Gossip Central

Apropos of Nothing: Woody Allen’s View from the Top

Back in the day, I knew a journalist who had a crush on Woody Allen, and joined a club with others similarly besotted. Witty and smart, this bespectacled nerd made them laugh, and that was sexy. Cut to Woody Allen today, a man in his ‘80’s trying to clear his name. His new book, Apropos of Nothing, is already a scandal because one publishing house coup caused a cancellation, to another’s gain. Hachette employees walked out in protest, leaving the publication to Arcade/ Skyhorse. Chalk it up to a knee jerk conclusion of guilt in the #metoo moment: a relapse of Woody Allen’s continued battle in courts of public opinion on the case of his having abused his daughter Dylan. You know the story. It’s complicated. A family rift. A woman’s revenge. In Apropos of Nothing, he tells his side: logical, clear, bewildered that his reputation remains besmirched after much investigation, his work boycotted in the America that gave it birth. If that were all, you might not want to read Apropos of Nothing. On the other hand, one of our most unique filmmakers also tells tales of his life, loves, craft and Manhattan real estate, offering a laugh-out-loud penthouse perspective: Brooklyn boy rises to the top.

Remembering Andreas Brown at the Gotham Book Mart

On December 27, 2016, I posted a story about returning to the Gotham Book Mart site, reconfigured after the legendary literary hangout lost its lease. Its proprietor, Andreas Brown, a man wise to books, theater, and the theater of books, died this week at age 86. Among many discoveries, he was onto Jimmy Kimmel, telling me, he’s going to be a big star. With some tweaking, I am remembering here Andreas Brown and his place among diamonds.

“That’s our trouble,” said my friend Roger Friedman, “everything used to be something else.” I had just told him about meeting my brothers and their families for the third Chanukah candle, 13 relatives in all, at a glatt kosher restaurant called Taam Tov in the Diamond District, on the very site of the legendary Gotham Book Mart. On November 17, 1986, my book, Kerouac’s Spontaneous Poetics, one of the first full-scale studies on the iconic beat poet and novelist, was celebrated here. A sign, “Wise Men Fish Here,” marked the spot, a literary emporium on a bejeweled street. The James Joyce Society met here. Among many other book parties, a reissue of Junkie was feted here too, in 1977. Carl Solomon and Patti Smith attended, honoring William S. Burroughs’ work. Poet Allen Ginsberg, who had clerked here back in the day, snapped my picture.

Salman Rushdie Commands The Rainbow Room at the Guild Hall Academy of the Arts Awards

Even against a gloomy sky, The Rainbow Room with its magnificent city views defied yesterday’s weather, an impending pandemic, democrats duking it out. At Guild Hall’s most festive winter celebration, honoring achievement in the arts and philanthropy, serenity reigned, although most honorees greeted guests and neighbors with fist bumps and elbows over the usual bear hugs and double cheek air kisses. Among those cheering on Dorothea Rockburne in the Visual Arts, Barry Sonnenfeld for Performing Arts, Ted Hartley for Philanthropy and “a life well lived,” and Salman Rushdie for the Literary Arts, were Philippe Petit, Ralph  Gibson and Mary Jane Marcasiano, Tovah Feldshuh, Blythe Danner, Jordan Roth, Toni Ross, Patti Kenner, and many more representing the vibrant community, many attendees former awardees. April Gornik promised that the long-awaited Sag Harbor Arts complex will open this spring. And Eric Fishl raised a glass to the memory of Michael Lynne.

Celebrating Sondheim with the New York Philharmonic: Joy on New Year’s Eve

Photo: Regina Weinreich

Introducing this evening, Bernadette Peters cautioned the audience at Lincoln Center’s Geffen Hall, "Sweeney Todd"'s Mrs. Lovett will not be singing about baking shepherd pies with real shepherds a featured ingredient. Not that it mattered. This would be Stephen Sondheim composer, and except for two numbers from Follies with the outstanding Katrina Lenk singing the words to “Losing My Mind” and “Could I Leave You,” Peters kept her promise. Lenk will star in a revival of Sondheim’s “Company,” coming to Broadway.

Without his brilliant lyrics, the Sondheim feste did not disappoint. Beginning with the “Overture to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” and “Suite from Into the Woods,” the orchestra, led by Alexander Gemignani, and directed by Lonny Price, sampled Sondheim’s ample oeuvre. You could see musicians pucker, whistling as birds in the woods. The performance, an hour and half of joy, included “Suite from Assassins” and ended with “Suite from Sunday in the Park with George.” Peters and Lenk returned, champagne flutes in hand, for “Auld Lang Syne.” If you are in New York City for the holidays, the Philharmonic is the place to be on New Year’s Eve.

