New York Social Diary - Social Diary

Hailing a taxi on West End Avenue. 5:00 PM. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013. Warm, sunny day, yesterday in New York, with the dark clouds rolling in in late afternoon/early evening, threatening storms but leaving only a few raindrops. Temperatures in the low 70s.

Stormclouds passing northeast over the East River at 6:45. Photos: DPC.

An empty oil tanker returns from the north, being towed south.

Stormclouds moving on in its wake.

Stormclouds passing over the Hudson River. 5:20 PM. Photo: JH.

Looking north.

Catching up. Monday night, the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) and the FIT Foundation hosted their annual gala at Cipriani 42nd Street. They honored longtime supporter George Kaufman (chairman, Kaufman Organization), Kay Krill (president and chief executive officer, ANN INC.), and Stefano Tonchi (editor-in-chief, W magazine). This was a fashion affair – obviously – and the women dressed for the occasion. The annual gala benefits the FIT Educational Development Fund, which provides scholarship, technology, and student services support, among other priorities. This evening raised $1.2 million.

“FIT is extremely fortunate to have three outstanding honorees this year,” Dr. Joyce F. Brown, president of FIT told the guests in her welcoming remarks. “Each brings a wealth of experience, expertise, and creativity to their respective fields. George Kaufman is not only a visionary in real estate and the film industry, but a longtime and very dear friend of the college. Kay Krill is a successful business leader who has imbued ANN INC., the parent Company of Ann Taylor and LOFT, with both a sense of style and purpose, and Stefano Tonchi transforms every publication he edits with his bold, imaginative point of view.”

Liz Peek, Stefano Tonchi, and Jessica Chastain.

Tony Bennett, a longtime family friend,presented George Kaufman with his award. Supermodel Karolina Kurkova presented Ms. Krill with her award. In her acceptance she announced that ANN INC. has committed to endow a full year scholarship that will be awarded annually to a student with a passion for designing fashion for women.” Actress Jessica Chastain presented to Stefano Tonchi his award. The gala also showcased a video installation titled Orbit Art Work by Jennifer Steinkamp.

The evening’s chairs were Pamela Baxter, president and CEO, LVMH Perfumes and Cosmetics; Joy Herfel Cronin, group president, menswear and children’s wear, Ralph Lauren; Julie Greiner, chief merchandise planning officer, Macy’s, Inc.; Yaz Hernandez, trustee, FIT Board of Trustees; Jane Hertzmark Hudis, global brand president, Estée Lauder; and Liz Peek, chair, FIT Board of Trustees.

Susan Bennett, George Kaufman, Mariana Kaufman, Iris Cantor, and Tony Bennett.

The Mesdames Hernandez and Peek have worked hard to develop FIT’s Couture Council which has not only raised a great deal of funds for the FIT Museum but also raised the profile of FIT substantially in the world of charity galas. Their annual autumn Luncheon is now the kick-off for Fashion Week in the Lincoln Center tents and the opening of the autumn social season in New York. It is hugely successful, drawing hundreds of guests. This year’s gala luncheon will be honoring Michael Kors.

This past Monday gala’s honorary committee included Reem Acra, Giorgio Armani, Dennis Basso, Edmundo Castillo, Maria Cornejo, Francisco Costa, Peter Dundas, Tom Ford, Monique Lhillier, Gilles Mendel, Narciso Rodriguez, Ralph Rucci, Angel Sanchez, Jill Stuart, Isabel and Ruben Toledo, and Vera Wang.

Karen LeFrak, Gail Hilson, and Peter Gregory.

The guest list, with more than 500 attending, included: Reem Acra, Dennis Basso, Dr. and Mrs. Jay Baker, Jeffrey Banks, Cathie Black, Tony Bennett, Hamish Bowles, Dr. Joyce Brown, Noreen Buckfire, Henry Buhl, Catherine Cahill and Bill Bernhard, Jessica Chastain, Francisco Costa, Joy Herfel Cronin, Christina Davis, Anh Duong, Alber Elbaz, Tom Florio, Jamee and Peter Gregory,Miss America 2013 and FIT student Mallory Hytes Hagan, Stan Herman, Jane Hertzmark Hudis, Chui-Ti Jansen, Mariana and George Kaufman, Michael Kaufman, Steven Kolb, Coco and Arie Kopelman, Karolina Kurkova,Kay Krill, Dalia and Larry Leeds, Karen and Richard LeFrak, Jacqui Lividini, Nanette Lepore, Terry Lundgren, Carol Mack, Julie Macklowe, Fern Mallis, Carl McCall, Greace and Chris Meigher III, Giles Mendel, Liz and Jeff Peek, Lisa Perry, Marisa Pucci, Hilary and Wilbur Ross, Jack and Susan Rudin, Ralph Rucci, Lauren Santo Domingo, Jean Shafiroff, Joan Smalls, Dr. Valerie Steele, Topsy Taylor, Isabeland Ruben Toledo, and Lauren and John John Veronis.

Also in attendance were some of FIT’s top Fashion Design, Class of 2013 graduates. All were award winners. Thaiana Cruz (children’s wear), Sijeo Kim (knitwear), Jae Lee (sportswear), Carly Rosenbrook (sportswear), and Trung Vu (special occasion) received Critics Awards. Emily Levine won a Best Use of Cotton Award from Cotton, Inc.

Chiu-Ti Jansen.

Kim Cho and Alina Cho.

Kay Krill, Karolina Kurkova, Archie Drury, and Catherine Fisher.

Carla Otto, Peter Dundas, Yaz Hernandez, and Ralph Rucci.

Fern Mallis and Jeffrey Banks.

Anne Sitrick and Dennis Basso.

Dr. Joyce Brown, Carl McCall, and Deborah Krulewitch.

Arie Kopelman, Cathy Black, and Ruben Toledo.

Jean Shafiroff and Jonathan Marder.

Kitty McKnight and Mariana Kaufman.

Steven Kolb, Liz Peek, ans Stan Herman.

Cathy Black, Ruben Toledo, and Ellie Cullman.

Isabel Toledo and Edgar Cullman.

And while all that gala was bursting at Cipriani, just five blocks to the west on 42nd Street at Espace, the Broadway babies of now and forever were congregating at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting’s 9th annual Stella By Starlight gala benefit, hosted by Studio alums Jane Levy and Keith Powell. For lovers of the theater there were members of Broadway’s pantheon of greats actually present – such as Hal Prince, Stephen Sondheim, Edward Albee, Bernadette Peters, Elaine Stritch, James Gandofini, Alec Baldwin and Liza Minnelli.

Mr. Sondheim was honored with the Marlon Brando Award. Charles Cohen, the New York real estate developer was honored with the Stella Adler Corporate Award“for outstanding commitment and contributions to the betterment of the community. George Takel was awardedthe Harold Clurman Spirit Award for “courageous contribution to the culture of the city of New York and beyond.” And there was a Special Presentation to Elaine Stritch.


	Stella Adler as an actress.

	Stella, the teacher.

Stella Adler, whose name goes above the title of this organization was a legendary theatre actress, member of a famous theatre family of Russian Jewish descent who came to prominence in the Yiddish theatre in New York in the beginning of the 20th century, and later gained international fame on Broadway and in the movies. Her younger brother Luther Adler appeared in several Broadway productions before joining the legendary Group Theatre in the 1930s, and played opposite his sister in “Gold Eagle Guy.”

The young Marlon Brando was an early student of Stella’s and appeared in “A Flag is Born” directed by Luther Adler on Broadway.

The Adler siblings (including Jay Adler) came to prominence in what might be considered the Golden Age of the American Theatre. Stella Adler, who was also a beauty, was married three times, including critic and playwright Harold Clurman who founded the Group Theatre with a number of writers, actors and directors including Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets, Sanford Meisner, Cheryl Crawford, Lee Strasberg.

She made her (English language) Broadway debut in 1922 in “The World We Live In.”

That same year the famous Russian actor/director Konstantin Stanislavski made his only US tour with his Moscow Art Theatre. Stanislavski’s influence had an enormous impact on the Adlers as well as American theatre in general, and subsequently on its acting teachers. In 1949, she founded her school in New York.

Her alumni included Brando, Robert De Niro and Jenny Lumet, daughter of director Sidney Lumet and Gail Buckley (daughter of Lena Horne). Many well-known actors also studied with her including Stritch, Warren Beatty, Martin Sheen, Harvey Keitel, Melanie Griffith. She also taught at the New School, the Yale School of Drama, and NYU. Alumns of her school in Los Angeles (which she founded in 1985 with her protégé Joanne Linville) include Mark Ruffalo, Benicio Del Toro Brion James, Salma Hayek, Clifton Collins Jr. and Sean Astin. The School is now run by Stella Adler’s grandson Tom Oppenheim.

This is New York.

Liza Minnelli, Elaine Stritch, and Bernadette Peters .

George Takei.

James Gandolfini.

Charles and Clo Cohen.

Jane Levy and Keith Powell.

Alec Baldwin.

Stephen Sondheim.

Harold Prince.

Bernadette Peters.

Alec Baldwin and Bernadette Peters.

Contact DPC here.

Father and son study the boats from the Hudson River Promenade. 4:00 PM. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch.

Thursday, June 13, 2013. Yesterday was another beautiful day in New York with temps in the low 70s, all sunshine and even the traffic in midtown was (mainly) moving.

I went down to Michael’s for the Wednesday mass-lunch. Star Jones was at the table just inside the door, lunching with Dr. Holly Philips; next door Deb Shriver of Hearst was lunching with writer Pamela Keogh (news hadn’t got out yet about the window washers getting stuck on the 44th floor of the Hearst Tower when their scaffolding collapsed — rescued by the NYFD — everyone was reportedly very calm throughout).

Window washers stuck on the 44th floor of the Hearst Tower.

I was lunching with Laura Slatkin, founder and CEO of the fabulously successful Nest Fragrances (100% increase in sales, five years in a row). NEST’s client list includes more than 50 world class brands such as Ralph Lauren, Christian Dior, Restoration Hardware, Estee Lauder, Anthropologie, Tory Burch, D. Porthault, Jonathan Adler, Vera Wang, Bergdorf Goodman and Neiman Marcus.

In the bay at Table One Diane Clehane was lunching and interviewing Kelly Lynch and Mitch Glazer who are in town promoting Magic City, the STARZ hit show created by Glazer and starring his wife (Ms. Lynch). Next door: Gerry Byrne of Penske Media. Next to them Terry Allen Kramer with Alana Stewart, and just beyond Nikki Haskell and Catherine Saxton. Next to them: Charles Grodin and Sandi Mendelson, literary publicist (Hilsinger-Mendelson).

Window washers stuck on the 44th floor of the Hearst Tower.

Moving on:Alice Mayhew of Simon & Schuster with political pundit Joe Conason who must be writing a book; super-agent Boaty Boatright with Jay Cantor; Cindi Berger of PMK (representing Mariah Carey, Shakira) with Jill Fitzo (PR); Chuck Pfeifer; Dr. Mitch Rosenthal, founder of Phoenix House, celebrating a birthday; attorney Michael Kassan; Simone Levinson with Jennifer Keil of the NY Post; Wednesday Martin and agent Miriam Altshuler;Beverly Camhe with Adriana Shaw; political commentator and consultant Robert Zimmerman; Michael Kempner with Michael Neuman; Nina Griscom and Robert Rufino who recently joined Elle Décor as its interiors editor, with Michael Boodro the magazine’s E-I-C who hired him away from AD; Tom Goodman with Bettina Zilkha; Areyeh Bourkoff of Lion Tree; WSJ’s David SanfordandLewis Stein; Martin Bandler, Chair and CEO of Sony Music; Larry Hackett, Exec Editor of People; Paige Peterson with her son Peter Carey Peterson; Bill Siegel; Dave Dyer VP at Warner Brothers; Jason Oliver Nixon; Katia Mead; Peter Gregory; Peter Price with Robert Frye, docu filmmaker. You get the picture: business as usual, bigtime.

Last Wednesday, a week ago, Peggy Siegal held one of her famous screenings. This one, hosted by Dick Cavett, Katie Couric and Regis Philbin, a Magnolia Pictures’ “Évocateur; the Morton Downey Jr. Movie,” a film by Seth Kramer, Daniel A. Miller and Jeremy Newberger at the Paley Center for Media.

The press release that Peggy sent out described the film thusly:

Before entire networks were built on populist personalities; before reality morphed into a TV genre; the masses fixated on a single, sociopathic star: controversial talk-show host Morton Downey, Jr. In the late ‘80s, Downey tore apart the traditional talk format by turning debate of current issues into a gladiator pit. His blow-smoke-in-your-face style drew a rabid cult following, but also the title “Father of Trash Television.” Was his show a platform for the working man or an incubator for Snooki and The Situation? Ironbound Films’ ÉVOCATEUR: THE MORTON DOWNEY JR. MOVIE dissects the mind and motivation of television’s most notorious agitator.

This media situation was more than 25 years ago and so there is a whole audience of talk show fans, junkies, aficionados out there now who may never have heard of him.

I had heard of him long before, because in the early 1960s when I first came to New York out of college, I had a friend whose stepfather was Morton Downey, the father of Morton Jr.

Actually Morton Jr. was not known by that name but by the name Sean. Sean Morton Downey. Sean was one of four or five children of Morton Sr.

Morton Downey with children, l. to r., Sean (Morton Downey, Jr.), 19, Tony, 15, and Michael, 21
(© Bettmann/CORBIS).

The father, Morton Downey, was one of the most famous singers in the early days of radio. A young Irish-American man from Wallingford, Connecticut whose father was the local fire chief. Morton started his career, singing-selling sandwiches on the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad on the route from Wallingford to Grand Central.

The sandwich-selling troubadour had a very high Irish tenor voice, so high that he once remarked he was just this side of being a castrato – the Italian term for a classical male singing voice within the range of a soprano, mezzo-soprano or contralto. There was a story in the family that the first time Morton’s mother heard him on a record, she said to her son: “a beautiful voice, who is she?”

By the time he was in his early 20s, he was working as a singer for the Paul Whiteman Orchestra (it was Whiteman who conducted the orchestra to George Gershwin’s debut of his “The Rhapsody in Blue” at the Aeolian Hall in New York in 1924).

The young Irish tenor was soon touring clubs in Paris, London, Berlin, New York and Hollywood, where he appeared in his first film produced by Jospeh P. Kennedy’s new RKO Radio Pictures.

In 1930, he was writing songs – including his signature hit “Wabash Moon” – and he opened his own club The Delmonico in New York. At that time he started appearing nightly on the Camel Quarter Hour broadcast for Camel Cigarettes.

In 1932, he was voted Radio Singer of the Year. This was a big deal as radio was sweeping the country and its performers were becoming nationally famous. By the late 1930s, Downey was an established star, a household name, earning $5000 a week (or 20 times or more that in today’s currency), one of the top three singing stars along with Kate Smith and Bing Crosby.

The three biggest stars in radio in the 1930s, Morton Downey, Kate Smith, and Bing Crosby.

His Coca-Cola Hour on the radio was bringing him 30,000 fan letters a week. It also brought him great fame as well as great friendships with the rich and the famous. Cultivating such friendships was a talent of his as great as his singing voice. Joseph P. Kennedy, by then also famous multi-millionaire tycoon (before his sons were old enough to run for political office), was one of his closest friends and would remain so for the rest of his life. So was Walter Winchell, and Sherman Billingsley who owned the Stork Club. Another great fan of his (and a well publicized fact at the time) and totally charmed by his Irish wit was the former King of England, the Duke of Windsor.


Morton Downey Sr., 1944.

His popularity came out of the growing Irish population in America that had a sentimental appreciation for tenors. It was a soft, sweet voice, gentle yet with decidedly powerful masculine tones to it. To hear him sing “Oh Danny Boy,” or “The Wearin’ of the Green” was to evoke real tears in both men and women.

Morton also had that famous Irish charm. When I met him I was already aware of his fame because my mother and father often referred to him, but I was unaware of his, what I would call, “world class” personality. It was more than a way with words, and more than the dulcet tones with which he could throw away a quip. To this young man, he seemed to know everybody in the world and his anecdotes about the famous and the rich (including the notorious) were spoken with an assurance that denied any falsehood.

As a kid who grew up on the New York tabloids, listening to Mr. Downey (as we young people called him) talk about the New Yorkers on the scene in those days, was the equivalent of seeing a movie star in person a dozen times over. He was witty, slightly but smoothly cynical, and frequently with a clever turn of phrase.


	Morton Downey with Barbara Bennett, 1932.

He was also by then a rich man. He and his second wife – a wealthy mining heiress – lived in an exotically splendid apartment that occupied an entire floor of a building on Park Avenue, filled with chinoiserie, French antiques, Impressionist paintings, and photographs of their famous or socially prominent friends. One which was most notable was an inscribed photograph of Mr. Kennedy whose son Jack had just been elected President. This was all heady stuff to a college boy starry-eyed in the big town.

All of his children from his first marriage were grown and none were living with him by then. His first wife Barbara, mother of his children, had become a forgotten woman, but born into a famous American theatrical family – the Bennetts. The patriarch was a matinee idol of the early 20th century American stage named Richard Bennett. Two of his three daughters were famous movie stars: Constance Bennett and Joan Bennett. Barbara was less successful with her stage career and was said to have been an alcoholic and, as it often was with families in those days, always referred to sotto voce (quiet shame) or not at all.

I met Sean Downey at his father and stepmother’s apartment one Sunday morning when he had come by to visit Morton. I knew nothing about their relationship although it was easy to see that Sean (later Morton Jr.) was a young man both intimidated by his father as well as anxious to gain his favor.

He had been “working” as a songwriter (maybe following in his father’s footsteps?) and a few years before had recorded a standard called “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” which did not turn out to be a hit.

Although I knew nothing about the relationship between father and son except for what I saw in the room that morning, it was clear to me that the father’s stepchildren -- the children of his wealthy and beautiful young wife, were more likeable or considered more worthy of affection than the man’s own son.

Famous parents are often a burdensome conundrum for their children. Show business is rife with examples of screwed-up kids who are invariably referred to as “disappointments” to their celebrated parents. And famous parents are invariably angry about that “disappointment” and not very helpful in the situation. What often results is a child with an awkward, if overbearing desire to please, who usually fails to succeed in that quest. That was the impression I had of Sean Downey that Sunday morning in his father’s grand Park Avenue apartment.

Away from his father’s presence, Sean was a congenial, personable, kindly individual who just trying to make his way in the world of would-be fame and fortune, and no doubt hoping to gain the favor or approval of his famous father.

It was my feeling that he faced an impossible task. I happen to be one of those people who is sensitive to the relationships between parents and children. I also happen to believe that it all begins with the relationship of the parent to the child. People in Show Business, especially stars get a disproportionate amount of daily attention that even children don’t get after infancy. They are aware of it in some cases and often unaware of it in many cases. Children can easily become ciphers in a family situation where the effects of the limelight rules. It was my impression (and I eventually saw it with more than one of the Downey siblings) that the father’s perception of his children was related to his perception of his former wife. Not good news and even an insurmountable task to overcome for the children.

Morton Downey Jr. on camera.

I saw Sean (Morton Jr.) only a couple of times after that first meeting. I never got to know him although he was a personable young man (still in his 20s) and he never betrayed his outward awe, admiration and respect for his father.

So it came as a real shock to me when I first saw him on his famous television show as Morton Downey Jr. He was far-out, loud, boisterous and at times even bombastically nasty – yet always looking to get all the attention all the time. I could only think: Here I am Dad! Riding on the Starmaking Express! I’m famous now too!

At least for those on-camera moments.

Fast TV friends: Morton Downey Jr. and Al Sharpton.

I could only think that his father – who by that time in his life had settled into civilian non-show business life as a member of the social and financial establishment, living in New York and Palm Beach, would have been mortified at the sight of it. A very successful, retired celebrity – Morton had quit his singing career years before, and was strictly a businessman (owning Coca-Cola Bottling companies as well as consulting as a rainmaker/conduit for tycoons, politicians and other businessmen eager to mine his vast connections at the highest levels of government and business). He still maintained friendships in The Business but only among those who could be regarded as peers. He was, for example, a close friend of Frank Sinatra– who’d idolized him as a kid aspiring to a singing career, and later became a close friend.

Morton Jr. had been developing his career as a talk show host on radio by the early 1980s, where he acquired a reputation for an abrasive style at KFBK-AM in Sacramento. He was fired in 1984 (and replaced by Rush Limbaugh).

