Mortimer’s Moments in Time

Mortimer’s, the Upper East Side society watering hole, was, simply, legendary, as was its proprietor, Glenn Bernbaum. “Mr. Bernbaum built Mortimer’s on the sheer force of his personality. An unassuming, brick-walled, moderate-size restaurant at Lexington Avenue and 75th Street, it became virtually a private club to the sort of fashionables whose names fill the gossip columns,” the New York Times wrote in Bernbaum’s 1998 obituary. The Gray Lady dubbed Bernbaum the “Solomon of bistro seating” because on the rare occasions when his regulars – Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Brooke Astor, Gloria Vanderbilt, Bill Blass, Reinaldo and Carolina Herrera, weren’t occupying table 1B, at the front window, Bernbaum had to make decisions that would stump Solomon. The hot spot, with only 19 tables, was a roaring hit with New York’s movers and shakers from its start in 1976 until its 1998 demise, with Glenn Bernbaum the arbiter of who was admitted to this elite “club.”

 

“Its social prominence caught on quickly as a luncheon spot for the ladies of the neighborhood—that being Park and Fifth Avenues,” wrote David Patrick Columbia in a new book, Mortimer’s: Moments in Time, out in March. “It was picked up by Women’s Wear Daily in their natural quest for fashion news. And soon the fashionable lunched and dined there. It wasn’t a fashion scene so much as a clientele from the social world, both national and international, who always looked in fashion. There was a feeling of clubbiness to it, and you dressed as if it were one.”

 

Pat Buckley & Nan Kempner  

 

“Nan Kempner (who lunched there every day, all snazzed up because she never left her apartment at Seventy-Ninth Street and Park Avenue without looking smashing) and Pat Buckley, Nan’s “partner in chic” who staged the annual Costume Institute Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with all the Swells (and the Nobs) turned out looking glam,” DPC added. “By the beginning of the 1980s and the Reagan era, it was without peer socially in New York.”

 

“I loved the worldliness of Mortimer’s and the elegance of the clientele,” said Robin Baker Leacock, the book’s author. “Mortimer’s was not a place that celebrated youth. It was a place of sophisticated culture, leaning a little to the wild side. And full of some very humorous people, some even with a twinkle in their eye. I liked that!”

 

“Glenn, Mortimer’s crusty owner, knew me slightly and soon began to enlist me to photograph the celebratory events that filled Mortimer’s night and day, with socially frenetic people who loved going out, through that socially frenetic decade, until his sudden death in 1998,” wrote Mary Hilliard, whose joyful photographs are the heart of the new book. “I would often get an abrupt phone message—Glenn’s gravelly voice saying, ‘Mary, call me.’ He would hang up just as abruptly. Never a goodbye or thank you, just the clunk of the receiver.”

 

Robert Caravaggi, Mortimer’s longtime maître d’, notes that one of Glenn’s best ideas was founding an annual HIV/AIDS benefit, Fete de Famille. “In the ‘80s he became upset and frustrated, losing friends and staff members to the disease, and did not think that the usual philanthropic social set was in tune with this devastating health issue,” Caravaggi says in the book. “He gathered his best and most influential friends and formed a very impressive committee. The event would be a street-circus-like fair. He planned a huge cocktail block party with magnificent food stations created by Mortimer’s and the A-list caterer, Glorious Food. The proceeds of the events went to New York Presbyterian Hospital for AIDS research and later their AIDS care center, now referred to as the Center for Special Studies: Glenn Bernbaum Unit. The thirteen events over the years raised millions of dollars and introduced and influenced high-society philanthropy to this horrible disease.”

 

To Robin Baker Leacock, Mortimer’s was magical. The book compiles memories of Mortimer’s in a specific time and place: New York City in the late 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s.

 

Remembrance of Things Past

Cornelia Guest

 

Uncle Glenn would always make me a delicious Flight Kit for my travels: Sandwich, salad, chips, tons of goodies, and a sweet note to send me on my way. It kept me well-fed for a few days. I was always the envy of everyone on the plane!!! A lady once asked me where my yummy food was from, and I said Mortimer’s. She called, got Uncle Glenn, and he said, ‘No way… Only for Cornelia.’ Uncle Glenn was the best… Everyone at Mortimer’s was wonderful. I miss them all and wish Mortimer’s was still there.

