But this upgrade has been slow in the making. In September of 2006, Mr. Dubin bought Onassis’ former residence from billionaire David Koch for $32 million. Though Mr. Koch and his wife did extensive renovations to the apartment during their tenure, Mr. Dubin; his wife, who is a doctor; and three children did not move into the 1040 Fifth apartment until February of this year, two and a half years after the contract was signed.

Now, nine months after moving out of 1010 Fifth, the apartment is finally going on the market, for $18,500,000. Why the lag? Perhaps Mr. Dubin was waiting patiently for the market to swing back, operating under Aesop’s advice that slow and steady wins the race. Indeed, his business strategy has been described by Institutional Investor as being “take-to-the-bank steady.” Though even if the 12-room, 1010 Fifth duplex is sold for the asking price, Mr. Dubin will still be $13.5 million short of breaking even with 2006’s 85th Street purchase. (He declined to comment for this story.)

Not to detract from the 6,000-square-foot “elegant Fifth Avenue cooperative.” Corcoran über-broker Deborah Grubman assures The Observer that the 1010 Fifth price is “very appropriate for the location of the apartment. It is right on 82nd Street, in front of the Met. It’s one of the most beautiful streets. And it’s quiet because it is not a through street.”

One can relish that quietude amid a seemingly ideal blend of old-world charm—prewar details, hardwood floors and a wood-burning fireplace—conveniently contrasted with new-world amenities—eat-in kitchen, central air-conditioning, double-pane windows. But it isn’t this harmonious synthesis that pushes the 12-room duplex’s price tag close to $20 million. The apartment’s most flaunted feature is indisputably the view from those aforementioned double-pane windows: Located on Museum Mile and above the tree line, the apartment has full south and west park views. Ms. Grubman adds, “There is an unusual amount of space for an apartment in that location. It has a lot of square footage.”

cmalle@observer.com

According to the blog for online bookseller AbeBooks, William Manchester's 1967 account of the Kennedy Assassination, which was featured on the cover of Vanity Fair this month, has outsold Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol four-to-one on the company's website since the magazine came out.

Death of a President went quietly out of print after its big initial run, as the VF article explains, because the Kennedy family didn't care for it. The Kennedys had basically commissioned the book, giving Mr. Manchester a series of exclusive interviews in return for veto power and the rights to the final product.

After suffering through a breakdown from his exhaustive research, Mr. Manchester signed a huge deal to have the book serialized in Look magazine, which upset Jacqueline Kennedy, who had assumed it would be an academic volume that no one would actually read.

Jackie threatened to kill the book, but Robert was worried about the damage that might do to his own political reputation--since the story was already playing out on the front pages of the Post--so the family ultimately let it go to print. The book got decent reviews and it sold very well, but the Kennedys let it go out of print, and the story had basically been forgotten until Vanity Fair dug it up (for their third posthumous cover in a row).

Of course, it's less than certain that the reading public actually prefers an exhaustive account of a presidential assassination over the investigation of freemasonry by a fictional professor of a fictional field called symbology; The Lost Symbol is still number one on Amazon and Death of a President is still somewhere around number 7,000.

In short, insists Mr. Kors, size doesn’t matter!

“In America, a lot of people get hung up on the size tag,” he says. “Don’t pay attention to the size label at all. Men wear their clothes too big and women wear their clothes too small.” Big or small, everyone looks great, the thread baron says, in a pair of aviator sunglasses and a “big, chunky watch.” And the gals can always turn up the glam factor, he adds, by throwing on a pair of metallic shoes, “like gold sandals.” Hmm…gold sandals. Gold sandals? Does anyone below Mount Olympus even make gold sandals? Oh, yeah! Mr. Kors does. A whole heap of ‘em.

But his parting words of advice prove more telling than most: “In your mind, do a check-list. Every time I wear a short skirt, people say, ‘You’ve got great legs!’”

Meow, Mike—me-ow!

But one did. And now Linda H. Davis has given him a biography: Charles Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life. Addams—for those of you still without a green card—is the man who drew those delightfully macabre cartoons in The New Yorker from 1933 until his death in 1988. His eccentric ideas and chiaroscuro drawings placed him in the pantheon of New Yorker cartoonists, at a time—the 1930’s—when the cartoons were the best thing about the magazine.

