“My mother had a lot of pretensions,” he continued. “One of them that she picked up from some of her tonier friends was ‘luncheon,’ which always struck me as a screamingly funny word. ‘I’m having luncheon at “21,” ’ she would say. I think ‘lunch’ is one of the funniest words in the world. That’s one of the reasons I used it.”
‘W**e invented the phrase,” said John Fairchild, the publisher of Women’s Wear Daily from 1960 to 1996. “Not Sondheim.” James Fallon, the current editor of WWD, clarified, “We’ve always taken credit for it—let’s put it that way. It might have come from Noël Coward or Cole Porter, but we used it long before Stephen Sondheim. The first time we used it was in the early 60s. Basically, it was whomever Mr. Fairchild saw at lunch. He would literally go to Grenouille and then sneak into the pay phone in the back and call the office and say, ‘Send a photographer out. Gloria Guinness and Babe Paley are having lunch.’ And whoever was in the photo studio would have to rush over and get the photo as the ladies rushed out the door.” (One of those photographers was Bill Cunningham, who quit in the 60s in part because he objected to *WWD’*s often sarcastic captions and eventually went to The New York Times, where he is now an institution.)
“We’d get people who didn’t really like to be photographed,” Fairchild told me. “Babe Paley, Marella Agnelli. The duch*ess of Windsor. Jackie O. Nan Kempner would throw herself in front of the camera. We were not interested in showbiz people, who loved to be photographed. The idea was that there was a certain group of ladies who were admired and were well dressed, and in those days that was important.”
Fairchild joked that he came up with the idea “out of desperation, because there was nothing else to write about.” But it was part of his genius as a publisher and journalist that with one simple, low-cost stroke he transformed the dull trade paper he’d inherited from his father into a breezy chronicle of the rich and fashionable, expanding its readership beyond garment-industry insiders to wealthy women everywhere and delighting its advertisers in the bargain. “A lot of these ladies were getting photographed for the first time,” noted New York publicist Paul Wilmot. “So not only was it a great way to promote fashion, but also the women whose pictures they ran were the real deal.”
Thus, on the pages of WWD in 1962 was the duch*ess of Windsor, in a Dior suit, with C. Z. Guest, in a Mainbocher coatdress, both in pillbox hats, white kid gloves, and low heels, outside La Côte Basque. And there in 1967 was Gloria Guinness, the impossibly long-necked, Mexican-born wife of British financier Loel Guinness, making a regal exit from La Grenouille, wearing a black Balenciaga coat, long white gloves, and a tall black hat and carrying an Hermès alligator bag. A year or two later it was Engelhard minerals heiress Annette Reed (now Mrs. Oscar de la Renta) leaving La Grenouille in the requisite buttoned-up suit, gloves, and pumps, but with a kerchief in lieu of a hat. (Flash forward to 1983 for a very different picture: Judy Taubman sweeping out of Le Cirque, long blond tresses flowing freely over the collar of her open sable coat, a Chanel quilted bag held between fingers decked in rings. Good-bye white kid gloves.)
Pioneer Lunchers
In the early years of the 20th century, when upper-class New York ladies began to venture out for lunch, they met at two newly established clubs, the Colony Club and the Cosmopolitan Club, both of which are still discreetly thriving. The former was New York’s first private club for society women, founded in 1903 by Mrs. John Jacob Astor III, Mrs. J. Borden Harriman, and two other highborn ladies in a Murray Hill mansion designed by Stanford White and decorated by Elsie de Wolfe. Although social men’s clubs had existed in Manhattan for decades, starting with the Union Club in 1836, the idea of women having their own club—where, like their husbands at the Knickerbocker or the Brook, they might receive correspondence from extramarital admirers—was so controversial that President Grover Cleveland found the need to speak out, asserting that a woman’s “best and safest club is in her home.” The equally exclusive Cosmopolitan Club followed in 1911. Its founders included Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr. (who would later be the driving force behind the Museum of Modern Art), and it was also located in the then fashionable Murray Hill. “The Cos” styled itself as more artistic and intellectual than its elder sister, with Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Helen Hayes, and Margaret Mead among its members. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was for a time an “ambi-clubster,” as women who belonged to both clubs were called. By then the clubs had moved uptown, the Cosmopolitan Club to 122 East 66th Street, the Colony Club to Park Avenue at East 62nd Street, where it had Delano & Aldrich build a neo-Georgian palace with a swimming pool and squash courts in the basem*nt.
