D AV I D PAT R I C K C O L U M B I A were bound in their minds to find one. Now. During our lifetime. It did not sound realistic, but it was hopeful. In the ensuing years of this annual dinner, the news has become progressively more assured in a way that it wasn’t at the beginning. They were already talking about drugs that could halt the progress of the disease. This evening, they were talking about discoveries that were raising the hopes and realities. Ronald Lauder was introduced by Leonard, who praised his younger brother’s philanthropy as well as his ambassadorial career. They are without question the two most interesting brothers in New York today because of their mother: Estée Lauder, a petite, diminutive woman who, driven with ambition and creative imagination (and
with a lot of help from her husband), made an empire. The two boys (who inherited it from their mother, who lived a long life) have made even more of it. I was thinking about this as I watched the exchange between the two brothers at the podium. I was thinking how, on some level that was very real, Estée would have been deeply proud of the boys she brought up. I’m sure she had help in raising them as she was a working mother, but their own conduct reflects a very strong, nurturing mother. A kind of epigenetic detail. I’ve never met Ronald although I’m well aware of his cultural work— especially with the Neue Galerie New York, which he created in the old William Starr Miller mansion on East 86th Street and Fifth Avenue. (This is
the building where the last Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt lived out her years after the Gilded Age.) I might have been introduced to him at some public occasion because I’ve been in his presence a number of times at these events, but I don’t recall. So my only impression of him had been physical. He’s a tall, solid-figured man, always impeccably dressed in a well-tailored suit and tie. There is a quiet, serious expression in his natural repose and demeanor. But I had no sense of his personality. That all changed at the podium in giving his acceptance speech. He told the nearly 300 guests: “Leonard and I have been involved together in many causes over the years. But this cause, this effort, means more to me than
almost anything else.” And then he continued to discuss how it came about, what he had learned, and what we can look forward to. This was done in a style that belied his serious countenance. He’s a man of a dry but jubilant wit. Again, I thought of his mother, whom I have been told doted on him as a young boy. It shows. He has a light but ironic sense of humor with a good dash of the “Noo Yawker” in him. He’s fun to listen to at times, and funny. He’s a man, like his older brother, with a serious sense of purpose as well as the joy of pursuing it. I believed him. They’re going to find that answer. Ronald told his audience of potential donors that every dollar goes entirely to the research. Everything else about the now major project (e.g.,
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