who had died in 1915 in the sinking of the Luisitania, and Margaret Emerson who was widely known as the “Bromo-Seltzer” heiress. The Vanderbilts had one daughter, also named Lucille.

Fifteen years later in 1950, the Vanderbilts divorced and Lulu married Ronald Bush Balcom, a champion skier who had previous attained celebrity when he married Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rogers.

Reggie Boardman and Lulu Balcom, 1960. "I remember Ellen and Lou, they were our close friends," recalled Mrs. Balcom when Augustus Mayhew spoke with her recently in Palm Beach.

Mrs. Balcom was herself an excellent skier and the couple – known to their friends as Ronnie and Lulu, lived in Palm Beach in winter and Fishers Island in summer, spending as much time as they could skiing in Klosters, Switzerland and Vail, Colorado. Mr. Balcom died in 1994.

Mrs. Balcom was also an avid golfer and often wore a round gold pendant with 19 small diamonds marking the “Hole In Ones” that she made in her lifetime, the first of which she made when she was 16.

Lulu Balcom's birthday party, October 1960: Lulu Balcom, Ronald Balcom, and Court Reventlow.

Lou Ordway's birthday dinner, December 2, 1960: Lou Ordway, Lulu Balcom, and Jack Stearns.

Lulu Balcom's birthday party. November 1, 1961, Palm Beach.

She and her sister, Emily Parson Ridgeway, who is now 103, and lives in New Jersey, have belonged to the Everglades and Bath and Tennis clubs longer then anyone in history.

Mrs. Balcom was also a talented artist, well known for her unique, primitive paintings. Most of her original works depict scenes from the Caribbean and New England. Her greatest love in life was traveling, and there were few places in the world she had not been. Like her friend Ellen Ordway she too accumulated a huge collection of leather bound books documenting her life in photographs.

Christmas card, 1961. Chalet Aurora, Klosters. Lulu and Ron Balcom.

Her friends remember Lulu Balcom as a fascinating lovely woman, kind and gracious, beautiful and chic, and liked by everyone she met, to the very end.

Besides her sister, she is survived by her daughter Lucille Vanderbilt Pate, two grandsons, Phillip V. Brady and Robert M. Balding, and granddaughter Dawn B. Pate. She is also survived by four great-granddaughters Allston Pate, Emerson Pate, Margaret Balding and Sara Balding, all of Georgetown, South Carolina. In addition, she is survived by her sister Emily Parsons Ridgway of Short Hills, and a step-sister Mrs. Horace Bailey. Mrs. Ridgeway, known as “Queeny” all her life, is now 103.

Lulu, Chocomount, Fishers Island, July 1962.

Lulu Balcom and George Coleman, Palm Beach, October 1962.

SS United States advertisement, LIFE magazine. Lulu and Ron Balcom with Mrs. André Embiricos aboard the SS United States.

Lulu Balcom's birthday dinner, Palm Beach, November, 1963.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you donate to the Island Health Project, PO Box 344, Fishers Island, NY 06390.

Ellen Ordway's photographs are from the Collection of
Gayle Abrams©.

Contact DPC here.

Enjoying the last sense of summer in Central Park. 4:00 PM. Photo: JH.

Thursday, September 5, 2013. It was a beautiful, late Summer day, yesterday in New York, and if traffic is any indication, the summer people are back in town. The place was bustling.

Museums were in the news.Lewis Kruger, Chairman of the Board of the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), announced yesterday that Dr. Glenn Adamson has been appointed as the museum's new Nanette L. Laitman Director. Adamson, who comes to MAD from the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, succeeds Holly Hotchner, who stepped down at the end of April. The new Director will assume his role officially October 15th.

Mr. Adamson is among the most prominent and respected voices in the field of applied arts and design. At present he’s been leading the V&A's Research Department, a unique cross-disciplinary department that oversees, assesses, and supports the development of museum projects. He helped initiate and shape major exhibitions, managed partnerships with museums and universities, and led academic fundraising. He was also a contributor to the V&A's publications, educational programming, media relations, and commercial activities.

Dr. Glenn Adamson, Museum of Arts and Design's new Nanette L. Laitman Director.

Mr. Adamson has published several books including The Invention of Craft (V&A, Bloomsbury, 2013), The Craft Reader (Berg, 2010), Thinking Through Craft (V&A, Berg, 2007), and is a founding co-editor of the Journal of Modern Craft, a peer-reviewed academic journal.

The Museum of Arts and Design, which occupies the Edward Durrell Stone building on Columbus Circle is one of the most interesting and visionary museums in the city. One’s interest cannot be determined until it is seen. Some of the crafts/objects that have been featured in its exhibitions, besides fascinating both adults and children on many levels, have become important mainstream objects of collection.

Yesterday was also the official unofficial opening of the autumn social season in New York with a benefit luncheon for another museum-related project. It was the Couture Council of the Museum at FIT’s 8th annual benefit luncheon on the Promenade of the David Koch Theater at Lincoln Center.

Arriving at the Promenade of the David Koch Theater for the 8th annual Couture Council luncheon that now traditionally opens Fashion Week in New York.

The luncheon now officially and unofficially opens Fashion Week which is centered right next door in the big Mercedes Benz venue set up in Lincoln Center between the Koch Theater and the Metropolitan Opera House.

The Couture Council, formed in 2004, is the brainchild of the museum’s director Dr. Valerie Steele to develop support for the museum. Shortly thereafter Liz Peek, then a museum board member had the idea of staging an awards luncheon to raise funds for the museum’s work.

Diana Taylor and Valerie Steele.

Liz Peek and Fe Fendi.

The first luncheon was held in 2006 at the Brasserie 8 1/2 , the popular restaurant on the subterranean level of 9 West 57th Street, just off Fifth Avenue. It was a small affair, comparatively, but it was a hit.

The following year someone had the bright idea of moving it over to Lincoln Center. A couple hundred guests were invited, and a tradition was established.

An Award for Artistry of Fashion was created to be bestowed annually. In the ensuing years the award has been presented to Karl Lagerfeld, Oscar de la Renta, Albert Elbaz, Valentino, this year to Michael Kors.

The video press on the first balcony, taking it all in.

With the event’s success, the Couture Council, now with a membership of more than 100 women, is dedicated to supporting the Museum which is a highly specialized museum of fashion -- and destined to become the greatest in the world. In the last half dozen years it has gained greater prominence and become a very effective fundraiser for the museum.

The Council helps make it possible for the museum to mount world class exhibitions of fashion, to acquire important objects for its permanent collection, and to organize public programs, such as the annual fashion symposium.

Aerin Lauder and Michael Kors.

Michael Kors busses Patti Hansen.

Iman, Kors, and Patti Hansen posing for the photos ...

The luncheon itself brings out the largest crowd of fashionable women and tastemakers in the city with a synergy that enhances Fashion Week. It has also helped build the Council’s board, attracting a membership of women who organize private tours and gatherings with leading designers, providing opportunity for a behind-the-scene look at New York fashion.

The luncheon begins with a reception at 11:30, with guests sitting for lunch officially at noon (it’s more like 12:45 whatwith the hundreds of guests, corps of photographers, milling about).

Yaz Hernandez, Marjorie Reed Gordon, and Sharon Handler.

Simon Doonan, Yaz Hernandez, Sharon Handler, and Marjorie Reed Gordon.

This year’s luncheon Chairs were Kamie Lightburn and Jieun Wax. Among the guests attending were:Lauren duPont, Linda Fargo, Vanessa Getty, Patti Hansen, Iman, Karolína Kurková, Aerin Lauder, Sandra Lee, Crystal Lourd, Alexandra Richards, Theodora Richards, Renee Rockefeller, Jamie Tisch, Elisabeth von Thurn und Taxis, Elettra Wiedemann, and Anna Wintour.

After opening remarks by co-chairs Lightburn and Wax welcoming guests, Dr. Valerie Steele took the podium, telling guests, “Everytime you see one of Michael’s advertisements, you just want to BE that woman – so chic, so glamoroius, jet-setting around the world in her sunglasses, and in the company of a handsome, glamorous man. So thank you Michael, for all you do for the women of the world.

Dr. Joyce Brown, president of FIT then announced the 2013 Michael Kors Scholarship winner, third-semester student Kim Nguyen, and thanked Kors for his support of FIT. The scholarship includes time studying in Europe, which as Dr. Brown pointed out, Michael Kors believes is immeasurably important to the development of a successful fashion designer. Then Liz Peek introduced Hilary Swank, who presented the Artistry Award to Michael Kors.

Hilary Swank.

Kamie Lightburn and Jieun Wax, this year's luncheon chairs.