The first restaurant to draw the ladies who lunched was the Colony, which opened around 1920 on the corner of Madison Avenue and 61st Street, only a block away from the Colony Club. (To confuse the two was considered a major social faux pas.) Originally a speakeasy that catered to rich men and their mistresses, the Colony was taken over in 1922 by its suave Italian headwaiter, Gene Cavallero Sr., who converted it into a bastion of café society, that glamorous, international hybrid of old and new money that had emerged in the wake of World War I. As Frederick Eberstadt observed, “Café society was the beginning of the ladies who lunched, because before that nice people had lunch and dinner at home. And the idea of going to a restaurant, except in desperation, was a new idea. Also, people no longer had the proper staff they’d once had. The war did it—it took all the servants.” (And gave affluent housewives something to complain about over lunch forevermore: the servant problem.)
The Colony was the first restaurant in New York to install air-conditioning, in the late 1920s, the first to import Dom Pérignon, in the 1930s, and the only one where the ladies could check their pugs and Yorkies along with their minks and chinchillas. A doorman ushered patrons into the spacious lobby (decorated by Dorothy Draper), off of which were the gentlemen’s smoking lounge, the ladies’ powder room, and heavily draped phone booths. There was also a Van Cleef & Arpels concession. The bar was to the left, wallpapered in blue-and-white striped linen, which gave it the feeling of a Waspy beach club. Its half-dozen tables were considered “out” until the Duke of Windsor pronounced it “gay” one day in 1938, whereupon he and the duch*ess made it extremely “in.” The high-ceilinged, chandeliered, red-plush dining room unfolded in three sections beyond the lobby. The farthest-back section was considered the least desirable—society arbiter Lucius Beebe called it the “social pesthouse”—setting the pattern for all future fancy Manhattan restaurants of seating the most prominent clients closest to the front door, where they could be seen. While the food wasn’t really French—chicken hash, soft-shell crabs, shad roe, Senegalese and billi-bi soups—the menus were handwritten in the language of the Bourbons. Prices were reasonable. There was no music. Press was handled by Count Lanfranco Rasponi, and society columnists’ meals were gratis. By the 1950s, women outnumbered men at lunch six to one.
And what a roster it was, starting with Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt, whose blessing in the late 1920s was said to have made the restaurant respectable, and continuing over the next four decades with Mrs. William Rhinelander Stewart, Mrs. Lytle Hull, Cordelia Biddle Robertson, Hattie Carnegie, Millicent Rogers, Barbara Hutton, Elsa Maxwell, Marlene Dietrich, Mary Sanford, Merle Oberon, and almost every deceased lady I’ve previously mentioned. The Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue powerhouses—Carmel Snow, Diana Vreeland, Chessy Patcévitch, Tatiana Liberman, Mitzi Newhouse—were constant presences, as were such models turned socialites as Gloria Schiff, Missy Weston, and Betsy Pickering Theodoracopulos.
“We had all the ladies who counted, including Rose Kennedy, her daughters, and Jacqueline Kennedy,” recalled Sirio Maccioni, who from 1961 until the Colony closed, 10 years later, was maître d’ of the bar. (He opened his own restaurant, Le Cirque, in 1974.) “In those days the Kennedys were very close to the Colony and to me. I had a fabulous rapport with Jacqueline—as Mrs. Kennedy and Mrs. Onassis. Jacqueline was the only lady in New York who had my home number. It was a great time at the Colony. You know, lunch was more important than dinner. You had to be successful at lunch to be a successful restaurant.”