I don’t know what Morton Sr.’s opinion was of his son’s “developing” career but I would make a calculated guess that Father was not impressed. The elder Morton Downey died the following year, in 1985 at age 84, however, and so, now his son was free to be whomever and whatever he wished.

In 1987 he taped his first Morton Downey Jr. Show on WWOR-TV, and blew the roof off of daytime talk show television, becoming, however briefly, maybe more famous than his famous father had ever been.

His career suddenly went stratospheric, but like a comet, here, way up there, and gone. It was almost as if he’d got too far away from himself, like some kind of video maniac. The few times I saw him on television, he always seemed to be pushing the envelope too obviously. I was seeing a man, in my opinion, who wanted to prove something to his father. An impossible task, for starters. The cards had been stacked against him long before, and now the old man wasn’t even around, so who cared? Only Sean, maybe. He died of cancer in 2001 six months from his sixty-ninth birthday, now unknown to a new generation of talk shows and reality shows hyping sex and Kardashians, would-be and otherwise.

Cast and filmmakers at a screening of “Évocateur; the Morton Downey Jr. Movie."

Andrew and Andrew

Bo Dietl and Rosanna Scotto

Ari Melber, S.E. Cupp, and Gloria Allred

Bill Boggs and Peter Cincotti

Bill Boggs, Regis Philbin, and Joy Philbin

Seth Kramer, Daniel A. Miller, Katie Couric, and Jeremy Newberger

Bill Boggs, Seth Kramer, Richard Bey, and Jeremy Newberger

Kimberly Guilfoyle and Jamie Colby

Jill Martin and Rosanna Scotto

Christian Campbell and America Olivo

Dan Abrams

Dick Cavett

Gloria Allred and Donny Deutsch

Contact DPC here.

Green streets. 5:00 PM. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch.

Friday, May 14, 2013. Raining in New York, off and on all day yesterday. Sometimes torrential. The weatherman said in the late afternoon that a Nor’Easter would blow through, and we got the edge of it. Cool temps – low 60s. Umbrellas and raincoats and rubbers (although New Yorkers never bother).

This has been Junein New York; a beauty in its cool and rainy (and green) way. Our friend Beverley Jackson out in Santa Barbara/Montecito, sent us a couple of pictures of the jacarandas in bloom, and we raved so much about them, that she sent us a couple more. Nature’s beautiful detritus, no?

Another beautiful jacaranda in full bloom and now shedding its lavender beauty on the streets and byways of Santa Barbara, California, compliments of Beverley Jackson.

Oh, what a beautiful morning, this past Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. looking north on East End Avenue.

And then at 7:30 p.m., on the northeast corner of East End Avenue and 83rd Street at sunset. The building at the end of the street is the fabled 10 Gracie Square which runs through the entire block from 83rd to 84th.

Yesterday afternoon, Louis Webre of Doyle Galleries asked JH and me if we'd like to come over to the Osborne apartment building on 57th Street and Seventh Avenue (northwest corner) to have a look at the Leo Lerman/Gray Foy apartment, now the property of Foy's husband Joel Kaye. The apartment's entire inventory is now being catalogued and packed up for auction (which will take place at Doyle Galleries in September).

Lerman and Foy occupied a massive nine room apartment in this building for 20 and 40 years respectively. The Osborne was built between 1883 and 1885 when New York was just moving uptown. Central Park was only fifteen years old and still in the midst of development — with many of its trees mere saplings, just two blocks north on 59th Street (which would become Central Park South connecting Fifth Avenue and Columbus Circle). From the north side of the building the view both east and west was barely populated. Three quarters of a mile to the north, the Dakota was just being finished. Today, 130 years after it went up, the only wear the building shows, if you want to call it that, is in the style of its interior and exterior decor. Otherwise it remains the fortress against the elements that its architects intended and its developers demanded.

The lobby of The Osborne, which was built in 1883, at 205 West 57th Street.

The main staircase at The Osborne.

The apartment itself which has south, east and north views is impressive for its substantial walls, windows, and woodwork — all perfect examples of interior design in New York at the beginning of the Gilded Age. Little has been changed in the Lerman/Foy apartment except for the kitchen, which was updated in the Sixties before they moved in.

To enter the building is to step back into a time a hundred and fifty years ago in New York when midtown was only beginning to be developed and settled. The Osborne had been built for the wealthier classes who often spent only part of the year (the colder parts) in the city.

As it is today, the builder/developer was marketing to a higher income bracket with the same key selling points: luxury, style and convenience. When Lerman and Foy moved in, in 1967, the building was already in its ninth decade and just a few blocks north and in view of The Great White Way (which is what Broadway was often referred to — for its lights). It was no longer in an appealing neighborhood for the prosperous upper middle classes of the city. However, artists, actors, writers and theatre people knew a good thing when they saw it. These enormous apartments back in the 60s were renting for often less than $500 a month.

Leo Lerman, in his prime, circa 1970s, and Gray Foy late in his life a decade after Leo had died.

Yesterday was the first time I’d ever visited the apartment. I’d met the men only once in the 1980s at Jean Howard’s house in Beverly Hills, although I’d heard about their “entertainments,” enormous cocktail parties populated with the literati, the glitterati and assorted friends and acquaintances.

An ordinary guestlist might include Frederick Ashton, George Balanchine, Leonard Bernstein, Paul Bowles, Maria Callas, Truman Capote, Carol Channing, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Aaron Copland, Marcel Duchamp, Margot Fonteyn, John Gielgud, Martha Graham, Cary Grant, Anaïs Nin, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Edith Sitwell, Susan Sontag, Virgil Thomson, Lionel and Diana Trilling and Anna May Wong all on the same night. It was a celebration unlike any other of its day.

A bulletin board in the kitchen of the Lerman/Foy apartment with everything still intact as when the men lived there. The bulletin board is full of memories of their life, their interests and their friends.

I’m probably dreaming here but nevertheless, it was close. They could fill almost every room and stay for hours yakking, talking, drinking, gnoshing and entertaining — all together in this treasure trove of memorabilia, curiosities, paintings, photographs, crystal, china, Victoriana and books and books and books, and more tchoctkes, curiosities, silver and fascination.

There is so much “stuff” beautifully displayed that when Jackie Kennedy, came one day with her young son John-John, the boy seeing that every shelf and tabletop and wall and mantelpiece was covered with objets of one form or another, perfectly placed, he assumed it was a store and innocently asked his hosts quite seriously: “Where are the price tags?”

The price tags are now in the process of being calculated. The auction of these items will occur some time in September at Doyle Galleries but we’ll be back for more coverage of this extraordinary New York home in the next few weeks.

Leo Lerman as a four year old growing up in Queens.

Young Leo, the journalist who had begun working for Conde Nast (when it was still owned by Conde Nast himself) in 1937 when he was still in his 20s.

Young Gray Foy, an artist who had come to New York from California in the pool with Leo floating in the background on a friend's property upstate. Circa 1959.

Leo in his mask that he wore to Truman Capote's Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel in 1966. It was the following year that Leo and Gray moved out of their rented townhouse on Lexington Avenue in the 90s into the Osborne.

Leo, Joel Kaye, and Gray, in Venice.

I don't know if Leo Lerman ever knew her but her photograph pinned up on the bulletin board made me wonder. Lillian Russell, the fabled singer and stage star of the late 19th and early 20th Century. Russell died in 1922 at age 61 when Leo was just eight years old, so an actual connection is doubtful. She must have rightfully represented the apotheosis of glamour and beauty to the boy. She was the foremost singer of operettas in America (before the Broadway musical came in), and her voice was that which was heard when Alexander Graham Bell introduced long distance telephone service in 1880. For 40 years, her companion was a businessman, known everywhere as "Diamond Jim" Brady who showered his lover with just that ... diamonds.

Marlene Dietrich. Dietrich and Lerman were longtime close friends and wrote hundreds of letters to each other through the years. They were confidants and forthright and frank in the thoughts they shared. Gray Foy recalled that the first time he was invited to a party at Leo's house (the first time they met), he was invited by a friend of a friend, knowing that it would be a big crowd and that it wouldn't matter if he didn't know the host, he rang the doorbell and who should answer but Marlene Dietrich. He was then a young man of 24 who had grown up in Los Angeles, the land of the movie stars, and Dietrich was one of the biggest and one of the most famous women in the world, so he was astounded. He knew immediately that he had come to the right party. That door closed behind him forever.

The maestro Arturo Toscanini and his wife and daughter with pup, aboard an oceanliner, circa 1932.

The legendary author Isak Dinesen (Out of Africa), another friend of Leo's.

The great Maria Callas, another close friend and a frequent visitor to the apartment in the Osborne. "To my dear Leo ..." she wrote (maybe you can figure out the rest).

Roddy McDowell, who in 1943 as a fifteen-year-old starred in M-G-M's "Lassie Come Home" with the original Lassie, here with a subsequent Lassie, in the early 1960s. "Lassie" was so successful that it had six sequels throughout the 1940s.

Leo Lerman was a prolific writer, journalist as well as a balletomane, opera fan, theatre fan, art collector and many other things. He wrote hundreds, maybe thousands of magazine pieces and other assignments for Conde Nast and others in his long career. He also wrote thusands of pages of personal journals about his day to day.

Six years ago, Stephen Pascal edited them for a book: The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lerman. Knopf. Several hundred pages of accounts of this Chockfull of life-Life of Lerman and Foy are interesting, intriguing, astoninshing reading of a life that was distinctly a New York life — what people dream about and come here for and even pursue successfully in one way or another. Gray Foy was one of those “people who dream” of life in the Big City when he moved here as a young man to pursue a career as an artist in New York. Meeting Leo Lerman serendipitously at that party one night led to all he dreamed of and more, forever.

The breakfast (and dinner table) in the kitchen where Lerman and Foy had breakfast and also dinner if they were at home. There was always a third placesetting for any guest who might drop by and decide to stay for dinner. The men were constantly shopping, no matter where they traveled, for "things," "tchotskes," "antiques," flea market items, and over the years acquired several large sets of china, including Meissen and Majolica. Everything was used as frequently as the moment called for it.

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Moon over Manhattan. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch.

Tuesday, June 25, 2013. Very hot in New York. And humid. The A/Cs whirr their massive dull roar into the streets of the night. We’ve been lucky so far this year weather-wise: very cool, often rainy, often breezy. Now comes the reality ...

There was an article by Ruth La Ferla called “What Price Generosity” in the Style section of this past Sunday’s New York Times about the charity circuit and how much it costs those girls to make it in New York and to keep at it. Ms. La Ferla used the annual New York Botanical Garden gala dinner dance at the Botanical Garden as the scene to exemplify the result of all that expense. The Botanical evening is one of the very last of the Spring season (it used to mark the end of it, although nowadays there is no end to anything). Its patrons are among the wealthiest, and in many cases (not all) most established members of the New York social set.

Yana Paskova for The New York Times

Ms. LaFerla called me about the piece when she was working on it. The objective, as I understood it, was to figure out How Much It Cost to partake of this kind of “high profile” New York social life. I told her, off the top, that it took “a lot of chutzpah and a lot of money.” She thought that was funny and laughed (and never used the quote). It is funny and it doesn’t apply to everyone of course, but it does apply to a prominent aspect of the charity social scene these days.

The getting and spending of money has long been part of the city’s social life. It reaches back decades and now even centuries. There have always been women who were extravagant in their achievement as fashion plates. Cole Porter commented on it in the 1930s in a song he wrote for Ethel Merman, “I’ve Still Got My Health (So What Do I Care”:

What do I care if Mrs Harrison Williams
Is the best-dressed woman in town?
What do I care if Countess Barbara Hutton
Has a Rolls-Royce built for each gown ...?
Why should I get the vapors when I read in the papers
That Mrs. Simpson dines behind the throne.
I’ve got a cute king of my own ...


	Jackie Kennedy Onassis.

	Gloria Guinness.

	Babe Paley.

	Marella Agnelli by Richard Avedon.

	CZ Guest leaning in to listen to Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan.

	The Duchess of Windsor with the Duke behind.

When Jacqueline Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis it was reported that she spent hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on her wardrobe (allegedly much to his annoyance). Although this came as a surprise to the average reader, it was still a pittance compared to some of her friends who would spend in the millions. They were considered the Best Dressed, of course, and many believed it was necessary in order to achieve such fashion glory. (After his death, and her settlement with his daughter, it was unlikely that Mrs. Onassis would spend those kinds of sums of her own money, as she was known to be tight with a buck.)

These women, especially Mrs. Onassis and some of the Capote swans like Gloria Guinness, Babe Paley and Marella Agnelli were also good for the fashion business. Mrs. Paley was once photographed (by Women’s Wear) emerging from lunch at La Cote Basque with her Hermes silk scarf tied around the handle of her Hermes bag. That one photograph was seen around the world. It sent sales through the roof and made the Hermes scarf (and bag) nationally famous (and longed for – they were very expensive: the bag itself cost $100). And in no time every woman in New York (those who could afford it – or had the money at the time) was doing the same thing with the same scarf and the same bag.

You could argue that those ladies established the pattern that has decades later gone ballistic in several ways. For example, although the aforementioned were already established in the social environs, the way to social notoriety for many these days (acceptance is another matter entirely) is via the purse – or in most cases, the wallet. It is almost always the women who are doing the advancing (climbing). Although usually there is a man in the background (not the shadows) who is presumably pleased with the exploit for a variety of reasons having to do with getting around and getting to know people in New York. There is nothing new about this in the history of metropolitan social life, but it is far more publicly obvious than ever before.

The New York Botanical Garden’s annual gala is a longtime, well-established one. Its founders and backers were mainly people who were interested in the Botanical Garden. Horticulture, plants and flowers. The result of their efforts over the decades is self-evident – it is beautiful garden park in the Bronx, filled with extraordinary specimens collected and nurtured over time. In its day it could have been regarded to those who did not, or could not afford to attend as a closed club because it had some of those markings to it, i.e, you’d see the same names year after year of people who socialized with each other year round on the golf courses and private clubs and international watering holes fairly exclusive to their set, namely, the rich and powerful.

This event was – and still is – essentially a beautiful cocktail garden party followed by a swell dinner dance in a tent. The ladies dressed and the men wore black tie. A kind of thank you (as well as fund-raiser), for their devotion and financial support).

The prestige of the Botanical still exists with that set. But like so many charities nowadays, the competition to sell tickets and raise money (I don’t know what they raised this year but I’d be surprised if it were less than $1 million) is keener than ever. It has made the event, like many of these galas, more of a photographer’s night – with everything but the insipid step-and-repeat scrim advertising some commercial contributor.

Social photographers are also now a big business here in New York. This has been going on for decades except now it’s a huge revenue producer for the photographers and a boon to the publicists and their clients as well as the charities. Once upon a time there were a few men like Jerome Zerbe and Bert Morgan and Slim Aarons who covered the smart set at their galas and parties in Palm Beach, New York, Newport and Southampton. These men were also part of that social milieu, dining, dancing and quaffing the bubbly with their hosts and hostesses – many of whom were close, even very close, friends. Their cast of characters in their photos were very social and you’d see them over and over – the bejeweled princesses and the social dowagers. And as often in the Social Register or the Almanach de Gotha. That famous photo of CZ Guest leaning in to listen to Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan comes to mind ... or The Duchess of Windsor hovered over by her society penguins in their white tie and tails, with the Duke seated nearby looking like he was about to pass out from terminal ennui.

It was another world – way out there, way up there, fascinating to see and a million miles away from us ordinary working stiffs. It was intriguing, or desirable, or laughable, or outrageous, or all of the above. But nevertheless fascinating. Amusement. Show business with a (real) diamond tiara.

Back in the late '60s John Fairchild’sWomen’s Wear Daily established itself as the new social bible by decorating its editorial pages with b&w candids by photogs like the then new-comer, Bill Cunningham, of the society ladies and the jet setters in their latest fashions (and they were the latest, and the chicest) dancing at private parties in discotheques (no one called them discos) or exiting their luncheons at Cote Basque, Caravelle or La Grenouille. These were all fashion shots, showing you what the fashion empresses were wearing, carrying, walking in. The dye was cast there.

In the late 1970s when paparazzi were flourishing in Rome and Paris, an industrious and enthusiastic kid from Long Island named Patrick McMullan began shooting strips of black and white photos for Andy Warhol’sInterview of the outré or the downtown set (which was just beginning) of social life in New York. Then Studio 54 was born and Andy Warhol’s dishabille Factory people were being replaced by Halston’s nightly group (including Warhol) of chic celebrity playthings with their high end fashion style and cocaine and champagne bacchanals. Still fascinating for us ordinary folk agog at life among the leisurely.

Andy Warhol by Patrick McMullan circa 1984.

Today, Patrick McMullan is a small industry employing a corps of photographers covering all kinds of events. And he has lots of competition – notwithstanding the now legendary Bill Cunningham of the Times, and Mary Hilliard, photo-heiress of the Slim Aarons set; Rob Rich, Julie Skarrett, Mia McDonald, Eric Weiss, Cutty McGill, Chris London, Gregory Partanio, Annie Watt, Billy Farrell, and his band of merry photogs, to name only a few who are busily covering the scene. Some “social” web sites have even turned it into a business – hire them and they’ll run your pictures on their site.

The upshot of this mass of lenses at every gala or kick-off or preview opening has created a new kind of social competition, creating a Paris Hiltonesque social celebrity now seen at all of the social charity events in New York. That is: getting your picture taken.


	Nicky and Paris Hilton in 1999. Photo: Patrick McMullan.

There have always been ambitious women (and occasionally a man) eager to be photographed (and thereby publicized on various social pages – including the NYSD). But the ritual was always in pursuit of recognition by those whose company they aspired to. There are not a few of the socially prominent couples in New York who have enhanced and even established their “standing” among the glitterati and social set by being “noticed” by the photographers. It’s publicity at its simplest and most effective.

The expense of gaining “acceptance,” of “belonging” among this strata has historically been an expensive task. Not every prospector has been successful and there have been more than a few Madame Bovary’s cast aside by the “betters” they aspired to. This is Edith Wharton’s territory and it is classic. But today, society (for want of a better word) is far more homogenous socio-economically. It is often a Business with a moveable P&L statement. The objective is closer to Warhol’s famous “15 minutes of fame” category. Get in the spotlight and stand out as long as you can get the light (or lights) to shine on you. Paris Hilton’s approach defines it – and it began one summer in Southampton in the mid-1990s, and later moved West to her hometown, Hollywood. Her exponents, the Kardashians are its champions. Its influence is far wider than most would imagine. Now it can be seen in media vehicles like the Reality TV shows, and even, among those who are neither young nor actors on the charity circuit, all reflecting the quickly changing, transforming times of society and the world of fundraising for philanthropies.


Andy Warhol, photobooth pictures of Ethel Scull.

Fifty years ago in New York, when Andy Warhol was first gaining a foothold as a famous artist, among his early supporters was a couple here in New York named Ethel and Robert Scull. The Sculls were wealthy owners of a fleet of yellow cabs. I think Mrs. Scull’s father was the original owner. They came out of nowhere (the suburbs of Nassau County I believe) and into the bright lights of the city as collectors of the very new Pop Art that Warhol was creating along with a number of other emerging artists (many of whom are now Establishment). The Sculls’ rise to prominence was entirely based on their early (before most collectors) acquisition of the new Art which many people didn’t understand, comprehend or even like. Nevertheless, they were cutting edge and it lifted them into prominence in the art scene and subsequently (to a small degree) into the social scene of New York. Furthermore by most people’s standards, they were wealthy.

In 1962 or early 1963, I was fresh out of college when a girl I knew invited me to an “art opening” in a small gallery in a townhouse in the East Seventies. It was for an artist I’d never heard of before: Andy Warhol. I believe the gallery might have been that of Leo Castelli but, as it was with Warhol, I’d never heard of him either. It was an astounding exhibition for this kid. You entered the gallery on the ground floor. At the end of the room there was a wall piled high with Kelllogg’s Corn Flakes boxes. On either side of that wall were entrances to two rooms. On the left was a room stacked high with Brillo boxes, and to the right was a room, the floor of which was diagonally laid out with Campbell Soup boxes (the red and orange box). That was the exhibit.

I was confused, having come from college Art History classes and knowing nothing despite that classic experience. This was Art? Later, of course, I learned. The artist was way ahead of us.

