Social Diary 8/13/04 - Marisa Berenson and Bill Kapfer held a private evening of shopping and cocktails previewing the Donna Karan Fall 2004 Handbag Collection

Hot August days/nights

Madison Avenue and 68th Street. Wednesday at 8:00 PM. Photo: JH.

It rained on Wednesday, late afternoon. The sky over Manhattan turned a deep grey and silver, the winds started blowing and then down it came, in torrents. I like the rains, washing the streets, the air; a respite that soothes the city’s mind. It let up within the hour.

The old Percy Rivington Pyne mansion on 68th and Park Avenue

Neighborhood History Lesson. About seven I left the apartment to go down to the Donna Karan store on Madison Avenue between 68th and 69th where Marisa Berenson and Bill Kapfer were holding “a private evening of shopping and cocktails previewing the Donna Karan Fall 2004 Handbag Collection.”

I met JH on the northwest corner of 68th and Park by the old Percy Rivington Pyne mansion that is now the Americas Society. Back in the late 1950s when Nikita Krushchev visited New York, the building belonged to the Soviets. It was on that balcony over the front door of the house, that he made an appearance one morning before scores of astonished New Yorkers, seeing a Communist dictator in the flesh for the first time.

It was during that same visit that the Soviet leader gave his famous speech at the UN where he took off his shoe and banged it on the lectern of the General Assembly to make a point. And during that same trip to this country he also visited San Francisco where he was shown the Golden Gate Bridge during a morning rush hour. Noticing that most of the cars making the crossing had only one passenger – the driver – he observed that Americans could have made it a lot easier traveling if they traveled in groups. He was right, of course, although it made no difference then or now. And how much do you want to bet that if you were to observe Moscow morning traffic today, you’d see the same thing?


L. to r.: Dorothy Kilgallen; 45 East 68th Street, once the home of the notorious lawyer, Roy Cohn.

Walking down 68th to the Berenson cocktail party, I pointed out to JH – who grew up in the neighborhood, but was born after the passing of these facts – the red brick townhouse at number 45 East 68th which was once the home of the notorious and brilliant lawyer, Roy Cohn. Before Cohn lived there, for many years it was the home of Dorothy Kilgallen, the Broadway columnist and her husband theatrical producer Dick Kollmar and their three children.

JH had never even heard of Kilgallen, (as anyone under forty-five or fifty today wouldn’t have) who wrote for the New York Journal-American and was syndicated in the Hearst papers. In her time she was one of the most powerful columnists in America, both popular and feared and reviled, and for good reason. Fashionable although not pretty – with a famously weak chin – she was the daughter of a veteran Hearst reporter, Jim Kilgallen, and grown up on newsprint, as they say, and had really made her name with the American public as a crime reporter, covering sensational murder trials, including the trial of Lee Harvey Oswald’s murderer, Jack Ruby – in much the same fashion that our Dominick Dunne does today, a half century later.

Kilgallen and her husband also had a morning talk show on WOR (with a nationwide hook-up) called Breakfast With Dorothy and Dick during which they’d discuss their social activities the night before, their family, the news of the world, and personalities. The newspaper ads for the show had pictures of them sitting around a breakfast table in their bathrobes with the papers, coffee and toast, all bright-eyed and raring to go.

PJ Clarke's

Kilgallen also had a famous (to insiders only) lunch hour everyday at PJ Clarke’s (still standing, same building at 55th and Third Avenue) in the backroom behind the bar. In those days, there was still the Third Avenue El that ran up the avenue, contributing to the gritty get-down chic of the place. Her luncheons occupied the same big round table in the back corner of the room, and like the eminence grise that she’d become, she held court with all kinds of politicos, celebrities, wits, and movie stars paying homage.

The star reporter was also a regular panelist for years with Arlene Francis, Bennett Cerf and Fred Allen on a hugely popular Sunday night television show produced by Mark Goodson and Bill Todman, called “What’s My Line?” Moderated by a pleasantly effusive man named John Daley, it was a very simple format where the panelists (men in black tie, women in evening gowns and jewels) had to guess the profession of the guest. it came on at ten or ten-thirty after Ed Sullivan, which was followed by the Philco Television Playhouse hour, and was the last show America watched before it turned off the TVs and went to bed.

Marilyn Monroe and Dorothy Kilgallen

Kilgallen was well known to her millions of readers for scoops, her mildly (compared to today) bitchy asides about celebrities (she always referred to Ann-Margret – then a newcomer – as “Miss Two-names”) and her feuds. Sinatra hated her. At one of his opening nights at the Copa, he was quoted as saying, after surveying the audience, “everyone in New York is here tonight except for Dorothy Kilgallen ... she’s out looking for her chin.”

It was Dorothy Kilgallen who first wrote publicly of the suspicions around the “suicide” of Marilyn Monroe, and not long after the assassination of JFK, broke convention in the press and wrote openly about the discrepancies in the official story of his murder. In the autumn of 1965, she briefly interviewed Jack Ruby in jail. Shortly thereafter she announced to the world that she was going to reveal the real story about the murder of the President Kennedy. Up until that moment the world believed the official Warren Commission lone gunman, single bullet story.

It was in that townhouse at 45 East 68th Street on the early Sunday morning of November 8, 1965, not long after returning from Dallas, that Dorothy Kilgallen was found dead sitting fully dressed, upright in bed. The NYPD reported after an investigation that the coroner found Kilgallen had died from ingesting a lethal combination of alcohol and barbiturates. She was fifty-two years old. All her notes and the article on which she had been working “to blow the JFK assassination wide open," according to her biographer Lee Israel, had disappeared.

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Marisa Berenson and Liza Minnelli

Meanwhile, over at the Donna Karan store, by seven-fifteen there was already a big crowd. I spoke briefly with Marisa Berenson who was doing this to raise money for the UNESCO-Berry Berenson-Perkins Fund for the Education of Children in Need – the world over. Marisa’s sister Berry was on one of those planes that were crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Mother of two Perkins children, Berry was the widow of actor Tony Perkins who died in 1992.

This night’s events was the beginning of a worldwide campaign Marisa Berenson will be engaged in raising money for the cause in her sister’s memory. A percentage of this night’s proceeds went to the Fund for the Children In Need.

Looking down from the stairwell

By seven-thirty, the Donna Karan store was packed. Liza Minnelli showed up with MAC’s John Demsey to support her friend’s efforts. JH got a shot of Minnelli and Berenson together. These girls have a friendship that goes back at least to the making of the film “Cabaret.”