AVENUE May | June 2022

SILAS FARLEY Steps up

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CONTENTS MAY–JUNE 2022 VOL.45 NO.3

FEATURES 50

ROOM OF ONE’S ONNA

An all-female arts sanctuary blossoms in East Hampton.

By Celia McGee. 58

BADEN BADEN IN YOUR BACKYARD We’re New York, home of the best spas in the world.

By Joshua David Stein.

66

MEET THE BIRKIN BODY

Two of New York’s best known plastic surgeons preview this season’s new looks.

By Horacio Silva.

70

POISED TO CONQUER New York City Ballet alumnus Silas Farley photographed by Matt Sayles for Avenue.

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THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF PHOENIX

Inside the torrid love triangle and dramatic downfall of rehab guru Mitch Rosenthal.

By Lisa Marsh.

4/14/22 11:37 AM

VERNISSAGE

Avenue’s insider preview of all that’s new and noteworthy: the complex history of Lincoln Center, the anti-digital future of digital; and a towering figure of 20th-century modernism.

CULTURE

BY JOSHUA DAVID STEIN, HORACIO SILVA, AND MARIA NEVELSON

20

BUY CURIOUS

32

BY HORACIO SILVA

POSTCARDS FROM THE VEG

A trio of restaurants in the vegan vanguard will entice even the most natural-born meat eaters.

BY JOSHUA DAVID STEIN

SILAS ENCORE

BY CONSTANCE C.R. WHITE

38

PERFORMANCE ENHANCERS

ULTIMATE TREASURE HUNT MoMA curator Ann Temkin on organizing the new Matisse blockbuster; Frieze hits the refresh button for its tenth anniversary; and Tom Postma, the architect behind TEFAF, on what’s in store for Maastricht this June.

The triumphant return to the city of the New York City Ballet alumnus turned choreographer and dance leader Silas Farley.

New pieces for a new you.

26

42

80

During the Jazz Age, drugs, sex, and alcohol could always be found at legendary madam Polly Adler’s “house.”

BY ARIA DARCELLA

84

44

ZIBBY OWENS WRITES A BOOK

The book influencer of Park Avenue discusses her memoir about love, literature, and growing up Schwarzman.

ON THE AVE. Gala season returns with a bang.

BY ANGELA M.H. SCHUSTER

Avenue highlights a new wave of leaders transforming the dance world.

NOTORIOUS NEW YORKERS

88

SOCIAL SKILLS

Meet the Major Arcana from the Avenue tarot set.

BY CLAIRE GIBSON

48

BOOK REVIEWS A crop of books that delve into the dark side of bright and shiny things.

REVIEWED BY CELIA MCGEE, LISA DIERBECK, CONSTANCE C.R. WHITE, AND HEATHER HODSON

LIVING 74

SIXTIES MINUTES Irving Blum and Jasper Johns photographed by Dennis Hopper on his front porch in Los Angeles in 1964. Top: the pool at Piaule Catskill, a boutique hotel and spa in upstate New York.

COVER: Illustration by Cecilia Carlstedt 8

BETTER FED THAN DEAD

Gary Deng, MD, PhD, a medical director at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, shares a few of his favorite recipes to keep you healthy.

Visit our website at avenuemagazine.com

PIAULE CATSKILL: SEAN DAVIDSON; IRVING BLUM AND JASPER JOHNS: DENNIS HOPPER/HOPPER ART TRUST

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AVENUE MAGAZINE | MAY—JUNE 2022

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A

Wellness

fter appearing in these pages as a restaurant reviewer, I’m delighted to be stepping into the position of editor-in-chief.

I can’t think of a better issue to begin with than this one, arriving as the season warms and the world opens.

The concept of wellness stems from an idea of abundance.

In fact, wellness and wealth come from the same Middle English root. But often one can have plenty of the former but too little of the latter, so this issue of Avenue is devoted to exploring what true wellness is and where to discover it. In these pages, you’ll find Avenue’s first ever spa guide, which showcases spas in our own backyard (sometimes literally), from glamorous new soaking baths on Governors Island to an acupuncture facial on the Upper East Side. Elsewhere in the issue, the collector and designer Lisa Perry gives our own Celia McGee a preview of her all-female arts center in East Hampton, an exemplar of how creative well-being rests on a foundation of mutual support and community. And the terrific Lisa Marsh delves into the torrid downfall—and possible rebirth—of rehabilitation guru Dr. Mitchell Rosenthal of Phoenix House. (Because there can be something salutary in schadenfreude.)

But wellness isn’t simply about the body. Culture is wealth, and wealth is wellness as well. Expanding our dance coverage—I am a former dancer—we have a profile of choreographer and former New York City Ballet alumnus Silas Farley, as well as a visit with podcaster (and now memoirist) Zibby Owens in her uptown home. You’ll find much more, of course, as you turn the pages and stroll down the new Avenue. Enjoy.

Yours, Like and follow us at @AVENUEinsider Sign up for our weekly newsletter at avenuemagazine.com

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AVENUE MAGAZINE | MAY—JUNE 2022

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Joshua David Stein CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Courtney Gooch LISA MARSH (The Fall of the House of Phoenix, page 70) knows how to pound the pavement and knock on doors to get to the bottom of a story.

For this issue, Marsh reported on the Phoenix House affair, a story that “kept me on my toes in the best way. Just when I thought I hit a brick wall in my reporting, sources would call with new elements. It was quite a roller-coaster ride. My curiosity and perseverance really helped tell this tale.” Though a New York City resident for more than 30 years, she doesn’t believe she became a true New Yorker until after she worked for both the New York Post and the New York Daily News.

DEPUTY & MANAGING EDITOR

Angela M.H. Schuster EDITOR-AT-LARGE

Heather Hodson PHOTOGRAPHY DIRECTOR

Catherine G. Talese PRODUCTION DIRECTOR

Jessica Lee STYLE EDITOR

Horacio Silva

MELANIE ACEVEDO (A Room of One’s Onna, page 50) arrived in New York at the age of 18 to enroll at the Parsons School of Design, where she studied under the photographers Art Kane and Lillian Bassman. In her 30-year-career as a photographer she has shot for publications including Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair, House & Garden, and A.D. “It was a very special day getting to spend time with these amazing women artists,” she says of photographing at Onna House, the East Hampton space created by Lisa Perry for female designers and artists.

“Lisa has created an oasis, and she made the most delicious cucumber sandwiches I have ever had.” Melanie lives in Sea Cliff, New York, with her husband, their two children, two dogs, and two cats.

GARY DENG MD, PhD (Better Fed than Dead, page 74) is the director of integrative medicine at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where he combines an evidence-based medical and scientific approach to health with both Eastern and Western philosophies of selfcare. In his forthcoming book, The Wellness Principles: Cooking for a Healthy Life (Phaidon), excerpted in Avenue, he shares some favorite recipes of his that are not only mouthwatering but can help prevent disease.

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LITERARY EDITOR

Celia McGee DIGITAL FASHION EDITOR

Aria Darcella DEPUTY PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Daniela G. Maldonado CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Constance C.R. White, Tom Shone, Judd Tully, Alexis Schwartz CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

Anders Overgaard, Richard Kern, Landon Nordeman, Rainer Hosch, Johnny Miller, Martin Vallin, Nick Mele © 2022 by Cohen Media Publications LLC AVENUE MAGAZINE 750 LEXINGTON AVENUE 16TH FLOOR NEW YORK, NY 10022 EDITORIAL@AVENUEMAGAZINE.COM

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LISA MARSH BY MAX LAKNER/BFA.COM; MATT SAYLES BY SARA MALLY; MELANIE ACEVEDO BY MELANIE ACEVEDO; DR. GARY DENG BY STEPHEN CARDONE

MATT SAYLES (Silas Encore, page 32) fell in love with photography while in grade school, and his first job after graduating from Stanford University and then UCLA was as an intern at the Associated Press. Now a portrait and commercial photographer and director, he lives in Los Angeles with his wife, their two sons, and three dogs. For this issue, he photographed the dancer and choreographer Silas Farley. “Silas is amazingly talented; I was in awe photographing and watching him move. Every moment was like watching art in motion.”

AVENUE MAGAZINE | MAY—JUNE 2022

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VERNISSAGE

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A House Divided

T

he night was warm, and the footfall of Louboutin heels echoed against the travertine marble façades of Lincoln Center. Inside the David H. Koch Theater, deep-pocketed balletomanes sipped champagne and nibbled on tuna tartare at the School of American Ballet’s annual gala earlier this spring. Discreetly trailed by security guards, comely models dripped with diamonds. (The night was cosponsored by Graff.)

Untrailed, patrons of the arts wore jewels of their own. (Among the guests were Kopelmans, Kargmans, and Rockefellers.) Speeches were given, toasts too, and soon young ballet students rushed to the parquet floor to chassé and fouetté and bound.

Ballet is an art form in which immense labor and effort appears easeful. Dancers are trained not to let their pain show. Have you ever seen a ballerina’s foot after dancing en pointe? Have you ever tried to lift your leg in a passé développé in second? It is a heroic act to do at all and a godly one to do smiling. So it is with Lincoln Center, a loose confederation of high culture that celebrates its 63rd anniversary this year. Despite its stately Internationalist architecture and peaceful mien, Lincoln Center is, has been, and seemingly will always be in turmoil.

DESPITE ITS STATELY INTERNATIONALIST ARCHITECTURE AND PEACEFUL MIEN, LINCOLN CENTER IS, HAS BEEN, AND SEEMINGLY WILL ALWAYS BE IN TURMOIL.

Illustrations by Isabella Cotier

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Part of that is the history of the space, which according to Joseph W. Polisi’s recent book Beacon to the World: A History of Lincoln Center (Yale University Press) many call the center’s “original sin.” Anyone who’s caught Spielberg’s West Side Story–or has a passing knowledge of urban planning circa 1950–will know the site of Lincoln Center was once a bustling community of black and brown New Yorkers called Lincoln Square or San Juan Hill. “The program was called slum clearance,” explains Polisi, the author, former bassoonist, and a president of Juilliard. “It was overseen by Robert Moses and it wasn’t just happening in New York but across the country.”

In his book, Polisi chronicles not just the conflict surrounding the politically fraught establishment of Lincoln Center, a project shepherded by John D. Rockefeller III (popularly known as JDR 3rd), but the continued tension that has marked the center since. First of all, despite its relative architectural uniformity, Lincoln Center isn’t a monolith. At its founding, the complex consisted of separate entities including the Metropolitan Opera, which had outgrown its theater on 39th and Broadway; the New York City Ballet; the New York Philharmonic, which was looking to escape Carnegie Hall; the Vivian Beaumont Theater; and the Juilliard School. Arching over this whole is another umbrella, Lincoln Center Inc., led first by JDR 3rd and then by the composer Bill Schuman, who envisioned the LCI itself as a cultural programming powerhouse. “The competition, between the constituents and LCI, between ticket sales, fundraising, and international festivals, all caused tension,” says Polisi.

Today, that tension is somewhat abating.

Under the leadership of Henry Timms, Lincoln Center is pulling back from its own programming, allowing each of the constituents a better chance at vying for an audience. In a remarkable turn of events, the New York Philharmonic’s $550 million David Geffen Hall will debut in October, a full year and a half ahead of schedule. Nevertheless, drama continues. The hell of Covid will not be forgotten, says Polisi, nor will the awakening of the Black Lives Matter movement. “Not only is Lincoln Center at a crossroads,” says Polisi, “but the cultural arts in America are at a crossroads too.” Moving forward will take work, of course, but if anything can be learned from the lithe limbs of the ballet students, many destined for NYCB, it will be beautiful to behold.

—joshua david stein MAY—JUNE 2022 | AVENUE MAGAZINE

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VERNISSAGE

To Be Screen-Free THE RECOIL FROM DIGITAL WILL BE

IN LOCKSTEP WITH THE TREND FOR TURNING OUR HOMES

NOT JUST INTO OFFICES BUT INTO WELLNESS PODS TOO.

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L

ucy Hardcastle thinks about the future a lot. A techno-determinist, whose namesake London design studio specializes in “sensual storytelling for the digital age,” she is the last person you’d expect to be predicting that the future of digital is increasingly anti-digital.

But that’s exactly what Hardcastle suggests in Absent Beauty, a new report on the future of beauty and wellness in a post-2020 world. Originally published in the trend forecasting platform LS:N Global, and since shared around the Internet like a viral lifehack, the report posits a not-too-distant future in which a collective desire emerges for screen-free escape.

“We are attached to our screens, and more and more we’re all associating screens with work and the workplace,” says Hardcastle, whose clients include Chanel, Nike, and the Victoria & Albert Museum, “so it makes sense that there will be a backlash to that, especially when it comes to the home space.”

According to Hardcastle and her team, the recoil from digital will be in lockstep with the trend for turning our homes not just into offices (which they alas already are) but into wellness pods too.

She’s dubbed the trend “physiological nostalgia,” or using technology to wind down and create a meditative, screen-free haven from the world.

“The idea of comfort is very much related to nostalgia” she explains, “but often it is vision-based—the most oversubscribed of the senses!—so we’re thinking a lot of how that could work in terms of memory devices based on form, tactility, scent and sound.”

This latter-day Faith Popcorn imagines a future in which we all have a “memory box” at home that releases stimulating scents, noises, and even familiar textures. Thanks to the help of soft robotics, the box will be able to expand into a multitude of shapes and sensations that conjure one’s past.

“It could be something that feels womb-like like a flotation device or something gamified and related to a virtual reality headset,” she adds excitedly.

“The possibilities are endless, but it will be something that feels very personalized and takes you to a place that feels comforting. The control over one’s own body, environment, and routine, which was already becoming apparent with the support of tech, has now become invaluable.” In this brave, newfangled world, even the freedom from screens will come through screens.

—horacio silva

AVENUE MAGAZINE | MAY—JUNE 2022

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VERNISSAGE

Modern Meemaw

T

here was no one quite like my grandmother Louise Nevelson.

G ra n d m a —I c a l l e d h e r Grandma, and she called me Ri-Ri—passed away in 1988, when I was 28. A towering figure of 20th-century modernism who continues to hold sway over the art world and is again being celebrated in exhibitions around the world, including the Venice Biennale, she also looms large over our family.

How could she not? From when I was 6, she talked metaphysics to me. She spoke about the importance of centering oneself and about how your friends are your mirror and should be respected. Her house was minimalist and the chairs were uncomfortable, because she believed that soft furniture made for soft conversation. In her own way she was trying to give me an inner foundation to handle things in life, but it was a lot for a young child to process.

She was a true eccentric, and unlike any other grandmother in the small town in Connecticut where I was raised. For one, she liked a good drink. Because of her heavy work, sometimes in a sweltering foundry laboring over 30-foot-tall sculptures, she smelled differently to the others, a sensual mix of body odor and Givenchy perfume.

She also looked different from my friends’ grandmothers. She cut her own hair super short, wore orthopedic shoes that she would spray-paint gold, and dressed like an art-world gypsy in a mix of vintage-store finds, high-fashion pieces, and jingly treasures she had picked up on her many travels to places like Iran, Afghanistan, and India.

Then there was her distinctive head gear— headscarves, turbans, men’s Stetsons, and equestrian riding hats—and her incredible jewelry, which she would pile on. Though her ethnic-

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looking jewelry was a key part of her look, not a lot of people know that much of it was made by her in the late 1960s.

