It’s Lonely at the Top, the Middle in the Plaza Hotel ...

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY
Published: February 17, 2008
KATHY RULAND decorated her family’s new two-bedroom condo at the Plaza Hotel with care. The windows, overlooking Central Park, are draped with gold silk, and the living room showcases her beloved Indonesian painting of the Hindu goddess Sita, which was bought at a gallery near her main residence in Laguna Beach, Calif. When she wakes up to front-row views of Central Park, she says she feels like a princess.

In the time she has been living, on and off, at the newly converted Plaza Hotel, she has met five residents of the 181-unit building. In fact, she has no idea who lives on either side of her; of the 10 apartments on her floor, she knows not a soul, not a face, not a name.

She wouldn’t mind meeting someone other than the decorators, real estate brokers and other service workers fussing over the apartments. But even the building’s security guards can’t offer much information.

“I keep asking, ‘Has anybody else moved in?’ and they shake their heads,” she said. “The place has been deserted.”

The Plaza Hotel, which has spent much of its 100-year history packed with guests like the Vanderbilts and the Beatles, not to mention debutantes and Frank Lloyd Wright, closed in 2005 to reopen as part hotel and part condominium. The hotel is scheduled to reopen March 1, and the condominiums have been finished for months. Buyers have closed on nearly 100 apartments.

Yet for the most part, no one is home. Only a half-dozen residents live there full time and another three dozen residents live there on weekends, according to Lloyd Kaplan, spokesman for the Plaza’s owner, Elad Properties.

On any night, the Plaza has rows and rows of darkened windows. The hallways on upper floors are silent except for the occasional shudder of wind. When young girls ask Ed the doorman whether Eloise is home, they are told she is on vacation in Paris.

So the buyers actually residing at the Plaza are finding life a little strange. Not that they regret their decision to move in. It’s hard to complain, after all, about living in multimillion-dollar apartments in one of Manhattan’s most legendary buildings, or to grouse about too much privacy. In New York, with its doubled-up roommates, clotted sidewalks and elbow-to-elbow dining, privacy is one of the ultimate luxuries.

But the Plaza does provide a window into the transient lives of the latest wave of the ultrarich in New York. Most of the buyers of luxury condos like those at the Plaza — including current and former top executives of Staples, JetBlue, Viacom and Esprit, as well as a few Russian billionaires — are rarely there. The city is just one more place they spend time around the country or the world. When they are living at the Plaza, some say they find themselves longing for a nod from a neighbor by the elevator, a hello in the lobby, a friendly wine and cheese gathering. Like anyone else, they long for a community, albeit a community of the megawealthy.

Kathy Ruland’s family owns two apartments in the Plaza. Her parents, Betty and Fred Farago, bought a one-bedroom $5.8-million apartment in July on the 15th floor, and a two-bedroom in October for themselves, the children and the grandchildren.

When they first bought the one-bedroom, the Faragos encouraged Ms. Ruland’s 17-year-old son, Stan, to spend the night by himself in the Plaza, one of the first people to overnight there.

The family knew the building was nearly empty, but thought Stan could be like the character Macaulay Culkin played in the movie “Home Alone.” That night, Stan ordered pizza, Cokes and cheese bread for the security guards and hung out with them downstairs. When it was time for bed, he reluctantly went upstairs to the family apartment. “It was a little bit spooky because it was totally dead,” he said. “It was this huge hotel, and I was the only one up there.”

In the fall, his 21-year-old sister, Kelley, moved into the apartment.

She had just transferred to Columbia University and didn’t want to stay in her dorm room, because she was lonely. Her roommate, it turned out, was always away with her boyfriend.

Kelley thought the Plaza would be busier, she said. But security guards called her Eloise as she headed in and out. Although her mother and grandmother often visited, she felt isolated. Last month, Kelley transferred back to the University of California, Los Angeles, moving into a shoe-box-size room at the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority house. “It doesn’t matter where you are or how nice the place is — you get lonely,” she said. “The only time I wasn’t lonely was when my mom and grandma were there.”

