Even though Dr. Joy Browne has written Getting Unstuck: 8 Simple Steps to Solving Any Problem (she also did It’s a Jungle Out There, Jane: How to Understand the Male Animal In Your Life), and even though she has the country’s longest-running call-in therapy show on the radio, she couldn’t handle bathroom renovations in her penthouse at the Grand Chelsea on West 17th Street.
“I have a Ph.D., I went to graduate school, I’m smart—and I was going to set my face on fire. … I couldn’t pick out the damn tiles,” Dr. Browne told The Observer.
So she left. According to deeds, she just sold the 1,625-square-foot, four-room duplex penthouse for $3.29 million to the art publishers Martin Bondell and Juliette Galant.
“I think every apartment I’ve ever lived in, they’ve said, ‘Even Nixon could get laid here,’” said Dr. Browne, a divorcee, quoting her friends. Do women think of apartments as “pads”? “Women think of their homes as a safe place. Lots of people that know me have never seen my apartment.”
Yet the apartment comes with a Jacuzzi, and she replaced the wood-burning hearth in her 27-foot-long living room with a gas fireplace—two universal symbols of bachelorhood. “It never got the walls crappy. … All my walls were white,” she said. “I tend to whitewash everything.”
She’s also leaving behind a massive upstairs terrace, which opened up onto her bedroom. But Dr. Browne did her writing in the extra bedroom downstairs, which had a view of the World Trade Center. “When I got bored with writing, I would look in the window for a while,
Curiously, Wikipedia lists her birth year as 1944, though Dr. Browne said she just turned 56. “I’m the first Scorpio, you’re the last,” she told this reporter, who recently had a birthday, too. “We’re really loyal friends, but very bad enemies. And we’re very sexy.”
