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Last night at the Seventh Regiment Armory for the opening night Preview of the 54th Annual Winter Antiques Show benefiting East Side House Settlement. |
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| New York Day and Night. Light rain, fog in mist by the late afternoon, mid-thirties.
Michael’s was a-buzz: Screenwriter Steve Shagan (“Primal Fear,” “Gotti”); Nick Simunek; Joan Gelman with Lisa Drew who hired me many a moon ago to write Debbie Reynolds’ autobiography for William Morrow; Stacy Morrison with Tim Gunn, the ebullient chief creative officer at Liz Claiborne; Glen Horowitz, the Manhattan rare bookseller; PR exec Steve Rubenstein ...
Last night at the Seventh Regiment Armory was the opening night Preview of the 54th Annual Winter Antiques Show benefiting East Side House Settlement. With more than 75 dealers on display there was a lot to see and a big crowd to take it all in. Jon Gilman’s TASTE catered (see Menu below). I don’t know what it is but once people get started with the gnoshing at these affairs, no matter how chic and elegant they might appear to be, their appetites get the better of them and many are just this side of ravenous, including this writer. Outside the weather was cold and wet, inside the weather was warm and cozy, surrounded by these dozens of booths full of treasures and fascinating items, and then of course, a little something to warm the tum-tum. You get the picture. A big success. A great show, it runs for ten days through January 27th. |
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Inside the Armory |
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| I left the Armory just a little after eight and with Mario Buatta to walk a couple of blocks down 66th Street to the Lotos Club for the AD100 dinner that Architectural Digest’s Paige Rense gives each year for her top 100 interior designers. First a little history: The Lotos Club is one of the oldest literary clubs in the country, founded in 170 by a group of young writers, journalists and critics including Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain to the world) who called it the “ace of clubs.” Writers, musicians, painters, sculptors, historians, novelists, college presidents and art collectors still make up the mix. Last night, besides the Paige Rense dinner, on another floor Carl Bernstein was giving a talk to a group of the membership about his work and adventures (and no doubt, about the subject of his latest book, Hillary Clinton).
Because the clubhouse went directly from private residence to club without any alterations in between, it retains much of the original family’s interiors including the stately oak paneled library and the grand ballroom on the second floor where the dinner was held. Last night’s annual dinner was the first I’d attended. The guest list was made up of decorators, designers, architects, writers who do the Architectural Digest stories, photographers who shoot them and Paige’s editorial staff. Make no mistake, AD is the most successful shelter magazine on the planet and an invitation to this dinner is an honor in the community. I first met Paige in the early 1980s in Los Angeles where her magazine was based at the time (before it was acquired by Conde Nast). The magazine itself has been around since 1920 (when it was an annual publication). Paige joined it in 1970 when it was owned by publisher Bud Knapp and had a staff of three. The following year, the magazine’s editor Bradley Little died in a robbery attempt and Paige succeeded him. By 1975 she had launched a re-made magazine in the tradition of European art books focusing on decorating, decorators and their clients. Beautifully published, it was one of those magazines that started out on the coffee tables of the rich and fashionable and moved slowly into the mainstream, picking up more and more prestige along the way. It was the talk of the smart set and the cognescenti. Its circulation was 50,000 a month. By the early 1980s AD was a mover in the industry that surrounds interior design and Paige Rense was a very influential person in Los Angeles among the designers, architects and film people. Her power in her business was such that she was becoming talked about and written about as a kind of legend in the making. She made careers with her choices, and developed enormous influence on not only interior, textile and furniture design but also residential real estate. AD had become the bible, and Paige Rense its gospels. By 1981, the circulation was 500,000 – a magazine publisher’s dream come true. |
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| Fifteen years ago, Conde Nast bought the magazine (along with Bon Appetit, of which Paige was a founding editor) and changed nothing except for moving Paige Rense to New York. Circulation continued to rise steadily. The magazine is a well-known goldmine, along with producing books under the AD umbrella. By 2000, the circulation had grown to 831,000. Paige Rense had long before joined that tiny sorority of American women who created a major American magazine that greatly influenced the popular culture. You can count ‘em on one hand: Lilia Acheson Wallace (in partnership with her husband) of Reader’s Digest, Helen Gurley Brown of Cosmopolitan, Edna Woolman Chase of Vogue, Diana Vreeland of Harper’s Bazaar (and later Vogue), and Paige Rense. Paige Rense’s influence in the magazine business is such that last night’s rooms at the Lotos were filled with men and women who were very happy to be among the invited, and very loyal to their editor who has shed such bounty on their careers. After dessert was served, Paige got up and spoke briefly, thanking everyone for their contributions and lightly mocking her “power” by proclaiming the sterling qualities of the “loyal.” She also joked about the shelter magazine business which, in its way, has little to do with the ongoing prosperity of AD. On her right at the table last night was a wiry, dark-haired forty-something man named Giulio Capua. Mr. Capua who is as American as his name is Italian, is the Vice President and Publisher of Architectural Digest, and, according to his Editor-in-Chief, the greatest publisher she’s ever worked with. I sat between Amanda Vaill and Nancy Collins. Amanda is the author of “Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins” (in 2006), “Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy, a Lost Generation Love Story” published in 1999. She also wrote a biography of her grandfather, the jewelry designer Seaman Schepps. A former editor and wife of an editor, Thomas Stewart of the Harvard Business Review. We talked briefly about Gerald and Sara Murphy, the glamorous yet star-crossed couple most associated with American expatriates of the 1920s in Paris, and the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Amanda was telling me that almost ten years after its publication, “Everybody Was So Young…” is still a big selling book (now in paperback). Its great success came as somewhat of a surprise to her although she knew when she first went to work on the couple’s lives, she knew she had something golden. Currently she is working on a screenplay for a television documentary on the life of Jerome Robbins who lived across the street when Amanda was growing up. At that time, he was just the man who lived across the street whom she saw walking his dog everyday. New York, New York, a heckuva town. |
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