Of course, New York can be a lonely place, even for the rich who make Manhattan their primary home and live in the equivalent of private clubs — 740 Park, for instance. Entry into those co-ops requires not just money, but also the right credentials. That means that they are closed off to the Russian billionaires and wealthy entrepreneurs from other American cities who live here part time.

Bernard and Joan Spain, who also live there, have held three cocktail parties for people who live nearby.
Contrary to what outsiders think, those residents can also be isolated. Michael Gross, who wrote a book about 740 Park, said the residents he interviewed talked about how they rarely saw one another and often rode elevators alone. The only exception was in the early 1970s when one vertical line of apartments, the D-line, filled with young families. But that closeness quickly disappeared when the D-line became known as the divorce line, because of all the marriages that fell apart.

“They don’t do secret deals to rule the world in the elevator,” he said. “They rarely see these people.”

The Plaza residents are isolated partly because the building is still filling up. Some buyers are waiting for decorators to customize their apartments for their art collections. Other buyers are staying at their third and fourth — or in some cases eighth and ninth — homes until the building’s restaurant and gym are open. That may not be until the spring.

In some ways, the Plaza Hotel’s residents are like newly wealthy New Yorkers during the Gilded Age in the late 19th century. Back then, newly transplanted New Yorkers lived in luxury hotels rich with dining rooms and men’s and women’s lounges.

David Nasaw, a biographer of Andrew Carnegie and a history professor at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, said that Mr. Carnegie lived in amenity-rich hotels like the St. Nicholas when he first moved to New York.

He later upgraded to the Windsor Hotel, and established himself socially by spending time in the hotel’s dining, drawing and reading rooms. Back then, Mr. Carnegie’s accommodations were looked down upon by older New York families who lived in private residences.

“Nobody who had any kind of money would dare live in an apartment building where there weren’t services,” he said. “You wouldn’t imagine in the 1870s or 1880s getting your services anywhere else. These places prided themselves on the amenities.”

Mr. Nasaw said the superwealthy in the 19th century may have had an easier time figuring out how to meet the neighbors. The social rules on how and when to call on one another were far more explicit, and it was easy to tell whether social overtures were accepted or rejected. Think of the invitations and rejections Countess Olenska receives in Edith Wharton’s novel “The Age of Innocence.”

“These formal structure and rituals allowed people to navigate,” Mr. Nasaw said.

THERE are, of course, no real rules anymore. That’s why when all the decorating is done, brokers say, it may not be easier for the neighbors to be neighborly. For many residents, this will be just fine. “The ones who bought there are not looking to be part of a community,” said Kathryn Steinberg, a broker with Edward Lee Cave, who sold two apartments at the Plaza. “They have their community.”

John Coustas, president of the Greek shipping company Danaos, closed last month on a two-bedroom apartment. He doesn’t plan on living there full time, but isn’t worried about being lonely. He has three sets of friends who also bought there. “Of course we hope that we’re going to meet more people,” he said. “We’ll see how it develops.”

Ms. Ruland said meeting people is hard simply because it’s hard to tell the residents from the help. One neighbor cast his eyes away from her one day when she walked through the lobby with a mop and bucket. She said she felt like telling him her family owns two apartments in the Plaza.

She hopes, she said, that over time she will meet someone there who shares her love of art and running. Her mother hopes that she will find neighbors who like to play canasta or bridge.

“It’s going to be easier when we go to the fitness center,” she said. “I would love to meet people. The sooner the better. It’s getting. ... It’s getting. ... We’re ready.”

Bernard and Joan Spain say the fitness center may not be the answer. The couple, whose main home is in Philadelphia, bought their $7 million two-bedroom apartment in June. After renovations, they moved in last month, replacing their space at the nearby Sherry-Netherland Hotel. In their five years at the Sherry-Netherland, they said, they never saw any neighbors at the gym.

They have high hopes for the Plaza. In August, they attended the 100th anniversary party to see if they could meet future neighbors. And when they moved in, the Spains introduced themselves to the single woman who lives on their floor with her mammoth dog, and also to a Swedish family they met in the lobby.

Ms. Spain has held three cocktail parties for friends who live nearby. “We popped some popcorn and put out some mixed nuts,” she said.

They invited the neighbor with the dog, but she took a rain check. And last week, Mr. Spain said, he met another neighbor while taking out the trash.

