Famous girls

Carl Schurz Park. 12 PM. Photo: DPC.

It was a chilly but sunny and beautiful first of May in New York. At noontime, on a quickie walk with Madame/Missy I passed the fence of Carl Schurz Park which was brilliant with nature’s Spring palette. I couldn’t resist getting a shot of it.

Famous Girls. Connections/separations. Down at Michael’s I lunched with Brooke Duchin and Alex Hitz. Mr. Hitz had one of those perfect sun-kissed California tans which are subtler and more affirming than the East Coast tans. This is because he has a wonderful house out there in the Hills overlooking L.A. and probably the silvery Pacific off to the west. I don’t know because I haven’t been there, but I know the neighborhood and I know the feeling.

My other lunch guest, Brooke (Hayward) Duchin lived part of her childhood in California where her father Leland Hayward was one of the first super-agents who eventually sold his agency to Jules Stein and MCA, and went on to become a highly successful Broadway and Hollywood producer (“South Pacific,” “The Sound of Music,” “Gypsy,” etc.). Mr. Hayward was married to Slim Hawks (later Keith) and last married to Pamela Digby Churchill, who became Brooke’s wicked stepmother who, after Hayward died, became Pamela Harriman. Brooke’s mother was a movie star named Margaret Sullavan, who had also been married to, among others, Henry Fonda. So the Fonda kids and the Hayward kids grew up together.


	Brooke and Peter Duchin

Brooke wrote a book about her family called “Haywire,” which was a big bestseller in the late 70s, and made into a hit miniseries. It was a seminal memoir, creating a genre, the first of its kind to present the Hollywood life as real in its extreme unreality.

Brooke has been married three times – first to Michael Thomas, the writer; second to Dennis Hopper, the movie star; and thirdly to Peter Duchin, the writer/pianist society orchestra leader, son of the immortal Eddie Duchin, and “foster” son of Averell Harriman who later married Pamela Churchill Hayward. So Mr. and Mrs. Duchin, it turned out, shared the same wicked stepmother.

So we’re sitting in Michael’s on this busy lunchtime. The conversation is filled with catch-up. Hillary Clinton; fors, againsts. Something about Hollywood and Hollywood history. Tales swapped or dumped about the great big wonderful world of privilege; economic firstly, and many other things a close secondly.

Shelley Wanger passed by on her way out. She wanted Brooke to write a second book, but the thought of it is anathema to Brooke. She had a mentor who sat on her to write the first book -- Joanna Mankiewicz, the daughter of the fabled (“Citizen Kane”) screenwriter, Herman Mankiewicz, brother of Joe. Brooke says she could never have done it otherwise; it would never have been written without her. After “Haywire “ was finished, Joanna Mankiewicz was killed when she was hit by a car while crossing a street in Greenwich Village.

Unlike a lot of writers, Brooke doesn’t seem to care that she’s not going to write another book. This next one was going to be about her years with Hopper (with whom she has a daughter Marin). She lived in L.A. then too. That was the 60s, the breakout/hippie decade. “Easy Rider.” She can’t stand it.

She’s been around fame all her life and she’s immune to it. Her editor, Shelley Wanger, who also came from Hollywood family of the same era (her mother was Joan Bennett, her father was Walter Wanger, the producer; her aunt was Constance Bennett), feels the same way. She too is immune to fame.

Sitting there at the table fifteen feet from the restaurant’s entrance, we noticed when a stunning couple appeared on the landing. They didn’t look familiar but they looked like they should have looked familiar.

He was tallish, narrow and wiry thin. With a mane of dark brown hair that looked like he’d been blown out through a wind tunnel. At first glance he looked like somebody you might see in St. Tropez. Or Hollywood. Of a certain age. Maybe record producer. Or an agent (movie). With a blue silk/linen jacket and his shirt open just about to his navel. Either that or he wasn’t wearing a shirt under his jacket.

The woman was dressed in a black suit and wore her blonde and brown hair in what in the 1940s was called an “upsweep.” She had a very small waist accented by a very wide cinch-like belt. Bette Davis in “Now, Voyager.” Or the gun moll: Ann Sheridan, so impeccably stylized and camera ready beautiful, circa 1945, that she could have just come off the set of a Warner Bros. Picture.

They were seated one table away. No one seemed to recognize them but they looked so much a part of a scene of a film that there those of who couldn’t help looking.

First of all she was beautiful – exotically wholesome, so to speak. He was cool, sophisticated, but older, and no beauty. Consensus: newlyweds or having an affair. In a movie anyway.

Later we learned that they were actually as famous. As famous in their worlds as the aforementioned. Had this restaurant been in Paris, they might have made the pages of Ola, or Paris Match or Pont Vue. The world of the famous, and the rich, and the privilege, and the access, and now more than ever before, the attention. Media attention.


