Thursday, January 3, 2013. Very cold in New York, just like the weatherman “predicted.”
Our revival this past Monday of the In Memoriam piece I wrote about John Galliher ten years ago, and this holiday time of year reminded us of another great friend to many in New York, Judy Green -- who died a little more than a year before John on September 14, 2001, in her Park Avenue apartment, three days after 9/11.
It’s been more than a decade and I very often think of her. When walking up Park Avenue past 62nd Street, I always look up at her windows, imagining that she is still there and getting ready for her evening – because she always had something going on, something to do, people to see.
I’d met her several years before, and we briefly had a time when she got the idea in her head that I should be her husband. She would often introduce me to people as her husband. It was ironic, and funny, and not something either one of us would have been suited for, but she liked the idea at the time. We were, in some ways, kindred spirits. She was also one of those personalities that once she’d befriended you, you became part of her life. And she liked having fun, a good time, an interesting time.
There are many people who knew her, who were friendly with her even since childhood, who still think of that energy, that laughter’, and especially at this time of year, those parties she gave so gladly.
She was big on Christmas. Although she was Jewish by birth, she tended to openly turn away from her Jewish-ness. It was a mindset that admired the WASP-ish sensibilities, even when she thought them tiresome or dull. The Christmas season was her cup of tea.
In the early '80s, after her husband died, having sold her property in Westchester, she moved into town fulltime in the big apartment on Park Avenue. It was ideal for her gatherings. At Christmastime, Robert Isabell, then the sensational party designer, did the place up in Ultimate Christmasland. With wreathes and ribbons and silver and gold; pine boughs, holly, mistletoe, the tree, the lights, and then the guests – maybe 150 – with the hors d’oeuvres provided by Vincent Minuto of Hampton Domestics.
People loved these parties because it was a mob scene, a cacophony of the New York social ladder from society matrons to her bookie. There was always a fire in the fireplace and Christmas songs to go with the American songbook (Sinatra) on the sound system. One year, the pine boughs caught fire from a spark from the fireplace, and the fire department evacuated the entire party from the building. A half hour later, fire out, everyone returned and the party started up again. That was Judy Green. Never say never when it comes to a banquet.
The following is the article I wrote about Judy, three days after her death ...
First published September
17, 2001— Judy
Green died last Friday morning 8/14/01 about 3 a.m. in her Park
Avenue apartment where she lived and entertained at countless
dinners, parties and receptions for the past twenty years.
Her friend Ann Downey was by her side. She had had a ten-month battle with pancreatic and liver
cancer. It is not clear to me when she learned the finality
of her affliction but I know that for several months
up until very recently, possibly even a few hours or
even a few minutes before her death, she thought she'd
triumph and defeat the disease. I know that from things
I've heard from the very few who'd been in contact with
her and because I knew her. She was a fighter. To the
bitter end. She was a competitive woman by nature, deeply
competitive, and life was in many ways a race, a race
to stay in. Death was a losing. An admission of losing.
I
met her only eight years ago when I came back to New York
from living in Los Angeles. I'd been writing social-historical
pieces for Quest. One day at a luncheon of some
mutual friends, Dominick Dunne told me that Judy
Green wanted to meet me and would I mind if she called
me. The whole idea of someone wanting to meet me and asking
if they could call was entirely flattering.
I'd
heard of her, although only in passing. In the '60s and
'70s, Judy and Bill Green had a big country estate
in Mount Kisco where they often entertained and were part
of a then dazzling set that included Frank and Barbara
Sinatra, Ann and Morton Downey, Bennett and Phyllis
Cerf, Rosalind Russell and Freddie Brisson, Claudette
Colbert, Pamela and Leland Hayward, among others.
I knew this only from the pages of W, and from the
columns of Liz Smith and Suzy. I knew also
that she'd written a couple of novels that created quite
a stir amongst the same social set. From the outside looking
in, it appeared to be a very glamorous life among the rich,
the glitterati and the literati.
Coincidentally,
a few days after Dominick had told me about Judy, I went
to a luncheon given by Heather Cohane, who then
owned Quest, at a now defunct restaurant on East
80th Street. Judy Green was among the guests. I introduced
myself. She was quite curious to see this man who'd she'd been
reading but had never met or seen. For some reason she imagined me
to be different in appearance and age. Again, all
very flattering.
