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Children playing on 89th and Riverside Drive with Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument behind. 5:20 PM. Photo: JH. |
August 20, 2009. Another hot day in New York. Tuesday night’s deluge and electrical storm struck a lot of trees all over the city and especially in Central Park, but it didn’t cool off the town.
I went down to Michael’s to lunch with Alexandra Lebenthal and her pa, Jim. Alexandra wanted us to meet because we share the experience of living in Los Angeles and working in/around The Industry. Jim Lebenthal went out there after college and worked as a photojournalist for the old LIFE magazine, back when was the most popular magazine in America. That and Time, which was also a Luce publication.
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| DPC with Alexandra and Jim Lebenthal. |
So much of what became The American Way of Life in the 1950s was presented and nurtured by the photographers and editors of LIFE. Your picture on the cover of LIFE (almost always black and white) or Time (often color and as often an illustration as it was a photo) was confirmation that you’d made it in America.
Furthermore LIFE being a pictorial magazine had an army of photographers who served as photojournalists and did then (all over the world) what video cameramen do today. Many great careers started at LIFE and later moved on into advertising and fashion photography.
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| Damon Warwick, Harry Benson, and Andre Leon Talley. |
Jim Lebenthal, as it happened, after a couple of years working for LIFE in Hollywood, came back to New York (which he was happy to do) and went to work in his family’s municipal bonds business. New Yorkers who were around in the 60s and 70s and 80s recall him appearing in television commercials with his mother advertising the family firm. A longtime friend of mine Cathy Callendar (now director of fundraising at Marymount School) with whom I had dinner last night, a woman who also started out her professional life in the bond business, told me that Jim Lebenthal was instrumental in reviving the public interest in municipals.
Michael’s was teeming yesterday. And noisy – all these New Yorkers getting all their words in under and above the din. It was Wednesday – always, it seems, the busiest day of the week -- but yesterday it was really cooking. |
| Shawn King and Marilyn Crawford. |
Ms. Crawford's blue shoes. |
At the table next to us Andre Leon Talley was entertaining three friends in from Los Angeles - Damon Warwick, Marilyn Crawford and Shawn (Mrs. Larry) King. On the other side of us Terry Allen Kramer was entertaining her daughter, granddaughters and Margo Nederlander.
Terry and her husband Nick Simunek have just returned from their annual six week sojourn to St. Tropez where their last houseguest for the season was the irrepressible international interior designer Nicky Haslam. Nicky has a new book coming out and Terry and Nick will be feting him soon at their Upper East Side penthouse which the summer rains have turned into a rainforest – the Noo Yawk version that is.
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| Terry Allen Kramer and family with Margo Nederlander (right). |
Next door to the Kramer table was Showtime’s Matt Blanc, and next to him Leonard Lauder was lunching with Alan Patricof. Around the room: Lynn Nesbit, Henry Schlieff, Cindy Lewis, Irwin Winkler, Judy Licht, Michael Wolfe, Chris Meigher, who was lunching with Harry Benson, one of the world’s great (and most prolific) photojournalists.
Late in the afternoon, the temperatures seemed to be rising. I took the dogs down by the river for their walks. It was beautiful out, despite the temperatures. Up above there were massive storm clouds and even a thirty second (literally) downpour which left a pointillist’s image of rain on the pavement (god’s version).
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| Storm clouds hovering over Gracie Square and the Promenade (John Finley Walk) in Carl Schurz Park, 7 PM. |
At seven-thirty I went down to Swifty’s to dine with Cathy Callendar. The place was packed, like Michael’s at lunch. Jeanne and Herb Siegel, Bruce Addison and Michael Foster; Alison Mazzola and Chris Hite; Arlene Dahl and Marc Rosen were celebrating the birthday of Arlene’s daughter Carole Holmes McCarthy. Across the way Dick Nye and Francesca Stanfill were entertaining. Next to them Gale Hayman and Dr. Richard Bockman were entertaining economist Jeff Madrick (latest book: The Case for Big Government) and his wife Kim (who celebrated her birthday last Friday); and in the corner, design guru Robert Rubino was dining with the great Adolfo.
It was nice and cool in Swifty’s. Outside the streets were dry and quiet and the air was very warm, while we wait for Mother Nature’s relief and begin the countdown to the end of summer. |
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