ONE
CARRIAGE TRADE
On that day in June 1999 when Tommy Hilfiger got into 820 Fifth Avenue, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where these kinds of things duly matter, the news was examined and deciphered like some sort of a social Rosetta stone. The ladies with the tanned, slender arms in their sleeveless Carolina Herrera dresses picked over the detailsthe square footage, the price, his wife, his moneyalong with the cheese soufflé every day at lunch that week at Swiftys. Why would eightyish society nabob Jayne Wrightsman, who reportedly controlled everything at 820 Fifth Avenue, down to what color the lampshades were in the lobby, let Tommy Hilfiger in? What did that mean? Was Fifth Avenue turning into Central Park West?
Fifth Avenue is the address against which all others are measured. It cleaves Manhattan down the middle, East from West, the geographic arbiter of status. It divides the Croesusean rich from the merely wealthy, the influential from the truly powerful. From its southernmost tip, at Washington Square in Greenwich Village, to Ninety-sixth Street, where it stops mattering, it is six and a half miles long, most of it high-end retail space and skyscraper office buildings. But on the mile and a half facing Central Park, from Fifty-ninth Street to Ninety-sixth Street, in sixty-three co-operative and five condominium apartment buildings, there lives the greatest consolidation of private wealth ever assembled in one place. Of that stretch of the avenue, 820 Fifth Avenue was one of the top two great houses, as the old-time management referred to the buildings they lovingly tended.
I would have thought Eight-twenty Fifth was the best address in the city, Edward Lee Cave, the don of the carriage-trade brokers sniffed, meaning pre-Hilfiger. At the carriage-trade brokerage houses, selling an apartment at 820 Fifth Avenue is the equivalent of receiving the real estate Légion dHonneur. The building is so exclusive, the co-op board so difficult, that even the loftiest plutocrats have been repelled from its doors, including three billionairesRevlon chief Ronald Perelman, financier Asher Edelman, and oilman Frederick Koch. Yet there it was, that Wednesday in June 1999, in a big, black bold headline in the salmon-colored New York Observer: TOMMY BOYS BIG ADDRESS: O.K.D AT 820 FIFTH. The article confirmed that baggy-clothing designer Tommy Hilfiger had been approved to buy, for $12.5 million, an eighteen-room, six-bedroom apartment at 820 Fifth Avenue from the estate of the poet Louise Crane and that high end brokers were in shock.
Truth be told, nothing seemed shocking anymore on Fifth Avenue. It was safe to say that there wasnt a coupon-clipping WASP dreadnought in sight. The real high-WASP families had long ago moved to quiet little buildings on fashionable side streets where the building profiles were lowerand so were the maintenance fees. As for real society on Fifth Avenue, well, the old saw is that real society died in 1908 with Mrs. William Backhouse Astor Jr.* In any event, Tommy Hilfiger was hardly the first new face to stake his claim to a rung in the social ladder, as one character in Edith Whartons House of Mirth describes a Fifth Avenue address. The history of Fifth Avenue has always been that of new money being trumped by newer money. The only difference now is that the cycles come much more quickly, the people are much richer, and new money smells better than it used to. Gertrude Vanderbilt once cautioned her grandchildren about men who made their money from oil and livestock: It takes three generations to wash off oil and two to exterminate the smell of hogs. She also longed for a more genteel time when Society was still Society and not a hodgepodge of tradesmen and stockbrokers. Men who made their money in oil or steel were known as shoddyites and nouveau riche families were nicknamed the McFlimsies. The moneymen who got rich on Wall Street were disparaged as bouncers. In the 1890s Ward McAllister was still trying to separate the nobs of breeding and position and the swells, who had to entertain to be smart. Entertaining to be smart meant a great deal on Fifth Avenue. All of the generations of Fifth Avenue residentsFifth Avenoodles, as the newspapers mocked them in the 1800swere always furiously social people who showed off their wealth and class by being voracious collectors of art, food, furniture, and clothing and givers of grand parties and balls.
When the name FIFTH AVENUE, in capital letters, appeared for the first time on the historic Commissioners Plan of 1811, it was only a designated number on a map, without any special distinction other than it started at what once was a potters field called Washington Square Park and ran straight up the island, all the way north to the Harlem River. The streets association with the rich began in 1834 when millionaire farmer and landholder Henry Brevoort, age eighty-seven and known as the Old Gentleman by his family, built himself a two-story, flat-roofed Georgian mansion on the corner of Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue, then three miles north of the center of the city, and chained a bear to a stake on his front lawn as entertainment.* Six years later, one evening in February 1840, Brevoort inaugurated the street as the home of lavish entertaining by giving the second masked ball ever to be held in Manhattan, according to the next days newspapers, for 500 people. Legend has it that two young guests elopedthe British consuls daughter, who wore a costume of floating gauzes, bracelets, a small coronet of jewels and a risoe[sic]-colored bridal veil, and a lad from a wealthy southern family, who wore cap and bells and cockle shells aglistening all in a row, according to one accountand caused such a scandal that society banned masked balls for years to come.
Upper Fifth Avenue of today is a big residential boulevard, 100 feet wide, with mostly tall apartment buildings and hardly a mansion (or a ballroom) for blocks. There are roomy twenty-foot-wide sidewalks on either side of the streetthe park side is cut pavement stoneand a center asphalt motorway sixty feet across, which is during the day a tangle of taxis, limousines, and buses headed south. At night the street is less crowded, sleeker, and a little surreal in its Stonehenge-like majesty. The silver-gray apartment buildings, especially the stately limestone fortresses, seem unapproachable and unoccupied. It is rare to see any movement, or even a person, in the windows of an apartment on Fifth Avenue, and oddly at times there are only a few people walking on the street. People who live on Fifth Avenue invariably never stroll on it but walk one block east to Madison Avenue, where there are interesting shop windows and fashionable restaurants. On many a clear spring night you can see for a mile down Fifth Avenue with not a soul in sight, except maybe a jogger or dog walker headed for Central Park. Most people go from taxi or limousine to the protective shield of a building canopy and disappear into the lobby, the portals guarded by uniformed doormen who monitor the street from behind the wrought-iron filigree covering the thick glass front doors.
