9.24.12: Stayed in all weekend | New York Social Diary

Stayed in all weekend

Reading the Sunday paper. 11:00 AM. Photo: JH.

Monday, September 24, 2012. Autumn has arrived. Yesterday was a brilliant, sunny, fairly cool day in New York.

Stayed in all weekend – except for picking up grub – cleaned up my desk to prepare for the next hurricane, did laundry, visited my favorite bookstore, bought another pound of meatloaf from William Poll (as well as the guac, the bagel chips and the inevitable chicken salad sandwich with a strip of crisp bacon on pumpernickel — now my TGIF reward). Shared it with my neighbors Scheips and Graff down the hall on Friday night. Saturday: zip. Beautiful down by the river; beautiful at my desk with my book.

Down by the river. 6:15 PM.

Had an early dinner Sunday night with a friend at Sette Mezzo. Basically an Upper East Side restaurant. Sette is very popular and on Sunday nights you’ll see a lot of the people who spend their weekends in the Hamptons or in Connecticut, many of whom know each other, taking early dinner with their families or relatives. No little/wee children, but many young people. The bill of fare is excellent, the portions are large-ish (although it seems few have a problem with that). The waiters Italian or I’ll believe it anyway. No liquor, only wine; cash only unless you have a charge. You can take home what you can’t eat but want to.


	The Sargent portrait.

	The book cover. Click to order.

Finished “Love, Fiercely” about the Phelps Stokes couple you’ve seen in the Sargent portrait.

The book is about: who was that couple in the famous Sargent portrait now hanging in the Met? As people, as man and woman, as man and wife; and what was that world they lived in like; what was their life like? It is a book about New York life for a certain class – Upper – in the Gilded Age. Not like ours. The writer’s interest in historical detail makes the trip vivid for the reader.

Her maiden name was Minturn. Edith, always Edie. An Old New York name. His was Stokes. Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes. They lived through the last three decades of the 19th century and the first three of the 20th. We think we’ve seen amazing technological changes? They saw the beginning. The telegraph, the telephone, the radio. All a wonder; something that has left us, apparently forever. But they knew a world where there was silence much of the time. Everything else came from that.

Edith and Newt lived an idyllic life. Except. No one lives an idyllic life. They wrote copious letters, probably thousands. They read a lot. They were together. They spent much of their times with their respective families (sisters, brothers, in-laws, lifelong friends). They lived a life of luxury (his parents’ weekend house in Lenox had a hundred rooms and they filled them on weekends for parties).

But you look at the picture with her bright lovely face in the foreground wearing her straw boater, her white tennis skirt and navy peplum jacket and his tall, dark, looming presence in white behind her – intense yet suggesting mystery.

These are the eyes of the painter Sargent. But they are the people he saw, in their flaming youth. “Love, Fiercely” is about that flame and what it warmed and where it was when it died out. And where New York went and what it was like. It was a special part of New York then and now.

Newt Stokes became obsessed in the last almost half of his life, with a project that remains unique in the annals of collections. An Iconography of New York at its inception when the first explorers came upon it, up until the late 19th century. It remains unique but the project took almost all their financial resources to complete. The Stokes fortune was tied up in Manhattan real estate. Properties which today would be worth billions. Yet, at the end of their lives in the late '30s, early 1940s, the Great Depression had sent real estate prices to the bottom and everything went for a song to simply pay everyday debts. But I don’t want to give away the denouement.

Which, speaking of writers of such matters, today is the anniversary of the birth of F. Scott Fitzgerald, in Saint Paul, one hundred and sixteen years ago in 1896. It ended in sadness for him, at forty-four, in 1940s in Hollywood, feeling washed-up.

Attempting to recover from alcoholism, burnt out and struggling to get work at that moment in his life, it was Fitzgerald who lamented somewhere that “there are no second acts in American life.”

It sounds wise in the saying and has made a strong impression on the generation that followed him, but even his life, in the 72 years since, disproves the notion: Fitzgerald’s books have sold in the tens of millions after his death. In the year of his death, I read somewhere that his royalties on “The Great Gatsby” (first published fifteen years before in 1925) were something like five bucks.

Fitzgerald’s character “Gatsby” turned out to be a classic: prescient then, and now. He articulates the moral and therefore economic dilemma of our times. Although ironically the image of the man, Jay Gatsby, has so much romance that the character’s core is shrouded in memory.

Nothing shrouded last Thursday night at Lincoln Center where the New York City Ballet held its annual Fall Gala. This year they celebrated Valentino Garavani, the great Valentino.

For the special one-night-only evening, Valentino also created costumes for three ballets by New York City Ballet’s Ballet Master Peter Martins. This included a world premiere work, as well as costumes for the New York preview of a pas de deux choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon. Also, as a tribute to the man and his signature “Valentino Red,” the company performed George Balanchine’s Rubies, the second section of the full-length Jewels, which is set in Igor Stravinsky’s Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra.

Valentino with Ballerinas

Valentino with Danseur

This was a star-studded evening. Beginning at 5:30 for cocktails, a 7 PM performance, followed by a dinner at 9 (the number on the program although never quite promptly). Black tie and New York women turned out with trumpets. And Valentino red. These are very special evenings and anyone attending is privileged. Because the Ballet Company and their creative associates down through the ages, serve up the beauty of humankind’s creative imagination. A powerful antidote to these times. And we’re all the better for it.

Dinner on the promenade

Valentino performance

Among the stars and their associations that night: Anne Hathaway, Barbara Walters, Angelica Huston, Iman, Andy Cohen, Carolina Herrera, Tory Burch, Daphne Guinness, Olivia Palermo, Diane von Furstenberg and Barry Diller, Narciso Rodriguez, Ralph Rucci, Martha Stewart, Sean Averny, Leila Rose, Cynthia Rowley, Darren Aronofsky, Kyle MacLachlan, Amy Sedaris, Adam Shankman, Alina Cho, Grace Gummer Allison Sarofim, Andres Santo Domingo, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Peter Brant and Stephanie Seymour, Peter and Harry Brant, Fe and Alessandro Fendi, Princess Firyal, Leonard Lauder, Carol Mack, Charlotte Moss, Randy and Jay Fishman, Nancy and Howard Marks, Ron Rifkin, Aaron Latham.

The evening was chaired by Giancarlo Giammetti, Sarah Jessica P., Maria Bartiromo, and Pamela Joyner.