This week, lunch at the Grill was totally booked, except for Friday when everyone disappeared for the long weekend. Pete Peterson was here only one day--he must have been too busy talking about the deficit! I'm surprised we're so busy for the time of year, but all of our events have sold out, too. On Thursday we held a private tasting for Brunello di Montalcino by Mastrojanni, a delicious Italian red wine. We had a lovely time--too much of a good time, with all that wine!

Ralph Lauren was here on Wednesday. So was Ms. Stewart and the actor Chris O'Donnell. Geraldo Rivera, who did his last wedding with us, also came in for lunch, and on his way out, he hugged Bill O'Shaughnessy, who was looking very charming as usual (but still no haircut!). On Thursday Tory Burch was here with a guest I didn't recognize, who was very stylish, of course.

We hosted a breakfast for Henry Kissinger, where he spoke at length about China and his new book. It was fabulous--the most well-attended breakfast in Four Seasons history. It shows that Mr. Kissinger is still in charge. Mr. Obama, you should listen to him!

Over the weekend, MasterChef Australia filmed at the Four Seasons, and I was one of the judges along with Paul Liebrandt and David Chang (Wylie Dufresne was supposed to come but he got sick!) We didn't even start filming until eleven o'clock at night, and were there until six a.m. but it was a lot of fun. The people who won made a chocolate gold cake.

I also got outside the restaurant this week--can you believe it? On Tuesday night someone invited me to Elaine's, two days before it closed. We drank bottles of 1996 Cheval Blanc that were outrageously inexpensive, and there were so many people I knew that I started to go around taking their orders--I was playing the maitre'd, and everyone thought I worked there! The best part about the night was the food. The last time I was at Elaine's was ten years ago, but the food was excellent. I had a steak that's as good as the one we serve in the Grill (don't tell anyone). I'm sad Elaine's closed--it's the end of an era. But at least I got to be there.

editorial@observer.com

Last weekend we had a private tasting for a very rare Louis XIII cognac with our best customers--just twenty people! Mary McFadden was there with Gregory Speck. We also had a cooking class. I had to get in early for that, because we make a full lunch and serve it with wine, and some people get really wasted.

On Monday we had a party for PR maven Peggy Siegal. Later in the week, Barbara Walters had a long lunch with Judith Giuliani. RFK Jr. came in, and of course Pete Peterson has been here. He always makes it in unless he's in Washington.

At the end of the week there was some drama. The prince came in on Friday and we didn't have his table. Oh, he was furious! He never shows up on time, but thinks he'll always get the same table. The matire'd said he called me every name in the book! But of course he didn't leave; instead he ate lunch in the Pool Room. On his last day before vacation! Can you believe it? What a going-away party! When I went to see he said to me, "You don't belong here; you belong on the other side." I had to pay him back, so when his guest arrived, I escorted him through the kitchen, through the private dining room and down the main staircase into the Pool Room. The prince doesn't know who he's dealing with!

At least he'll be in Paris for a few months, where he can cool off. But he'll be back--our prince always comes back.

editorial@observer.com

Earlier in the week Henry Kissinger came in with Jane Hartley (Ralph Schlosstein's lovely wife). I don't know what they were doing together, but they were holding hands. Then at the end of their lunch, Mr. Kissinger leaned over and said to me, "Can you please call Pete Peterson and tell him that I am having a very amorous lunch with Jane Hartley." They have some little joke going—they both love her. It was very amusing. Harold Ford Jr. was also eating with a married woman. He came in with Jerry Speyer's beautiful wife, Katherine Farley.

Thursday was all money. The whole financial world came—Larry Fink, Steve Schwarzman, Joe Perella, Ralph Schlosstein, Pete Peterson. The only person missing was the chief of Goldman Sachs! You basically don't need to seat anyone on days like that because they all automatically go to their own table. Steve Rattner was back from vacation. He looks better than ever, 10 years younger. I think it's because he's doing what he loves.

Matthew Bronfman ate with two gentlemen at a banquette on Friday, right next to Beth Rudin DeWoody, who was lunching with the brand-new president of the New School, David Van Zant. At a nearby table, former Goldman Sachs partner Henry Cornell dined with associates. He now operates a winery in Napa Valley. His wine is outstanding!