The views help prevent them from getting lonely. They entertain themselves by watching thousands of people mill in and out of the Apple Store below. They also talk on the phone with a friend’s friend who bought a third-floor apartment, but has not yet moved in. They hope that they will meet people when the shops and restaurants open.

“We expect that we’ll meet very interesting people,” Ms. Spain said. Her husband added, “We’re optimistic people.”

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Boys Will Be Boys, Girls Will Be Hounded by the Media

By ALEX WILLIAMS
Published: February 17, 2008

A VIDEO of Heath Ledger hanging out at a drug-fueled party two years before his death would seem to constitute must-see material for a tabloid entertainment show.

Relatively speaking, the late Heath Ledger has been treated gently by the news media.
But when such a video ended up in the hands of the producers of “Entertainment Tonight,” the program declined to broadcast it, a spokeswoman said, “out of respect for Heath Ledger’s family.” The 28-year-old actor died on Jan. 22 from what the medical examiner called an accidental overdose of prescription medications.

Amy Winehouse did not merit the same discretion. Images from a video that showed her smoking what a British tabloid, The Sun, said was a pipe of crack cocaine, as well as admitting to having taken “about six” Valium, were widely disseminated in the news media around the same time.

When Owen Wilson was hospitalized in August after an apparent suicide attempt, his plight was the subject of a single US Weekly cover story. Not so Britney Spears, recently confined in a psychiatric ward, who has inspired six cover stories for the magazine during the same time span.

When Kiefer Sutherland was released from the jail in Glendale, Calif., after serving a 48-day sentence for a drunken driving conviction, the event merited little more than buried blurbs.

Contrast this to Paris Hilton’s return to jail last year after a brief release to serve the rest of a 45-day sentence for a probation violation involving alcohol-related reckless driving. The event invited a level of attention that evoked the O. J. Simpson trial. Hordes of cameras enveloped the limousine that ferried the tear-streaked heiress to jail.

Yes, women are hardly the only targets of harsh news media scrutiny — just ask Mel Gibson. But months of parallel incidents like these seem to demonstrate disparate standards of coverage. Men who fall from grace are treated with gravity and distance, while women in similar circumstances are objects of derision, titillation and black comedy.

Some celebrities and their handlers are now saying straight out that the news media have a double standard.

“Without a doubt, women get rougher treatment, less sensitive treatment, more outrageous treatment,” said Ken Sunshine, a publicist whose clients include Ben Affleck and Barbra Streisand. “I represent some pretty good-looking guys, and I complain constantly about the way they’re treated and covered. But it’s absolutely harder for the women I represent.”

Liz Rosenberg, a publicist at Warner Bros./Reprise Records who represents Madonna, among others, also thinks sexism is at work. “Do you see them following Owen Wilson morning, noon and night?” she asked.

Some editors confirm that they handle female celebrities differently. But the reason, they say, is rooted not in sexism, but in the demographics of their audience.

The readership of US Weekly, for example, is 70 percent female; for People, it’s more than 90 percent, according to the editors of these magazines.

“Almost no female magazines will put a solo male on the cover,” said Janice Min, the editor in chief of US Weekly. “You just don’t. It’s cover death. Women don’t want to read about men unless it’s through another woman: a marriage, a baby, a breakup.”

Thus, magazine coverage of Mr. Ledger’s death gave way to stories about Michelle Williams, Mr. Ledger’s former girlfriend and the mother of his daughter; US Weekly, for instance, put the headlines “A Mother’s Pain” and “My Heart is Broken” atop a four-page spread. Mary-Kate Olsen, telephoned several times by the discoverer of Mr. Ledger’s body, came in for it, too: “What Mary-Kate Knows” trumpeted In Touch Weekly.

Indeed, while one of People’s best-selling issues of the last year was its cover story on Mr. Wilson’s suicide attempt, a follow-up cover on his recovery was one of the worst sellers, said Larry Hackett, the managing editor.

Conversely, he said, the Britney Spears story continues to flourish precisely because women are fascinated by the challenges facing a young mother.