Mr. Kors, who is enthusiastically forthright and frank about himself, reminisced briefly about his time as a student at FIT, including what he thought of fashion design before he entered, and what he learned (to the contrary). He amusingly described the variety of clothes/costumes he wore as a design student, poking fun at some of his outlandishness get-ups, and pointing out that all good things can come out of that for a designer’s development.

He was grateful to be feted and to receive the award. The hundreds of women in the audence returned his gratitude by wearing his designs to the luncheon. So in all of the pictures we’re running, you’re seeing mainly the work of Michael Kors.

Michael Kors with Dr. Joyce Brown, president of FIT.

Hilary Swank and Michael Kors.

Hilary Swank, Kim Nguyen, Michael Kors, and Anna Wintour.

After the presentation was concluded and the photographers had their moment to catch Kors with his award and his admirers (such as Hilary Swank), Yaz Hernandez, the current Chairman of the Couture Council, also in a Michael Kors and also wearing (like Kors) dark glasses, toasted the guests and held the drawing for the raffle (a ticket was in every placement envelope) – Asprey’s Life Ring of yellow and white gold rope. Then Ms. Hernandez thanked the guests for their attending and their support.

The luncheon’s menu began with a chilled sweet pea tarragon soup, topped with crispy shallots, buttery croutons, and radish slivers. Main course was a Cobb salad with organic chicken, applewood smoked bacon, and Great Hill blue cheese. The dessert: vanilla, raspberry and chocolate ice cream sundaes and special FIT Couture Council cupcakes were served. Yes. Why not!

Stefano Tonchi, Yaz Hernandez, and Valentín Hernandez.

Amy Fine Collins and Simon Doonan.

Bronson van Wyck and Mark Gilbertson.

Blaine Trump.

Among the guests were: Amsale Aberra, Reem Acra, Marc Anthony, Iris Apfel, Nina Arianda, Fabiola Arias, Glenda Bailey, Dennis Basso, Cathie Black, Andrew Bolton, Hamish Bowles, Geoffrey Bradfield, Mario Buatta, Robin Burns-McNeill, Sharon Bush, Lisa Cashin, Kathryn Chenault, Barbara Cirkva, Suzi Cordish, Christina Davis, John Demsey, Carole Divet Harting, Simon Doonan, Linda Fargo, Fe Fendi, Amy Fine Collins, Joele Frank, Ron Frasch, Nina Garcia, Michele Gerber Klein, Marjorie Reed Gordon, Jamee Gregory, Audrey Gruss, Cornelia Guest and Agnes Gund.

Kamie Lightburn, Liz Peek, and Melissa Mitthoff who traveled from Houston for the luncheon.

The Spring hat (the fashion week is spring).

Stephanie Winston Wolkoff and Eleanora Kennedy.

Wait, there’s more: Sharon Handler Loeb, Patti Hansen, Amanda Hearst, Celia Hegyi, Yaz Hernandez, Judith Hoffman, Iman, Chiu-Ti Jansen, Kimberly Kassel, Mariana Kaufman, Eleanora Kennedy, Coco Kopelman, Karen LeFrak, Leonard Lauder, Alexandra Lebenthal, Larry Leeds, Heather Leeds, Petra Levin, Kamie Lightburn, Jaqui Lividini, Carol Mack, Julie Macklowe, Fern Mallis, Grace Meigher, B. Michael, Gillian Miniter, Natalie Morales, Josie Natori, Liz Peek, John Pomerantz, Ann Rapp, Alexandra Richards, Theodora Richards, Darcy Rigas, Muna Rihani al Nasser, Judith Ripka, Sheryl Schwartz, Pete Scotese, Jean Shafiroff, Nancy Shaw Michelle Smith, Martha Stewart, Hilary Swank, Diana Taylor, Jamie Dr. Annette Rickel, Tisch, Lizzie Tisch, Barbara Tober, Zang Toi, Stefano Tonchi, John Truex, Kay Unger, Bronson van Wyck, Robert Verdi, Jieun Wax, Anna Wintour, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, Sarah Wolfe, Whitney Wolfe and Prince Dimitri of Yugoslavia.

Now Fashion Week begins. We are fortunate that NYSD’s fashion reports will again come daily from Ellin Saltzman who will deliver the low-down in what she saw in terms you can understand even without seeing.

the Josie Robertson Plaza at Lincoln Center after the luncheon.

Walking up Madison Avenue on my way home, I passed the Lisa Perry boutique where the designer was about to launch her Spring collection (tennis anyone?).

Contact DPC here.

Working on The Warwick on 54th and 6th Avenue. 2:00 PM. Photo: JH.

Friday, September 6, 2013. Another beautiful late Summer day, yesterday in New York, with temperatures in the mid-70s and the Sun shining all day. By mid-evening the air had got pleasantly cooler, a tiny reminder that this is the way we’re going.

Summer’s over. That was quick. So many have commented to me about how “fast” it passed. With everybody back in town, I noticed it first thing Tuesday morning -- the sidewalks in front of the apartment buildings were very busy with students and parents heading for first day of school; and the roadway along East End Avenue was jammed once againwith cars and school buses.


	Photo: JH.

Last night was the beginning of the Rosh Hoshanah holiday, and the city was suddenly (sort of) quieter. Not quiet like summertime, but less traffic in midtown. I went to Michael’s to lunch with a friend, and it was also quieter too.

In certain parts of town, however, there is a concentration of crowds for Fashion Week, another kind of religious holiday here in New York.

Today here on NYSD we begin our daily coverage of the shows by Ellin Saltzman. I don’t know if I’ve reported this before but Ellin had a long and notable career in fashion retailing for many years at Saks Fifth Avenue and then Bergdorf Goodman. I asked her to do this coverage for us because I knew she could tell the readers what she actually saw and how she would, or would not apply it.

I don’t know if I ever reported this other nugget, but many years ago before I became a professional writer, I was in the retailing business and owned a couple of off-price designer sportswear boutiques in Westchester and Fairfield Counties. It was a business that I happened into (by choice and chance) in the long, harried days when I was searching for this road I’m on now.

This was back in the 1970s. The clientele was mainly middle and upper-middle income women (everybody likes a bargain), mainly suburban women – many of whom were not “professional” but rather ran their homes and looked after their families.

It was a very prosperous business, and had I had the passion for it – which I did not – I probably could have made something even more prosperous out of it. It so happened that when I was beginning to rake it in, however, I told myself that if I did continue, indeed, and make a substantial income (formerly known as “a lot of money”), I’d never be a writer. So, long story short, I sold my business in the late '70s to a woman who worked for me, and I moved myself and my feline and canine friends to Los Angeles. And so it was.

Photos: JH.

Although I never had the “passion” for the retailing business, I did find it interesting. In a way, it’s not so different from my professional life now – I meet a lot of people and “people” are infinitely interesting to me. In my former business, I learned something about how women choose their clothes. I learned that unlike men, almost all women want to look nice, or good, or smart, or pulled together. Or all of the above. Clothes make the man; they express the woman.

I never learned about women shopping when I was growing up, or when I was married. Both my mother and my wife knew what they liked and got it, and never talked about it. I thought they both had taste and my wife had a great style that I call “easy on the eye.” She loved clothes but never acted like it mattered.

What I learned in my days of retailing was that many women – many many women – are very insecure about their choices. They’re also insecure about the way they look in the clothes they think they’d like. This is a tough one to get over. It is usually about Too Fat or Too Thin, although both extremes seem more frequent and noticeable than ever. Many, no matter their personal issues (which are often exaggerated personally) need guidance – the kind of guidance that lends then some authority even with their whims.

Photo: JH.

I also learned that contrary to the thought that women have lots and lots of clothing, many do not. Sometimes it’s lack of interest. Most times, it’s purely economical. They may have an adequate amount of around-the-house or casual clothing. But for the street items which are often big ticket, most women want to be as economical as possible. A jacket, a skirt, a dress, a blouse, a pair of pants every season, and she’s in business. If she makes her choices carefully, she’s already got a small, smart wardrobe that she can add to or accessorize without worry, and last. Having learned that, I found it easy to sell (although I frankly got bored with selling and spent more of my time at my desk at home writing).

Coincidentally, I had lunch yesterday at Michael’s with a longtime friend, Emilia Saint-Amand. Emilia was a customer of mine back in the day. I still remember when I first met her. She was younger than I although I called her “Mrs.” (and her previous last name), and very pretty, a young mother, and a divorcee.


	Emilia Saint-Amand.

She looked at clothes very carefully. Sometimes I’d tell her if I thought something looked really good or not. Most of the time I just watched as she’d inspect it all in the three way. She always looked great and sporty, which was the style for young women at that time.

She was a very careful shopper. She tells me today that she still has a few items that she bought from me back then. I don’t know if I believe her although she’s not prone to exaggeration or dissembling.