These pieces were extensions of her work, most notably her collages, and she kept making them over the years, exploring the medium again and again, which I find interesting. You can see the mind at work putting these shapes together. The only difference is that they were at a radically smaller scale than what she was used to working in.

I’m surprised that until now only galleries were interested in this part of her creative output, but now that Hedi Slimane at Celine has released a limited-edition capsule collection inspired by her jewelry, a new generation of her fans will hopefully discover it.

I wonder what she would make of the renewed interest in her. She’d be tickled pink, and would probably say that it’s about time.

—maria nevelson

AVENUE MAGAZINE | MAY—JUNE 2022

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Carolina Herrera ruffled silhouette pant. $1,890; carolinaherrera.com

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Aquazzura “Tequila Plexi” sandal. $1,350; aquazzura.com

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Chanel highly resistant ceramic and steel J12 watch, $9,500; chanel.com

Manolo Blahnik “Gothisi” jewel buckle clutch. $1,465; manoloblahnik.com Oscar de la Renta draped sweetheart gown. $9,890; oscardelarenta.com

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Girard-Perregaux “Laureato Infinity” onyx watch. $15,000; watchesofswitzerland.com

Hermès “Arceau Squelette” 40mm stainless -steel and leather watch, $8,550; hermes.com

Franck Muller “Grand Central 42mm Tourbillon” timepiece. Price on request; franckmuller.com

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Adidas by Stella McCartney Ultraboost 21 shoes, $161; adidas.com

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4/8/22 1:35 PM

MIXED COMPANY Omnivores and vegetarians delight at the Musket Room.

Postcards from the Veg Natural born meat eater Joshua David Stein ventures into the vegan avant-garde

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Y

ears ago, when I was younger and intemperate, I was the restaurant critic for the now zombified New York Observer. Once, after a particularly decadent feast and nursing a nasty meat-and-martini hangover, I declared that, due to both personal and planetary health reasons, I would heretofore cease eating meat. I would, I declared not without a tinge of waggish self-importance, become the city’s first vegetarian food critic at a major newspaper. That lasted all of...a week. Rash was the decision, and premature too. And despite its underlying logical soundness, my resolve soon faded. At the time—this was seven years ago— vegan and vegetarian options in the city seemed to exist on a continuum wholly independent from ambitious and mainstream restaurants, the kind of restaurants a critic generally critiques. (There were a few exceptions, which we’ll get to in due time.) It quickly became clear that the reason

DINNER SPREAD: NITZAN KEYNAN/COURTESY OF MUSKET ROOM

VERNISSAGE

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CHEF SHENARRI FREEMAN, LASAGNA: ERIC MEDSKER/COURTESY OF CADENCE

PLANTING THE FLAG Below, Chef Shenarri Freeman of Cadence; right, and her Southern Fried lasagna (right)

there were no vegetarian critics was that most chefs saw vegetarian options as afterthoughts, toss-aways for the temporarily cleansing and hippie-inclined, and at any rate not worth the full application of the chef’s creativity.

But that was then and this is now. Now, when the climatic cost of eating meat has been made abundantly clear; now, when my cardiologist flips his lid reading my LDL; now, when our mayor is (mostly kinda) vegan; now, when New York is an Eden of vegetarian eating. But I am older, more measured and less inclined to sudden outbursts.

I still am not yet ready to forswear the pleasures of flesh. However, I can say this: meat eaters need not eat meat exclusively. From a health perspective, they probably shouldn’t. From a pleasure perspective, they definitely are missing out. Taken together, a trio of restaurants—among them Cadence, a sliver of a vegan Southern food restaurant in the East Village; Dirt Candy, the long-running haute cuisine temple in the Lower East Side; and Musket Room, a fine dining destination in Nolita—can’t help but make one yearn for what lies beyond the pastures and feedlots and in the fields.

Cadence, the latest addition, has only eight seats indoors and a kitchen as narrow as a tenement hallway. But since it opened in 2021, the

restaurant has set the world on fire. It was recently named one of the Best New Restaurants

by Esquire [full disclosure: by me] and the chef, Shenarri Freeman, is now a habitué of Vogue and WWD. Pete Wells, the New York Times critic, gave the place a review so glowing it’s amazing that day’s edition didn’t catch fire on the embers. All the hullabaloo is occasioned by Green’s reimagination (some might call it a reclamation) of Southern food from a cuisine so unhealthy it’ll clog your arteries like the BQE at rush hour into something equally hearty and satisfying, more surprising, just as delicious, and much healthier.

Refreshingly, there are no tricks on the menu or clever subterfuge. Nothing is fronting. Nothing is stunting. One of my favorite dishes, the buffalo oyster mushroom, is a simple symphony of crunch and gloop. A neon orange sauce–bathed mushroom is accompanied by avocado and "buttermilk" (i.e. not buttermilk) ranch in a pretzel bun. It does not taste like chicken. It tastes better, something bursting with umami and heat. Another wonder is the Southern fried lasagna, consisting of two rolled “cigars” of lasagna, which are fried then and served atop a Beyond Meat Bolognese. That the dish contains no meat is the least exciting thing about it. Instead it is the interplay of texture, the crunch and chew, the turning of someMAY—JUNE 2022 | AVENUE MAGAZINE

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The best evangelists are often the least preachy. That being the case, then Amanda Cohen, of Dirt Candy, is veganism’s St. Paul.

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thing I thought I knew into something I’m thrilled to meet.

With so small a staff and so minuscule a kitchen, understandably the menu is limited at Cadence, and it isn’t difficult to eat its entirety in one evening with a friend. And, as I yearned to return again and again, I wish it might be refreshed or revived or reimagined. For Greens’s creativity is as deep as her skill, and I wonder what more she can do if stretched. But I needn’t soothe myself with cheesesteaks in the interim. Just a few blocks south, Dirt Candy promises plenty more vegetable invention.

The best evangelists are often the least preachy. That being the case, then Amanda Cohen, of Dirt Candy, is veganism’s St. Paul. To the best of my knowledge, Dirt Candy is the longest running, most ambitious, and most successful vegan restaurant in New York. The restaurant opened not far from where Cadence is now in 2008 but in 2015 relocated to a more modern setting in the Lower East Side. Since 2017 it has been tasting menu only. On the night I visited, the space emits the tell-tale susurrus of fine dining.

Dirt Candy, despite the playful name, is a serious restaurant. It is neither portentous, pedantic, or self-serious, but it is clearly the work of an ambitious chef. From the first course of the five-course tasting menu, dubbed the Vegetable Party ($90), Cohen’s intentions are clear: to disprove the false dichotomy between virtue and pleasure that dominates the conversation around veganism.

There is pleasure in virtue, of course, but there are also outright unproviso’d pleasures here too.

PUMPKIN PAD THAI: EVAN SUNG. AMANDA COHEN: GEORGI RICHARDSON FOR MAGGIE MARGUERITE/COURTESY OF DIRT CANDY

DIRT CANDY MOUNTAIN Above, Amanda Cohen of Dirt Candy; left, her pumpkin pad Thai

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MY AIM IS TRUE Below, Musket Room chef Mary Attea; left, a concord grape dessert.

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and vegan tasting menus just as well cared for as their carnivorous ones. When Daniel Boulud reopened his flagship last year, he offered a fully vegetarian tasting menu, for example. When Mary Attea, the brilliant new chef at Musket Room in Nolita, offers both an omnivore menu and a vegan menu. On a recent dinner with a friend, we chose one of each. Even as my companion’s pearlescent hamachi crudo with pomegranate and winter citrus arrived, a bright, perky combination of flavors

Let them eat pork, for I have cabbage, smoked, with wheat berries in a sourdough consommé.

I know and love, my eyes stayed fixed on a far-out salad of grilled lotus root with bright pink baby beets and Thai basil. It was as interesting visually as it was texturally and in terms of flavor. Even as my friend’s sweetbreads were served, plump and crisp in hazelnut browned butter, I wasn’t jealous.

For I had a maitake mushroom with cacao nibs, cashew, and celeriac to devour. Let them eat pork,

for I have cabbage, smoked, with wheat berries in a sourdough consommé.

Such is the power of pleasure seeking—and the weakness of principle—that for most of us vegan and vegetarianism will not be options we choose if it means giving anything up. Like lipograms, the mark of a successful vegan restaurant is that you don’t miss what’s not there. You appreciate what is. It takes a special kind of chef to pull it off, yet thankfully these three brilliant women and their teams do just that.

CONCORD GRAPE: NITZAN KEYNAN. CHEF MARY ATTEA: COURTESY OF MUSKET ROOM

A caviar-and-potato pie is a great example. Perhaps an homage to Russ & Daughters around the corner as well as the Lower East Side’s Jewish roots, it appears as a cupped latke with a payload of glistening Danish seaweed caviar and a dollop of crème fraîche atop it. No one misses the osetra.

The second course recasts kale into silky bright green noodles, finished with a kale broth. The result, far from being sternly salutary, is instead as warm and comforting as rolling hills. A buche de mushroom mousse, a witty play on a Black Forest bûche de Noël, meanwhile, showcases the mushroom’s versatility; as mousse, layered with Bing cherry puree; as grilled, like shaved black truffle.

But Cohen’s work goes well beyond the plate.

One of the things I most admire about the chef is how she has been an early and committed advocate to building a more fair and just restaurant workplace. She was one of the first chefs to eliminate tipping, and a little note, even more than pastry chef Rachel Bossett’s black garlic sticky toffee pudding, left a sweet taste in my mouth: “The restaurant pays its staff a fair living wage plus benefits.” In this critic’s opinion, Dirt Candy and Cadence are the best vegan restaurants in Manhattan. Unlike some other recent vegan affairs, these are not sanctimonious, they are not performative, they do not place the ego of the chef at the center of the plate and expect us to quaver with awe at his ability to disguise vegetables into something far removed from the field. They don’t have a secret meat room.

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“I didn’t give people a chance to reject me. I would walk into the weights room and say, ‘Okay, let me show you how to do pliés.’”

Silas Encore

Silas Farley, the electrifying former New York City Ballet dancer turned choreographer and educator, talks to Constance C.R. White about his triumphant return to the city

TRIP THE LIGHT FANTASTIC Silas Farley photographed on the campus of the Colburn School in Los Angeles, where he heads the dance program.

Photography by Matt Sayles for Avenue

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ilas Farley leans back in his chair, the delight evident on his smiling face as he warms to his subject: Igor Stravinsky. The Russian composer is the reason that Farley, who electrified audiences for seven years as a member of the New York City Ballet corps de ballet before his surprising exit in 2020, is about to touch down in the city for the first time in two years. And a lot has changed in the world of dance since. The 28-year-old comes back not as he left, but as a choreographer (and father to baby Asa, who’s listened to plenty of Stravinsky already), invited to create the only world premiere piece for the 50th anniversary of the NYCB’s extraordinary 1972 Stravinsky Festival in May. Farley, who has created a 26-minute ballet for the occasion, selected 16 NYCB dancers, “eight ladies and eight gentlemen,” with varying degrees of experience, status, and body shapes. “I wanted to show the depth of the company,” he explains from his office at the world-renowned Colburn School in Los Angeles, where he now heads the dance program. Tall (he’s 6'6") and animated, with a short Afro and ready smile, he looks every bit the bohemian California artiste, complete with a Covid beard and collarless white shirt. Visible on the wall behind is a framed newspaper clipping of Farley as a 10-year-old studying with the legendary choreographer Alonzo King.

The score of Farley’s new piece is by composer and writer David K. Israel and is based on compositional notes exchanged between Stravinsky and the iconic choreographer and cofounder of NYCB, George Balanchine. Together, they formed one of the all-time great composer-choreographer

collaborations, achieving Brady-Belichick levels of mutuality and success. “For Stravinsky and Balanchine to be in this living relationship, it’s supercool,” Farley says with a smile.

This particular exchange, he explains, began with a melody Balanchine wrote to his friend and colleague for his 64th birthday. Israel found the manuscripts, and from these wisps of friendship and creativity began to create a full orchestral piece. Farley’s wife, the dancer Cassia Farley, designed the costumes of reds and gold in simple leotards, for a classic Balanchine look.

“That relationship of the movement and the music that runs through all of Balanchine’s choreography,” Farley says, “is perhaps clearest in his work set to the music of Stravinsky.”

For Farley, dance has been a lifelong passion: he fell in love at age 6 with ballet while living in North Carolina. “A dance company from Mississippi came and performed at our church. Up to that point I had seen worship dance but had never seen ballet,” he says. “I think it was the power and poetry of the men that impressed me.”

The youngest of seven children, Farley was born into a family where everyone did praise dance and everyone participated in sports. His brother Matthias is a National Football League defensive back. His mother, who is Black, and his father, who is white, were unequivocal in their support of his dance ambitions.

Mercifully, he was spared the all-too-common racial or gender barriers that sometimes come with being an African American or a Black male pursuing ballet. “I wasn’t exposed to that,” says Farley. “I had four older brothers and that may have insulated me."

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“There’s an opportunity to raise up an ever-growing group of artists of color.”

“And,” he continues, “I didn’t give people a chance to reject me. I would walk into the weights room and say, ‘Okay, let me show you how to do pliés.’ I was sharing,” he adds, laughing.

Since childhood, an unseen hand has pulled him toward “sharing” and choreography. He began his training at the age of 7 at the King David Christian Conservatory in Charlotte, North Carolina, and took his first choreography workshop at just 11 while at the North Carolina Dance Theater School of Dance. And besides talent, he had no end of hot connections. It was through NYCB’s formidable network that he and Colburn found each other.

His teachers at NCDT (now called the Charlotte Ballet) included the celebrated ballerina Patricia McBride, who danced with NYCB for almost 30 years, and her husband, the French dancer Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux. Farley dreamed of dancing at NYCB, and at 14, with the couple’s and others’ encouragement, he was accepted at the School of American Ballet. He lived in the academy’s dorms on the Lincoln Center’s campus and attended the Professional Children’s School for his academics.

At the age of 18, Farley was faced with a pivotal choice. Admitted to Harvard, he was also waiting to hear whether he would be invited to join NYCB. He chose to forgo Harvard on the gamble he’d make the company. “I could always go back to school later,” he reasoned. His faith paid off.

Soon Farley’s long limbs and impeccable technique vaulted him to the top of his game. He was taking principal roles in the works of Balanchine 34

and Christopher Wheeldon, and originating roles in ballets by Lauren Lovette and Justin Peck.

But even then Farley’s ambitions were broader in scope. He left in 2020 to pursue his passion for education and choreography. “I always felt a sense of calling for being an educator,” he says, explaining why he left. “It’s such a joy to have retired as a young man and to be able to illustrate and demonstrate, working with students.”

A year later, he was appointed dean of the Trudl Zipper Dance Institute at the Colburn School, LA’s world-renowned school for music and dance, as well as an Amplify Artist. Alongside his leadership positions at the Colburn, he is also an alumnus trustee of the Professional Children’s School, serves on the board of the George Balanchine Foundation, and continues to host his popular NYCB podcast, “Hear the Dance.” Despite his busy schedule, when NYCB approached him about choreographing the Stravinsky-driven piece for the May festival, he was ready.

Farley is well aware that his visit symbolizes not only New York’s return to its rites of a post-pandemic spring, but a dance world finally creeping toward long-overdue equity and diversity. His past and present roles with NYCB make him emblematic of transformative changes underway in dance—changes that challenge and that could finally cause to crumble the confining walls of homogeneity, most vivid in its upper echelons. He ticks off recent major developments in dance land: “Janet Rollé, Aesha Ash, the Dance Theater of Harlem receiving that incredible grant for $4 million.” (See Avenue’s sidebar.)

