New York Days

One of JH's photograpsh that will be on view and for sale at The Chinese Porcelain Company from Friday, May 16th through next Monday, May 19th with all of the proceeds benefiting the Women’s Committee of the Central Park Conservancy.

New York days. The sun came out yesterday, dried off the city, warmed up the place and it was Spring again.

Ramble ramble. I wasn’t there but ... JH was walking down Fifth Avenue, on his way from The Chinese Porcelain Company where he’s preparing for the exhibition of his NYSD photographs which will be on view and for sale from Friday through next Monday with all of the proceeds going to the Women’s Committee of the Central Park Conservancy. I mention all that so you won’t forget but ...

We were talking business as he was walking along (I was home at my desk) when he suddenly told me he’d just passed former Governor Spitzer on the street. “I just passed Governor Spitzer,” he said, half-exclaiming. This happens in your head when you pass a famous person on Fifth Avenue – which is not unusual.

The sighting of Eliott Spitzer, according to JH. The man was wearing a suit and shirt with open collar and no tie. He looked like he’d had a long day and was not so much the better for it. Of course, that was only how he looked and since JH isn’t a mind reader, he couldn’t discern how he felt.

The sighting led me into a typical diatribe (if you’re within shouting distance and I feel comfortable expression of my Humble Opinion). I don’t feel sorry for Eliot Spitzer, but as I said to JH when he reported the sighting, can you imagine if we knew All About the Sexual Activities of all the people we pass on Fifth Avenue. Not that I’d want to, but what if.

We live in a society where there is profound (it would seem) and prurient, and of course moral, interest in the sex lives of others. So great is the interest that it would almost seem as if the rest of us do not have sex lives worthy of discussion. However. It still distresses me that Mr. Spitzer had to leave office because of private activities which, no matter how ill-advised especially concerning his political enemies, were none of my business and none of your business. Maybe the business of his lovely wife (and she is lovely), but certainly not ours.

I know that most of us mind our Ps and Qs and walk the straight and narrow. But for those of us who don’t – the numbers here are fat -- for those of us still in hot and mindless pursuit of carnal knowledge (with consenting adults), I really don’t see that it’s anybody else’s business no matter who they are.

I say that on reflection of all that I see going on in the world I cover and the people who inhabit it, that it is easy to observe that the angels among us are few and far between. Which may be regrettable but nevertheless true.

This opinion was shared during my conversation with the tolerant (for listening) JH as he was making his way down the avenue. However, just as he was passing Tiffany & Company, he suddenly naturally changed the subject with a new exclamation: “I just passed Diane Keaton!”

Talk about a mood elevator. The only thing you could criticize Diane Keaton for publicly is owning too many houses. And what kind of criticism is that? New Yorkers love a movie star; it’s thrillsville in the Big Apple.


Andre Previn

With all good intentions I missed the stellar evening on the social schedule last night which was the London Symphony Orchestra’s Spring Gala which was held at the Colony Club and which honored Andre Previn, the conductor and composer.

Mr. Previn was born in Germany in 1929 and fortunately emigrated with his family to his country in the early 1930s just as the National Socialists were about to exercise their gruesomely entropic sense of humanity.

The Previn family ended up in Los Angeles when it was still a desert paradise laying foundation to the Dream Factory that became the American culture. Andre graduated from Beverly Hill High School and went to work in the movie studios’ musical departments. In short time he was always busy and eventually would win an Oscar for his work.

In 1967 Mr. Previn became the music director of the Houston Symphony and that assignment elevated him out of the movie studio consciousness into the world of high culture and classical music. A year later he became the principal conductor for the London Symphony. Later he became conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony. My favorite Andre Previn album is “Andre Previn and Shelly Mann play Pal Joey.” Jazz-time. Therein may lie the key to the man’s great career. He was also a much married man.

His second wife Dory found herself cuckolded by someone she thought was a “friend,” one young girl, movie actress, Hollywood-brat named Mia Farrow who stole her husband’s heart away. This occurred in the late 60s or thereabouts and Dory Previn who was quite an able composer lyricist got her sweet revenge by making a couple of hit albums about life in the Lost Lane and the land of deceit.

Dory Previn is also, for all you trivial pursuers out there, the creator of the term “yadda-yadda” writing about driving down the Freeway screaming to oneself. Yadda-yadda-yadda is everywhere today, on the streets, on the highways, left hand or right to the ear: yadda yadda.

Later Mr Previn married Ms. Farrow and they made a big family. One of their children, an adopted Korean child named Soon-yi, later left home with the man of the house, one Woody Allen, and therein lies another story. Yadda-yadda yadda, oh Elliot Spitzer wherefore art thou? And if only you could play a hot piano. Or even the clarinet.

Buit that was then, and now all these years later, Mr. Previn is nigh onto almost 80 and has had a long and dazzling career as a composer, jazz musician, conductor, and last night at the Metropolitan Club in New York, the London Symphony Orchestra feted their native son and genius.


	George Gurley

Meanwhile in another part of the forest, down south of Fourteenth, about ten o’clock down on West 12 Street where it intersects with West Fourth, a young woman here in town named Hilary Heard was giving a surprise 40th birthday party for her fiancé, one journalist named George Gurley.

George, if you don’t already know, is one of Manhattan’s more intriguing and clever journalists. He did an interview with me for the Observer about eight years ago which remains the most intriguing and clever interviews ever done of me. Which is not saying much except that George has the ability to bring people out (as opposed to “outing” people). Which is why he can portray a wide variety of people and always with a Gurleyian affection.

George looks like the kind of guy who’s always working on a story and were he a more hirsute individual might look like he needed a shave. Being less so in that department, instead he often looks like he needs to wash his face and take a nap. But he won’t. Because he’s busy conjugatin’ and contemplatin’ and turning out that copy which is what any good journalist is good for.

I can’t help writing about him with a certain affection because George evokes that. He’s been going with Hilary for quite some time and he’s so committed to his work that he turned their visits to a couples therapist into a widely read series about contemporary relationships in the Big Apple. George hails from the Midwest. His beautiful mother Katherine has been married a couple of times so that George has half-brothers and a (now former) stepfather who went off with Anna Wintour, the famous Vogue editor. So George has a good story of his own, with lots of subplots and probably even a TV series somewhere between Archy Bunker, The Fugitive and CSI. I’m just exercising my writer’s license of course.

The party was held at the Beatrice Inn which is one of the most “in” places of Manhattan’s Young and Restless (not to mention the obligatory Foolish) and all other cats and curs of such ilk and stripe. I’d never been there before and wanted to go to George’s surprise party if for no other reason than to see what all the ballyhoo was about. It’s a small place on the ground level of an old house in the Village. It’s been there for years (and years and years) and so it looks like ... a dump. Well, yes, sorta and always. That is, no doubt, at 2 am when you can’t move wedged in between a multitudinous stew of the beauties and the beasts, just about the coolest place in little ole New York in its wee hours of gestation and re-birth. George inspires the literary and raptures, as you can see, and a visit to the Beatrice helped.