If it’s Wednesday it must be Michaels ... as they say, “lunch, your magic spell is everywhere.” At the big round table in the bay you had Dan Aykroyd and his beautiful wife Donna Dixon (and she really is beautiful, on stage and off). You had (same table) Fran Drescher and her lawyer (whose name I didn’t catch). You had Twyla Tharp! And ... Twiggy!!!

I am old enough to remember when Twiggy first came to New York. Someone gave a big party for her at Irving Penn’s studio. He was shooting her. She was the hottest thing in fashion photography! Very Young, maybe sixteen. A little bit of a thing, waif-like, tiny. The party was a mob scene, maybe three hundred people and the studio/loft was vast and not brightly lit.

Twiggy

Everybody wanted to see Twiggy that night. She was a phenomenon. She was part of the British invasion that started with the Beatles. Why a mob wanted to see Twiggy, I can’t tell you. Maybe because she was so young. Or so little. Or so skinny. Maybe because we were very young and didn’t know better.

She had a manager who might have been her husband, Justin de Villeneuve, I think was his name. He was there. Hundreds of us in the process of becoming celebrity-crazed (it seems to have picked up momentum back then) swarming around to have a look at Twiggy. Finally, she came moving through the crowd, masses parting to let the little waif move through. As she passed there was a light on her face, as if showing her the way, revealing up close: A beautiful face. She had an absolutely beautiful, kind, sweet face. The Sixties. This was the Sixties. Beautiful, sweet, kind was getting into our psyches. Not forever maybe, but at least for a little while.

Anyway, yesterday at Michael’s, looking over toward their table – which was right next to mine – when she got up, I recognized “the face,” the way you say: “I know that face.” But an older woman. Younger than I, so I’m not being unkind. Still a kind face, maybe sweet, and maybe beautiful in a soulful sense. But far from the fresh still in my memory. She was famous when Aykroyd was a kid. Before Fran Drescher saw the light of day. That is the nature of fame and fortune, our memories are occasionally reminded.

There were two or three others at their table. Fran Drescher looks great and is as friendly as you might imagine. Warm and friendly and gracious. Not bad, believe me; not bad.

Around the room: next to them was Al Roker with Toady producer Jackie Olensky and the show’s publicist Lauren Kapp. Next to them was Joe Armstrong with Jonathan Burnham, the publisher of HarperCollins which has a new biography of Conrad Black in the stores next week. Explosive is the word.

Next to them: Broadway producer Terry Allen Kramer with her granddaughter and Margo McNabb. Next to them: Barry Diller and his guest. Next to them Frank Gifford and guest. Around and about: former D.A. best-selling mystery writer, Linda Fairstein. Across from her: two of the greatest interviewers in the history of television: Larry King with Mike Wallace. Next to them: Robert Friedman, and then: Jack Myers and Matt Blank. Across the way: David Hirshey with Sara Nelson and James Atlas. Across from them: Jeff Greenfield, Jerry Della Femina and Joel Siegel; and beyond: Jamie Niven, Shubert Theatres chairman Gerry Schoenfeld; producer Joan Gelman; Chris Meigher with Dorothy Kalins; Tony Hoyt with Bill Weede; Jacqui Lividini with Lori Rhodes, Jennifer Man; beyond them, Peter Price, and across the way from him, his wife Judy Price with Beth Rudin DeWoody; then Jesse Kornbluth . Also: Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel; Liz Finkle and friends; J.D. Heymann and Joanne Fowler with Suzy Fabrikant. Had enough? You see what happens to New Yorkers? They get carried away. Every day as a matter of fact.

I was having lunch with Michael Gross who is celebrating the first anniversary of the publication of his book “740 Park Avenue” with the publishing of the paperback. The subtitle is: “The Story of the World’s Richest Apartment Building.” That’s not hype, considering some of the residents. 740 Park, if you didn’t know, is a co-op built at the beginning of Depression by Jackie Onassis’ grandfather, James Lee. It wasn’t his intention when he built it for the economy to turn into a Depression. If only he’d known, it might not be here today. He was coming from the position when the world according to finance was flying high and Manhattan real estate was the goose that laid the golden egg. As a result, he built a beautiful apartment building (designed Rosario Candela – now a legendary architect of prime Manhattan apartment buildings), with the best materials and excellent construction. Many still consider it the best-built apartment house in New York.

Things did not go so well for Mr. Lee once the building was completed in 1931. The Depression got worse. Even Jackie’s father Jack Bouvier had to rely on the kindness of his father-in-law to put them up (at 740 Park) for a time. Nevertheless, there were those stalwarts (and still solvent) such as John D. Rockefeller Jr. who bought a large apartment and lived there for the rest of his life. And since then, Vanderbilts, Havemeyers, along with the Rockefellers, Bouviers, Chryslers, Houghtons and Harknesses right up to today’s Bronfmans, Perelmans , Kravises, Lauders, Steinbergs, Kochs and Schwarzmans are, or have been in residence.