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Part of Farley’s mission is to increase representation of black instructors and students at Colburn. “We have great donors at the school, and they want to see artists of color as teachers and mentors,” he explains, as well as young students of color. He’s already begun working with King and his Alonzo King LINES Ballet company, based in San Francisco, and the Colburn School has just received a $1million donation to establish a scholarship fund for young male dancers from underrepresented communities. In Farley’s view, “There’s an opportunity to raise up an ever-growing group of artists of color.”

But will the world ever see Silas Farley dance again? (After all, Brady’s come back from retirement too.) We will not, he says. As he sees it, when teaching, he’s living his purpose. “I want students to be able to enter into this art form. You have to teach them how to embody the art form.

“I think ballet can be a social good,” he continues. “It’s emotional. It’s rigorous. It’s disciplined, it’s collaborative, and at its essence it’s the pursuit of beauty, which is always a noble and ennobling enterprise.” The history and the relationships he’s made through NYCB will buoy him forward and help shape him into one of ballet’s new leaders, he believes. There is no going back.

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“I think ballet can be a social good. It’s emotional. It’s rigorous.

It’s disciplined, it’s collaborative, and at its essence it’s the pursuit of beauty…”

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Performance Enhancers A new wave of leaders are transforming the dance world

DARRELL GRAND MOULTRIE BY FRANKLIN THOMPSON; KYLE ABRAHAM A.I.M BY TATIANA WILLS; AESHA ASH BY VICTOR LLORENTE, COURTESY THE SCHOOL OF AMERICAN BALLET; CAMILLE A. BROWN BY ©JOSEFINA SANTOS, COURTESY CAMILLE A. BROWN; JANET ROLLÉ BY LARRY BUSACCA; FRANCESCA HARPER BY RICHARD TERMINE

DARRELL GRAND MOULTRIE

AESHA ASH Associate Chair of Faculty, School of American Ballet

Choreographer and teacher

Born and raised in Harlem, the celebrated Darrell Grand Moultrie works across ballet, contemporary, and commercial dance genres with ease, winning multiple awards along the way. His latest crowd-pleasing piece, Indestructible Light, created in a pandemic bubble, was set to the recordings of Duke Ellington and performed by ABT on tour.

FRANCESCA HARPER Artistic Director, Ailey II, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

The dancer, choreographer, singer, actor, producer, teacher, director, and educator, as well as ballet consultant for the Oscar-winning Black Swan, became the artistic director of Ailey II eight months ago, following in the footsteps of her late mother, Denise Jefferson, who directed the Ailey School from 1984 until 2010. “It feels so much bigger than me,” she has said of the appointment.

JANET ROLLÉ CEO and Executive Director, American Ballet Theater

The former manager of Beyoncé’s business empire arrives at a uniquely challenging time following catastrophic losses of revenue during the pandemic, while ballet continues to struggle with attracting younger audiences. But Rollé has the business chops for the job, not to mention a lifelong passion for dance ever since her mother enrolled her in class when she was 8.

KYLE ABRAHAM Choreographer and Artistic Director, A.I.M. (Abraham in Motion)

The multi-award-winning artistic director of Abraham in Motion has been on fire recently, creating solo work for dancers such as ABT megastar Misty Copeland. His collaboration during the pandemic with NYCB, When We Fell, was feted by the New York Times as being “among the most beautiful dance films of the pandemic.”

Since becoming the first Black female member of the permanent faculty of S.A.B. two years ago, the former student and New York City Ballet dancer has been an agent of change. In June she takes up the newly created position of associate chair, overseeing the relationship between faculty and students. “I have this hyper-awareness of that student who is shy in the corner and just needs someone to pull them out.”

CAMILLE A. BROWN Dancer, choreographer, educator, and founder, Camille A. Brown & Dancers

The trailblazing Brown is used to scoring firsts: last fall the Guggenheim Fellow and five-time winner of the Princess Grace Award became the Metropolitan Opera’s first Black director, codirecting and choreographing Terence Blanchard’s opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones. This spring she directs and choreographs the revival of Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf, making her the first Black woman to both direct and choreograph a Broadway show in 65 years.

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Ultimate Treasure Hunt

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ounting MoMA's highly anticipated exhibition “Henri Matisse: The Red Studio,” which opens on May 1, presented a unique challenge for noted curator Ann Temkin, not the least of which was a global pandemic. The show—some four years in the making—required that she gather all of the extant paintings and objects depicted in the artist’s handsomely scaled oil on canvas, The Red Studio. There were no options for substitution should any given work be unavailable. In short, she says, “It was all or nothing. Without 100 percent, the show was a no-go.” Luckily, Temkin’s persistence paid off. For the first time since they appeared in the artist’s studio more than a century ago, all the works—save for a large painting of a nude that we know to have been destroyed—are together again at last.

Painted in 1911 and acquired by the museum in 1949, The Red Studio depicts the artist’s workspace in the town of Issy-les-Moulineaux, on the outskirts of Paris. The painting, Temkin explains, is a highly curated “autobiography” that is as notable for what we don't see as what we do see. “The works shown in it range in date from 1898 to 1911, yet Matisse chose not to include any made between 1899 and 1905, a pivotal time in his career when he rose to fame as the leader of a radical new art movement, which critics dubbed the Fauves (‘wild beasts’) for their savage use of color.”

What we do see, she says, is Matisse at his most experimental. “The works he shows us—which happened to be in his studio because he had yet to sell them—were all really radical pictures at that time, and the majority of collectors, particularly in France, found what the artist did so completely outrageous.”

But Matisse, she adds, did find a loyal following in Scandinavia, hence the reason that three of the paintings included in the show are on loan from SMK— The National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen, where the show travels after closing in New York in September. Here Temkin provides Avenue with a private preview of Matisse’s Red Studio.

Henry Matisse’s 1911 oil on canvas The Red Studio takes center stage in MoMA’s latest exhibition.

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“Henri Matisse: The Red Studio” runs May 1 to September 10, 2022, at MoMA, after which the exhibition will travel to SMK—The National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen, on view there October 13, 2022, through February 26, 2023. moma.org

HENRI MATISSE, THE RED STUDIO: MRS. SIMON GUGGENHEIM FUND, THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK, © 2022 SUCCESSION H. MATISSE/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

For MoMA curator Ann Temkin, it was all or nothing when it came to organizing “Henri Matisse: The Red Studio,” reports Angela M.H. Schuster

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Behind the Scenes with Matisse curator Ann Temkin

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NUDE WITH A WHITE SCARF 1909

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“At the time it was painted, Nude with a White Scarf was considered provocative in terms of depicting the female form. It was greeted with quite a bit of discomfort and bafflement by critics who just couldn't understand what Matisse was trying to do in his portrayal of the nude—in this case, a powerful woman overtly comfortable with her sexuality, rather than a female, docile and demure. In putting so many female nudes in The Red Studio, Matisse is telling viewers, ‘I’m redefining the notion of beauty.’”

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DECORATIVE FIGURE 1908/1912

“The bronze included in the exhibition actually postdates the one depicted in The Red Studio. But it was cast in 1912 from the very same plaster that is shown in the painting and is, therefore, identical to it. We do know that this figure was the first bronze Matisse ever made.

Unfortunately, all the artist’s plasters were destroyed as they were considered an intermediary step in the creation of a work.”

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HENRI MATISSE, NUDE WITH A WHITE SCARF: J. RUMP COLLECTION. SMK–THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF DENMARK, COPENHAGEN; DECORATIVE FIGURE: GIFT OF SAM AND AYALA ZACKS, ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO, TORONTO, BOTH © 2022 SUCCESSION H. MATISSE/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

CULTURE

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HENRI MATISSE, BATHERS: GIFT OF THE AUGUSTINUS FOUNDATION AND THE NEW CARLSBERG FOUNDATION, LE LUXE II: J. RUMP COLLECTION SMK–THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF DENMARK, COPENHAGEN; CORSICA: THE OLD MILL: WALLRAF-RICHARTZ MUSEUM & FONDATION CORBOUD, COLOGNE; YOUNG SAILOR II: JACQUES AND NATASHA GELMAN COLLECTION, THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK, ALL © 2022 SUCCESSION H. MATISSE/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

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BATHERS Ca. 1909

“Formerly known as Nymph and Faun, Bathers is a mythical painting that pays homage to Cézanne, who was Matisse’s favorite postimpressionist painter, and one who made hundreds of paintings and drawings of bathers. We’ve retitled the canvas Bathers because that was Matisse’s original title, which we found out in our research.

The whereabouts of the painting were unknown for decades. It turns out it had been in a private family collection for the past 75 years. Several years ago, the family approached the National Gallery of Denmark and said, ‘We know that the first owner of this painting was a Danish collector. Perhaps you would be interested in buying it from us.’ Within the Matisse world, that was quite a moment.”

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LE LUXE II 1907-1908 4

YOUNG SAILOR II 1906

“Given that Young Sailor II looks so primitive and so simple, as if it were the work of a child or a self-taught painter, Matisse was afraid to let people know that it was actually by him.

He was even more afraid of how the painting would be received. When he showed it to a friend, he told him that ‘the local postman had painted it.’”

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CORSICA: THE OLD MILL 1898

“In Le Luxe II, Matisse takes on a very traditional subject—three naked women by the water—that harkens back to antiquity. One thinks of goddesses frolicking and relaxing in some sort of mythical landscape. Here, however, he dares to modernize that very archaic form. And this is really what made people so crazy at the time. They thought that these figures looked like monsters—with one of the figures having but four toes.”

“Corsica was executed shortly after Matisse’s marriage to Amélie Parayre in 1898, and not long after he had finished his art school studies. Later in life, the artist often spoke about how transformative his time on the island was for him. He had never been to the south before, nor had he seen the Mediterranean. On Corsica, he discovered a new way of dealing with light and color. By including that painting in The Red Studio, whether consciously or not, he’s signaling to the viewer the seminal nature of that trip in the arc of his career.”

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Frieze Frame The New York fair hits the refresh button for its tenth anniversary edition, writes Angela M.H. Schuster

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s the art world emerges from the chaos of the past two years, Frieze New York is upping its game for its tenth edition. There’s a new fair director, Christine Messineo—a former gallerist who was plucked from its own vaunted roster—and a new partnership with the leading art-based virtual and augmented-reality platform, Vortic.

The contemporary art fair returns to The Shed on Manhattan’s West Side with more than 65 participating galleries from 17 nations—among them Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Esther Schipper, Thaddaeus Ropac, Galeria Luisa Strina, and White Cube.

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International powerhouse Hauser & Wirth is offering a solo presentation of five new large-scale works by Charles Gaines from his acclaimed and ever-evolving Numbers and Trees series, which he began in the 1980s. For these new works, says gallerist Marc Payot, the Los Angeles–based artist he has literally changed course, reversing the layering process for which he is well known in the creation of his multidimensional, mixed-media oeuvre, with the trees taking center stage rather than serving as a backdrop. “This new approach brings the tree’s shadowy branches to the foreground and obscures the brightly colored, complex numbered grid painted below it.” The image of the tree, Payot tells Avenue, has been central to the artist‘s work since the mid-1970s, and his methodical examination of its form continues in this latest iteration of the series, inspired by the immense trees Gaines encountered during a trip to Dorset, England, in early 2020.

Other highlights include presentations by São Paulo–based gallerist Luisa Strina, who is offering mixed-media works by Alexandre da Cunha. The London-based Brazilian sculptor utilizes mundane objects as his primary media, creating tapestries made of cleaning mops and totems made of washbasins that are evocative of works by artists associated with the Turin–based Arte Povera movement of the 1960s and ’70s.

Meanwhile, Chelsea gallerist Tanya Bonakdar is presenting a suite of sculptures by Los Angeles artist Kelly Akashi, including a yet-to-be-titled work in onyx and lost-wax cast lead crystal.

As for the partnership with Vortic, Messineo says, it literally brings a new dimension to the fair.

“The cutting-edge immersive technology will allow us to create virtual viewing spaces across its online platform, its advanced rendering engine capable of accurately replicating paintings, sculptures, installations, and video works in 3D.” Frieze New York runs May 18–22 at The Shed. frieze.com

CHARLES GAINES: © CHARLES GAINES, COURTESY THE ARTIST AND HAUSER & WIRTH, PHOTOGRAPHS: FREDRIK NILSEN; KELLY AKASHI: COURTESY THE ARTIST AND TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY, NEW YORK/LOS ANGELES

A PERFECT 10 Clockwise from right: A yet-to-be titled piece by Kelly Akashi executed earlier this year. Artist Charles Gaines in his Los Angeles studio and his new mixed-media work, Tree #3, Minerva Walk, among the latest in his Numbers and Trees series.

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Fair Game Tom Postma, the architect behind TEFAF, the most beautiful art fair in the world, shares what he has in store for Maastricht this June with Angela M.H. Schuster

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ince its launch in 1988, The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) has built a reputation as the most visually stunning event of its kind for connoisseurs of rare art from antiquity to the 20th century. On June 25, the 35th edition of the highly vetted event returns to Maastricht after a two-year hiatus with a roster of 242 dealers from around the world—among them Axel Vervoordt, Mullany, Daniel Crouch, Charles Ede, Colnaghi, Galerie Kugel, and Rob Smeets.

Ahead of the fair, Avenue caught up with architect Tom Postma, who for the past two decades has been instrumental in its stellar design, creating its highly cultivated ambiance and the dramatic floral displays for which TEFAF is known. We wanted to see what’s in store for this year’s event in the wake of Covid, which forced the 2020 edition to close four days early.

“For those familiar with the layout of the fair, there will be quite a number of noticeable changes,” says Postma, “among them the removal of the ‘ceiling’ above the stands, which has in years past made the massive volume of the MECC [Maastricht Exhibition & Conference Centre] more manageable and intimate.”

The ceiling, he explains, was eschewed largely to enhance air circulation in this post-Covid world. Other major changes include a reorganization of the floor plan, with slightly smaller stands to accommodate more dealers, and the conversion of a glassed-in mezzanine—which, in the past, hosted galleries specializing in works on paper—into a luxury collectors’ lounge and forum for talks by specialists in all areas of the art world, from curators to those offering discreet financial services.

And then there are the flowers. “As this edition will be held in early summer, rather than spring as in years past, the flowers will feel very different, wildly abundant but clearly reflective of warmer and more optimistic days ahead.”

As this writer knows well, having attended the fair for many years, the MECC is anything but a stunning architectural wonder; rather it is a convention center that has all the charm of a dated sports arena and parking garage. Yet, in Postma’s hands, this behemoth of a building complex becomes a veritable geode, ugly on the outside and a wonder to behold inside. Once visitors pass through the ticket checkpoint, they are transported a world away—to an extraordinary place where money is no object.

TEFAF runs at the MECC (Maastricht Exhibition & Conference Centre) June 25–30, with a VIP vernissage on June 24.

TEFAF MAASTRICHT/MARK NIEDERMANN; TEFAF MAASTRICHT 2022 SKETCH, COURTESY TOM POSTMA DESIGN

ART IN BLOOM From top: Tom Postma’s sketch for the entrance for the 2022 edition of TEFAF Maastricht; The spectacular floral display that greeted fairgoers in 2020.

