Last Wednesday, NYSD readers know, we had the pleasure of visiting Washington and Georgetown where I was interviewed at Nathan’s, a great restaurant on the corner of M Street and Wisconsin Avenue. My interviewer was the restaurant’s owner Carol Joynt who conducts these “luncheon” interviews every week or ten days with people in different professions. She then posts the interview on her web site, Nathan’s Q&A Café (www.nathansgeorgetown.com). It’s there now if you want to have a look. The actual interview took place over about a half hour although Carol’s broken it down into separate segments for each question (about five minutes).

The week just passed.

She was wearing a red scarf covered with skulls by Alexander McQueen (“Skulls are definitely in”), a white designer T-shirt by Francesco (“I got it for free, so I’m representing for him”), white vintage jeans and red vintage shoes from Screaming Mimi’s, her favorite store.

That’s from George Gurley’s piece in last week’s New York Observer, “I Am Charlotte Bocly.” Charlotte Bocly is a very pretty, very charming Texas oil heiress with luminous connections on both sides of the Atlantic, who lives here in New York and who makes Marie-Antoinette sound like Eleanor Roosevelt. At least when she’s talking to George Gurley.

Phoebe Eaton, George Gurley, Spencer Morgan, and Bobby Zarem

George is a remarkable interviewer. Originally from the Midwest – Kansas or Iowa; one of those – he’s a certified cosmopolitan New Yorker through the pathway of his beautiful mother, socialite Katherine Bryan. He’s tallish and lanky, a kind of a placid, dough-pale countenance, with some schoolyard mischief in his bright eyes and an ironic innocence in his Midwest-flat tone of voice. And he’s always looking a little askew in an absent-minded professorial way.

And so it is, with a kind of corn-pone, almost aw-shucks approach, George will sit a subject down, turn on his tape recorder, ask some almost pedantic question, follow its path, and let the subject blab him- or herself into their very own ... booby trap. The subject, if not at least slightly circumspect or reflective (and Ms. Bocly clearly is not either at this time in her young life) then proceeds to blab his or her head off. Yes, blab, like: run off at the mouth; the way we do when we like to hear ourselves talk.

The subhead of the piece is “Meet the ’06 Girl of the Year.”

Ms. Bocly appears to Have It All. Katharine Hepburn as Tracy Lord in the Space Age. With just a dab of Edie Sedgwick. Oh, the girls in this burg who wouldn’t kill for just a smidge of any of it. And she’s saucy too when she wants to be. An antecedent of hers was one of the founders of Humble Oil which is now part of Exxon. Glitz and bling everywhere: Family collections sit in the Met for the hoi-polloi to contemplate; Movie actors try to pick her up; Boys who stay for the night can’t sleep in her favorite Marie-Antoinettte bed because its too small. Our heroine, in this story, is all of 20 or thereabouts and if Marie-Antoinette didn’t really say “let ‘em cake,” maybe Ms. Bocly will get around to it, if ever confronted with the realities of today’s world. Read it and weep.

Alex Kuczynski

Read it and freak. The last party I hit on Thursday night was the book party upstairs at “21” for Alex Kuczynski and her new book, “Beauty Junkies” about the multi-billion dollar cosmetic surgery business. The author is a well known personage on the New York scene principally because of her journalistic forays beginning at the New York Observer and then for the New York Times, and her marriage to Charles Stevenson, a very wealthy hedge fund owner and private investor. She also has a very outgoing and assertive personality and is one of those media creatures who has a knack for getting attention, including controversial attention. She is also not shy and not shy about describing things in intimate and even at times stomach-churning detail. Her book is a good example and why it is a page turner for anyone who likes the subject, or a juicy story combined with appalling even shocking medical concoctions. Will it go to series? Is anything possible?

