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I flunked
out of college at the end of the first semester of my junior year. That might have been, should have been,
could have been, very
troubling for a young man about to embark on the Big Search For A
Life. But it wasn’t. I’d flunked four semesters straight
of the “science and mathetmatic” requirement. I also
had a working scholarship which was burdensome to a child who liked
to play and to read and to socialize: I was not “serious.” But
in December of that fatal semester, just before the Christmas break,
I entered a One-Act playwrighting contest. It required writing a
one-act play, casting it and putting it on. Three were chosen for
performance and mine was one of them.
It was called “Twelve Picassos and a Green Rug,” about
two college roommates and their “philosophies” about
life. In those days – maybe it’s so even today – college
students often sat around and discussed many things, such as the
anticipated Great Big World out there after college. In my play,
one of the characters believed you could have anything you wanted
in life (such as 12 Picassos and a green rug) by simply wanting it,
while the other character fervently believed life was about playing
by the rules and taking things one step at a time. The young man
who believed you could have anything you wanted by simply wanting
it won the playwrighting contest. The prize was $100.
The winning was a seminal experience of personal achievement (I was
twenty) and remained so in my consciousness for many many years thereafter.
It motivated me to eventually become a professional writer.
The usual formula for flunk-outs was to go home, get a job, take
some college credit courses locally and return to start over again.
I knew this was never going to happen. I wanted to go to New York.
A college friend, hearing of my plans, asked me where I was going
to live. I had no idea. She did. Her mother had an apartment which
she rarely used because she spent most of her time on her property
on the Maine coast. Perhaps I could stay there for awhile. That sounded
fine with me. During the Christmas vacation, I got a letter from
my friend telling me that everything was set and they were expecting
me right after the New Year.
So in early January 1962, I came down to the city by train with a
couple of suitcases and a portable Smith-Corona, ready to begin life.
Outside Grand Central I got into a Checker cab and gave the cabbie
the address: 71 East Seventy-first Street.
It seems incredible in retrospect that I had no knowledge or even
anticipation of where I was going except that it was “an apartment,” where
I could live rent-free for the time being – all magic words
to a bumpkin.
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740
Park Avenue
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The “apartment” turned out to be a sixteen room duplex
at 740 Park Avenue (with its side entrance address at 71 East 71).
It was the family’s apartment, although everyone had grown
up and moved away (except for my friend who was still in college).
There was a German cook who prepared a breakfast of bacon and eggs
and freshly squeezed orange juice, served on a tray in the library
every morning by a round and trundling and otherwise silent Irish
maid in uniform. My bedroom, which had been the bedroom of the man
of the house who was now infirm and living in a care-facility, had
two large French doors that led to a small terrace and looked south
to Rockefeller Center and the RCA (now the GE) tower. I could also
see the blue IBM digital clock on Madison Avenue in the Fifties.
My room had its own bathroom (something new in my life) that was
by anybody’s standards large and luxurious.
By architectural standards, and certainly by the standards of how
I had grown up (in a simple New England farmhouse built in the 1840s),
it was very grand. The elevator stopped at the apartment’s
door with a small vestibule that led to a large gallery with a marble
floor and 12-foot ceilings, at one end of which was a circular marble
staircase, and off of which was a very large living room, a wood
paneled library and a large formal dining room with a folding screen
that
covered the entrance to the pantry and kitchen.
Aside from the architecture, however, the décor was homey
and even threadbare and very lived in. There was also a scent about
the place which I have never been able to articulate adequately;
not a perfume but more of a clean, neat mustiness. Recently I was
telling the architect Robert A. M. Stern about it
and he called it “the
smell of money.” That seems adequate.
The environment bespoke order, like the mail and the New York
Herald-Tribune which was perfectly placed by unseen hands, fresh
on the long table just inside the front door every morning – or
the World-Telegram
and Sun which was placed there in the late afternoon. The wood furniture
pieces were all excellent antiques, well cared for and polished,
and the lamps were porcelain or brass, although the draperies, the
cushions on the sofas and chairs were faded and well-used with time,
and punched up daily by the maid to keep them looking fresh.
