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| Golfing at the Breakers in Palm Beach (taken with a camera phone). 4:45 PM. Photo: JH. |
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| April 10, 2009. Yesterday was a perfect early Spring day in New York with only the slightest chill in the shadows but warm in the Sun. The pears are beginning to blossom. I love those trees which at their height look like clusters of the whitest, lightest bunches of popcorn just ripe for the picking. Then about three or four days later, it turns green and we have to wait another year for that particular blessing of nature’s beauty. I went to lunch at Swifty’s with a friend of mine who is a real estate broker (high end). It’s impossible not to get onto the subject of apartments and prices and how’s it going. And who’s it going. My friend told me there was a moment last November when it wasn’t going. No selling, no buying, no nothing. Like it just stopped. However, last year at this time there were something like four apartments at over five million under contract. This year, one year later, there are twenty-four. So from my friend’s assessment, that’s how it’s going.
After lunch I got a call from a journalist doing a story on the Housewives of New York. The journalist called me about Luann de Lesseps because she’s been on the NYSD fairly often. I met Luann with her husband Alex about ten years ago here in New York, through a friend of mine who is an old friend of theirs. It might have been less or more in terms of time. They were living in Malta. We had drinks one late Sunday afternoon in a restaurant on the upper East Side. Alex is very Euro although kind of Americanized. He’s relaxed with himself, easy to get to know. Luann is/was very American, almost small town girl. I knew she wasn’t because of our mutual friend: the de Lesseps had lived in what for Americans was/is a very international world, a kind of social world that is both Old World and new. That is generally unlike the American social experience. Luann was ready to spend more time in America. She wanted to pursue her career as an actress. She has that: she likes the limelight. It’s authentic. Anyone who’s ever wanted to be an actress, has that. The stars have it in spades. Luann’s American-ness was so pronounced compared to her husband’s European-ness that I had the impression that Alex was a very democratic sort of person. In conversation that seemed so. We mainly talked about current events and international politics. Alex’s views were Euro-oriented, which is always interesting to these American ears. At the time he was involved with some hotel development in Havana, as are many Europeans, and so his take on that situation in relationship to the rest of the world was enlightening. He sees an interesting world.
As a couple they seemed hand in glove. He was the center, or so it seemed. He had authority. But she was not attentive but complementary. I had no idea, nor was I told at the time that they were count and countess. It almost seemed funny when I first heard that because they had none of the American-presumed hauteur or stuffiness of Euro-titled. I’ve met a lotta counts and dukes and lords and ladies and many have gotta lotta that to dump on us lesser souls. Not the de Lesseps. I later heard that Luann was part Native American. That was interesting because she seemed so white-girl-American-small-town-but sophisticated. I liked her very much. Over the years I’ve seen both a few times although never to sit down and have another interesting conversation, as it was that Sunday afternoon. But that’s this New York life. I’d seen only clips of the show. It’s not a subject that interests me enough since I have little time in this over-stuffed schedule. But I looked last night. |
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| LuAnn and Kelly Bensimon are a type unlike the other girls. They’ve both been traveling in the same circles for a long time. They’re American but they’re international in experience. Whether they’ve absorbed it or not, they’ve been exposed to a very sophisticated world somewhere across the universe from “Housewives of New York.” It is a funny show. It’s so stupid. The people aren’t stupid but if you didn’t know better, you might easily think that. I don’t know Kelly or Luann well enough to know if they are really like that but they certainly aren’t in my experience of them. They seem so petty and pedantic. It’s not annoying. It is funny. But it is also stupid. Frankly I have met Jill Zarin a couple of times and again, my impression of her is far far away from the image on that show. They all seem entirely silly. Which may be, but I tend to doubt it. I do believe these women could feel or act that way given the right circumstances. But I also believe that the right circumstances have to do with having a camera on them. That and the ka-ching of excessive limelight. But that’s to be expected of almost any of us. |
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Mario and Ramona Singer, Governor David A. Paterson, and Jill and Bobby Zarin |
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| But really all that show is is Bread and Circuses. I don’t begrudge the producers. Whatta good idea! Who wudda thought? (Him)(Them?). I don’t begrudge the viewers because it is funny. It’s like watching Marie Antoinette on Zoloft (and on Mars). It’s certainly not like real life in the year of our Lord 2009. It’s not about us but it’s there because of us. So I concluded that Kelly and Luann, anyway, are just two wholesomely ambitious girls whose marriages have come to an end and they’re thinking of their futures and the roofs over their heads. If it means getting up in front of a camera and acting like an airhead for 23 minutes once a week, what’s so bad about your face on the cover of TV Guide. Beats an abandoning husband, you’d have to agree. And now for another slice of the loaf -- all natural, no preservatives and a word to the wise! |
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