There are also a few formidable heavy wooden street-level doors along Fifth Avenue, some banded with metal. These are the entrances to one of the citys most luxurious residential treats, a maisonette, literally, a small house that is carved out of the larger building surrounding it. Maisonettes are usually triplexes, most with their own private gardens, and they can also be entered from the main building lobby, which is the way most owners prefer (for security purposes). Other doors lead to the many professional offices of a variety of doctors and dentists that populate street-level Fifth Avenue. If Fifth Avenue doctors are not necessarily the best in their specialties, they are at least the most financially successful in being able to pay the rent for their offices, sometimes as much as $35,000 a month for a suite of rooms facing Central Park. The avenue is particularly known for its corps of vanity physiciansdermatologists, cosmetic dentists, diet gurus, and plastic surgeons offering youth-restorative services. For over thirty years the superfine needles used by Dr. Norman Orentreich and his staff at 909 Fifth Avenue have been legendary fonts of wrinkle-filling collagen and Botox injections that smooth out the worry lines of troubled clients such as Elizabeth Taylor. At 1009 Fifth Avenue plastic surgeon Dr. Gerald Imber prefers to start nipping and tucking clients while theyre still in their late thirties, so instead of their getting dramatic middle-age overhauls and looking pulled tight, he simply arranges it so that over the decades his patients maintain their youthful visage. One of Fifth Avenues largest maisonettes, a fifteen-room triplex at 817 Fifth with forty feet of frontage facing the park, was for many years the home and office of Dr. Howard Diamond, the grand master of rhinoplasty in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. Thousands of princesses from all five boroughs and New Jersey made the pilgrimage to Dr. Diamonds subterranean operating rooms to sleep under anesthesia for a few hours and awaken with the doctors famously all-purpose ski-slope nose with his distinctive planed bridge. The maisonette was bought by the late pediatrician and philanthropist Dr. Anne Dyson, who gutted it; installed new wiring, central air conditioning, and six phone lines; and put it on the market for $15 million.
Like every fashionable center of life, Fifth Avenue has had its share of white-collar scandal, but once the frisson of schadenfreude passes, manners and civility prevail and a brisk howdyado? (as Dominick Dunne captured the perfunctory greeting) is always offered in the elevator or lobby. The two impermissible breaches of conduct for a resident of a Fifth Avenue building are suicide and murdereither to be the victim or the perpetrator causes neighbors distress, although Ann Woodwards taking her own life at 1133 Fifth Avenue years after she accidentally shot her husband at their country estate gave the building more cachet than it ever had before. But there was no small feeling of satisfaction when Serge Rubinstein, the infamous crooked financier, was strangled to death in his art-filled town house at 814 Fifth Avenue, where, noted the newspapers, there were nineteen pieces of furniture and fifteen paintings in the murder bedroom alone. Claus von Bülow had the good taste to sell his eighth-floor apartment at 960 Fifth Avenue after he was acquitted of attempting to murder his wife, Sunny, at his second trial, thereby depriving his neighbors of the pleasure of snubbing him in the lobby. At the time of his murder, Wall Street financier Ted Ammon was suing his neighbors at 1125 Fifth Avenue, including actor Kevin Kline, claiming he had lost an $8.5 million buyer for his tenth-floor apartment because of the co-op boards failure to give his buyer a board meeting in a timely manner. When Ammon was found bludgeoned to death at his Middle Lane mansion in East Hampton in October 2001, the attorneys for his estate dropped the lawsuit and the apartment was quickly and quietly sold for $10 million to a partner at Goldman Sachs.
Despite the persistent notion that Fifth Avenue is somehow not welcoming to Jews, there is at least one Jewish family in every building, although the majority dwell in the newer, post-World War II buildings that are easier to get into. Rich Jews first claimed the street in the late nineteenth century. Clothing manufacturer Isaac V. Brokaw assembled a family compound: a French Renaissance mansion with turrets for himself at Seventy-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue, twin houses next door for his two sons, and one for his daughter around the corner. Felix and Frieda Schiff Warburgs Gothic mansion at Ninety-second Street was so grand that it was turned into a museum housing the greatest collection of Judaica in the world. The banker and patron of the arts Otto Kahn, one of the most admired Jewish men of his time, built the last private house on Fifth Avenue in 1918; and to be different, he sheathed his 13,000-square-foot mansion in limestone imported from France. The present Temple Emanu-El, built in 1929 on East Sixty-fifth Street, is considered one of the richest Jewish temples in America, with more seats than Saint Patricks Cathedral, and it stands on the exact spot where the apex of society once stood, the home of John Jacob Astor IV.
The avenue was also once the home of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations at 838 Fifth, a building whose interior has been gutted and transformed into luxury condominiums that start at $9 million (maids rooms in the first-floor rear can be purchased separately for $500,000 each) by one of the streets most prominent Jewish residents, Alfred Taubman, the seventy-nine-year-old shopping-mall developer and former chairman of Sothebys, who lives right next door at 834 Fifth Avenue. Taubman has left intact the commandment chiseled across the facade of the old Hebrew Congregations building, Love thy neighbor as thyself, which is pretty much what his neighbors at 834 did after he was incarcerated in a federal penitentiary for seven months for price-fixing between his company and the auction house Christies. He returned home to his building without the least bit of diminution in his social standing.
