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 Born and bred
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| Playground on 64th and West End Avenue. 10:10 PM. Photo: JH. |
August 3, 2010. It was another beautiful summer day in New York yesterday. Sunny and very warm but not humid, with a sparkle in the air. The streets were quiet but the sidewalks in mid-town (57th and Fifth) were jammed with tourists. How do I know they’re tourists? Because they take lots of pictures of themselves in front of Donald Trump’s building (and personal address), in front of Tiffany, in front of Prada, in front of Gucci. In front of the plaque across the street that says Playboy Enterprises. But especially Trump and Tiffany. Talk about name identification.
I went down to Michael’s to lunch with Susan Fales-Hill who has just published her novel One Flight Up. This is her second book. Her first was a memoir about her mother Josephine Premice and was called Always Wear Joy. You know who said that. And did. I’m sure daughter followed because although I never knew mother-daughter together and I don’t/didn’t know either of them well (didn’t really know mother), I can tell by daughter what kind of a mother she had. A good one.
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Left: Mother and daughter on the cover of Always Wear Joy.
Below: Josephine Premice with her husband, Timothy Fales. |
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I’m repeating myself but for the sake of the exposition: I used to see Josephine Premice when she came to Sardi’s for dinner back in the mid-60s when I was a kid and she was older, but a kid too. She was a very glamorous woman with an effervescent personality, swathed in furs, shimmering in diamonds and silks and gold, as friendly as all get-out, and practically brought the music with her when she entered the restaurant. Today she’d be perfect casting for a revival of Auntie Mame (either musical or original play).
Everyone at Sardi’s loved it when she passed through its portals because it meant fun and warm. And joy, which she always wore.
The daughter, whom I have been following for sometime, is similar but with a different style, somewhat more reserved (although warm and friendly and ready to laugh). She has a strong fashion sense, like her mother, and is tall and willowy so fashion is her fan.
Whereas mother was a Broadway star, daughter is a star in her world – which is the world of social and cultural New York.
But there’s more to it because besides being a wife and mother, she’s professionally ambitious. Besides being an author (who cut her teeth writing for the Cosby Show and Suddenly Susan).
Susan is a born and bred New Yorker. Her Haitian born mother married a New England WASP and had two children who were brought up by their conscientious parents as bi-racial. That doesn’t sound remarkable in this day and age but it still is, according to Susan. The marriage didn’t last but the relationships held firm.
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| DPC and Susan Fales-Hill at Michael's. |
Susan grew up in her mother’s big apartment on West End Avenue. In those days, West End Avenue was home to a lot of theatre people who appreciated the big solid rambling apartments near the river and near the theatre district. Like me, she still likes strolling down Broadway on the Upper West Side to smell the coffee that is New York.
Because of her bi-racial background and her social and economic background, she was at once an outsider who was “inside.” This, to her, provided her powers to observe, and like a lot of writers, she’s happiest just taking in the world that surrounds her, wherever that may be.
She went to private schools here in the city, then to Harvard, then to The Cosby Show in Hollywood, and now to New York. She’s very active in charitable activities in New York although she is loathe to call herself a “philanthropist,” a word whose definition has been distended by the egos gratifying themselves. “Andrew Carnegie was a philanthropist,” she said. “John D. Rockefeller. They built libraries, hospitals. I work to raise funds to support helping people.” |
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| The red carpet leading to the steps of the entrance to Blenheim with Susan Fales-Hill and her husband Aaron Hill in the center rear. 6.13.05. |
You’ve seen her picture any number of times on the NYSD attending a variety of dinners, luncheons and galas where she attends often as a chairman or co-chair. She’s an eloquent and witty speech giver and when you hear her it’s kind of disarming because indeed she looks like a Park Avenue matron and at the podium sounds like the chairman of a major corporation out to charm the troops.
This report has turned into what looks like a valentine, I see. That’s one way you could look at it. She’s a complete charmer because she’s smart, conversational, thoughtful and is often laughing at herself. So this is my effort to define a woman, a New Yorker, whom I myself have had the privilege of observing for quite some time, a woman who bears a leadership personality. New York can bring this out in people.
I hadn’t yet read her book when I sat down to lunch because I’m in the middle of another that is coincidentally about this contemporary New York that Susan is mining. But I did take a quick look just to see what the subject matter is.
One Flight Up has a main character named India Chumley who physically resembles the author and even comes from a bi-racial marriage. And she’s a lawyer who does a lot of pro-bono work and has a very solid marriage to a banker, not unlike Susan’s husband Aaron Hill. And she has a daughter, like you know who. Who is a very good daughter, incidentally even though mother has her emotional ticks aka hang-ups. Like contemporary women working in New York, India juggles time, relationships, issues and ambitions. A lot of these young women know each other and even work with common objectives (the charitable business).
This is an odd but interesting moment in New York, difficult to define because change is in the offing, in the air. Many identify the feeling as anxiety. Others, like the Susan Fales-Hills of the world identify it as “work to be done” on all sides.
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| Mother and daughter at a book party for One Flight Up, hosted by Will and Laura Zeckendorf. Click to order. |
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Susan writes at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street. She works anywhere between an hour and five hours a (week)day on her book (she is working on a third), depending on her school-age daughter’s schedule.
When she was writing television, it was a collaborative effort and the dialogue could be written amidst interruption, just like real life. However, when she started writing straight prose (including magazine pieces), she found she needed to avoid distraction, to concentrate. That was when she found the New York Public’s gift to writers.
She takes her laptop down there and sits in the Main Reading Room because it is beautiful and and elegant and peaceful, and there are many people all working intensely on their own projects. By working at the library Susan gets to focus without the interruption of a phone call, or coffee making, or responding to something at home, or just getting up and walking around. If she needs something in the way of information, she’s got the library there to supply it. She knows why she’s there.
India Chumley, the main character in One Flight Up knows why she’s there too, from I can gather. As I said, I haven’t read the book yet, and frankly I think it is the kind of novel that women relate to with more interest and more readily. However, I’m curious to see the life that Susan portrays because it is a New York life right now, and even a life that could easily be imagined to be hers (in ways). It will be interesting to see where Susan will take India. Knowing what she does and seeing what she sees.
“One Flight Up” is dedicated:
To Aunt Diahann, Aunt Eartha, Aunt Carmen, Aunt Lena, Aunt Adele, and the other Premice/Charliers women, most especially my mother Josephine, for teaching me that each woman must write her own rules, and that blondes don’t necessarily have more fun
To the magnificent men who have graced my life
There you have it. |
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| A club boat cruising down these East River by the northern tip of Roosevelt Islandas the sun was setting, 7:45 pm. |
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