After the exhibit we were all invited to a party at the artist’s loft which was in the East 40s. I’d never been in a loft before and I daresay most New Yorkers had never seen a loft (unless they worked in one). It was a new way of living and working, like the art. The loft was Warhol’s. It was all silver, painted, its support poles and columns wrapped with tin foil, the floors, walls and ceilings were all silver. It wasn’t sleek or chic but it was creative and different and an artist’s studio. The crowd was diverse but included a lot of artists – almost all of whom I’d never heard of but with names like Lichtenstein, Poons, Dine, Rauschenberg, Johns, etc. Most prominent was a fashion model, and most famous, Jean Shrimpton, who was the center of all attention, including what few photographers were present. They all wanted a picture of Shrimpton and all the artists wanted to be in a picture with Shrimpton. That was easy to understand.

Ethel Scull 36 Times.

Ethel Scull, a blonde woman of unremarkable presence, not beautiful, not unattractive, but easily identifiable as maybe a suburban housewife, finally took the floor in the center of the room, surrounded by nobody (everyone was crowded around Jean Shrimpton), and yelled to no one in particular but within everyone’s earshot: “I’m paying for this fucking party, when the fuck are they gonna take a picture of me??!!”

She was mad.

And no one responded. Years later the Sculls were famous in the art world for having been among the very first to collect what now has become a billion dollar category of art works. She and her husband later divorced and someone told me that the art was sold (at what would now be bargain basement prices), and Ethel Scull’s star rose and fell to dust, now long forgotten.

Today Mrs. Scull would have no problem, and even be above all those looking for the same sort of simple photographic attention, although as her luck would have it, she came much too soon to the ball.

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A three-hatted family. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch.

Wednesday, June 26, 2013. Another very warm and humid day in New York. The kind that subtly saps your energy so that by the end of the day you just feel like putting your feet up. By nightfall by the river, there was a good breeze, however, slightly warm but refreshing.

NYSD's Advertising Director Gail Karr with the ageless and "very hot" Diane Keaton standing in front of the Ralph Lauren Women's store on 72nd and Madison Avenue last Friday afternoon. Gail stopped Ms. Keaton to tell her how great she looked: "you look exactly as you did in your Annie Hall days!" The gracious Ms. Keaton replied with, "Well, thank you! You look great, too! And I love your belt!" After some more pleasantries, Gail gave the lovely Ms. Keaton the rundown on what she was wearing: An Anne Fountaine blouse, a 2013 Ralph Lauren Summer collection belt, skirt from Calypso, and 2012 Tiffany & Co. Central Park Conservancy tote. Life in New York.

Walking the dogs (quickly – they don’t like the hot pavement) late this afternoon, I was thinking about what New York must have been like before air-conditioners. Reader who visit often know that I don’t own an a/c. When my family lived here in the 1930s, my mother used to tell me, people slept out on the fire escapes and lolled in cold baths. New York, including Manhattan, was a city of neighborhoods – I mean neighborhoods of working people. And full tilt ethnicity. My eldest sister’s best friend was an Armenian (parents) in the building next door, for example. Children played in the streets and at certain times the Fire Department opened fire hydrants to spray them. Heaven.

I was discussing this with a friend who grew up in Florida. She’d asked me if we had air-conditioning in my family’s house when I was growing up. No. No one I knew did (1940s and '50s). It was considered quite a luxury when it first became available to the mass market.

She asked me if I remembered the heat of Summer back then. I don’t, except for a couple of times when it must have been relentless for days. Although there was a children’s pool in the park at the end of our street and, we used it nearly everyday. At night we slept with all the windows and doors open (screened in, of course), and on top of the sheets. We didn’t have fans either.

Sometimes my older sister and brother-in-law would take me with them for a late night dip in Russell Pond, a very cold natural pond in a village nearby. Heaven again. Some neighbors kept their shades drawn until nightfall. Then they’d sit on their front porches after supper until it was time for bed (9 - 10 pm). People didn’t turn the lights on in their houses until they went inside, just before bed. The only light when it got dark was from the street lamps, and the moon when it was bright. It was calm. The world seemed calm to the kid. You didn’t lock your door at night (or ever); there was no danger, in a small New England town.

Meanwhile back in New York, on today’s Diary, Jeanne Lawrence covers an opening exhibition in the new Museum of Chinese Art (MOCA) in Chinatown. I haven’t been there yet but I was introduced to it by Patty Tang. We ran a picture of Patty and her daughter and her mother who was celebrating her 101st birthday at Sistina. They had taken over the restaurant for a birthday lunch.


	Madame Aileen Chiang Pei, with her granddaughter Penelope Tang August, and her daughter Patty Tang, at her 101st birthday celebration this past Friday at Sistina.

I met Patty and her husband at a dinner party a couple of years ago at the downtown house of Corice Arman, wife of the late French-born American artist. The Tangs are Chinese but have lived all or almost all of their lives here in New York, so they’re as American as this kid. Except they are more worldly and more sophisticated culturally.

I had lunch with Patty at Michael’s one day about a month ago. She told me about her family’s past. These are the Chinese that abandoned China with the coming of Mao. Obviously they were upper class Chinese and their properties were being confiscated, as well as their assets. This generation has lived long enough to see that world change and then change again. And if we give them a little more time, God knows what the changes will be.

Madame Chiang Kai-shek lived in the neighborhood also, at 10 Gracie Square, until she died 10 years ago. Evidently she’d lived there for years among a host of famous New York names like Jock Whitney, Mrs. Mellon Hitchock, Brooke Astor, Gloria Vanderbilt et al.

I was living there at the time, staying with a friend when I first came back to New York. One afternoon in winter I was leaving the building when a group of Asian men in black wool overcoats suddenly emerged from the building into the motor passage (that runs through the block from 83rd to 84th, inside the building). I noticed they seemed to secret a tiny, really tiny lady with black hair into a waiting limousine. Once in the car, she was in the middle between two of these men, and so small, the back of her head was barely visible through the rear window. Then, followed by another limousine with Asian men in black overcoats, the cortege left the building.

“Who was that?” this curious writer asked Frank the doorman. “That was Madame Chiang Kai-shek.” Every Thursday at five she went out for her ride. She liked to go up to Grant’s Tomb at 123rd and Riverside. Often. She was about 98 then. She five or six years later. May-ling Soong, one of the fabled Soong Sisters.


Madame Chiang Kai-shek in 1965.

Patty Tang’s mother and her friends all knew Madame Chiang quite well. It must have been something like a court in exile because she and her family and her. Hannah Pakula has written a thoroughly engrossing biography of the women, once one of the (few) most powerful women in the world. She lived in exile like a queen, just down the block from where I live now, which no doubt was all she knew. Some of the dresses/ costumes from that era made for and owned by Madame Chiang and her friends are on display at MOCA now through September 29. They were smart and chic, even now.

Also in today’s NYSD is piece on food and traveling by Delia von Neuschatz who, with her husband, recently visited the Basque City of San Sebastian on the northern coast of Spain. I am not much of a traveler (although I’m always glad when I’m there) and not really a foodie, but this visit / diary of Delia’s is extraordinary. She’s written in two parts – which is good because I can hardly wait to read about what else she’s seen (and eaten). San Sebastian, which I’d heard of but knew nothing about, sounds like a place I’d love to visit, maybe even for a lifetime. No matter the level of your enthusiasm about the subjects, I dare you not to think: hmmm, I could like that. Delicious is a word that rescued her often on this culinary journey.

So let it warm and grow more humid in Manhattan, I don’t care. We can all dream of faraway places and other times and wait for the rains to wash and cool our streets and wake us up. This is New York.

Delia's fantastical dessert at Arzak in San Sebastian.

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A family walk in Central Park. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch.

July 1, 2013. A very warm, quiet weekend in New York with the weatherman forecasting thunderstorms, flash flooding and even maybe a tornado. Not. Sun on Saturday. Overcast on Sunday and no rain. This was the first summer weekend and at least in my neighborhood, the town cleared out.

New York is really wonderful when that happens. Although evidently it’s not like that in midtown where thousands of tourists pack the pavement along Fifth Avenue.

Waiting for the rain that never came on Sunday afternoon. Photo: JH.

On Saturday night I went down to Broadway and 45th Street to the Booth Theater to see Bette Midler in “I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers.” Broadway was more than jammed with people. Don’t go near the place in a car because it will take you hours to get near the Main Stem as Walter Winchell used to call it (hyperbole but feels that way too).

There was also a Street Fair on Sixth Avenue from 42nd Street to 57th Street until 7:30 on Saturday, so, as I said, forget it. I got out of the taxi and walked the two and half city-wide blocks. By the time I got to Seventh Avenue and Broadway, I was in the middle of throngs of humanity on a summer night, thousands and thousands of people of all ages, many with children, even infants, just taking in the promenade of ballyhoo and neon. It’s quite a sight.

Broadway has always been a promenade of ballyhoo and neon along with thousands of people just strolling along, taking it all in. The difference now is there are more, mobs even. And the lights are brighter, and bigger and more animated and even in greater quantity.

If you’ve never seen it, do try, at least once. I’m always awed by it all, although each time I do think: I’m never coming here again on a Saturday night in summer (or warm weather). Nevertheless, I was once a tourist too, many long moons ago, and that tour was something that inspired a whole life, and an interesting life. But geezus! The clamoring crowds!

The Booth was full up for Ms. Midler and her show. It wouldn’t be a bad guess to think that many, if not three quarters (or more) of the audience never heard of Sue Mengers until Bette Midler came along to play her.

As soon as the curtain went up, the audience applauded and cheered and applauded and cheered. A good way to start of any show. Midler who is nothing if not a a supremely talented performer, never let that energy drop for even a second. There was no intermission and the show ran for ninety minutes. She sits on a couch and except for moving around on it frequently, she never gets up until the very end. And it wasn’t miked (and should have been). But yet even with that, she kept the audience rapt and hanging on to her every word (including the blue stuff). And laughing, even guffawing all the way through. This is Bette Midler.

She can’t be bad because she is Just Brilliant. It’s the personality and her connection with her audience. I doubt very much if the real Sue Mengers (who was once the super-ist of Super Agents until Michael Ovitz& Co. stole all her mega-stars) could have held an audience with her natural monologue. Or kept them laughing.

Nevertheless, Midler made it a big big hit and it’s been reported that the investors got their money back and then some in this limited engagement – almost unheard of since Richard Burton did the same in “Hamlet” forty years ago.

The play itself is a one-woman show, and although it was packed with one-liners that Midler delivered with hilarious sleek bravado, Menger’s life, the “real” life — which was mainly her career in a career-oriented town — had a very bittersweet denouement. And it came when she was still a comparatively young woman. She had everything and suddenly she lost it all. This was not funny, and no amount of ironic cracks could have made it thus for her. She retired because basically she got kicked out of her business (by some bad choices and mainly by her clients — many of whom were friends — which tells you a little something about the gentlemen of the community as Billy Wilder used to say).

She had such a powerful personality and an ability to endure and revive (or “survive” as they like to say). In “retirement” she created a new world for herself: that of hostess/priestess on her sofa smoking her cigs and her dope, having her drinks, entertaining all her buddies (many of them her former clients), but nevertheless. “Sunset Boulevard”— Norma Desmond as former agent.

Bette Midler made it her character but another actress, another kind of actress could really cast a different spell (laughs and all) in that role. Someone mentioned Streep or Redgrave as examples. It’s a great part for an actress and I can imagine another interpretation.

Anyway, when Bette Midler finished (Mengers gets up from her couch and slowly makes her way out of the room and down the hallway to her bedroom), the audience gave her a thunderous ovation that must have lasted what would have a been three or four curtain calls (if the curtain had rung down). Bette Midler is a joy; it’s that simple. You feel good when she’s there in front of you. Once she starts, she takes you on her trip, and never misses a beat. It’s smiles and laughter all the way. I was watching a great star performing at the Booth on Saturday night.

Last Thursday morning at 11 at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, they held a memorial service for Paul Soros who died on June 15th, just ten days after his 87th birthday. Mr. Soros had been very ill for the past several years – although he made the best of it and lived his life to the fullest possible right to the end.

There were several hundred guests all but filling the auditorium, including many of the city’s prominent philanthropists, businessmen and the many friends of Mr. Soros and his wife Daisy. Memorials of this sort – of prominent New Yorkers are uniquely impressive because of the great public curiosity and the guests they draw.

The program began promptly at 11.Peter Soros, the eldest of the two Soros sons, spoke first, followed by his brother Jeffrey; then by the Soros grandchildren – Preston, Simon, Sabrina, Tommy Soros; then Stella Powell-Jones, a relative through marriage, and then his nephew Robert Soros. His younger brother George, was not present.

Paul Soros, 1926 - 2013.

The young Paul and Daisy.

Emi Ferguson then performed a delicate and moving rendition of “Ave Maria” on the flute. Ms. Ferguson was followed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an admiring, longtime friend of Mr. Soros; followed by one of the Soros doctors, Dr. Louis B. Harrison, and then Kathy Cohen who was a longtime bridge partner.

Afflicted with Parkinsons, among other physical ailments, at the very end of his life he was unable to hold his cards and sometimes unable to speak. Nevertheless, he played – with someone holding his cards for him, with him pointing to which card he wished to play. Ms. Cohen remarked that in all the years they played together, unlike many card players, he remained unruffled (and un-angry) at the end of any game.

Before the service began, there was a series of family photographs shown on a screen above the stage. that black line that runs through them is actually one of the mikes above the stage in Alice Tully Hall.

After Ms. Cohen, pianist Elizabeth Joy Roe performed a powerfully haunting interpretation of Chopin’s Nocturne in C-sharp minor, Op.27 No.1. She was followed by a longtime friend Peter Georgescu, then Lera Auerbach, a young composer whose education had been assisted by a grant from the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans; and finally with a few words from his wife of sixty-one years, Daisy. The Soroses were well-known as a couple. It was always clear to anyone who knew them that they were a very successful and dynamic team always on equal and respectful (and often amused) footing with each other.

Although I was in his presence, in his company a number of times, and I came to know his wife Daisy as a friend, I never knew him, or had a conversation with him. I did observe him frequently, however, and he was especially interesting to the eye because he was a handsome man, in a distinguished way, and carried himself with a courtliness unique to most men, no matter their financial or socially sophisticated stature. He had an almost royal, yet modest bearing. I once remarked about it to Daisy because Paul always gave a slight bow with a smile when shaking one’s hand or greeting. Daisy laughed when I mentioned it, adding, “you know, he answers the phone like that, too.”

I knew he was a very successful businessman who had made his millions as an engineer. I knew he had endured the Second World War in Hungary first surviving the Nazis and their deportation of Jews, and then the Russian victors who pillaged and murdered so many (the Russians accused him of being a Nazi officer and he barely escaped with his life from captivity). He and Daisy had long been very active philanthropists here in New York. For almost two decades they underwrote the Midsummer Night Swing (dance-a-thon) every summer at Lincoln Center. They were also big supporters of the New York Philharmonic and their Fellowships program for New Americans had an endowment that eventually totaled $75 million.

His friend Peter Georgescu spoke about how Paul Soros was a good man. He was a good man and a good man. His grandchildren, all probably not more than 12 or 14, each spoke briefly but articulately with wit and affection about their grandfather and the deep and kindly impression he made on them.

He was a man of few words in the sense that he had the ability to listen and then respond thoughtfully. The young woman Stella Powell-Jones in referring to her conversations with him – whom she admired greatly – told how he once quietly counseled her that she needed to show more “curiosity” in her pursuits in life. Lera Auerbach recalled meeting him when she couldn’t speak English and how he infused her with confidence with his kindly interest.

He was a champion skier who lost his chance to participate in the Olympics because of a freak accident on the slopes which ended with him losing a kidney. He was an excellent tennis player who also lost an eye, but kept on playing. He came to this country with $70 in his pocket. He was accepted at MIT and at Harvard but chose Brooklyn College because it was only $14 a credit.

Paul and Daisy have long been a popular couple here in New York. While he appeared to be the quiet partner, they both clearly enjoyed “having fun.” Their funding of public dances is a perfect example. They infused their friends and guests with the same warmth and cheer.

Each speaker at the memorial shed light on different qualities and characteristics of the man. What fascinated me about their comments was that although I didn’t know Paul Soros (except to say hello to), he was exactly the man I’d imagined from frequent observation. This was not so much because of my perception or perspicacity as it was a reflection of who he was as clearly defined by his conduct with and respect toward others, and by others’ reverence and respect for him. He was kind, he was brave, he was sensible and sensitive, courteous and courtly, highly intelligent and thoughtful; a man who had a lust for life and the ability to enjoy so much of it. He was curious and therefore inventive and innovative, and he never lost track of who he was as merely a man, very often a feat itself for those graced with great success.

Daisy and Paul Soros at the 17th Summer Swing Season that they sponsored at Lincoln Center. Photo: DPC.

The program lasted for about an hour. The tributes were a comfort not only to the memory of the man but to the guests who felt graced at having known him as a friend, a partner, a father, a grandfather, a supporter, a mentor and a good man.

The program, which I’ve included contained some of Paul Soros’ thoughts about life and about his life that articulate in another way what the speakers referred to from personal experience.

To learn more about this remarkable man and his extraordinarily rich life, read the New York Times obituary, here.

Contact DPC here.

Walking along Central Park West. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch.

Wednesday, July 3, 2013. Rainy days, off and on. New York hasn’t had the rain that was predicted. In fact it’s been mostly dry with occasionally moments of rain. Evidently it’s been much heavier around us, just as it was snow-wise last winter. But most of the precipitation seems to scatter away when it gets to these parts. It is very warm though.

The holiday weekend has already begun. My cabbie told me yesterday afternoon that the town was already beginning to empty out. Historically these next two weeks are when many Americans take their summer holiday.

Watching the stormclouds over the East River to the north from the Promenade by East 83rd Street, looking at the RFK Triboro Bridge (with the arched railroad trestle behind). 7:30 p.m.

Roosevelt Island across the river looking south.

The white grey stormy clouds to the south over the Edward Koch Queensboro Bridge, 7:30 p.m.

Dog Days. The other day down at the Animal Medical Center on East 62nd Street and the East River, a phalanx of NYPD police dogs formed an “honor guard” while New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly was on hand to celebrate NYPD Transit K9 “Bear,” a six-year-old German shepherd who had been injured the week before in the line of duty. “Bear” was aiding his handler Police OfficerVincent Tieniber in subduing and arresting a suspect.

Transit K9 Bear had been treated at The Animal Medical Center immediately following the incident and then released. He returned a week later for an evaluation by the dentistry team.

NYPD Transit K9 Bear ready to leave The AMC's recovery room.

NYPD Commissioner Kelly, Kathryn Coyne, CEO of The Animal Medical Center, Officer Tieniber and his partner, K9 Bear, get ready to walk out of The Animal Medical Center.

NYPD Officer Vincent Tieniber and his partner, Transit K9 Bear.

NYPD Transit K9 Bear up close.

NYPD Officers and their K9 Partners standing ready.

NYPD Transit K9 Bear and his partner, Officer Tieniber, exit The Animal Medical Center to a formal "Walk Out Ceremony" by fellow NYPD Officers and their K9 partners.

And while we’re on the subject of our beloved canines (and don’t forget our felines), you too, can be a hero for your K9 by following these Dog Tips For Hot Summers.

These rules are very important to your dog’s well-being and health. Many of us take for granted our dogs’ health in this weather. Hot weather can be as dangerous for these best friends of ours as they can be for an infant or an elderly person in poor health. In other words, the heatcan kill them.

I witness these dangerous moments fairly often on the street and in the park where joggers and people on their bicycles often “run” their dogs on these very hot days. These pet owners are obviously working up a sweat getting their exercise. Good for them maybe but HORRIBLE for the dog. In fact it’s seriously endangering the dog’s life to the point of death.

It’s not always easy to convey that message to those blithely running their animal while casually cycling along with the breeze. My experience in reminding owners of such dangers when they are in the process has not been positive. People flip me the finger, or yell that they can “do whatever the fuck I please ....” Or even stop, get off the bike and threaten to slug me. Gratitude is not in vocabulary. And Grace is the name of their first grade teacher.

However, that said, this is what we all need to know in taking care of our animals in this great summer heat:

1. Liquid Assets. Prevent dangerous dehydrationby keeping fresh water accessible for your pets at home and when you go out. Add some ice cubes if it's super-steamy.

2. Car Sick. Never leave animals alone in your car, even for a quick errand. In hot weather the temperature inside a closed vehicle can rise to 120 degrees within minutes. Opening a window can prove risky as well. Remember, dogs can be amazing escape artists.