Interestingly, David Koch, who with his wife Julia and their children, is a new resident of the building after having lived in Mrs. Onassis’ apartment on Fifth Avenue. You see how they follow each other around? The Schwarzmans live in the old Steinberg apartment which before that was the Rockefeller apartment.

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The apartments, even the smaller (there are no “small”) ones, are big and spacious and have a certain American grandeur that is hard for the imagination to resist (of course the checkbook always can). Mr. Schwarzman paid somewhere in the range of $31 million for his apartment several years ago. Very large apartment; massive. A record price in New York at the time. But few months ago, a two bedroom which belonged to Walter Annenberg’s sister Enid Haupt who passed away last year, went to John Thain, the president of the New York Stock Exchange for $29.5 million.

Michael Gross’ book, however, is fascinating, because aside from his respectful reportage on the architectural plans for the completed building, he tells you the stories of those who lived in the apartments, right up to today. All rich people, in one degree or another, well-gotten and ill-gotten gains; family sagas, dark tales of woes, occasionally happier moments and the complexity of the Family Unit, the meat of novels and movies. And myths.

Last night. Seguing, speaking of: Carolyne Roehm used to live at 740 Park Avenue with her then husband Henry Kravis, the buyout tycoon. When they divorced the apartment was sold to Charles Stevenson, a hedge fund investor who still lives there with his wife, the writer Alex Kuczynski . Mr. Stevenson is also the head of the board of the building. Mr. Kravis remarried, as some of the world knows, and moved to a large apartment a few blocks down the avenue that once belonged to Helena Rubenstein the cosmetics tycoon, and later belonged to Charles Revson, the Revlon cosmetics tycoon.

And Mrs. Roehm moved first to Sutton Place and then to another spectacular apartment not far from Sutton Place (see NYSD HOUSE; The Way They Live). Last night she held a cocktail reception for her new (coffee table) book, “A Passion For Parties” at her stupendous apartment.

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Big room for a cocktail party; beautifully lit, magnificent portraits commanding space in a room with a 27 foot ceiling. Grander than grand, and ain’t love too? Carolyne Roehm has created a life that is picture-book perfect and you can see that there is great pleasure derived from it because she is at once creative and industrious. Her houses are part of her creative intent although there is a bigger picture. Even the hors d’oeuvres – the dollop of sauce on the smoke salmon; the Spanish sausage pigs-in-a-blanket (I was gobbling). My pictures don’t capture the chic and sophistication that we often imagine New York to be (somewhere), and was there in that room last night.

A lot of the group were friends; so it was a very relaxing party, a six-to-eighter. There were a number of people from the interior design community, and media people, and social and business people. Our hostess treated it strictly as a reception rather than a “hawk the wares” book party. Copies were provided to guests as they were leaving. At her brilliant antique grand piano was a pianist in black tie turning out the Gershwin, Porter, Rodgers and Hart.

In other parts of the room we talked about ... real estate. And what is happening. And the greed that has enveloped the sensibilities in our neighborhoods. Duane Hampton who belongs to the Municipal Art Society was telling me about a lot of the projects people are dreaming up that will alter old buildings and/or even destroy old neighborhoods. In other parts of the room we also talked about ... bad breath. I don’t know how we got onto the subject. Serena Bass, the restaurateur/caterer and Grace Meigher. Who knew famous people with bad breath. The kind where you turn away when they’re talking to you because you don’t want to keel over from the fumes. We are all afraid (well, not all of us, I know) from time to time, that we have bad breath. It’s a fear that grows out of consideration for others (and fear of abandonment). I was thinking of one famous television news personality (male) whose fumes seem nearly lethal when he’s pontificating and more breath is expended. It’s funny. Nowhere did I hear a conversation about the current state of affairs in Washington or Baghdad.

Carolyne Roehm has published several books on the art of decorating, entertaining, floral design, etc. This new book “A Passion For Parties” is about her life in the city and in the country. And her entertaining (like last night). It’s so beautiful just to look at, you can’t help thinking, I could live like that (if I won the lottery maybe). At least: that might be nice.

What she has created in the realm of Lifestyle, is a kind of business model for the Art of Living Well. What she has created is a fascinating pleasure to peruse, to dream about, to think about, to wonder about. This is a girl who came, quite some time ago now, from the Midwest to the Big Town where, just like in the song, she “made it there, “ New York, New York. This is what draws us back to this town again and again, either physically, or in our reveries or both. Carolyne Roehm is New York. Even in the country. Wait’ll you see the book; you’ll be New York too. In Carolyne Roehm’s realm. A pleasure.