“For a person of such total privilege he was incredibly zealous, driven, and completely enmeshed in all of the relevant issues. He could have been lying on a beach somewhere, but he wasn’t.” In later years he also founded a radio station holding company, Commodore Media. He and Amanda were divorced in 1972. “They married very young,” explained Bartle Bull, who introduced them. “You have to understand.” Amanda went on to lead the New York City Planning Commission and is now a principal at Bloomberg. In 1977, Carter Burden married Susan Lombaer, a psychotherapist. Their life was a happy one in New York. In town, one occasionally spied Carter lunching near his Rockefeller Center office at The Sea Grill, or dining with Susan and
friends at Girasole, a friendly neighborhood joint just a couple of blocks east of their splendid pad. On such occasions he was always friendly, witty and very bright. They also enjoyed Southampton and frequent travels. Once, outside the Uffizi Museum in Florence he gazed at her walking ahead of him and said admiringly to an old teacher, “Can you believe how beautiful my wife is?” Carter Burden was only 54 when he died, the same age, remarkably, as his mother, and of the same heart ailment. His funeral took place at the Church of Saint Ignatius Loyola and featured
selections from Faure’s Requiem, chosen by his close friend and collaborator, Mark Hampton, whose own life was to end too early a few years later. Carter’s son, Carter III, spoke affectionately of his father that day, and he and his sister Belle remain active in New York. One is left to wonder what this protean player on the landscape of New York’s “Fun City era” in the 1960s and 1970s would be doing were he still here today, but his legacy lives on in multiple dimensions, prominent among which is the finest collection of 20th century American literature yet assembled. u APRIL 2015 77