We also advise against tying your pooch to a pole outside while you run into Starbucks for a Frappuccino. He can easily and quickly be swiped, and used for kill in dog fights. Beware naivete. If pets aren't allowed where you're going, it's better to leave them at home.

3. Time Out. If you let your dog roam unsupervised in a fenced yard, keep track of time. Make sure she's out alone for only a short time, preferably in the early morning or evening. If you don't have shady trees, prop up a beach umbrella so there's a cooling-off spot for Fido. Also, place a bowl of water outside.

4. See Spot Run. Many dogs were born to run, but they don't always know when to stop, and a summer jog can be deceptively dangerous for your four-legged companion. Dogs don't sweat like people. Their sweat glands are in their feet, so heavy panting and drooling is a sure sign of overexertion.

Be sure to take water breaks and take it easy when it's particularly hot, especially when you're riding a bicycle and your dog is running alongside and cannot easily stop when he tires. The best times to exercise for both you and your furry partner are early morning or late afternoon when the sun is less intense.

Before your first pavement pounding of the season, visit the vet. Remember, animals age quicker than humans, so Spot's former abilities may have changed since last year.

5. Street Scene. Monitor your dog's feet and avoid searing hot pavement or sand. Be cautious of broken glass that doesn't affect your shoed feet, but can hurt soft paws.

6. Head In. While it's cute to see your dog's ears flapping in the wind as he breathes in the rushing air from your car window, it's not a safe practice. Keep all ears, noses, paws, and any other body parts in the car when you're driving. Stray objects, as well as dirt, could injure your pet and its eyes.

7. Stop the Itch. You've seen the ads: Cats and dogs scratching up a storm. Now, take the advice. No matter which product you prefer, make sure your pet is protected from fleas, ticks, and Lyme disease.

8. Worm Warning. Spread by mosquitoes, heartworm can be deadly. It's most prevalent in the Midwest and Southeast, but occurs throughout the United States. Chat with your vet about the best prevention for your dog and visit HeartWormSociety.org for more information.

9. Off Limits. Try to keep curious canines and felines from chewing on plants and newly fertilized grass. Fertilizer kills weeds, so it's no surprise that it's dangerous to pets (not to mention humans).

10. Lost or Found. Finally, keep tabs on your loved ones. While you're soaking up the sun on your lawn or tending your garden, you might not notice if your dog or cat sneaks away from the homestead. Make sure they always have identification tags or a microchip.

From BluePearl Veterinary Partners, we received this additional important and helpful information in caring for your pets on these very hot days. This is good to teach your children also. Teaching them to care for their animals will assist them in learning to care for their loved ones (including you):

The doctors and staff from BluePearl Veterinary Partners recommend: With all of the celebration, sweet savory barbecued dishes, open flames and fireworks, paying attention to detail is important to prevent pet injury.

Prevention is always the best form of first aid. However, in the event of a burn or injury to your furry friend, here are some first aid tips you need to know:

Never put any types of cream, ointment, butter or margarine on a pet’s burn. These can introduce bacteria and other harmful substances into the burned area.

If the burn is mild, cool the area as soon as possible with cool water and contact your veterinarian. Never use ice as ice increases the chance of hypothermia.

For more severe burns, cover the wound with a clean, sterile cloth. Most importantly get the pet to your family vet or nearest emergency veterinary hospital as soon as possible.

In addition to the burn itself, injured animals may not behave as usual due to pain, fear or shock.

Besides burn injuries, veterinarians usually see an uptick in emergencies related to vomiting, diarrhea and heat exhaustion during the holiday.

Keep pets in an air conditioned environment or a cool place during the heat of the day and limit strenuous activities such as running and playing. Always make sure your pet has access to plenty of fresh water.

If your pet does become overheated, spray the animal down with room temperature or cool water, but never ice water. Ice cold water causes a decrease in blood flow to the skin and heat can’t escape the body, which makes heat exhaustion symptoms worse.

Besides physical injuries, pets may have an increase in anxiety and stress due to fireworksand visits by a house full of guests that may not usually be around. This is important to remember as your pets may not behave as they usually do.

If your pets frighten easily, make sure they can’t run away, as loud noises from fireworks could frighten them. Also, if your pets are frightened due to this unusual activity, try playing a game during this time to distract them or place them in a secure area like a kennel where they can feel safe.

Placing a blanket over the kennel can decrease their anxiety. If you know your pet experiences anxiety in thunderstorms and while fireworks are going off, contact your veterinarian to see about potential medicated solutions.

Furthermore, with the Fourth of July usually comes a feast of flavorful foods, but remember the same things you enjoy could harm or even kill your pet.

Alcohol, avocado, caffeine, chives, chocolate, coffee, garlic, grapes, macadamia nuts, onions and raisins, can all have a negative effect on your pet. If your pet has ingested any of these items and is displaying signs of gastrointestinal upset, contact a veterinarian as soon as possible.

Most importantly, when you are in doubt about your pet’s safety, you should contact your family If it is an after-hours emergency and your usual vet is closed, BluePearl’s trained specialists and emergency personnel would be happy to help at any one of their emergency locations.


	Peg Breen and Barbara Tober and Sandy Warshawsky (top right) enjoying the view from a New York Water Taxi.

Meanwhile, back to us bipeds, outside in New York: Last week last Tuesday night, the Landmarks Conservancy Board took several guests on a boat trip in New York Harbor to view the Eastern Coast of the East River, viz., Williamsburg, DUMBO, the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Wallabout Bay, as well as all the areas that are now being developed that were once piers and an active ship Harbor; and Ellis Island.
Everyone met at Pier 17 at 5:30 in the evening to board a New York Water Taxi owned by the Durst Organization. The destination: to survey the Brooklyn Waterfront from a new vantage point.

Hosted by Barbara and Donald Tober, the groups included Lewis Lapham, Tom McGrath, Daniel Billy, Nora and Jack Kerr, Sandy and Stan Warshawsky, Sally Minard and Norton Garfinkle and their grandson Sam Garfinkle, Mindy Papp and Clark Halstead, Marla Sabo, Justin Abelow, Walter Deane, Bruce Knecht, Charlotte Trifus and Lloyd Zuckerberg and their daughter Hannah Zuckerberg.

Seeing the area from the water brought a new perspective for everyone. The guests were treated to close views of the Statue of Liberty and the World Trade Center (a foray into the Hudson River), and also so many historic sites -- such as Buttermilk Channel, Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village.

Raindrops had been pelting down just before everyone was on board, but miraculously, the Sun came out along with sunglasses, and everyone had a terrific time taking photographs of the shoreline.

Barbara Tober told me that the camaraderie and appreciation for the city we live in gave everyone a increased sense of “why they spend so many hours involved in the Landmarks Conservancy, and why New York City is so well worth conserving.”

So the Fourth is finally upon us. We are midway through the New Year, and it is moving fast. Americans seem to be experiencing more and more extreme weather. As I write this, huge fires have blanketed large parts of the Southwest where they’ve been experiencing extreme heat. Blair Sabol told me out in Scottsdale on Monday, temps reached 112 in midday. Terrible for all the animals too. Here in the East there has been a lot of rain all the way up the Eastern Seaboard into Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

I’m one of those characters who doesn’t mind the rain. In fact I often like it. For me it’s fodder for my imagination and sensibilities. I love the green after the rain and the smells of the city after it’s been washed down. Everyone benefits. It also cools us off. Sometimes.

I plan to stay put. I can imagine the pleasure people will have out in the Hamptons, no matter the weather since it means Summer is Here. It is good; it offers the excitement of the new, and the Sun still kisses, and the salt of the ocean is in the air.

However, imagining it is enough for me. Part of that is the rigors of the NYSD. It owns us over here, me and JH. It’s like an infant that never grows up. It always needs attention, care, nurturing, massaging, prodding and exquisite flights of fancy. We should be so lucky. Not an easy task being a parent, is it? However what we get in return is the Grace of Learning.

Here in town on a long holiday weekend is like an excellent vacation. I tell myself I have time to think, and to read, and to contemplate what Francis Scott Key called “the twilight’s last gleaming,” its “broad stripes and bright stars” too. There are big fireworks over the rivers on the night of the Fourth. And off in Central Park. I might or might not see them. I’ll remember all the Fourths that came before — especially those when I was a kid — deeply inculcated with the greatness and the heroism of those who “fought” but also stood up for it. It still feels fresh, that feeling; as it returns to mind — fresh like the grass and the trees after the newly fallen, hard-fallen summer rain. It’s God’s blessing, available to grace.

Contact DPC here.

The Statue of Liberty. 9:30 PM. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch.

Monday, July 8, 2013. Very hot weekend in New York. The kind of heat that just won’t go away. You’d walk outside after dark and it was swarming warm. Back inside.
I stayed in town over the weekend, which I am happy to do because the calendar is blank and the time can be spent reading or doing nothing – which is a challenge even when I’m doing it. Nothing.

I’m reading a book by George Packer called “The Unwinding; An Inner History of the New America.” I had read a review of it in the Times which wasn’t entirely positive but made me curious as to what the author was going to talk about, and in what way. Would it be statistics and economic theory or political rants? If so, Zzzzzz.


Click to orderThe Unwinding.

It was one of those books that I bought with the intention of possibly not reading it (beyond the first ten pages). It’s 430 pages and I’m three quarters of the way through. The author tells his story through profiles of a variety of Americans, mainly ordinary working people whom we’ve never heard of, in towns we may have known or not. There are some famous ones too: like Robert Rubin, the former Treasury Secretary, and Oprah and Jay-Z. And some towns, like Tampa and Youngstown. There may be more; I’m not through.

So it wasn’t the kind of book I thought it might be (stats, etc.) and I find myself wanting to do nothing but read it. It’s a documentary, a movie, in some ways like a watching a train wreck and a car wreck you knew was going to happen because you knew the engineer who was always busy elsewhere, and car’s driver was texting on his cell instead of watching the signs on the road.

But it’s uniquely American. It’s Steinbeck re-visited with its own rich texture that we all know as citizens of this extraordinary country and culture. A friend of mine referred to this sort of thing as “pessimistic.” I know what he meant because the news isn’t “good news,” mainly. But that’s life: the news often isn’t good. But we’re still here and so maybe there’s a chance that we can do something about it. Something good.

That’s what July 4th was always all about; something good, something worth celebrating.

July 4th fireworks as seen from 13th Street and 6th Avenue. Photos: JH.

Meanwhile, out in Wainscott, Charlie and Susan Calhoun Moss hosted an annual 4th of July luncheon for their friend Peter Brown who became an American citizen 17 years ago. Peter was born in Britain. At this time in his life, he is an extremely influential public relations executive handling a lot of famous clients, many of whom prefer staying out of the news, so don’t even ask; celebrities, royal personages, etc.

I don’t know him well although I often see him at Michael’s where he usually occupies a table next to the table I usually occupy. Back in the days of '60s rock and roll and the Beatles, the Stones and Elton John, and the British invasion, Peter was there. He knows everybody, rockers, royals, bankers, writers, and his neighbors. You can see by the pictures that it was a very “at home” kind of luncheon with a long table occupied by longtime friends.

Jack Peterson in front of 16 years of group shots of the Peter Brown 4th of July Luncheon.

The guests at the 17th annual Peter Brown 4th of July Luncheon.

The Moss' house also has an interesting history, as it was once the local Post Office, built in 1880, way back when the world was different and everybody had a lot less energy available, no cars, no phones, no lights, and hardly any technology, so messages were sent by taking pen in hand.

But that was then. Now the house, having been uprooted – in 1978 – like the rest of us, overlooks the sea (and Wainscott Pond), and meadows and trees of green. It had its day as a post office and now is vitally involved in sheltering mirth and joy, and all the other things that go on under domestic shingled roofs. A perfect example of what I meant by “something good.”

The house as the Post Office on Main Street in Wainscott, New York in 1880.

The house as it looked when it was originally moved in 1978.

The house as it looks today from the Atlantic Ocean side.

View from the porch.

From the pool looking towards the Altlantic.

An ancient Korean stone Buddha greets you as you walk into the back garden.

Back to the Mosses, the hosts. Each year at this luncheon, Charlie reads from The Declaration of Independence. Always good to remind what our Forefathers had in mind. The luncheon included Paige Peterson, Peter Brown, Imogen Lloyd Webber, Christopher Hewat, Jamison Hewat, Fred Shuman, Stephanie Shuman, Fred Seegal, Robyn Seegal, Bonnie Chajet, Clive Chajet, Annie Gwynne Vaughan, Morgan Silver Greenberg, Carol Ryan, Ed Victor, John Loeffler, Debbie Loeffler, Don Weiss, Allison Weiss, Bob Cochran, Suzanne Cochran and Murray Nossel.

The luncheon coterie.

Peter Brown, Stephanie Shuman, Ed Victor, Bonnie Chajet, and Charlie Moss reading from The Declaration of Independence.

Peter Brown and Susan Moss.

Bob Cochran and Morgan Silver Greenberg.

Debbie Loeffler and Charlie Moss.

Imogen Lloyd Webber and Debbie Loeffler.

Annie Gwynne Vaugn.

Paige Peterson, Susan Calhoun Moss, and John Loeffler.

Other good news from across the sea: Thursday a week ago at the University of St. Andrews in Fife, Scotland, UK, our friend Harry Benson was given an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters. Coincidentally, Harry and Peter Brown came into their professional lives on similar turf.


	Harry Benson's view of DPC taking pictures at the Central Park Conservancy "Hat Lunch," circa 2010. I think I was taking a picture of Harry taking a picture.

Harry first came to America traveling with the Beatles on their first American tour. All those memorable shots of John, George, Paul and Ringo jumping up and down on their beds in the Plaza Hotel (I think it was the Plaza) and them mugging for the camera in Central Park, were taken by the intrepid Harry. All these years later Harry has taken some of the most famous images of our age, often here in America. He even married a girl from Texas and set up housekeeping in little ole Manhattan.

In all those years Harry (who even went with George Harrison on his honeymoon), has photographed every President from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Barack Obama. He’s marched with (and photographed) Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., photographed the riots in Watts, the Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the Berlin Wall as it was being built and as it was being torn down. He was with Senator Robert F. Kennedy that fateful night at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when he was murdered and in the meantime photographed scores of famous stars and even Michael Jackson in his bedroom. He’s even photographed me for God sakes.

Topsy Taylor, DPC, Emilia Saint-Amand, and Joy Ingham, taken at Michael's restaurant by Harry for his New York Book which he did in collaboration with Hilary Geary Ross, New York New York (Powerhouse Books). The book is an extraordinary compendium of New Yorkers then and now, done in that famous Benson style; a one of a kind. Topsy, Emilia, and Joy were the ones who introduced me to that great charity "City Harvest" that all three women devoted much of their time to for years.

Harry is indefatigable, full of mirth and full of beans. He’s a longtime, good American but also a Scotsman by birth and sensibility (and quite a bit of that accent if you listen carefully – as he’s more a listener than a talker.

A few years ago, The Queen awarded him a CBE (Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire). I know he was very touched to have received that honor. Nevertheless, he still lives here in New York on the Upper East Side with Gigi, that Texas girl he met way back when. Gigi is his rock, and the mother of his daughters.

Harry Benson receiving an honorary doctorate from The University of St Andrews.

Contact DPC here.

Cynthia Lufkin in her Upper West Side apartment in 2008. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch.

Tuesday, July 9, 2013. Partly sunny, partly cloudy and very warm in New York yesterday, but not as humid as the weekend, with a brief but torrential shower in the early evening which cooled things down, if not off.

Cynthia Lufkin. I’ve been putting off writing this since I heard the news last Wednesday afternoon. I’m one of those people that if I put something off long enough, it will go away and I’ll begin to forget I was putting it off. I’ve been putting this off because it was grievous and disturbed me deeply. I feel there is nothing I can add to the situation but can only look for comfort. However, I know I am not alone in feeling this way; and that there are many people out there who want to know and who are thinking about it.


Cynthia Lufkin (1962-2013).

Last Wednesday morning Cynthia Lufkin died at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital here in New York. She was fifty-one. She had been ill with cancer of the brain and lung. I don’t know how long this has been going on but several years ago she had triumphed over breast cancer. In the meantime, she became a mother for the second and third time with a second daughter and then a son. Her first daughter from her first marriage is now a young teenager.

She had fought valiantly and courageously. She had much to live for including her three children, two of whom are still little ones; and a devoted, supportive husband, Dan Lufkin, who had enhanced her life immeasurably in the last decade of her life. These realities must have distressed her even more deeply than the great pain she endured; she knew she was being overtaken and leaving them.

I loved Cynthia. We were friends – not close, but good – for almost 20 years. I first met her professionally. She was a young woman newly out of college (Trinity), working in public relations at Tiffany under Fernanda Kellogg; and I had started the Social Diary in Quest magazine. She was one of those women whose charm was her smile and her laughter. Otherwise she was seriously conscientious, as if to make certain that she got something, got everything, right. She was also newly married and forging a professional life in New York as well.

That marriage ended a few short years later, right after she gave birth to her daughter Schuyler. The word went around among her friends that she was devastated by her husband’s desire to leave. All dreams she might have had about a future were shattered.

She was nonetheless fortunate despite her great disappointment, because she had backbone and possessed the gift of friendship. She was a good friend, and she had friends and a support group here in New York. Her professional life at Tiffany also gave her access to an expansive social life where she could form friendships. As a young married woman, she and her first husband had already become part of the younger set that was, and in some ways still is, identified with social impresario Mark Gilbertson.

After her divorce, Cynthia remained active on some of the junior committees on the charity circuit – a kind of volunteering that allows a lot of young people to meet and create friendships. This is where making a social life begins in New York for a lot of newcomers who are enthusiastic and seeking to make a life as members of the community. Cynthia was well suited for it because she was a “joiner” by nature. She liked people and she was easily inclined to participate. Her professional experience also gave her something to bring to the table in party planning and fundraising and entertaining.


	Cynthia and Dan with Wendy Carduner at Doubles.

	Cytnthia and Dan at the New York Botanical Garden.

	Cynthia and Dan backstage.

Shortly after her marriage ended, she met Dan Lufkin. It wasn’t an accident; they were introduced by their great mutual friend Wendy Carduner, the directrice (and proprietress) of Doubles, the private club in the Sherry-Netherland where both Cynthia and Dan were members. Wendy had a feeling the two would like each other.

Dan was immediately taken with Cynthia. But from her side, despite her natural charm and openness, it was a moment in Cynthia’s life when she was still picking herself up from a serious loss: she wasn’t interested in a new relationship with anybody. She was not a young woman given to illusions or visions of some white knight coming to her rescue. Her focus would be on pulling her life together, and taking care of her infant child as a single mom.

Dan Lufkin, however, is a glass half-full man no matter. He pursued her, gently but assiduously. She couldn’t help liking him. But she had a life to work out, and she couldn’t see any man as part of it at that moment. Furthermore he was older, and very wealthy, and had a couple of marriages in his past. However, as she soon learned, youth blessed him.

It was a moment when she felt unprepared emotionally. She turned him down the first couple of times he called for a date. The third time she relented, thinking that would at least get him to stop calling. He didn’t. Instead he romanced her despite her doubts. He took her “no” for an answer but continued to pursue her anyway.

She liked him. He made her laugh. He was kind and thoughtful. He was fun, and a mature man behind that youthful joie de vivre. On the second or third date he proposed marriage. That kind of shocked her. Although she had an effervescent charm that could have been mistaken for impulsive, she was quite the opposite: levelheaded, responsible and grounded. Doubts or not, those magic powers of persuasion that made Mr. Lufkin a wunderkind in his youth prevailed; not long after she agreed to marriage.

She seemed to make the transition to newlywed, wife of a wealthy and influentialman, patiently and prudently, naturally committed to holding on to her own identity. She stayed on at Tiffany and thereafter wrestled for some time about a decision to leave and follow new pursuits.

She was cautious. She had now married a dynamic man, an experienced leader in the community, a man of means and an adventuresome curiosity. He was also a man in charge of his life; self-possessed, confident, and worldly. He would be a new, very different experience from her first marriage. There would be a lot to learn and a lot to adjust to.

She met the challenge. I don’t know who motivated whom, but together the Lufkins became more active in New York philanthropy and the social life surrounding it. Cynthia took on more committee work. She also became pregnant.