And Clinton crony Vernon Jordan dined with Don Marin. I don't know why President Obama didn't pick him for chief of staff. I would like to have a chief of staff like Vernon Jordan. Can you imagine how many attractive women there would be in the administration?

Julian Niccolini is the co-owner of the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan.

On a recent Thursday morning, Internal Revenue Service agents walked up to a shiny new building on East 74th Street. Bernie Madoff's younger son has a $4.4 million condo on the fifth floor, but they were looking for his neighbor. "Tell them I'm not here," the money manager Kenneth I. Starr said to the doorman from the $7.6 million apartment he bought a month and a half ago. "Only my wife is here."

An hour later, the agents were about to use a master key when Ms. Starr, a former erotic dancer, opened the door: "He's," she whispered, "upstairs." The 66-year-old financial adviser, whose clients have included Henry Kissinger, Caroline Kennedy, Bunny Mellon and Martin Scorsese, was found hiding in a closet, his shoes sticking out.

Eight days later, Carly Simon was lying in bed in Martha's Vineyard. Wearing a white nightgown, a kind of Victorian-style shift, she answered the phone. "I'm fine," she said. "I'm not fine, what am I saying?" For one thing, she's been ill: She thinks she was bitten by a tick when her horse was put down. For another, the singer says she has lost upward of $15 million to Mr. Starr, who is being held without bail on charges that he was running a Ponzi-like scheme.

In a complaint that accuses him of fraud and money laundering, prosecutors say Mr. Starr (no relation to the Clinton foe) bought his new apartment with $5.75 million taken from Ms. Mellon, a 99-year-old widow, and $1 million from Uma Thurman. He repaid the actress when she went up to his office to confront him two weeks later, using money taken from his client Jim Wiatt, the former William Morris chairman.

Ms. Simon, whose father co-founded Simon & Schuster, thinks her own money is gone because of Mr. Starr's negligence and fraud, which she wasn't sharp enough to catch in time. "You're talking to somebody I'd rather not be," she said. "I don't like to admit how little I knew about anything financial."

READ MORE FROM THE CARLY SIMON INTERVIEWS>

"She leaves it to people that she trusts," said her sister, Joanna, a Manhattan real estate broker, and the late Walter Cronkite's companion. "And it turns out a lot of those people were untrustworthy. She's a real artist, and she needs people to look after her." Cronkite, too, she said, was a client of Mr. Starr's, though he got out early.

If an enormous lesson of the financial crisis was that most of Manhattan was cheating, one moral to the story of the sprawling Madoff disaster and now the cinematic Starr charges is that most everybody is being cheated, even the artistes and statesmen and dazzlingly aristocratic widows.

IN THE MID-'90s, the singer and her ex-husband, James Taylor, happened to be using the same money manager. "I felt that I was second best, and I wasn't getting the kind of attention that a pasha like myself would want," she said. "James just always was much more of a worker bee than I, and therefore it reflected in the kind of attention from a business manager that one would expect." 

She heard about Ken Starr from three different people at once. "All very successful and moneyed," she said. "They were all very importantly involved with the theater and television."

Still, when she went to meet the adviser, she brought along a friend, Dirk Ziff. Mr. Ziff, a billionaire, didn't raise any red flags, though nor did he want to use Mr. Starr himself. (As it happens, his brother Robert has been named as a client, although a spokesperson told The Observer that he denies knowing the adviser, let alone having invested with him.)

As Ms. Simon remembers it, Mr. Starr told the singer he knew her work-her songs include "You're So Vain," "Nobody Does It Better" and "That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be." Mr. Starr said that even though her wealth fell below his threshold, he'd take her on as a client and piggyback her account onto Blackstone private-equity deity Pete Peterson's. She didn't understand how that would work, but she liked the sound of it. "I thought, 'Wow. I struck gold.'" He guaranteed a return of 28 percent. "Of course, in retrospect, one sees extremely differently, but I thought he was the type of power that I hadn't come across."

Up until recently, Mr. Starr had rarely been photographed without a charming and important person by his side. Around town, he could be seen sipping Diet Coke at the Four Seasons at lunch; or maybe chatting to other guests at Bank of America's ritzy private client event about his time at the glorious Allen & Co. retreat; or at a charity ball with his nice wide grin, a tie over his modest paunch, his bald head shining in the light and an arm around a good New Yorker like Jimmy Nederlander.