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CULTURE

Zibby Owens Writes a Book A touching memoir about growing up Schwarzman from the book influencer of Park Avenue

BY CLAIRE GIBSON

S

unshine floods Zibby Owens’s spacious Park Avenue kitchen, bouncing off the white countertops and amplifying the effect of light. As “Wolf ” by the Swedish band First Aid Kit plays over the home sound system, the day’s edition of the New York Times rests untouched in the middle of the stainless steel island. The book influencer, podcaster, TV personality, writer, publisher, mother of four and famous daughter (of Blackstone Group founder Stephen Schwarzman) is standing, in jeans and navy blazer. Her hands grasp a bottle of Smartwater.

Would she like to sit down? “I’ve been at my desk recording all morning,” she says. “Do you mind if I stand?”

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It’s a rare moment of calm in a life that moves at breakneck speed. In a matter of just four years, and despite the global pandemic, Owens has built her literary podcast Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books into a full-scale enterprise, landing her on Good Morning America one morning and in the pages of the Washington Post the next.

During the pandemic, in particular, she has rapid-fired her rawest emotions and personal setbacks on Instagram. Almost 20,000 followers read about Covid claiming the life of her beloved mother-in-law, then her husband’s grandmother.

But through it all, one achievement had eluded her. Unremitting in her support and encouragement of authors and their books, she had never published a book of her own. After all, if moms don’t have time to read books, how could they

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A CASE OF BOOKS Zibby Owens, opposite, with copies of her new memoir, Bookends, and, below, in the book-lined office out of which she runs her Moms Don’t Have Time franchise.

Photography by Catherine Talese for Avenue

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have time to write them? Not that she hasn’t tried.

For almost two decades, Owens pitched memoirs, novels, and nonfiction stories to publishers. No takers, but that’s about to change.

“You want to see it?” she asks. In the dining room, across from a large-scale Candida Höfer photograph of the Mafra Palace Library in Portugal, she has stacked printed galleys of Bookends: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Literature, due out in July. Part literary love story, part family history, it’s a propulsive read that chronicles Owens’s complicated relationships—with food, with romance, with books, with vast wealth—all told with the self-effacing warmth that has won her the title of “literary fairy godmother” among the wide range of writers she’s had on her show.

Owens launched her popular podcast in 2018 out of her book-lined office on the second floor of her Rosario Candela triplex with nothing but an idea, GarageBand, and a couple of Blue Yeti microphones. Since then, more than 900 authors have appeared with her, from Susan Orlean to Amor Towles, Dani Shapiro, Malcolm Gladwell, Celeste Ng, Maira Kalman, and Jaqueline Woodson, to name a few. (In 2019, after a chance meeting at Emma Straub’s bookstore, Books Are Magic, Owens invited me on to talk about my novel Beyond the Point, then enlisted me to help edit several essays that went into her quarantine anthology, Moms Don’t Have Time To.)

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Owens’s writing journey started in 2003, the year she graduated from Harvard Business School.

While her classmates scattered to high-powered jobs at various companies across the globe, she returned home to Manhattan. She had decided to write a memoir about losing her best friend from Yale, Stacey Sanders, who died on the 93rd floor of the World Trade Center in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. As a lifelong reader and lover of books, Owens wanted to honor her friend’s memory by putting the story of their friendship and the shattering grief of the loss down in words.

But when she finished the manuscript, she found no publishers were interested. It was too 46

soon for a 9/11 memoir, they told her agent. Who was this Zibby Schwarzman, anyway?

“I was devastated,” Owens says, "I had never failed so publicly before. It didn’t occur to me it wouldn’t sell.”

After all, failure doesn’t exactly run in the family.

The granddaughter of successful German-Jewish entrepreneurs on both sides, Owens grew up with a front row seat to the meteoric rise of her father and his formidable global enterprise.

In addition to the near incomprehensible wealth and privilege that implies, Bookends chronicles Owens’s struggles with crippling shyness as a child, and the way books brought her solace.

ALL THAT COUNTS Owens, above, in a rare moment of quiet, and opposite, the cover of her new book and a glimpse into her childhood reading with a volume from the miniature book business founded by her maternal stepgrandfather atop her summer reading list from lower school.

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She wanted them to do the same for other people, and in 2018 she started with by-invitation-only salons with authors she thought would appeal to her well-heeled—though time-pressed— social circle, which led to her podcast and the catchy concept she took from her moniker for the salons. When she interviewed authors, hearing echoes of her own experience in prominently published writers’ stories of their struggles to get published was “inspiring,” she says. “It made me feel better to hear Mitch Albom say he had survived rejection. Mitch Albom! It just made me realize, if he can do it, then it’s just part of the business.”

The book she is finally publishing, thanks to Amazon Publishing’s imprint Little A, is heartfelt and touching, and leaves a few things out. It makes no mention of Owens’s first husband, investment banker Andrew Right, as well as their marriage and divorce. When I ask why, her face goes still and she sighs. "I just don’t want anything related to my kids,” she says. “And, it’s their dad.” Though the answer is strangely unforthcoming for a memoirist, a more satisfying description may be found elsewhere in Bookends, where Owens does describe her sudden depression at age 9, when her parents announced their divorce; her stint as a Weight Watchers coach; and, with a kind of detached awe and discomfiture, the unusual experience of being a fly on the wall to her father’s growing private equity empire, reminiscing about her family’s skyrocketing wealth as if it was a roller-coaster she never signed up to ride. “For a long time I tried to keep that part of my life a secret,” she writes, “asking my dad’s driver to drop me off two blocks away from school…or occasionally fudging how I got to the Hamptons for

the weekend when really I’d flown on a helicopter. The cat appears to be out of the bag now, despite my different last name…I don’t want to hide it anymore, but I would never flaunt it. That’s just not who I am.”

The Hamptons have long formed a shimmering backdrop to her summers, and her story really starts to glow the year a fill-in tennis coach for her older son steps onto the scene. The pro’s name was Kyle Owens, and he was visiting from Charleston, South Carolina. What starts as a standoff between coach and mother—“So, listen, your son doesn’t really like tennis”—ends on the beach several months later with the two entangled like teenagers in the sand. “What, the gardener was taken?” a friend quips when Owens reveals she’s fallen in love. Nonetheless, the unexpected romance has led to a happy marriage (they wed in 2017) and a close partnership—it was Kyle who revived her ambitions as a writer, Owens says.

So each day, after the hour-long drive around Central Park for school drop-off, Owens returns to her office with its pair of blue velvet sofas to write her essays, record her author interviews, host marketing meetings for the new book or her new publishing imprint, Zibby Books, or hop on a Zoom call for one of the five philanthropic boards she serves on. Her schedule is so tight, she recently invited best-selling author Adriana Trigiani to join her family for dinner so they could have enough time to talk.

“This was never the goal,” she says, looking around her briefly peaceful apartment and the small publishing empire it contains. “My goal was to sell a book. But I’ve ended up doing something so much better. And I’m really grateful.”

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CULTURE

From horses to Hollywood, algorithms to oysters, four new books delve into the dark side of bright and shiny things.

HORSE

by Geraldine Brooks (Viking)

A foreign correspondent by training, a horsewoman by passion, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Geraldine Brooks usually goes the distance for her subjects by embedding them in history. It is, she knows, where the present lies in wait. With Horse, her new novel, Brooks enters the fray of America’s monuments and mythmaking, Civil War and civil disobedience, writing history and righting it. In it she returns to the American 19th century of March, her retelling of Little Women from the point of view 48

of the absent Father March, for which she carried off that Pulitzer in 2006. Since then, scholarship and politics and culture battles have not gone gentle on the period.

Horse is at once darker and more enlightening, a brooding work of fiction woven from narrative fragments free-floating in time.

It extricates from its Ralph Lauren amber a seemingly sunny subject—antebellum Thoroughbred racing and the painting genre that iconized it—to find the unavoidable shadows underneath.

Brooks’s fact-based story originates with Lexington, a legendary racehorse named after his birthplace in Kentucky in 1850.

Brooks imagines the prize animal in a painting with a young enslaved boy named Jarret, following him as he grows into a man and navigates his way to freedom while grooming the stallion into the most famous stud sire in American history. What’s wrong with this picture? For Brooks it starts with an aspiring artist from up north, Thomas J. Scott, who comes to The Meadows plantation in search of equestrian portrait commissions.

Despite the questions he raises about the landed gentry’s source of wealth in human chattel, the titles of the works he produces are nevertheless in keeping with the slaveholding mentality of lumping Jarret together with Lexington, as a possession rather than a person dignified with a surname— “Warfield’s Lexington led by black Jarret, his groom.”

Tracing the painting over the course of a century and a half, Brooks deftly illustrates how it is entwined with our own. Jarret’s quietly heroic actions in war and love are the reason one of Scott’s double portraits first ends up in the hands of Martha Jackson, the gallery owner and Cedar Tavern regular who helped Jackson Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists to prominence in the 1950s. While Pollock’s connection to the canvas is a surprising one, Brooks’s greater interest lies in the fate of the painting in the more immediate present, when it surfaces in a trash bin in Washington, D.C., and is retrieved by a brilliant, well-born Anglo-Nigerian art historian at work on his dissertation—his accent “clipped, like a topiary,” his Oxford polo championships remembered bitterly. The picture becomes a mystery wrapped

in a love story, wrapped in a Smithsonian curator’s unusual encounters with Lexington as she goes about her line of osteological work. Here again, Brooks doesn’t shy away from confronting—and having her characters face—the same racialized violence inherent in the painting’s creation.

Alerted to this novel and its June publication date, a Thoroughbred-raising friend of mine responded enthusiastically: “Thanks so much. It’s coming out just in time for the Triple Crown.”

—celia mcgee

THE CANDY HOUSE

by Jennifer Egan (Scribner)

Full of futuristic flourishes and hairpin plot twists, Jennifer Egan’s bewitching new novel, The Candy House, picks up where A Visit from the Goon Squad left off. Twelve years have passed since that book first dazzled us and won Egan a Pulitzer: time is a mysterious, lurking presence in both novels.

Like us, Egan’s characters hurtle through their lives without knowing what the hell is coming next. You might become a West Coast rock and roll impresario with your own private beach, pool, and artificial waterfall. Then again, you might pop pills, go off the rails, ditch your spouse, lose your legs, gain 100 pounds, get a Ph.D., pen a bestseller, sell your algorithms to a sketchy billionaire, or change the world. All this unfolds in The Candy House as the story leaps from the 20th century into the future.

In the novel’s universe, the Internet swells to Godlike proportions: “an all-seeing, all-knowing entity that may be predicting and controlling your behavior, even when you think

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JANE FONDA AND BROOKE HAYWARD: DENNIS HOPPER/HOPPER ART TRUST, HARPER COLLINS

you’re choosing for yourself.”

How to be free in a mechanized world is the question that runs through the pages of this rollicking, kaleidoscopic novel. Better yet, Egan supplies an answer. Leading us along a yellow brick road to peril and adventure, she stops along the way to ponder philosophy—free will, the nature of consciousness— with curiosity and brio. Immensely entertaining, the novel is a raucous celebration of humanity in all our hubris and cluelessness, populated with an array of characters from seven-year-old girls to spies. It shimmers with the unexpected; no one remains who they are for long.

Over such limitless possibility looms an insidious force, what Thomas Pynchon named “the pointsman…who throws the lever that changes the points.” People are minding their business, having breakthroughs and breakdowns while something or someone out there is pulling their strings.

Tech guru Bix Bouton is CEO and founder of Mandala, and his social media empire manipulates behavior with algorithms. It’s that eternal battle, Human vs. Machine, but a resistance movement is brewing, “eluders,” who refuse to upload their memories to Bix’s vast database, and go off the grid. They are Egan’s untethered, changing their life stories in ways no algorithm can possibly foresee, breaking free. —LISA DIERBECK

MOONLIGHT AND THE PEARLER’S DAUGHTER

by Lizzie Pook (Simon & Schuster)

Pearling in 19th-century Australia was a dirty business. Men hacking up phlegm, roaches everywhere, and swarming crabs were just the start. Man-eating alligators were a very real danger and, for

the primarily Indigenous pearlers, treacherous European bosses who stopped at nothing to make a buck—or a guinea—including forced labor and family betrayal.

This is the world into which English travel journalist Lizzie Pook plunges us with Moonlight and the Pearler’s Daughter, her first novel, a tale of intrigue, death and, er, filth. Her heroine is young Eliza Brightwell, whose father, having moved his family to these rough shores, has gone missing. She is determined to find him, even if it means risking her life. Foreboding is everywhere in Bannin Bay, where the Brightwells have settled. Skies seem as gray as cigar smoke, and oppressive heat and unpleasant funks are par for the course. “Was this really where they were going to make their fortune?” Eliza had wondered when they arrived from England. “Eliza had glanced at her father. He could not meet her eye.”

Fauna and flora intertwine like infernal twins. One moment Bannin Bay’s residents are eating fish for sustenance, the next they may be assaulted by the reek of rotting marine life, or by a jellyfish carrying fatal venom. Pook depicts how hard the circumstances were, not least for women, confined to marginal roles. But Native Australians fared the worst.

Many were kidnapped for diving work so dangerous it could leave them crippled or dead. Pregnant Indigenous women were set to diving thanks to the barbaric and inevitably lethal belief that, because their lungs were enlarged, they could stay underwater longer.

Four and half pages of background notes at the end of the novel testify to Pook’s extensive research, which helps her evoke the harsh upshot of the high demand for pearling’s products well into the 20th century, before plastics made such everyday items as pearl buttons obsolete. It’s an immersion in the brutality of existence that will linger with you.

Exacting in every detail, including period vocabulary that may have you checking your fattest dictionary, Moonlight and the Pearler’s Daughter is Lizzie Pook’s love letter to anyone who loves historical fiction. For every archaic word or regional expression, she gets at themes—of love, loss, sexism, racism, birth, death and betrayal—that we all understand.

—CONSTANCE C.R. WHITE

PLAY IT AS L.A. Jane Fonda and Brooke Hayward photographed by Dennis Hopper in Malibu around 1965

EVERYBODY THOUGHT WE WERE CRAZY: DENNIS HOPPER, BROOKE HAYWARD, AND 1960S LOS ANGELES

by Mark Rozzo (Ecco Press)

Andy Warhol called the welcometo-L.A. party that Brooke Hayward and Dennis Hopper threw him at their Spanish colonial in the Hollywood Hills in 1962 “the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me.” The guest list mixed Hollywood’s young players with contemporary art stars in a setting eye-popping even by the wigged one’s standards. In Everybody Thought We Were Crazy, Mark Rozzo’s gossipy, extensively researched, and compulsively readable new book, the HaywardHopper marriage emerges as a dazzling, improbable love affair between two people bonded by a radical-chic aesthetic that helped make them, for a brief, heady period, the stuff of Andy Warhol dreams.

The couple was in many ways a union of opposites: Hayward a cool patrician beauty and a product of Old Hollywood, Hopper

a wayward teenager from Kansas turned renegade actor and aspiring artist with a taste for mescaline.

“A moving adrenaline pump,” Terry Southern once called him.

They met in 1961 in the Broadway production of Mandingo, marrying soon after against the vehement wishes of her father, studio mogul Leland Hayward (her mother was stage and screen icon Margaret Sullavan). Moving to California, the young duo found themselves absorbed “across every strata” of Hollywood society, as Hayward put it, and on into L.A.’s literary and counterculture scenes—from Joan Didion to Ed Ruscha, Jane Fonda to Tina Turner, Black Panthers to Hell’s Angels.