Then toward the end of her pregnancy she was diagnosed with breast cancer, It was a very serious case, requiring extensive surgery. The window of opportunity in beating it was narrow. It was decided that she’d have to have the baby prematurely so she could have chemotherapy as soon as possible. It had become a matter of life and death. She did it, and she sailed through her treatment and her recovery to arrive at a clean bill of health.


Out and about in East Hampton.

Whatever hardship Cynthia had to endure is known only to her husband and those closest to her. Because she was soon out in the world again, actively participating and working. Summers were spent at their house in East Hampton. They bought a house here in New York, and also acquired a country house in Litchfield County. Later they build another property on the sea in Nova Scotia.

A few years after the birth of her daughter Aster Lee Lufkin, Cynthia gave birth to a son, Daniel Patrick Lufkin. The Lufkins spent much of their weeks in Connecticut where the children were in school. Never more than two hours away from the city, they continued their involvement in several charities including the American Cancer Society, Evelyn Lauder’s Breast Cancer Research Foundation, the Museum of the City of New York, the Women’s Conservation Committee of the Audubon Society, The Central Park Conservancy, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Care Center, The American Museum of Natural History, to name only a few of their interests.

Cynthia and Dan Lufkin became one of the most attractive and sought after couples in New York, and for a number of reasons: both warm and friendly, empathic and philanthropically inclined, they liked people and they were participators. Separately and together they were both gregarious, courteous, gracious, serious about their interests and easy to laugh.

Away from their “social life,” Cynthia and Dan were a family of children, dogs (they had three at last count), and friends. As comfortable as they were at fundraisers and black tie benefits and opening night galas, they were just as comfy at home in their jeans and tweeds, dividing their time mainly between Manhattan and Litchfield County.

Cynthia Lufkin and her daughters Schuyler and Aster Lee on the beach at East Hampton, Summer 2007.

Her life had changed dramatically after meeting Dan, and it was a good life.

I don’t know when she was last diagnosed with the cancer that would take her. I had heard vague references about her state of health in the last year but I am not one to inquire about such things unless there is a way for me to be helpful. Otherwise the most helpful way, in my view, is to keep stlll and follow the lead.

I saw Cynthia in the last couple of months at Michael’s where she was lunching with Dan and friends, and at the Audubon Society’s Women in Conservation luncheon. That was only a little more than a month ago, and Cynthia was her warm and smiling self.

There will be a memorial for Cynthia Lufkin at the Dune Church in Southampton this coming Friday afternoon. The church is where Dan and Cynthia were married and where one of their children was baptized. Cynthia’s concern for now would be the grief of her children and for Dan who was her rock on what turned out to be a difficult and challenging path of life.

Contact DPC here.

Manhattan skyline from the southeast. 10:00 PM. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch.

Wednesday, July 10, 2013. Yet another very hot day, yesterday in New York. Although this time there were some torrential showers (not rainstorms like the weatherman predicted). Five minutes or so each. They cleaned the sidewalks and the streets and the temperature dropped a few degrees. But only a few. And I had been telling myself we were going to have a cool summer. Ha ha; the joke’s on me.

The talk (where there is talk) of current events in the city are the candidacies of Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer. Mr. Weiner is running for Mayor and Mr. Spitzer has announced that he will run for city comptroller. The media is playing it up as a kind of duo au scandale, since both men found/accidentally came upon notoriety (quite unintentionally) in their private lives.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it doesn’t matter because both situations were an opportunity for the public to allow itself to be distracted once again from what’s really going on in our culture, our society. Business as usual.

Mr. Weiner is famous for having exposed himself physically through the wonders of modern technology. It is a peculiar activity, that former activity of Mr. Weiner. At least to me. However, it is also quite commonplace to a lot of other people. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions (who knows) across the world are into exposing themselves physically on the web to anyone who really needs to look. And evidently there are lots of those out there too. I’ll bet there are even some or quite a few who need to look who also think Mr. Weiner is a terrible man.

I don’t know him; I don’t know what to think. One thing you can say about him is he’s very much a man of his generation. I don’t know what to think of a lot of it. We’ll find out later, I’m sure.

Mr. Spitzer, who is older by a few years, had the old classic kind of sex scandal. He was exposed by the powers that be whose financial chicanery was well on its way to being exposed by Mr. Spitzer. Checkmate.

Actually, aside from his personal private activities, Mr. Spitzer had the public good in mind in his work. That’s actually what got him elected governor. However, the good public drops everything when they hear about any kind of extra-marital liaison that a public figure is having. The idea being that public figures should be pure and holy. At least the reformers.

I’m not suggesting that these things are not important because they are ... to the individuals involved and no one else. We already know many if not most politicians are into some kind of hanky-panky and/or are corrupt. That's why they sit at the bottom of all respectability polls, duh. People (or at least the mainstream media) pretend it’s one party and not the other. Well, it’s people. It’s us.

As far as sex goes, the internet has changed the public attitude, especially for the younger generations. Children are looking at this stuff on the internet, and unsupervised. Period. Forget about thinking how can you stop it because the genie is out of the bottle. How it affects them, what they are thinking, I don’t know. Not a few of them think it’s funny.

Unlike the days when a man or a woman had a liaison in the privacy of a hotel room unknown by their wedded partners or whatever, nowadays people are publicly displaying their body parts for any and all to see and look at in hopes of “having a relationship.” Don’t ask me; I don’t know. But I’m in the dark about this, beginning with the immortal question: WHY?

I’ve been told Mr. Weiner is leading in the polls. Even Christine Quinn, who is running for mayor is saying he hasn’t proven he deserves a second chance. When I read that I thought: A second chance at what?’

Evidently the public doesn't agree, however. Or more succinctly, doesn't care. Ms. Quinn is a lesbian. Zzzz. Once upon a time a woman of her sensibilities would have been living by the well of loneliness. Solo. Coming out would have been a major scandal. Instead she's running for Mayor of the city at the center of the world and who cares. Now she's a mainstream politician, kind of like a 21st century Doris Day. No scandal there. Zzzzz

So this is what they are talking about in New York with all this heat swarming around us. Someone asked me if Silda Wall Spitzer, Mr. Spitzer’s wife of a quarter century, approves of his latest move. I wouldn’t know because she hasn’t told me, but from the little I know of Silda, I’d guess she would. She knows he’s good at his job and he likes to do it, and she knows that that’s what we all need in public servants today.

For all I know the same could be said for Mr. Weiner. But remember I know little. And you dear reader, from the way that information is imparted by media today, may know even less because that’s Show Business.


	Charlotte Casiraghi and Gad Elmaleh.

Meanwhile back in the ivory towers of Europa, speaking of scandals with no teeth, a friend writes from Marrakech that there is a rumor going around Paris that Charlotte Casiraghi is expecting a child. Ms. Casiraghi is the beautiful daughter of Princess Carolineof Monaco and Hanover, the niece of Prince Albert and the granddaughter of Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly of Philadelphia, Broadway and Hollywood. And her aunt is the beautiful Princess Stephanie. Her boyfriend for the past couple of years is the Moroccan/French actor-stand up comedian Gad Elmaleh.

My friend pointed out that if that rumor is so, the child will not be the first of the Monegasque royal family to have a child born out of wedlock. Prince Albert, for example, has three – two daughters and a son – with women to whom he was never married. Charlotte’s brother Andrea has a son with Tatiana Santo Domingo, and they’re not married. Princess Stephanie has a daughter (besides the son and daughter she had with her now former-husband Daniel Ducruet), and even Grandpa Rainier’s mother Princess Charlotte was born outside of marriage and later legitimized – and then named heir presumptive of the throne.
And so it was.
None of this is a secret (unless you don’t read or don’t care), nor is it a scandal no matter how hard you try. It doesn’t matter anyway because the Grimaldis aren’t politicians. They have a throne. Which I sometimes think is what a lot of our politicians would prefer, and I can understand why, can’t you? Put yourself in their shoes. Or shorts, or whatever. (Just don't tell anybody.)

Contact DPC here.

Pen, paper, and phone. 1:00 PM. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch.

Monday, July 15, 2013. A week of dog day afternoons according to the weather forecasters’ pretty accurate predictions. And after the past two weeks of “real feels” in the low 100s, I believe them: more of the same.

Although we got a reprieve last Friday afternoon. At first we thought it would merely be rain washing the streets but by evening it was noticeably cooler.

Friday early afternoon, there were these beautiful, thick clouds moving eastward across Manhattan and Queens. Looking southward across to Roosevelt Island.

Looking northeast across the northern tip of Roosevelt Island to Queens.

And looking toward the northeastern sky over Carl Schurz Park.

Then mid-afternoon on Friday, it became overcast and started to pour. I got this photo of a young father caught in the downpour, seeking shelter under my building's canopy (and calling for help?). Then just as quickly, although still raining slightly, the Sun came out.

Mid-evening, about eight o'clock it started to rain again, bringing cooler breezes to push away the looming heat.

Early Saturday evening about eight-fifteen, the stormclouds rolled in again (although far less threatening). Looking across East River at the end of East 83rd Street toward Roosevelt Island.

At that same moment, looking west across East 83rd Street. The two tall apartment buildings are located on the southeast and southwest corners of York Avenue and 83rd Street.

Dog Day Afternoons. These weeks of hot and humid afternoons and evenings are nothing new in my life, but I find myself so fixated on them after a few days of such intense heat that I don’t feel like leaving my apartment.

Yesterday afternoon, I was cleaning out some of my files and going through some of the boxes of photos I’ve acquired over the last few decades when I found a series of them from the days in the 1980s when I lived in Los Angeles.

I loved Los Angeles summers. They were warm, sometimes warmer than others, but never humid. Usually in late July or early August the San’Anas would blow in the scorching heat off the desert, and then it would be intensely HOT !!

On the hottest nights (and no air conditioning, as is my habit), if it got unbearable, I’d get up from my bed and go just outside and sit in the swimming pool for ten or fifteen (or sometimes twenty) minutes. That always did the trick.

It was all so convenient. This is the height of luxury in my book. That’s my little Rum Rum lying in one of his favorite spots, by the open glass door of the bedroom, just a few steps from the pool.

Here’s Rum Rum in closeup. He was a quiet, sweet dog and not noticeably aggressive as some Jack Russells can be. But more about him in a minute.

Here’s our tiny luxurious fiefdom. I never got over the fact that I was living in one of the greatest metropolises in the world, and just outside my bedroom (and dining room) door(s) was this pool available 24/7. The dog in the picture that you can barely see because he’s so white is Pogo, a kind and gentle blond mutt who belonged to my friend Elsa Braunstein who was a resident of the house for a time.

In the early years, the house itself was a bit of a co-op commune. Its four bedrooms occupied by a cast of characters, all friends, mostly people working in The Business, until the last few years that I lived there first with a partner and then by myself – with friends from the East, and even the Far East passing through, staying over for a few days or even a week or two; and even on one occasion, a fellow-writer from New York who rented a room and made it his home whenever he was in LA on business. He told me that sometimes when he’s in LA he still drives by the house for nostalgia’s sake, recalling the good times and the good life everyone enjoyed there.

Whenever someone was in the pool, the dogs, especially Rum Rum would follow them around the edges of the pool barking. Sometimes Rum would fall in and have to be rescued but then he’d get right back to skittering around the pool, barking and chasing the swimmer.

This was my workroom in the house on Doheny. On the desk (which I made out of a piece of plywood, using rarely-looked at large coffee table books and catalogues to prop it up) was my first Mac.

The year was 1988 and I was in the middle of writing Debbie Reynold’s autobiography “Debbie, My Life.” That computer was the latest – although not for long obviously. You had to insert a disk for storing your information. You can see a few of their boxes in maroon and blue under the desk. You can also see something you never see anymore – a Rolo-dex. And a press button phone installed by the phone company (for free!). Also behind the desk is an amplifier, CD player and record changer and tape deck. On the wall is a color portrait my friend Schulenberg did of me in the late '70s.

And there’s little Rum Rum (I often called him Rum-biti too), sitting on the sofa with me while I read (looking so serious) Vanity Fair. This looks like Rum was posing for the camera but this was what he did when he first jumped up. He’d sit there propped up with his left forepaw pressing on my shoulder. He’d stay like that for a few minutes and then lie down and stretch out beside me. I had several dogs during the time I lived out in Los Angeles. Three of them returned to New York with me and lived out their final years here, including Rum Rum.

I’d moved to Los Angeles with one big mutt, Rexy and five cats. I met my first shih-tzu, Tiger, through a friend who was never home, leaving the dog in an eventual state of panic.

So I took him. Here’s my friend (Lady) Sarah Churchill in the dining room of her house on Lloydcrest Drive in Beverly Hills. She’s holding Tiger while Sparky sits up, propped against no one and looks on with his ears back and his ego wanting. Quite seriously.

Sparky was a very tough little Jack Russell. I think he was five or six here. He was not especially friendly with other dogs, in fact he could be a bit of a rumbler if the spirit or the right dog or person moved him. However, he was Sarah’s number one dog, and they adored each other. She had two others, a female, older, Sue Sue who was also a tough JR. Tougher than Sparky boy too. She died a year after I moved in. And then there was little Rum Rum, who was a gentle, almost delicate little guy who was cuffed now and then by both Sue Sue and Sparky (separately – Sparky didn’t mess with Sue Sue even though she was older and stout).

Here’s Sparky again, king of all he can see, sitting on Sarah’s terrace. That roof across the road belonged the Tina Sinatra, the youngest daughter of Frank. Sparky and I came to know each other quite well as I lived at Sarah’s the first full year I was in L.A. Sarah often traveled – very often – and she had two other houses at the time: one on the Peloponnese overlooking the bay of Corinth, and another over looking the Caribbean in Montego. She’d also frequently hit New York, London, Miami and other places across the world where she had friends or which sparked her curiosity. Sarah was one of the original members of the Jet Set.

After I moved over to Doheny, she’d leave the dogs with me while she was away. Sparky remained his tough self but behaved around me when other dogs came by his space. He loved to go for rides in the car, of course, and always laid himself out on my shoulders behind my head sandwiched in against the headrest while I was in the driver’s seat. Rum Rum never dared approach that space but he liked standing on his hind legs with his forepaws on the dashboard looking out the window.

Once Sarah was away for several weeks, maybe months – I can’t remember. When she came back Sparky was delighted to see her and instantly switched his affection and his loyalties. Little Rum, however, was his meek and retiring self, because Sarah rarely paid attention to him anyway. She thought he was a splendid looking Jack Russell, but Sparky was her boy.

So I decided not to give Rum Rum back to her. I told her I was keeping him because he was left out at her house. She was rather annoyed with me and, as was her style, provided a strong argument about why she should get her dog back (claiming she wanted to breed him because he was such a beauty). I prevailed however, and Rum came to stay for good. Sarah wasn’t deeply offended, and soon got used to him in his new home.

That's Rum Rum with Polo, above. Polo came into our lives one very rainy afternoon in late winter when he, soaking wet, approached the sliding glass door of my workroom and pawed it. I was so amazed that a dog would be so straightforward at a strange door, that I opened it and let him in and dried him off. He had a name tag (Polo) with his dates and a phone number. I called several times and left messages, but got no response. On the third day I got the owner. He lived, as it happened just about an eighth of a mile around the corner from me (we lived in the section known as The Bird Streets, or The Birds).

I told him I had his dog – although I was amazed that he didn’t seem especially worried that his little guy was missing for three days. I got his address and drove the dog over to his house. The guy, probably in his mid-fifties, a talent agent, swarthy, unshaven and in his bathrobe (it was midday – he looked like he had a long night), saw Polo standing looking out of the car window and said: ”Do you wanna dog?”

Yes, and so it was. Polo (or Popo as we often called him) was a very friendly guy with Rum Rum, although he liked to bully him lightly every now and then. You can see Rum’s attitude when they’re on the chair together. Rum is looking away as if to say, “I’ll bear up but it could be better ...”

And here’s the boy, solo in his classic Rum Rum pose.

Polo died several years later of kidney failure. We were heartbroken at losing him but I decided the best thing for our sorrow was to find a new dog who needed a home immediately. I heard from a friend about a woman over in Brentwood who rescued dogs and had a female shih-tzu “but” that she was a biter. She was only two but I knew from my vet that that behavior rarely changes. It is usually the result of abuse. It is also true that a lot of people put their faces right up to a dog’s face. This is VERY unwise and also scary for the animal. It is not unusual for them to snap or bite in self-defense. That move often elicits violent abuse from the idiot who didn’t consider the dog’s situation.

I took the girl because I knew she’d be a hard sell. She rode home on my lap while I was at the wheel, Forever after whenever she rode in the car with me (including across the United States), she rode in that place. I named her Fa Fa after a childhood friend of my ex-wife because I liked the sound of it: frivolously sweet. Eventually she was Mrs. Fa Fa.

The first night we were home, there was an earthquake. I jumped out of bed to pick up Fa Fa who was sleeping in a corner of the bedroom. As I reached down to pick her up, she bit me!

But I noticed that immediately thereafter she cowered in fear and remorse, terrified and waiting to be punished. Aha! Someone did her in. So I petted her and assured her it was all right, and I left her there. I realized her biting was not an attack but a reaction.

I lived on a point of the hill of North Doheny Drive that actually had a side walk. I used that to walk the dogs a couple times a day. We’d walk around the bend to the upper Bird Streets, beginning with Robin Drive (where Larry Flynt, I think, still lives). This is a shot of Doheny close to the top of the hill.

On that same spot looking southwest is West Los Angeles and Santa Monica, and the Pacific from which you could see Catalina on a day that was clear.

That’s what they call a marine layer clouding the cluster of tall office buildings in the distance. They are Century City which was built on the backlot of 20th Century Fox in the 1970s. The tall building that is closer is on Doheny Road in what is called Beverly Hills Adjacent, and home to many famous stars. In the lower left of the picture, you can see the sidewalk curving (to go up the hill). The reddish rooftop was that of a house belonging to Madame Alex who was the number one madam in Los Angeles. Her girls came to the house for their assignments. I often saw them on my dog walks. They were all gorgeous, usually brunettes, always drove Beamers and stayed only briefly. One early evening I saw a cortege of three stretch limousines deliver about a dozen Arabs in full regalia – no girls – evidently for cocktails. Or something.

I had no idea what the lady who owned the house did for a living. Nor did I know her name. In fact, the few times I saw her outside, she was wearing a dreary, faded housecoat and looked like someone’s gramma back on the farm in Kansas. Although she was noticeably not friendly (neighborly).

It wasn’t until one night there was a lot of noise in the neighborhood and a SWAT team paid a visit and arrested “Madam Alex” and release her on a million dollar bail. And so it was. She later settled, and moved to a little bungalow down the hill and retired. And this writer moved back to Manhattan. Ah LA., ahh, nostalgia on a hot summer day.

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Sailing away on the Hudson. 5:00 PM. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch.

Wednesday, July 17, 2013. Very very warm in New York. Hot you can run away from (remove your hand from the hot stove). Warm you’re stuck, and hazy in your head.

I went to the doctor this morning because I’ve had a queasy stomach for the past four days, off and on but on enough to make me wonder (or fret or obsess). When I see a doctor I always try to recount every detail I can remember so he can get a full picture (including anything stupid).

I was telling him that last Thursday night about midnight, sitting at my computer, I was wishing for something sweet to eat. Like chocolate, or cookies. I purposely didn’t have any in the house. I knew that. But I looked in the cupboard anyway ... and found ... the dreck of a small box of honey roasted almonds from Zabar's. There were probably a dozen of them. They’d been sitting there for a couple of weeks or more.


	The culprit, specifically the honey roasted almonds.

I took it to my desk. And consumed them. They were on their last legs and the heat and had had its way too. But almonds are almonds. I love almonds. Or used to. Then, when I lay down to go to sleep, I had this sudden jolt of pain in my belly. It felt, in my imagination what a lightning bolt looks like. Terrifying.

That’s the story. Adding up the past four days, it was after that moment I developed this lo-grade, vague nausea and sometimes almost-indigestion. It made me very uncomfortable.

So yesterday morning when I woke up and felt worse, I called the doc’s office and asked if he’d see me. Yes. 12:15.

Now this doc whom I like very much always has an office full and there’s always a wait. I took a book with me: Lapham’s Quarterly edition of “Family.” I knew I’d have time to read. The office was very air-conditioned – something I’m not used to. Too much so in my opinion but it wasn’t my office. It was almost cold.

I had to wait more than an hour for the doc. I found that I was feeling so much better that I wasn’t sure what I was going to tell him (“I’m a hypochondriac”). Actually every time I’ve gone to see that doc, I’ve felt better when I left the office. Tells you a little something about me, no? And him of course too.

