These are beautiful late Spring days in New York. Maybe it’s just failing memory but I can’t remember a series of such beautiful days in a long long time.
Yesterday afternoon JH and I went to a meeting at Soho House, the private club in the Meatpacking District. If you’ve never been, it’s very rustic/Briddish hipped-up, pipped-up/warehouse sleek. Kind of like a very hip hotel where a certain set meet. The Now.
We met in a large private room (with glass walls) off the dining room, filled with low tables and comfortable chairs. The members are generally 20-40-something. Lots of laptaps around, opened; people working, meeting, lunching. Not crowded.
We eventually had to vacate our meeting room because of a big party coming in, so we went up to the roof where the pool is. That was a like a summer day in Manhatta under the most favorable circumstances; more favorable in fact than I’ve ever seen on this old isle of Manhattan, as close to LA luxe climate-wise as you could get here in the Big Apple. And all around -- views and views, fabulous views (because the city is low there).
Lots of poolside lounging, sunning, chatting, meeting, cell-phones. But bright, fresh mid afternoon sun; the slightest zephyr from the Hudson. Not a care in the world-land. I know that’s not the case, and certainly isn’t with me, but that’s what it felt like up there.
Not always. There is a story going around these days, very sotto voce but so sensational that many are wondering how long before the lid blows off. With a wow, and a pow!
It directly involves some very prominent New York names, a very rich and now very elderly; woman who has lived the last fifteen years of her life almost as a recluse in her palatial Upper East Side apartment and her house out on the East End. A great friend of hers, or rather, someone she thought was a great friend of hers, someone she trusted above and beyond her own children, someone she trusted her very large fortune with, ripped her off.
Ripped her off is the polite way of putting it, although the transfers or “investments” appeared to be quite legitimate in that there were business deals, maybe not the kind you’d associate with a nonagenarian, but nevertheless, etc.
And now, they say, it is Gee-Oh-Enn-Ee. All Gone. This could be the hyperbole of rumor although a family member is a friend of mine and the news is very bad. And very sad. She even had to borrow money to pay her taxes last year. Now she has met the final years of her life in the form of a brutal betrayal of what she grievously believed to be a friendship.
Some say there will be jail terms before it is over and a raft of names, associations with the friend; well-known, bigtime, social, celebrated, some implicated, most not, everyone looking for the guilt. Calling Dominick Dunne.
If you are reading this Diary on the East Coast of America in the late morning, your reporter and NYSD’s intrepid photographer/designer will be airborne for London and the opening of the Olympia Art Fair, one of the great Art Fairs of the World. The Olympia opens on Thursday.
When you tell people you are going to London, their faces light up. “ooh, London.” The city where you can still hear the footsteps of others on the pavement. We’ve never done the Olympia before.
One thing that we never realized when we started the NYSD was that we’d be covering so many of the great art and antique fairs of the world. But in the past seven years, we’ve been to dozens – in New York, Palm Beach, London, Paris, Maastricht, Moscow and back. I never considered it because my interest is peripheral curiosity and my bank account does not have such access. But they are very serious business, as you may have gathered by now. And very big money business. And big culture business.
They attract a wide array of fascinating people; people of power, money, wit, curiosity, scholarliness, acquisitiveness, and all the lovely genius of human foibles and fantasies that accompany such humanity. From a writer’s point of view, it’s a million stories and often astonishing.
Would I write them, could I write them? For me and a thousand others maybe, for there are so many. Just like the acquisitions, stories everywhere. Plus we get to see the history of art and artisanship of this civilization of ours, with its wit, its cleverness, its beauty and the serenity of the centuries. Hello London, hello!
|
