What a difference a week makes!
On Sunday, The New York Times finally reviewed Rogues’ Gallery, Michael Gross’s two-month-old, unauthorized exposé about the famous people behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The review came just days after the book began appearing in the New York Public Library system, erasing Mr. Gross’s concerns that the two Read More
When literary agent Richard Curtis and his wife, Leslie, heard about journalist Michael Gross’ unauthorized Metropolitan Museum exposé Rogues’ Gallery, they wanted to check it out. Literally! So they searched the online catalog of the New York Public Library. But the book wasn’t listed. Then they called the library and got “kind of a vague Read More
“It was an exercise in sucking up hostility, being called names, being hung up on,” author Michael Gross said of Rogues’ Gallery, his unauthorized and rather provocative history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“I had never encountered hostility on that level—hostility so organized. It was daunting, it put a dent in me,” the 56-year-old Read More
New York Post: The trial of 84-year-old Anthony Marshall, son of the late great socialite and heiress Brooke Astor, has all the elements of a Trial of the Century: Every Monday through Thursday, muckraking journalists, the sliver of obsessed public, and various luminaries of the Manhattan social and charity circuit pack the lower Manhattan Read More
Charlene Marshall, wife of accused Astor scion Anthony Marshall, sobbed in the courtroom on Thursday morning, May 7, as reporters and spectators waited out a two-hour delay in the morning proceedings, which resulted in the replacement of a juror for the first time so far in the eight-day trial.
The two-hour hiatus gave Read More
“I knew I should have listened to that man; he told me you’re not my friend,” the late Brooke Astor told her close friend Annette de la Renta during a walk in Central Park sometime in 2001 or 2002.
Ms. Astor had just dropped the leashes for her two dogs, Boysie and Read More
Brooke Astor’s long friendship with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and his wife, Nancy Kissinger, almost ended abruptly on her 80th birthday.
“My husband made a bad choice of comments,” Ms. Kissinger testified in Manhattan Supreme Court on Wednesday, May 6.
In a toast, Mr. Kissinger had publicly congratulated the prominent Read More
The late philanthropist and socialite Brooke Astor had a “very nice, cordial relationship” with her son, Anthony Marshall, said Linda Gillies, longtime director of the now-defunct charitable foundation set up by Ms. Astor’s husband, Vincent Astor. “They spoke, they laughed together and they worked together.”
Yet, mother and son inevitably had their moments. Ms. Read More
Anthony D. Marshall, Brooke Astor’s only son, has been indicted on criminal charges that relate to his handling of his late mother’s finances and will, which was curiously amended in 2002. One of the late Manhattan doyenne’s former lawyers, Francis X. Morrissey Jr., has also been fingered in the case. According Read More
Sitting at his cream-colored desk inside a halo of luminous office white, Oscar de la Renta held forth at his Seventh Avenue fashion headquarters on a morning in mid-May. As it is the height of the so-called spring season, this is where Mr. de la Renta gathers his strength between the charity fund-raisers and dizzyingly Read More