She’s also a great dresser. Yesterday she wore a kind of salmon pink dress to lunch at Michael’s. I don’t know how to describe it, but I have heard that she’s a big client of Oscar’s and so maybe it was Oscar’s. I wouldn’t be surprised because Emilia interprets Oscar with the same certainty that he designs with. I never told her this before but I love walking up Fifth Avenue with her after lunch because I can see all the men and women taking notice, and Emilia’s completely unaware, caught up in whatever the conversation is. I know they’re looking because she looks so great.

I tend to think that ideally, this is what many if not most women would like. It’s not like being a clotheshorse or a fashion plate, it’s just the desire to look like you’re living in the world now, and you’re comfortable with yourself. Even if it doesn't feel so; at the very least, it's a start.

I mention all this because that is how and why I thought to invite Ellin Saltzman to join us here on NYSD during the Fashion Weeks. Ellin, like Emilia, always looks good, looks stylish, looks appropriate, looks confident, and looks attractive. And, as I said, Ellin’s a pro, that line of looks was her business in New York for many years. She knows the customer and her needs. That’s what we want to offer to our many readers who are women.

Contact DPC here.

Street scene, 54th and Sixth Avenue. 2:30 PM. Photo: Jeff Hirsch.

Monday, September 9, 2013. Bright, sunny weekend with slightly cooler nights. A friend of mine coming in from London this morning sent me the following email: “Brrr. Definitely a nip in the air in London.”

No doubt soon to be coming our way too. In the meantime we’re having lovely late Summer days and nights, and no doubt some more hot days around the bend.

I love the upcoming season. It is always exciting and emotionally charged like the first days of school. I love the colors that it brings – although not so much in the city where the leaves turn only at the very end. I love that “nip in the air.”

Looking East at the end of East 83rd Street over the East River on Friday afternoon, 6:45 p.m.

Same time Sunday night looking north up East End Avenue and south down East End 6:50 p.m.

And South and North, same view, 7:30 p.m. Sunday.

Friday I got this catalogue in the mail from Doyle Galleries and their upcoming auction of the Leo Lerman & Gray Foy Collection on September 24th. I like this picture because it gives you the opportunity to see every item clearly. In real life, the room is large and tall and dark Victorian despite the ample (tall) windows. It has a drama, a stage drama, if you will, about it. The entire apartment does. It is not reclusive or dark and foreboding in its feel, as you might expect of a Victorian interior. It is quite cheerful, and possibly because of this “Collection.”


	To learn more: www.doylenewyork.com.

The thousands and thousands of people who came through its doors to attend the hundreds of parties these two men gave down through the decades, must have felt they were in the thick of that great theatrical drama that the rooms refer to.

It began with Leo. He was born in New York, in Queens into a family of ethnic Eastern European immigrants in 1925. All the world outside their door was new to them, and all remained new to the boy who grew up with them.

Leo came of age when the city was possibly at its metropolitan zenith. It was a city of skyscrapers, factories, working class neighborhoods, wealthy neighborhoods, a powerful theatrical (and movie) culture. There were eight or ten dailies. Radio had entered and connected the country “Coast to Coast.” The city’s nightlife was bursting. People went out all the time. They went out to bars, to restaurants, to nightclubs all the time. People saw each other socially all the time – those who had the time and money, because New York was always a city of working people.

When Leo was 26, in 1941, he was offered a job writing for Vogue and other Conde Nast titles. This was when the man himself, Conde Nast was running things. Leo’s previous background was theatre. He had aspired to be an actor. For whatever reason – probably at least having to do with “earning a living,” the move into the magazine world was the golden road for him.

Gray and Leo at the Costume Institute Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, circa 1990.

In those days many New Yorkers held parties. Up in Harlem and also down along the Upper East and West Sides, people held “rent” parties where everybody chipped in something, brought a bottle and host or hostess might raise enough to meet next month’s. Up on Park Avenue and Fifth in the tonier part of town, certain women (and some men) held what today are called salons where people dropped in for cocktails and conversation. If you knew the hostess or host, you knew the days and the times the welcome mat was out, and you just showed up.

This style of socializing was common in the city, and in the smarter salons, you’d meet the world or at least the World According to New York.

Joel Kaye, Gray's husband. The couple married two years ago this past August. Joel grew up in the same building where his father had an apartment when Leo and Gray moved in.

Kaye in front of Duffner & Kimberly Bronze and Leaded Glass Red Poppies Floor Lamp, Circa 1910. Estimate $40,000 - $60,000.

For Leo Lerman, the man in his late 20s, newly arrived in Manhattan from across the bridge, New York, Broadway, nightlife and salons was like having arrived at Oz and finding out it was true. Eventually he rented a small brownstone on Lexington Avenue in the 90s. Today that would cost you millions of dollars. Seventy years ago, the upper 90s was the tip of Manhattan -- at the border of Harlem. There was a line then. There still is now in many ways but in many ways it’s gone and Harlem is having another Renaissance – you can pay millions for a townhouse in Harlem too. The point being, the higher and closer to Harlem, the lower the rents. Smart and clever New Yorkers (along with the working classes with families) rented there. That brownstone might have cost him no more than $150 a month, if that.

It was there where Leo’s real life began. He was by nature a highly sociable person, and a very curious fellow, as well as an ambitiously aspiring New Yorker. Vogue Conde Nast was his ticket to ride and ride it he did – with panache and extreme certainty. In those days Broadway and Hollywood came and mixed with the more exotic socialites, writers, artists, composers, conductors and ballerinas, all at one time, all for a drinks party at Leo’s.

Over the summer, JH and I visted with Joel Kaye and had a look around the apartment and its extensive collection that was in the midst of being dismantled for the purpose of the auction. The desk pictured here is made from an old pianoforte.

The lamp is Tiffany Studios Bronze and Favrile Glass Student Oil Lamp, Late 19th, Early 20th Century. Estimate $15,000 - $20,000.

The auction consists of approximately 600 lots of furniture, decorative arts, paintings, books, photographs and ephemera collected over fifty years for their home in the Osborne.

They knew if they went to Leo’s they were going to meet a good time, a lot of fun, or least something to drink. They drank a lot in those days too – the word alcoholic had yet to come into the parlance. Leo, who was not a celebrity himself, became famous to the famous, and therefore a celebrity in that way.

It was there that the young Gray Foy, a very goodlooking, blond California boy, studying to be an artist, came as a friend of a friend, to one of Leo's parties on Upper Lexington Avenue, sixty or more years ago. Gray never left. Soon it was Leo and Gray always and forever. They were living together, and although this was a couple of decades before Gay Liberation, they were liberated, and it was quite clear to everyone that they lived in a fully domesticated partnership.

And they, the writer and the artist, shared a fondness for collecting ... all kinds of things from tchotchkes and ephemera to antiques, china, silver and great pieces of art. They were inveterate visitors to flea markets and junk shops wherever they went wherever in the world. And from those places closeby and distant, they brought back what became a treasure trove that is displayed (and going to auction September 24th) in this catalogue.

Rustic Style Twig and Branch Etagere, Est. $1,500 - 2,500.

Neoclassical Style Gilt-Iron Eight-Light Chandelier. Est. $1,500 - 2,500.

A view of the main reception room.

More views of the living/reception room.

The dining room.

A series of volcanic eruption paintings including several of Vesuvius.

Looking into the bedroom hallway.

A corner in one of the bedrooms.

The corner of another.

The orignal bathroom.

American Renaissance Revival Walnut Chest of Drawers in the master bedroom. Circa 1870. Est. $500 -- $700.

A bedside table.

The breakfast table.

A ktchen wall bulletin board and impromptu wine cellar.

Leo described it thusly in a letter he wrote on August 28, 1972 to a man named Manuel Gasser in Switzerland about their collection:

“Two decades ago, these objects (furniture, bibelots, lamps, fabrics, books ... everything that could, in a sense, reproduce the past, from about the 1840s until the 1914 war) were quite inexpensive, actually to be found in junk shops, in cellars and in attics. Many visitors to the house, a typical 1870ish New York brownstone on upper, then unfashionable, Lexington Avenue, found the contents funny. Some even thought the Tiffany glass lamps ugly. Nothing in the collection cost much – the kinds of things one generation adores, the next scorns, and some succeeding covets.

“The collections range from horn cups to Staffordshire cottage ornaments to depictions of firework displays to a series of Russian views to Tiffany and other Art Nouveau lamps and glass and furniture to majolica to bucolic and “forest” beast wood carving to Neapolitan gouaches of Vesuvius to toys (especially dolls) to over 15,000 books. There are, literally, hundreds and hundreds of objects, mostly European or American: (glass [bells over]) waxed fruits and flowers and paper construction arrangements, walking sticks, beadwork cushions, Russian lacquer boxes, dozens of paintings of dogs .... And were all collected out of love for the solid past they represent, collected to return the life in these objects to the times in which we live.”

