Next up on the essays shelf:
Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker
Life Stories is a collection of “profiles” from The New Yorker, edited by David Remnick. The pieces span the 20th century, one of the best parts of these compilations. I also love that it’s not just celebrities who are covered, although they are represented here too. There are celebrities in certain sub-cultures, and then also a couple of people who are virtually unknown (“Mr. Hunter” from Staten Island), and yet fascinating. The best part of the profiles is that they are so in-depth and so lengthy (some of them run to 40 pages long), that you actually feel like you have met these people.
Benjamin Sonnenberg was a Russian immigrant who came to the United States in 1910 with his family. His father owned a clothing stand. Sonnenberg early on attracted attention from people who recognized his abilities, his intelligence – people who looked out for him, made sure opportunities came his way. He did all kinds of things in his career, journalism, fund-raising, etc., until he became a P.R. man for the rich and famous. He died in 1976.
I didn’t know anything about the guy, although surely he has shown up in many a biography I have read. He represented Samuel Goldwyn, David O. Selznick – but eventually he moved away from show business clients (although never entirely) to big corporations. He managed the PR for Bergdorf Goodman’s and CEOs and what-have-you, and did so from his gigantic home on Gramercy Park. The home has since been sold. He would host legendary dinner parties (his goal was to make his home as good as eating out in a restaurant). The top floor of the house was a movie theatre and he would have private screenings there. His heyday was in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, but he lived as though he were a baron of industry in the Gilded Age of the Industrial Revolution. Smart about business and smart about people.
Here is the man in question, with his famous walrus moustache.
Benjamin Sonnenberg by Man Ray
He wore bowler hats, and walked with a cane. He wanted the people who hired him to realize that he made more money than THEY did.
Geoffrey Hellman wrote the following piece in 1950, and, as the title suggests, it is about Benjamin Sonnenberg’s house, and what an extraordinary structure it is, first of all (gigantic for a private home in Manhattan), and also Sonnenberg’s philosophy of entertaining. He goes into his theories on entertaining in great detail. He is a raconteur. He speaks with a daunting vocabulary. He is somewhat ridiculous, but also clearly a genius at business, at getting clients, at doing what his clients want. His story is a classic rags-to-riches tale. He had little formal education, but he knew how to get along with people, and he knew how to get people to buy what he was selling.
More on Benjamin Sonnenberg here.
The profile is a fascinating portrait of a man and his home. It is filled with numbers, i.e.: “two-hundred-and eighty-three bath towels, a hundred and twenty of them monogrammed, seventy-two washcloths (thirty-two monogrammed), forty bathmats (twenty monogrammed), fifty-four linen or damask tablecloths, six hundred and twenty-four napkins, a hundred and seventy-two sheets, and a hundred and thirty-eight pillowcases.”
Here’s an excerpt.
Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker
Sonnenberg’s house, clothes, and career as a host reflect the goal he set for himself in 1922. He was then only a few years removed from Grand Street, where his father, a Russian immigrant, had a clothing stand. His capital was a few hundred dollars saved from his salary as a social worker. “I resolved to become a cross between Condé Nast and Otto Kahn,” he has said. It is his view that he has gone a long way toward fulfilling his ambition. He pursues his Nast-and-Kahn-like activities not only on Gramercy Park but in eight fashionable restaurants he goes to constantly – Voisin, “21,” Robert, the Colony, the Oak Rooms of the Ritz and the Plaza, the Club Room of the Stork Club, and the Champagne Room of El Morocco – and in commodious pleasure domes, generally on Long Island, which he rents summers. Against these imposing backgrounds, he plies guests – most of whom are listed in a four-thousand-name card file he keeps – with a practically uninterrupted procession of meals, hot and cold canapés, sandwiches, and drinks. In addition, he occasionally presides, on behalf of clients, at really large parties of three or four hundred guests. For these gatherings, he rents the main room of the Stork Club, the Maisonette of the St. Regis, or a hotel ballroom suite. He gives a number of headwaiters a hundred dollars at Christmas, and he hasn’t had to wait for a table anywhere in years.
Perhaps because his profession is such a modern one and, in his opinion, so intangible (“I’m the builder of bridges into posterity,” he once said when pressed for a definition of what he does for his clients. “I supply the Listerine to the commercial dandruff on the shoulders of corporations”), Sonnenberg likes to surround himself with solid appurtenances of the past. “I may gross five or six hundred thousand dollars a year, but to the public the business I’m in still seems a flimflam, fly-by-night business,” he says. “I want my house and office to convey an impression of stability and to give myself a dimension, background, and tradition that go back to the Nile.” He hasn’t entirely realized this aim, but the fact that some of Mrs. Fish’s social triumphs and Harry Lehr’s shenanigans took place in what is now his dining room strikes him as proof that he has made strides in the right direction. He likes to identify himself, however peripherally, with history and with bygone stateliness, and he is willing to settle for the eighteenth, the nineteenth, or even the early twentieth century. His offices, at 247 Park Avenue, are decorated with wallpaper bearing London scenes in the time of Dickens. He is driven to them in a 1942 Rollston-body Packard by a chauffeur named James, whom he hired away from a funeral establishment sixteen years ago. He takes pleasure in telling friends that his steward, Walter Blanchard, used to be with Ambassador David K.E. Bruce, and before that with Ambassador Myron T. Herrick, and that it was a pair of Blanchard’s pajamas – and not, as commonly believed, a pair of Herrick’s – that Lindbergh wore while putting up at the American Embassy in Paris after his celebrated solo flight. Even Sonnenberg’s part-time retainers are, for the most part, old family servants. “They represent the super-duper echelon of service today,” he says. “You no longer find them in the great houses, which don’t exist, but in the private dining rooms of banks. The man who at lunch served Sloan Colt at the Bankers Trust or Winthrop Aldrich at the Chase shows up at my place in the evening. It’s a kind of inner coterie – the last remnant of the permanent butlers, now, alas, a thing of the past.” A few months ago, a Sonnenberg guest, seventeen years a married woman, was relieved of her coat at the door by a servitor who greeted her by her maiden name. She remembered that he had been the butler in the Arthur Curtiss James house. She had last dined there, with her parents, in 1930. Advised of the episode, Sonnenberg was enchanted. He instructed Blanchard, who hires the rest of the household help, to place this distinguished factotum at the head of his free-lance list. For a couple of years, Sonnenberg had a full-time butler-valet named Mears, who came to him from the Duke of Windsor. This circumstance tickled Sonnenberg. “Mears regales me with all kinds of stories about the Duke,” he used to tell friends during this well-connected period. Once, as he was having his dessert at lunchtime, he said, “Mears, you must be in love.”
“Why, sir?” asked Mears.
“You have failed to remove the salt,” his employer said.
“Not customary to remove it at lunch, sir. Only at dinner, sir,” said Mears.
Sonnenberg pulled at his mustache and settled back to think it over. He did not venture any further technical remarks to Mears for several days.