Bernard-Henri Levy and Arielle Dombasle

They were: Daphne Guinness and Bernard Henri Levy. Many Americans have not heard of him but he is one of the most famous intellectuals of France, in Europe. A best selling journalist, intellectual and “New Philosopher” whose thoughts have blown apart the legitimacy of Marxism, Communism, etc. Corruption always follows, he postulates and proves. We don’t have his type in this country. Plus he socializes with exotically beautiful women whose presence gives rise to all kinds of thoughts.

He is also the son of a rich man, an Algerian Jew who migrated to France when Bernard Henri was a little boy, his father became a multimillionaire. When he died his son inherited his business which he sold for hundreds of millions.

M. Levy has also been married three times. Right now he is married to the luscious Arielle Dombasle, a French girl brought up in America. Or vice versa. Mme. Dombasle Levy is a chanteuse. She gave a concert at the Supper Club here in New York a year or two ago. She was costumed in a provocative gown while delivering her songs, leaning into a stool in her tightly wrapped sheath as if we were Rick’s Place in Casablanca. Except the Supper Club holds a thousand people.

M. Levy’s luncheon date, Mrs. Guinness was born in to the British brewery family. Her father has a title, Lord Moyne. She too was she born with one: the Honorable Daphne Suzannah Diana Guinness.


	Daphne Guinness

Suzannah, for her mother, a beautiful French woman who died a few years ago of cancer. Diana for her paternal grandmother Diana Mitford Guinness Mosley. Grandmother came from the famous literary family of sisters (and one brother who was killed in the Second World War). She left Mr. Guinness to marry Oswald Mosley the notorious British fascist. Hilter attended their wedding. The company they kept. She and her husband remained sympathetic to the Hitler crowd for the rest of their lives. Although they were jailed in England during the 2nd War.

Mrs. Guinness was married when she was nineteen to Spyros Niarchos, one of the sons of Stavros Niarchos, the Greek shipping tycoon. The couple had three children. She is now forty-one. They a divorced a few years ago. She is said to have got a $35 mlllion dollar settlement and now has transformed herself from billionaire’s wife into girl about town, mainly London.

I met her once, in passing, at a dinner party of Alice Mason’s several years ago. She was married then and was introduced as Mrs Niarchos. They looked like upperclass Europeans dress and bearing. He was a pleasant but somewhat diffident man with unobtrusive looks, in his late 30s or early 40s; and she was a beauty; very slender, dressed very well, probably French couture, with that cut-glass British upperclass accent and a manner which spells aristocracy and money.

Americans do not have this. We’re still too provincial. Not even the very rich ones. It is an edge that is authentically gilted. Which is why the British are the best and the most terrible snobs. And arrogant.


Daphne Guinness and Karl Lagerfeld

That is not to say Mrs. Guinness Niarchos was arrogant that night we were briefly introduced during the cocktail hour. She wasn’t. She was beautiful and could make you wonder if this is what Babe Paley or that other Guinness – Gloria – was like.

She was also quiet and unobtrusive like her husband. That was the impression I was left with and kept, true or false, when I later read that she divorced Niarchos and was seen around London nightlife a lot.

Then I saw pictures we ran of her, like the one shown with Karl Lagerfeld in Rome. This was such a different personality or self-presentation that I wondered if it were the same woman. Not only had her fashion transformed, but from the looks of it, so had her personality. There was a touch of the Edie Sedgwick in the image projected.

It was, I later learned, the same Diana Guinness. Looking much younger. Now, she is Out There. Not a shrinking violet or a wallflower. When I saw her today I didn’t recognize her except to know I knew the face. Her persona, like her lunch partners was like something out of a movie. Fame can do that to you.

For others, like my friend Brooke, it’s “pass the ketchup.” She had the cheeseburger, without the bun, and with crisp bits of freshly fried bacon.

Last night at Sotheby’s, the 10th floor galleries were set with tables for 225 for dinner amidst the contemporary and impressionist art preview. The matter at hand was the 2nd Annual Connoisseur’s Dinner with accompanying wine and art auction to benefit Leonard Lauder’s charity, the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation.

It was black tie and the Galleries of Sotheby’s turned out as they are with a beautiful collection of art to be auctioned soon, served as a rare backdrop for a dinner. Warhol, Bacon, Picasso, Monet, Courbet, Leger, Munch, Degas, Chagall, van Dongen.

waiters in the Sotheby's 10th Floor gallery awaiting the dinner guests.

A Bacon tryptich awaits the auction gavel.

I talked to a man named Dr. Howard Fillit who is the director of the Foundation. It was started by Leonard Lauder and his family foundations have been funding it – the quest to find drugs to treat it. He told me that it is essentially a disease of old age, that it is not new. Much of what we used to call dementia or senility in old age was really the same as Alzheimers. Dr. Fillit, who is also affiliated with Mount Sinai Hospital, also believes that we will find a drug to treat it successfully.