Looking down the stairwell of the Osborne where Lerman and Foy lived. The building began construction in 1883 and was completed in 1885.

A view of the entrance gallery of another apartment on the same floor.

Kaye bids us farewell.

The great Telegraph of London recently published one of their great obituaries of a man named Rochus Misch– unknown to me until reading this, although probably known to many war historians and those who follow military history.

Herr Misch was, as young man, Hitler’s bodyguard and was in the bunker in the final days and hours before the “thousand year Reich” and its creator crumbled to dust in its ashes.

It’s a morbid story but somehow relevant in many ways as is Herr Misch’s life and what (and if) he learned from it.

From The Telegraph.


	Rudolf Misch in 1942.

Rochus Misch, who has died aged 96, worked for five years as Adolf Hitler’s bodyguard, courier, orderly, and finally Chief of Communications, acquiring an intimate insight into the machinations of the Nazi leadership; his recollection suggested that Hitler and Rudolf Hess considered an armistice with Britain in 1941, and that when Hitler rejected the idea Hess flew to Scotland under his own steam.
Ultimately Misch was in charge of the switchboard in the Berlin “Führerbunker”, where Hitler and members of his inner circle met their grisly ends as the Red Army closed in, in 1945. The bodyguard was the last person to leave the bunker, and was a key witness to the macabre events dramatised in Der Untergang (“Downfall”, 2006), Oliver Hirschbiegel’s extraordinary film about the end of the Third Reich.

He recalled how, on April 30 1945, Hitler locked himself in his room with his bride-of-a-day Eva Braun:“Everyone was waiting for the shot. We were expecting it. I had just said to the technicians: 'I’m going over [to Hitler’s office], can I fetch you anything?’ And they said no. Then came the shot. Linge [Heinz Linge, Hitler’s valet] took me to one side and we went in. I saw Hitler slumped by the table. I didn’t see any blood on his head. And I saw Eva with her knees drawn up lying next to him on the sofa – wearing a white and blue blouse, with a little collar: just a little thing.”

Misch was also a witness to the grimmest of bunker stories — the murder by Magda Goebbels of her six children. “The children were prepared for their deaths in my work room,” he recalled. “Their mother combed their hair — they were all dressed in white nightshirts — and then she went up with the children. Dr Nauman told me that Dr Ludwig Stumpfegger would give the kids 'candy water’. I realised what was going to happen immediately. I had seen Dr Stumpfegger successfully test poison on Blondi, the Führer’s dog.” Frau Goebbels returned an hour or two later, and without saying a word went to her husband’s room. There, she laid out a game of patience.

Misch then helped to establish a direct line from the Reich Chancellery to Soviet lines, while General Krebs tried to negotiate an armistice. But the Russians demanded unconditional surrender. When the news was brought to the surviving inmates of the bunker, they assembled for a meeting at which Goebbels reminisced about the triumphant early days of Nazism, but made no reference to his family, dead upstairs. “Magda Goebbels just sat there,” Misch recalled, “saying little, head high. She was chain-smoking and sipping champagne.”

All of them knew what was coming. “Goebbels said to me: 'Well, Misch, we knew how to live. Now we know how to die.’ Then he and Frau Goebbels processed arm-in-arm up the stairs to the garden. Soon afterwards somebody called and asked for General Krebs. I connected the line but there was no answer. I went to Krebs’s room and found him and Burgdorf [General Burgdorf, Chief Adjutant] sitting motionless. I first thought they were sleeping.” Both officers were dead.
Though Misch was probably a reliable witness to the facts, he showed none of the remorse or psychological insight that others exhibited when talking about the Nazi era. To Misch, Hitler remained the kind boss who joked with his staff, loved Charlie Chaplin, children and animals and was so considerate towards others that he married Eva Braun the day before their deaths “solely out of consideration for her parents”.

Rochus Misch was born on July 29 1917 in Oppeln, Upper Silesia, in what is now Poland but was then part of Imperial Germany. Orphaned in the First World War, he grew up into a broad-shouldered, though none-too-bright, young man — the ideal recruit for the elite SS Leibstandarte regiment which he joined in 1937.

He served as an Oberscharführer in the Polish campaign of 1939 but was wounded and taken out of active service. While he was recovering Hitler’s office rang his regiment looking for “an honest, reliable fellow” to join the Führer’s team. Misch was recommended.

Misch’s experience sometimes produced tantalising titbits which seemed to run counter to mainstream historical research. When an interviewer asked him about the sort of thing that upset Hitler, for example, Misch recalled seeing him distressed only once — after his deputy Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland in May 1941: “For three days he was very gloomy.”

“Some days before that we were at Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s residence in the Bavarian Alps,” Misch noted. “He was talking to Hess, when somebody brought in a dispatch. The Führer read it and exclaimed: 'I cannot go there and go down on my knees!’ Hess replied: 'I can, my Führer.’ At the time a German diplomat was meeting the Swedish emissary, Count Bernadotte, in Portugal. The British were very active in Lisbon, so I think there might have been some peace offer from London.” At the time, the Nazi regime claimed Hess had gone mad. But the true purpose of his mission to Britain remains unclear, and official British documents relating to it are still classified.


Misch in his garden in Berlin, 2000 (Photo: Christian Jungeblodt).

After the Goebbels met their deaths, Misch was finally free to make a break for home. He managed to make his way to the Friedrichstrasse station, where he ran into Heinz Linge. The two men felt their way through a tunnel under the river Spree: “Through a grating, we saw a group of German soldiers. We couldn’t believe it. We decided to go up and join them. That was it. The soldiers were Red Army prisoners.”

Bar a short period when he was taken back to Germany in 1946 as a witness in the Nuremberg trials, Misch spent the next three years in the Lubyanka. Stalin refused to believe that Hitler was dead, and survivors from the bunker were tortured for evidence about the Führer’s imaginary flight. At one point, Misch wrote to the Soviet secret police chief, Beria, asking to be shot, so unbearable was the torture. Instead, he spent six years in the gulags before being released in 1954 under an amnesty agreed by Khrushchev.

He returned to his two-storey home in the east Berlin suburb of Rudow and to his wife, Gerda, whom he had married in 1942. There he set up a wallpaper and paint business, which he ran until 1983.

Misch remained an uncomfortable reminder of attitudes which many Germans like to believe have been consigned to the history books. In 2005 he was accused of tainting the memories of Holocaust victims after calling for a plaque in memory of the Goebbels children to be placed next to a new Jewish memorial.

After the release of Der Untergang, he was rather pleased to find himself the object of worldwide media attention, and took every opportunity to show interviewers his snapshots of Hitler and Eva Braun in happier days at Berchtesgaden. “It was a good time with Hitler,” he reminisced. “I enjoyed it and I was proud to work for him.”
Misch’s wife died in 1998. They had a daughter, but she broke off all contact with her father.

Rochus Misch, July 29 1917, died September 05 2013

Contact DPC here.

In the spirit of Fashion Week: Apthorp Cleaners window on Amsterdam Avenue. 7:30 PM. Photo: JH.

Wednesday, September 11, 2013.Twelve years later. Warm, even humid but sunny, yesterday in New York. When you say humid to New Yorkers now, they all think last July. No, not that bad. Weatherman says humid and warm for the next couple of days. Last days of Summer.

It’s Fashion Week, in case you hadn’t heard. There were cocktail parties. Jeff and Liz Peek had their annual “Welcome Back” (that’s not what they call it) cocktail reception at their Park Avenue penthouse. Lots of old friends, many of whom saw each other this past summer – if they were in Nantucket where the Peeks go.

Then a half mile down the avenue Mark and Nina Magowan hosted a book party for their friend Tom Scheerer and his new book by Vendome, “Tom Scherer Decorates.” Then farther down the avenue called Lexington, Jim Hedges, Michael Bruno (creator of “First Dibs”) and Jim Druckman hosted cocktails to celebrate “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” photographs and important works by Andy Warhol at the New York Design Center in the 1st Dibs Gallery at 200 Lex.

Interior designer Tom Scheerer at his book launch last night. Click to order.

Tom's host and hostess Nina and Mark Magowan.

Last night about nine, I took a walk up Madison Avenue with the digital just to see what they’re putting in the windows while across the Park and farther downtown they’re dressing up the models for next Spring and Summer. Both Dennis Basso and Oscar de la Renta– who are represented on Madison Avenue in their own boutiques – had their shows yesterday. You can read about it on Ellin Saltzman’s Fashion Diary today. So did Elie Tahari whom Ellin reviewed. Elie was celebrating his 40th anniversary in the business with his Men’s and Women’s Collection for Spring 2014.

Passing by Restaurant Daniel on 65th Street and Park Avenue, last night on my way to Madison Avenue.