Among the few men present might have been Fulco di Verdura, the society jeweler, entertaining Babe Paley and her sisters, Betsey Whitney and Minnie Fosburgh, with tales out of school about their arch-frenemy, Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman. Truman Capote also liked to lunch at the Colony, preferably in the bar. New York hostess Louise Grunwald, then a fledgling Vogue editor, recalled his inviting her there in the 1960s, along with six of his grand lady friends: “He placed me next to him, and he whispered in my ear, ‘You do know this lunch has a theme? And the theme is every one of these women has slept with Gianni Agnelli.’ ”
Capote and Verdura were part of the growing contingent of Gentlemen Who Lunched with the Ladies Who Lunch, most of whom were gay and many of whom had something to sell. This list included the decorators Billy Baldwin, Valerian Rybar, Robert Denning, and Vincent Fourcade, the designers Bill Blass and Luis Estevez, the costume jeweler Kenneth Jay Lane, the pianists Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, the Brazilian millionaire Nelson Seabra, the purely social extra man Johnny Galliher, and the real-estate heir Jerome Zipkin, who turned escorting top-drawer ladies to top-drawer places into a profession.
The French Confections
On October 15, 1941, Gene Cavallero and the Colony finally got some serious competition for the affections of café society. That night an imperious Frenchman named Henri Soulé launched Le Pavillon, at 5 East 55th Street, directly across from the St. Regis hotel, with a party glistening with Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and Kennedys. Soulé, who had begun his career at 14 as a busboy in Biarritz and had come to New York to manage the restaurant in the French pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair, is universally credited with introducing French haute cuisine to America. As owner and maître d’ of Le Pavillon, he dazzled his opening-night guests with a five-course dinner of caviar, sole bonne femme, poulet braisé au champagne, cheese, and strawberries and cream. For the next quarter-century Le Pavillon would be considered the premier French restaurant of New York, and Henri Soulé the city’s haughtiest host, relegating customers he deemed second-rate, including his landlord, Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn, to the rear dining room—“Outer Hebrides,” Capote called it. The A-list ladies were seated along the red velvet banquettes up front, along with Aristotle Onassis, Stavros Niarchos, Frank Sinatra, and Salvador Dalí. “He would arrange his people around the room as if he were a woman preparing a ball,” the late Charlotte Curtis of The New York Times recalled. “He would put Mrs. William Paley on one banquette like a huge bouquet of flowers, Mrs. John Pell on another side, and perhaps Elizabeth Arden in still a third corner.”
Soulé’s snobbism was reinforced by his sky-high prices, but the soignée set kept coming back, appreciating the special touches that made Le Pavillon their kind of place, such as the hand-dried Baccarat glasses from which they sipped their favorite dry white Burgundy, Château de Puligny-Montrachet. Indeed, one of the great ironies of the ladies’-lunch culture was that the ladies cared more about ambience than cuisine, because they were always dieting. The duch*ess of Windsor wasn’t fooling when she declared, “A woman can’t be too rich or too thin.” She also said, “All my friends know I’d rather shop than eat.” As Brigid Berlin, daughter of Honey Berlin, wife of the chairman of the Hearst Corporation and a friend of the duch*ess’s, told me, “Yes, they had lunch every day at Pavillon and the Colony, and got all dressed up and went to the hairdresser before going to lunch. But they didn’t eat. They pushed their food around their plates. They were on Dexedrine. My mother used to have four asparagus—that was it.”
By the early 1960s, the rich and thin would have several more velvety venues in which to meet and not eat as various vassals of Sun King Soulé—“Le restaurant, c’est moi,” he liked to say—opened their own snooty French restaurants in Midtown Manhattan. The first—La Côte Basque—was launched by Soulé himself, in 1958. The previous year, to spite Harry Cohn, he had moved Le Pavillon to the Ritz Tower, but Cohn soon died, leaving the old space unoccupied. Soulé covered the walls with pretty murals of the French seashore, lined the ceilings with rustic beams, added a few simpler, less expensive dishes such as omelets, crabmeat salad, and duck à l’orange to an otherwise classic menu, and announced that La Côte Basque was “Pavillon for the poor.” It was run by the stern Henriette Spalter, Le Pavillon’s former coat-check girl and Soulé’s longtime mistress, who became notorious for her campaign against women in pants, demanding that even presidential daughter Lynda Bird Johnson change into one of the paper skirts the restaurant kept on hand to deal with offenders of its rigid dress code. Nan Kempner, refusing to submit to this humiliation, removed the bottom half of her Yves Saint Laurent pantsuit and wore the top as a tunic. Among the silent majority who toed Madame Henriette’s line to nibble on the superb cold striped bass with green sauce was Pat Nixon, usually accompanied by Pat Mosbacher, the wife of White House chief of protocol and America’s Cup winner Emil “Bus” Mosbacher Jr.
