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.
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. |