A lot of grey and black in the windows. Some so darkly lit that it was difficult if not impossible to photograph adequately. As it is, the windows’ interior lighting often flood the camera’s image so it is not the best representation of what I was seeing.

The most alluring were the windows of Frette, Pratesi and Yves Delorme. Bedding, linens, pillows, soft, ahhh, Zzzz ..... There were, however, some beautiful things and some fascinating ones. Dolce and Gabanna have harkened back to ancient Rome for their inspiring dresses, skirts and shoes. Louboutin is taking on a little bit of Stubbs & Wooten, although much cozier. Ralph’s little tots can be about the best looking kids (of all ages) in town. Oscar is Oscar, never fails. Prada is Prada. Everyone has handbags, handbags, handbags. Arche had some low-heeled shoes for those who want to move fast and efficiently. Missoni and Pucci are chic and inimitable.

Alice and Olivia.

Theory.

I couldn’t get any photos of the sumptuous jewels that fill the windows along this main thoroughfare for the rich the chic and the shameless during the day. All put away for a good night’s sleep in some place safe and solid.

Madison Avenue is a great walk at the mid-evening hour. There’s no real heavy road traffic and very few pedestrians. It’s simply New York with autumn approaching. Sutton Foster opened last night at the Café Carlyle. The talents back in town too. Clint Holmes comes in October 1st and then Judy Collins returns for her annual visit to the room that Vertes (hand)painted on October 15th, through the 26th. The town’s comin’ around.

Dennis Basso.

Bar Italia.

Rolls Royce parked in front of Bar Italia.

J. Crew.

Derek Lam.

Armani.

Oscar de la Renta.

Luigi Borrelli.

And of course, Michael Kors.

Kate Spade.

Anya HIndmarch, who was last week's lunch interview in the FT.

Tory Burch.

Home with Frette.

Davide Cenci

La Perla.

Max Mara.

Bonpoint.

Lanvin.

Donna Karan.

Valentino.

Dolce & Gabanna.

Pratesi in pink.

Redd Krakoff.

Cesare Paciotti.

Prada.

Juicy Couture.

Tom Ford.

Bottega Veneta.

Asprey.

Pucci.

Celine.

Ralph Lauren for the little ones.

Including the cashmere teddy bears.

And the toddlers.

And the growing up kids.

And the chic ladies.

Calypso.

Milly.

Manrico Cashmere.

Carolina Herrera.

Christian Louboutin.

More Christian Louboutin.

Yuna Powell.

Mid-evening walkies.

Coming to the Cafe Carlyle.

Walking home.

Sandro.

Yves Delorme, welcome ...

Lisa Perry.

Arche.

Intermix.

Vilebrequin.

Missoni.

Michele Negri. And we're at 78th and Madison. Time to pick up some dinner and go home ...

Contact DPC here.

The Queensboro Bridge. 3:30 PM. Photo: JH.

Thursday, September 12, 2013. Very, very warm and muggy in New York yesterday. You could “see” it, let alone feel it.

It was Wednesday and so it was Michael’s. It was a typical pandemonium of a room, as Wednesday often are. A real “up” day. I sometimes think people are celebrating the day before Thursday which means TGIF.

I was lunching with Vincent Minuto, who has a company called Hampton Domestics whose ads you may have seen (and maybe clicked on) on the NYSD.

DPC and Vincent Minuto of Hampton Domestics at Michael's.

Vincent and I first met about 20 years ago at a party of the late Judy Green. Judy died 12 years ago just three days after the attack on the World Trade Center. She was a great friend to many, including this writer, and also to Vincent who was her caterer at her fabulous New York parties.

She lived above the town at 555 Park Avenue and she loved giving big parties for two or three hundred. The guest list was the most eclectic you’d ever find in New York, at least on the Upper East Side. Bankers, barkers, rockers, real estate moguls, debutante, actors, artists, singers, socialites and people on the hustle. She loved a big different crowd.


	Judy Green, a great friend to many, including this writer, and also to Vincent who was her caterer at her fabulous New York parties.

	A guest at Judy Green's happily partaking in one of Vincent's tea sandwiches.

	Vincent and Judy made sure the bubbly was never far away.

She was a child of New York, a kind of Marjorie Morningstar who grew up on Central Park West and dined and wined on and all over the town. Joie de vivre, it was; and drama too, like behind the scenes with Broadway baby. But always laughter, lotsa laughter. Her many friends still often think of her and her times whenever they pass that building at 62nd and Park. Her idea of a New York cocktail party was the kind us kids dreamed of when growing up out in the boonies. Fun, glamorous, crazy and delicious.

Vincent was her caterer. His greatest specialty for Judy were his cucumber and water cress sandwiches, or “tea sandwiches.” They’d be spread out with everything else on the dining room table and half the crowd would be hanging around gobbling them up like candy. It sounds like an exaggeration, but it was true and still funny to remember.

Vincent and I would run into each other over the years, here in Manhattan, out in the Hamptons where he’s had a house as long as I’ve known him. He’s a low-key kind of guy, a Sicilian from Brooklyn where his father had a business making sports trophies. His brother still runs it, and his mother who is now 83 still works there. When Vincent was a kid he did a lot of the engraving after school.

Vincent loves his work (and he’s got a lot of it); he loves people. He takes everything as it comes, and as a result it’s a charmed life. No doubt he’d think so too.

He attended the Culinary Institute (although he says “cooking isn’t learned, you’re born with it…” He started out as a kid working in the kitchen at “21” and then for a man named Donald Bruce White.

Donald Bruce White (he was always referred to by his three names) was a Broadway actor who had great success as a juvenile but the career cooled off by the time he was an adult. A man who always liked to cook, he fell into catering (a convenient way to grab meal) and turned it into a very successful business here in New York.

White had a roster of clients that still reads like a Who’s Who. Vincent learned the ropes from White and when the opportunity came up to work for Bob Guccione, the founder/publisher of Penthouse, he took it. He worked for Guccione for 17 years, as cook and managing the household staff of eighteen as well as the staff of 12 in the Rhinebeck house.

Besides his work with Guccione he was always taking catering assignments on the side. That business grew and somehow led to him developing another business – Hampton Domestics – placing people in the domestic service business. It’s not something we hear about when it comes to “employment” matters but it’s a thriving business and Vincent is one of the biggest agents in the city, in the Hamptons, in Palm Beach and elsewhere.

A Judy Green affair.

He credits his (what I call) success to his years in the catering business. There isn’t a name in the Social Register, or among the Quest 400, not to mention corporate rosters, who don’t have his phone number.

For years he catered Liz Fondaras’ Bastille Day party at her beach house in East Hampton every July, as well as her dinner parties at her Fifth Avenue apartment.

Liz, who died last year in her 90s, always held the buffet lunch at her poolside and her list of guests ranged from local friends to international celebrities and Washington hotshots. The lure for her guests was of course the hostess and her guest list, but to all who knew her it was Vincent’s buffet – which included those famous tea sandwiches – that drew the flocks.

One of Liz Fondaras’ Bastille Day parties at her beach house in East Hampton.

After Guccione, he went to work for Leona Helmsley at her estate in Greenwich. Helmsley, who died several years ago, was a controversial figure (known as the “queen of mean”) for her meteoric personality. Vincent loved her. When they met, he reminded her that they were first introduced at one of Judy Green’s parties. She didn’t remember. He also told her they came from the same neighborhood in Brooklyn. That was it; he was hired.

He only stayed on for seven months because he missed the action of the city and the Hamptons. “Mrs. Helmsley was a very lonely woman. She told me that having a lot of money made her life complicated and lonely after her husband died,” Vincent recalled.


According to Vincent, Mrs. Helmsley was a very lonely woman.

"Sinatra loved to cook," said Vincent.

Vincent plays the piano. It started when he was a toddler and his parents gave him a toy piano for Christmas. When he was twelve, he’d save enough money to buy a used Baldwin grand for $750. Big big money in those days and especially for a kid. It’s still in his mother’s living room out in Brooklyn. The Hamptons house has one and every Summer he holds recitals for local kids studying piano. At parties, there’s music and singing always.

In summertime business moves out to the Hamptons. His catering clientele run from old Social Register families to hot hedge fund people. Vincent provides the staff, the food and sets it all up. He’s not one to participate in his clients’ parties – as this Diary might be mistakenly conveying. But he sees it all, enjoys what he sees, and thinking of only one thing: making the client happy with what he can deliver. Many of those clients get to know him, just as I did, as a friend because he’s open and kind and quick to laugh.

He talked about the golden days for him in Southampton when both Judy Green and Ann (Mrs. Morton) Downey used to entertain Frank Sinatra. Vincent loved Sinatra. They spoke the same language (different inflection), the boy from Brooklyn, the kid from Bayone. Sinatra had a wicked sense of humor and very quick wit. He loved to cook too and was often in the kitchen kibitzing and checking things out. Laughter abounded.