The marriage paralleled the ’60s: youthful idealism and creativity giving way to chaos, darkness, excess, and an unraveling as Hopper buckled under alcohol, psychedelic drugs, and the weight of his own artistic expectations. His prodigious success with Easy Rider in 1969 came too late to save his marriage.

And Brooke? She retreated to New York, where she wrote her no-holds-barred memoir, Haywire, and settled into a certain normalcy. Hopper, not so much.

(A marriage to Michelle Phillips of The Mamas & The Papas lasted all of eight days, and on a sprawling adobe estate he bought in Taos, New Mexico, he descended into a maelstrom of sex, drugs, guns, and paranoia.) But what stays with the reader is Hopper and Hayward’s glamorous Pop Art Camelot, and the friendships it forged among artists and writers, musicians and movie stars. No wonder Warhol was impressed. —heather hodson MAY—JUNE 2022 | AVENUE MAGAZINE

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RO OM O F O N E ’S ONNA AN ALL-FEMALE ARTS S ANCTUARY BLOSSOMS IN EAST HAMPTON

BY CELIA MCGEE

PHOTOGRAPHY BY MELANIE ACEVEDO

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WOM E N WORKING IT Onna House founder Lisa Perry, opposite, makes artists feel at home, including Almond Zigmund, previous spread, with part of her Dresses and Urns series, and Patricia Udell, above, seated in front of her Black Leaves on White.

need a room of their own. But sometimes, as Virginia Woolf herself might agree, they need some together. That is the idea behind Onna House, a new space founded by the designer, collector, author, social fixture, and political power broker Lisa Perry and dedicated to presenting— and appreciating work—by women artists and designers, which opens in East Hampton over Memorial Day weekend.

“Hi all,” trills Perry, bounding in from the black SUV that has deposited her at the modernist house she has spent the last year restoring, refurbishing, and giving a new name: onna means woman in Japanese. She has arrived to spend the morning with four of the more than 20 women painters, sculptors, textile, and mixed-media

artists, ceramicists, and furniture designers whose work will be featured in Onna House’s inaugural season. There are flowering branches to be arranged, books to be opened to just the right archival photographs of the house when it was built in 1962, and iconic pieces by women from the past to be looked at through the prism of Perry’s contemporary discoveries. That’s a mahogany bench by Charlotte Perriand nestled up against an Anni Albers rug in the elongated main room, offset slantwise by elegantly attenuated dining furniture from London-born Anna Karlin’s collection Subverting Domestic Familiarity.

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“It was freezing cold,” she says, and the Perrys had driven down from their estate in North Haven because the pandemic—and the Trump years—had given Lisa the idea for a retreat where she could break herself out of an unaccustomed solitude. “My house in North Haven is great,” she says, “but there was only so much solitude I could take being there just with Richard full-time.”

Spending more time in the Hamptons, she had also met Russ Steele, a well-connected art, antiques, and artifacts dealer who runs his operations out of the same address as East Hampton’s Red Horse Market. He encouraged her to look at

GATHERING PLACE The house was originally built in 1962 for Pop art collectors Ethel and Robert Scull, pictured above, at top, with their good friend Andy Warhol and his 36 Portraits of Ethel Scull on the wall behind them. Middle, like Lisa Perry, the Sculls were supporters of women’s rights, and used the house to host such important figures as Betty Friedan, here in 1970. Bottom, a barefoot Robert stands in the living room in 1964 in front of a work by Robert Rauschenberg. Opposite, artist Sabra Moon Elliot leans against a credenza commissioned by the Sculls for a wall now displaying a series of her glazed ceramic pieces.

JAMES ROSENQUIST, GEORGE SEGAL, ANDY WARHOL, AND ROBERT AND ETHEL SCULL: PHOTO BY JACK MITCHELL/GETTY IMAGES; BETTY FRIEDAN: TIM BOXER/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES; ROBERT SCULL: BOB ADELMAN ESTATE

interior designer Kelly Behun piled with bright rounds of dried wasabi peas playing off a platter of plump doughnut circles from Grindstone Donuts and Coffee in Sag Harbor—unexpected juxtapositions that anyone who knows Perry has come to expect. “Her eye is so clear and quick and decisive,” says the ceramics artist Toni Ross, better known to many perhaps as the Toni of Hamptons hotspot Nick & Toni’s, whose Stele 21, sculpted from stoneware, slip, and cotton thread, was an early Onna House acquisition. Because Perry places each piece in dialogue with others, says Bridgehampton artist Sabra Moon Elliot, she has “made the art into a symphony,” and the artists chosen for Onna House feel composed into a whole.

Onna House differs also from the traditional gallery model because Perry has designed it as a place where women can gather to exchange ideas about their work and lives, and where potential collectors will not just have a chance to see new work but meet the artists behind it. “We’re able to come together here,” says Elliot, “and talk about our work away from the isolation of our studios.”

“It’s recuperative, uplifting,” says the Constructivist-influenced artist Patricia Udell. “Lisa elevates us. She’s creating art with art. We call her our Peggy Guggenheim.”

Located on exclusive Georgica Road, Onna House will be open by appointment only. “It’s a place to be inspired and collaborate and build a sense of community,” says Perry, who worked on it with architect Christine Harper. “I’m a big believer in women having a place of their own because we think and see and feel differently—it’s a place to just be ourselves.”

Although her building blocks include boldface names like Kelly Klein, Behun, and Ross, others are just starting to be recognized, or receiving attention long overdue. Candace Hill-Montgomery segued from an early career as one of the few Black models walking the runway for Oscar de la Renta, Bill Blass, and Mollie Parnis into decades of high-school art teaching because the doors of commercial art galleries remained closed to her as a Black woman artist. Three of her statuesque cyanotypes and a woven artwork line the Onna House entrance, and this summer she will be an artist-in-residence at The Church in Sag Harbor.

The notion for her sanctuary came to Perry the moment she saw the original property, she says. So did a flood of childhood memories of a house not unlike the one before her when she and her husband, retired hedge funder Richard Perry, went with a real estate broker to look at a low-slung dwelling many other Hamptons buyers would have viewed as a teardown. Her mother had had a gallery in Chicago, and she grew up in a Japanese-inspired house by modernist George Frederick Keck in Highland Park, Illinois. Her father founded and ran the family textile company, Dana Mills. “I felt like I had come home.”

The property’s provenance wasn’t bad, either.

Originally designed for glamorous “taxi tycoon” Pop art collectors and Andy Warhol patrons Robert and Ethel Scull, the property seemed tailormade for a designer and collector whose lifestyle brand spent much of the past two decades referencing the Sixties at their most ebullient.

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JORDAN TIBERIO

ALL OF A PEACE The front of the house, above, restored by Lisa Perry. Artist Candace Hill-Montgomery, opposite, in the living room of Onna House with a rug designed by Anni Albers in 1928, a Cansado bench designed by Charlotte Perriand in the 1950s, 1960s chairs by Pierre Chapo, a contemporary vase by Roger Herman, and a bench from Anna Karlin’s Subverting Domestic Familiarity line against the wall beneath Mary Little’s unbleached cotton Greystone from 2019.

the wealth of art and design by women in the area, as did a much younger dealer, Tripoli Patterson, a former surfer who now runs a blue-chip gallery out of a converted warehouse in Wainscott.

Through them she found herself drawn to work by women with echoes of her childhood home, and markedly departing from the oversized, hardedged, color-saturated work by primarily male artists with which she and her husband had made their name as collectors.

This time around the work tended to be spare, tonal, and earthy, referencing nature and the cosmos, as well as women’s inner worlds and emotions, their private strengths and sources of resilience. A small, two-part Behun piece called Charm Table is meant to suggest nurturing and motherhood. Site-specific artist Almond Zigmund chose the kitchen for her series Dresses and Urns, mural-scale biomorphic compositions painted on mulberry paper pasted directly onto the walls.

Much of the work Perry favors now, too, has its roots in traditional textile arts associated with women—knitting, sewing, quilting, weaving, crocheting—that have a special resonance for her, since she first came to New York to study at FIT with a focus on textile technology and color theory.

In June the first show in the space for temporary exhibitions repurposed from the ample garage will be work by the Swiss jewelry and fashion designer Ligia Dias that includes dresses fabricated from paper on a monumental scale. Onna House, Perry says, “combines every one of my passions. My passion for art and design with my passion and longstanding support for women’s rights.” Her close friend Hillary Clinton has already visited.

It should come as no surprise that Perry is hoping to host artists’ salons and talks as well, and fundraisers for nonprofits and organizations targeted to the East End. The guesthouse seems to be begging for eventual artist residencies.

Only half-jokingly, she adds, “Next, Onna House South, in Florida,” where the Perrys have a house in Palm Beach, “and then, the south of France,” where they own a villa on the Côte d’Azur. Seated in the room off her office that she now calls the Tea Room, she gives a delighted wriggle in one of the two spherical 1950s rattan chairs there.

“I used to think these were by a male designer,” she says. “But I found out they were designed by a woman,” the French designer Janine Abraham.

“You can imagine how happy that made me.”

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BY JOSHUA DAVID STEIN

GUTTER CREDITS TKTKTKTKTKTKTKTK; ROMILLY LOCKYER/GETTY IMAGES; ILLUSTRATION: NAOMI OTSU

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LET THE HOI POLLOI HAVE CHAMONIX AND THE PEASANTS PELLEGRINO. WE’RE NEW YORK, HOME OF THE BEST SPAS IN THE WORLD AND IF YOU CAN RELAX HERE YOU CAN RELAX ANYWHERE.

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Take Me To the Waters An ambitious Italian spa arrives in New York Harbor

N

ew York is a city with few extant secrets. Every inch has been built up, crawled over, and occupied.

But for years, Governors Island, which occupies 172 acres in the Upper New York Bay, was terra incognita to most New Yorkers.

A military installation since 1776, and the home of Fort Jay since 1806, then passed through the armed forces from Army to Coast Guard, the island remained off limits to most civilians. Then in 2003, it was returned to the city of New York and her people, and the long and laborious process of adapting it for peacetime pursuits began. Today there’s an arts center, an annual Jazz Age lawn party, glamping, a high school, and vast swaths

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of green space meant for picnicking and strolls.

But perhaps the most peaceful element opened in March: the QC NY Spa. It is hard to imagine what soldiers, from grunts to the Coasties who were stationed in the barracks (now transformed into the Italian-based spa), would say if they saw hassled New Yorkers soaking in the two sleek azure pools set into what was once their mustering ground. It’s not hard, however, to imagine the wonder the soldiers would feel if they knew that their rooms would be turned into a labyrinthine and sprawling spa consisting of themed saunas, Vichy showers, foot baths, and relaxation rooms. Almost certainly an expletive would be used.

In some ways their surprise is no different than most of us might feel stumbling into the spa today. Firstly, taking the waters, a hallowed tradition among spa-goers since Roman times, isn’t exactly de rigueur in the Northeast. America’s spa culture is largely rooted in luxury hotels and focused on treatments rather than the nearly all-day affairs of soaking and lounging that characterize European baths. (Though this is changing too; see facing page.) Secondly, that QC Terme, a small Italian company, whose first baths were in that country’s Bagni di Bormio in the Italian Alps, was tapped to rehab three large barracks—Numbers 112, 113,

and 114—in an ambitious five-year $50-million plan in the last great stretch of open space in New York beggars belief. Thirdly, and most important, it is a wonder to find such endless relaxation within a stone’s throw of those skyscraper stalagmite shards of the Manhattan skyline.

When the weather warms, two pools, beset by lounge chairs, will steam in the chill morning air. (They are not yet open.) The baths aren’t quite thermal but they are full of various salutary minerals. (And anyway, New York State law requires pools to be chlorinated.) Steam rooms and saunas occupy the barracks rooms, some themed, as in a slightly Germanic pine-sauna or a “Sauna in the City” that features cutouts of skyscrapers.

(Today, only building 112 is open though the other two are slated to open shortly.) There is a rosemary-infused botanic steam room and a marbled Scottish-themed one. Relaxation rooms feature, among other frivolity, hanging cocoon chairs, harem-style pillows, and an “illusion” room that appears upside down. There’s a fireplace room, and one fitted out with a gramophone, and one meant to sit in and record one’s memories of the day. Spa-goers can travel an endless circuit of steaming, showering, and lounging for hours, made all the more relaxing as it unfolds in the shadow of the busiest metropolis in the world. qcny.com

ILLUSTRATION: NAOMI OTSU; POOL: COURTESY OF QC NY SPA

POOL PARTY: Wading at the QC NY spa

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Reading List

Home Sweat Home A visit to the Oleon House

Spa food for thought

Working out in loft-like spaces tucked into residential Manhattan neighborhoods has become a genre unto itself. But few are as intimate as Oleon House, a newly opened private wellness studio helmed by Carlos Leon and Menna Olvera. If the former name sounds familiar, that’s likely because Leon once upon a time dated Madonna and the two share a daughter, Lourdes (who happens to work out with her dad three times a week). But who among us hasn’t romanced a pop culture

icon? Should that define us 20 years later? In the interim, Leon, an actor and a personal trainer, has deepened his expertise to the point of profundity and joined forces with Olvera, a functional medicine coach and integrative health practitioner.

Oleon House is like a luxurious fitness mullet: business in the front, party in the back. A visit includes a very personal interview with both Leon and Olvera, followed by 30 minutes of intense work with Leon—think battle ropes, assault bikes, and medicine balls—and then 30 minutes of restorative yoga led by Olvera in the peaceful back room. First you sweat in a series of interval training periods, then you lollygag with various bolsters and accessories nestled around you. For those who value privacy and despise the untz-untz clubfeel of many gyms, Oleon House is your new fitness oasis. theoleonhouse.com

There are many books about health and a few about wellness but precious little has been written about the wellness complex itself. Fariha Róisín’s newest title, Who Is Wellness For? An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who It Leaves Behind, out in June, is therefore a much needed wake-up call.

Róisín, a Muslim queer Bangladeshi author, poet, and journalist, examines how Western wellness culture consistently appropriates global healing traditions. One chapter, for instance, is titled, “On White People Co-Opting Yoga.”

Easy reading it is not but important perhaps for the challenge it poses to us reposing. Ultimately Róisín doesn’t reject the Western wellness complex entirely but realizes that “in the question of who is wellness for, I’ve come to understand that wellness isn’t for anyone if it isn’t for everyone.” Who is Wellness For?, out

the night sky glowing above it, saunas (dry and wet), and lounge areas. There are massages too, but deep-tissue sportsoriented bodywork from a team of elite therapists. And after all those toxins have been released, there’s an inhouse restaurant with juices and cocktails as well as fancified riffs on borscht, a bonya favorite. abathhouse.com

stimuli cease and one regains one’s center?

At Vessel Floats, the new Brooklyn mindfulness-centered float studio, appeals to both newbies and old hands. The experience begins with a selection of tonics, including a botanical sleep aid and lucid dream tonic or a seven-mushroom immunity-enhancing elixir. Then you’ll be led to one of the four massive saltwater tanks for an hour of nude soaking. (The water is VERY filtered.)

If doctrinaire silence and void isn’t your thing—and yes, they can be terrifying—they also offer custom sound and light baths to ease you into the world of floating. vesselfloats.com

June 14, is published by Random House.