“If Britney weren’t a mother, this story wouldn’t be getting a fraction of attention it’s getting,” Mr. Hackett said. “The fact that the custody of her children is at stake is the fuel of this narrative. If she were a single woman, bombing around in her car with paparazzi following, it wouldn’t be the same.”

Others, like Roger Friedman, an entertainment reporter for FoxNews.com, said that female stars tend to make more-compelling stories because “they are more emotional and open” about their problems. Male stars, he said, tend to be “circumspect.”

Rebecca Roy, a psychotherapist in Beverly Hills, Calif., who has several clients in the entertainment industry, said that male celebrities can often wriggle out of trouble with a rakish bad-boy shrug. But, she said, the double standard can reinforce the destructive behavior of female stars, pushing them to further depths of substance abuse and erratic behavior.


Ms. Roy said that troubled male stars like Robert Downey Jr. are encouraged to move past problems to a second act in their careers, while the personal battles of women like Lindsay Lohan or the late Anna Nicole Smith are often played for maximum entertainment value.

“With men, there’s an emphasis on, ‘he had this issue, but he’s getting over it,’ ” Ms. Roy said. “But with women, it’s like they keep at it, keep at it. It’s almost like taking the wings off of a fly.”

Ms. Min acknowledged that her magazine played down its coverage of Owen Wilson and Heath Ledger. Part of the reason, she said, was that female readers tend to be sympathetic toward young men in crisis.

“With Heath Ledger, people walked on eggshells trying to strike the right tone,” Ms. Min said, adding that “public sentiment for Heath Ledger factored into our coverage.”

Edna Herrmann, a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles, said that while schadenfreude is part of the enjoyment of star travails, women especially respond to female celebrities with commonplace demons. “Misery likes company,” Dr. Herrmann said.

But some believe the power of a celebrity’s publicist has more bearing on coverage than gender. “Entertainment Tonight” reversed its plans to show the video of Mr. Ledger following protests from stars like Natalie Portman and Josh Brolin organized by ID, which represented Mr. Ledger and still represents Ms. Williams.

In some cases, celebrities may be victims of their own appetites for media attention.

“It would seem to me that no one who demanded, who expected privacy, at the get-go was denied that privacy,” said Stan Rosenfield, a publicist who represents George Clooney.

And Harvey Levin, the managing editor of the gossip Web site TMZ.com, said that female stars are afforded every opportunity to move past their sins, as long as they clean up their behavior.

“Nicole Richie, who took a beating generally for being a screw-up, has turned it around, and everyone’s cheering for her now,” Mr. Levin said of the former Paris Hilton sidekick and tabloid staple, now the mother of a month-old daughter.

Even if news media coverage is weighted in their favor, male celebrities aren’t exactly feeling immune from harsh scrutiny.

“There is certainly an argument for it being incredibly sexist, the attention that’s given to women and the hounding of them,” the actor Colin Farrell said at a recent party for his new film, “In Bruges.”

Mr. Farrell, who has attracted his share of attention, said such potential bias did not make him any less of a news media target. “If they catch me out and about,” he said, “they’ll go for it.”

As Mr. Farrell spoke in a room filled with journalists and photographers, he was not even sipping a beer.

Additional reporting by Paula Schwartz.

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Art and Life, Steeping in a Teapot

By DAVID COLMAN
Published: February 17, 2008

FRITZ HAEG is not the best-known artist in the Whitney Biennial, opening next month. He has not had a breakout solo show at the Zach Feuer Gallery. He is not being wooed by Larry Gagosian. His prices at auction are nonexistent.

“I don’t even sell work,” he said with a laugh.

But in an art world growing jaded with such signifiers, Mr. Haeg, an architect by training and a landscaper by nature, may end up the surprise star of the Whitney show. Among the “homes” he designed for 12 “clients” are a beaver lodge and pond for the sculpture court, an eagle’s nest over the entry and other cribs around the museum for a mud turtle, mason bees, a flying squirrel, a bobcat and other critters that once lived on the Upper East Side.

Given that Madison Avenue is one of the world’s fanciest shopping streets, you would think Mr. Haeg is casting stones. In 2005, for his first nature-ruption series, “Edible Estates,” he replanted front lawns in places from Salina, Kan., to London, with vegetable gardens.