Nowadays, his best friend out there is Loraine Bracco. “Because she’s totally real.” And then he laughs. “And Joy Behar” who tells him he’s “a gay man in a Mafia don’s body.” More laughter. “I get it,” he explained; “I’m Sicilian.”

I asked him how business was at Hampton Domestics. Not being one to need, let alone afford, domestic staff, I tend to forget anyone might. Very busy in Vincent’s world. He always pays for his quarterly ad in advance (which is always surprising and delightful to receive), because, he told me, his ad in the NYSD has brought him very good luck in business. So he honors that, much to our pleasure.

Our lunch ran into the quiet time at Michael’s when the customers are gone and they’re setting up for the dinner hour. Vincent’s has so many adventures, met so many people, so many different kinds of people -- many of whom are/were famous and celebrated and even notorious -- that this writer was all ears hearing about the stage he works on and the people he loves, no matter who they are. Or were. Joie de vivre; it’s catching.

Two recent job listings on Hampton Domestics.

Meanwhile Michael’s. The joint was jumping. At the table next to mine, Peter Brown, the international P.R. guru was lunching with New York Post’s distinguished theatre critic Michael Riedel. Next to them it was Joe Armstrong, the Mayah of Michael’s with Dave Zinczenko of Men’s Fitness and ABC television as a news correspondent. Behind Brown and Riedel at Table One, ATV Music’s Martin Bandler. Across the way, three of Da Boyz:Michael Kramer, Dr. Gerry Imber and Gerry della Femina; across from them, producer/casting agent Bonnie Timmerman with stage and film producer Fred Zollo; Diane Clehane (our very own Brenda Starr) with Steven Stolman of Scalamandre. Steven, who is assiduously expanding the “brand” of the textiles and fabrics house in to china, flatware, wallpapers, is now writing a book on the long and fascinating life of Scalamandre.

Around the room. Nikki Haskell with Rikki Klieman and Eva Mohr; Desiree Gruber with Marc Graboff, President of NBC Television; Simon & Schuster’s Alice Mayhew and her author, Jennet Conant; Sam Shuman; Sharon Bush and Bettina Zilkha; Michael Mailer; Glenn Horowitz; Nan Talese; Ryan Kavanaugh with Claire Atkinson of the New York Post;Tony Hoyt and Charla Lawhon; Pauline Brown of LVMH with Hamilton South; David Adler, founder of Bizbash.


	Jonathan Alpeyrie.

	One of Jonathan's photographs while in Syria.

More: Jim Friedrich of Empirical Media; Sanford & Stein; Jim Casella of Case Interactive; Michael Del Giudice of Millennium Partners; Newell Turner of Hearst; Richard Descherer; Peter Gregory; Ted Hathway; Jerry Inzerillo; Dan Lufkin; Shelly Palmer; Jake Ottman of Warner Music; Susan Blond; Justin Cauli of Pandora; Tom Prassis of Sony Pictures Classics. Meanwhile, at the bar– the preference for some regulars lunching (they can catch the world walking by) – Kira Semler and Liz Wood (in from DC), and Kim McCarty, wife of the proprietor.

And at the table in the corner, Jack Kliger, President of TV Guide, with a young man who looked like he could have been Kliger’s son. He was dressed very casually in a tee shirt and jeans. My friend/Brenda, Diane Clehane scooped me on this but it’s worth repeating no matter. The young man is the son of a friend of Kliger’s.

His name was Jonathan Alpeyrie. Kliger referred to him as a combat photographer who, on his third trip to Syria, was abducted at gunpoint by masked men at a checkpoint near Damascus. He was held for 81 days, finally freed on the paying of a $450,000 ransom. During captivity he was often chained to his bed, and was almost shot by a guard one night when he went to the bathroom without permission.

Mr. Alpeyrie, who has been in town photographing Fashion Week, told an interviewer in the British Journal of Photography that he owes his freedom to “A Syrian man close to the regime, a member of Parliament and a businessman looking for Douard Elias and Didier Francois (two French journalists who went missing in Syria on June 7th), who stumbled upon me.”

Wednesday lunch at Michael’s.

Contact DPC here.

Looking east across Central Park from the fifth floor of the Time Warner Center. 12:30 PM. Photo: JH.

Monday, September 16, 2013. Beautiful weekend in New York and very early Autumn weather: sunny, temps in the low 70s, high 50s at night. Friday night, a one hour torrential (torrential) rainfall, and then a brilliant half moon rising over Manhattan.

Thursday night, 7 p.m. Looking south toward the 59th Street Queenboro (now Ed Koch) Bridge. It was overcast and the air thick with moisture, but it didn't look like it was going to rain.

Waiting for my car. A parents' reception at the Brearley School. 7:15 p.m.

I parked on the corner of 80th and Lexington at 8 o'clock. There were raindrops on my windshield. I'd forgotten my umbrella. I decided to wait until the "shower passed." Across the street was a new business I'd never noticed before.

Two minutes later, the clouds broke. It was pouring. I wasn't going to leave the car. I thought it was momentary. It went on, torrentially, for 45 minutes.

Friday night, looking South on East End Avenue at the half moon rising above.

Sunday afternoon at 2:30. A private yacht heading north on the East River.

The view south, same time.

The smaller yacht, heading South.

A bigger smaller one, same direction.

Someone's kitty out for a walk. Cats usually do NOT do this. Won't do it. This cat was actually strolling along behind its master at a good, albeit slow pace. It was straying to the left, somehow distracted by something it was seeing or smelling. I asked the man (who was always carrying a small transport bag for the cat also) if he always did this? Yes. He liked it.

Heading south.

Sunday night I had dinner at Sette Mezzo, Lexington Avenue between 70th and 71st) which by 7 p.m. was jammed with regulars from the neighborhood including some familiar faces such as Barbara Walters, who was dining with Prince Dimitri of Yugoslavia and Pamela Gross and Jimmy Finkelstein; also the Newhouse brothers, Si and Donald, and their families; also Amanda Burden with Charlie Rose; Jeanne and Herb Siegel; Susan and John Hess and friends. The Hesses recently returned from their annual Summer in Malibu.

I was with my longtime friend Channing Chase who millions might know as Dorothy “Dot” Campbell, the mother of that rotten Peter Campbell (Vincent Karthheiser) on “Mad Men.” Currently Dot is suffering from early dementia and “lost.”

Channing as Dorothy “Dot” Campbell.

Channing and I have known each other for a very long time, since the days when I was a kid, new in New York and also pursuing an acting career. We were acting partners auditioning for agents. I was not an actor -- a lesson, I fortunately learned early on. (Although if someone offered me a role in anything I’d take it. Ham.) Channing, however, was, is, an actress; and she’s worked diligently and dedicatedly, and made a good living at it all these years since.

Back in the early 80s, when I living in Los Angeles, I persuaded her to leave New York and come out to pursue her career in film and television. Channing is, and always has been, a determined, dedicated actress. There are no let-ups with this girl. She later married (26 years there too), former advertising executive now art gallerist Dan Saxon and they live happy (really) in a beautiful vintage Spanish Colonial house in Los Feliz.

To demonstrate her “determination” -- to keep herself busy between auditions when she was first living out there, she and a group of friends founded the Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice, California. To make work, to give actors work, to keep honing their craft while waiting the endless wait for the next call from their agent.

That was 26 years ago too. The company now has one major theater, and two small houses operating for their productions. Currently they are presenting Arthur Miller’s“A View From the Bridge" (Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3), running through October 27th.

If you don’t watch Mad Men, you’ll recognize Channing from her appearances in such films and TV series as Evan Almighty, Charlie Wilson’s War, Family Matters, Life with Bonnie and ER, as well as such national TV commercials for Dell Computers, Discover Card, Glade, Arm & Hammer, Campbell Soup and other major sponsors.

A Delicate Balance by Eward Albee at the Pacific Resident Theatre (2002-2003 season): Greg Mullavey, Channing Chase, Bruce French, and Andi Carnicke.

Longtime readers of the NYSD may remember Channing had the remarkable experience of “sudden death” 31 years ago last Good Friday, at the beginning of her stay in Los Angeles. We’ve published the story a couple of times here. This is what I mean about determination.

Contact DPC here.

7:15 PM. Photo: JH.

Tuesday, September 16, 2013. Nice day, yesterday in New York. Temperatures around 70. Partly sunny, often cloudy. And then noticeably cooler, autumn cooler at nightfall.

There’s something about the clouds. I don’t know if it’s just that I never noticed, but the skies have often been very dramatic lately. At six last night, I took the dogs down to the Promenade by the river and was glad I brought my camera because ...

View from the entrance of the Promenade of Carl Schurz Park at East 83rd Street looking across the East River northeast toward Roosevelt Island, Queens, and the RFK Triboro Bridge.