At
her invitation, I called a couple days later and we
made a date to meet for drinks one late afternoon at her
apartment on Park and 62nd. I'd never had the
experience of someone wanting to meet me because they'd
liked what I'd written. Although, of course, I had experienced
the opposite more than once. Or twice. So it was a very intriguing,
especially since I had no idea what her personality was
like or what our conversation would be like.
The
day before our meeting I happened to mention to Gerald
Clarke, the Capote and Judy Garland biographer,
that I was going to meet Judy Green. He said: "Oh
you'll have fun. She loves to give parties and she'll invite
you to her parties." In New York, the idea of going
to parties (up until this past week -- 9/11),
the possibility of meeting new and interesting people is,
for many of us, part of what city life is all about.
The
Green apartment, decorated by her great friend Ann Downey,
was large, plush and glamorously ornamented, and welcoming,
with a large wood-paneled living room, a boldly rich red "library" (with
a red Rothko over the sofa, a Warhol of Judy over the bar
commode, and a Dufy on the opposite wall). It was a real
New York apartment in a way that can only exist in New
York. The kind where you'd imagine the rich and the famous
pass through.
And they had. The tables on either side of
the sofa were crowded with silver-framed photographs of
the glamorous and rich and famous friends. Men, women and
children. Dressed for summer, dressed for grand evenings;
on yachts, by the sea, under palm trees. Sinatra relaxing
poolside with his wife. Princess Grace with Judy's
late husband Bill Green; Truman Capote in
his Studio 54 garb, the society columnist Suzy,
looking very sportif, under a cabana, adjusting
an earring, looking very much like a movie star, Andy
Warhol waving, Rosalind Russell laughing, Irving
Lazar beaming. The photographs of a golden life, a
life of leisure. At least on first sight.
Judy
and I sat and talked that afternoon for about three hours.
We talked about the people we knew in common. We talked
about books, authors we liked, books we hadn't read. She
was full of information, details about New Yorkers, Hollywood
people, actors, authors, artists. I liked her right away. Her conversation had
an "insider's" quality; she was privy to the
other side, and often the underside, of the lives so many
of the rich and famous who were only familiar to me as "names." The
stuff that gets categorized (initially anyway) as gossip.
To a writer, (or to me anyway), stories, anecdotes for
sake of insight or for sake of titillation about
the rich and the famous are irresistibly compelling. Especially
if the teller is well informed.
That
and my endless curiosity, combined with her welcoming personality,
created an instant bond between us.
She
was a small woman, probably no more than five-four. Blonde
at this age, a brunette earlier on. Perpetually tanned
(from frequent trips to Palm Beach in the wintertime and
Europe and the Hamptons in the summer). She often wore
red, or black. She was not a fashion maven, and although
she had the perfunctory fur coats and accessories, and
always looked "turned out," she cared little
about it. She had by then been a widow, young, for fourteen
years. Mother of a daughter Christina (now married
to Lloyd Gerry) and a son Nicholas. She'd
had a sparkling, if not brilliant career as a novelist. Irving
Lazar was her first agent and Bob Gottlieb was
her editor.
She
was born and brought up in New York, on Central Park West,
daughter of a wealthy businessman. From an early age she
moved in the social circles of the Our Crowd families,
as well as tycoons of publishing and show business. She
was a very pretty girl. Author/historian Barbara Goldsmith recalled
meeting Judy when she was seventeen, "at a Christmas
ball Mrs. Arthur Lehman gave for her grandchildren
the Buttenweiser, Loeb, Bernhard kids.
She was wearing a lemon yellow dress and she was so beautiful,
with those cat's eyes and cameo face (before the sun, before
Bill Green, before books and articles and people like Swifty)."
She
was very proud of and duly impressed by the fact that she
was related, on her mother's side, to Dorothy Fields,
the great Broadway lyricist. Judy, too, was very facile
with words, and loved to, and often did, whip up a witty
and clever lyric or poem for a friend or an occasion.
When
she was in her late 20s, she married a businessman named
Bill Green, a man almost twice her age, and who had a
previous marriage. Green was, as I said, a very close friend
of Sinatra's, as well as Edgar Bronfman, the Seagrams
heir, with whom he had close business connections. By this
time Judy had already published her first novel and embarked
on her literary-social career. The combination of friends
that the two brought to the marriage provided an energetic,
peripatetic and rich social life, that characterized the
marriage. In his late sixties, Bill Green died suddenly
of congestive heart failure, having been stricken while
they were staying with Claudette Colbert at her house in
Barbados. |
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