Read Online The Rothman Scandal by Stephen Birmingham - Free Book Online Page A

York.”
    â€œHuh!”
    â€œSchrafft’s,” he said.
    â€œAw, you’re pulling my leg,” Mona said, and moved away from him in search of more quotable grist for her journalistic mill.
    â€œDear me, what a perfectly dreadful woman,” the young Englishwoman said to him.
    The orchestra was playing “You’re the Top,” changing the lyric slightly to suit the occasion:
    You’re the top,
    You’re the Park Pavilion,
    You’re the top,
    Now you’ve hit five million …
    And one or two couples were actually dancing, which was becoming a rare thing to see at a New York party these days, where there were too many important business matters, and people, to talk about. Lenny strolled among the party players, those fashionable savages, listening to their voices rising against the music, fueled by cocktails and champagne.
    â€œShe photographs okay if you shoot her in profile. Shoot her from any other angle, and she looks like Noriega in drag.”
    â€œSpeaking of horrors, there’s Molly Zumwalt. She must be on furlough from Silver Hill.”
    â€œMolly Zumwalt has a certain sense of style, but no taste. You know what I mean. Blue Rigaud candles.”
    â€œHer husband had a penile implant. Then he had a vasectomy. What’s he want , anyway …?”
    Was it always this awful? Lenny sometimes asked himself. Was there always such cruelty, such venom, so much anger and envy and greed? “The East Side Razor Blades” was what Lenny called these women, who were for the most part thin and for the most part streaked blondes. At a certain age, in New York, every woman became a streaked blonde. He had christened them the Razor Blades, furthermore, long before Tom Wolfe called them X-rays in that book. His was a more apt description, Lenny thought. An X-ray was transparent, black-and-white, and flat. But a Razor Blade could cut, and nick, and slash, and kill. There were male Razor Blades too, of course, equally dangerous, and never satisfied until there was blood all over the floor.
    And the answer to his question was no, it had not always been like this. When Lenny first came to New York in the early thirties, it had been quite a different place. The city had been vital, and pulsing, and fun, and everyone went everywhere. Those had been hard times, of course, but they were getting better, and everyone was simply glad to be alive and in the city together, helping things get better. Then had come the war years, and those had been the best of all. Having made sure that he was ineligible for the draft—that quite absurd incident back in Onward took care of that—Lenny had flung himself, yes flung, into the joy of those years when everyone was rooting together for the city, the country, the world.
    There were real stores in the city then, not glitzy show-biz emporiums like Bloomingdale’s, but real stores like Best’s and DePinna, which everyone knew was better than Brooks Brothers, and Altman’s, which always had the best of everything, including that wonderful bakery shop, and Bergdorf’s, before Andrew Goodman sold it to a chain. And W&J Sloane—you never needed to hire an interior decorator in those days. Sloane’s told you how to furnish your rooms, and you could be certain they were right.
    And then there were the hotels and restaurants and nightclubs they all went to—the Marguery, with its extraordinary garden courtyard, the Ambassador, the old Ritz-Carlton, the Savoy-Plaza, and the pre-Trump Plaza when it really was the Plaza. No more. Those places were all, all gone. They had danced at places like Larue—those tiny blue sparkling, starlike lights in the ceiling—and the Monte Carlo and the Copa, and at the Persian Room they had listened to Hildegarde—the “Incomparable Hildegarde”—in her long white gloves sing “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” and for her last number she always came out