Three more Le Pavillon spin-offs followed: La Caravelle in 1960, La Grenouille in 1962, and Lafayette in 1965. The proprietors of the last, Le Pavillon’s former saucier and captain, Jean Fayet, and his wife, Jacqueline, the former cashier, also had very strong opinions about proper attire, banning miniskirts as well as slacks. “I was at Lafayette one day, and Jackie Onassis had her sunglasses up in her hair,” John Fairchild recalled. “And the owner said she didn’t like people who had dark glasses shoved up into their hair and asked her to remove them.” Nonetheless, Lafayette attracted divas such as Marion Javits, wife of Senator Jacob Javits, and Phyllis Cerf Wagner, wife of Random House chief Bennett Cerf—it was on East 50th Street, across the street from the publishing house’s headquarters—who saw themselves and the restaurant as a bit more “serious” than the competition. The Fayets doted on Capote, but they scolded Bette Davis for asking Yogi Berra to autograph her menu. “The menus belong to the restaurant,” Monsieur Fayet told the movie star, according to a 1970 review in New York magazine by Gael Greene. Davis’s date reportedly shot back, “At $90 a snail, you can afford one menu.”
La Caravelle was started by a pair of defecting maître d’s from Le Pavillon and La Côte Basque, Fred Decré and Robert Meyzen, and one of Soulé’s longtime chefs, Roger Fessaguet. Rumor had it that Joe Kennedy had bankrolled them—he hadn’t, but the association didn’t hurt—after word got back to him that Soulé had dismissed John Kennedy’s chances of winning the presidency. In any case, the ambassador was there on opening day, September 21, 1960, along with financier Bernard Baruch, columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, and Doris Stein, the wife of MCA founder Jules Stein. La Caravelle was located at 33 West 55th Street—“One of the things we feared most was we were on the West Side,” Decré told Frank DiGiacomo in a New York Observer article years later. “And in those days, society wouldn’t cross Fifth Avenue, except to go to ‘21.’ ” They needn’t have worried. The *Times’*s Craig Claiborne said it was “an establishment of such caliber, there is an inclination to use such expressions as ‘first rank’ and ‘ne plus ultra,’ ” and the long row of banquettes leading to the dining room—Siberia there too—were instantly claimed by the city’s leading ladies, including Brooke Astor, who became a regular. In the 1960s, Claiborne pronounced it “the finest restaurant in New York on almost every count.” WWD reported that Happy Rockefeller and Cristina Ford were seen there in 1968 dishing about the wedding of Jackie Kennedy and Ari Onassis.
By far the biggest lunchtime scene was at La Grenouille, which just happened to be Fairchild’s favorite observation post. Owned by Charles Masson Sr., yet another disciple of Henri Soulé, and his wife, Gisele, the restaurant is still considered by many to be the most beautiful in New York. Whereas other Le and La restaurants might have bouquets of roses or peonies on the tables, La Grenouille was a bower of dogwood, forsythia, or cherry-blossom branches, depending on the season. Charles Masson Jr., who runs the restaurant today, told me his father had an obsession with flattering lighting, and when General Electric discontinued the lightbulb he preferred, he had Westinghouse reproduce it, despite the fact that the minimum quantity for a custom order was 25,000 bulbs. “My father understood one thing, that if he made an environment as beautiful as possible, where women would feel beautiful, the women would come and, guess what, the men would come after them.”
Young Masson, who went to work at the restaurant in 1974 after studying at Carnegie Mellon, said every day was another party: “We had a room full of the top executives from Seventh Avenue and Madison Avenue, smoking, drinking martinis, and discussing business over extended lunches. One of my first tasks was just changing ashtrays. It was almost a full-time job. And then there were the ladies, who had no notion of time and would stick around for the whole afternoon. They would massacre their white wine by having spritzers. And then the early 80s ushered in the lamentable Diet co*ke era.”
