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 Memory Lane
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The Hudson River currents. 1:15 AM. Photo: JH. |
June 9, 2009. Yesterday was another beautiful summer day in New York. Warm but not humid with a cool breeze coming in with the evening.
The Wednesday-it’s-Michael’s Lunch. ShowBiz/MediaBiz with a little tycoonery thrown in with the tomfoolery. The players: Bob Barnett, the Washington lawyer who doubles as a literary agent and got those multi-million dollar books for people like Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, among others; producer Jean Doumanian, tycoon Ron Perelman, MoMA director and philanthropist, Marie-Josee Kravis; “War of the Roses” tycoon-author, Warren Adler, his internet tycoon son David Adler (separate tables), literary agent Ed Victor and David Young of Hachette; Gerry Byrne, Alison Brod, tycoon Bernard Schwartz: Vanity Fair’s Nancy Jo Sales; and two of the International Glad Girls (you’re glad to be with them ... and they’re glad too), Jolie Hunt, the media public relations excutive who is now with Reuters in London, and Felicia Taylor.
The city is quiet right now. These weeks are vacation time for a lot of people, and it’s kind of a relief. Mother Nature is also gracing us with perfect summer weather. I’m not sure if the tourist business is up or down, but it’s a great time to visit New York thanks to the weather, the pace, and I hear the hotels are offering great deals. The horse drawn carriages that line up along Central Park South are busy taking visitors on rides through the park.
Memory Lane. I was looking through some Quest magazines from fifteen years ago for a piece I wrote about Vincent Astor who by then was known – if at all – in New York as the husband who left Brooke Astor all that money.
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| Summer, 1993. A view of Georgica. |
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| March, 1994. The Southampton home of Mica and Ahmet Ertegun. |
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| April, 1994. Glin Castle, ancestral home of the Knights of Glin. |
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The piece was one of the first I’d written for Quest. I’d come to New York from Los Angeles to write an autobiography for Bobby Short, the international cabaret singer/pianist who for three decades held down the fort at the Café Carlyle for five to six months a year in the late spring and the late autumn.
The collaboration didn’t work. Mr. Short, who had a remarkable life and a long career (starting at age 8 and working for seventy years until his sudden death from leukemia), was not interested in assessing the ups and downs of that long road but instead preferred some casual memories about whom he met and what he saw (and at times played for). This writer sought to take a more trenchant look at the life. No.
I had a feeling when I’d left Los Angeles in September 1992 to come out here for the job, that it might not work out, and that if it didn’t, I’d be stuck here. I was right. But I was rescued by friends and good luck that turned into good fortune. My friend Beth DeWoody took me to a cocktail party at the Chanel boutique one night and I met Heather Cohane, a diminutive Englishwoman with a very large presence who had started Quest and was then the proprietor (the magazine was later acquired by the present owner Chris Meigher).
Heather and I had a brief conversation about a mutual friend of ours – one Gloria Etting of Philadelphia – and she asked me to write a profile of Gloria. That started something. Two years later Heather asked me to write a social column for the magazine, and the New York Social Diary was born (at first in print).
Looking through these old Quests, I was fascinated more by the party pictures pages than anything I’d written. Party picture pages were not something new. Women’s Wear Daily and later W were running them in the 1960s, followed by Andy Warhol’s Interview and then Avenue magazine in the late 70s. The Quest party pictures were almost all taken by Mrs. Cohane who, like this writer does today, would go to a party and simply take some pictures of the guests. There was no digital then and no color. Just black and white. And of course unlike today where the reader of NYSD can often see the pictures the next morning, in those days you had to wait two months for the magazine to be set up, printed, distributed and then gobbled up by the social crowd.
This first page is of a book party for Dominick Dunne at his latest (at the time) “A Season in Purgatory” at the Four Seasons restaurant. There are some familiar faces and some who are no longer with us. James Brady, the Fairchild editor, passed away this past January. Linda Stein, talking to Mario Buatta, was one of the top real estate brokers in New York with a gilt-edge entertainment industry clientele including rock stars. Linda was murdered in her Fifth Avenue apartment by her housekeeper two years ago.
On this page Ivana Trump, talking to Dominick, was about to marry her second husband, Riccardo Mazzucchelli, whom she would divorce after only two years. Mr. Short, my brief employer, is pictured here with Maria Cooper Janis and Catherine Cahill, in the picture next to that young couple about town Karl Wellner and Deborah Norville. |
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In this second page, more familiar faces. Anne Hearst was hosting a party at Mortimer’s (still going strong then) with her friend Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Both Hearst and Kennedy are still actively involved with this wonderful organization that is trying to look out for the health of our drinking water. The lady captioned Kathleen Hearst was actually Christine Hearst, the ex-wife of one of Anne Hearst’s cousins, at the time although she was soon seen in the company of an investment banker named Steve Schwarzman to whom she is now married. And there’s little Peggy Siegal looking jeune fille with her pal Steve Benson who in those days was a popular man about town (before he moved to marriage).
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| Third and last page. The first one to catch my eye was Joan Rivers. Then there’s the kid, the new social reporter with his friend Mrs. DeWoody, taking in the crowd at the New York City Mission Society dinner honoring the Rockefeller and Sutton families. Gordon Parks (pictured with Cornelia Bregman) and Johnny Galliher pictured here with Virginia Coleman and his pal Carroll Petrie, have, as Galliher always put it, “gone to heaven.” |
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