Of course, the people at 834 Fifth, a building that rivals 820 for supremacy on the street, are getting used to high-profile hijinks. In 1991 one of the buildings best-known highfliers, John Gutfreund, the so-called King of Wall Street, was forced to resign as the chief executive of Salomon Brothers because of his complicity in a Treasury bond scandal. Ten years before that, the building was in the spotlight because John DeLorean, the inventor of the gull-wing automobile that he named after himself, was arrested for laundering drug money so he could raise development funds for his car. DeLorean went bankrupt and was forced to sell his apartmentwhich was bought by one of the few people of color to own an apartment in a Good Building on Fifth Avenue, Reginald Lewis, an African American who was chairman of Beatrice Foods, and his Filipino-born wife, Loida.*
The most famous person of color who lived on Fifth Avenue, now moved away, was a longtime resident at 1158 Fifththe actor Sidney Poitier. It was the broker Dolly Lenz of Douglas Elliman who brought Poitier to see the apartment in the WASPy building, booking the appointment using the maiden name of the actors wife. Lenzs colleagues scoffed about Poitiers chances of getting into such a posh building, but the admired actor had letters of recommendation from Disney chairman Michael Eisner, television icon Bill Cosby, and actor Gregory Hines, and he was not only accepted by the board of the building without hesitation but was given as a gift a silver key chain on which to hang his new apartment key. Poitier became the best-known African American co-op owner on Fifth Avenue, but because his building was above Ninety-sixth Street, the real estate status line, Fifth Avenue aficionados dont think it counts.
The most highly discriminated-against group on Fifth Avenue is neither the Jews nor people of color, but those who toil in the fashion industrycloak and suitters, as they used be more politely called, or garmentos, as they are now known. Although Fifth Avenue residents are in love with fashion and being fashionable, they dont want people who actually work in that business to live next door to them. There was only one really big name in fashion who lived on Fifth Avenue, and that was Ralph Lauren, who resided on one of the floors of the original fifty-four-room triplex built for Marjorie Merriweather Post at 1107 Fifth.
But Tommy Hilfiger was no Ralph Lauren.
Mr. Hilfiger had not revived fashion nostalgia for a more elegant era, nor did he use a polo player for a logo or sell cashmere deck chair throws for $2,700 at a boutique on Madison Avenue in the old Rhinelander mansion. Mr. Hilfiger was the designer and marketer behind a company that manufactured or licensed $2 billion a year in clothing and accessories for urban ghetto kids. Hilfigers baggy-trouser trademark shapeone could hardly call it a silhouettethe kind that teens wore hung down low, so the crack of the buttocks showed, with the crotch around the knees, was like an urban teenage uniform. In school yards across America, a garment with Hilfigers name and tricolored flag logo stitched on it was considered as haute a fashion accessory as a Hermès crocodile clutch on Fifth Avenue, yet it is safe to assume that there was not a soul who lived at 820 Fifth Avenue who had a single article of Tommy Hilfiger clothing hanging in his or her cedar-lined closets.
A few days after news of the sale, more details began to leak and it became clear that the formidable Alice Mason, the doyenne of all the carriage-trade brokers in the city, had had her hand in it. But even for Alice Mason, getting Hilfiger into 820 was quite a trick.
II
THIS IS HOW I do it, Alice F. Mason said with the satisfied smile of a magician about to divulge the clever secret of her favorite illusion.
I sit eight people here, and I have eight here, eight there, and eight here, she said, wending her way through the modest-size rooms of her apartment, pointing out assorted occasional tables. Then I put this under here and take this out, she explained obscurely, gesturing to a sideboard. Thats sixteen, twenty-fourshe counted guests aloudand then twenty in here in the libraryshe turned into a room almost bare except for the built-in banquettes under the windowswell, it would be the library, but I dont have any books. She laughed.
Mason, a jowly seventy-two, was demonstrating how she would manage to seat sixty people at one of her black-tie dinner parties in her compact, eight-room flat on East Seventy-second Street. She was dressed to receive a visitor in a smart, tailored black Armani pantsuit and a big burst of expensive white costume jewelry around her neck, and Fluffy, her twelve-year-old white Pekingese, was tucked under her left arm, just like in the portrait of them on the wall of her living room. She loves showing people around her apartment because it has long been one of the little ironies of New York real estate arcanum that Mason, the esteemed broker who practically invented the modern carriage-trade end of the business, lives in a rent-stabilized apartment and pays only $1,500 a month for rent. What is more striking is that this back-elevator apartment, with its bleak view of Lexington Avenue, is legendary as one of the great salons of the city. Over the past thirty years the literary, political, and diplomatic elite of the time have converged on Masons unpretentious digs to participate in dinners that are so mannered, they qualify as social kabukiEvenings that are like plays, she said. Their aim was to give you a mental high that lasted for days.
She got the idea to give regular parties in the 1970s when the writer Norman Mailer, a friend, told her, If I knew I was coming to your house for dinner the second Tuesday of each month, I could save myself four or five lousy dinners. Masons parties always followed the same cast-iron mold. They were called for 8 P.M. and guests were expected to be prompt. Dress was formal. There was no such thing as being fashionably late, although sometimes there would be a crush in the small elevator. She would greet her guests, usually dressed in a gown by James Galanos, standing just inside a small, laquered red entrance foyer whose walls are tiled with mirrors. Her daughter, Dominique, forty-four, who began assisting her mother with her parties when she was fifteen years old, would stand nearby, handing out place cards and table seatings, although there would be a small chart on the wall for backup. Mason would urge her guests into her simply decorated living room of Louis XIV-style furniture and a fake ficus tree for an hour of hors doeuvres, cocktails, and chatter until, precisely at 9:00 P.M., in a busy scurry of waiters and waitresses, a transformation occured. The rooms would be disassembled, the fold-out tables opened, linen and place settings would appear, the library be reconfigured, and voilà, dinner for sixty, catered by Daniel Boulud, the latest chef de la maison.
There were always sixty; thirty men and thirty women, and Mason did not feel obligated to invite husbands with wives (or vice versa) if one of them was boring. (I try for fifty-six people who are interesting, she once confided to New York magazine about her standards, and four who are boring.) When Richard Ivor, the British ambassador to the United Nations, asked if he could bring his wife, Mason told him, Tell her its a working dinner. Mike Nichols and Diane Sawyer were one of the few married couples invited togetherothers were Norman Mailer and Norris Church, Betsy and Walter Cronkite, and Barry Diller and Diane Von Furstenberg, but they were separated at dinner at different tables in different rooms. Twice in the course of Masons dinner parties, guests fell in love. Louise Melhado and editor in chief of Time Inc. Henry Grunwald, who married in 1987, met at a Mason dinner party, as did Francesca Stanfill and Peter Tufo, former managing director of investment banking at Merrill Lynch & Co. and the U.S. ambassador to Hungary.