I got the once-over. He thought it was probably the almonds. I still say: let’s hope so. I won’t do that again.

I took these pictures on Monday night about 8:30 in the evening. A very hot day but leaving us with the most beautiful red and pink skies, casting a glow over the neighborhood.

New Yorkers seem to be going along with this heat despite its intensity. Last night some friends took me to dinner at Sette Mezzo. The place was jammed; lots of friends and friends of friends; a New York local. One of my dinner partners had just finished a book I recommended “Citizens of London,” and loved it.


	Click above to order.

	Click above to order.

Everyone I know who has read that book has loved it. There’s a reason they do. All those historic characters whose names are household words are presented with warts and all (yes, Churchill; yes, FDR), and you can “get” them. You can see how much we are who we are All of us. This is positive bad news.

I was asked what else. I told them “The Patriarch” the Joe Kennedy biography. Big. I think 800 pages. An emotional experience if you take it seriously. You like him, you don’t like him, you’ve met people like him, known people like him, you get how he could be charming, you see how he was very shrewd, driven and clever, and cut-throat in business. He was an operator, a horse’s ass at times; a schemer, a publicity hound, a world class fooler-arounder, a devoted husband, and most of all a devoted father.

You see how Roosevelt could outfox him and he couldn’t do a thing about it (except pretend to try). You see how this man accomplished what he did. The fatherhood was it for me. He gave his love to his children. And his money too, but that’s another part of the forest; love was first. Now you know what I think.

I tell this story because right after describing the man to my friends, I looked up, and sitting at a table directly across the room, waiting for her dinner partners, was the surviving child of that father and his famous brood – Jean Kennedy Smith. (who was dining with Phyllis Newman and Joe Armstrong). This is New York.

They weren’t all inside -- over at the Frick Collection they were holding their annual Garden Party on the lawn in front of the mansion. They didn’t mind the heat obviously and the men were even wearing jackets and ties.

The Garden Party made its debut in 2008. It’s one of the most desirable social events of the summer season because it’s just a party. No other reason to be there except to see and meet people, enjoy the cocktails, the breezy jazz and a splendid night in Mr. Frick’s garden. There were about 500 looking very summery and unfazed by the temperature that I’ve been whining about.

Guests at the Frick Collection's annual Garden Party on the lawn in front of the mansion.

They could have gone (and some did) inside the mansion and enjoyed its fabulous collection of fine and decorative arts featuring masterpieces by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Fragonard, Holbein, Houdon, Goya, Gainsborough, Velázquez, Renoir, and others of note. In the Portico Gallery, there is a current special exhibition Precision & Splendor: Clocks and Watches at The Frick Collection.

The Frick is a very special place in New York. It has a serenity that embraces you when you visit. Its galleries offer a contemplative quality that can only be found in a private space like someone’s home. The setting of the collection is a circa 1913–14 residence of a great steel magnate from Pittsburgh in industrial America. This was his jewel. This was created for just that: contemplation and beauty, and even with you, whoever you are, in mind. It also embodies the other worldliness of the Gilded Age of the City; its dernier cri.

Under the trees at the Frick Garden Party.

So there they were, inside and outside taking in the pleasure New Yorkers have of seeing people known and unknown, often in crowds, small to medium, at the end of a workday in the middle of blazing summer. The signature cocktail was the Garden Gimlet (with American Harvest Organic Spirit — you had to taste it). The jazz group: The Flail. The proceeds from the tickets support many programs including educational and curatorial initiatives and Library activities.

The leadership behind the evening: Pauline Eveillard, Susan Johnson, Martha Loring, Alexandra Porter, Tess Porter, Deborah Royce, Lisa Volling, and Jennifer Wright.

The Garden Gimlet with American Harvest Organic Spirit kept people cool.

In the crowd: Paul Arnhold, Alexander Berggruen, Margot and Jerry Bogert, Emerson Bowyer, Mitchell Cantor, Edward Lee Cave, Tia Chapman, Missey Condie, Jerry Ann Woodfin-Costa and Victor Costa, Caitlin and Michael Davis, Dan Dutcher, Christina Eberli, Allison Ecung, Barbara and Bradford Evans, Pauline Eveillard, Juliet L. Falchi, Jennifer Farrell, Kalyn Fink, Mark Edward Fox, Tiffany Frasier, Sarah Jane and Trevor Gibbons, Mark Gilbertson, Wes Gordon, Gemma Gucci, John Hays, Elizabeth Horvitz, Katherine R. Horvitz, Michael Horvitz, Redmond Ingalls, Susan and Henry P. Johnson, Lucy J. Lang, Christine Layng, Adam K. Levin, Patricia Lovejoy, Amory and Sean McAndrew, Heather McDowell, Sarah Nir, Julie Pailey, Elizabeth and Douglas Paul, Joan Payson, Alexandra C. Porter, Tess Porter, Allison and Peter Rockefeller, Deborah and Charles M. Royce, William R. Schermerhorn, Robert Schneider, Maggy Frances Schultz, Cator Sparks, Lisa and Jeff Volling, Alexandra R. Wagle, Frick Director Ian Wardropper and Sarah McNear, Cameron Wilcox, Coke Anne and Jarvis Wilcox, Courtnay Wilcox, Jennifer Wright, and more.

Union Square Events provided a menu. Here you go:Caprese salad with basil & fleur de sel, mango and Thai basil summer roll, classic Maine lobster roll, sweet corn and Jonah crab croquette with chili-lime crema, tarte flambée, seared sirloin with thyme and shallot agro-dolce, seven-spiced lamb loin with tomato mint chutney and papadum crisp, with passed desserts to follow.

Chairmen Tess Porter, Alexandra C. Porter, Deborah Royce, Martha Loring, Pauline Eveillard, Lisa Volling, Jennifer Wright, and Susan Johnson. Photos: John Calabrese.

Juliet Falchi and Christina Eberli.

Mark Gilbertson and event Chairman Deborah Royce.

Frick Director Ian Wardropper and Event Chairman Martha Loring (also great great granddaughter of Henry Clay Frick) with a guest (left).

Jerry Ann Foodfin-Costa and Victor Costa.

Board member Michael Horvitz with daughters Katherine R. Horvitz and Elizabeth Horvitz.

Frolicking guests at the Frick Garden Party ...

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Sunset, Hudson River. 8:30 PM. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch.

Thursday, July 18, 2013. Hot in New York. What can I say? I caught a cab at 55th and Sixth after the Micheal's lunch. I got in and the guy says: "do you know how hot it is?" "Yes I do." "Yeah but do you know HOW hot?" "How." "101! Look!" and he pointed to his dashboard registering the number. I wasn't surprised. I'm sure it's been this hot many times before but this time seems like MORE. Maybe it's just the world we live in.

As the cab entered Central Park, there was a black lab standing in a small stone tub of water (probably meant for the poor horses). The black lab was in heaven. He stood up and shook off the water, tail wagging; and then dropped back into the wet, plop. Ahh, joy. What a good idea. I thought of all the dogs I see on the street with their walkers, panting. I thought of the walkers too. I thought of myself; it's that kind of heat.


	Ahh, joy.

The Michael's lunch was a typical Wednesday lunch. A madhouse. All kinds of people doing business even if that means social.

The list; around the room.David Thalberg, Exec Director of Krupp Kommunications (K2) with Diane Clehane, the Brenda of Mediabistro. The ying and the yang. Nearby, Joe Armstrong, Duh Mayah and his pal David Zinczenko; Miki Ateyeh and Diane Fogg; Stu Cantor; Alexandre Chemia; Joanna Coles, E-I-C of Cosmo, with Michael Wolff, media columnist for The Guardian; Lisa Dallos of the HL Group with Nicole Purcell and Suzan Gursoy of Adweek; Alice Mayhew; Ellin Delsener, Bettina Zilkha, Annette Tapert; Lee Eastman (son of John; Lee's aunt was the late Linda McCartney, and his cousin is Stella); Bob Gutkowski; Bruce Paisner and Cathie Black; Shelly Palmer; Alan Patricof; Eddie Pollack; David Poltrack; Newell Turner, editorial director of the Hearst shelter magazines; Michael J. Wolf; Leonard Lauder with Stefano Tonchi, editor of W; David Zaslav; Cindi Berger; Jorge Espinel; Jimmy Finkelstein and (his wife) Pamela Gross; Kirsten Fleming; Joan Gelman with sons Josh Gelman and Gregg Gelman; Gerry Byrne and Richard Heller; Luke Janklow with David Rosenthal; George Malkemu of Manolo Blahnik; Gil Shiva; Brad Siegel; (followed by actor-director Fisher Stevens); Steven Stolman; Nickie Robinson; Vicki March; Herb Allen. I was with artist Nan Swid, who has a one-woman show coming ukp in the autumn. And all this was just the half of it – within my purview.

Meanwhile, back at the Dog Days, this is a public service message that comes from the heart and with the urgings of three little ones who are often sleeping within three to six feet of me when I am at my computer:

You may have already heard this on WABC but if not, here goes: the ASPCA has tips on how to properly care for your pet during extreme heat.

There are 7 things to know about your pets and this heat:

Know the warning signs of heat stroke. Watch out for the following symptoms of overheating: excessive panting or difficulty breathing, drooling, mild weakness, stupor, seizures, bloody diarrhea and vomiting.

If you suspect your pet is suffering from heat stroke please contact your veterinarian immediately.

Avoid dehydration by always having fresh, clean water available and lots of shady places where pets can cool off. Like that tub I saw at the entrance to the Park.

Do not leave pets unsupervised around a pool. Not all dogs are good swimmers. Introduce your pets to water gradually and make sure they wear flotation devices when on boats. Rinse your dog off after swimming to remove chlorine or salt from his fur, and try to keep your dog from drinking pool water, which contains chlorine and other chemicals that could cause stomach upset.

Limit exercise to either early in the morning or late in the evening. Before starting your walk, feel the sidewalk. If it's too hot to touch, it can burn your pet's pads and should be avoided.

Bring outdoor pets inside, and give them access to air-conditioned areas of your home. For animals who must remain outside, provide a shady, sheltered place to rest and lots of fresh water in stable containers.

Never leave an animal alone in a parked vehicle. On a hot day, a parked car can become a furnace in no time — even with the windows open — leading to fatal heat stroke within minutes.

If you see a pet in a vehicle on a hot day, take immediate action. Note the car make, model, color and plate number, then go to the nearest stores and ask the managers to page the owner. Call the police if necessary.

For more information: www.aspca.org/pet-care/hot-weather-tips
Suffolk SPCA: https://suffolkspca.org
Nassau SPCA: http://www.nassaucountyspca.org

And take good care of yourself too. Don't dehydrate, keep as cool as possible and pray for some rain to drop the temp for all of us.

9 PM. 86°F.

Contact DPC here.

Deserted playground. 2:30 PM. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch.

Friday, July 19, 2013. Weather the same old story. We’re havin’ a heat wave. The experts say relief comes tomorrow. Good news but not soon enough.

Whatever is going on in New York is going on behind closed doors with the A/C full tilt. I’m talking about restaurants. I was at Michael’s again yesterday, my second time this week (nada the week before incredibly). I went to meet Susan Solomon, the founder and CEO of the New York Stem Cell Foundation.

DPC and Susan Solomon at Michael's.

Leo DiCaprio was at the table across the aisle. I don’t know him. Although we once had a brief conversation – forgettable to him, and not forgettable to me because it was an opportunity to get a sense of the person. I found him unaffected and there. Just like up there on the screen.

Gary Cooper had that quality; you like him, no matter.


	Mr. Everybody-out-in-the-city.

Leo’s not big on movie star looks any time. Yesterday he looked like Mr. Everybody-out-in-the-Valley. This might be read as an insult. It’s not. He looked like hell, movie-star-wise. I told myself he must be making a picture, and that’s the character. Or taking a big break, and who cares. However, that said, it doesn’t matter. He’s a star, like Cooper. Or like Jack Nicholson.

He’s so unobtrusive, so regular, so ordinary in his presence. Same on the screen. But then he speaks and there it is. He’s got to be the biggest male star out there. And there he was with Bob Friedman (a Michael’s regular) of radicalmedia.com. Mr. Guy Next Door yesterday at Michael’s, Mr. Big Star in Hollywood.

I said to Susan Solomon, “turn quietly to your left and look at the table across from us ...”

At first she said, “I just saw Richard Johnson come in,” thinking that was my reference. Then she slowly turned and look across at that very everyman face.

Almost scruffy, the strip of van Dyke on his jawline, hair longer than usual. When he got up after finishing lunch with Bob Friedman. Friedman left him to go over and say hello to Richard Johnson who was with Richard Turley. Leo DiC stood up, had a big black bag, which he drew over his shoulder. He’s put on a lot of weight (or maybe taking it off?). He cudda passed for a young Texas rancher who eats well, tosses back a few now and then, and knows what he thinks. But everyman as a Star. Leo.

That was our celebrity sighting for the month. I do see a lot of “stars” come through the doors at Michael’s, but every now and then there’s the Star and it’s great because he or she has the same heavy yet subtle allure that you see on the screen. You just like it.

Susan Solomon is the definitive optimist in my book. We’ve only met and talked once before and that must have been six or seven years ago at a Municipal Art Society dinner in the Lever Brothers Building. We were seated next to each other. Yesterday was a repeat in terms of interest and words and thoughts passed between us.


Susan Solomon and Paul Goldberger.

She’s married to Paul Goldberger the architectural historian and critic who writes for the New Yorker. You could call Goldberger “distinguished,” because he is, but you wouldn’t call him that because he’s so intellectually accessible that he’s like Leo in presence: a pleasure to meet.

At the time we met, Susan was just working on pulling together the New York Stem Cell Foundation. I’m not a scientist and not scientifically inclined or all that interested. I’m interested in terms of wonder and amazement but it is a scope outside my own.

I was curious to know how she arrived on that doorstep. She wasn’t a scientist either. She was a lawyer by profession originally. What was her area of expertise? “Solving problems, organizing people to solve problems.” She was a natural and she likes it.

When I say she defines optimism, it’s because she’s pleasantly matter-of-fact about the challenge. A good mother. I mean that seriously. It turns out she has three sons – all in the range of above 20 to 30. Two married, one living like he was married but no certificate (yet, says mother). When she told me about her sons – all of whom are out of college and self-supporting in professions that interest them because they are interesting to them and not because of the money – I could see what she wrought.

She’s a born and bred New Yorker. In the last decade she lost her father to a heart attack and then her mother to cancer. These were grievous losses. You understand when she talks about her family (only when asked) that her strong maternal sense must have been nurtured by that mother and father. Also, one of her sons – and this is important – has had diabetes since he was a small child. That led mother to seek out organizations to raise funds and deal with the problem medically.

Because of her interest in the problem, she read a lot for years, and all the time. She was also actively involved philanthropically, and so she met a lot of people in the medical and medical research professions.

One day in 2004 she read in the New York Times, in a tiny little item buried in the first section which reported that the State of California had created a $3 billion fund for stem cell research. Susan already knew about stem cell research because she had learned that this was the high tech of the medical research field. Stem cell research was the future in the task of finding efficient drugs to treat specific diseases and medical conditions.

After reading that tiny squib of an article Susan called a friend she knew in scientific research who explained what was being done in looking for new, innovative ways to cure serious diseases such as heart, and cancer, and diabetes. An idea was borne of Susan from learning what they were doing in California. Her friend made it clear that this was something that should go on in New York too.

That was it. The New York Stem Cell Foundation was founded in 2005. Eight years later, Susan and her supporters have raised $100 million for research. They have their own facility.

Paul Goldberger, Susan Solomon, Dr. Scott Noggle, Dorothy Lichtenstein, Donald Sultan, Dr. Valentina Fossati, Yigal Ozeri, and Michael Joaquin Grey at The New York Stem Cell Foundation's 1st Annual Spring Benefit held on June 20th.

I knew nothing about what the NYSCF did, nor anything about stem cells. Susan demonstrated what the foundation's research led to, to explain what the NYSCF did and what stem cells are. Running the nail of her right index finger against the skin of her left hand, she told how they have devised a way to culture hundreds of living cells by taking a tiny piece of that skin and to introduce DNA from a human skin cell into an unfertilized egg from a separate donor, and using that egg to develop and test drugs to cure or retard a number of major diseases like the aforementioned, like Alzheimer’s, like Parkinsons, MS, leukemia and ALS. This new technique for acquiring/making cells will eventually end the use of mice and dogs and monkeys from any kind of medical research. It is also faster and more efficient.

After founding NYSCF with her own money, she rented a 500 square foot lab and fundraised from her apartment. What followed was a controversy over the use of embryonic stem cells. The Bush Administration banned using fed funds to create new stem-cells from discarded human embryos.

NYSCF team members Hector Martinez, Liheng Wang, Dieter Egli, Lisa Cole, Haiqing Hua, Kylie Foo, and Daniel Paull at the 7th Annual Gala and Science Fair in 2012.

In the area of growing human tissue, one of the Foundation’s postdoctoral fellow Giuseppe Maria de Peppo is working on using stem cells to grow new bone tissue. Susan Solomon believes that the day will come that stem cell research will allow us to grow patches of bone to replace damaged or degenerating bone. She believes one day we will do the same in repairing damaged hearts.

The NYSCF started in their tiny lab with three researchers and no grant money. Now the staff numbers 51 and has an annual budget of about $20 million almost entirely raised from private contributors and about 8% from government grants.

Susan believes that the achievements they’ve made in just a few short years at the NYSCF is due to her decision to give researchers – who are mostly young MDs and PhD to explore what interests them without the hindrance of “academic of government” restraints that scientists of deal with every day.

Alex Meissner, Vanessa Ruta, Susan Solomon, Julian Robertson, Chris Harvey, Michael Long, Dr. Deepta Bhattacharya at The New York Stem Cell Foundation's 7th Annual Gala and Science Fair.

When I asked her about her background before she became the godmother of Stem Cell Research, she recounted her work as a lawyer at Debevoise & Plimpton. She didn’t tell me that she also established and ran Solomon Partners LLC to provide strategic management consulting to corporations, cultural institutions and non-profits. She didn’t say she’s been Chairman and CEO of Lancit Media Productions, a children’s TV production company; the founding CEO of Sothebys.com; President of Sony Worldwide Networks – a company formed to oversee the Sony Corp of America’s investments in satellite and cable radio, etc., and she also held executive positions, at MacAndrew and Forbes Holdings and MMG Patricof and Co.

And brought up three boys who are now out in the world forging their own careers in journalism, and cultural research – all objectives of their longtime personal interests.

The funny thing is our lunch ran over the time she could allot because of other commitments for the day not because we were talking about stem cell research but instead about books and biographies and people and history. The problem when she reads in bed, she told me, is she can end up staying up much later than she should because she’s so engrossed in the book. Buoyed everywhere by this Optimism.

The NYSCF is holding its 8th annual gala and science fair this coming October 15th in the Frederick Rose Hall at Jazz at Lincoln Center.. Among the features of this gala will be a real science fair so that supporters can be entranced and enhanced by learning more about the work on stem cells research. To learn more visit nyscf.org/gala

Contact DPC here.

Grapefruit moon. 1:00 AM. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch.

Tuesday, July 23, 2013. Overcast, cooler, but still muggy, with intermittent light rain from mid-afternoon through evening. It’s been worse lately; much worse.

I went down to Michael’s to lunch with Linda Fairstein. My cabbie was a guy who had the same New York/Brooklyn Irish accent that my father had. It interested me because it’s a distinctly New York accent that has all but disappeared. It turned out that he was a Brooklyn born Irishman too. That accent of the first American generation probably resulted from having parents who had emigrated to America. Their offspring had no brogue but nevertheless spoke in the same parlance.


	“The Shot Heart Round the World."

He asked me if I followed baseball. No. Did he? Yes. I told him my father followed the games on the radio up in Massachusetts when I was growing up, but his favorite was the Brooklyn Dodgers, naturally. It must have provided all kinds of reverie I never heard about. I reminded my cabbie that back then New York had three baseball teams, two in the National League and one in the American League.

I could tell this guy was a big fan. I knew when he asked me if I liked the Yankees. That’s how we got to the Dodgers. But, I told him, I remember when Bobby Thomson hit a three run home run for the New York Giants that won them the pennant for that year. They called it “The Shot Heart Round the World.” It was the first coast-to-coast telecast of a ballgame. It was October 3, 1951.