Then there are odder images, like the shots of him with his tattooed and buxom wife, his third, next to bodybuilders at their American Gladiator-themed private cocktail party. But even at the pole-dancing parties she threw, there are happy snapshots of Mr. Starr with David Blaine or Scarface producer Marty Bregman. Al Pacino was a client, too.

So were Mike Nichols, Annie Leibovitz, Neil Simon and Barbara Walters. And during a recording of a conversation with the Los Angeles private investigator Anthony Pellicano that was leaked during his trial, Mr. Starr said the billionaire Mort Zuckerman had been a client and friend, too. "That's not my recollection," Mr. Zuckerman, also a Madoff victim, said this week. "I'm going to tell you something: For years I have been asked by various friends in the entertainment world, and I have advised them all to stay away from this guy."

AT FIRST, THE singer and the adviser got along fine. "Smooth sailing," Ms. Simon said. "Things looked as though they were moderately improving for the first four or five years." She didn't talk to Mr. Starr very often, though she sometimes saw him up on Martha's Vineyard, where they both knew the humorist Art Buchwald.

When the fall started, it was too slow to bother her. There were sporadic warnings from friends, and there were official complaints in court from clients like Sly Stallone, Wesley Snipes and Joan Stanton, the widow of a Volkswagen mogul and the radio voice of Lois Lane. Ms. Simon got a new assistant, who saw she was being billed for odd storage units-and, somehow, James Taylor's health insurance. There was a tax mishap. There was a piece of paper sent to Martha's Vineyard that would have sold off her favorite investment had she signed. There was an enormous line of credit established.

But it was not a crisis. "My life was so filled with so many other problems," she said. There were health issues to worry about, and her children, plus her relationship with Starbucks, which she eventually sued over an album. "'We've set it up,' said Ken Starr to me, 'so that you will not have to worry for the rest of your life.'"

A few months after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the singer got a call from a woman at the Starr office. She wanted whatever money that was in Ms. Simon's Martha's Vineyard account transferred to New York, because there suddenly wasn't enough money to pay staff members, like the assistant. "That's when I began to call Ken," she said.

"Why would you want to get in touch with him?" someone at his office said. In January, as she tells it, she waited an hour to speak to him. "I said, 'Ken, why don't I have any money?'"

"What do you mean?" he said. "Everything's fine."

She left him, wiped out. Beyond the question of negligence, she and her attorney, Marty Singer, say she may be a victim of the Ponzi scheme he's been accused of. Last year, The Times called him the "go-to guy for star-crossed stars." "We are at the stage," he said this week, "when we could be suing."

"She claimed things, that he allowed her to spend too much money on her house, stuff like that," said the attorney Bert Fields, who has done work for Mr. Starr for years, and helped him with Ms. Simon's complaints earlier this year. "That's the kind of thing my wife might accuse me of."

"Oh, bullshit," she said. "I think you spend too much on your investments based on what your money manager tells you to spend."

"I would be reluctant to file the suit," said Mr. Fields. "But listen, it costs $65, I think, to file." A few years ago, The Times called him "the man to call when taking on a studio."

Mr. Starr was arrested with the former president of the City Council, Andrew Stein, who was charged with lying to federal officers about a shell company that was used for Mr. Starr's fraud; Mr. Stein was released on bail. Attorney Ed Hayes, an inspiration for Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, met with Mr. Starr in jail. "He didn't seem cocky in the slightest; he seemed very disheartened and upset," Mr. Hayes said.

Mr. Hayes was only involved for a few days. "In the beginning, he said, 'I'm going to have the money,' and then he didn't come up with it."

When Ms. Simon heard about the agents and the arrest and the jailing, she said she felt sorry that she hadn't left Mr. Starr earlier. "There was one friend of mine that said, 'I just feel I'm too old to deal with this. He takes me out to lunch when I'm in town!' So there was one friend of mine who just wasn't going to do anything about it."

Her West Village duplex has been on the market for years, but she still has her house on Martha's Vineyard. There, waiting for a Lyme disease test early this week, she was in bed again in the late afternoon, but optimistic. "I'm a believer," she said. "So I'm a believer that the next great thing could happen."

mabelson@observer.com

Consider this. While co-op owners at the 52nd Street and East River apartment house have listed rambling units for more than $20 million, the most expensive sale ever at the River House, according to  the database of a broker who has done business in the building, is $12.25 million, and that was nine years ago, in a bull market. A rival broker put the most expensive sale ever at a mere $10 million for a four-bedroom unit in 2008. In the era of $26 million sales at the newer 15 CPW and $14 million transactions at Superior Ink, that is, dare we say, kind of pathetic.