Dinner guests were seated in tight groups of six or eight around tables so small that each guest could have only one glass and one plate in front of him or her at a time, and wineglasses needed to be removed with each course as a new wine was introduced. In this deliberately intimate setting guests were expected to share one topic of conversation among the table and not engage in private discourse with the person to their right or left, contrary to custom. Its not like a bon-mot thing, Mason once explained, where one wit is trying to outwit the other. It was also understood that one person held the floor at a time, and at each table an unofficial monitor, or host, usually a regular such as Gloria Steinem or Helen Gurley Brown, enforced the rules. The tables might be small but the conversation never was, especially when the knee-to-knee guests included Dominick Dunne, Steve Kroft, Carl Bernstein, Peter Jennings, Arianna Huffington, Alan Greenspan, and Barbara Walters. There were never any movie starssave for Woody Allen, who in later years was allowed to bring his young bride, Soon-Yi. Mason wanted stimulating conversation, not pretty faces. Sometimes, but rarely, the events were fund-raisers for her favorite Democratic Party candidates, including Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, whose framed photographs with her are displayed on tables throughout the apartment.
She always tried to arrange unusual and hopefully productive pairings at the same table. She has seated representatives of Yasser Arafat with such prominent New York Jews as Loews Corporation magnate Laurence Tisch and New York Daily News publisher Mortimer Zuckerman, whereby they were able to have an unusually free exchange of ideas in a collegial atmosphere. There was an unspoken rule that political conversation must not get too heated, which is why one night columnist Sidney Zion had to pop up several times from his table at a Mason party (this one held off-premises at Regines) to cool down. When author Dotson Rader broke protocol and wandered from room to room, Mason was so piqued that she announced he would never be invited back. (Mason herself is not the easiest dinner guest. W magazine reported that she sat stone silent during a Park Avenue dinner party because she was miffed about being seated at a B table. She let herself out the back door without saying good night to the hosts. I know the way out, she was quoted as saying, I sold them the apartment.)
Dinner would be over at 10:45 P.M. and the guests were expected to leave the way they arrivedpromptly, except for one night in 2003, when the Iraqi invasion was about to begin, Bill Clinton discoursed until nearly 1 A.M. and held the crowd mesmerized, Mason said.
The net effect of the parties was that Mason became one of the citys most unusual power brokers, a combination Elsa Maxwell-Pearl Mesta cum political operative who raised millions of dollars for Carter and Clinton. The press lapped her up and she reigned in the 1980s. ALICE IN POWERLAND, W called her in a big spread; ALICE MASONS BIG DEAL DINNERS, her feature in New York magazine was titled; and she was the MASON DU JOUR, in Manhattan, Inc. The publicity generated a powerful halo effect; her well-heeled guests and their friends thought of her first when they wanted to buy or sell, such as Woody Allen, whose town house Mason sold for $27 million. While some brokerage houses half Masons size spent as much as $50,000 a month to advertise, she rarely had to place a paid ad in a newspaper. The publicity about her parties made them legitimate tax-deductible write-offsat around $15,000 each back then, a real bargain.
But the parties were hardly just a marketing tool; they were also an affair of the heart. Mason had been giving dinner parties long before Norman Mailer suggested she hold them on a regular basis. Mason started entertaining at home in the late 1950s, when she first got into the real estate business. She grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia; her mother was a Cuban American from New York, her father a Chestnut Hill dentist, and she attended Colby College in Maine. Although the details of her background have been disputed in gossip columns and magazines, the small mysteries of her past only enhance her mystique. She is thrice divorcedthe first a six-month marriage to a distant cousin in 1952 with whom she shared her maiden name of Masonand she is not inclined to talk about any of her husbands. She finds the whole subject of marriage a very boring thing. Boring is a key word in Masons vocabulary and her psychology. You only have so much energy, she once told a reporter, and I dont want to put mine into marriage. Also, I loathe companionship. I get bored so easily with that. . . .
In a way, the dinner parties are like romances for her, said her daughter, Dominique, who runs the company, Alice F. Mason Ltd., from their small, crowded offices on Madison Avenue, big enough for only a dozen or so desks. Dominique is the daughter of Masons second husband of four years, Francis Richard, a director of the Berlitz School whom she married in 1957. You plan the dinner parties and you write them down, Dominique said, and you rework the seating and you call everybody and see if theyre going to come, so it was like replacing a romantic factor in her life, and they had all the aspects of a romance. Even in Masons freshman days in the real estate business with a small firm called Gladys Mills, handling mostly rentals or town house sales, Mason invited her clients to dinner at her apartmentthen a one-bedroom on the Upper East Side. The guests, who included Marilyn Monroe, for whom she arranged a sublet at 2 Beekman Place, and Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt Jr., were forced to eat their dinner from trays while sitting on Masons bed.
Mason was thrilled that she had Alfred Vanderbilt as a client; he had recently divorced his wife, whom he left behind at 820 Fifth Avenue, which was then a rental, and he needed his own place. I thought, Finally I have a great client, Mason said, settling into a French-style upholstered sofa in her living room, and Ill be able to get him into one of the good co-op buildings. Then I discovered that he wasnt in the Social Register, for some reason or other, and a lot of better buildings wouldnt consider him.
