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Authors: Stephen; Birmingham

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The private parties given in individual apartments, meanwhile, are something else again. “The annual tax-deductible party” has become a feature of big-city life everywhere, and a number of Dakota parties are given for publicity—to promote a person, a product or an event. The number of publicity-oriented parties is another thing about which Winnie Bodkin shakes her head. With his restaurants, which he likes to keep filled with a snappy clientele, Warner LeRoy finds it wise to toss two or three large parties a year—each for at least a hundred guests—with all New York's snappiest people in attendance. George Davison-Ackley has an interest in a theater and dance company, and, to draw attention to these interests, he too has embarked upon a career as a Dakota host, closely rivaling the LeRoys.

He certainly has the place for it. His rooms are graced with
ceiling-high bamboo trees in red-lacquered wicker tubs, with Oriental rugs and Chinese tables and garden stools, needlepoint chairs and cushions, huge bowls of red tulips and white lilies. “The people who did the Seagram Building” did the bookshelves in the library. In his apartment, Mr. Davison-Ackley is able to accommodate as many as fifty people for a seated dinner. For a cocktail reception he can handle as many as 450 guests—more than could be squeezed into Mrs. Astor's ballroom. Of one of these gatherings he says, “It was the most eclectic group—blacks, whites, gays and straights. The Cronyns came, and Myrna Loy and Louis Falco. A little lady downstairs came up and sat with Myrna Loy, drinking until two
A.M.
I'd invited a black clerk from my law firm, and he was standing next to my mother. The next thing I knew, they went off and had dinner together! I turned my bedroom into a discothèque. It was noisy, but there were no complaints. Eugenia Sheppard got the date mixed up, and showed up two days later.”

George Davison-Ackley is the kind of fellow who complains that his telephone rings so much that it drives him to distraction, and yet maintains six separate listing (“Davison, G. W. Ackley,” “Ackley, G. W. Davison,” etc.) in the Manhattan telephone directory, all for the same number, so that his telephone friends will have no trouble locating him. He is also the kind of man who, each time he pours himself a fresh martini, pours it into a fresh Baccarat glass.

He has made great social strides in New York, where one of the city's leading social arbiters is unquestionably Earl Blackwell. Earl Blackwell used to look straight through George Davison-Ackley when the two encountered each other. But no longer. “There was a dinner party at the Kennedy Gallery,” George Davison-Ackley recalls. “Eugenia and Earl were there. Jackie Onassis arrived and spoke to me, and Earl come over and asked me to join his group. He had finally decided that I was someone to know.”

When Gil and Susan Shiva give one of their big parties, coat racks are set up inside the building's entrance gate, and someone is stationed at a table with a guest list to check off names as guests arrive, so there will be no crashers. So many celebrities turn up that there are inevitably photographers outside the gate to photograph the famous faces as they appear. Susan Shiva cooperates with the press by notifying them in advance that she is having a party. But she draws the line at letting the photographers up into her apartment. Gil Shiva recently embarked on
a career as a motion-picture producer, and for the opening of his first film—Lina Wertmuller's
The End of the World in Our Usual Bed in a Night Full of Rain,
with Candace Bergen—the Shivas had a large party. Lauren Bacall, who shares a service elevator with the Shivas, came to the party through the Shivas' kitchen door, thus avoiding the photographers. But when Gil Shiva explained that the party was to publicize his movie, Miss Bacall agreed to go downstairs into the courtyard to be photographed. “It was very kind of her,” Gil Shiva says.

Publicity, fund-raising, politics and business, after all, are what New York society in the late 1970's is all about. But the amount of business entertaining that goes on in the building annoys some Dakotans who prefer a quieter, less publicized social life. Friendships have disintegrated over this issue.

In the summer of 1967, at the time of the Six-Day War, the Shivas were scheduled to have a party for the benefit of the Alvin Ailey Dance Company. Sixty people had been invited, but at the last minute the Shivas were asked to host an Israeli fund-raising affair in their apartment on the same date. The Israeli fund-raising, they felt, took precedent over the dance troupe. On the afternoon of the party Susan Shiva telephoned her upstairs neighbor Theodate Severns to ask a big favor. Would Mrs. Severns be a substitute hostess and have the Ailey party at her place? After all, the fact that the party was to be at the Dakota was the party's main drawing card.

