1.24.12: Celebration of The Life | New York Social Diary

Celebration of The Life

Looking towards The Central Park Lake. 2:00 PM. Photo: JH.

Tuesday, January 24, 2012. A wet and rainy day, yesterday in New York, with temperatures climbing north of the 40s.

The last of the "little" snow from this past weekend, courtesy of JH.

Yesterday morning at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, they held a “Celebration of The Life of Evelyn H. Lauder,” who died last November 12, three months to the day after her 75th birthday.

A ten o’clock is early for me since we rarely put the Diary to bed before 2 or even 3 – and one doesn’t immediately fall asleep thereafter. A ten o’clock across town meant an 8 o’clock rising. That means four or five hours sleep, if I’m lucky, which isn’t enough to for me. Once when talking about the subject of sleep with a group of people in the media world, Martha Stewart asked me how much sleep I got. I told her six hours if I were lucky. “Oh you get a lot of sleep,” she said almost dismissively – like “toughen up, boy.” I asked her how much she got. “Four.” Geez.

I realize with that last paragraph that I was looking for a good way to detour from this report. It was a grey day in the city. And wet and brown and dark. And crowded. It wasn’t depressing per se; but it was what it was, and I was going to a memorial for someone I liked who died despite her zest for life and hadn’t skipped a beat to the very end in making the most of it.




	A picture of Evelyn and Leonard on the inside cover of the program.

	Back cover with a photograph by Evelyn Lauder, "Can Spring Be Far Behind, Winter 2011."

I got to Lincoln Center (heavy traffic on the West Side) about five after ten, and to my seat less than ten minutes later. There were a number of us, including Daryl Roth, the Broadway producer, and Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, who didn’t seem to know where he was sitting.

Those of us “latecomers” found seats (and a great view) from the second Ring (there are five). The program had not yet started. The orchestra and finally the first and second Rings were filled. There must have been about 3000 guests (it was by invitation only).

I took my seat as close to the stage as was available. I looked at my program. Amos Chan took that sweet picture of Evelyn sitting in a field of what looks like a sea of red tulips.

Opening the program, a large, unattached square of opaque paper fell out. It was a poem:

THE DAY I FOUND OUT
By Evelyn H. Lauder

SHOCK WAVES, COLD FEAR IN THE PIT OF THE BODY
PRIORITY PLANNING TIME, PROJECTS TO FINISH, WHO NOT TO TELL
SHOCK WAVES WIDENING, SPREADING AS FAR AS THE HORIZON
SPLASHING UP AND DOWN WITH WIDENING CIRCLES
SHOCK WAVES BOUNCING INTO THE FAR REACHES OF KNOWLEDGE AND AWARENESS
SHOCK WAVES ASKING CIRCLES OF QUESTIONS
HOW FAR, HOW LONG, HOW GOOD, HOW BAD
HOW LONG? HOW LONG?
SHOCK WAVES OF PAIN, NOT FOR ME, BUT FOR THE LOVES OF MY LIFE.
SHOCK WAVES, WILL YOU GO AWAY?
SHOCK WAVES TOO SOON, TOO SOON.

October 20, 2009

On the left hand side of the program was the picture of Evelyn and Leonard at an earlier time in their lives – I would guess the late 80s. She is wearing a magenta red couture dress and a diamond and ruby necklace. They look rich and glamorous. And happy, but really.

Then there was the Order of the Service.

On stage left, seated were Rabbi Peter J. Rubinstein, Barbara Walters, Mayor Bloomberg, Leonard Lauder, Elizabeth Hurley and Dr. Larry Norton of Memorial Sloan Kettering and a force in Evelyn’s Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Set behind them was an enormous arrangement of fresh flowers. And on the big screen on the other side of the stage was a color photograph of a flower that Evelyn had taken. Beauty was what she was always looking for.

In the orchestra pit, The Empyreal Strings (sixteen musicians and a conductor, Roman Teplinksy, Founder and Director) was playing what reminded me of a Viennese melody. This authority of reference may be my imagination because I knew that Evelyn had been born in Austria in 1936.

The stage of the David H. Koch Theater yesterday morning before the Celebration service.

However, I was taken by that poem in the program. I was imagining the reality of those words. She wrote what was going through her mind when the news was delivered to her. This was not her first bout, the story having started twenty years before -- the bout that took Evelyn on an odyssey of philanthropic passion that created the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and raising more than a quarter billion dollars for research to find a cure.