The some reason or other that Vanderbilt wasnt in the Social Register was that he had demanded his name be removed from the infamous black book with red lettering as a matter of principle, as had several other men of good conscience. The Social Register, sometimes referred to as a stud book, is simply an alphabetical list of the names and addresses of people deemed to be in society. It had its precedent in the 1883 Society-List and Club Register, which was a directory to the homes of the old English and Dutch families of New York and who was at home to receive guests on what days. It no doubt influenced Mrs. Astors self-appointed arbiter elegantiarum, Ward McAllister,* who first uttered the number four hundred as the amount of people who mattered and who could comfortably fit into her ballroom, to compile his own list of the famous Four Hundred six years later. (He suggested that perhaps our good Jews could put together their own social list. They didnt.) The modern-day Social Register that confronted Alice Mason was first published by Louis Keller, of Short Hills, New Jersey, the son of a patent attorney and a former dairy farmer with a fetish for the rich. After Mr. Keller died in 1922, various functionaries, including one ancient woman, Mrs. Edward C. Burry, who collected clips of marriages and deaths from an office on Park Avenue South until she died in 1960, kept up the tradition of compiling the Register for fifty years. Every entry includes the surname of the patriarch, matriarch, and offspring of each clan, along with their alma maters and years of graduation in parentheses. Town and country addresses and phone numbers are also supplied. New additions had to be nominated by an existing member, seconded, and recommended by letter. For many years the Register was completely white and Protestant, with a few Golden Clan Irish Catholics. For a time Bernard Baruchs name was in the Register, but not because he wanted to be, and John Hay Whitney also demanded his name be deleted from the book as a matter of conscience, as did the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, who called the existence of the Social Register a travesty of democracy. Sometimes people were removed for unseemly behavior. When the 1966 edition was published, the headline of Suzy Knickerbockers column in the New York Journal American was a relieved 66 SOCIAL REGISTER OUT AND NO ONES DROPPED. It hardly seemed a portent of late-dawning equality when in 1999 African American entertainer Bobby Short was listed for the first time. A more egalitarian version of the Social Register continues to be published today, albeit with some embarrassment, by the publishing empire of Forbes Inc.
It was a stunning discovery for Mason to learn that inclusion in the Social Register could hold absolute sway over who was able to live where in New York. All of these buildings had managing agents, she said, and all the managing agents were in the Social Register themselves, and they only hired brokers who were also in the Social Register, and they werent allowed to sell to anyone who wasnt in the Social Register. Mason eventually got Alfred Vanderbilt into 31 East Seventy-ninth Street, and he had to give all his relatives as references, she said.
The Social Register turned out to be only one of Masons many frustrations. She discovered that New York co-operative housing was a morass of prejudices and shibboleths. A 1959 survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League of Bnai Brith reported that of 175 luxury co-ops in New York, one-third had no Jewish residents, achieved by a gentlemans agreement that owners sell only to their own kind. It wasnt just Jews that certain buildings didnt want, Mason said, the frustration of those days creeping back into her voice. They wouldnt take anybody. They didnt want big-time WASPs from California, or the Midwest, or Texas. They didnt want people with vowels in their names, like Italians or Greeksno matter how rich they wereor people who came from countries whose names had too many vowels, like Scandinavians. The Our Crowd Jews had their own building anyway. The Straus familyone s, she pointed out, who owned Macys department stores built Seven-twenty Park Avenue for themselves, and they lived there until they died and kept everybody out. Eight ninety-five Park and Seven-thirty Park were also for Our Crowd Jews. Six-fifty Park was built for the rich Irish.
Mason shrugged. I thought, What is this all about, this separation of everybody? Its so amazing. Id really like to learn something about this.
Mason bought herself a copy of the reverse directory, a phone book available from the telephone company that lists names and phone numbers by address. Mason began to compile a catalog of the top 150 buildings on the Upper East Side of New York on a stack of yellow legal pads. For each address, she made a subjective evaluation of the complexion of the building, analyzing it financially, socially, and psychologically. She counted how many names sounded Jewish or Italian or foreign. She noted the difference between a building where there was one German Jewish name like Schiff and buildings where there were several Greensteins and Rosensweigs, who were clearly Eastern European Jews. She learned that some boards didnt mind taking achievers, as she called them, first-generation rich who had made their money in admirable ways, and that certain boards had a reputation as do-gooders, who were open to accepting someone new. For instance, 834 Fifth was a very liberal building in terms of religion and new money despite being one of the most desirable on the street.
I made it my business to meet a key person on all the important boards, Mason said. Not the whole board, just a key person, and I developed many relationships so I could call a key person on the board. I started by getting Our Crowd Jews into Fifth Avenue buildings because they were bankers and they had everything in common with all the people who were in there already. They just werent in the Social Register, so I didnt break barriers with some furrier. Although, truth be told, she did slip in a few furriers. Dominique Mason told of a wealthy furrier who wanted to buy an apartment at 655 Park Avenue and had the money but not the breeding. Mason advised him to transfer all his bank accounts to a branch office on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-first Street where she did business. Then she met with him and his wife and gave them a copy of the Social Register and said, I dont care how long it takes, go through every single name. Anybody you ever met in your life that knows anybody in this book, you find me four people! Mason also took the mans wife, who had a terrible hairdo and wardrobe, to Bergdorf Goodman and made her buy a suit for the board interview. And as for her Bronx accent, Mason said, When you go to the board meeting, say youve got a coldCOUGHand you cant talk.
It was also a revelation to Mason that one of the most difficult kinds of people to get into co-operative buildings were diplomats, with some good reason. Diplomats hold frequent cocktail parties and receptions, can indulge in controversial politics, and in general make bad neighbors. And they have diplomatic immunity as well, so even if they tie up the elevator every night and make too much noise or stop paying their maintenance fees, there is no way to evict them. Masons third husband was a Dutch diplomat (I married him in December and divorced him in May, she told New York magazine), and that brief marriage ignited her fascination with the United Nations. In 1971, when the Peoples Republic of China was admitted to the United Nations, she remembers thinking what an exciting time it was in New York and she wondered where all those new Chinese diplomats would liveor where any diplomats lived, for that matter. In 1977 billionaire Prince Saud al-Faisal, an heir to the Saudi throne and Saudi Arabias foreign minister, was turned down at 640 Fifth Avenue on a thirteen-room apartment that belonged to Bruce A. Norris, the president of the Detroit Red Wings, because other residents feared demonstrations. When the U.N. ambassador from Zaire applied for an apartment at 32 East Sixty-fourth Street, a board member said he heard the ambassador liked to drink, he liked to entertain, and he would go into the closet and throw spears and the board had to say no.