Addams developed his distinctive wash technique while on staff at True Detective magazine, retouching photographs of blood-splattered corpses so they weren’t quite so grisly. New Yorker editor Harold Ross found Addams’ drawing style hilarious, and he began feeding the cartoonist ideas when he ran dry. Ross thought of his magazine as a collaborative effort, and by the time Addams got there, as many as 2,000 cartoon sketches and ideas were submitted by writers, artists and staffers each week, to be disbursed to favored artists. (Lee Lorenz, the magazine’s former art editor, once told me that of the thousands of published cartoons by George Price, only one idea came from Price himself.)

The Addams cartoon in the Aug. 6, 1938, issue was, however, very much his own. In the interior of a dark, dilapidated Victorian house, a curvaceous, dark-haired woman in a spidery black dress and her hulk of a retainer listen patiently as a vacuum-cleaner salesman, oblivious to the home’s disrepair—cobwebs, bats and broken balusters—makes his pitch: “Vibrationless, noiseless, and a great time and back saver. No well-appointed home should be without it.” This was the first appearance of what later became known as the Addams Family. As more cartoons about the vamp (soon christened Morticia) and her ghoulish family followed, New Yorker readers became curious about the weirdo who drew them. “What,” they kept asking anyone remotely connected to the magazine, “is Charles Addams really like?”

Charlie, they were told, was really a sweet, charming guy, and nothing at all like his bizarre cartoons. Happily, the answer that Ms. Davis gives isn’t nearly so bland. She notes his tendency to laugh at funerals and his fondness for buying suits of armor, medieval weaponry and other reminders of death—such as his coffee table, a wooden contraption with holes in each corner meant for draining fluids from human bodies. Furthermore, photographs of him in the book reveal a face that was exactly what you’d expect from looking at his cartoons: bulbous nose, slits for eyes, heavy brows and a smile that always seemed demonic. Nevertheless, a steady stream of young beauties longed for him, and no fewer than three goddesses—Jacqueline Kennedy, Greta Garbo and Joan Fontaine—found him a desirable escort.

As anyone might easily have deduced from the way Addams drew children, he loathed the idea of having any. Although genuinely in love with his first wife, Barbara, he refused to have a child. “I am my own child,” he explained. He also found monogamy impossible to endure and was always on the make. Barbara knew about most of his dalliances and put up with them, but when Charlie, after finally agreeing to adopt a child, reneged at the last minute, she left him.

In his tiny datebook, which kept a terse record of all his conquests (“Veronica Lake, 1770 Inn”), he also noted the end of his marriage (“B.A. leaves”). Addams returned to the unencumbered life of a bachelor. The small-town kid from Westfield, N.J., was a celebrity now, with a duplex on West 54th Street, right behind the Museum of Modern Art. Since Barbara didn’t ask for a nickel in alimony, he had plenty of disposable income to buy a 1926 35C Bugatti (the same model in which Isadora Duncan lost her life, as he frequently and gleefully pointed out) and to participate in amateur car races sponsored by the Sports Car Club of America, of which he was a member. He also bought a house at Westhampton Beach that even Morticia might have thought looked extremely odd.

In 1954, Addams married another Barbara, Barbara II or “Bad Barbara” (as his friends dubbed her), a diabolically manipulative woman who separated Charlie from a big chunk of his fortune upon their divorce, including residuals from the television series The Addams Family.

Thanks to Addams’ datebooks and interviews the author conducted with those who’d known him, the reader is supplied with a long list of Charlie’s tootsies. My brain cells were beginning to go numb from the numbers when suddenly, among the list of his attractive dates, the name of Jacqueline Kennedy showed up.

Yes, they really were a combo for a short while—until he committed the unforgivable indiscretion of discussing her with a reporter and was shut out of her inner circle. Just as well. He didn’t have the big bucks she required, and as she once put it, “Well, I couldn’t marry you. What would we talk about at the end of the day—cartoons?” Had he really broached the subject of marriage? How could he? What was he thinking?

Well, judging from this extremely detailed biography, thinking wasn’t something Charlie liked to waste his time on. He enjoyed his cigars, his vintage automobiles and his celebrity. Most of all, he enjoyed women. As far as women and fame were concerned, he’d gotten everything he could have hoped for. Perhaps thinking is only for those who haven’t. On the last day of his life, spent in Connecticut with fellow cartoonists Frank Modell and James Stevenson, his old friends asked him if he had any regrets about his life. Well, yes, the 76-year-old cartoonist replied, there had been this pretty but elusive woman named Kay ….