STUDIO: BILL MILES/COURTESY OF OLEON HOUSE; POOLS: COURTESY OF BATHHOUSE; HANDS: COURTESY OF VESSEL FLOATS

Soak the Rich AIRE ANCIENT BATHS Tribeca

When Aire opened in New York in 2012, it was the only high-end soak game in town.

(We love the Russian and Turkish baths in the East Village, but luxury they are not.) A series of lighted, heated pools ranging from 102 to 46 degrees Fahrenheit occupy the cavernous 16,000-squarefoot subterranean basement of a former textile factory on Franklin Street.

Hundreds of candles glow, relaxing music plays quietly, argan oil (and sandalwood and grapeseed) massages are offered in private massage rooms. A hammam-style steam room turns its glass

walls opaque. It’s equal parts monastic and sensual. For the particularly indulgent, there’s a wine bath filled with Ribera del Duero. Though public, Aire feels private since only 20 people are allowed in at a time for one-hour slots of highly concentrated relaxation. beaire.com BATHHOUSE Williamsburg

By far the most social and fun bath experience in the city, Bathhouse also perhaps hews most closely to the Roman baths of antiquity. Far from somber, quiet affairs, these were bustling, sweaty, and, at times, rowdy centers for

civic life. Bathhouse, which occupies a 10,000-squarefoot section of the former Dr. Brown’s Soda Factory in Williamsburg, is all those things. Says cofounder Jason Goodman, “We’re really giving the middle finger to that idea of performative relaxation.” A younger crowd, between 20 and 50, shvitz and kibitz in a circuit of three pools, a steam room with

VESSEL FLOATS Greenpoint

Sensory deprivation tanks have been soothing the minds and bodies of the slightly far-out since the 1970s. The trend peaked perhaps in the 1980s but has had a renaissance of late. After all, in these chaotic times who wouldn’t want to float in 1.5 tons of saltwater calibrated precisely to your skin’s temperature in complete darkness, until all external

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What the Flute?

A crop of new luxury spas has replaced the summer camps of yore in New York State PIAULE

back), and a “Thirsty” flag, A paradise of earth tones and the raising of which summons linen, Piaule is a 50-acre retreat afternoon cocktails to your in the bosom of the Catskills. private cabin.

Opened last year, the resort huttonbrickyards.com features 24 private cabins, each a study in natural modernism, KENOZA HALL a restaurant (helmed by the Above Kenoza Lake, the extremely talented Manhattan graceful manor Kenoza Hall émigré Ryan Tate) and, sits high atop a hill. Opened in naturally, a spa whose cedar 2020, the old house has turned sauna has a mountain view, modern inn, thanks to hipster whose steam room is made hoteliers Foster Supply Co. with local bluestone, and Even higher up the hill, next to whose treatments include an 10 newly opened one-and-two immersive sound bath (that bedroom bungalows, is the is, if the sounds of the woods Hemlock Spa, where treatments aren’t relaxing enough.) are inspired by 19th-century piaule.com naturopath Sebastian Kneipp. kenozahall.com HUTTON BRICKYARDS

With the arrival of (mostly) Brooklyn transplants, Kingston has gone from small industrial town on the Hudson River to small postindustrial town with a very nice spa and hotel. That would be Hutton Brickyards, a hotel and spa which now includes barrel saunas overlooking the water, body brushing treatments, back facials (like a facial, for your 62

TROUTBECK

The 250-acre Hudson Valley estate once hosted poets like Thoreau and civil rights leaders like MLK Jr. (not at the same time). Now the manor house and adjoining buildings have been reborn as a luxurious hotel with a massive, airy, woodsy spa named the Barns, where you can meditate, soak, sweat, and be massaged until

you find your own Thoreauvian poetic inspiration. troutbeck.com INNESS

Taavo Somer, the mind behind Freemans Sporting Club, bellwether of mid-aughts hipsterism, recently opened this members-only club and hotel in Accord. There’s a 12-room farm house and 28 cabins and a Mediterranean restaurant.

Until the spa opens in 2023, you’ll have to make do with the tennis, golf, swimming, and more. inness.co THE CHATWAL LODGE

By far the splashiest opening this year is The Chatwal Lodge, the upstate branch of the iconic luxury hotel brand, which opened in April. This one, an 11-room lodge, is done in high Adirondack-lodge style and full of summer camp amenities (kayaking, horseback riding, stargazing) and also nonsummer camp amenities like en suite massages from the pros at the nearby YO1 Wellness Center. thechatwallodge.com

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ou can’t walk into a wellness center without being subsumed by vaguely Eastern ambient music. Who makes it? And why? To find out, we asked Steve Gordon, who, with his brother David, runs Sequoia Records, by far the most prolific and popular spa music purveyors.

How would you describe your music?

You can use words that are music business words like ambient, relaxation music, meditation music, spa music. None of those would be wrong.

But you can also let go of those kinds of words that are used by music industry types and say it is intentional music. The musician is composing music with an intention to relax you, to soothe your mind, to put you at ease.

How long have you been doing this?

Believe it or not, we’re in our 40th year. We used to be session musicians for rock bands in Los Angeles. But it was so stressful. One day we went hiking in the woods, heard nature sounds, and started recording them. Those albums were very successful.

How has the spa music business changed?

Back before streaming, everyone who was doing this kind of music was an artist. Now, there’s a lot of people who do it more like a business. There’s a lot of artists who have names like Spa Music or Music for Spas. So it’s gotten pretty cynical. David and I, though, still approach it as an art form.

What’s your best seller?

Right now, Gratitude: Relaxing Native American Flute Music is hugely popular. It has super ambient keyboards behind the flute.

ILLUSTRATIONS: NAOMI OTSU

Upstate of Mind

Behind the spa soundtrack

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FOR THE BODY Unito shawl collar bathrobe. $440; frette.com FOR HIS FACE Caldera + Lab “The Good” multifunctional serum. $97; calderalab.com

Spa at Home Pamper in place

FOR THE HANDS Czech & Speake leather-bound manicure set in gray. $805; mrporter.com

FOR HER FACE Augustinus Bader The Rich Cream. $280; augustinusbader.com

PRODUCTS: COURTESY OF THE BRANDS; FACIAL: COURTESY ORA

FOR THE HOME Goodland wood-burning hot tub. $5,795; hellogoodland.com

On Pins and Needles A visit to Ora, the UES’s newest acupuncture spa

The Upper East Side doesn’t exactly seem to be a hotspot for traditional Chinese medicine. There are needles a-plenty up here but mostly they’re filled with Restylane and Botox. At Ora, however, a luxury acupuncture studio opened last December, the needles are tiny stainless steel narrow gauge pricks, which are inserted at your meridians, turning you into a relaxed collection of cells with

free-flowing qi. With its David Rockwell-designed interior—lots of white marble and gold—Ora is anything but a standard acupuncture joint. The front is a minimalist “tea & tonic” lounge featuring constipation solving pu-erh blends and tonics made with ginseng, coconut water, and deer antler essence. Ora offers teen acupuncture—a popular mother-and-daughter activity—as well as 30-minute “Chi’ll” sessions and more serious 50-minute “Essential” sessions. But, according to founder and CEO Kim Ross, Upper East Siders have been flocking in for the Ora Acupuncture Facial, available only at this location. (Another Ora opened in NoHo in 2020.) The 75-minute treatment combines both traditional Chinese medicine with facial cleansing, facial cupping, and lymphatic drainage. For many first-time acupunctees, “It’s great at targeting your inside out,” says Ross, “you can’t look good if you don’t feel good.” The idea of being needled can be daunting,

but Ora takes pains to be welcoming. Each of the five treatment rooms feel like cozy nests, with a heated bed at the center and a sense of humor.

“Say Chi!” admonishes one cheeky mirror, and— after 75 minutes of acupuncture—it’s hard not to obey. oraspace.com MAY—JUNE 2022 | AVENUE MAGAZINE

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To Well and Back A very long treatment at a very nice spa

SELFIE STEAM: Doing the work at The Well

Wake Up

It’s time to rethink the common wellness trope

BY LODRO RINZLER

Buddha statues and Buddhist imagery are omnipresent in spas and wellness centers. On one hand I think how nice that they’re putting out a statue of the Buddha. Maybe 64

someone will be inspired and want to study the dharma, or Buddhist teachings. On the other hand, I do not think that is the intention.

Often, the statue reads as another piece of furniture, as décor and not a representation of an actual person, someone who “woke up.” How would the owner feel about putting their own religious figures in a spa?

Would Catholics consider putting Jesus near the massage table? If not,

why do so with the Buddha. When you think about the actual journey of the Buddha, he was a prince who, some 2,500 years ago, left the comfort and luxury of his palace to seek enlightenment in the forests of India. He woke up by not chasing pleasure but accepting suffering.

Lodro Rinzler is the cofounder of MNDFL and the author, most recently, of Take Back Your Mind: Buddhist Advice For Anxious Times.

PHOTOS: GRANT LEGAN/COURTESY OF THE WELL; ILLUSTRATIONS: NAOMI OTSU

Most spa treatments last 60 minutes, 90 if you’re lucky. But at the Well, the luxe emporium of wellness that opened in 2019, treatment can last weeks, even months. Founded by Rebecca Parekh, former COO for Deepak Chopra; Kane Sarhan, former head of brand for Starwood Capital Group and 1 Hotels; and Sarrah Hallock, a former executive at Vitaminwater, the Well was originally a members-only club. For $375, 2,000 members could swan around the 18,000-square-foot space in the Flatiron, from meditation rooms with crystals embedded into the floor to steam rooms and saunas and lounges and a private fitness studio and a restaurant. Covid forced a change of plan, but the pause allowed the company to evolve further. The membership model has been dropped.

The Well has expanded to two new branches: one at the Mayflower Inn in Connecticut and another, a Hacienda AltaGracia in Costa Rica. And, back in New York, in a revamped and deepened wellness programming. The ne plus ultra of the latter is the Well Way, a health-focused treatment that lasts between four to six weeks.

Developed by the chief medical officer, Dr. Frank Lipman, author of tomes such as The New Health Rules and Better Sleep, Better You, the program includes a team of caregivers, from functional medicine specialists to health coaches.

Over a series of medical consultations, diagnostic tests, and coaching sessions, the Well way promises to address the hellish soup of acronyms that can make our insides miserable, from IBS to SIBO. Through a mixture of supplements and behavior and nutrition modifications, brain fog will be cleared, hormones will be rebalanced and your thyroid will go back to doing whatever a thyroid is meant to. The package, which also includes eight day passes and a hefty discount on other services, runs $1,425. the-well.com

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Hotel Motel Luxury Spa

WAITING ROOM: COURTESY OF BAMFORD SPA; LED MASK: COURTESY SPA DE LA MER; STAIRWAY: COURTESY OF LA MAISON VALMONT; POOL: COURTESY OF SHIBUI SPA

Travel without leaving the city with these four spas

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ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE Bamford Haybarn Spa

CALIFORNIA Spa de la Mer

It’s Dorset in DUMBO at the new Bamford Spa at 1 Brooklyn Hotel. The brand, developed by Carole Bamford, takes inspiration from the English countryside, here present in herby organic facials and massage treatments.

At the Baccarat Hotel, the first dedicated spa from the cult skin care line includes plenty of Miracle Broth facials, developed in California (not France) by the mercurial astrophysicist Dr. Max Huber.

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SWITZERLAND Maison Valmont

JAPAN Shibui Spa

On the third floor of the Hotel Carlyle, Valmont has created a Swiss oasis where one can avail themselves of facials using their famed L’Elixir des Glaciers as well as treatments like an Alpine Vitality massage, leaving you with enough energy to bound down the stairs to the lobby.

In one of the stranger juxtapositions in New York, in the basement of the Greenwich Hotel a 250-year-old farmhouse has been reassembled as part of the trailblazing Shibui Spa. One of the first and still the best onsen-style spas, Shibui offers traditional massage as well as onsen (or bath) rituals.

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ILLUSTRATION BY AVENUE; IMAGES: PEXELS, COURTESY OF NYPL

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Meet the Birkin Body W TWO OF NEW YORK’S BEST KNOWN PLASTIC SURGEONS PREVIEW THIS SEASON’S NEW LOOKS

BY HORACIO SILVA

hat to buy the woman who has everything?

Limited-edition handbags are so last season, as the ladies who shop will tell you.

If you believe the black-card chatter, the most in-demand luxury offering is not an It Bag, but a plastic-surgery procedure that gives patients what’s known as a “Birkin body.” At prices ranging from $35,000-$75,000, the services by Dr. Ryan Neinstein, the New York plastic surgeon responsible for the procedures, certainly cost as much as a top-of-the-line Hermès. And if the recent run on the city’s plastic surgeons is any indication, it won’t be long before waiting lists begin to rival those for a Himalaya, the astronomically priced unicorn of handbags.

“This is one of the busiest times of the year for us,” says Dr. Andrew Jacono, New York plastic surgeon to the one percent, pointing to the oversubscribed calendar of social events and charity benefits in the lead-up to Memorial Day. “It’s really the last hurrah if you’re going to do a procedure and be ready by the end of May. But this season, there is more of a rush than usual, and people are looking to make a more dramatic reentry.”

Neinstein concurs. “Most of our patients have not spent much time socializing the last two summers,” he says, “let alone in a bikini. And quite a few of them have had kids, and just want to be the best version of themselves when they reemerge on the scene. It’s almost like they got a second chance.”

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Neinstein, who shares a sprawling practice above Bergdorf Goodman with his wife, the celebrity fitness trainer Lauren Duhamel Neinstein, and has a nearby 6,000-square-foot recovery penthouse for patients overlooking Central Park, designed by Adam Cassino, offers neck-down body surgery specializing in athletic mommy makeovers.

“Whether my patients have had children or not, what they see in the mirror is not how they feel in their body,” he says. “The stretching of muscles and skin and stubborn fat deposits are not things that they can always fix with diet and exercise, so we get the call.”

Though he is known as the King of Lipo, Neinstein sniffs at the procedure’s old-school associations. “What I do is not just removing fat,” he explains. “Anyone can suck that out. We sculpt bodies.” He adds that in the last decade, liposuction was dismissed my many as being for overweight people trying to cheat their way to a guiltfree body, “but now the perception is changing, and it’s also very much seen as being for type-A folk who want to go that extra mile.” It doesn’t hurt that rival body-contouring procedures such as CoolSculpting have recently fallen from favor in the wake of several high-profile botched cases, most notably that of the former supermodel Linda Evangelista, who alleges that the fat-freezing procedure left her disfigured and unrecognizable.

In his efforts to help melt fat and tighten the skin, Neinstein enlists newfangled ultrasound devices such as Vaser and J-Plasma, to “help me see around corners and have a better understanding of how far we can push the tissue to be like an old shoelace being tightened again.” Every procedure is bespoke, so to speak, but he says that most of his patients want “natural-looking hills and valleys that help women to look longer, leaner, and more athletic.”

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And it’s not just women who are turning to surgery to rid themselves of persistent problem areas. Neinstein estimates that up to 30 percent of his patients are men, ranging from corporate bigwigs to professional athletes and even the occasional queen from RuPaul’s Drag Race. Henry Stimler, a 42-year-old finance executive who divides his time between New York and Miami, went to Neinstein last December after losing a lot of weight during Covid. “I used the time to get in fantastic shape,” Stimler says, adding that despite the daily training and intermittent fasting he still had persistent love handles and back fat.

“I’m a big believer that if something bothers you and you can do something to fix it, then do it. I don’t think there’s any shame in it. We’re all striving to achieve something, and for people like me it’s the last piece in the puzzle.”

