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Taking
a break from the rain on Friday afternoon on 68th Street between
Park and Madison. Photo: JH.
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A
knowing reader/player picked up on last month’s blind item about a beautiful young married woman having an affair with an
older, very rich married man at a famous summer resort, and told
me that I didn’t have the item exactly right.
She made the following corrections (in italics):
The item as I wrote it:
“One of the most beautiful women in New York is
having a mad passionate love affair at one of the most venerable
Eastern seaboard resorts
(where she’s been summering all her life).
Married, with children, and a movie star-handsome successful husband
to boot, she’s in love with a man kwy-ta-fyoo years older
than she. Also married and with a gazillion dollars (although our
leading lady, who doesn’t need a dime from anybody thanks
to all those ancestors).”
The correction: Our leading lady is married
to a man who is “movie
star handsome” and although he comes from “an old family
with a good name” he is not notably successful, and there
is no money, to speak of. As it is with a lot of old families,
his family’s fortune, passed down through the generations,
has been spent.
Our leading lady also comes from “an old moneyed family” but
also in the case of her branch of that family, there isn’t
any left, to speak of.
Now, when people in this milieu say there is “NO” money,
it’s not exactly like you and me, folks. There may be an
apartment on Park Avenue – it’s just not one of the
big ones. There may be a Mercedes in the garage; it’s just
not a new one. And there may be a family house by the seashore;
it’s just that it belongs to Grandpa and when he kicks the
bucket, it becomes part of the ever dwindling pie divided by halves
or eighths or sixteenths.
And, most importantly, money, as it is in so many situations in
the New York world of social power and prestige, is the Name Of
The Game. And money, as is often the case with these girls, is
what they want, and what they (feel they) need. And why they’d
give up one hubby for another.
The item as I wrote it (continuing): “And will there be a
divorce? The word on the avenue is NO. There will be no divorce.
He’s been married too long and made money too much and for
too long.”
The correction: Uh-uh; not quite, sez my source. There may not
be a divorce with the gent with the wife and the gazillions, but
my source predicts that our leading lady is already out there looking.
Although everything will remain status quo, as the song goes, Until
The Real Thing Comes Along.
Last Saturday’s Page Six featured an
item about publicist Peggy
Siegal’s faux pas at one of her famous film premieres
that allegedly put her in the doghouse with Paramount Pictures.
Earlier this year, according to the item, Peggy didn’t recognize Gerry
Rich, one of Paramount’s major execs at the screening
of “Mean Girls” and asked him to give up his seat for
someone she regarded as more important (than somebody she didn’t
recognize). According to Page Six’s sources, “it sparked
a big brouhaha and now the studio’s refused to work with
her again.”
This is not the first time the fashionable veteran publicity exec
has more than slightly annoyed someone in the executive suite of
a major film studio. In her intense desire to get it “right,” she’s
been known to bruise an ego here and there. (Although the egos
in this orbit can take care of themselves).
However, it must be said in her defense, nobody else in her business
consistently brings out the heavy hitters and opinion makers for
film launches and screenings. Peggy Siegal made private screenings
one of the de rigueur social happenings in New York. “Important” is
not only important to her, it’s everything.
She has one of the very best, if not The Best VIP list for opinion-makers
in all of New York. She’s a master at her master list, constantly
shifting, revising, shuffling, updating, and re-grading for variety,
talent and importance. You see writers, socialites, bankers, business
tycoons, models, managers, agents and editors, all anxious, popcorn
in hand, for the lights to go down and the screen to light up.
Her technique for entertaining these troops is simple: give them
a privately screened flick and afterwards feed them well in one
of top restaurants in New York. As the late legendary society hostess
Kitty Miller used to say: Hang out the ham and they’ll all
come running.” And boy, do they ever! |
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