Moreover, as recently as 2008, before Lehman crashed, the 26-story edifice had three units on the market, an embarrassing glut for such a self-consciously elite institution. Today, according to Streeteasy.com, there are five active listings, from a four-bedroom, third-floor apartment asking $24.5 million to a three-bedroom on the 12th floor asking $4.9 million.

How has this terrible state of affairs come to pass at River House—the River House—the one that Henry Kissinger has called home for decades, the apartment house so uppity it rejected the likes of Gloria Vanderbilt and Diane Keaton, the apartment house sooo exclusive that it prohibits brokers from naming the building’s address or even its name in listings?

There are many ways to answer that question. Most of them tend to involve the excrescences of Robert Moses; the citywide decline in crime, which has rendered Manhattan one big playground for the rich; and the rise of the condominium.

RIVER HOUSE, designed by William Lawrence Bottomley, rose between 52nd and 53rd streets and the East River in 1931, on a site where cigar and furniture factories once stood, and at a time, not so unlike our own, when the rich found the contrast between urban grit and the high life aesthetically charming, according to The Times’ architectural writer Christopher Gray.

Charming from a decent remove, that is. According to Mr. Gray: “With a yacht landing, a mid-block driveway, a walled garden, apartments of nine to 17 rooms and private tennis and swimming club in the basement, River House offered accommodations that few New Yorkers had any hope of enjoying. Sleek chauffeured limousines entered a landscaped courtyard on 52d Street and exited down a ramp to 53d Street.”

Today, what charm existed in peering at the laboring classes while sipping a sherry in the confines of one’s 17-room flat is no longer. River House now finds itself surrounded by suitably posh neighbors. Nor, for that matter, can the resident, à la Marshall Field III, waltz outside onto one’s yacht, and after a 35-minute ride alight at one’s Port Washington home. For that, River House residents have Robert Moses to thank.

Just nine years after the building’s erection, the span of the F.D.R. that ferries cars from 14th to 92nd streets opened for business. And so the yachting dock went the way of the Manhattanite’s unfettered access to the waterfront.

What remains in lieu of yachting access is something a tad more austere. On a recent Sunday afternoon, where the easternmost tip of 52nd Street ends in a cul-de-sac bluff overlooking a River House patio below, an elegant lady in a red baseball cap lounged below browsing through the weekend paper, protected from the roar of the cars on the neighboring F.D.R. by nothing more than an ivy-covered wall. 

Strike one: Robert Moses. Strike two: the passage of time.

“Over the passage of time, some buildings lose their fashionable cachet, others gain it and others maintain it throughout, like those on Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue,” said a broker who’s done deals in River House.

Indeed, much has happened since its heyday, which extended well into the ’80s and ’90s. For one, the city has gotten much, much safer—a trend that has transformed countless traveler-beware precincts in Manhattan into paradisiacal playgrounds for those with too much discretionary income.
“New York had these enclaves, just because the city wasn’t that safe,” said Laurence Jones, an architect who’s worked in his share of wealthy buildings. “It was totally secure, isolated, protected. Now, you can’t imagine a neighborhood less interesting.”

In the immediate vicinity of River House, there are, to wit, no chic restaurants, no hot cocktail bars. There are no art galleries or beautiful young things strutting about in the latest frocks. Rather, there are at least three florists (rich people just love their fresh flower arrangements); the stuffy restaurant Le Perigord; a furniture store; a D’Agostino; Tal Bagels; an oddly placed McDonald’s; a Parnell’s Pub and Restaurant; a diner; and a GNC.

“It’s not a question of not being able to get the architecture and quality,” said another well-positioned broker. “It’s purely location.”

AND, THEN, LET US NOT forget the rise of the condominium, a form of housing that predominates in other, more livable cities, but that has somehow only recently gained steam in New York.

“I’ve seen a tremendous increase in demand for condos for the super rich, versus the co-ops,” said Tamir Shemesh. whose Prudential Douglas Elliman group is now marketing the über-lux condos at One Madison Park. “A lot of buyers want hassle free.”