The memorial service was organized by his third wife, Marilyn, known as Tee, who didn’t care how often he caroused with other women (although by that time he was spending more time in doctors’ offices than hotel rooms). Tee also respected his expressed wish that his funeral not be the occasion for solemnity. It wasn’t. The gathering of friends at the Celeste Barthos Forum room in the New York Public Library was the jolliest of parties. How could it have been otherwise with the likes of Roger Angell, Calvin Trillin and Saul Steinberg, as well as the other New Yorker cartoonists, all telling their favorite Charlie anecdotes? And it was comforting to his friends to know that Addams’ drawings would often be on exhibit on the third floor of that very building. (He’d donated them to the library.)

A person’s charm is difficult for a writer to convey on the printed page, but Linda Davis has managed it. At the close, I found myself feeling terribly cheated that I hadn’t had the pleasure of Charlie Addams’ company.

Edward Sorel’s Literary Lives (Bloomsbury) was published earlier this year.

- Michael Calderone

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has yielded its authority to

Condé Nast and the dastardly, foppish Hamish Bowles so as to present Mrs.

Kennedy as a simp. Sadly, the late First Lady's words and actions in her early

30's are accessible to such a view, and so you walk out of the Metropolitan

with a sense-surely a false one-that she was

the most superficial woman ever to live in the White House.

The muse to this blockbuster show would seem to be Vogue cover girl Gwyneth Paltrow. Oddly

sexless, passive, larval, shadowed by her husband's seriousness of mind, Mrs.

Kennedy is in the thrall of fashion magazines and "Oleg," the second-rate

Cassini, who used the prestige association Mrs. Kennedy gave him to go

downmarket the rest of his career. Like Ms. Paltrow, Mrs. Kennedy comes off

here as a well-connected snob without anything to say, who seems to insult

common people every time she would address them and is surrounded by flatterers

in bow ties, from John Kenneth Galbraith to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who demean

everyone by talking about how smart she is.

It reminds me of my 11-year-old friend who had dinner with

Cameron Diaz on a movie set not long ago. The two chattered away. Later she was

asked what Ms. Diaz is like. "She's getting hair extensions!" came the

breathless report.

That is in essence Hamish Bowles' take. The surprise is that

Vogue 's European editor-at-large's

view of Mrs. Kennedy as a coy and vacuous clotheshorse has been endorsed by the

Metropolitan and, worse, the Kennedy Library in Boston.

"What does my hairdo have

to do with my husband's ability to be President?" she says in a "Campaign Wife"

newspaper column. "Actually I've always loved clothes, and when I've had the

time I've enjoyed the universal feminine sport of shopping around from store to

store and looking for new styles in the women's magazines."

When she has the time … it is all that Mrs. Kennedy, or her

puppet master, care about. The choice of her dresser, in December 1960,

precipitates a crisis.

"Thank heaven all the furor is over," she says to Mr.

Cassini in a letter embarking on their partnership. "Now I know how Jack feels

when he has told three people they can be Sec at State! … ARE YOU SURE YOU ARE

UP TO IT OLEG? PLEASE SAY YES."

This letter is laid out in a vitrine, for nine pages,

providing the mob the sort of detail that only a fashion editor could relish.

"1. I wired Bergdorf to send you my measurements ….

"3. Diana Vreeland will call you …. "

Later, the trip to India is empty of all concerns but what

to wear.

"I must play Holi with Nehru which means squirting colored

water at each other …," Mrs. Kennedy titters, growing serious when she receives

the typewritten itinerary, which she goes over fastidiously with a pen, to say

what she will wear on every occasion.

"Chanel brocade … Cotton Tassell print … Mauve Zuckerman

suit."

The designer Gustave Tassell was a come-down born of crisis.

"I wouldn't have gotten involved

with Tassell if at one point I was leaving for India in about three weeks and

was desperate."

Oh, but she will take the long view.

"It is really harder than organising the Pentagon to

organise all these clothes."

Note the continental spelling. And the Paris-centered world

view. And the somberly pompous tones of French-born Philippe de Montebello on

the audiophone. Francophiles haven't had it so good since they gave us the

French deck.

The curators say Mrs.

Kennedy furthered American diplomacy. But in spite of the Tassell print, India

and Pakistan went to war, and the sleeveless bodice in leaf green cannot

prevent the wearer from kissing the ass of a dictator, and kissing it

fatuously.

"I know that the wife of a politician should be discrete and

learn to qualify every statement," Mrs. Kennedy writes to the Mexican

president. "But I keep wishing that some little man with a microphone would run

up to me and ask, which is your favorite country and people in the world?-and I

would throw discretion to the winds and say 'Mexico'....