But his work is more than simple eco-commentary. From his Los Angeles home (a vintage geodesic dome), Mr. Haeg has carved out an intriguing niche within modern architecture, performance art and eco-activism.

This is clear even with his new “Animal Estates,” as the Whitney installation is called. The beaver lodge, for one, will be stained black. “It’s going to look as if Marcel Breuer had designed a beaver lodge,” he said.

Mr. Haeg grew up northwest of Minneapolis, near St. John’s University, with its buildings that, like the Whitney, Breuer designed in the 1960s. St. John’s, a Roman Catholic university run by Benedictine monks, made an impact on the young Mr. Haeg, whose father graduated from the school. “The Abbey Church there is burned into my subconscious,” he said.

Today, even as Mr. Haeg is putting his beloved geodome on the market and deaccessioning unnecessary objects, there is one thing he is hanging onto. That is a teapot made in the late 1990s by Richard Bresnahan, who since 1980 has run the St. John’s pottery program, working only with local materials, from clays and glazes to wood for the kiln.

“It’s one of the only things I’m keeping,” he said. He bought the pot, a traditional Japanese double-gourd shape, a few years ago on a return visit with his father to the campus. “The first time I visited Bresnahan’s studio, I was blown away,” he said. “This is a part of the art world that’s really been marginalized: handcrafts and the stories of how things are made. I don’t think many artists think about where their materials come from.”

The teapot meshes not only with his ideals equating art’s ends and means, but with his retro ’60s aesthetic, a blend of pop-kitsch and eco-sincere. “It reminds me of my geodesic dome a bit, the way it’s this sphere up on three feet,” he said. “And the glaze — it’s very hippie, like it’s still forming itself. And there’s a nice conversation between the light, handmade cane handle and this big orb that’s solid and made of clay.”

And despite the exalted pedigree of the piece, he uses it all the time. “I drink a lot of tea,” he said.

Though Mr. Haeg calls himself a lapsed Catholic, the teapot reminds him of his admiration for the integrated way of life observed by the Benedictines at St. John’s: praying, teaching, farming, hiring high-modern architects.

“They really believe that everything matters,” he said. “There’s something so simple and primitive in the best possible way of what the life at St. John’s is and what the clay pot represents. It’s sort of a reminder that design isn’t just about physical acquisitiveness. It can be a means to a more fulfilled life.”

If it doesn’t make you embrace the Benedictine creed, it at least makes you think about switching to tea.

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A Spoonful of Immunity?

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
Published: February 17, 2008

LOS ANGELES

DR. TEA KNOWS BEST Mark Ukra prepares a tea blend in West Hollywood.
FIRST there was vegetarianism, which begot veganism, macrobiotic adherents, raw foodists and something known simply as “the cleanse.” Now make way for immunity-enhancement, via your chopped salad and salmon tartar.


California has long led the country in the creation and fortification of urban food ways. The state was on the forefront of restaurants devoted to raw food and was the birthplace of the organic produce movement. In Los Angeles, vegan restaurants are nearly as prevalent as hamburger joints.

Now, restaurant menus here are marrying the broader commercial movement of “functional” foods — those stuffed with heavy doses of vitamins and antioxidants — and a national fixation on immunity boosting (a fizzy gulp of Airborne is as much a part of the pre-flight experience as a baggage check).

In Beverly Hills, Crustacean, a modern Vietnamese restaurant, has attached an icon to the left side of several menu items letting diners know that those dishes supposedly boost immunity. At M Café de Chaya in Hollywood, a macrobiotic restaurant often dotted with celebrities, the chef, Shigefumi Tachibe, has “items that offer both immune boosting and healthful benefits for everybody,” said his spokeswoman, Cindy Choi.

Down Melrose Avenue a bit from M Café is Dr. Tea’s Tea Garden and Herbal Emporium, where immunity enhancement is always part of the menu, said Dr. Tea, a k a Mark Ukra. “We work a lot with cancer patients to bring their immunity up, and lots of people come in to get our tonics to get rid of the flu,” he said.

Foods that its makers claim enhance the immunity system have become increasingly mainstream over the last several years. Jamba Juice led the charge years ago, and has spawned many competitors serving juices sprinkled with supplements that claim to strengthen the body’s ability to prevent illnesses. Airborne, drinkable vitamin blends that claim to be armor against germ-filled environments, have flooded drug stores over the last several years.