William Zeckendorf, a pioneer of condo development in New York, including that of 15 Central Park West, traces the birth of the condo here to the St. Tropez on East 64th Street, which was built in 1964. But, he added, condos didn’t really begin to take root in New York until the 1980s. Mr. Zeckendorf has since built some 30 condo buildings, including Worldwide Plaza, the Vanderbilt, the Columbia and, of course, the Zeckendorf Towers on Union Square.

“Starting in 1990, condos began to outpace co-ops in pricing,” he said, “and starting in 2000, the difference exploded.”

Not only are condos units growing, but co-op boards have become, particularly during the recent boom, even more restrictive. And few if any are more difficult than that of River House. Which leaves a wealthy apartment-buyer with the following question: Deal with an ornery co-op board all for the sake of an inconveniently located, albeit stunning co-op, or buy a centrally located condo and save yourself the hassle.

Doesn’t seem like much of a dilemma, now does it?

drubinstein@observer.com

Such is the deserved luck of the ballyhooed tower at 731 Lexington Avenue-half-luxury condo, as One Beacon Court (owners have included, among others, Johnny Damon of the world champion Yankees, and Beyoncé), and half-office building, as the Bloomberg Tower. The mayor's media concern, Bloomberg LP, rents 885,000 feet on the bottom 31 floors of the 54-story tower. It is the sole office tenant; there's not even any sublease space available in this, the worst office-leasing market since at least the early 1990s.

In 2004, the area surrounding the Bloomberg Tower, especially on the Third Avenue side, was not exactly an upmarket area, as it has increasingly become since the tower's debut more than three years ago. Its developer, Steve Roth's Vornado Realty Trust, filled the surrounding neighborhood with sleek new retail space that it purchased during the tower's construction, and it now owns the block on the south side of 58th Street, and the retail on either side of Lexington-home to tenants such as Zales Diamonds and the salon Phyto. But the sine qua non of the building is definitely Bloomberg.

The mayor's secretive company locks in the tower's lucrative identity and provides the consumers for the surrounding retail-a sort of chicken-or-the-egg symbiosis. Those who have toured Bloomberg LP's custom-built space, designed in an open layout by Studios Architecture, around a huge circular escalator, are in awe of it. New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger described it as "a newsroom truly designed for the electronic age ... a dazzling work environment tucked inside a refined but conventional skyscraper."

The HBO documentary Le Cirque: A Table in Heaven follows Mr. Maccioni's decision to move his definitively upscale French restaurant to the tower in order to give it a more contemporary feel and a more relevant address. The celebrated restaurant now looks out of 27-foot glass windows onto Beacon Court.

SEVEN-THIRTY-ONE LEXINGTON used to be the flagship site of Alexander's department store, once a local Bloomingdale's rival. The last Alexander's to close, the store shut its doors in 1992. Alexander's Inc., a REIT that now leases and develops the sites of the former stores, owns the building in a partnership with Vornado, which retains a 33 percent stake in the tower.

After the demolition of Alexander's in 1999, The New York Times called the site "one of the world's most valuable holes in the ground," though the neglected building had been a blight on the neighborhood for years. Then, after more than two years of negotiations, Vornado struck a deal in 2000 to develop the site, with Bloomberg LP as the anchor tenant (Michael Bloomberg was still a private citizen then). Construction began in 2001, but was not finished until 2005, due to design difficulties.

The building, designed by Cesar Pelli of Pelli Clarke Pelli, has not changed hands since its construction. Of the 1,307,000 square feet of total space, 174,000 feet belong to premier retailers in the building's ground and first-floor, glass-box units, such as H&M, Home Depot, and the Container Store. Atop the steel-framed business tower sit 105 luxury condos, all of which sold before the building opened.

Vornado erected another two-story, glass-box space at 968 Third Avenue, at 58th Street, to fill out the neighborhood, both in design and clientele; and it owns the brushed brass and limestone Architects & Designers building at 150 East 58th street. That 39-story mixed-use tower, a trophy for both its history and appearance, is the penultimate building in Vornado's east midtown collection. The REIT owns other buildings linked to design, such as Chicago's Merchandise Mart. But the Bloomberg Tower is the capstone.