 

David Patrick Columbia

 

Quality was at the forefront and those who possessed what Glenn considered “quality of qualities” were given the table in the window and those close to it. You couldn’t make a reservation for that or any other table, although “no reservations” was for the hoi polloi. C. Z. Guest or Babe Paley or Jackie Onassis always had their social secretaries call ahead. Glenn was otherwise democratic with the rest of us, although it might have required waiting at the bar (which was part of the main room and not a bad place to wait and people-watch).

 

André Leon Talley

 

I remember C. Z. Guest of Old Westbury drove in and held her daughter’s debutante dinner at Mortimer’s. She took over the entire restaurant. It was a black tie, and Cornelia went rogue modern, wearing a blue Fabrice spangled short evening sparkler. The heavy candelabra with white candles burned down and almost spilled onto my table, seated jammed up to the main bar in the large room.

 

Bob Colacello

 

I think my most memorable time at Mortimer’s was the night Reinaldo and Carolina Herrera invited me to a little dinner for Princess Margaret in the side room. Glenn had ordered a centerpiece of pink and lavender sweet peas for their table, which he thought was very English. I got there early with Carolina, who hated the sweet peas. . .But she loved the peonies on the table reserved for Betsy Bloomingdale, so she switched the arrangements before Betsy arrived.

 

Michael Gross

 

As the years went by, and I started covering life in the city’s tonier precincts for magazines like Manhattan Inc. and Vanity Fair, and then The New York Times and New York Magazine, it seemed that somehow, I’d been issued a membership card, and given a second-row seat at the circus of vanity, ambition, wealth and insouciance that was Bernbaum’s boite.

 

I clocked the comings and goings of the impeccably-clad widows, Edna Morris, Brooke Astor, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, whom Glenn placed in the vitrine, the large single table by the sun-swept front window. Glenn would whisper, too, sometimes, nudging me toward this story and away from that one.

 

 

The Bonfire of the Vanities

 

Billy Norwich

 

I remember piling into a car with Nan Kempner and Glenn and going to our screen tests to play ourselves, or reasonable facsimiles, in Brian De Palma’s film version of Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. Nan was cast almost immediately, given a couple of lines of dialogue too, and stayed behind to talk to the costume people. Anne Slater, Glenn, and I returned to Mortimer’s to nurse rejection. Would Glenn and I never get out of our respective typing pools?

 

Not only were we rejected, but so too was Mortimer’s itself. The studio didn’t think the movie-going public would believe Mortimer’s, in all its understated simplicity, was the society watering hole in New York. As I recall, an ornate brass and crystal situation in Rockefeller Center was cast in the role of dining palace. “Well, darlings,” Mrs. Slater said, smiling and consoling, and laughing behind her cobalt blue eyeglasses.

 

People Like Us

 

Dominick Dunne

 

Back in 1988, I wrote a best-selling novel called People Like Us, which concerned itself with New York society. Mortimer’s was the center of the novel. I called it Clarence’s, at the suggestion of Sisi Cahan, who thought Glenn might mind. The character I based on Glenn was named Chick Jacoby, and Chick was a martinet who had a genius for placement and ruled his domain in exactly the fashion that Glenn ruled Mortimer’s. Mind? He didn’t mind at all. He was thrilled. At the book lunch party, he changed the name on the awning outside on Lexington Avenue from Mortimer’s to Clarence’s.

 

[Glenn] absolutely roared with laughter when Hollywood producers of the mini-series of People Like Us didn’t think Mortimer’s had the right “look” for Clarence’s. They wanted something grander, not getting it, that the lack of grandeur was the very point of it, as were the prices. “There’s nothing the rich like better than a bargain,” he once said to me, and I used the line in the book.

 

André Leon Talley

 

[Glenn] once hosted a party for me, to entertain John Galliano in 1993. We sat outside on the sidewalk in an enclosed special tent. Iman came in wearing a long red Alaïa dress and caused a stir. John wore white powder on his hair, and John Bult—who helped fund the rebooting of Mr. Galliano with the March 1994 collection in Paris, at the late Sao Schlumberger’s landmark mansion—attended. He later took the Concorde to Paris and decided to give Galliano fifty grand to make that legendary show, which really launched his career as a visionary designer. That all happened because of Glenn Bernbaum at Mortimer’s.

 

 

Robert Caravaggi

 

My relationship with Glenn Bernbaum was a love-hate one, and during my extended time there I either quit or was fired a few times but was always asked back by Glenn. You see, he needed maître d’s to be nice to his customers. He generally was only nice to his friends, a list that would grow as time went on. With Mortimer’s he had found his vehicle for becoming a social arbiter, a position he relished beyond any other and that ultimately would seriously cloud his judgment and health.