The date on the poem was a year and a half ago. I’d seen Evelyn a number of times during that period, out in public, at dinners, at Michael’s, in her office. I had a feeling that she wasn’t feeling up to par, because she wasn’t out as much as she used to be. I didn’t know, however, that the end was nigh and she was well aware of it. She was always her same softly cheerful self, always inquiring, always curious. I kept thinking about those times and how she wore them with such aplomb and such grace. The fortitude.

We don’t know what that’s like unless we’ve experienced it, and usually it means you don’t have anyone to tell that to because it’s late in the day, your day. But yesterday, sitting there in the second Ring listening to that melody, and looking at that flower and reading those words, it felt like the movie of the woman’s life. And this was the final ending.

Soon the service began. All but Leonard Lauder spoke, each with a personal recollection of knowing the woman – because they knew her well.

When they were finished, everyone exited the stage. There was a video of her life shown on the screen. Home movies through the decades. There was black and white footage of the baby in her father’s arms, then by her adoring father’s side. They was footage of her father’s store in Vienna which they had to leave behind when fleeing from the Nazis. By that time Evelyn was sheltered on the Isle of Wight, although she too was vulnerable to the German bombing like everyone else on that side of the Atlantic.

Someone said that she had such a good “nose” that she could smell the difference in the RAF bombs and the Nazis.”

Someone said that she started out, after graduating from Hunter College, as a teacher in Harlem, and that she kept the pictures of her students in her wallet. Then she met Leonard. And Estee; not a small matter.

The footage of her life changing when she entered the Lauder family is interesting. As a young married woman, she was handsome and striking looking, darkly brunette, kind of like Ann Bancroft with a youthful yet womanly earthiness that must have appealed to her husband.

The auditorium of the David H. Koch Theatre yesterday morning before the service began.

In the footage of her days as a young mother playing with her children on the beach, she was the modern post-War woman. Her mother-in-law had brought her into the business which had only just begun to prosper. By her late forties, early fifties, Evelyn was an elegant, sophisticated New York woman, bright-eyed and taking it all in with her steady enthusiasm. You see it in her in the red dress in the picture.

I’d known her slightly for awhile before I saw her full personality. Before that she was friendly in a gracious and ladylike way. But on my first attending the BCRF’s annual black tie gala, I saw the real Evelyn operating, all engines going. The Ambassador, the Fundraiser, the Personality, at home on stage, at home with her objective, at home with her close friends; almost coquettishly amusing but very serious and very credible with her guests. I saw then the power of the woman and her deep sense of purpose.

After the film, her two sons William and Gary, and her daughter-in-law Laura, and her four grandchildren Rachel, Danielle, Eliana and Joshua came out along with Leonard. Each spoke about their mother, grandmother, mother-in-law. The audience full laughter evoked by the children's memories of "Evvie" brought everything home.

William recalling his mother in summertimes when he was a kid broke a couple of times. So did two of his granddaughters. Everyone, however, had stories to tell about her behavior toward them, the mother, the grandmother, the Jewish mother. You could see she was the force for them that she was for the BCRF and no doubt for her business, and all the facets of the life she shared so closely with her husband.

Then Leonard spoke with his two sons flanking him at the podium. Despite the size of the crowd, literally thousands of people, you still got the feeling everyone in the room knew this woman.

Everything I heard about her that I had never heard before only reminded me of the woman I knew. She took photographs of flowers because it was the beauty she was after. Life was beauty, beauty is life. Steadfast.

There was celebration in the man’s voice as he recalled his wife and their life together. You knew they were a team and she was on his team and he most definitely was on hers. I kept thinking of how much she obviously was getting out of life during those days when I saw her and she was already aware of her state of being.

The Promenade waiting the guests to enter from the auditorium. The couple on the lower right, waiting, are David and Julia Koch.

It was a big life she had, that she made with her husband and her family and her thousands of friends and acquaintances and strangers whom she guided in their moment of panic. I put that together with the black and white footage of Mr. Hausner holding his little Evive, the baby, in old Vienna. I thought of the young girl being awakened by her mother aboard ship as it was entering New York harbor, passing the Statue of Liberty, so that she could get her first glance at the New World they had come to, the land of Liberty.

Someone brought up “taxes” -- maybe it was a recollection of Leonard’s -- that Evelyn was grateful to the country that she had come to live for the rest of her life that she thought it was an honor to pay taxes to have this great haven to live in.

That was how she saw it and how she left it. She had set a good example, made the most of it for herself and so many many others whose lives she touched.

The Empyreal Strings played several tunes of Evelyn’s choice and ended with “Fascination,” as the guests exited the auditorium and moved to the Promenade for hors d’oeuvres and drinks, and to say hello to Evelyn’s family. A piece was missing though ... a force.

Comments? Contact DPC here.