3.31.10: The business called show | New York Social Diary

The business called show

Looking south along Park Avenue. 3:00 PM. No, school is not in session. Photo: JH.

The business called show. Rainy day. Michael’s for lunch. The place was crowded, considering the religious holidays that have slowed the pace of the city since many are away with their families.

We talked about the business called Media where everything goes faster everyday. And more. Print is about the news. Television is about the sensation, and the web is about the community. At their most effective they come together.

The news today is poorly reported. Many so-called journalists (once upon a time they were called reporters, or even news hacks) are neither knowledgeable or curious. Those who are write the best stories. But we are fed a lot of blather, no matter the medium, from people with vested interests of one sort or another.

Show Business. I took a cab through the park on my way home after lunch and decided to get off on East 80th Street and walk up to Crawford Doyle for a book. I passed E.A.T. which at 3:30 on a dull and rainy Tuesday afternoon was jammed.

Crawford Doyle is a bookstore between 81st and 82nd that’s been there for a long time. They also sell first editions of popular novels from earlier in the 20th century, and old catalogues from auctions at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, etc. It’s small but they’ve got a vast selection of fiction and non-fiction in hardcover and paperback. I went there because it occurred to me it was about time for a new Lapham’s Quarterly.

I’ve written before about this 4-times-a-year “literary” magazine put out by Lewis Lapham, who first came on my radar years ago when he was editor of Harper’s Magazine. So forgive any repeating myself. I’d never met him or even seen his picture, but I liked to read him because he’s a good teacher. You’ll learn something you didn’t know or hadn’t thought of. He has very strong opinions but he is perceptive with a clean eye, smart and fair; and has a keen eye for the hilarious and the absurd among us. And is probably conservatively liberal if you know what I mean. A West Coast version of Louis Auchincloss sans the Knickerbocker primness and the pursed lips.

(I recently learned that Mr. Lapham is a West Coast born and bred -- San Fran—grandson of a Lapham who started Texaco.)

Cut to chase. This new edition of Lapham’s Quarterly is devoted to Arts & Letters. Some of the contributors include Pushkin, van Gogh, Billie Holliday, Alexander Pope, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Zadie Smith, Balzac, Marianne Moore, Joel and Ethan Coen, Chopin, Chehkov and many more. The professor has assembled another star cast to teach us a few lessons and learn us a few things about life on this here planet of the Apes and Coyotes.


Billie Holiday.

Billie Holliday’s piece in this edition, excerpted from “The Lady Sings the Blues” written with William Dufty, tells the history of her famous song “Strange Fruit.” If you don’t the story (and I didn’t), even if you don’t know the song, although every Billy Holliday fan does, the story of how it came to be and what it became and did to the audiences and did to the singer – when she was twenty-four and met the man who wrote it, Lewis Allen – is very moving and once again, as the Professor had intuitively or instinctively planned for us students, evokes and provokes thought about the how’s and why’s and what if’s of things.

It’s fifteen bucks at your bookstores, Barnes and Noble, available on Amazon, by subscription. Get a copy and feast your eyes on Professor Lapham’s brainfood, turn a few lights on. You’ll never be the same and glad for it.

Meanwhile, I started out thinking of Show Business. I went to see Leslie Uggams open at Café Carlyle last night. More about that in a minute. My friend and neighbor Charlie Scheips joined me for the show. Next door to us was Rex Reed. He told me that the greatest show on Broadway right now is “Red” with Alfred Molina and a new young actor named Eddie Redmayne. It sounds like Redmayne is going to be a star.

He said the young British actor is just brilliant and that the show is fantastic. None of that’s a “quote” from Rex Reed because it’s not exactly what he said; it was what it sounded like. He’ll write what he thinks and make it much clearer (and probably even more alluring).

As it was, I felt like I should run down to the Golden theater right then and there and buy a ticket. Rex told me there are already lines around the block just to buy tickets for the future performances. It’s a two man show. It runs 90 minutes with no intermission and you take it home with you. Great Theater.

On my way to the Upper East Side via Central Park, looking south toward the Plaza where the horses and carriages turn off the main automobile route. 3 pm.

Great Theater. June Havoc the actress died this past Sunday in Connecticut. She was in her 90s. Up until a few years ago, for most of the 20th century, America knew the name June Havoc as an actress on film and the stage, a memoirist, playwright (“Marathon 33”) and as the sister of Gypsy Rose Lee.