When it comes to the faces of New York voluptuaries, Jacono, the beau monde plastic surgeon whose much-ballyhooed, decade-old “deepplane” technique involves hoisting the entire facial skin from the muscle level instead of pulling it back at a more superficial level, says that postCovid he has seen an uptick in two key areas.

“Without a doubt, eyelid surgery and necks,” Jacono says empathically. “The eyes can start to look tired as you age, and this is something women typically do in their early- to mid-40s.”

Among the most popular treatments he offers are a temporal lift, a go-to procedure for fine-tuning the brow and eye area, which costs $30,000, involves incisions being made into the hairline, and requires 10 days of healing time. “It’s a minimally invasive procedure that gives you a more energetic, fresh eye and brow arch without creating the dreaded ‘surprised’ look because it doesn’t lift the central portion of the brow.”

Meanwhile, an upper blepharoplasty ($20,000 and requiring 10 days of healing time and referred

ILLUSTRATION BY AVENUE; IMAGES: FLICKR, COURTESY OF NYPL

“WOMEN ARE INCREASINGLY OPTING FOR AN ISOLATED NECKLIFT TO HALT INCIPIENT CREPINESS AND LAXITY.”

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to by Jacono as the “conservation upper eyelid lift”) offers a more subtle East Coast take on the distorted Hollywood look that has ruled for decades. It involves modifying two fat pads in the upper eyelid: the central fat pad, above the center of the eyelid, and the nasal fat pad, close to the inner corner of the eye.

Though it’s a given that the neck, like the hands, is usually one of the first to go, until recently women had to rely on concealment.

As Jacono says, “There’s nowhere to hide in summer—you’re not going to be wearing a turtleneck.” He says that women are increasingly opting for an isolated necklift to halt incipient crepyness and laxity.

Addressing the deeper tissue by going under the platysma muscle and sliding it back into its original youthful position, the muscle is tightened on the sides of the neck and in the middle of the neck—an approach that requires three incisions, a small one-centimeter incision under the chin and one behind each ear. There are none in front of the ear so no scars are visible.

To underestimate the effect on wellness would be a mistake, says Neinstein, whose office features a neon artwork with the words “look good, feel good.” “When your sense of self is elevated, it makes you feel so much better about yourself and want to take better care of themselves, and you become a little more virtuous and better person overall. There’s no question that there are significant health and mental health benefits.”

It’s an opinion shared by Jacono. “Generally when people have plastic surgery,” he says, “it sparks so many positive emotions and makes them want to do different things, go out more frequently, spend time with more friends, you know, look for a new romantic partner or business opportunities. It really transcends just about every part of somebody’s life when they feel great about the way they look.”

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THE FALL OF THE

HOUSE OF

PHOENIX INSIDE THE TORRID LOVE TRIANGLE AND DR AMATIC DOWNFALL OF REHAB GURU MITCH ROSEN THAL

BY LIS A MARSH ILLUSTRATIONS BY PARTHENA KYRIAKIDES

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“THERE WERE ALWAY S PICTURES OF MITCH

AND ANNET TE TOGETHER,…

YOU COULDN ’T NOT

PUT IT TOGETHER.”

T

he legend of the phoenix is familiar. Considered both Greek and Egyptian in origin, the story is the same— the brilliant crimson-andgold bird bursts into flames, only to be resurrected, just as glorious, rising from the ashes of its own destruction.

One can understand why, then, the mythical bird is such an appealing one for Phoenix House, the famed rehabilitation center founded in 1967.

“We, who have destroyed our lives by substance addiction, are striving to do [sic] rise from the ashes of our defeat to take our rightful place in society,” reads its website. In terms of nonprofit drug-and-alcohol rehabilitation centers, it doesn’t get much bigger than Phoenix House. Supporters include Beyoncé, who founded a cosmetology training center within Phoenix House, and a long list of honorees from its annual Fashion Awards fundraiser, among them Tory Burch, Glenda Bailey, Andrew Rosen, Diane von Furstenberg, and more.

But the bird’s tale has taken on another meaning. In a stranger-than-fiction twist, rising like a phoenix is exactly what Phoenix House founder Dr. Mitchell S. Rosenthal is attempting to do with his own life after a long-simmering extramarital affair, now public knowledge in Upper East Side social circles, set him upon a path of ruin.

Dr. Rosenthal, known universally as Mitch, is movie-star handsome and astonishingly pedigreed. A psychiatrist at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Oakland, California, during the Vietnam War, Dr. Rosenthal founded Phoenix House while serving as deputy commissioner of New York City’s Addiction Services Agency. He has been in the

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business of addiction since. Now 85, he walks a fine line between being craggy and rugged and, at any rate, appears far more youthful than his years should allow for. In 1990, he married Sarah Simms, Ph.D., a psychotherapist. It was his second marriage. But Rosenthal’s wandering eye never blinked. “It’s an open secret,” said a longtime friend of all parties involved. “I’ve known about this for years.” This is a long-term affair that Rosenthal had with society powerhouse Annette Tapert, a cool, patrician blonde.

Tapert, 65, who has authored or coauthored more than 10 books, including memoirs of Slim Keith, Swifty Lazar, and Siegfried and Roy and a smattering of style-centric books, seemed to embody the glamour about which she wrote. Her first marriage to investment banker William Tapert dissolved when she met her second husband, Vanity Fair writer Jesse Kornbluth. During her affair with Rosenthal she was—and is currently— married to investor, racehorse owner, and breeder H. Joseph Allen, 80, who is based in Palm Beach.

Tapert is well known in society circles, where her charm and work ethic have taken her far.

She’s appeared as a talking head on such television shows as Million Dollar American Princesses (2015), E! Mysteries & Scandals (1998), and Charlie Rose (1995). And, added an old friend of Tapert, “She was great working a room.”

For Tapert, a longtime supporter of Phoenix House, it wasn’t out of the ordinary for her and Rosenthal to be seen in each other’s company, until rumors started swirling and it was. “It was not unusual that they were out together,” said the longtime friend. “There were always pictures of Mitch and Annette together,” but then, “You couldn’t not put it together.”

Complicating matters was the fact that Rosenthal’s paramour was a friend to Dr. Simms, Rosenthal’s wife, who seemed increasingly left out in the cold.

“It’s not a pretty story,” added the longtime friend, but “Annette is staying with Joe and Sarah is on her own.”

In fact, Tapert’s old friend said, the affair was never seen as a threat her marriage. “She was never not with Joe Allen.”

Though an open secret among some, it was closed perhaps to the most concerned parties.

Simms only learned about the affair after the fact.

(It is said that H. Joseph Allen is still unaware.)

But now Simms is not staying silent.

“It was a long time before I found out about them,” Simms told Avenue. “Annette was my friend—we were all friends.”

But among the gilded traveling circuit, philandering isn’t exactly unheard of. (However, it is usually carried off with a bit more discretion.)

No, the real tea was that not only had Rosenthal stepped out on Simms with Tapert but that he, perhaps the best-known of all addiction experts and the founder of one of the most successful rehabilitation facilities in America, had developed a drinking problem in the aftermath of the affair that lead to his stepping away from Phoenix House in 2015. In terms of downfalls, you couldn’t ask for a more perfect crater.

Rosenthal, naturally, disputes this. Though he admitted to Avenue he had had a drinking problem, he says it was unrelated to his affair. “I did not start drinking because of this,” he says.

“About one and a half years ago, I felt I was drinking too much. I dealt with it and that’s the end of it.” He added, “It seems to me not to be as juicy as it sounds.”

Perhaps not. But his quick departure from Phoenix House—and subsequent scrubbing from their press materials—in order to found the much smaller and less prestigious Rosenthal Center for Addiction Studies does seem puzzling at best. According to the organization’s 2019 finance report, Rosenthal is the center’s only paid employee, and it boasts a questionable board of directors—which includes not only Tapert but “electroceutical” entrepreneur Chip Fisher and Douglas Schoen, perhaps best known as a lobbyist for Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk.

It’s a far cry from Rosenthal at Phoenix House’s prime. As the addiction center’s founder and public spokesperson, Rosenthal was its smiling and charming face. He seemed always to be out networking, socializing and always looking for donations. And—since who doesn’t want to support second chances—he was soon pressing flesh with fashion industry leaders like Tommy Hilfiger, Vera Wang, and Diane von Furstenberg, as well as actress Mary Steenburgen and local leaders Andrew Cuomo, Michael Bloomberg, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, and more. But his matinee smile irked some longtime Rosenthal watchers.

“He turned on the charm and made a success of himself, but he always felt a little off to me,” says one media exec who has known Rosenthal since his first marriage. “I don’t trust him. I ran into him all the time—he goes to a lot of parties.”

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This media executive also knew Rosenthal’s first wife, author and interior design expert Ellen May, now Ellen May Wright. “Years ago, we played tennis with them,” the exec says. “We heard he screwed around on her.” After they divorced, “She was too much of a lady to blast him and she remarried very quickly.”

Rosenthal and Tapert met after his first marriage ended. The very social Rosenthal loved organizing dinner parties for friends, mainly couples, at the iconic East Side Taiwanese restaurant Pig Heaven. These salon-like evenings were called “Pig Dinners,” the old friend explained, and the guest list included a collection of boldfaced names at the time like Judge Kimba Wood, Time’s Michael Kramer, and Vanity Fair’s Jesse Kornbluth and his wife, Annette Tapert.

At that time, Rosenthal’s charm and charisma seemed to know no bounds. “In New York City, Mitch was an important figure,” Simms said. “He was divorced for a long time and he’s very… exceptionally good-looking.”

Rosenthal, then 54, and Simms, then 33, married in 1990 and became a team in every way. He raised both money and the profile of Phoenix House while Simms was earning her Ph.D., and afterward she became an adolescent family therapist, seeing clients at Phoenix House and in private practice. They were the benign king and queen of the demimonde. Unfortunately, after ten years of marriage, Simms became ill with myalgic encephalomyelitis, otherwise known as chronic fatigue syndrome. The disease transformed her from a vital, vibrant, and active woman to one whose activity is dictated by the level of fatigue she feels each day. “When I collapse into bed, the fatigue actually hurts,” Simms wrote for Thrive Global in

2018. “It has completely upended my life.” In more ways than one. According to Tapert’s old friend, Rosenthal’s affair began during Simms’s health crisis. “When he started to take care of her because she couldn’t take care of herself, they’re no longer partners in all respects.” The friend added: “There are couples who are teams with a real marriage and then there are just couples.”

Simms tells a slightly different story. “It was not one thing—not Annette, not the alcohol—it was a slow unraveling, and all of the things pulled us apart. We’re not divorced, but we live separate, independent lives,” she said, adding, “but there is still”—she paused—“consideration between us...

It’s an unusual arrangement as it exists,” she continued, “This is not a War of the Roses situation.

We can cohabitate because it’s a big enough apartment that we can maintain privacy.” But she added, “We’re not getting back together—it’s not going to happen.” In fact, Simms, who admits she has a profile on Bumble, says “I put myself on it because a friend said, you’re 65, what are you waiting for?”

Though her rift with Dr. Rosenthal might be permanent, Dr. Simms has reached a détente with Tapert, who couldn’t be reached for comment.

Simms says, “We made peace.”

All this leaves Rosenthal smoldering out in the cold. But don’t mourn yet. As he well knows, belief is an integral part of rehabilitation, and Dr. Rosenthal clings to a mixture of faith and, perhaps, delusion. According to him, he is still happily married. Rosenthal insists things with Simms are “fine.” “We are together,” he told Avenue. “We do a lot of things separately, but we live together.” And it is, perhaps, through that gap, between reality and myth, that Dr. Rosenthal hopes to reemerge, glorious once again.

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LIVING

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Cookbook shelves are crammed with healthy guides but few are written by an author as qualified as Gary Deng, MD, PhD, medical director of integrative medicine at the famed Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Here, in an exclusive excerpt from his forthcoming book, The Wellness Principles: Cooking for a Healthy Life, Deng shares his favorite recipes.

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LUKE ALBERT/REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF PHAIDON. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Nut Butter Multigrain Toast with Poached Fruits

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Aioli Shrimp with Walnuts

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When I started out in oncology, the field was focused on attacking tumor cells. But over the past 20 years, we’ve learned to think of cancer as part of an ecosystem, and that ecosystem is the body. Simply put, if you have a healthy lifestyle, your ecosystem is more hostile to cancer cells and to illness in general. I think Covid-19 really showed that to us. People with underlying conditions suffered much more than those with a healthy and functioning ecosystem. Diet is, of course, a big part of that.

But what I found was that after I explained the basic principles of a healthy diet—less sugar, less butter, less salt, less meat, more plants— my patients would say, “Great. But I need something specific. I need recipes.”

I didn’t pick up cooking until about ten years ago. Before that I was too busy with my residencies and studying for my MD, PhD. But once I did start, I found my knowledge of molecular biology extremely helpful. Cooking is just another form of chemistry. These recipes represent not just years of experimenting in the kitchen but also draw on my work as a doctor as well. They find ways to be delicious that don’t harm the body. They are life-affirming and, because studies show that 40–60 percent of all cancers are related to lifestyle choices and 15–30 percent are linked to diet, they can literally be lifesaving too.

Nut Butter Multigrain Toast with Poached Fruits Toast is a staple breakfast food, but regular white bread toast with butter and jam is high in simple carbohydrates and saturated fat. I use multigrain to replace white bread, nut butter to replace cow’s milk butter, and poached fruit to replace jam or jelly. The carbohydrates in white bread are mainly from white flour, but multigrain bread includes other grains and seeds, so it has more fiber, B vitamins, vitamin E, and minerals. Nut butter has more unsaturated fat than butter and is dairy-free. I like sunflower seed butter for its distinct taste, but use your favorite unsweetened nut butter. Finally, the quick-poached fruit I make here is sweetened by cooking it in its own juices, so it doesn’t have any added sugar as both jam and jelly do.

Serves: 4 Ingredients • 4 medium apples, pears, peaches, or plums (or a combination), unpeeled and cut into slices 1 inch (1.25 cm) thick • 4 slices multigrain or whole wheat bread • 4 tablespoons unsweetened nut or seed butter, such as sunflower seed butter, almond butter, or peanut butter Instructions In a medium saucepan, combine the sliced fruit with enough water to just barely cover the fruit. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer. Cover and cook until the fruit is tender and translucent, 7–10 minutes, depending on the fruit you’ve chosen. Drain off any excess water.

Toast the bread to your desired doneness.

Spread the nut butter on the toast, top with the poached fruit slices, and serve.

Aioli Shrimp with Walnuts Shrimp (prawns) are a good source of marine protein, and walnuts are rich in plant protein and plant oil. This combination serves as a healthy protein dish that pairs well with light-tasting vegetables and carbohydrates. You may be aware that shrimp is high in cholesterol, but there is “bad” cholesterol (LDL, low-density lipoprotein), which can cause damage to the body, and “good” cholesterol (HDL, high-density lipoprotein), which helps the body remove the bad cholesterol. Shrimp in moderate amounts was found to actually raise the levels of good cholesterol (HDL) more than the bad cholesterol (LDL). Look for shrimp with translucent and firm flesh, which indicates freshness. It is easy to overcook shrimp, which will make them hard and dry. Shrimp that are fresh and properly cooked should feel almost crunchy when you eat them. In the dish, I prefer the healthier homemade aioli over mayonnaise because it uses olive oil. The milk powder adds creaminess to the dressing, but you can omit it if you don’t have it.