And has this strategy paid off? Vornado would not comment for this story, but retail leasing in the region has perked up significantly since the Bloomberg Tower's arrival, with other buildings in the area renovating and a new, livelier strip of retail sprouting on Third Avenue. (Office rents in the area, and not necessarily in the fully leased Bloomberg Tower, run generally into the $40s and $50s a square foot, according to Yale Robbins.)

A Times article from 2006 credits the tower with the increased activity. "Real estate owners and retailers in the neighborhood are also upgrading their properties. ... Other retailers east of Third Avenue, an area that has traditionally had more service-oriented retailing ... said they were feeling the pinch of the Bloomberg Tower, either in the form of rising retail rents or more competition for the potential customers."

gvoien@observer.com

The Four Seasons Restaurant, modernist shrine of food and power, celebrated its 50th anniversary on Thursday night. It was cold for June, but fortunately the red carpet was made of always-in-season Astroturf. “The red carpet is green,” co-owner Julian Niccolini lamented. “Alex wanted it to be pink.” He was referring to co-owner Alex von Bidder, with whom he was holding court as the party began. “Look who is coming! Look who is coming!” Mr. Niccolini kept crowing.

The parade of notables included members of the power-lunch crowd as well as designers Erin Fetherston and Ralph Lauren. Model Jessica Hart—“Hart, H-A-R-T!” an assistant had to yell to photographers—set flashes on fire. She wore leather pants and shifted her weight constantly, throwing out knees and hips in lanky contrapposto as if freshly delighted by her surfeit of limb. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who arrived a few minutes later, was one of the very few who incited as much enthusiasm. The photographers did not, however, call him “sweetheart.”

Inside, behind the dining rooms’ famous metal curtains, a mixture of classic pop, big band and Motown was playing over the speakers. The restaurant held fast to its mid-century aesthetic, even where it could barely be seen—the bartenders poured Coke from small glass bottles.

Still, some things have changed. Overheard: “Every desperate banker is trying to write a book.”

Waiters roamed carrying sliders, sushi, spring rolls, oysters and tiny desserts.

The absence of seated dining was a source of concern to Candida Royalle. Ms. Royalle, a producer and director of female-friendly pornography, had gotten separated from the friend who brought her and was looking for someone—anyone—she knew.

Star Jones was perhaps the only woman who, on arrival, grabbed Mr. Niccolini more enthusiastically than the other way around. Perhaps she was feeling frisky thanks to the oysters, which she'd tried for the first time this evening.

“If you’re gonna do it,” she said, “you do it here.”

Author Salman Rushdie and his girlfriend, Pia Glenn, were not interested in talking to The Transom. “We’re sort of in party mode,” Ms. Glenn explained.

For Mr. Rushdie, this seemed to involve sitting quietly on a banquette at the back of the room. Author Jay McInerney, however, was at the center of activity. His favorite memory of the Four Seasons? “Watching a girl jump into the pool after taking her top off.” He paused. “It was a while ago,” he said, as the crowd sucked him back inexorably into the Pool Room. “It was good.”

“He is Kofi Annan,” Mr. Kissinger replied.

“Is he a distinguished fellow?” Ms. Astor asked.

In fact, the sitting secretary general of the United Nations was the guest of honor that night at the very dinner the late grande dame of Manhatthan high society was then hosting.

And so the parade of high-profile witnesses dishing embarassing tales of the esteemed socialite's late-life forgetfulness and delusion continued on Thursday, May 21, in Manhattan Supreme Court.

Mr. Kissinger, wearing a stately black suit with a maroon tie, recounted the conversation in his much anticipated morning testimony at the trial of Ms. Astor's son, Anthony Marshall, who stands accused of raiding his mother’s estate for more than $60 million, through a series of will changes at a time when the wealthy society maven was battling Alzheimer's. (Mr. Kissinger's wife, Nancy Kissinger, testified earlier; next up: Barbara Walters!)

Three months after the Kofi Annan incident, at her 100th birthday party, Ms. Astor would fail to recognize Mr. Kissinger, too. He would not see her again before her death in 2007 at the age of 105.

Prior to her decline, the prominent pair had been friends for almost a quarter of a century, traveling to the Middle East together in the early 1980s, and making a series of holiday trips to the home of designer Oscar de la Renta and wife Annette de la Renta in the Dominican Republic, where the two would take long afternoon walks.