There is supplement-infused Spava coffee, which offers an immunity formulation with rose hips and echinacea. Green Giant, the food manufacturer, has something in the marketplace called Immunity Boost, which are microwaveable frozen vegetables. Yoplait Essence Immunity Boost has “probiotics with zinc and iron,” also meant to charge up the system.

But in Los Angeles, the connubial relationship of farm and pharmacy in restaurants is on the march. The former unadulterated pleasure of simply dining has been replaced with the feeling of a very expensive clinic.

“People more and more are understanding the importance of good health, and how priceless it is,” said GT Dave, a former Beverly Hills High School student who started his company, Millennium Products, in his kitchen at age 16. He now distributes Kombucha juice, which claims to enhance immunity, in restaurants around Los Angeles and Whole Foods stores nationwide. “Previously, health foods and health products were a very niche product, like for Berkeley free-spirited tree-hugging people,” he said. “Now people realize that the immune system is the foundation of our lives.”

At Crustacean, immunity-enhancing menu items do not have supplements. Instead, the chef and owner, in consultation with a nutritionist, went through the existing menu and plucked out offerings that they believed were already naturally helpful.

Each item is marked on the menu by a little leaf representing a Vietnamese herb, just as one might see a heart icon next to an egg-white omelet at a diner, indicating that the meal is low in cholesterol. “The hope is that this system could be used by other restaurants,” said Ashley Koff, the nutritionist who consulted on the menu.

For example, there is the Buddha roll, which has shiitake mushrooms (which have iron and Vitamin C, Ms. Koff said), lemongrass mushroom soup (lemon grass has folate, zinc and iron) and wild salmon tartar, which features cucumbers (vitamin C, folate and vitamin A), wild salmon (omega 3, selenium), garlic (selenium, phytochemicals) and red onion (vitamin C and copper, among other things).

“What I looked for were ingredients that brought forward minerals and phytochemicals,” Ms. Koff said, referring to chemical compounds derived from edible plants and fruits that are believed to aid cancer prevention. So how did it taste to this reporter? The lemon grass soup has a nice bite, and the Buddha roll has a clean fresh flavor. The chicken roulade and roasted fillet of sole were dull to this tongue; all was far more delicious than standard health-food fare.

The immunity enhancement does not end at the table — you can sit at the bar and pickle yourself while ostensibly warding off disease and calamity. There are martinis made with vodka and goji berries (antioxidants) or cucumbers. Taste note: both have a strong vodka top and fruity finish.

Experts on microbiology are decidedly mixed on the value of such menu designations. Michael Starnbach, an associate professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at Harvard Medical School, said the heart icon might help diners, because it would warn of foods proven to be bad for your cardiovascular system.

But, he said, there is not enough hard evidence to prove that any food can enhance the immune system. “There is no doubt these menu items have these nutrients,” Mr. Starnbach said. “But that is different from the claim being made on the menu.” Unlike many health-food restaurants, Crustacean, a family business, started out as a Vietnamese restaurant, without overt health claims. The An family’s first restaurant, Thanh Long, opened in San Francisco in the ’70s in an old deli purchased by the family, still in Vietnam at that time, as a foothold into the United States. The restaurant remains there today.

The An sisters, eager for a hipper place to go with their friends in the city (four out of five girls are in the business) pushed for Crustacean, which opened in 1991. Then came the Beverly Hills outpost in 1997.

The Ans were always health conscious. “I was born into a family where we care about health,” said Helen An, the matriarch of the family, who is also head chef. “I learned Eastern medicine from my grandparents.”

Whether the immunity-marking trend has legs remains to be seen, but given the packed scene at M Café every lunch hour eating “the big macro burger,” and kale salad with peanut dressing, it certainly is hot.

Whether patrons are warding off illness will remain a subject of debate. “I would have a positive reaction to seeing that menu,” said Linda Gooding, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the Emory University School of Medicine. “But as a scientist I would say that’s a personal preference. That’s not a scientific fact. Eating is a lifelong experiment. I think that’s all you can do.”

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