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LIVING

Ingredients For dairy-free, omit the milk powder • 16 shrimp, peeled and deveined • 1 teaspoon kosher (flaked) salt • 1 teaspoon cornstarch • Pinch of freshly ground white pepper or black pepper • ¼ cup (2 fl oz/60 ml) olive oil • 1 cup (150 g) walnuts • 2 tablespoons honey • 2 scallions, cut into 1-inch (2.5-cm) lengths • 2 tablespoons aioli or mayonnaise • 1 teaspoon milk powder (optional) • 2 tablespoons chopped parsley Instructions In a medium bowl, combine the shrimp, salt, cornstarch, and pepper. Mix well to coat each shrimp.

In a large frying pan, heat the olive oil over medium-low heat. Add the walnuts and fry until lightly browned, stirring occasionally, about 2 minutes. Transfer the walnuts to a bowl, add the honey, and toss to coat the walnuts.

Increase the heat under the frying pan to medium. Add the shrimp and scallion (spring onion) segments to the oil remaining in the pan. Cook, stirring occasionally, until opaque and cooked through, about 3 minutes. Remove to a serving bowl.

Add the aioli to the bowl and sprinkle with the milk powder (if using). Toss to mix well. Add the walnuts and toss again. Sprinkle with the parsley.

Kiwi and Honeydew Sorbet with Cashew Milk I typically look for dessert options other than ice cream, because of its cold temperature and high sugar content. Cold desserts chill the stomach, impeding digestive functions when you need them the most, after a meal. On those occasions when you really do want a cold dessert, eat this low-sugar, dairy-free fruit sorbet.

You can replace the kiwi and melon with almost any other fruits, such as mangoes, raspberries, or peaches. You can also use frozen fruits.

Serves: 4 Ingredients • 4 kiwifruits, peeled and cut in half • 1 lb (450 g) honeydew melon, peeled and cut into ½-inch (1.25-cm) pieces • 1 tablespoon honey • 4 tablespoons unsweetened cashew milk • 4 dashes of triple sec liqueur (optional) Instructions Arrange the fruit chunks on a baking sheet and freeze until solid, at least 1 hour.

Meanwhile, chill a blender jar or the bowl of a food processor. (If you have a blender with a very narrow base, the food processor may be a better option here.)

Put the frozen fruits and honey in the chilled blender or food processor. Pulse until the fruit is in tiny crystals and is light and fluffy.

Divide among four glasses. Drizzle 1 tablespoon of cashew milk and a dash of triple sec (if using) over each serving.

Excerpted from The Wellness Principles: Cooking for a Healthy Life © 2022 by Gary Deng, MD, PhD. Reproduced by permission of Phaidon. All rights reserved.

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LUKE ALBERT/REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF PHAIDON. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Kiwi and Honeydew Sorbet with Cashew Milk

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NOTORIOUS NEW YORKERS

Polly Amorous

“N

o one starts out to be a whore,” the notorious madam Polly Adler once said. No one starts out to be a madam either, let alone the most successful and glamorous one of P roh ibi t ion - era New York. But that’s exactly where Adler ended up during her reign: sitting atop the glittering swell of New York City’s nightlife by catering to its seedy underbelly.

Adler was born, one of nine siblings, into a devout, tight-knit Jewish community at the turn of the century in what is now Belarus. Her father, impoverished, devised a way to send his children to America one at a time. At 13, Adler was the first to go.

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She soon settled with family friends in Massachusetts, but the respite was short-lived. Despite a steady job at a paper factory and classes at night school, Adler was too ambitious to stay put.

It didn’t help that her hosts were dreadfully cold to her. So she decamped to Brooklyn, staying with family. This time it was a corset factory in which she worked, making a paltry $5 a week. The hours were long, and the exhausted Adler often fell asleep at night school. Ultimately, Adler quit her studies, instead finding freedom in the dance halls of Manhattan and the amusements of Coney Island.

Her conservative relatives tolerated it, until a young Polly spent a full night out with the not-yetfamous Broadway star Harry Richman. At only 19 years old, Adler was out on her own, with nothing but her own wits to ensure her safety.

POLLY ADLER COLLECTION/COURTESY OF ELEANOR VERA

During the Jazz Age, drugs, sex, and alcohol could always be found at legendary madam Polly Adler’s “house,” Aria Darcella reports.

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“Polly lived in a time of tremendous hypocrisy...men were far more willing to pay women for access to their bodies than for their minds,” Debby Applegate, author of Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, explains. “She was one of millions of women who found themselves getting the short end of the social stick, who decided, ‘To hell with this, I’m going to take care of myself.’”

Adler moved to Manhattan, living in a luxurious Upper West Side apartment with an aspiring singer. “It was a sweet story the way she told it, but not a very likely one,” writes Applegate. “The details of how [Adler] found herself living with a showgirl in a deluxe apartment on Riverside Drive didn’t add up. How an unemployed singer and an out-of-work factory worker managed to pay the rent on a nine-room apartment...she never even tried to explain.”

Murky details aside, Adler’s entrée into the underworld was complete by 1920, when she was running her first brothel, working for an amateur “wise guy” named Nick Montana. The timing was auspicious. It was the same year Prohibition was passed, a boom for enterprising criminal elements.

“If I had all of history to choose from, I could hardly have picked a better age in which to be a madam,” she would later write. While Montana handled the money and rent on an apartment in Morningside Heights, Adler procured the girls and kept the place running. With her acquisitive eye and keen business sense, it wasn’t long before she started averaging $100 a week.

Naturally, as her involvement with the underworld increased, so too did her brushes with the law. In December of that year, Adler was arrested for the first time when a pair of vice squad officers burst into the apartment and took her and another girl down to the station. Montana bailed her out, got her a lawyer, and Adler managed to evade charges. Nevertheless, it proved a harrowing experience. More pressingly, she had been outed to her neighbors. But the experience taught Adler an important lesson: now she knew to grease the palms of dirty cops, and developed what Applegate calls a “sixth sense for danger” in avoiding future raids.

Adler was becoming a pro. She learned to keep extremely detailed notes about her clients and their preferences; she weeded out undercover cops; and she started keeping her brothel open 24 hours a day. “She was really good at all the bourgeois virtues: she could save money, she could do accounting. She knew how to run a home in a way that was homey and warm,” explains Applegate.

“But more importantly, she was good at her business in a business filled with people who are not good at running businesses.”

Soon Adler’s brothel was a favorite for a who’s who of the underworld. Gangsters like Arnold “the Brain” Rothstein, Lucky Luciano, and Bugsy Siegel, among others, became regulars at her house. But her fans weren’t only from the shadowy reaches of the mafia. Among her famous clients were vaudevillian-turned-gossip columnist Walter Winchell, industrialist Jock Whitney, and humorist Bob Benchley, usually with fellow Algonquin Round Table member Dorothy Parker, who would chat with Polly while the men were in flagrante delicto.

Though never substantiated, there were rumors

WORKING GIRLS Above: Manhattan madam Polly Adler, right, partying with some of the call girls she employed.

Opposite: Adler on holiday in Palm Beach in 1930 with another one of her call girls.

ADLER’S BROTHEL WAS A FAVORITE FOR A WHO’S WHO OF THE UNDERWORLD INCLUDING ARNOLD “THE BRAIN” ROTHSTEIN, LUCKY LUCIANO, AND BUGSY SIEGEL, AMONG OTHERS.

she was visited by a Vanderbilt, a Rockefeller, and even then-governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

“They would just stop by for a nightcap,” says Applegate of Adler’s more prestigious guests. “Or they would stop by because they could party there without people peering into their business unlike at the Stork Club or the more fancy nightclubs.”

Part of the draw was Adler herself—she was lively, entertaining company. Oscar-winning songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen described her as “warm and funny, smart and gutsy and fun to be around.”

As the money rolled in, Adler invested in her own brothels, setting up shop in upscale buildings across the city, decorating them with themed rooms (like a bar inspired by King Tut’s tomb), and providing the absolute best hooch and food available. She also slowly invested back in herself, buying finer clothing and springing for nice haircuts and manicures.

By 1927, she was pulling in an estimated $60,000 annually—about $900,000 today. Her success was strong enough to withstand the initial blow of the stock market crash. In fact, by 1930 so many women were coming to her for work that she was turning away upward of 40 for every one she hired.

But as New York vowed to clean itself up, the authorities began to push Adler out. Though under Mayor Jimmy Walker Adler had been able to operate her business by paying off cops and politicians, the end of Tammany Hall meant the end of Adler’s golden era. In 1931 she was dragged into the Seabury Commission, an investigation into corruption in the city. And in 1933, under the administration of the new mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, Adler spent 24 days in jail.

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TRICKS OF THE TRADE Clockwise from above: 201 West 54th street, one of Adler’s main brothel locations from 1924 to 1934; Adler’s business card, a discrete play on her name; Adler exiting a police van after being arrested during a raid.

name was splashed in the papers each time, found it difficult to get straight work. She was a branded woman. By 1945, she shuttered her doors in New York for good and moved to California.

Out West she had a new lease on life. After finally graduating high school at the age of 45, Adler worked with a ghostwriter on a new venture: her memoir. After being rejected by nearly all New York’s male publishers, who were fearful it would tarnish their reputations, literary agent Ann Watkins and publisher Mary Roberts Rinehart saw it for the gold mine it was. They were right. When the book, A House Is Not a Home, was finally published in 1953 it was an instant hit, selling two million copies. It even spawned a film adaptation with Shelley Winters as Adler. Unfortunately, Adler didn’t live long enough to see it.

She died of lung cancer in Los Angeles at the age of 62 in 1962.

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BUILDING: MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK; CARD: POLLY ADLER COLLECTION/COURTESY OF ELEANOR VERA; ADLER: NY DAILY NEWS ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

NOTORIOUS NEW YORKERS

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SCARLET LETTERS Adler posing with copies of her best-selling memoir, A House Is Not a Home, in 1953.

Despite her infamy in New York, the news of Adler’s death only garnered three sentences in the New York Times. Then, as much as now, outlaw women were rarely lionized into the pop-culture antiheros men of their age were. But Adler’s passing might have gone unnoted for other reasons too, namely that it complicates our romanticized notions of that Jazz Age. “We think of that time as a time of glamorous nonstop parties. But somebody had to do the work,” Applegate says. “Looking at the mechanics behind the American dream, you can see how often the people who are making the world glamorous are actually poor young women being paid to provide somebody else’s pleasure, and how often these parties are a cover for shenanigans that we don’t like to look at.” It is a thought that somewhat dulls the glitter of the Gatsby era, but it was the life of one of its most colorful characters.

“YOU CAN SEE HOW OFTEN THE PEOPLE WHO ARE MAKING THE WORLD GLAMOROUS ARE ACTUALLY POOR YOUNG WOMEN BEING PAID TO PROVIDE SOMEBODY ELSE’S PLEASURE.”

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ON THE

Eva Chen and Laura Harrier

FRIENDS AT BENEFITS

The Fifteen Percent Pledge held its inaugural benefit gala at the New York Public Library.

Iman

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Sherri Brewer and Aurora James

Jameel Mohammed and Anifa Mvuemba

PHOTOS BY ARTURO HOLMES/GETTY IMAGES

Dapper Dan

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Michael Espiritu, Wilhelmina Gerken, Carrie Fowle, Grace Corton, Laura Rivera-Ayala, Yasmin Naghash, and Prince Rudolf Melikoff Alessia Fendi and Wes Gordon

FRICK N’ GORGEOUS

PHOTOS BY GUTTER BFA CREDITS TKTKTKTKTKTKTKTK;

The Frick held its annual Young Fellows Ball at its new temporary location on Madison Avenue.

Zión Moreno and Savannah Smith

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David Alexander Jenkins and Allison Ecung

SPRING AVENUE MAGAZINE Indré Rockefeller and2020 Sarah| Hoover

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Barbara Tober

Carrie W. Hinrichs, Ed Lewis, Carolyn Wright-Lewis, Darren Walker, and Jonathan Stafford

FANCY FEET

The School of American Ballet hosted its annual Winter Ball at the David H. Koch Theater.

Sophie Sumner and Evan Mock

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Roze Traore

Will and Allie Kopelman

SUMNER, MOCK, KARGMAN, AND KOPELMAN: NINA WESTERVELT; ALL OTHERS: GETTY IMAGES

Jill and Harry Kargman

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Diana Taylor and Michael Bloomberg

Martha Stewart

ARTS AND MINDS

PHOTOS BY BFA

Corey Damen Jenkins and Nicole Gemma

First Lastname Barbara Tober and First Lastname

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The Winter Show held its 68th annual opening night party.

Proceeds from the event went to East Side House Settlement.

Victor de Souza, Adison Smith, and Silas Smith

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SOCIAL SKILLS

Fortune Telling Meet the Major Arcana from the Avenue Tarot Set

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ILLUSTRATIONS BY AMANDA BAEZA

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SCAN FOR FULL LISTING

Gary R. DePersia Licensed A s sociate Real Es t ate Broker m 516.380.0538 | gdp@corcor an.com

12 Acre North Fork Soundfront Like You’re on Vacation Everyday North Fork | East Marion. You remember the feeling. You’re on holiday on the coast of some Caribbean isle or on the cliff of a European town overlooking the Mediterranean. Each morning when your head leaves the pillow you know you are on vacation with broad expanses of water dotted with boats and vistas of other shores. Much closer to home, only 100 miles from Manhattan, you can recreate that feeling each and every day when you develop this very private, nearly 12 acre waterfront, meadow-like parcel composed of two 5.7 acres lots spanning 350’ along the North Fork’s Long Island Sound. With permits pending, a savvy buyer would save hundreds of thousands of dollars and months of waiting to begin construction of a significant house, waterside pool, tennis court and even a guest house for those who would undoubtedly flock to help you enjoy your grand, new estate. The low, but stable bluff, provides easy access down a gentle pebbled path to the beach from where you’ll enjoy an abundance of aquatic activities while conversation and laughter will resound around the inevitable nighttime beach fires. The property affords ample opportunity to create your own vineyard, apple orchard or a field of wildflowers through which your driveway will meander right to your front door. Only a few miles from both the ferries of Greenport and Orient Point, this well positioned property provides easy access to everything that has made the North Fork the new sought after destination. At night, go into town for dinner at one of the waterfront restaurants overlooking Shelter Island or head to one of the many vineyards for a wine tasting.

But on clear evenings, eat early as you might want to get back for some of the most beautiful sunsets anywhere, as the sun seems to disappear somewhere into the Sound leaving the horizon a purplish haze.

Exclusive. $7.65M WEB# 888798 | Lot 1 $3.825M WEB# 888799 | Lot 2 $3.825M WEB# 888847 Real estate agents affiliated with The Corcoran Group are independent contractors and are not employees of The Corcoran Group. Equal Housing Opportunity. The Corcoran Group is a licensed real estate broker located at 660 Madison Ave, N Y, N Y 10065. All listing phone numbers indicate listing agent direct line unless otherwise noted.

All information furnished regarding property for sale or rent or regarding financing is from sources deemed reliable, but Corcoran makes no warranty or representation as to the accuracy thereof. All property information is presented subject to errors, omissions, price changes, changed property conditions, and withdrawal of the property from the market, without notice. All dimensions provided are approximate. To obtain exact dimensions, Corcoran advises you to hire a qualified architect or engineer.

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