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| Green streets. 5:00 PM. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch. |
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| 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? |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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Contact DPC here. |