‘Everybody looks divine at La Grenouille,” said Carolina Herrera, who has been lunching there since she moved to New York from Venezuela in the 1970s. “And you can see everyone because of the shape of the room.” Both the front dining room and the less desirable rear one are square with banquettes all around. From the beginning, the corner banquettes in the front room were considered the best, reserved for such fashion plates as Hélène Rochas and Drue Heinz and the designers who dressed them, particularly Yves Saint Laurent and Oscar de la Renta. The latter’s first wife, Françoise de la Renta, former editor of French Vogue, was La Grenouille’s reigning queen. “She was the key,” said her friend John Richardson, the Picasso biographer. “She was like the air-traffic controllers at Kennedy. She knew exactly who was going up, who was coming in, and who was going to crash.” On any given day she might be sharing quenelles of pike with Grace, Lady Dudley, Marie-Hélène de Rothschild, Jacqueline de Ribes, C. Z. Guest, or Jane Engelhard and her daughter Annette Reed (who married Oscar de la Renta after Françoise died).
In 1972, Fairchild’s then new monthly publication, W, rated what it called “Les Six, the last bastions of grand luxe dining in New York.” On top were La Grenouille and Quo Vadis, with “4 toques blanches” each. Then came La Caravelle (3.5), La Côte Basque (3), and Lafayette (3). In last place, with two toques blanches, was Lutèce, which, with its Alsatian chef, André Soltner, and Provençal décor, represented a clean break with the Soulé tradition. In Lutèce’s airy, sun-filled town house, situated on East 50th Street, closer to the river than to Fifth Avenue, there was no Siberia, only Côte d’Azur. There were several other, more old-fashioned French restaurants that the ladies also patronized—Le Café Chambord, Le Périgord, Voisin, Passy—but they didn’t really register in Fairchild’s hierarchy and therefore barely counted.
This sheltered, hoity-toity world was torn apart in 1976 by the one writer who had been admitted to its inner sanctums: Truman Capote. The publication of “La Côte Basque 1965,” a chapter of his long-awaited and never-to-be-completed Proustian novel, Answered Prayers, in Esquire magazine, was seen as a betrayal of the confidences he had extracted from so many ladies over so many lunches. Set in the restaurant of the same name, Capote’s semi-fictionalized account of some of international society’s major scandals mixed real names—Gloria Vanderbilt, Oona Chaplin, Jackie Kennedy, Lee Radziwill—with barely disguised portrayals of his closest friends, most outrageously Slim Keith and Babe Paley. Much to his chagrin, they banished him from their society forever. But, when all is said and done, no one did more to immortalize the ladies who lunched—even while bloodying their banquettes—than the Tiny Terror, as WWD took to calling him.
Lunch Italian-Style
In portraying his lady friends as shallow, brittle, catty snobs, Capote tainted their grand French haunts by association. In doing so, he may have accelerated the rise of three Italian-owned restaurants more in the mold of the Colony and Gene Cavallero than Le Pavillon and Henri Soulé—Orsini’s, Quo Vadis, and Le Cirque. Orsini’s, an expensive trattoria on West 56th Street run by the jet-setting Roman Armando Orsini and his younger brother, Elio, had been going since 1953, attracting movie stars such as Elizabeth Taylor, Lauren Bacall, Marcello Mastroianni, and Yul Brynner. By the 70s it had become very popular with such hip ladies as Bendel president Geraldine Stutz and Halston muse D. D. Ryan, who preferred its casual, brick-walled upstairs room. The younger set—Penelope Tree, Candice Bergen, Marisa Berenson—stayed slim on the carpaccio and arugula salad that the Orsinis popularized in New York. For the queen of Saratoga, Marylou Whitney, Armando would personally grate the Parmesan over her fettuccine.
Quo Vadis went even further back, to 1946, when it was started by Bruno Caravaggi and Gino Robusti, who had managed the restaurant in the Belgian pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair. Located on 63rd Street at Madison Avenue, Quo Vadis billed itself as Continental, not French or Italian—a specialty was fondue bruxelloise, cheese croquettes with fried parsley—and its owners were much more welcoming than, say, Madame Henriette Spalter or the Fayets. The place to sit was in the little bar off the Roman mosaic entryway. “I loved it,” said John Richardson, “because it was not fancy, it was not expensive, the food was perfectly good, and it was full of friends. Grenouille was more of an occasion. Lunch at Quo Vadis was for conversation and gossip from table to table.”