I had a girlfriend who lived five blocks down the avenue at 640 Park
in an apartment that was far more lavish in the glamorous sense with
famous art and sumptuous upholstery and crystal chandeliers. My hostess,
who was an heiress to a large family fortune (as was her husband),
lived, despite her extensive property holdings, very frugally by
comparison. Nothing about her costume reflected her financial or
social position. In fact, she wore a faded and even ratty-looking
old mink coat whenever she went out in cold weather. Although she
was a very kind woman in intention, her outward manner had a certain
hauteur not unlike Katharine Hepburn, and so that there was no mistaking
her place in the social order. Her telephone book was the Social
Register (literally) and entertainment was a very occasional trip
to the theatre or lunch at the Colony Club, or more frequently a
card game with a couple of friends and her elderly mother who lived
nearby but nevertheless arrived in her chauffeur-driven Bentley.
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John
D. Rockefeller Jr.
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My hostess and her husband had moved into 740 many years before (and
into a much larger apartment initially), encouraged by one of the
Rockefellers who were family friends (John
D. Jr.’s widow was
still living there). When she was in town, as she was every few weeks,
usually when a son or daughter was briefly in residence, dinner
was served in the dining room at 7, after a cocktail in the library,
and
a jacket and a tie was the unspoken rule for the boys. If she were
there on Thursdays – which was the staff’s night off – we’d
go over to the Polo Lounge in the (now defunct and condo-ed) Westbury
for dinner. My hostess had no familiarity whatsoever with the kitchen.
Once when she and I went into the kitchen to make some coffee, I
realized she was on foreign and very uneasy territory which made
her nervous and almost girlishly insecure (for she was otherwise
a woman who exuded – in that Hepburn way – confidence).
It was a very very quiet place to live, as most of
the time I was there by myself, and high above the town (about fifteen
floors),
there was little sound of the hustle and bustle of the city. Once,
one of her sons, who was a contemporary, was in residence for a few
weeks and decided (with my help) to have a party. He invited a lot
of friends (I knew hardly anyone in the city at the time), hired
a band, bought the booze and we rolled up the carpet in the living
room to make a dance floor. This little foray turned into a major
faux
pas. When Madame next returned to New York, she was evidently informed
immediately of the goings-on and was very put out. That aforementioned
hauteur kicked in big time: son was mightily reprimanded and so was
I for not having the sense advise him otherwise. In retrospect,
it was a harmless incident. Nothing was broken or damaged and there
were no private episodes in the bedrooms, but it was evidently just
something that was not done.
That, it seemed, was the manner of the building’s
tenants, although I knew none of them and saw very
few of them in the lobby. It seemed as if most of the residents were
like my hostess, little
old ladies who never left their apartments without their hats and
their gloves, in their laced up low-heeled shoes. I wasn’t
staying there long before I realized that the residents were all
very serious, or at least appeared to be in their own minds, and
as they walked across the carpeted lobby to their waiting limousines.
Oddly enough, although my “lodgings” were first-rate
and then some, at that age, I was still anxious to have “my
own place.” About six months after moving in, I found it: a
tiny one bedroom apartment, with a kitchen in the wall of the living
room, on East 87th Street between Lex and Third, with a college fraternity
brother, for $110 a month (split two ways), and quite happily, I
moved out of the grand building on 71st Street and Park Avenue.
My hostess finally sold the apartment in the early 1970s after having
it on the market for a few years. She had bought it in the late 1950s
and at the time of the sale, I was told that it went for about the
same price she paid, which was in the low six figures. Today that
apartment would sell for upwards of $15 million.
All these years later, Michael Gross has written a riveting
book about 740 Park, just published, and its extraordinary
history. In the years between the present and my initial stay there,
I’ve
known a number of its residents and have come to understand that
it has long been considered one of the most desirable (if not these
most desirable) cooperative apartment building in New York. It certainly
is one of the most expensive. |
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Lee,
mom, and Jackie when they lived at 740 Park
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Thelma
Chrysler Foy when she lived at 740 Park |
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740 Park Avenue; the Story of the World’s Richest Apartment
Building is one of the best social documents of the past
seventy-five years in New York. The building, designed by Rosario
Candela, was begun in 1929, the year of the stock market
crash, built by James T. Lee, the maternal grandfather
of Jacqueline Onassis and Lee Radziwill (who
lived there as children with their mother and father), at a cost
of $2.25 million – the highest amount per square foot ever
spent on a residential building in the city’s history.