Mason got out her trusty yellow pads and researched where all the diplomatic residences were located. Then she had a map of Manhattan with the location of 145 diplomatic missions drawn up, each identified with its national flag. She named the map the Alice Mason Map of Permanent Missions and Observers to the United Nations, New York and sent one to all the missions at the U.N. plus foreign leaders, she said, with a note saying that she would be happy to represent them in finding housing, despite the problems. No real estate broker had ever solicited foreign nationals before, and for the past twenty-five years Mason has been the United Nations de facto real estate broker, a valuable niche market upon which no other broker has been able to encroach.
When all else fails, Mason turns to a higher power for board capitulation. She believes in astral projection and in chanting as a way of influencing opinion. Thats how I got Jack Kaplan into Seven-sixty Park Avenue, she said. Kaplan was a controversial man, the former owner of Welch Grape Juice Company who sold his company to a cooperative of workers. In 1964 a congressional panel accused him of helping funnel $1.25 million through one of his personal charities, the J. M. Kaplan Fund, for use in building a CIA training camp in Costa Rica. Jack Kaplan was not the profile of that building, Mason said with a meaningful nod. I knew that board wouldnt want him, but I had this method in the sixties that nobody else had. Every day I went to my yoga class and I chanted, You want the Kaplans, you want the Kaplans . . . , figuring that somebody in that yoga class would be in astral contact with someone on the board of Seven-sixty Park Avenue. Jack Kaplan was unexpectedly accepted, and a few weeks later one of the board members ran into Mason on the street and said to her, We cant believe we let Jack Kaplan in. I must have been in a trance. At the meeting I suddenly said, We want the Kaplans! Why did I want the Kaplans?
Masons favorite story of astral projection took place in 1969 when she was trying to get Eddie Gilbert into the penthouse at 1133 Fifth Avenue. Gilbert was Time magazines former Boy Wonder of Wall Street who had fled to Brazil with over $20 million he borrowed to cover bad margin calls, which he repaid after he returned to the United States to do some time in Sing Sing. He was still very rich and needed a place to live. Gilbert had been in jail for six months for fraud, Mason said, and he married an airline hostess, but he was dying for that apartment at Eleven-thirty-three. He told me, Oh, Alice, if you could only get me that apartment. I said, The head of the board is a judge named Kaufman, and I want you to say over and over again to Judge Kaufman, Eddies paid his dues, hes paid his dues, you should let him in, hes paid his dues. . . . And when Eddie went for his board meeting with Judge Kaufman, the judge said, Well, Eddie, youve paid your dues . . . and they let him in!
Mason chuckled. But that was 1969. I havent done that in a while, she said, smiling, hoping it did not sound foolish. And I did not chant Tommy Hilfiger into Eight-twenty Fifth Avenue, she added.
III
EIGHT-TWENTY FIFTH AVENUE is a vortex of desire in Manhattan residential real estate. Situated on the corner of East Sixty-third Street and Fifth Avenue, it looks like moneya stately fortress of glistening gray limestone crowned with a modest copper cornice. It is one of the great works of architects Starett and Van Vleck. A prim white canopy, its number 820 flapping in the wind, stretches from the curb to the entrance. The double front doors are glass set behind a thick bronze filigree and attended by two doormen liveried in dark gray uniforms with black stripes down the side of their trousers.
The building has only twelve apartments, one per floor, and in each one the paneled wood and mirrored elevator opens directly onto a forty-three-foot-long entrance gallery with parquet de Versailles floorsthe architects breathtaking introduction to the lavish sensibility and size of the apartment. Lining this enormous entrance gallery are sets of double doors leading to an enfilade of reception rooms overlooking Central Park: living room, den, library, sitting room, and dining room, each with its own fireplace. The volume of the rooms is such that if it were not for the spectacular view of Central Park across the street, the sensation is of being not in a building in New York City but in a French country château suspended in the ether. It is unique even among the great buildings of New York because the apartments have never been subdivided and for the most part are in their original, unadulterated 1916 layouts, each with seven servants rooms and a back servants hallway so the staff can go about their lives and tasks unseen.
Not only is 820 Fifth Avenue physically handsome, it is regarded as the kind of a building where the residents lead a privileged and a congenial way of life, Nancy Richardson, the former wife of financier Frank Richardson who lived on the fifth floor and whose apartment was for sale for about $18 million, told a reporter. Since it was built in 1916, the building has sheltered some of the most powerful men in the United States, including Alfred E. Smith, the former governor of New York; Arthur and Kathryn Murray, the owners of the dance studios; and one of the richest men in the city, Robert Goelet, whose sprawling family owned much of the land under what is now Rockefeller Center and who once gave a party in his apartment for 350 guests, including the Jay Goulds, three princesses, and Prince Matchabelli. Alfred Sloan Jr., chairman of General Motors, died in his apartment at the age of ninety. Pierre Lorillard, the son of the tobacco billionaire, and Eberhard Faber, the man whose name is on the millions of pencils his company manufactures, both lived in the building until their death at age eighty-seven.