“We had a rule: Never discuss substance, only discuss people,” Mr. Kissinger testified. “It was great gossiping sessions.”

Mr. Kissinger nearly wrecked their friendship twenty years prior, when he mentioned Ms. Astor’s advancing age in a toast at her 80th birthday party. “That was a disaster,” he admitted on the stand. “She shot up from her chair, denying she was 80. A lot of the other guests got up and said I obviously didn’t know what I was talking about.”

After the party, “she wouldn’t talk to me, she wouldn’t take phone calls,” Mr. Kissinger testified. He finally sent flowers, and some kind of note about how the Chinese assign ages arbitrarily, which seemed to do the trick.

The former secretary of state was rather diplomatic in discussing Charlene Marshall, the much-maligned wife of the accused Mr. Marshall. “She was not fond of her daughter-in-law,” Mr. Kissinger said.

On cross-examination, Thomas Puccio, an attorney for Mr. Marshall's co-defendant Francis X. Morrissey, seemed to pry for a little courtroom gossip about their close friendship.

“Would you care to tell me how a close a friend?” Mr. Puccio asked.

“I’m not sure how you mean that,” Mr. Kissinger replied.

On his way out of the courthouse, Mr. Kissinger was helped by a group of guards. “Dr. Kissinger, anything you want to say to the press?” one reporter asked.

“No, thank you,” he replied with a hearty smile. He then stopped, shook the hands of two reporters, and then kissed court officer Jennifer Morgan on the cheek before hopping into a black Audi.

“No one’s ever done that to me,” Ms. Morgan told the Daily Transom after returning to the courtroom. “I was embarrassed. I wasn’t expecting it! My heart’s still pounding."

Brooke Astor’s long friendship with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and his wife, Nancy Kissinger, almost ended abruptly on her 80^th 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 Manhattan socialite on finally attaining octogenarian status. Bad form.

Put down The Prince, Henry! Read As A Gentleman Would Say.

Suffice to say, the fine-mannered doyenne Ms. Astor was not amused. “She was furious! Absolutely furious!” Ms. Kissinger told the jury. To make amends, she said, "letters were sent, flowers were sent, telephone calls were made."

Twenty years later, all was forgotten.

In 2002, Ms. Kissinger attended Ms. Astor's 100th birthday party at the home of former Chase Manhattan Bank Chairman David Rockefeller.

Despite having been friends for nearly thirty years--Ms. Astor had even named a dog Henry!--their reunion barely registered with the declining grande dame of New York society. “I don’t believe she recognized me,” Ms. Kissinger said.

Prosecutors are trying to convince jurors that the charitable centenarian had descended into dementia by the time she rewrote her will in 2004, redirecting $60 million in monies previously earmarked for charity to her only son, Anthony Marshall, who now stands accused of conspiracy and grand larceny in an alleged plot to take advantage of his mother's confused condition and loot her vast fortune.

Earlier in the day, defense attorney Thomas Puccio, representing Mr. Marshall's co-defendent, Francis Morrissey, sparred with geriatrician Dr. Howard Fillit about the actual severity of Ms. Astor's Alzheimer's.

Testimony so far has also tended to highlight Ms. Astor's apparent dislike for her son's spouse, Charlene Marshall, a former preacher's wife who left her prior husband to run off with Mr. Marshall.

Ms. Kissinger only piled on. She recounted a Christmas party in 2001, when Ms. Astor gave a necklace and earrings to her close friend, Annette de la Renta. As Ms. de la Renta left the room to put them on, Ms. Kissinger recalled, “Brooke turned to me and said, ‘I don’t want Charlene to get them.’”

Taking the stand in a long green dress with gold buttons, Ms. Kissinger brought a stately elegance to a courtroom that was, for the first time in six days of testimony (and counting), packed. Despite the case’s high profile, reporters often had a bench to themselves for much of the past week. But the expected testimony of Ms. Kissinger and, later, Ms. de la Renta brought out new notebooks from the likes of the Los Angeles Times and Women’s Wear Daily.

The buzz was, in fact, audible. Bailiffs cracked down on the reporters’ frequent pow-wows, after the court reporter complained she was having trouble hearing the proceedings.

Following her testimony, Ms. Kissinger immediately headed for the elevator without speaking to reporters.

“Who made your dress? Can you at least tell us that?” hollered one reporter, to no avail.