Mrs. Severns agreed to help Susan Shiva out, and then phoned downstairs to Winnie Bodkin at the desk to ask for an off-duty elevator operator to help serve. Winnie told Mrs. Severns that she was sorry, but all the elevator operators had been pre-empted by the Shivas for the Israeli fund-raiser. “She had taken
all
of them,” says Mrs. Severns. “I was flabbergasted! I was going to have
her
party in
my
house—and with no help! The Shivas sent up wine and cheese, but I had to provide all the glasses and all the clean-up. I never even got a thank-you note! I was furious!”

Like eggs in a crate, the thin-shelled egos compartmentalized in the Dakota are easily cracked. But it should be remembered that the Six-Day War was an emotional time for all Jews, and so perhaps Susan Shiva can be forgiven for forgetting the thank you.

As a hostess, meanwhile, Susan Shiva is usually in full command of the situation, and her parties rarely get out of hand. At a party for
Prince Michael of Greece, for example, a certain number of guests were invited for dinner, and certain others were invited for after dinner. On the after-dinner list was Gianni Agnelli, the Fiat head, who made the mistake of thinking that he could bring along ten or so uninvited friends to the party. The friends included Countess Gioconda Cigogna, Prince George Vassichekof, Count Yash and Eva Gabronska, the Duke and Duchess de Cadaval of Portugal, Patricia Lawford, Kevin McCarthy, Yul Brynner, and Kirk and Anne Douglas. This was too much for Susan Shiva, who threw the whole lot out, titles and all.

But there are times at the Shivas' parties when the going does get a little rough. When Robert F. Kennedy was making his Democratic Senate bid in New York, the Shivas, who are ardent Democrats, threw a party for him in order to win the “intellectual vote” away from the Republican incumbent, Senator Kenneth Keating. Among the intellectuals invited were William vanden Heuvel, who was Kennedy's campaign manager (and, for a while, Susan Shiva's brother-in-law), Jacqueline Kennedy, Leonard Bernstein, Adolph Green, Gloria Vanderbilt, Zachary Scott, Jason Robards, John Gunther, Jules Feiffer, Allegra Kent, Paddy Chayefsky, Abe Burrows, John Kenneth Galbraith, Lillian Hellman, George Plimpton, Lauren Bacall and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. All went well until Arthur Kopit, the playwright (
Oh Dad, Poor Dad
…), announced that he was for Senator Keating. He was pushed backward over a sofa, spilling his drink on himself, the sofa, the rug and the person who had shoved him. Getting to his feet, he said, “I see the Kennedy swimming-pool-shoving syndrome is still with us.”

Because of the celebrity of the building's tenants and their friends and guests, episodes like this have a way of getting into the gossip columns which, less celebrated tenants feel, tends to give the Dakota a bad name, and makes it sound as though the building is the scene of nothing but wild parties. In fact, almost everything that happens at the Dakota gets into the papers, and this ruffles some Dakotans' feathers. The building is particularly proud of its security system. All visitors must be announced. The entrance gate is locked at midnight, and late-arriving guests and tenants must ring for a watchman to be admitted. All groceries and mail are delivered to apartments by the building's porters. Workmen and repairmen arriving on the service elevators will not be admitted to apartments until they have been identified by the
owners. Many apartment owners, when they are at home, still do not bother to lock their front doors, but New York has become increasingly security-conscious. And there have been slip-ups. Not long ago, David Marlowe's doorbell was rung by one of the periodic groups of young girls who had somehow penetrated the system, and who were going up and down hallways trying to find John Lennon. David Marlowe fooled them by saying, “This is John Lennon's apartment, but he's in Europe for the summer.” The girls departed.

And there are fears. “One thing that worries us,” Wilbur Ross says, “is that if someone got into the building, how would we ever find him?” It is true that in some of the building's dark storage spaces and closets and rooftop lofts a person could conceivably hide out for months undetected. But once he was inside, a prowler unfamiliar with the building would also have a hard time finding his way out, since so many of the Dakota's doors and hallways open into cul-de-sacs.