Andy Warhol loved the acoustics created by the vaulted ceiling and the plush red carpet, and he taped many an Interview cover story in the bar, including one with Truman Capote after his fall. I was editor of Interview and lived in the apartment building that housed the restaurant. I remember being there one day with Andy and Paulette Goddard, the movie actress who had been married to Charlie Chaplin, the actor Burgess Meredith, and the German novelist Erich Maria Remarque. Sitting on the opposite banquette was Goddard’s old friend Carroll de Portago, who was with the man who would soon be her fourth husband, retailing tycoon Milton Petrie. As she sliced the septuagenarian’s steak Diane and fed it to him in tiny pieces, Goddard whispered, “That’s the man Carroll’s going to marry. He makes $30 million a day just sitting there.” Andy asked, “How do you do that?” Paulette said, “Interest.”
We frequently lunched at Quo Vadis with Diana Vreeland and Lee Radziwill, both of whom were longtime regulars. Elsie Woodward, one of the last of the Long Island grandes dames, always in black, was usually there, as was the almost as ancient and even richer Kitty Miller, the widow of Broadway producer Gilbert Miller. Knopf editor Shelley Wanger, the daughter of movie star Joan Bennett and producer Walter Wanger, remembered, “Kitty always wore a huge mink and never checked it. She sort of sat on it, and as the lunch went on she would slide lower and lower on the banquette, because the coat was silk-lined. By dessert, all you could see was her face peering over the table.”
“They just felt very comfortable,” said Robert Caravaggi, Bruno’s son, of the Old Guard ladies who lunched at Quo Vadis. “The place was there a long time, and I think they considered it almost like home.” When it closed, in 1982, Vreeland wrote a letter to the partners: “You always protected our privacy so beautifully and gave us such wonderful service and individual attention There is no place that we can think of that will compare to it.”
But there was. Eight years earlier Sirio Maccioni had opened Le Cirque, two blocks farther uptown in the Mayfair hotel, and by the early 80s it had left almost every other glamorous restaurant in the dust.
Le Cirque was decorated by Ellen McCluskey Long, the sister of former New York governor Herbert Lehman. The banquettes were beige suede, not red velour; the murals teased Versailles with their frolicking chimpanzees done up in 18th-century court dress; and the overall color scheme was peach on melon, rather than scarlet on crimson. There was no status alley leading to a cavernous, half-empty dining room, just one big brightly lit room, the implication being that everyone there was someone. It quickly became the stomping ground of Nouvelle Society—Ronald Perelman and Claudia Cohen, Donald and Ivana Trump, Henry Kravis and his second wife, the fashion designer Carolyne Roehm. Real-estate empress Alice Mason had lunch at the same table practically every day. So did fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert, who ran the International Best-Dressed List. Estée Lauder, another frequent presence, gave lunches for Nancy Reagan and her inner circle—Pat Buckley, Nan Kempner, Lynn Wyatt, Betsy Bloomingdale, and one man, Jerry Zipkin. “Mr. Zipkin was difficult but very loyal,” said Sirio Maccioni. “I used to ask him, ‘Can I do anything, Mr. Zipkin?’ He would say, ‘Remove that lady over there. She’s too loud.’ ”
The First Lady’s closest male confidant vied with John Fairchild for the corner table closest to the door. But Fairchild never tried to compete with Zipkin’s boldfaced arm candy—Aline, Countess of Romanones, Greek shipping matron Maria Goulandris, the up-and-coming Blaine Trump in her newest Christian Lacroix. Another favorite was Denise Hale, from San Francisco, with fellow Serb Mila Mulroney, wife of Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney. As Susan Gutfreund put it, “The whole world passed by at Le Cirque.”
The one French restaurant that still pulled in the ladies was La Grenouille, although even there elegance was giving way to notoriety. Charles Masson recalled a lunch that Liz Smith organized to rally the girls around Ivana Trump after Donald left her for Marla Maples: “One of the guests must have spilled the beans, and it was mayhem. There were so many groupies on the street banging on the windows and trying to get in, it was actually scary. We had to call the police.”
