Vera Wang Walks the Aisle
The blog Realestalker has found the listing for Vera Wang and husband Arthur Becker’s 778 Park Avenue apartment. Seems they’re moving on up the real estate pecking order, but down the avenue, by taking over the apartment previously owned by Vera’s late parants, Chen Ching and Florence Wang at 740 Park Avenue. So if you […]
Hello, I Won’t Be Going… Yet
A portrait of the Director as a much-younger man. (Philippe de Montebello moonlighting as a book-jacket model.) Charles McGrath of the New York Times takes a fascinating look at the thirty-year-long reign of Metropolitan Museum of Art director Philippe de Montebello, 71, in tomorrow’s Arts & Leisure section — and the lingering uncertainty about who […]
D. D. Ryan, R.I.P
Dorinda Dixon Ryan, better known as D.D., died this morning after a brief illness. She was a fashion editor at Harpers Bazaar, a costume designer (for Stephen Sondheim), the matchmaker who helped create the Eloise series by introducing author Kay Thompson to illustrator Hilary Knight, a central figure in the inner circle around the late […]
Schadenschwarzmanfreude Pt. II
Dealbreaker asks, “Does Private Equity Hate Stephen Schwarzman?” Though it practitioners do think him “ostentatious, churlish, megalomaniacal, tone-deaf — and a hypocritical dissembler to boot,” my impression is that they’ll hold their noses and do business with him when its to their advantage.
The Old New Journalism
In today’s New York Times, George Vecsey writes on the baseball great Don Newcombe and mentions a story about Newcombe by my father, the late Milton Gross, who was a sports columnist for the New York Post for about thirty years, calling it “one of the great sports columns of that or any other era.” […]
In the Pink
My review of Fifteen Central Park West appears smack in the middle of this week’s New York Observer. Curbed.com says I gave the building “the gross treatment” but missed two little scooplets buried deep in the piece: banking biggie Sandy Weill and Och-Ziff’s head hedge hog Dan Och are among those soon to move in […]
Name Games
From concert stages to museum toilets, anything goes (up for sale) nowadays when it comes to what philanthropic organizations call naming opportunities. In the new issue of Contribute, I look at the naming marketplace, its pleasures and its pitfalls. The biggest one? As Page Six writes of the article today, “Forever is no longer forever.” […]
Win For All?
Has Shelby White, the antiquities collector and Metropolitan Museum of Art trustee and benefactress, agreed to repatriate some of her storied hoard to Italy? Il Messaggero thinks maybe. The artsjournal blog CultureGrrl translates a vague but nonetheless promising comment by Italian culture minister Francesco Rutelli: “… We are a step away from a final accord… […]
“I embody the gag reflex.” — Doug Marlette, R.I.P.
Doug Marlette, 57, the Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist and creator of Kudzu, died today in a car crash in Mississippi. Doug was one of the nineteen baby boomers whose stories I combined in My Generation. His part of it, based on a series of interviews conducted in 1999, is scattered throughout that book. I’ve gathered […]
Frank Talk
I have a new favorite blog, The Wealth Report by Robert Frank, author of Richistan. In today’s post, he comments on my recent feature in Contribute about the bull market Naming Rights. “If you truly want to make the world a better place, please don’t clutter it up with more plaques and name tags,” Frank […]