My cabbie exclaimed, “I was there !” Wow. “How old were you?” Amazed, I wanted to know. “I was nine.” And he was at the Polo Grounds the day Bobby Thomson won them the pennant. Wow.

When they went to Series, however, the Giants lost to the Yankees. The Yankees were always the winners, or it seemed that way.

Linda Fairstein is just publishing her fifteenth Alex Cooper crime novel, “Death Angel.” It’ll be in the stores a week from today 7/30. She writes one every year. I am in awe of her productivity, not to mention her success. The crime novel genre is big all over the world; but you probably know that.

DPC and Linda Fairstein at Michael's with her newest novel, Death Angel. Click to pre-order.

I’ve known Linda for several years. We have one of those New York friendships that are practically impossible anyplace else in the world. We see each other for lunch or at a dinner maybe three or four times a year. But: we talk. It all spills out. In the course of these conversations, we get to know a lot about each other. And enjoy it. That’s friendship.

She’s a very industrious individual but always of good cheer (I’m sure there are moments when she’s not but you can see that she’s motivated and that is her pleasure). I’m always interested in how people’s lives develop and acquire definition.


Linda greeting fans at an Authors In Kind Literary Luncheon Benefiting God's Love We Deliver.

Linda’s life, for example, has been marked by older men of great influence, beginning with her father who was a doctor, practicing in Westchester. When she was about to go away to college, he asked her what she wanted to pursue in her life. She said: she wanted to write. She had been brought up on books, been going to the library since early childhood and she wanted to create them.

Dr. Fairstein had another way of looking at it -- and a not uncommon one: write and starve. He urged her to have a profession and following her father’s advice she became a lawyer.

Linda graduated from Vassar with honors and then attended the University of Virginia School of Law. Her first big job out of college was working with District Attorney of New York County Frank Hogan. DA Hogan had a staff of scores of male lawyers and seven female lawyers. He hired Linda on the recommendation of a professor of hers whom he held in high esteem.

In those days, women were not allowed to even be exposed to a lot of criminal cases that involved sex and violence. She was assigned to do research and worked in the municipal libraries. She loved it. Then Mr. Hogan died, and was replaced by Robert Morgenthau who served for 34 years as District Attorney.

It was Mr. Morgenthau who took the women out of the research library and put them to work on crime cases. He also brought more women onto his staff. In 1978, Linda was made head of the sex crimes unit. Linda served under Morgenthau until 2002, thirty years.

Linda lost her husband Justin Feldman two years ago this September 29. Mr. Feldman was 30 years her senior, although they’d been married for twenty-five years. He was a prominent lawyer here in New York closely engaged in politics and public policy, besides private practice. The Fairstein/Feldmans had one of those relationships where they intensely shared so much of personal interest. There was never a dull moment and a highly agreeable companionship.


	Linda with her late husband Justin Feldman.

Justin Feldman was also Linda’s editor in that he’d read her manuscript as it was progressing and offer his edits. Evidently he was a brilliant at it, and as hard as it might have been for her to take at times, she found he was always right. From those years she acquired much of his abilities to help herself.“Death Angel” is the first of her crime novel series that was written without his input.

Yesterday morning, I had just finished the manuscript for “FlipFlop,” a very affecting memoir by Julie Baumgold, an excerpt of which is featured in this month’s Vogue. I immediately picked up “Death Angel” to give myself a change of scenery and put Baumgold evocative and thoughtful story aside for now.

The opening scene takes place at the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park where the nude body of a young woman has been discovered floating in the nearby pond. It has yet to be determined how long the body was in the pond, so there are no clues yet. Alex Cooper is on the scene. I thought to myself, I’m going to be having lunch with the woman who wrote this. And I know she knows exactly what this looks like, just like real life. And she also knows how they go about deconstructing the crime, and what methods they have for clues.

The Bethesda Fountain in Central Park is very real. If you have the imagination (and you don’t need much), you know this sort of thing is not unrealistic even if it’s made up. So you stay, to look, to see, to learn.

That’s what hooked me, so that I returned to it right after lunch with the main detective.

Full moon, 8:00 PM.

Last Saturday in East Hampton, the East Hampton Historical Society opened its highly anticipated East Hampton Antiques Show to the historic grounds of Mulford Farm with 55 antique dealers participating.

Now in its seventh year, the East Hampton Antiques Show is widely recognized as a highlight of the East Hampton arts and social calendar.

Interior Designer Steven Gambrel was the Honorary Chair of the Friday, July 19th Preview Cocktail Party, where patrons had an early buying opportunity of the extraordinary array of antiques, art, jewelry and collectibles. Ticket proceeds from that preview benefited the East Hampton Historical Society.

Everything took place on the pastoral grounds of Mulford Farm, located on James Lane in the heart of the village of East Hampton. This historic 3.5-acre property features a restored 17th century farm house as well as several barns and outbuildings that are among the oldest on eastern Long Island.

Guests were greeted at the entrance by Ashley Hecker and Nicholas Nickas of Ralph Lauren's East Hampton Historical Society Collection

Richard LaVigne (Knollwood Antiques) with his doppelganger?

Roseanne and Richard Barons (Executive Director of the East Hampton Historical Society)

Benefit Co-chairs Jill Lasersohn, Debbie Druker, and Hollis Forbes

Benefit Honorary Chair Steven Gambrel with Dara O'Hara

Tia Mahaffy and Chesie Breen

Nathan Wold, Erin and John Tintle, and Tom Samet

Kelly Klein with her Mother Gloria List

Jack Lasersohn, Joseph Aversano, and Peter Emmerson

Bob and Min Hefner with East Hampton Village Mayor Paul Rickenbach and his wife Jean Rickenbach

Jeff Ellis, Newell Turner, and Tony Buccola

Amy Ma with Andy Sabin

Charles and Mary Jane Brock

Georgia Spogli, Jane Scott Hodges, Deb Shriver, and Charlotte Moss

John Barman, Robert Levy, Marcia Levine, Kelly Graham, and Michael Clifford

Duncan Darrow with Wendy Moonan

Also last weekend, in Southampton Honorary Chairs Susan Allen, Board President Jonathan McCann and Jean Shafiroff welcomed more than 200 supporters to The Southampton Animal Shelter Foundation’s (SASF) 4th Annual Unconditional Love Gala on July 20th at the home of Sandra McConnell.

WNBC’s Chuck Scarborough emceed the evening and honored NBC’s Award Winning Animal Advocate and Best Selling Author Jill Rappaport along with ASPCA animal behaviorist and trainer, Pamela Reid, Ph.D CAAB who was given the outstanding achievement award.

Chuck Scarborough, Elizabeth Brett Scarborough, and Michael Brett

Jean Shafiroff, Martin Shafiroff, and Elizabeth Shafiroff

After a fabulous dinner catered by Robbins-Wolfe Eventeurs the Alex Donner Orchestra kept guests on their feet, including Henry Buhl, Amy and Ray Cosman, Raya and Cliff Knight, Southampton’s Mayor Mark Epley, Jean Remmel Little, Nicole Noonan, Kim Renk and Greg Dwyer, Martin and Elizabeth Shafiroff, Leesa Rowland and Larry Wohl, Fred Tanne, Elaine Sargent, Lisa McCarthy, Laura Lofaro Freeman, Lucia Hwong Gordon, Yaz and Valentine Hernandez.

Corporate Chairs for the event included Allen & Co, Barclays, Ferguson Cohen LLP and Sequin Jewelry. The special evening also featured an auction where a behind the scenes tour of the Today Show by Jill Rappaport went for $10,000 and a Sintessi diamond poodle pin by Michel Piranesi went for $5,000.

Karen Ferguson and Susan Allen

Proceeds raised from the Unconditional Love Gala help SASF continue to care for over 1200 homeless animals rescued from the Hamptons each year. Funds raised will also support the shelter’s work with No More Tears Rescue to rehabilitate and find homes for adult dogs rescued from puppy mills; with The Humane Society of Northwest Georgia to take in dogs on death-row and find them permanent homes; and with the ASPCA to save dogs from cruelty and disaster situations and place them in safe homes.

Proceeds will also benefit the shelter's various programs that help special needs of children, along with educating, mentoring and implementing SASF's "Playing For Life" program, created by their Training & Behavior Director, Aimee Sadler, which is currently in over 40 shelters and highlighted at the major animal conferences across the country.

Carole Bauhs, R. Couri Hay, and Joe Alexander

Sandra McConnell and Charles McConnell

Renee Schlather and Jonathan McCann

Jean Remmel Little

Larry Wohl and Leesa Rowland

Kevin Maple, Marianne Epley, and Mayor Mark Epley

Lucia Hwong Gordon, Grace Lee, Kathy Reilly, Randi Schatz, Nicole Noonan, and Tara Mulrooney

Nancy Stone

Raya Knight and Clif Knight

Kim Dryer

Valentine Hernandez, Yaz Hernandez, Basil Zirinis, and Sandra McConnell

Gary Lawrance and Zita Davisson

Alex Donner and Harry Buhl

Photographs by Richard Lewin (East Hampton Historical Society).

Contact DPC here.

New York Life Building and The Empire State Building. 9:00 PM. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013. Temperatures in the 80s, but it’s Summertime, and not so humid, thankfully. A beautiful day, yesterday in New York.

I went down to Michael’s to have lunch with Brooke Hayward who came in from Connecticut for the occasion. Liz Smith came by the table and as she left, she said to Brooke: “Write another book,” referring to a sequel to her best-selling “Haywire” which was re-published last year. Brooke responded by shaking her head and waving her hands as if to say: I don’ wannit!

Unbeknownst to me she planned it as a birthday lunch, as mine is coming up on Friday. For this we had the “cake” which in this case was two scoops of coconut ice cream and a slice of coconut cake. Steve Millington somehow remembered I liked coconut ice cream. And cake. Brooke didn’t want but one taste so I had to eat it all.

Old Wild-Eyes at table with Brooke Hayward, who arranged for and surprised me with the birthday dessert yesterday at Michael's.

Close-up of the plate, designed by Michael's General Manager Steve Millington, who also took these pictures.

On Monday Al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based international broadcaster privately-owned by Al Jazeera Media Network, named Kate O’Brian, the 54-year-old, former ABC News senior vice-president, as president for the new Al Jazeera America, which will go on-air August 20th.

I don’t watch television very much, and I never watch any of the news shows. I got out of the habit a long time ago. I used to watch news, especially network news a long time ago from the days of Huntley-Brinkley, Walter Cronkite and even early Dan Rather. I don’t know why I stopped. I must have been without a tv somewhere in my travels and didn’t have access.


Edward R. Murrow.

In their inception and early years, tv had to compete with print and the only way was to inform the public. They worked hard at it. I remember when Ted Turner changed everything on tv news with his 24-hour programming. Mr. Turner was a real media tycoon in that he changed our habits and even our thinking at times. NPR was popular but was only on public-funded stations. They reported stories you didn’t get on network, but because of their outlets, had a smaller audience.

Network news in the days of radio and early television was as competitive as print. CBS led the pack. But as late as 1960, New York had seven dailies. Reporters fought for stories. Radio naturally morphed into television and its early newscasters and news directors also competed for stories and exclusives. America watched Edward R. Murrow’s“See It Now” and his documentaries on the state of the nation and its health and learned.

Then two things happened that ultimately changed the approach to news in both TV and print: the war in Viet Nam War, and then Watergate. After the Viet Nam exit, so too went a lot of hard reporting and news.

It was the Viet Nam War news on television that turned the public against the war itself. Because of what they were seeing in their living rooms nightly -- the casualties, and the blood and human catastrophe. Many millions marched in the streets across the land in protest, and for a long time. The protest seemingly did not affect government policy as the war escalated. But eventually it wore down the policy so that the leadership began to look for a way out to keep its power. Lyndon Johnson forsook a re-election because of the public sentiment.

Nixon visting the troops in Viet Nam. This photo was taken at the beginning of his Presidency when the war was still escalating although people were hopeful because he was assuring the nation that he had a plan to end it.

Then along came Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal – which is largely unknown to our young adult population but which had the entire nation riveted to the television for weeks in the middle of the summer, with the Senate Watergate Hearings. We learned what has and had oft been said: politicians (among others) lie and cheat and steal and even do a few other things that the citizens would not condone. It was the first time in the history of the nation that the President had to resign from office – or face an impeachment trial.

After Richard Nixon resigned, he granted an on-camera interview to David Frost who was known for his trenchant questioning of his guests. This was a big “get” for Frost (and Nixon was handsomely compensated) since the “disgraced President” as he was often referred to in the media, had become reclusive.


	Frost and Nixon.

The appearance turned out to be a good move for Mr. Nixon, not unlike the way one can let some fresh air into a room by opening the doors and windows. He was still as compelling a national political figure, as he had been since his early days in Congress.

Frost finally asked him “what” he (Nixon) thought caused “Watergate.” It’s important to know that by then (a year or more after Nixon resigned), Watergate was now being referred to in the media as “a second rate burglary.”

So, what did Mr. Nixon think was the “cause” of the Watergate scandal (and the man’s personal political tragedy)? Without skipping a beat, the former President responded “Viet Nam.”

Viet Nam changed not only Richard Nixon’s life but it changed the news. We don’t see carnage anymore on network news. Which is fine with me. Although, ironically, we see more and more and more of it in film and television entertainment for the mass audience. Even the news for many has become an entertainment or a kind of reality show. And we don’t learn anything that the Powers That Be, whoever they are, be they corporate or politics, don’t want us to know.

Al Jazeera evidently is not that. I know several people – none of them left-wing or hardliners about anything political – who only watch Al-Jazeera for news. And why: “it’s the only television news that really tells you what’s going on and doesn’t soft-pedal it.”

In other words, it’s ambitiously competitive. The old fashioned way.


The young columnist Jack O'Brian, circa 1950, at the Stork Club.

His daughter Kate O'Brian, who is the new president of Al Jazeera America, which debuts on August 20.

When I saw the news that Ms. O’Brian had been appointed, I suddenly thought of Jack O’Brian, a columnist and journalist for the Hearst papers and later a radio talk show host on WOR for decades. O’Brian was in the thick of his career in New York from the 1960s through the 1980s. I happened to meet him when I first came to New York because he was a close friend of the stepfather of a girl who was a friend of mine.

Hearing about Kate O’Brian’s new position, I could only wonder if there were a connection with Jack O’Brian I knew. I recalled once visiting him and his wife Von with my friend at the O’Brians. They lived on the Upper East Side with their two very young daughters. One was named Kate. After that initial meeting, I never knew what happened to either of the girls.

So I Googled Kate O’Brian on Monday and got this picture. She doesn’t look like her father if you compare the photograph we have of him in his thirties, but she sure looked like she could be his daughter. A chip off the old block maybe.

Now that was interesting. Because there was a clear resemblance. The “old block” was a hardnosed newsman and columnist. And with legendary ambition. He started out as a cub reporter working for the local paper in his hometown of Buffalo. When he got to New York by the late 1930s, he somehow fell in with, insinuated himself with, Walter Winchell -- the one-and-only-and-never again. Talk about competitive.

Winchell wrote a daily Broadway column that was read daily by 30 million people. In the world of New York and Broadway and politics, no one had such power that Winchell had over public opinion. No one, in print or on camera ever topped his readership number – and the population of the country then was less than half what it is now. Farmers out in Iowa read his “gossip” every day.


	J. Edgar Hoover and Walter Winchell.

Winchell could make or break. He was a big booster of FDR. He was palsy with J. Edgar Hoover, the most feared man in America. He was a lot of things, including a reporter who trolled the clubs, the New York nightlife which was a thousand times what it is today, and regularly cruised around New York nightly with the cops responding to calls.

The story “Sweet Smell of Success,” written by Ernest Lehman for the old Cosmopolitan Magazine (Hearst) was a kind of roman a clef of Winchell and his ways published in 1950. Years later the man who bought the story for the magazine, then story editor David Brown, brought it to 20th Century-Fox and Burt Lancaster played the brutally tough Winchell character and Tony Curtis played his brutally tough/stop-at-nothing cohort. That character was said to have been based on two of Winchell’s henchmen, a press agent named Irving Hoffman, and Jack O’Brian.

When I came to New York just out of college, Jack O’Brian was television critic for the Journal-American. Television was new, and it was growing fast and changing content quickly. Jack O’Brian could be brutal in his assessments of what he was watching. He had his favorites – people like Cronkite, Bert Lahr (the Cowardly Lion from “The Wizard of Oz” and Perry Como). But he dismissed others by the busloads, often with a single jolt of a quip. Once, when it was announced that actor Franco Nero was taking on the role Robert Goulet created in the original Broadway cast of “Camelot,” Nero’s press agents were flacking that the part would do for Nero’s career what it did for Goulet. O’Brian asked in his column: “What? Turn him to stone?”

Jack O'Brian's "The Voice of Broadway" column (which was the name and layout of his predecessor Dorothy Kilgallen's column), in the New York Journal-American. O'Brian took over the column when Kilgallen died unexpectedly. This was the most prestigious column other than Cholly Knickerbocker in the Hearst newspapers and syndicate. When the paper closed, O'Brian took his talents to WOR where he had a daily radio talk show which was heard all over the country.

Jack O’Brian was one of at least a dozen columnists writing for the Journal-American daily, and he was not the top (that was Dorothy Kilgallen), but he had the savvy to turn his spot into controversy, even very annoying controversy. There was more than one actor, TV celebrity, author, singer who got whacked with one of Jack O’Brian’s asides. And dozens who had tales to tell of their Jack O’Brian jabs in print.

His big break came after the untimely death of Dorothy Kilgallen – he was given her spot and Broadway was his beat. He was well prepared, and occupied that place until the J-A finally closed several years later. Then he moved on to radio where he had a daily show on WOR talking and interviewing celebrity guests. He occupied that spot almost twenty years, and he died eleven years ago in 2000 at the age of 86.

He was a classic Irish-American New York journalist – hard biting, pugnacious, quick-witted, ambitious and – when he wanted to be – warm and friendly, and very sociable.

Because of my friendship with the girl whose stepfather was O’Brian’s friend, he would often invite us to join him and his beautiful young wife Von on Friday nights at the Stork Club. There we would sit at the fabled Table 50 (the corner table) in the fabled Cub Room (the Stork’s version of the VIP room).

Often we were the only ones occupying the room. It was the final years of the Stork, and it was obvious even to a young kid from the sticks, starry-eyed though I was. It didn’t draw a big crowd, although it was still doing business.


	Ernest Hemingway, Sherman Billingsley, and John O'Hara at the Stork Club.

And Sherman Billingsley, its owner founder was on hand every night, and often joined our table for a chat. One night I asked him if there were ever famous people he didn’t like having in his club. “Two,” he answered immediately. “Who?” “John O’Hara and Frank Sinatra.” “Why?” “Because both guys were such bad drunks you never knew what they were gonna do to anybody.”

Table 50 at the Stork with Jack and Von O’Brian was sometimes joined by two youngish men (although much older than I and my friend) – Si Newhouse and Roy Cohn. The two had grown up together and to this new kid in town, they looked like cousins. I later learned that were lifelong friends sicne boyhood.

Roy Cohn was already famous across America because of his relationship to Senator McCarthy and his witch hunts for Communists. Si Newhouse was not as well known to the public at the time, although I recognized the name because his father Si Sr. had acquired the local Springfield, Massachusetts dailies which were read in my parents’ house.

After the Stork we’d often wander the few up Fifth Avenue to Reuben’s, the famous 24 hour deli-restaurant on the corner of 58th and Fifth across from Bergdorf’s where we’d have a late night famous Reuben’s pastrami sandwich. Some nights we’d walk a few blocks west to Lindy’s, another famous all-nighter where the Broadway crowd came for the famous cheesecake, washed down by a beer or a shot before bedtime. That was the very beginning of my education of New York.

All of this crossed my mind on Monday afternoon when the notable media move of Ms. Kate O’Brian was announced (on the internet). I emailed another friend who knew the O’Brians and asked if she were Jack and Von’s Kate. I wasn’t surprised to learn she was.

I have my doubts that the lady has quite the same temperament as her late father. I don’t doubt that he adored her and must have been very proud late in his life to see the progress she made in his business. I wondered what he would have thought of her going to work for the Arabs, things being the way they are in the minds of those who wear their opinions like badges at times. In some way, I’ll bet, he would have been proud of that too. He already knew who his girl really was/is. He would have recognized that she had the competitive edge and was prepared to take on the major media outlets and show them What For. A chip off the old block, as I said. This is New York.

