The Good Life

Man and dog take in the Fall foliage in Central Park. 3:30 PM. Photo: JH.

A very quiet Thanksgiving weekend in New York. The cabdrivers were complaining that the city was even quieter than last year. A cabdriver’s lament, however, can be a city-dweller’s dream. New York is never more glorious than a holiday weekend no matter the time of year. You really feel like you have the city to yourself (and you’re never alone anyway). Everything is more easily accessible and even more of a wonder. And in late autumn, New York was sparkling, sunny, and brisk. And quiet.


Sandy at last week's NYC Ballet opening night

Sandy Hill. I met Sandy Hill in 1990 when I was living in California and had come here to do some research for a book I never wrote. Our mutual friend Beth DeWoody invited me to spend the weekend with Sandy and her then husband Bob Pittman at their country house in Northwestern Connecticut. I’d read about Sandy in Suzy and in W. She was a very goodlooking, all-American-looking woman in her 30s. She and her husband – who already had a high profile in his business – were a new and dynamic young couple on the New York scene during the splashy days of what W called Nouvelle Society.

The house in Connecticut was right on the roadside, behind one of those old stone walls that the settling Colonial farmers put up while clearing their fields. The house had once been a long, one story stone barn, sitting on the edge of a pasture, which is what it still more or less looked like from the outside. Inside it had been completely converted into a contemporary country house with lots of space for a young family and weekend guests, and a bathroom with a bathtub in the middle of the room.

It was winter time and the weekend I was there Sandy was having had a plain old country dinner party for her friend Meredith Brokaw who’d just published a children’s book. Evidently a few weeks before she staged an “Elvis” party that had everyone talking because of the party, the get-ups and the heady guestlist. Fun, was the word for it.

ON this night everyone came dressed in jeans and sweaters. The group was mainly New York media and business people and the conversation was lively. Coincidentally, I was seated next to Geraldine Stutz who at the time was editor of a publishing arm of Random House. Mrs. Stutz was a legendary retailing executive in her day. Having developed boutique merchandising in a large store (Henri Bendel’s); she’d made fashion history. A few months after our meeting, she hired me to write an autobiography for Bobby Short (the results are another story).


	Our hostess on horseback for her Fandango luncheon

I obviously did not know Sandy Hill well enough at the time to know that she’s a big party giver, parties of all kinds. What I did see on introduction was that this beautiful bright-eyed young woman was very energetic in a way that is almost athletic. She was outdoorsy in nature although she was proficient as a hostess – organized, seamless in execution and very attentive in a make-yourself-at-home sort of way.

I did learn one other important fact about her on that first visit, however: she’s a California girl. California girls, the born and bred ones, in my opinion, have a little bit different a sensibility about how they live their lives: they just go out and DO IT. I think I first developed this notion from what I’d read of Joan Didion on subject. Didion is a California girl: they’re the descendents of the pioneer women. Glamorous as she can be, you can also imagine Sandy Hill as a pioneer woman.

So when I heard she was doing a cookbook a couple of years ago, I was .... wondering. I knew she could climb Everest, but ... a cookbook?

Well, it’s not a cookbook. I heard wrong. It’s a book about ... entertaining. And cooking. And eating. And living the good life and living it good.

“Fandango; recipes, parties, and license to make magic” (with recipes by Stephanie Valentine) is all of the above and something more. Something like a piece of memoir. It’s coffee table size. It’s beautiful, and beautiful all the way through. Everything looks scrumptious and this reader knows the author well enough to know that everything is as scrumptious as it looks because that’s her way of doing things. And there’s the great outdoors, which plays a very happy part in her style of living and entertaining, day or night. And it’s beautiful.

Mision de la Purisima Concepcion de la Santisima Virgin Maria. La Purisima Mission State Park in Lompoc, California was founded by Father Presidente Fermin de Lasuen on December 8, 1787. The original mission was damaged in 1812, known as El Ano de los Temblores (or the Year of the Earthquakes). This newer mission was built four miles from the original site.

I love this paragraph she wrote in the book’s introduction. She cuts right to the main ingredients:

“I can’t say that nothing good ever comes to she who waits; I haven’t enough experience with that approach to comment on it. But I have found that the rewards in my life have been multiplied exponentially by the thought and effort I’ve invested in earning them. This book is not about quick and easy anything. This is about making any occasion as grand as you would if it were the last thing you would ever do.”

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There you have the woman’s essence and this book is its testimony in a very real way. Everything you see, from the vineyards of Santa Ynez to the dishes served up to the participants, the décor and the hostess who is a believer when it comes to using her imagination, is fabulous. And a relief, a respite, no matter how brief. I think the author should be commended also for choosing photographers who’ve brought her life and her cuisine and her style together in such an alluring way that all you can think is: that’s for me.

In the years that have passed since our first meeting, Sandy has had a life, the likes of which inspire biographers and novelists.

Several years ago our author remarried, the international businessman Tom Ditmer. They have a ranch with vineyard (or a vineyard with ranch?) out in the hills behind Santa Barbara, California. It’s called Oak Savanna Vineyard. As anyone who has ever been to that part of the world knows, it’s just this side of paradise, if not the real McCoy.

When that part of the world was first settled by the Spanish, they had ranches (or was it ranchos). They also had no means of communicating with their distant ranching neighbors except by horseback. So when they made the trip, they often made an occasion of it: they partied; the fiesta, or, as they called it, Fandango. It was a celebration of all things good.

After reading this book, it’s somehow not surprising that this California girl who’s kayaked the Arctic (and the East River – see The List [2]), ridden the plains of Kenya and scaled the Himalayas, should be staging Fandangos for her lucky friends and neighbors (and readers).

A luncheon inspired by a trip the Hill-Ditmers took to Southeast Asia (which included elephant rides).

Clockwise from top left: La Zaca Chicken Mole; The fandango luncheon table; Pods and Roots.

The Oak Savanna Vineyard contains some of the oldest grapevines in Santa Barbara County. Today the vineyard comprises six acres of chardonnay, twelve acres of syrah, and several acres each of viognier, sangiovese, and tempranillo vines. The wines are available for sale in the tasting room shared with Andrew Murray Vineyards on Grand Street in Los Olivos, as well as www.oaksavannawine.com [3] and at Le Bernardin in New York.

The table set for Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve menu: Hot Rum Sting; Open Fire-Roasted Chestnut Soup; Roasted Stuffed Goose with Huckleberry Gastric, Turnip Pave, Herb Salad with Beet Vanilla Vinaigrette; Christmas Trifle.

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