At varying times, it should be noted, Gypsy Rose Lee was known as June Havoc’s sister. Her Baby Sister. Baby June, as she became immortalized in her big sister’s memoir, simply titled “Gypsy.”


	June Havoc, playwright with star Julie Harris in her autobiographical play, "Marathon 33," in 1967.

The sibling rivalry was evidently inevitable, thanks to Mama Rose. Both sisters have lived on as characters on the American scene for the past half century because of the musical version of the book, although many people today are unaware that “Gypsy” was a real person and not just a character in a musical play.

The real story of the hardscrabble life of those two girls with their tough-as-nails mother Rose riding the vaudeville circuit through the 1920s into the Great Depression and what they made of out that for themselves is one of the great American women’s sagas of the 20th century.

Miss Havoc, like her late sister (Gypsy died in 1970 at 59), was an animal lover, rescuer and protector.

Show Business Last night at the Carlyle. Leslie Uggams was making her club debut after eighteen years away from the New York audience. The room was packed with many who’ve been her fans and admirers for many more years than that, including Tommy Tune and the aforementioned Rex Reed.

She took us on a musical memoir. She first appeared on stage at the Apollo Theater on 125th Street in an amateur contest which she kept winning and winning until they finally booked her for the stage show. There the little one met the greats, like Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, and learned from all of them. And while she told us about this path and those stars who befriended the kid, she gave us some renditions of their famous songs.

From those Apollo days, Leslie, the kid from Washington Heights was working steadily in television and on stage and then in the mid-1960s she was cast to star on Broadway in “Hallelujah Baby!” written by Jule Styne and Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Broadway was having a golden era in those days although few were aware of it. “Fiddler,” Funny Girl,” Hello Dolly,” “West Side Story,” “Gypsy,” “Mame,” “Cabaret,” Neil Simon comedies, Edward Albee dramas, revivals of O’Neill, of Tennessee Williams, the choreography of Bob Fosse, of Jerome Robbins, “Chorus Line,” Michael Bennett. And Leslie Uggams.

She told us last night that she got that part in “Hallelujah Baby” because Lena Horne turned it down for whatever reason. For the past year she has been working on a musical version of the life of Lena Horne, “Stormy Weather,” which has played on the West Coast (Pasadena Playhouse) and in Philadelphia. Next stop Broadway.

Leslie Uggams has been pounding the boards, as they say, like Lena, like June, like Gypsy did before her, for decades earning her living and entertaining millions. The gamine is now the worldly woman who shares generously with her audience which loves her back. She’s at the Café Carlyle for only two weeks. This is a real return-to-earth New York evening, not to be missed if you can help it.

They held the New York premiere of Anne Bass' film "Dancing Across Borders" about the life of Cambodian dancer Sokvannara Sar at the SVA Theatre on 333 West 23 Street and a reception after at Cedar Lake Studios.

Mikhail Baryshnikov

Nina Griscom and Lily Baker

Sokvannara Sar

Todd Eberle

Chiara Clemente

Sam Shaeffer

Anne Bass and Olga Kostritzky

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Cece Cord and Hamish Bowles

Billy Norwich

Carolyn Roehm, Robert Couturier, and Blaine Trump

Barbara Bancroft

Anne Bass and Sokvannara Sar

Bill Cunningham

Jill Melhado and Peggy Siegal

DIFFA: Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS launched DINING BY DESIGN with 5-days of events running concurrently with the Architectural Digest Home Design Show at Pier 94, 12th Ave. at 55th Street in New York City from March 18th through Monday, March 22nd.

This year, Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber hosted the gala dinner in New York. DIFFA's DINING BY DESIGN bringing together some of the most talented and celebrated individuals in the worlds of fashion, interior design, art, and architecture to create spectacular, over-the-top dining environments.

The multi-city tour, which in past years has raised more than $13 million for DIFFA, featured dining installations by designers such as David Rockwell for Rockwell Group, David Stark for Benjamin Moore, Michael Tavano for New York Design Center, Poggenpohl for MMPI, David Beahm for Continental Airlines, Moore & Giles for Architectural Digest, Walt Disney Signature, Kravet Inc., Joseph Carini for Carini Lang, Alfredo Paredes for Ralph Lauren Home, Vicente Wolf for Artistic Tile, 2Michaels, Bradley Stephens, Eric Warner, Shelly Sabel Designs, Tracy Reese and Kiril Kirov Razortooth.

Guests at the gala dinner dined within the design installations, making the event a truly unique experience for all who attend. Following DINING BY DESIGN New York, DINING BY DESIGN will travel across the country to various cities.