And to the southeast to Roosevelt Island and the 59th Street Ed Koch Bridge.

Look at that cloud cover over Roosevelt Island and Queens stretching out over Long Island Sound. It’s so beautiful. and yet casually threatening ... a storm maybe; an omen?

The tide was coming in. You can always see the river flowing north with a strong, swift current full of large eddys. This is power; it’s not a notion, this it. A beautiful sailboat. About a 39-footer, with two people on deck, was coming up from the South. These boats are never full sail (or any sail) when moving on the river. I’m not a sailor so I don’t know if that’s the law or if it just doesn’t work as well. So they motor. It’s interesting to watch them moving north when the tide is going out. Motor and all, they barely move upstream when she’s going out. Patience provided by Mother Nature.

Last night, just about sundown, a single sailboat, La Nelga (I couldn’t read the port) was motoring north with its mainsail open also. Sail or motor, nothing was necessary: the current was carrying them along rapidly. The travelers were on Alert. Attention must be paid now. You’re entirely in the moment and nowhere else. The world was moving on in that single boat.

La Nelga moving north. They were moving right along with the strong tidal current.

The wind and the water picks up their speed.

I love watching the boats. There’s not one, especially the sail boats, that I don’t imagine myself on. I look at the crew and I equate it with not-having-a-care-in-the-world. It’s a moment of private relief for me. I know; it’s delusive. But it’s my trip to bountiful at the end of a New York weekday in mid-September where the Sun and the Clouds and the Changing Tides are all around us, at our door, or closeby. The Washington Navy Yard shootings. You can feel them in New York. You could feel the dark moment right after. You could see them in the clouds. 9/11 did that. Period. Those clouds I was watching were carrying messages. Moving on. Peace somewhere out there. East of the Sun, West of the Moon.

La Negla in the distance moving toward the bridges and Long Island Sound. 5:45 p.m.

Over the weekend, I got caught up in reading“The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy” by David Cannadine. I’ve had this extraordinary book for years, for so long that I have now two copies, one more recently published. It was originally published in hardcover in 1990. It’s a tome, 600 or 700 pages.

The new (top) and old versions. Click to order.

I probably first bought it in paperback a few years later. It was another one of those books that I bought because of the cover. In fact the newer different cover was as alluring as the original and I bought it a second time last year, having forgotten that I owned it. Anyway, I am glad to have two copies, one updated.

Mr. Cannadine is a scholarly writer. You have to pour yourself into the thicket of information about a world, a way of life, a point of view that is unimaginable to us Americans — or anybody else for that matter. It’s jammed with facts and information detailing an epoch. In fact, I’ve never finished it. I just go back every now then mainly because I’m curious about something.

The British aristocracy in its 19th century heyday at the height of the Industrial Revolution and old Queen Victoria was a way of life that is still imitated, perhaps, in a kind of faux way – and maybe now moreso than ever. Nowadays the plutocrats have their fantastic and fabulous lairs and estates, yachts and jets, greater than anything, technologically than the British aristos could even have imagined.

However, back then they lived on a different planet and they lived well. So well that when Americans see depictions of that way of life (all coming from the UK), such as Upstairs, Downstairs, Brideshead Revisited, Downton Abbey, we swoon to the dramas they provide about that way of life. Because you can only think (without thinking), I’d take that.

Of course, that was not exactly what it’s cracked up to be in retrospect (which makes it all the more believable to us working stiffs). Because as all good things come to an end with one Sundown or another, so it was for the Brit. Aristos a century and more ago.


The Marlborough Family, 1905 by John Singer Sargent. Aristocracy merges with the plutocracy in its most famous and enduring example, when Consuelo Vanderbilt married the Duke of Marlborough. Four generations later, their great-granddaughter, Lady Henrietta Spencer-Churchill, is a prosperous member of enterprising workforce, international interior designer and author, a 21st century working girl.

With that, I will stop writing about “The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy” except to say that in its riveting account about the evils of plutocracy overtaking it, I came upon this quote by Arthur Ponsonby, 1st Baron Ponsonby (1871 – 1946), a British writer/politician/social activist (and third son of Sir Henry Ponsonby, the long devoted Private Secretary of Queen Victoria — one of those “Serving Victoria”).

Lord Ponsonby wrote about the evils of plutocracy:

The manipulating of interests, the juggling of the money market, the mania for speculation, the creation of false money standards, the international syndicates of financial adventures to which governments have become a prey, the control of the press, the ostentatious benevolence of millionaires, and the brutalizing effect of the pursuit of wealth. — The Decline of the Aristocracy, published a century ago in 1912.

Lord Ponsonby is most frequently quoted and best remembered for something he wrote in a book called “Falsehood in Wartime: Propaganda Lies of the First World War” in 1928:

“When war is declared, truth is its first casualty.”

The things we learn from picking up a book.

One more thing. Last Thursday night I went to run an errand and found a parking place on 80th Street and Lexington Avenue. There were raindrops on the windshield and having forgotten my umbrella, I decided to wait till it subsided (a long wait, it turned out).

Sitting there waiting as it started to really rain, I noticed a group of (mainly) young women exercising in the storefront across the avenue. We ran the picture I took – first of them exercising and second of the torrential rain that blocked out any view even thirty feet away and lighted. The name of the storefront, as you can see, was the fhitting room. It’s obviously an exercise class. At first glance I thought it was a yoga class. It’s also a new business in that neighborhood.

Fhtting room the first time I saw it last Thursday night waiting to escape the rain.

Yesterday morning I got an email from a woman named Rebecca Horn, a Senior Account Exec at BrandLink Communications. She’d seen the picture I took of the fhitting room in the rain, and this is what she told me:

I saw on your site that someone had posted a picture of The Fhitting Room, which is a fitness studio that I represent. Please find information below and attached. I wanted to know if anyone from New York Social Diary was interested in attending a class.

The Fhitting Room is a High Intensity Training (HIT) fitness studio, which recently opened at 1166 Lexington Avenue. Their signature "FHIX" (Functional High Intensity Mix) of exercise moves integrates five essential building blocks of fitness to deliver optimal results. Aside from taking place in a beautiful, highly stylized, brand-new space, the benefit of The Fhitting Room is that class sizes are intimate, with a maximum of 12 participants, providing a more personalized experience for clients and allowing instructors to focus on each participant equally.

Last night about 4:30. They were working it.

So now we know. High Intensity Training Fitness studio. “FHIX it now.”

Watching them yesterday – they were really working (phew!), I thought to myself: “how could that be bad for you?” Then I got out of the car and went on my errand.

When I returned twenty minutes later, there was a woman, probably in her early forties, walking in the roadway at the red light, moving from car to car, holding a large empty plastic cup. She was asking -- with a very pained, desperate expression on her face – for money. For anything.

She didn’t notice me in my car and passed me by. She looked like she could have been someone who lived in this Upper East Side neighborhood of middle and (mainly) upper income (and very rich – Madonna, for example, lives right around the corner). She was thin and haggard, troubled, and hadn’t bothered to pull herself together – although she looked like the kind of woman who did. When not one responded she buried her face in her hands for a minute and then trudged on down the avenue. It looked as if no one was responding.

This can get to me. New York is hard rock when your pockets are empty. Like that boat on the river, it just passes you by. I think part of it is it frightens people (‘there but for the grace of God go I”).

I’m always left wondering “why” when I see this. I mean “why” in the sense of what were the circumstances that led to this, to going out on the street asking strangers for money (help). Whatever you think about it, there are more and more young, often women of (at least formerly) solvent circumstances sitting on the pavement leaning against a building with a sign asking.

In my neighborhood there are more young (late 20s/early 30s and older) Hispanic women collecting bottles and cans for money. Friday afternoons, often till late at night. When I see them on the street in the nighttime (often close to midnight), I give them a twenty. Yes, I can use the twenty, definitely; but then I think of how many bottles and cans they have to collect to fix those enormous balloon like plastic bag, I think how much more valuable that twenty will be. Who it will feed, keep warm, shelter.

Many of them are young mothers. Mouths to feed. All of them, I’ve noticed, are well turned out, neatly dressed, neatly groomed. Not like that desperate young woman I saw on Lexington Avenue at 5:45 in the afternoon. But they are desperate too; and they are doing something too. I suggest whenever we can, we give. Something. Desperate means food. Always. I know there are those to whom it means something else; but mainly it means food and shelter. Without that we’re all nothing.

Contact DPC here.

Waiting for the bus on Lexington Avenue. 11:30 PM. Photo: Jeff Hirsch.

Wednesday, September 18, 2013. It’s almost Autumn in New York, and with yesterday's temperatures dropping into the mid-50s by mid-evening yesterday, it’s beginning to feel like it.