It is not just a book about the $15 billion a year industry, it’s about the author and her “addiction” to the procedures that women (and men) pursue with a passion that is so singularly self-absorbed as to be soulless in its distinction. That is not to say all people who have cosmetic surgery are “addicted” to it. But Mrs. Kuczynski’s experience, and one that she became a “member” of, so to speak, would indicate that the business of getting yourself “done” is kind of a crazy business. Or a business for crazy people. I don’t mean the doctors. I mean the patient/clients. Some of her examples of people who are “into it” leave you comparing this modern civilization to ancient Rome. I know that’s very dramatic, but, what Mrs. Kuczynski’s book does with its very detailed reports as well as its sweeps of the lives of the “addicted” ones, is cause you to think about all this. And us. And what.

I have no idea how many people who at “21” that night have had work done but it would be safe to say that it was a healthy percentage in the room because 1. this is New York, and 2. there were many affluent and in some cases prominent people in the room. In New York, affluent, prominent people are the likeliest candidates for cosmetic procedures because they have access to it and can afford it. Mirror mirror on the wall didn’t end with the Wicked Witch of the West. And this is Oz we’re talking about. It’s becoming clearer and clearer that on many socio-economic levels (not just the top one) we’re living in Oz. At least for the time being.

The talk around town about the book has been mainly on Mrs. K’s looks and how they’ve changed. I’ve even written that they’ve changed. But on Thursday night at “21,” I have to say she really didn’t look all that different to me. She looked like Alex. Thinner maybe. Thinner face maybe, more sculpted maybe, but I’m not sure. Her hair is back to her natural brown. Although I like blonde. For all the glamour that’s presumed about the results of cosmetic surgery, our author was dressed on this evening more like working journalist, a serious one, of course.

Big crowd: Tim Metz and Gerry Fabrikant, Candace Bushnell and Charles Askegard, Toni and James Goodale, Molly Jong-Fast and Matt Greenfield, Renata Adler, Geoffrey Bradfield, Debbie Bancroft, David Koch, Debra Jaliman, Parker Ladd and Arnold Scaasi, Jeffrey Leeds, Margo MacNabb, Susan Magrino, Milly de Cabrol and Jeff Podolsky, Sherri and Ed Rollins, Jim Reginato, Terry Allen Kramer and Nick Simunek (who were hosts along with Charles Stevenson), Linda Wells and Charlie Thompson, Felicia Taylor, Donna Zilhka, Alexa Stevenson, Josie Stevenson, Annette Tapert, to name just few.

I left “21” (which was packed by the way) actually thinking about Charlotte Bocly. This was her world too, maybe even more hers than any of the guests at the Kuczynski book party. Because they’re starting younger and younger with the cosmeticizing. That’s just our world; part of it. Then I was thinking of the figures that I’d read the day before about the 650,000 Iraqis who’ve lost their lives. And the more than 2,800 soldiers; young mothers, young fathers, sons and daughters, families. Everywhere; here, there. Is that just our world too? I don’t know. I really don’t know.

More Basics. On Thursday night, we first hit the Benefit preview opening of the International Art and Antiques Fair at the Armory on Park Avenue and 67th Street. This particular evening benefits the Society for Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the Center’s committee works very hard to make a success, which means: raise a lot of money. This year they were sponsored by two women who are independently in business: Taryn Rose and Janna Bullock, and they raised more than $850,000. Even more noteworthy is the fact that Mrs. Bullock is Russian, a resident of Moscow, among other places and a New York real estate investor/developer. Both women, obviously dynamic, are also very unpresumptuous in meeting. This is the kind of woman the Society attracts: successful and committed.

There were sixty-five dealers from all over the world. The Armory is a treasure trove of beautiful and interesting things that pay tribute to the beauty of man’s creative and artistic genius. To be in its environs is definitely a palliative.

Many fascinating items. Two, for example: At the stall of Potterton Books, they had for sale The Library of Eileen Hose. Ms. Hose was the assistant to Cecil Beaton and inherited his library which is now available at Potterton. Amongst the collection are Beaton’s address books (European and United States and the guestbook from his Memorial Service here in New York in 1980). While we were looking through the guestbook and JH was photographing it, coincidentally Carmen Dell‘Orefice happened along just as we had noticed her signature in the guestbook. She told us that she was first photographed by Beaton when she was fourteen at the beginning of her modeling career, which has now stretched through six decades. The entire collection of 80 books, many signed and now rare first editions is priced at $45,000.