The building is also associated with CBS president William Paley, who lived on the eighth floor with his best-dressed wife, Babe, a leader of society and in whose entrance gallery once hung Picassos 1906 Boy Leading a Horse, then worth only about $125 million. The horse was an appropriate image, because one of the first occupants of the eighth floor was the utilities baron and horseman C. K. G. Billings, who had become famous in New York in 1903 for giving a dinner party in the Grand Ballroom of Sherrys restaurant for thirty-six guests seated on horseback with small tables affixed to their saddles. The horses were brought oats for dessert. In later years the eighth-floor apartment was owned by the much-married Stavros Niarchos, the billionaire Greek shipping magnate whose estate sold the apartment for $15 million to Goldman Sachs mergers and acquisitions co-chairman Jack Levy. Eight-twenty Fifth Avenue is so special that it has even had an imaginary tenant: the con man in the play and movie Six Degrees of Separation who passed himself off as the son of Sidney Poitier gave it to the police as his home address.*
Some say the buildings exclusive reputation began to change in June 1996 when Terry Semel, the co-CEO of Warner Brothers, bought the eighteen-room, 7,000-square-foot seventh-floor apartment of Ann and Gordon Getty for $12.5 million. It was reported in the press that the venerated Jayne Wrightsman didnt want Mr. Semel in the building, embarrassing everyone involved. Semel was show business, although he was also smart and a gentleman, as well as enormously richso rich, in fact, that some years earlier he had given up his seat on the Time Warner board rather than comply with the Securities and Exchange Commissions requirement that he reveal his compensation package. He would have had no trouble meeting the co-op boards reputed demands that buyers have $100 million or at least twenty times the price of the apartment in assets. It also happened that Semel and his beautiful wife, Jane, were avid art collectors, and it was intimated in the press that Semel was able to bypass Mrs. Wrightsmans objections to him and get approved by the buildings tough co-operative board by currying favor with the board president, William Acquavella, a prominent art dealer, by buying art at Mr. Acquavellas Madison Avenue gallery. This caused what Avenue magazine called an internecine squabble between Mrs. Wrightsman and Mr. Acquavella. In fact, Mr. Semel had never bought art from Mr. Acquavellas gallery. Yet this issue of being able to curry favor with Mr. Acquavella, who bought his own eleventh-floor apartment in 1993 for $9.8 million, was one that vexed the building and justifiably infuriated Mr. Acquavella, who demanded and received a correction from the publication that printed it. But as Mark Twain said, Scandal sticks to rebuttal like tar.
In any event, word on the street is that the highly honorable Mr. Acquavella doesnt make the final decisions about 820 Fifth anyway. Although Mr. Acquavella is the putative president of the buildings co-op board, conventional wisdom is that the octogenarian Mrs. Wrightsman, who lives on the third floor, runs the place. The elegant, small-boned rara avis of society is the widow of Oklahoma-born oilman Charles Wrightsman, who died in 1986 at the age of ninety. It was Mrs. Wrightsman who has been credited with bringing the newly widowed Jackie Kennedy to Fifth Avenue only six months after the assassination of President Kennedy when she tipped off the former First Lady that Mrs. Lowell Weicker had put her fifteen-room apartment on the market at 1040 Fifth and that it would be an appropriate home base for her. It was not far from the apartment of Jackies sister, Lee Radziwill, who had recently moved to 969 Fifth Avenue, and her in-laws Patricia and Peter Lawford, who lived at 990 Fifth, and Jean and Stephen Smith, who lived at 950.
Mrs. Wrightsman and Jacqueline Kennedy met when they were both young housewives in Palm Beach, with Wrightsman a lot greener at the game of Palm Beach housewife than Jackie but a lot richer. Wrightsman was born Jayne Larkin, in Flint, Michigan, and in the 1940s she was a saleswoman at a perfume counter in a Los Angeles department store when she met Charles Wrightsman, a divorced man thirty years her senior, with grown children. Wrightsman didnt have many social credentials, but he did have social ambition and barrels of Oklahoma crude, along with a twenty-eight-room Palm Beach villa that he gave to his young wife as an anniversary present in 1947.
It was in Palm Beach that the young Mrs. Wrightsman began a remarkable transformation. She hired tutors for herself in the arts, literature, and French, in which she became fluent. She began to work tirelessly for charities, garnered a reputation as a warm host and a good friend, and started to study eighteenth-century French furniturealso an interest of her new friend Jackie Kennedybecoming a connoisseur of the period. She would later be declared the queen of the French decorative arts when her collection was put on permanent display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969, including the Rubenses, Vermeers, and Louis XVs red lacquer desk that passed through the Palm Beach estate. When Jackie Kennedy was First Lady she appointed Mrs. Wrightsman to a committee to help find period pieces to decorate the White House, and over the years the women became so close that Mrs. Wrightsman stood vigil with the family in the apartment when Mrs. Onassis died. The Wrightsmans eventually abandoned Palm Beach as a home base for a suite at the Pierre Hotel, and frequently visited with the Baroness Renée de Backer, a Rothschild who lived at 820 Fifth Avenue, whose apartment they eventually bought.
At 820 Fifth Avenue, these many decades later, Mrs. Wrightsman is said to have total say, not just over who moves in but over what kind of wood paneling is in the elevator or what color the flowers are in the vase in the lobby. She is so powerful, it is said in jest, that she has influence over who gets into the building next door, 825 Fifth.*
She certainly controlled the fate of the fourth-floor apartment, right above her, which had been put on the market in February of 1998 for $13.5 million. For over seventy years it had been the home of the family of Mrs. W. Murray Crane, the widow of U.S. Senator Winthrop Crane of Massachusetts. Mrs. Crane cofounded the Museum of Modern Art in 1929 with Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr., as well as the Dalton School, and lived in the apartment with her daughter, Louise, until she died at the age of ninety-eight. Louise Crane, who died in 1998, was a noted poet and arts patron as well, and more philanthropy for music and art in the city of New York was generated out of that apartment than almost any other place in the city. The apartment deserved an occupant worthy of its provenance, and even just to show it to potential buyers, real estate brokers had to make appointments through Mrs. Wrightsmans lawyer, to be preapprovedthe logic being, why even bother showing the place if the client was someone Mrs. Wrightsman wasnt going to let buy it?** Among those who didnt pass muster was peripatetic Johnson & Johnson heiress Elizabeth Libbet Johnson, who for a moment was fixated on buying both the Crane apartment and Nancy Richardsons fifth-floor apartment above it for a total of $27 million and combining them into the largest trophy apartment on the street14,000 square feet. But because renovation work is allowed only during summer months, it would have required five summers to complete the scope of Ms. Johnsons extensive makeover. Mrs. Wrightsman said something like over my dead body, and Ms. Johnson was told to move on.
And so, the fourth floor of 820 Fifth Avenue languished empty and dark for over a year, a magnificent palazzo unable to find the perfect suitor, when one June day Tommy Hilfiger stepped across its doorway.
IV
IT WAS A moment that happened, Alice Mason said, by way of explanation. And it was an exception.
It was very intricate, explained Dominique, who had joined her mother in the living room and lit a cigarette, much to her mothers disapproval. It was about a million pieces to a complicated puzzle that my mother figured out.