The New Wave
And then there was Mortimer’s. Glenn Bernbaum, a former retailing executive who was a great friend of Zipkin, Bill Blass, and Kenneth Jay Lane, opened his “society saloon” on Lexington Avenue at 75th Street in 1976. It was an instantaneous success. “Glenn was a great customer of Quo Vadis, and he knew my dad very well,” said Robert Caravaggi, whom Bernbaum brought in as maître d’. “P. J. Clarke’s was another favorite of Glenn’s. He wanted to do a place more like that—brick walls, wooden floors, white tablecloths, and milk lights. It was the long bar that really made the room.” The decorator Mario Buatta noted, “The people were the decoration.” Bernbaum was a well-known curmudgeon, who took pleasure in turning away the hoi polloi or sending them to the Siberia of the side room. He took even more pleasure in placing his favorite ladies—Brooke Astor, Jackie O, Gloria Vanderbilt—at the table in the front window, where passersby could gawk at them. A total Anglophile, he indulged the wild young English heiresses, most notably Catherine Guinness and Lady Anne Lambton, with long, late weekend lunches. From a wealthy Philadelphia family himself, he knew, as he told Blass, that the rich love a bargain. And he gave the ladies plenty of low-cal choices—tiny twinburgers with no bun, chicken paillard, crab cakes, and Dover sole. “Mortimer’s was the most amusing place of all,” said Carolina Herrera. “In a way it was not like a restaurant. It was more like a private club.”
Bernbaum, who died in 1998, stipulated in his will that Mortimer’s should not continue without him. One year later, Robert Caravaggi and Mortimer’s chef Stephen Attoe opened Swifty’s, two blocks south on Lexington. The name came from Bernbaum’s pet pug, which in turn had been named after Hollywood agent Swifty Lazar, and the backing from Bill Blass, Nan Kempner, cosmetics entrepreneur Gale Hayman, and the designer Adolfo, among others. Such Mortimer’s standbys as Casey Ribicoff, widow of Connecticut senator Abe Ribicoff, the anthropologist Iris Love, and the socialite Anne Slater promptly turned themselves into Swifty’s regulars. With its clubby English décor by Buatta and Anne Eisenhower, it continues to pull in the next generation of Upper East Side girls who sometimes lunch, including Tory Burch, Lauren Dupont, Renee Rockefeller, Marjorie Gubelmann, Fernanda Niven, and the Boardman sisters, Serena and Samantha.
Today, of the original midday shrines, the only ones remaining are La Grenouille and Le Cirque (in its third, very jazzy incarnation, on East 58th Street). Orsini’s went in 1984, and La Côte Basque, La Caravelle, and Lutèce all passed away in one fell swoop, in 2004, largely for a lack of ladies who lunched. By the 1990s—with the Clintons in the White House and First Feminist Hillary the leading role model for women—the power lunch had replaced the ladies’ lunch, and media mavens superseded society swans in the publicity pecking order. Diane Sawyer was the new Babe Paley, Anna Wintour the modern Gloria Guinness, and they started lunching with the Big Boys in the Grill Room of the Four Seasons.
After Michael McCarty cloned his art-filled Santa Monica bistro on West 55th Street, in 1989, Michael’s became probably the hottest lunchtime spot in Manhattan. It features California cuisine: Cobb salad, Caesar salad with steak, roasted heirloom carrot salad. The town’s most exclusive lunch clique calls itself the Harpies and includes Barbara Walters, Liz Smith, Nora Ephron, insurance executive Lisa Caputo, ABC’s Cynthia McFadden, Condé Nast’s Maurie Perl and Beth Kseniak, and Jennifer Maguire Isham of the Tribeca Film Festival. They gather frequently at Michael’s, “only in the bay window,” according to charter member Peggy Siegal, the film-industry publicist. “Harpies do not talk about shopping or fashion,” Siegal told me. “We get all dressed up, but our dress is reflective of our professional stature, not of a husband’s bank account—or a sugar daddy’s.” Liz Smith put it more simply: “It’s a bunch of us sitting around shooting the bull.” Another group—Diane Sawyer, Joan Ganz Cooney, Lesley Stahl, Peggy Noonan, and *Vanity Fair’*s Marie Brenner—gets together at Marea, the contemporary, pricey Italian restaurant on Central Park South.