 

 

Robin Baker Leacock

 

Mortimer’s embraced eccentricities, just as Europeans have for centuries. There was always a party going on with fashionable and interesting people to meet, who loved living slightly outside the culture of the mundane day-to-day. Mortimer’s was full of people attempting to live life to the fullest, and I was attracted to this attitude!

 

Mary Hilliard

 

At one early Fête de Famille, Glenn was actually sitting down near a little stage where Peter Allen was singing and playing the piano. Glenn and his friends, Anne Slater (of the blue-tinted glasses), John Cahill, and Brooke and Peter Duchin were whispering so loud that Peter, in the middle of his song, turned and demanded, “Glenn, be quiet! You can gossip with Anne later!”

 

Robert Caravaggi

 

In the late ‘70s, Mortimer’s one-room roared every lunch and dinner with many chic European and American young types partying hard alongside owner Glenn Bernbaum’s friends named Blass, KJ Lane, Zipkin, Adolfo and Short. These gentlemen brought in the society ladies and a legend was born.

 

 My Mortimer’s

By R. Couri Hay

 

Deb of the Decade

 

I coined the phrase “Deb of the Decade” at Mortimer’s, for Cornelia Guest who was the ‘80’s most glamorous It Girl. This happened during a dinner party her mother, society swan C.Z. Guest, gave at the legendary Upper East Side boite to celebrate my friend, Cornelia’s, debut into high society.  I asked C.Z. and Mortimer’s owner Glenn Bernbaum to sit me next to Eugenia Sheppard, the New York Post’s Society columnist, so I could subtly “feed” her Cornelia’s new “title”, it was the headline of her next column. Who else would tell you these things?

 

Cornelia and I called the inimitable Mr. Bernbaum “Uncle” Glenn, and he treated us like his favorite niece and nephew.  He always gave us the window table, known as the restaurant’s best perch, as long as Jackie Kennedy or Truman Capote weren’t there.  Uncle Glenn encouraged us to bring our friends, including Anne Hearst, Jay McInerny, Boy George, Tama Janowitz and stars from Andy Warhol’s Factory, to Mortimer’s for late-night drinks and suppers after the grown-ups had all gone home to bed.  Andy often came with us as he liked to be around lively young people. N’est-ce Pas?

 

   

Fête de Famille

   

“Uncle” Glenn and I were both gay, so we bonded over many things, including in 1986 when he started hosting his Fête de Famille, an annual benefit for the

New York Presbyterian AIDS Foundation. Glenn asked Cornelia and I to join his Junior Committee to help sell tickets and bring our fancy friends to the party, which was one of the most important events of the fall season.  All the era’s most prominent ladies and gentlemen including, Mrs. and Mr. William F. Buckley, Blaine Trump, Nan Kempner, Bill Blass and Reinaldo and Carolina Herrera would come.  Of course, Bill Cunningham, the New York Times Evening Hours photographer, was there to capture everyone in all their glory as was Aileen Mehle, AKA Suzy, the ne plus ultra society columnist for WWD and W.

 

The Best Dressed List

 

One of the fun features of the charity was an auction, where Glenn would get his friends to donate various items. I was often asked to not only help get the gifts, but to pull the lottery tickets. Glenn, a master marketer and press agent, taught me a few naughty tricks.   The naughtiest of all was instructing me that no matter what ticket I pulled out of the glass bowl, to announce the winner of the Harley Davidson motorcycle as Nan Kempner, whether she was on the ticket or not.  This resulted in massive publicity because Nan was on The Best Dressed List and the idea of her riding a motorcycle in a Yves Saint Laurent tuxedo was irresistible to the press.

                  

RIP Glenn Bernbaum

 

Another year, I procured an expensive painting from my friend Mark Kostabi.  Again, Glenn instructed me that no matter whose name was on the ticket I was to announce the winner as the designer Bill Blass.  This, again, resulted in major PR not only for Mortimer’s and Glenn, but for Bill Blass and Kostabi.  Everybody won, except for the poor soul whose name was really on the ticket.  I’m only telling this story now because “Uncle” Glenn is now in heaven, entertaining the angels and pulling new favors out of the clouds for his friends.  I hope one of those “tricks” will include getting the Pearly Gates to open upon my arrival, which I hope won’t be anytime soon.  RIP Glenn Bernbaum, there will never be another Mortimer’s!