The New York Public Library’s Literary Lions Gala by the Book

A bookish night at the New York Public Library, the Literary Lions gala celebrates writers. Charlie Rose attended, and was ensconced in conversation as pigs in blankets were passed. Jean Doumanian confessed to hating long cocktail hours, but the gabfest went on for a while. Writers do have stories. Julie Taymor is finishing her film on Gloria Steinem, and Gay Talese, ever the dapper gadabout, said he went out to screenings and book events galore, even stepping out to a pub to watch television, if nothing else was on his social calendar.

Tom Hiddleston in Betrayal: Star Power on 45th Street

Marital infidelity is that slippery slope, just ask the characters in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal in a superb revival at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater. Coming from a fictional literary elite, meaning they are also verbally gifted, and would have to be for Pinter’s poetry, Jerry (Charlie Cox) and Emma (Zawe Ashton) think they’ve gotten away with a seven -year affair when they meet up two years after their trysts ended. A book agent and a gallerist, they’ve been cheating on Robert, her publisher husband (Tom Hiddleston), who is also his best friend. Got that? Famously for this Pinter play, the events unravel backwards in time, much being made of when and how the betrayed know what. The truth is slippery.

Jules Feiffer at 90: Guild Hall Celebrates with an All-Star Reading of A Bad Friend

Starring Oscar awarded F. Murray Abraham and Mercedes Ruehl, the reading of Jules Feiffer’s 2003 play A Bad Friend at Guild Hall, could not have featured more good friends. Under the expert direction of Harris Yulin who also read, along with the outstanding Tedra Millan, Dave Quay, and Josh Gladstone, one of the East End’s finest character actors, the reading thrilled an audience of Feiffer’s friends (Monte Farber and Amy Zerner, Audrey Flack, Susan Lacy, Celia Weston, among them), his wife Joan Holden, and the author himself.

Rob Reiner, Visiting the Hamptons, Reads Mr. T at Celebrity Autobiography

Photo: Roger Friedman

Rob Reiner was the surprise guest at Guild Hall for Celebrity Autobiography, a riotous show based on a single conceit. It’s not that the lives of celebrities are merely a hoot, but that read aloud, the unintentional humor is mind-blowing. Case in point, Tiger Woods’ sexual innuendo describing his golf strategies in Tiger Woods: The Making of a Champion. Or Reiner as Arnold Schwartzenegger’s dialogues with himself, emboldening the workings of an already outsized ego, or Joe Namath’s obsession with his hair, in Alan Zweibel’s voice. When performed onstage for an audience by first class actors, the results are laugh out loud good. That is the engine that fuels Celebrity Autobiography, a hit every year on and off Broadway, and at Guild Hall. The brainchild of playwright/actor Eugene Pack, who, upon reading Vanna Speaks, producer Merv Griffith’s miraculously talented letter turner on Wheel of Fortune, discovered that describing in detail what it is that Vanna White brings to the game, is its own game. And so he had Lewis Black reading White.

Ugo Rondinone at Guild Hall: Here Comes the Sun

Come out of the dark: Ugo Rondinone’s work at Guild Hall lifts us in radiant shots of sunlight. In the two large gallery spaces the walls are bare, lit by fluorescen fixtures. You might be mistaken to think you are in Walmart under this austere light, but the effect on the art is, well, looking in full sun, stunning. In one gallery, a series of graphic yet shimmering circles in gold and yellow are juxtaposed with Guild Hall’s regal space. In another gallery, large hoops made of twigs work as frames, and the few hung on the wall with nails suggest Christ’s crown of thorns, a beatific sight. In a third gallery, hung shingle style, are hundreds of children’s drawings of the sun, some in blazing color. Everywhere at Guild Hall, the suggestion of hope offers a glimpse of a better future.

Elvis in Vegas: The King Graces a Surreal City in the Sixties

In Sagaponack, the house Richard Zoglin shared with his late wife Charla Krupp sits nestled on wooded grounds: immaculate, swimming pool, antique adorned, just the way she, a style editor for Glamour and In Style Magazine, left it. By contrast, the subject of Zoglin’s new book, Elvis in Vegas: How the King Reinvented the Las Vegas Show, which tells “The King’s” story in transforming Las Vegas entertainment, is as much about the place itself in all its tawdry madness: a culmination of Zoglin’s work in his last two books, Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-Up in the ‘70’s Changed America, and Hope: Entertainer of the Century, taken together, his books form a trilogy in the history of American entertainment, well researched and themselves well, highly entertaining.