"Now I think your face is noble and sad-and I have seen

earlier pictures where you were always laughing …. It always hurts me to see

how hard is the life of great men-but then I think that no true man is happy

unless he does with his life something of value. That must be your consolation

…. "

You will say it is about clothes; it's a show about clothes

and design.

And yes, Mrs. Kennedy had incredible style. That is

undeniable. Impeccable taste. Ravishing beauty. Cobra-cold instincts. Her

decisions about the White House decor were dead-on, a point Mr. Bowles drives

home humorously in the catalog with a photograph of the Eisenhower's Sun

Parlor, which might as well have been in Boca. ("I wish the British would burn

the White House again so that we could start all over," Mrs. Kennedy sighs when

she is done.)

The show captures the feeling of giddy liberation that Mrs.

Kennedy brought to the nation after a long rain of dowdiness. Mamie Eisenhower,

Bess Truman, Eleanor, Lou Hoover, Grace Coolidge.

But if you press the

point, Mrs. Kennedy's style had its limitations. And this show presses the

point, insists so much that Clothes Made the Woman that by insisting it exposes

those limits. The pillbox hats grew boring and relentless. All the waist bows

came to seem prim and chaste: Don't-open-me-till-Christmas. The Empire waist

was not a signature but a failure of imagination. So formal and stiff. There

was rarely a moment of spontaneity or humor.

And so perfect: The show's belief that Mrs. Kennedy never

made a mistake underlines that point. She never made a mistake. Creative people

make mistakes. Her style was not especially creative.

Besides, the show is not just about clothes. It's called Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years .

It purports to describe a prominent woman and her era, with the help of the

Kennedy Library and Museum. By accepting that charge, then forcing so many of

Mrs. Kennedy's sheltered asides in our face, the museum has made those years

out as shallow. And made Eleanor Roosevelt look like a goddess, and Hillary

Clinton look sage.

The Clintons. Their

shadow is here, too. How can you move through these rooms and watch Mrs.

Kennedy leave privileged girlhood and recede into an adult, coldly opaque

privacy; observe the famous appearance with Charles Collingwood on CBS

describing her changes to the White House, in which she seems affectless, her

voice a bare peep; and at last come on her wooden letter to her husband

recruiting him in the saving of the Abu Simbel site in Egypt-"Memo to JFK …

Opinion of Mrs. Kennedy … I think they will now be satisfied with an expression

of the President's support"-how can you move through these rooms without

wondering about the ravages of that relationship?

After all, our country

has just now concluded a White House tour in which former girlfriends talked

about sexual addiction and cigars. Too much, yes-still, there was a kind of

insight there about the First Couple.

Now Hamish Bowles has

walked in on the primal scene and covered his eyes. That doesn't mean we can.

When Mrs. Kennedy's society secretary, Letitia Baldrige, seems to steer Mrs.

Kennedy one way or another in her firm and icy voice (also on the audiophone),

I hear the harbinger of Evelyn Lieberman, patrolling the hallways against

Monica Lewinsky. Mrs. Kennedy at the end of this show is a starkly different

woman from the Campaign Wife at the beginning, and the improvements are not

just the pale blue tablecloths that in Mrs. Baldrige's understanding "caused a

revolution," but Mrs. Kennedy's awareness of the marriage she was in.

I have no idea how large that awareness was; still, it gives

this person, and her show, some gravity.

That oversight may be excused in the name of discretion, but

Mr. Bowles makes a truly grave error in eliminating all discussion of the

assassination, except for a photograph of the First Couple in the open car

which-placed as it is at the end of the exhibit-he would like to be haunting

and tasteful. It only serves to remind us of what he has left out.

The assassination occasioned Mrs. Kennedy's noblest moments

as First Lady. The Mrs. Kennedy who flew with her husband's body back from

Dallas was a far more compelling person than the lady who panicked over the

wrong Bessarabian carpet. This is the Mrs. Kennedy who supremely coordinated

the state funeral, which is nowhere depicted here, and helped not only her

family but the nation stumble forward; a woman who, in the throes of grief,

studied Lincoln's funeral so that she might serve us.

And the same woman who, stripped of silliness and

entitlement, saved Grand Central Station by throwing herself down before little

Abe Beame.

"Is it not cruel to let

our city die by degrees, stripped of all her proud monuments, until there will

be nothing left of all her history and beauty to inspire our children?" she

wrote to the Mayor.

"History and beauty"-such thrilling words. The Metropolitan

prefers grosgrain.