“Good Lord, what’s happened to the picture?” wondered Lord William Waldorf Astor when he saw the empty wall space in Brooke Astor’s red-lacquered library, where her cherished Childe Hassam painting had hung.

For decades, the two Astors had visited each other across the Atlantic—two sides of the same vast fortune—and Mr. Astor had often listened to his American cousin-in-law speak glowingly of the picture that hung above her fireplace.

“I was amazed,” Mr. Astor testified on Wednesday afternoon, April 29. “She said Tony had sold it because she needed the money, which was a somewhat surprising remark for her to make.”

 He was referring to Anthony Marshall, the late philanthropist and socialite Ms. Astor's only son, who stands accused of stealing from his mother's $200 million fortune.

 Pressed by Fred Hafetz, Mr. Marshall’s attorney, Mr. Astor admitted he did not remember the exact conversation, but insisted Ms. Astor told him that Mr. Marshall “wished for the painting to be sold.”

 The painting presided over Ms. Astor’s library, and, having appeared twice on a giant projection screen during the first full-day of testimony, it may be a fixture on the courtroom’s wall throughout the state’s case. Prosecutors have charged that Mr. Marshall, 84, took an undue $2 million commission on the $10 million sale of the painting, a move the state claims was part of a larger raid on his mother’s assets.

 Mr. Astor told the jury that “Cousin Brooke” also worried, at her son’s insistence, about the cost of traveling to London, and particularly, the expense of staying in the lavish Connaught Hotel. She fretted so frequently that Mr. Astor inquired, through a friend at Citibank, into the state of her finances, and was ultimately reassured as to her financial stability.

 Mr. Hafetz questioned whether her son’s concern had simply become something of a “signature line” for Ms. Astor in her later years. And, upon cross-examination, Mr. Astor admitted that, for all her expressed concern about money, Ms. Astor still traveled by private jet, and maintained three staffed homes.

 Mr. Astor also testified that Ms. Astor “didn’t particularly get on” with Mr. Marshall’s wife, Charlene Marshall, and seemed “slightly intimidated” by her. In discussing whether to leave Ms. Marshall some of her jewelry, Mr. Astor remembered Ms. Astor saying, “I find it difficult because she’s envious of what I’ve got.”

 According to Mr. Astor, the tension was evident on Ms. Astor’s 100th birthday. “I’m so glad you’re here because I want you to take me. I don’t want to go with Tony and Charlene,” he recounted her saying. “She said, ‘You’re coming in the car with me, just the two of us.’”

 Ms. Astor was concerned about her inability to recognize and remember guests, he testified, so he coached her to simply smile, shake hands and thank her guests for coming, he testified. Upon arriving, she employed his advice on a burly security guard, and Mr. Astor had to steer her back toward David Rockefeller, one of her close friends and the party’s host, he said.

 After her birthday, “she became much more frail physically and mentally,” Mr. Astor testified. He recalled having tea with his daughter and Ms. Astor later that year. “I had forgotten how young your wife was,” Ms. Astor told him.

 In a black suit with a red and blue tie, and with the enchanting title of an English peer (along with an accent that befuddled the court reporters), Mr. Astor brought an air of European distinction to a trial that is expected to feature the upper crust of American society. Luminaries including Henry Kissinger and Barbara Walters are expected to testify. The Daily Transom spotted Manhattan power publicist Peggy Siegel in the courtroom on Wednesday, sitting in the fourth row.

 Mr. Astor began by giving a brief, trans-Atlantic history of the Astor family fortune. The original John Jacob Astor had immigrated from Germany to the United States, where he built a fur trapping empire, and then invested in New York City real estate. Mr. Astor died in 1848 with more than $20 million dollars. (In 2006, Forbes estimated Mr. Astor’s fortune would be equivalent to $110.1 billion dollars today.)

The trial witness Mr. Astor is the fourth William Waldorf Astor (think Waldorf-Astoria), the first of whom took his share of the family fortune to England in the late 19th century. Mr. Astor, who sits in the British Parliament, remembered visiting Ms. Astor’s husband, Vincent Astor, as a child. Though the two had been married only briefly, the British Astor seemed to relish Ms. Astor's assumption of the Astor mantle. “She was very friendly and very focused on being a member of the family,” he testified. “It was something that gave her and us great pleasure.”