Banned Yahoos and Fed Social X-Rays


It was the best show in town, socialite historian Dominick Dunne wrote once Mortimer’s, a brick-walled restaurant on the corner of 75th Street and Lexington Avenue – provided you can find a table.

From this distance, it’s not easy to characterize or even understand the appeal of a joint from 1976 until it abruptly closed after the death of its owner. Glenn Bernbaum In 1998 it occupied a singular place in the social scene of Manhattan and even beyond. Often considered the clubby spot that appears in Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” Mortimer’s was so unassuming that scenes from the movie were filmed elsewhere that Mr. Bernbaum himself once said, “Midwestern people wouldn’t do that,” I don’t understand the simplicity of the place.

The decor was simple at best: bare brick walls, schoolhouse lanterns, a curved bar from its days as a hall, and wooden chairs with hard seats that Vogue editor André Leon Talley once complained was “hard for one person.” The menu included nursery dishes such as chicken breast, salmon croquettes and creamed spinach, reasonably priced (a hamburger cost $1.90 in 1976) because, as Mr. Bernbaum once observed, no one is as cheap as the rich.

The clientele at Mortimer’s was always a draw, and it was indeed a starry party, as Robin Baker Leacock’s “Mortimer’s: A Moment in Time,” a new coffee table book by Mary Hilliard, due out next month, shows. by G Editions. The book illuminates a lost social landscape inhabited by a wealthy, well-connected, famous and sophisticated group, a group that fits with Marlene Dietrich’s long-ago observation of New Yorkers that they are constantly hungry for anything but food.

According to broad consensus, Mr. Bernbaum, a former apparel industry executive who bought an Upper East Side building as part of his second act after retiring, was a curmudgeon. With no background in the hospitality business, he placed his restaurant in a corner, sandwiched between a Catholic church and two now-defunct gay bars, effectively operating it as a private preserve.

“It was basically a club,” writer Bob Colacello said in an interview.

A man of contradictions, Mr. Bernbaum was rude and polite, distant and warm, sad and often extremely funny. Peter Bacanovic, a technology executive and longtime Mortimer regular, recently described the man as the “Cerberus of the Upper East Side.” Yet, unlike the hounds of Hades, Mr. Bernbaum fiercely guarded the doors of his home against those he considered the unwashed social dead, cursing and fawning over the privileged who walked through the door.

It is instructive to consider how small the largely self-elected elite that seems to run New York City is in the pre-digital world. Capital “S” society prospered in those days. Fashion was effectively controlled by John Fairchild, the dandy publisher of the Women’s Wear Daily. Bernbaum, Bill Blass, and a tight-knit group of “confirmed bachelors” like socialite Jerry Zipkin, who probably had a better phone line to the Reagan White House than the Chiefs of Staff, wielded their power on the social scene. . Fancy young socialites were walking around in their Christian Lacroix puffy dresses. And the ladies who ate their lunch did indeed—a cigarette smoked in a Dunhill mouthpiece if a meal could be called three bullets and a Craven A cigarette.

This is how the editor, novelist, and one-time gossip columnist William Norwich described his introduction to Mortimer’s book shortly after its 1976 opening. Mr Norwich visited this place for the first time as a guest of a friend’s mother and has returned over the years. many of their customers were dazzling people watching.

1B, unchanged on Sundays, was Diana Vreeland at the table to the right of the window. Nan Kempner sat nearby and also did fashion plate and philanthropist Judith Peabody crowned with her signature fluffy nimbus. On any given day, alone or together, one was likely to see heir Gloria Vanderbilt, Barbara Walters, Jacqueline Onassis, Estée Lauder, William S. Paley, Fran Lebowitz, Henry Kissinger, Claudette, as Mr. Dunne noted in Vanity Fair. . Colbert, Katharine Graham, Mike Wallace, Lord Snowdon or Greta Garbo.

Few of these A-list movers and shakers now survive in collective memory, and as such the book earns its high cover price of $85 as a document of a lost time.

One way to see Mortimer, as Ms. Leacock said from her home near Palm Beach, Florida, is like the sum of New York society in the “pre-PR nightlife” days. I’m going out tonight because you have to be on a list and that list didn’t even exist then.

Or if it was, it was primarily in the head of an arrogant, eccentric, and autocratic restaurateur, a man who never took reservations but of course, as he told Vanity Fair, ran a joint to meticulously “get things done for us.” Friend.”



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