Completed and first occupied in 1931, the Depression all but
destroyed Mr. Lee’s original business plans and the building
limped along financially until Abby and John D. Rockefeller
Jr. moved into the building in 1938.
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Electra
Havemeyer Webb
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Jerzy
Kosinski
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Gayfryd
and Saul Steinberg
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Its
original tenants included Mayflower descendants, Vanderbilt scions,
Wall Street bankers’ great-granddaughters, a sugar heiress
(Havemeyer) and people with names like Whipple and Hadley and Brewster and Hoppen and Thorne and Gerry. In
its earliest days, with apartments difficult to fill because
of the economy, Black Jack Bouvier (Jackie’s
father) lived there rent-free, thanks to his father-in-law (who
didn’t have much use for his son-in-law).
Despite Mr.
Lee’s original intentions, the building became a rental (as
happened to many other Manhattan buildings that were originally slated to be
co-ops). Mr. Rockefeller’s solid financial status and active interest in
his living environment eventually put the building on the (long) road to solvency.
In the meantime it attracted some of the biggest names in American society and
industry including Walter Chrysler’s three children – Thelma
Foy, and Jack and Walter Jr., Peggy Bedford Bancroft, William
Hale Harkness, Marshall Field; Campbell Soup heiress Elinor
Dorrance, Frank Gould, Angier Biddle Duke, Gardner Cowles; a rich widow
named Mary Weir who later married unhappily the author Jerzy
Kosinski; Mellons, Gimbels, Bronfmans; Warner Brothers heiress Doris
Vidor; Annenberg heiress Enid Haupt. Steve Ross lived
there with his second wife, Amanda Burden and then with his
third wife and widow, Courtney (who still has the apartment), Saul
Steinberg lived there through two scandalized marriages, a third one
which elevated him in society, after which he was confronted with near financial
ruin, and finally sold his apartment for a record $31 million to financier Steve
Schwarzman. Anne Eisenhower and her husband Wolfgang Flottl owned
an apartment for eight years and never moved in, later selling it to a Tisch.
David and Hilly Mahoney lived there and sold eventually to Ronald
and Jo Carole Lauder. Screenwriter William Goldman (who
is quoted “I believe I was the poorest person to ever live in that building”), Rand
and Jesse Araskog, Henry Kravis and Carolyne Roehm, Ronald Perelman, a Goulandris, a Niarchos, a Santo
Domingo and David Koch have all been owners (some still
are). |
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Marie
Josee Kravis and Henry Kravis
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Charles
Stevenson and Betsy Gotbaum |
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Rand
and Jesse Araskog
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L.
to r.: Amanda Burden and Charlie Rose; David and Julia
Koch; Steve
and Christine Schwarzman.
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The
author’s painstaking but illuminating research provides
the most fascinating details of the architectural, financial
and social history of this incredible metropolitan residence,
telling the stories of each and every family who ever inhabited
its palatial apartments. It’s Dynasty all over again times
one
hundred. Anything that’s ever happened in the annals of human behavior
has visited the rooms of this building and my only regret when reading it was
that I couldn’t read it fast enough. It’s like eating popcorn while
sitting through a thriller movie; you can get lost in the act.
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Click
image to order
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It’s also
a perfect example of how the roots of history are always conceived
in what is always referred to as gossip. Michael Gross’ text
takes you through the decades of social change – from the
little old ladies who never left the building without their hats
and their gloves to the contemporary men and women who dashed from
the basement gym to their waiting SUVs in their athletic outfits.
Divorce, murder, infidelity, anti-Semitism, embezzlement, mistresses,
homosexual liaisons, bankruptcy and all the rest of the profligacies
that visit and menace the human condition, are to be found in exquisite
detail between the pages of this book. It’s a big box of
chocolates that transmogrifies into excellent nourishment for the
historically minded and students of the modern metropolis. |
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