Thanksgiving weekend in New York was  a beauty after the grey day of Thanks. Mild temperatures, sunshine. Many of our tonier neighbors vacated for their gilded and green pastures or stretches of seaside and sand. Or down among the sheltering palms, also gilded, of Palm Beach. Thanksgiving launches the season down there. Think Homecoming weekend; the kids can barely contain themselves. As grownups, of course.

So the city itself is a beautiful, fascinating and intriguing place to be on these palmy days of no gridlock. And very relaxing. New York by weekday is frustrating, demanding, disinterested, demanding, kick-in-the-ass stimulating, and people people people and therefore cars and cars and cars. There is no rest for the weary for it’s all get-up get-out and get-on with it.

I had my Thanksgiving again this year, as I have for the past eight or nine years, with David and Helen Gurley Brown and Alice Mason. Conversation: who will be the next president, and real estate in New York.

After dinner I went up the avenue to Anne Ford’s where she was entertaining her family and some friends. Then I came home to organize the Friday Diary which was Clemmer Mayhew’s labyrinth of a familiy history – the Munns of Palm Beach. Mr. Mayhew did for this family what many of us would like to do for our families – get a look at the big (and long) picture. This piece goes back four or five generations of several families, all related. Large families, no matter who they are, never fail to draw interest. In this case, the Munns were related to a number of well known families in the world, who have led fairly rarefied lives in the corridors of American wealth and power.

Weekend notes. Friday night dinner at Swifty’s with Andy Reznik, an old friend from Los Angeles, in for the holiday to see his family. Saturday night he and I and Barbara Uzielli and Sassy Johnson went to Le Cirque. The place was buzzing. It was the first time at the new Le Cirque for both women (and for Andy) who have often dined at both other Le Cirques.

The women both had the Dover Sole which was pronounced “divine,” and in the case of Mrs. Uzielli, the Dover Sole “with stripes” is something she’s been looking for since the last time she was in Florence. $52 in case you’re wondering. The sole, not the town. I had the filet of striped sea bass. Excellent. Mr. Reznik had the lamp chops. Beyond. Much oohing and ahhing. Yudda thought these people never had a good meal before. No, great. Great was the word Saturday night.

Hell or a handbag. At dinner the talk was about money. Mrs. Johnson is a broker at the newly-being- refurbished Plaza. Although she cannot reveal any details to us hoi-polloi, (like “who” and “how much”) she did say that business was brisk. Very brisk.

We’re talking about one bedroom apartments for over a million bucks. And two bedrooms for over three. I’d heard this before about the Plaza sales – drawing a rich demographic from all over America who “want to own a piece of the Plaza.”

That reminded me of a situation I heard about about where a very wealthy couple in town bought their two children a little pad of their own downtown. $12 million with a $14,000 monthly maintenance. Make yourself at home kids. In the land of all kinds of money.

Good thing you don’t have to pay that kind of maintenance, no? That also reminded me a story I heard about an art dealer who several years ago bought herself a sharp little Miata to tool around in. Except she never did tool around. It sat in the garage for two years with nary a press on the gas. So she decided to sell it. Which she did. Got $15,000 for it. And with the fifteen gees, she went and bought herself ... a handbag. Yes, not big enough for a Miata maybe, but scads more useful.. And really, it’s nothing compared to the $35,000 Hermes bag for which there’s a waiting list. In the land of all kinds of money.

Which, speaking of, Bill Cunningham’s fashion montage in the Sunday Times, was of the new Chanel bag which in the photos looks like a big black oilcloth sack, and costs something like $3000. You see them all over town.

And speaking of all over town, Andy Reznik was telling us at dinner that in LA the new Bentley sports coupe that goes for $160,000 a pop is as “common as a Mercedes,” there are so many of them on the street.

A guy down the end of my block who owns one. He traded in his Mercedes (plus a few bucks of course). I happened to see him pull up one late Saturday afternoon when I was walking my dogs. Probably in his late 50s, early 60s, leather jacket, designer shades, jeans, no handsome-harry, he got out of the car and strutted away like one cool dude (or so he may have been thinking). In his dreams anyway (i.e. behind the wheel of the Bentley coupe).  Personally I was thinking “one very rich dude.” In the land of all kindsa.

So when I say the talk at the table Saturday at Le Cirque was about money, I’m really talking about life on another planet, this one.

Sunday afternoon I took a stroll over to the Met to have a look at the Americans in Paris Exhibit. Mainly to have a look at the Madame X portrait by John Singer Sargent. I’d seen it before but for some reason this exhibition has given it a new context. For me anyway.