The Social Season is beginning to reflect it too, with the calendar chock-a-block with events. Last night at Cipriani 42nd Street, New Yorkers for Children hosted its 14th annual Fall Gala honoring Nicholas Scoppetta and Benefiting Youth in Foster Care.


	Nicholas Scoppetta, Dayssi Olarte de Kanavos, and Susan Burden.

Mr. Scoppetta has been in public service for most of his life. New Yorkers have known him as the Fire Commissioner, also former Commissioner of the Administration of Children’s Services, also a former Deputy Mayor and Commissioner of Investigation for the City of New York, as well as Counsel to the Knapp Commission, Assistant US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and several other positions.

What is remarkable about Mr. Scoppetta is that all of that isn’t the half of it. His path in life, it would seem, led him to affect the lives of thousands and thousands of children in Foster Care to brighter, sustainable stable lives of personal achievement and accomplishment. Not a few of them were in the room last night.

He was born on the Lower East Side in 1932, the youngest son of Italian immigrants struggling in the Great Depression. When he was four years old, his parents turned him and his two older brothers over to the city’s care.

Initially the boys stayed in a shelter on 104th Street, and then they were separated. About a year later they were reunited by chance in a dentist’s office. It was his brother Tony who recognized the five-year-old Nicholas.

Eventually the three boys ended up in a group home in Bronx called Woodycrest, which is now an AIDS hospice. Woodycrest, Mr. Scoppetta recalled last night in the recounting of his early life, was a saving grace for the child.

Nicholas Scoppetta accepting his honor last night at Cipriani 42nd Street, recalling his brave and industrious life helping children in foster care and expressing his gratitude for his own family -- wife, son and daughter, grandchildren and lifelong friends. A great man in our presence. And a humble one also.

That time – between leaving his parents’ hearth and care, and moving to Woodycrest in the Bronx was deeply difficult for the little Nicholas, as he recalled, still deeply touched by the memories more than seven decades later. Being with his brothers, and living in circumstances where he was cared for and felt cared for, was an enormous relief for the child. When he was twelve, in 1944, the brothers were reunited with their parents.

We hear about Foster Care but if we haven’t been personally experienced it, we don’t know about the emotional impact is has on an already painfully deprived, entirely dependent child. To us it is a thing, a process, an institutional umbrella for what is in stark reality, a deeply troubling sentence for any child. Furthermore many children in Foster Care are placed there by law enforcement because of horrendous abuse, negligence and poverty. They are already beaten down before they are fully formed.

Recipients and highly successful ones of NYFC's programs to assist children in foster care, they opened the evening with their recounting of their experience of NYFC and the progress it afforded them in their lives today. Winners in gratitude.

Spirit Award Winner Crystal Cameron shares her history of abuse, neglect, loss and triumph, now the loving mother of a six-year-old daughter, and enrolled in the RN Pathway program at the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing. She attributes her bravery, pluck and achievement to the guidance and assistance of New Yorkers for Children.

Spirit Award winner, Zinyusile Brian Khumble, 20-year-old sophomore at Pace University studying Public Accounting. Brian was born in Zimbabwe and raised there and in South Africa. He moved to the US four years ago and has been in foster care since he was 17. He has also taken an active role in improving foster care for other young people. Aside from his studies, Brian works full time at Fishs Eddy and is also a youth advisor for Minds On Fire, an organization dedicated to helping young people enter adulthood with confidence, curiosity and compassion.

Unless reminded, we can easily forget or ignore how defenseless all children are in an abusive and neglectful household, or in a sea of institutional care devoid of love and affection, not to mention the inevitable sense of futility that smothers. Most adults cannot handle such circumstances without deep suffering. Children surviving it is nothing but miraculous.

Nicholas Scoppetta, however, had the natural fortitude, assisted by the care of those looking after him in Woodycrest, and his brothers, and eventually the abiding sense of family, to survive. He graduated from High School in 1950, served in the Army for two years, and with the GI Bill graduated at 26 with a degree in Civil Engineering in 1958.

The following year he won a New York State Regents Scholarship and attended Brooklyn Law School at night. During the day he assisted in the investigation and prosecution of cases in which children had been abused and neglected. In 1962 he graduated Law School and his path, as we can see in retrospect, was laid out for him.

Mayor Bloomberg opened the evening praising Nicholas Scoppetta and the NYFC for its work in improving the lives of children in foster care.

He told us last night that currently of those in Foster Care, no more than 9% of the children made it to college and less than 2% of them graduated. Today 90% of the youth in NYFC's "Guardian Scholars" program graduate from college. Not a few people believe that Nicholas Scoppetta’s personal experience and his vision of what could be possible has made that difference. Last night he also reminded those of us who never realized it or have forgotten it, that all of us need meaningful personal relationships to succeed in life.

Last night’s gala, attended by several hundred, including many people who are prominent in charitable circles here in the city, is now a major social and philanthropic event in New York. Scoppetta and Burden and their executive director Susan Magazine and their volunteers have created a very successful organization that has raised and distributed more than $50 million to benefit youth in foster care since 1996. The evening is now traditionally hosted by some of the exceptional young people whose lives have been changed because of their involvement in NYFC. The difference, as one of the student hosts reminded the guests last night is that “no one becomes someone without anyone.” NYFC provides that anyone and many “someone’s.”

View of the stunning Paper Sculpture that greeted guests entering the hall last night, by David Stark Design and Production.

It’s a heart-rending and joyful evening, energized by the enthusiasm of its supporters. Gala Co-Chairs were Donya and Scott Bommer, Susan Burden, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, Oscar de la Renta, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Lise and Michael Evans, Deborra-Lee Furness and Hugh Jackman, Susan and Tony Gilroy, Erika and Kevin Liles Dayssi Olarte de Kanavos and Paul Kanavos, Candice and Scott Posner, Kelly and Jay Sugarman and Lauren and Justin Tuck.

Among the Vice-Chairs and guests were Mayor Michael Bloomberg who opened the evening praising the Commissioner and his work, Frederic Fekkai and Shrin von Wulffen, Rebecca Minkoff, Adriana Lima, Crystal Renn, Selita Ebans, Lindsay Ellingson, Hilary Rhoda, Nigel Barker, Jules Asner and Steven Soderbergh, Annelise Peterson, Andrew Saffir and Daniel Benedict, Alina Cho, Susan Shin Debbie Bancroft, Nicole Esposito, Pia and David Ledy, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff and David Wolkoff, Amada and Jonathan Ellian, Julie Macklowe, Zang Toi, Martin and Jean Shafiroff, Gillian and Sylvester Miniter, Jay Diamond and Alexandra Lebenthal, Muffie Potter Aston, Tatiana and Campion Platt, Geoffrey Bradfield, Eric Brettschneider, John Demsey.

Tatiana and Campion Platt with Marisa Noel.

Gillian Miniter, Alex Lebenthal, and Yaz Hernandez.

Lydia Fenet.

Juan Montoya.

Andrew Saffir, Juan Montoya, and Daniel Benedict.

Beth DeWoody and Hutton Wilkinson.

Jill Kargman.

Jamie Niven, Executive VP of Sotheby’s conducted an auction. This year marked the 10th Anniversary of the Spirit Awards, a $10,000 scholarship awarded annually to a young person in foster care. North Shore LIJ Health System sponsored two Spirit Awards in honor of the 10th Anniversary.

NYFC works in partnership with the Administration of Children’s Services to improve the prospects of children supported by the child welfare system. It supports programs promoting paths to stable adulthood through education and sustainable relationships with caring adults. There are nearly 13,000 children in foster care in New York City today and New Yorkers for Children is committed to providing them with the essential tools to become successful, self-sufficient adults.

What is amazing is hearing the stories these young people share about their abusive beginnings and seeing how NYFC’s work has motivated, directed and infused them to become stable, dynamic, productive and confident young adults who bear the qualities and characteristics of future leadership – like their supreme mentor Mr. Scoppetta, in their chosen fields of interest, and in their personal lives. The message is the same in all of them, to all of us: It Can Be Done.

NYFC graduate and speaker last night Jessica Maxwell with Susan Burden, co-founder of New Yorkers for Children.

Julie Macklowe and Zang Toi.

Muffie Potter Aston and Julie Macklowe.

Zang Toi, Julie Macklowe, and Muffie Potter Aston getting the message.

Kathy Steinberg.

Alice Shure.

Contact DPC here.

You’d hear about it even in New York

The Perfect Distractions

Wearing it with aplomb

Nantucket for a long weekend

Strong, steady rain

Full of sunshine

Staying in the City

Standing on ceremony

Traveling Eye

The last week of Summer

Stops along the way

The end of the last long weekend

In the News

Summer’s over. That was quick.

Loving the upcoming season

Twelve years later

You could “see” it, let alone feel it

All the world's a stage

There’s something about the clouds

It’s beginning to feel like it