And there have been a few burglaries. In 1971 Sidney Carroll's apartment was robbed, and Robert and Eileen Carlson vigorously protested a search of their maid's room by an employee and the police. A few years later Warner and Kay LeRoy's apartment was burglarized, but the LeRoys admit that it was their own fault. “We'd gone away for the summer and given keys to a lot of workmen,” LeRoy says. Some time after that, Eugenia Sheppard reported the loss of some jewelry. Later on, the missing pieces turned up in a drawer where Miss Sheppard had forgotten she had put them. But the Sheppard “burglary” somehow found its way to Liz Smith's gossip column, where it was reported that Miss Sheppard had said that hers was one of a “rash” of burglaries at the Dakota. For a while, everyone in the building was very cross with Eugenia Sheppard. One burglary and one non-burglary did not seem enough to constitute a “rash.” This was the sort of publicity that the Dakota did not need at all. It hurt the value of everyone's investment.

Still, if you are famous, people recognize you and comment on what you do. One of the perils of the publicized life is public embarrassment. One of the drawbacks of life at the Dakota is that its famous tenants keep the building in an almost perpetual spotlight. The Lennons, of course, are a special problem, but other celebrities have occasionally managed to strain the rules. One is not supposed to park a car in the
Dakota's carriage entrance, but when Jason Robards was married to Lauren Bacall, and living there, he once slept all night at the wheel of his car, parked there, and no one knew quite what to do about it.

Cars frequently betray the identity of their owners. When John V. Lindsay was Mayor of New York, everyone in the building—and in the neighboring buildings—was interested to see the Mayor's official chauffeur-driven limousine draw up in front of the Dakota one balmy evening. The tall Mayor stepped out of the car and entered the building, Who, everyone wondered, might the Mayor of New York be visiting? The car and driver waited outside.

And waited.

The next morning the question became even more intense. The Mayor's limousine, its driver dozing at the wheel, was
still there.

“Oh, there have been some really
wild
parties,” bubbles Ruth Ford. “One night there was a
particularly
wild party, with all sorts of electric guitars and amplifiers and a rock band. By around eleven or twelve at night, people began complaining. Everyone who complained was invited to the party. Finally the police poured in—and
they
were invited to stay. They stayed, drinking and carrying on with everyone else. It
worked.”

It might not have worked a few years ago. One of Warner LeRoy's downstairs neighbors was a woman, since moved away, who was an heiress to a beer fortune. She called the police at the slightest sound of a party, and the police arrived and broke up whatever was going on. The lady herself was fond of giving opera recitals, which she considered properly dignified and civilized in tone. At one of her recitals an elderly Dakota neighbor had the poor taste to have a heart attack and die. The indignant hostess ordered her butler to drag the dead man back to his own apartment and deposit him there, where he belonged.

Chapter 21

The Bottom Line

On Tuesday, February 22, 1898, the dining room of the Dakota offered a special menu. The Dakota's menus were elaborate in those days, but this one was especially so. After all, it was George Washington's birthday. The first President would have been 166 years old. The cover of the menu depicted “The Dakota Behind an Old Rock in Seventy-second Street Looking from the Bloomingdale Road, 1884.” The Bloomingdale Road was Broadway, from which the Dakota was once visible. The bill of fare announced:

DINNER

Oysters en coquille Little Neck Clams

Tortue Claire à l'Anglaise Cremè de Volaille

Consommé à l'lmpèratrice

Canape Lorenzé Lettuce Tomatoes Radishes Olives

Celery Salted Almonds

Mousse of Salmon à la Victoria

Broiled Spanish Mackerel à la Mâitre d'Hotel

Cucumbers Pommes de Terre, Dauphine

Boiled Capon à la Reine

Filet Mignon of Beef à la Cheron

Stewed Terrapin à la Maryland

Timbale de Gibier à la St. Hubert

Fricassee of Fresh Mushrooms en Caisse

Beignets de Pêches glacés au Kirsch

Ribs of Prime Beef Spring Lamb, Mint Sauce

Punch Benedictine

Ballotin de Pigeon en Bellevue

Roast English Pheasant, Bread Sauce

BOOK: Life at the Dakota
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