D AV I D PAT R I C K C O L U M B I A He shares his homes with his longtime partner, James Costos, who is currently president Barack Obama’s ambassador to Spain (which is where Michael spends at least a week a month or whenever he can tear himself away from his very busy business). “Spain is the mother ship,” he says, alluding to California’s history as a Spanish colonial outpost. “Every third-grade art class in the state was assigned to make mission houses out of sugar cubes. It was part of the curriculum.” Meanwhile, back in Madrid, Michael redid the United States embassy, which had not been changed since the days when Angier Duke was president Lyndon Johnson’s ambassador to Madrid in the mid-1960s. All of the Smith and Costos residences—Holmby Hills,
Rancho Mirage, Manhattan, and now Madrid—are in this new book along with several private residences that Michael has done for clients both here and in Europe. Happily for the design-minded who buy this book, it also contains an index of many of Smith’s resources both here in New York and Los Angeles as well as in Europe. The next day, I went to lunch at Swifty’s with Susan Cheever, the author of the biographies E. E. Cummings: A Life, American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work (which is about those famous American authors, all of whom lived in and around Concord, Massachusett,s in the mid-
opened the book. Nevertheless, since we were longtime “friends,” I decided to at least to take a look so I wouldn’t be wasting her time. After I finished the intro, I was only sorry that I had a lunch date because I wanted to continue on this fascinating history of our relationship to booze, the history of our relationship (going back to the pilgrims), and the part that drinking plays—and has always played—in American lives and American history. It’s not a sad or tortured book but instead a compelling story about U.S. (us). That evening, I started out early at the shop of Liz O’Brien, who has an atelier in fields of collecting in the decorative arts at 306 East 62nd Street between First and Second avenues. She was hosting an opening of a collection
19th century), and My Name is Bill: Bill Wilson: His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous. She has also written five novels and four memoirs, including the first one (which I have in my library) called Home Before Dark. Cheever comes from a writer’s family, including her father John Cheever. She also teaches writing at the New School. Cheever has a brand new book out called Drinking in America: Our Secret History. She’s a neighbor of mine, living a block away on East End Avenue. We also share several mutual friends and run into each other not infrequently while walking our dogs, or on our way to and from the local Gristede’s. That morning, anticipating our luncheon, I had not even
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