Even WWD couldn’t buck the media-centric trend. As editor James Fallon explained, “The interest tilted toward celebrities and away from society. The women Mr. Fairchild photographed weren’t trying to build a career or get a reality-TV show on the back of the fact that they were having their picture taken after lunch. There’s always that ulterior motive now, it seems.”
Carolina Herrera added, “At some point the press started talking about the ladies who lunch in a derogatory way. Then suddenly it became: ladies who lunch—don’t touch it.”
Paul Wilmot opined, “I’ll tell you what killed the ladies who lunch: work. Society women today will become decorators, go into real estate, paint, design jewelry, do anything not to be considered dilettantes. They’ll market a candle! They go to the Four Seasons and they have the crudités and San Pellegrino water and they go back to work.” Or as Susan Gutfreund, now a working decorator, put it, “You go to Michael’s and every table has an agenda.”
And if they don’t have a career goal, they’re either raising children or raising funds. Charity lunches are the big thing, the most famous being the annual Central Park Conservancy luncheon—also known as the Easter Parade—which draws 1,200 Upper East Side women in hats. Otherwise it’s two or three friends having a quick bite at the Monkey Bar, the Modern at MoMA, Casa Lever, Sant Ambroeus, Sette Mezzo, DB Bistro Moderne, Amaranth, or Doubles, the private club in the Sherry-Netherland hotel. One of the most popular places is Fred’s, the large, noisy dining hall on the top floor of Barneys. La Côte Basque it’s not. But even at La Grenouille the new order prevails: this past August it was the setting for a lunch to promote Gloria: In Her Own Words, HBO’s documentary about Gloria Steinem’s career and her views on sex and reproduction.
This past summer in Southampton, Donna Karan had Peggy Siegal round up 50 women, including Judith Giuliani and Cristina Cuomo, for a lunch at Tutto il Giorno, the restaurant owned by Karan’s daughter and son-in-law, in order to inform them about the work of her Urban Zen Foundation. “Today, it’s very rare that ladies just lunch,” art collector Beth DeWoody, one of the guests, told me. “Ladies lunch for a reason, for a cause. And we’re here to support Donna and what she’s doing, which is so incredible, in Africa, Haiti, all over.” Siegal interjected, “It’s not just about going to La Côte Basque and seeing who’s in the room. Donna’s going to speak about health issues, of body, spirit, and mind. She has her whole agenda.” Before we could eat, Karan spoke at length about her mission, which was inspired by her husband’s death from lung cancer 10 years ago: “I started Urban Zen because I had so many women I was dressing, but I realized what I needed to do was ad-dress them. It wasn’t what we were wearing on our outside but what we were wearing on our inside Urban Zen is about finding the calm in the chaos. And the world we live in now, as we all know, is ultimate chaos. We can no longer sit around and have lunches as we used to do. Our lunches have to be proactive, and let’s get things done.”
Karan then introduced Rodney Yee and Colleen Saidman, the yogis who run the Urban Zen Integrative Therapy Program at Southampton Hospital and Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan. As the waiters brought out bowls of burrata mozzarella and cherry tomatoes, Saidman announced, “I’ll just lead you through a little bit of meditation. Set both feet on the floor. Take your hands and put them in your lap. Close your eyes. And then, maybe for the first time today, actually go inside and realize that you are in fact breathing … ”
At the end of the meal, Karan had a small fashion show of Urban Zen’s latest clothing line, which consisted mostly of tank dresses, pajama pants, and tunics in shades of brown, olive, and gray. She herself was wearing a khaki-colored stretch-wool dress, gladiator sandals, and a huge necklace made of leather tassels and African masks. “My fashion philosophy is: If you can’t sleep in it and go out in it, I don’t want to know from it,” she pronounced.
As I was leaving, Nancy Silverman, the estranged wife of former Cendant C.E.O. Henry Silverman, said to me, “You should change your article to ‘Girls Who Don’t Like to Lunch.’ ”