From the steps of the Met looking down 81st Street. I had to go up the avenue to get a shot of the banner of the show at the Gugg which is also packin’ em in: El Greco to Picasso. This part of town is called Museum Mile now since it also includes The Frick, The Met, the Museum of the Arts, the Jewish Museum, the Neue Gallery, the Cooper-Hewitt and the Guggenheim – all within a mile or 20 blocks on Fifth Avenue. The Neue Gallery, the last home of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt III who moved in after giving up her bigger house at 640 Fifth. Now the home of the Gustav Klimt purchased for $135 million several months ago, a fortune far greater than old Mrs. Vanderbilt ever knew. What she knew, however, was living like a queen, even if a bit deposed by time and fashion, and the tax man.

I’d forgotten about the almost cadaverous translucence of her skin, what the painter described as “lavender or chlorate of potash-lozenge colour,” Mme. X was Madame Gatreau in real life and when it was first shown to the public at the Salon of 1884, the public was outraged and clamoring (of course) to see it. Evidently it did terrible damage to Mrs. Gatreau’s reputation. A beautiful low cut black dress on a beautiful female figure. What would they have thought of Paris Hilton?

I digress. Madame X was a star in Paris society at the time. She was beautiful and had a great presence. Sargent had seen her and had wanted to paint her. The portrait turned out to be very good for his career, which he had intuited on first sight of her. He wrote to a friend who knew her: 'I have a great desire to paint her portrait and have reason to think she would allow it and is waiting for someone to propose this homage to her beauty. If you are 'bien avec elle’ and will see her in Paris you might tell her that I am a man of prodigious talent.' 

As soon as the Salon doors opened to the viewing of the portrait, the Parisians lost it. Vitirol at its most raffine. Mme. Gatreau’s relatives were so upset they tried to have it withdrawn from the show. Nothing doin’. Some felt that it should have been burned.

In the original painting, Madame’s right dress strap was off her shoulder, suggesting all kinds of erotic notions (for those times). Mr. Sargent who was only 28 and had been at it for ten years, had triumphed.

The subject did not feel that way about her portrait, however. She hated it for all the trouble it cost her, although more than 20 years later she acknowledged its success and understood it. In 1916 after being in an exhibition in San Francisco, Sargent offered it to the Met for 1000 pounds, and 90 years later it is still drawing the clamoring crowd. Who see it quite differently and with awe.

The American in Paris exhibition runs through several galleries. It is a tour almost sentimental (considering these times), of Paris, and anyone who loves Paris, or has dreamt of Paris as a passionate obsession, will rekindle those feelings as well as evoke at least a slight longing for it. The show runs through January 28.

Betty Comden died on Thanksgiving Day here in New York. She and her writing partner Adolph Green (who died in 2002) had their first hit on Broadway, “On the Town,” sixty-two years ago when Ms. Comden was twenty-seven years old. Comden and Green as they were known far and wide after that, had many hit shows, wrote librettos, lyrics and movies including “Singin’ In the Rain” with Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor and Debbie Reynolds and were Broadway legends to two generations of theatre-goers and every actress or actor who ever wanted to work in a musical show. 

Adolph Green and Betty Comden

I never knew Ms. Comden although I saw her often in my travels in the past fifteen years. My first and clearest memory of her was in 1975 when I was invited to a benefit concert given by Mary Martin and Ethel Merman.  I was seated in the mezzanine and at one point Mary Martin came out to perform:

I have a place where dreams are born
And time is never planned
It's not on any chart
You must find it with your heart ...

Recognizing it but not recalling its title, I turned to the woman sitting next to me and asked if she knew the name. “Never Never Land,” she answered very quietly. I thanked her. She then added, “I wrote that with my partner.”

Never Never Land

Betty Comden. I cannot explain why but it gave me a thrill just to hear her say that. I grew up with much admiration for her as an artist and performer that her modestly put information about her lyric impressed me even more. I was also surprised to realize she was in the mezzanine instead of fifth row center.

She had a savvy working girl quality to her steage persona and a great natural elegance at all times. I have no idea what she was like in person or off-stage although when I saw her in public at benefits or parties, that elegant presence was always as I imagined it. It wasn’t an elegance  of fashion, but rather of spirit. It was a tribute to Broadway and the American theater that this great lady was one of its brightest, cleverest lights for so long.

And that's my home where dreams are born
And time is never planned
Just think of lovely things
And your heart will fly on wings
Forever in Never Never Land

Music by Jule Styne
Lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green