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Looking north towards downtown Manhattan. 4:00 PM. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch.

Thursday, July 25, 2013. Sunny and warm but decidedly milder yesterday in New York, with temperatures dropping to the low 70s by mid-evening.

I passed my drivers test today. I haven’t had a driver’s license since it expired ten years ago and I somehow never renewed it. It must have gone to an earlier address and never found its way to me. But I bought a car recently (a good used car owned by some friends who had been leasing it). It was her car and she hardly ever drove it – at least by New York standards – a black Mini Cooper convertible with a brown top, and brown leather seats and 9000 miles. My friend who picked it out and owned it has great taste, and is practical.


	My Mini Cooper, finally ready to drive.

Being without certification, I had to go through the process once again for the getting of a driver’s license. You don’t just go up to the counter and say: Hi, I’m here, gimme a new license. Uh-uh; you go up to the bureaucracy, you wait in line, and it drags you into a den of endless documentation gathering. However, many who led me through were courteous and kind, all the way.

I’ve been driving since I was sixteen, which was the legal age back in the 1950s. I don’t remember my driving test except that you had to get the hand signals right or forget it. Now hand signals have been replaced by more adequate and dependable signal lights. So I didn’t have to worry about flubbing that one.

I went to Yonkers, just to get out the city’s chaos for a few minutes and in search of shorter lines. (It was a good idea.) It’s just up the Henry Hudson Parkway, beyond Riverdale, and bureaucracy out of the big town is a picnic compared to the DMV down on Wall Street which can feel like waiting for the subway that’s always late.

There are three steps. You take a written test. I remember the original as being a lot harder than the one I took this time. And although I passed this one, I got two wrong. When I asked which ones they were, for my own edification, I was told they were not allowed to tell you. Okay, onward. What ever Lola wants ...

Across the street from the DMV is the Yonkers Metro-North Railroad station, built in 1911 for the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad. The architects were Warren and Wetmore, one of the firms responsible for Grand Central Terminal.

The second step is the Five Hour Driving School class. Yes, From 11 in the morning till four in the afternoon. If you’re an old driver, it’s a snooze and although the intention seems noble, it reeks of politics from the pork barrel. If you’re new, well, you need it. The teacher, a former postman who decided to keep working after retirement, was mild and genial and adjourned us an hour early just to keep everyone awake. I found myself studying him. His story about himself spoke of a man who had common sense and has found his path to constant youth through work. And the rent too maybe. He wasn’t a good speech maker or lecturer, but he told us little anecdotes about himself that were folksy and nice. They weren’t funny or sad or witty or weird. They just weren’t anything. But the man’s intent, his wish to do his job well, shone through. Then as the dramatist, I switched my purview and wondered if when he got home to the wife, he turned into House Devil, as they used to say in his parents’ days. Then I thought, nah, he’s just a nice guy.

As it happened I did learn something from his class. Or rather had something reaffirmed, something that I find is one of the most difficult rules of all (in life), viz., Watch Out.

I never looked at my Road Test Evaluation until last night when I was writing this Diary. I only learned then that I had 15 points against a perfect evaluation: poor judgment in turning and making a "short right." Funny, I don't venture out anymore than I have to.

Watch Out. That’s the secret of good driving. And there are a lot of people who are not in on it. Dogs, maybe yes; people, no. Nor are we in a learning mode. Nowadays what that term would mean to many of us moving around the city on foot, or bikes, or in cars, is: Keep your watch where you can see it when you wear it.

So, after getting my certificate of Driving School, i.e., a Learner’s Permit, I made an appointment for the test. Six weeks wait. I knew that was going to happen. So I waited. As I waited I began to get nervous about my ability to drive since I hadn’t driven much in all those ten years. I had actually “driven” a few times, after my license expired. But very rarely.


DPC with his papers.

The first time I went out for the “Drivers Test” with my learner’s permit, I encountered what it’s like to be on the road with a lot of people who don’t watch out, and even people who are “watching” something else, i.e., their cell phones, while driving. Anxiety entered the picture. I was re-entering the brave new world via the automobile.

Yesterday was graduation. My friend, neighbor and NYSD "Art Set" columnist Charlie Scheips drove me up to Yonkers to a quiet four lane (with island) strip, where the test begins, on the edge of the city near the Cross County Parkway. There were four cars waiting for the two officials giving the tests. I got in the drivers seat of the car, we drove up the road. It was a local neighborhood of single family houses, slightly hilly, little traffic.

He instructed me to take a right. I did. Down another road to a light. Red. I waited. Some other cars passed. I was instructed to take a left. I did. Another stop sign. Okay, now a right. Down another road where he told me to stop and make a three point U-turn. I did. Back up the road. Another stop sign. Parallel park the car behind a car. Not a problem. Then back to the corner; a left, a left, and presto, it’s over. Ten minutes.

I wasn’t nervous, I was surprised to learn. And now I have wheels. Doesn’t anybody say that anymore, “wheels?”

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Subway searching. 3:00 PM. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch.

Tuesday, July 30, 2013. Yesterday was a beautiful, sunny Summer day in New York.

I never take vacations. I don’t say that to boast. I think it’s the conditioning of my proletarian Congregationalist conditioning as a kid. Word hard or perish. For many it would probably seem pathetic. They may be right. Or, they may be wrong. Furthermore, a writer is always challenged to find a way to earn a living.

However, these past few weeks have been a kind of vacation for me. A summer vacation. In thinking about it, I realized, ironically it was because of the heat. New Yorkers stayed home as much as they could, and inside. Those who could left town (and got the same thing wherever they went in the Northeast corridor). Aside from occasionally going out to an early dinner, I had more time. To read. All pleasure, nothing challenging.


Click to order"I Told You So."

This past weekend I read“I Told You So; Gore Vidal Talks Politics/Interviews with Jon Wiener.”

The opening page after the copyright page contained the quote of Gore: “The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.” The blurb on the cover has a quote by Dick Cavett: “Best talker since Oscar Wilde.”

Although Mr. Cavett couldn’t have been around when Wilde was propounding his poetic wit for any and all to listen to. I never imagined what that would have been like until I read Cavett’s quote. Because Gore Vidal is endlessly interesting on a number of levels.

The only problem I have with his interviews is there are times when I think he thinks he knows everything. Then there I times when I think he knows everything too, comparing him to myself who knows little if anything. So it’s a good problem.

The book is four or five interviews, conducted with the man at various community or university auditoriums. The subjects touched upon are politics, history, historical figures, Hollywood figures, scandals and fiascos. He fills you in where you probably never had been. He is impressively knowledgeable about many things, especially historical characters down through the ages. The good part about that message is Keep Reading.

So I did. If you like Gore Vidal, you will not be disappointed. If you don’t like Gore Vidal, you shouldn’t waste your time. When we read with rancor we deprive ourselves of truth.

Then after the Vidal interviews — it was a quick read, a very nice little book; like watching it on TV with no noise in the room — after that one I picked up the new “My Lunches with Orson; Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles.” Edited by Peter Biskind. If you’re a fan or an historian of movie lore, or even if you just like watching those great old movies on TCM. Like a compulsive habit; buy this book.

Orson Welles at table. I once saw him there. He was the size of the table — round table — sitting in a tiny nook of a private room, separated from public view by a curtain in the old Ma Maison on Beverly Boulevard. Dressed all in black, vast in size, somewhat darkly menacing yet oddly sorrowful in presence, it was almost like Hollywood noir come to life; “The Third Man” sixty years later. I moved along that day I saw him, knowing I wasn’t supposed to be there.

Gore Vidal.


	Click to order“My Lunches with Orson."

Henry Jaglom was there and Welles let him record their conversations. They were compiled into an interview and that was mentioned and understood by both parties. Entirely a Q & A. A very quick read of course — again like watching a great docu about the business of Show and Hollywood.

Both parties knew that a good interview is a good conversation. So that’s what we get. That’s where all the stuff comes out when you’re talking to an actor or an artist.

Welles loved to talk, loved to reminisce, to recount the era, the personalities, the likes and the loathings. He’s witty and fun and smart and yet obviously at the same time very vulnerable to his ultimate condition. The latter was irrelevant when Welles had the floor and the attention. The wunderkind, now emeritus, took over.

As you may know, Vidal and Welles were both charming conversationalists as well as very bright, sharp and intelligent. They apparently shared many of the same attitudes toward universal questions. They did meet but it seems that it didn’t develop into a great friendship. Although, after reading the two back to back, I could only imagine would have made a highly fascinating duo of an interview about their worlds — literature, film, theatre and politics. Now and forever. But it may also be the room wasn’t big enough for the two of them together.

October 30, 1938, Orson Welles in the Mercury Radio Theatre at his War of the Worlds, Invasion from Mars Broadcast on CBS; sent millions of Amerians into panic it was so believable. Or so they thought.

Orson Welles and Henry Jaglom in 1983, two years before Welles' death.

Divorce Bel Air Style. Robert Day, the billionaire Superior Oil heir and international investor, is divorcing his beautiful wife Kelly. The Days have been married for a number of years, and quite happily according to close friends.


Kelly and Robert Day.

But evidently Mr. Day, who is from one of the rich oil families of Los Angeles, the grandson of William Keck (who founded Superior Oil), a man who is now celebrating his 70th year, wants to go it alone.

This may be true but out in them thar hills there isn’t a stadium large enough to hold all the beautiful young things who wouldn’t mind being married to their very own Croesus, who is known to be very generous when it comes those rocks that shine like chandeliers. Plus he knows everybody everywhere and has a very interesting life.

Kelly, a classic Southern California beauty, is also a lovely person with lots of friends. I was told that Robert has bought her a Bel Air mansion of her very own, given her upwards of $250 million, and a brand new Bentley so she’ll enjoy the ride.

Forbes Magazine says that Mr. Day is worth around $1.4 billion but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s just what he keeps in his checking. For emergencies. Good luck to two nice people.

Luncheon at Michaels: LuAnn de Lesseps, Nikki Haskell, Joan Collins, Kelly Day, and Debbie Loeffler.

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Taking in the city. 5:00 PM. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch.

Wednesday, July 31, 2013. Warm, sunny Summer’s day, yesterday in New York.

Yesterday I went to lunch with Cornelia Guest at Michael’s. Cornelia just returned from a trip to Positano and then to a new spa outside of Valencia, Spain. She was interested in it because the diet was macrobiotic, which she likes, and it offers many new de-tox and health restoration techniques. She loved it all.

We also got into talking about Los Angeles and summers out there where the heat is usually easier to take and where Hollywood dominates the thoughts of many who live there. We concurred that it was a most interesting place to live.

Cornelia and I talked about living out in Hollywood pursuing our dreams. She laughed at a thought she was having, and then told me that she never forgot the “advice” Sammy Davis Jr. gave her when she first arrived in Tinseltown: “Just remember, No one knows where the nose goes after the doors close.”

Coincidentally, a reader of the NYSD in Los Angeles, having read my report yesterday on the Gore Vidal, I Told You So book, sent me this message last night:

In the last years of his life, I saw Mr. Vidal on a regular basis at the Polo Lounge (in the Beverly Hills Hotel). He was in a wheelchair and had a (very nice) male nurse. Gore would sit next to the piano player and sing standards and show-tunes for hours. He knew it was the end. When he sang, "My Way", he very loudly emphasized the words "THE END IS NEAR, and so I face, the final curtain." Still, he seemed happy. He enjoyed talking to the people in the restaurant and would sometimes invite people back to his home to listen to opera.

In the book of Vidal interviews (“I Told You So”) he laments the loss of language and historical knowledge in the generations that have followed him, pointing out that the younger filmmakers have no sense of living, but more a sense of movies, which of course is not the same thing.

It occurred to me that his singing those songs in public was not only a pleasure but another way for him to demonstrate the loss he was referring to. When I received the above story, I was reminded that I like to do the same thing. Sit there by the piano and sing. I’m not good at it and I can play but I’m basically a banger with a heavy pedal. Nevertheless, the pleasure of the words and the wit of the composers is pure joy.

There’s a radio show that I often listen to on WFUV-FM (90.7) called “The Big Broadcast.” It runs from 8 p.m. to midnight every Sunday evening, and it is hosted by a man named Rich Conaty. Rich plays the recordings from the American Songbook of the 1910s, '20s and '30s. Each week he honors the musicians, composers, lyricists and vocalists who were born on a day of that week and plays their work.

He is also an old-time DJ, the kind who fills the space between recordings with factual patter about the songs and recordings, and an occasional corny joke that nudges pleasant memories of another era (the one where these songs originated).

You can stream the show also all week long. I stream it frequently during the week. It’s almost an obsession that has provoked me to thinking about why I like it so much. It is not the music I grew up with, which was rock, although I was born at the tail end of the pop music era.

It is the music of my mother and father’s generation, those who were born at the beginning of the century and came into their prime by the 1950s. I would hear this on the radio when I was a kid. One of my aunts was great on the upright and she played a lot of those tunes too.

What draws me to the material is the message, its sentiment and the wit of the lyricists. Cole Porter for example from his title song of the Ethel Merman show, Anything Goes:“When you hear that Lady Mendl standing up Now does a handspring landing up On her toes, Anything Goes ...”

It was an age of popular romance and humorous hijinks. The words were the ticket to dream. Most of the songs had to do with love, romance, disappointment because of it, exultation and joy because of it, hilarity and cleverness, and often framed by wonderful music and at times genius musicianship. Respect abounds.

It is called nostalgia which unfortunately reduces its importance historically. But so be it. Hearing it played, sung, performed, underscores the loss of innocence that now confronts us in the dawn of the 21st century. Here in New York, for example, the conversations I hear about these days are about Anthony Weiner who is running for mayor. If you don’t know about Mr. Weiner’s extra-curricular carnal activities, good for you. He has been roundly condemned for his behavior/personal choices – although truthfully that kind of behavior is rampant in our world today – just as Facebook has changed the meaning of the world “friend.” Instead of connoting a personal experience, the word also doubles (very frequently) as a marketing tool. You could say Mr. Weiner is a walking marketing tool, if you’ll pardon my French.

Gore might have expressed it this way in his Polo Lounge concerts:“You and the night and the Music, Thrill me but will we be one, after the night and the music are done?”

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Letting the air in. 4:30 PM. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch.

Thursday, August 1, 2013. Beautiful weather in New York. Temperatures in the high 80s but not humid. Breezy by the river.

It was Wednesday. I went to Michael’s to lunch with Norah Lawlor who has her own public relations firm, Lawlor Media Group. Norah is Canada born and bred. She is tall with a commanding presence but a steadfast humility about her. She got into the business, fresh out of university about the same time that I came back to New York from Los Angeles, about twenty years ago. In that time she’s built a strong business dealing in charity events, beauty, hospitality and retail. She’s a Capricorn. They keep busy.


	Norah Lawlor.

Michael’s was its a-clattering Wednesday self.Herb Siegel was at his regular table 5 with his son Bill Siegel and another guest. Right next to him, Vartan Gregorian was lunching with the Ambassador to Afghanistan; next door was Gerry Byrne, Vice Chair of Penske Media with Maryann Halford, finance and digital media consultant; Simone Levinson was with our Deputy Mayor Patti Harris; CNBC’sRon Insana; Harold Holzer, Senior VP at the Metropolitan Museum, occupied Table One which looked liked a powwow of a working (delicious) lunch. Interiors-interiors, Steven Stolman of Scalamandre with Tristan Butterfield of Kohler. (Steven was featured in this past Friday’s HOUSE interview); tabloid impresario David Pecker with David Zinczenko publisher of his newly re-launched Men’s Fitness, along with Diane Clehane. Clehane’s lunches are interviews and she’s assiduous in getting her story which is published later in the afternoon on mediabistro.com. Next to them, Micky Ateyeh and guests. Nearby: Endeavor’s Ari Emanuel, brother of Rahm, the Mayor of Chicago, with David Zaslav, prez of the Discovery Channel; Chris Meigher of Quest with Lesley Stevens of LaForce and Stevens public relations. Moving around the room, Jack Kliger of TV Guide; Bobby Friedman the guy who had lunch with Leo DiCaprio a couple of weeks ago; the irrepressible Jason Binn, publisher of DuJour; Stu Zakim of Bridge Strategic (PR) with Mike Berman (bermanmeansbusiness.com); Diane Whiteley of Entertainment Weekly; Webster Stone, Nick Verbitsky of United Stations; Elizabeth Watson; Pamela Mohn; Tom Goodman of Goodman Media; Scott Marden; David Sanford and Lewis Stein who just married after 44 years together; Shane Glass of Hearst and dozens more who escaped my eye.

There’s nothing listed on the Social Calendar right now and so there’s time to read. I mentioned the “My Lunches with Orson; Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles” edited by Peter Biskind. I started it over the weekend, having read a taste of it in New York magazine a month ago. I love this book. It’s a great antidote to all the heavy stuff around us, and it’s two very smart men talking about their lives and their world.

I grew up hearing that Orson Welles was a genius, a boy wonder in the movie business. I didn’t know what that meant except my mother told me that back in the '30s he had a weekly show on the radio (The Mercury Theatre) that was very popular. One night he did a show depicting an invasion from Mars. It was so believable that millions of Americans listening in went into a panic that we’d been invaded by Martians.

That show made him a star with the popular audience. He was already a successful interpreter of Shakespeare and world famous for it, a true wunderkind. He made “Citizen Kane” in 1941 in 1941, a cinematic roman a clef inspired by the lives of William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies. The film was controversial at the outset because Hearst was outraged and powerful. RKO, the studio distributing it, was also owned by the Rockefellers (who later sold it to Howard Hughes) and Hearst was powerful enough to make them nervous.

Welles was married more than once. His first or second wife was Rita Hayworth with whom he had a daughter Rebecca and whom he starred in his classic “The Lady From Shanghai.”

Little if any of this information is in the book. It’s a conversation, taped at lunch at Ma Maison, the popular restaurant in West Hollywood, in the early '80s. By this time the boy wonder was an aging man of great girth, whose career was essentially known as “washed—up” in the lingo of the industry that once glorified him. So there is a subtext to this conversation. This is a man who has seen the heights and the lows and is, to use Stephen Sondheim’s ".... Still Here.”

Welles the man, despite his aging-ness and unraveled careers, retains a fresh and youthful, if somewhat edgey outlook on life. He covers so much territory and he’s so highly engaging because of his knowledge and his wit, and his vast scope of interests.

You get why he was a wunderkind, so sure of himself and yet so much the wiser, always willing to concede as if there is a possibility he might learn something more.

The two men discuss film, the industry, the stars but then that leads to the world, to travel, to legendary characters from our popular culture, historic figures, authors, artists, stars; sex of course – albeit briefly and quickly. It’s a mad dash of energy that pours out.

The Lady from Shanghai, 1947.

It was Henry Jaglom’s idea it was to tape Welles in conversation. There’s relationship there – older director/younger director discussing the business. Jaglom’s great esteem for Welles is palpable throughout, but he holds his own with this powerful personality and the respect is mutual. Nearly finished with the book, I realized that Jaglom was “directing” this all along, as if it were a filmed, and he sets it up to bring out his star, Orson Welles.

There’s insight, show biz tales told with a director’s eye for scene. There’s dishing the stars and producers and their dances with power, and international politics. You get the feeling that Welles could talk about anything and keep you riveted. He’s very very smart, and practically bursting with creative thinking. You don’t go for long before he punches up a laugh about someone or something, including himself.

Orson Welles and Henry Jaglom.

People who are students of film perhaps know this about him – an enormous personality that was part of this enormous talent that came out of the boy from Minnesota who became one of the most famous stars of classic theatre by the time he was 20. Knowing the man was regarded as brilliant that young age, Jaglom brings to us the mature man who is still young at his (late, for him) age, and charming, and amusing.

It is a “performance” with a deep subtext. The former wunderkind/star is saddled with the burden of those years of accumulation of excesses, and a career that ebbed practically to non-existence in a town where only one thing matters.

Anyone you know who loves the Turner Classic Movies library or any lovers of Shakespeare and the classics, or the politics of the mid-20th century when the world changed so dramatically into modern times – or anyone who is just in the mood to be entertained by a man who knows more than you do, or probably often thought so – will love this book. Taped thirty years ago, it’s as fresh as if it were made yesterday. Welles can’t resist being a know-it-all, spinner of truths and tales. It’s one of the things you like about him; and yet he demonstrates his own vulnerability throughout.

Click to order My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles.

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