Tommy Hilfiger had been represented in the deal by Alice Masons top producer, Deborah Grubman, the wife of high-profile entertainment attorney Allen Grubman, who has represented almost every major figure in the music industry, from P. Diddy to Tommy Mottola to Madonna. Deborah Grubman had a reputation as being a smart, honest broker, and her husbands tentacle-like business connections were a never-ending source of real estate clients for his wife. When Deborah Grubman first suggested to Alice Mason the pairing of Hilfiger and 820, I said, I dont think so, Dominique recalled. Then she had gone and showed it to him anyway, and when he wanted to buy it, Mom figured out whether or not he was feasible and then she figured out how it became feasible.
Mason did not pick up the phone and call Jayne Wrightsman. I was barely acquainted with her, Mason said, and calling ahead for an on-the-spot decision is never a good idea. Do I want a fast no? Mason asked. Or do I want to try for a slow yes, and see what I can do?
What Mason did was to build a portrait of Tommy Hilfiger in his board package that she knew would appeal to Wrightsmans sensibilities. Her most important tools were the letters of recommendation she assembled, which read like a mini-biography of Hilfigers life after she got through editing and tinkering with them. Mason asked Hilfiger to get a long, descriptive letter from a childhood friend, a clever touch that presented the homespun Tommy Hilfigera self-made man from a modest background in Elmira, New York, where he was one of nine brothers and sisters of a hardworking Catholic family, his father a watchmaker, his mother a nurse. He married his high-school sweetheart, Susie, and they had three polite, well-behaved children. The letters made it clear that he made his money not on some clever business deal, but the hardscrabble way, opening first one retail shop in upstate New York and soon ten of them, before selling them and venturing to Manhattan, where he started a company that tapped into the style zeitgeist of 20 million teenagers. Perhaps the most important letter in the package was a recommendation from Leonard Lauder, whose cosmetics company, Estée Lauder, manufactured and distributed Hilfigers highly successful perfume. In the echelon of Manhattan status, you cant get much better than a letter from Leonard Lauder, Dominque said.
But you can get betterif it turns out, just providentially, that a few years earlier you had made a substantial seven-figure contribution to the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a museum that is one of Wrightsmans great passions. Hilfiger also made a well-publicized $2.5 million donation to the Fresh Air Fund, another of Wrightsmans favorite charities, which sends city kids to summer camp. It bode especially well that the donations had been made years before he even thought about 820 Fifth Avenue. Mrs. Wrightsman liked that, said Dominique. She liked that it wasnt tit for tat.
As for his personal finances, Mason decided to present Hilfigers assets through his holdings in his namesake company, rather than his personal assets, as the crucial part of his financial qualification, although he showed both to the board. Published reports were that Hilfigers salary per annum was about $25 millionnot very much for a building like 820 Fifth Avenue. However, Hilfigers $2-billion-a-year company was very cash-rich, with a reported $500 million in a war chest that Hilfiger had accumulated to buy out other companies. When the final figures came in, Dominique Mason said, Hilfiger showed us his money, and it was a lot.
Tommy Hilfiger being accepted by the board of 820 Fifth Avenue would have been one of Alice Masons greatest triumphsif only he had ever moved in there, even for only one night. Instead, Hilfiger came to loggerheads with the board about his renovation plans, and while they were dickering about what he could tear down and rebuild and when, the baggy-pants craze passed and his business fortunes waned. Although Hilfiger switched to a more classic look, his sales kept plummeting and the company lost more than half of its market value; eventually the bonds used to back his company were reduced to junk status. His business was not the only thing that falteredso did his longtime marriage. Within a few months of closing on the apartment, Hilfiger and his wife of twenty years started divorce proceedings and Hilfiger wound up in a bachelor pad with the other veterans of the co-op wars in TriBeCa, where he bought a 4,500-square-foot condominium penthouse for a mere $3.5 million. Less than a year after buying the apartment at 820, he put it back on the market, with Alice Mason as the broker, this time priced at $20 millionclose to a 100 percent increase in less than a year. That was the right price for it at the time, Mason huffed. Hilfiger had underpaid.
Even at that exalted price she found a buyer right in the buildingLily Safra, the billionaire banking widow, who bought Hilfigers apartment for $18 million for her daughter to live in. It was a handsome profit for Hilfiger and yet another commission for Mason. Safra spent another few million dollars renovating the place and had new wiring, plumbing, lighting, and flooring added. However, like Hilfiger, her daughter never moved in and Mrs. Safra put it back on the market in 2002, decorator ready, asking $30 million. It was sold for a reported $24.5 million in the fall of 2003.
Deborah Grubman has since left Masons employ and is now a managing partner at the Corcoran Agency, where she is one of its most successful brokers.
Jayne Wrightsman appears to have learned her lesson. When in March of 2000 Steve Wynn, who sold his Mirage Resorts in Las Vegas to MGM Grand for $4.4 billion, tried to buy socialite Nancy Richardsons fifth-floor apartment for $17.5 million, Wrightsman put her foot down and said, Forget it.
Mason said shes satisfied with the Lioness in Winter portrayal of her in a recent issue of a society magazine, and she agreed that she has cut back drastically on her business responsibilities and simplified her personal life. She lunches occasionally at her corner table at Le Cirque (and chants for a cab to pick her up and drop her off) and she sells real estate when its necessary for the boss to make a cameo appearance, but most days she stays in her apartment and some days she doesnt go out at all. She has cut the dinner parties back to only one a year, making them more exclusive than ever.
There are three reasons why she stopped giving the parties, Dominique said. She entertained everybody she ever wanted to have dinner with. People complained to her everywhere she went that they werent invited. And people didnt invite her back.
Invited back? Mason cried when she heard this analysis. If I had to sit through somebodys boring dinner party, Id want to kill myself. She mimed putting a gun to her head.
Boring. That word again. In truth, her own parties began to bore her, like her romances. People arent as interesting now, dont you think? she asked. Today everybody is famous or very rich, and beyond a certain amount of money, what difference does it make?
Copyright © 2005 by Steven Gaines