Casual
Epstein, Joseph
Casual GIMME SHELTER You live, they say (usually accompanied by a sigh), and you learn. They say it; I don’t. You live, I say (with an even deeper sigh), and you yearn. And I generally make...
...Along with 15 acres of property, it has a renovated 15,000-square-foot house, with seven bedrooms, a staff apartment, and “a living-room fashioned out of a former ballroom...
...Still, it’s lower than the price of the Forbes family ranch in Colorado, which is going for $175 million...
...I feared calls in the night telling me that the sump-pump had gone on the fritz, the windows needed replacing, the small pier had sunk...
...Simplify, simplify, always simplify, is my motto, with the proviso that, while simplifying, it doesn’t hurt to fantasize...
...Keeping a pied-?-terre in the Plaza does not seem to me at all a bad idea...
...One assumes that, while their owners are elsewhere, there are servants and agents and security firms looking after all this valuable real estate...
...Cunning negotiator that I am, I feel sure I could get the Gittis place down to $57.6 million...
...What I have found myself yearning for these days is real estate...
...The Weekend Journal section of the Wall Street Journal carries ads for four-story townhouses on near-northside Chicago streets named Goethe, Schiller, Astor...
...Toward the front of the same magazine are ads for newly erected skyscrapers with condominium apartments starting at $2.6 million...
...The newspapers are full of it...
...Everyone has read about that night in the 1920s when Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, the original fun couple, nicely schnockered as always, jumped into the Pulitzer Fountain in front of the Plaza...
...The Plaza Hotel, I note, is now being broken up into condominium apartments, the great grand Plaza, offering perhaps the most convenient location in Manhattan and lots of history...
...Real estate may be the new porno...
...My staff—not yet hired—would be pleased to have use of the apartment, and would cotton, too, to the tennis court and swimming pool on the property...
...Twenty or so years ago I had the chance to acquire, as a second residence, my late mother-in-law’s lovely twostory house on an artifi cial lake in Michigan for the beggarly sum of $45,000, and chose not to do so...
...14,000-square-foot palazzos, with eight bedrooms and nine baths (and two half-baths), all for a mere $12 million...
...Not going to happen, of course...
...The back pages of the New York Times Magazine contain ads for estates in Connecticut and Virginia with stables and swimming pools and tennis courts and gently rolling lawns...
...I, on the other, much grubbier hand, seem destined to be a single-domicile man...
...I remember heavy red drapes, thick rose-colored carpets, gold-plated faucets in the shape of dolphins in the large bathroom...
...When I wake in the morning I shouldn’t at all mind looking out on a vast panorama of water and islands and ever changing tropical skies...
...Which doesn’t stop me from noting an ad in the current Town & Country for Rendezvous Bay, in Anguilla, in the Lesser Antilles, that has residences in the works—occupancy in 2010—for from $3 to $20 million...
...And I generally make it a point to yearn for things that I am certain to be unable to obtain...
...Apartments in Manhattan and London and Paris, houses in Palm Beach, Barbados, Tuscany...
...Eleven bathrooms might take some getting used to, since I have never lived in more than seven rooms, but I’m sure I could work this out...
...Sounds promising...
...What’s the point of yearning for the merely possible...
...I was once put up for fi ve days in a suite in the Plaza, in lieu of a fee, by a magazine to whose wealthier sponsors I spoke...
...Unlike the Fitzgeralds, I did not take a refreshing dip in the Pulitzer Fountain but instead walked down to Lexington Avenue, where I bought a hot-pot so that I could make my own tea in the morning...
...The only problem I can see is the asking price, which is $59 million...
...I look at my bankbook, I consider my stock holdings, and realize that I am far from meeting those demands, and by now I am confi dent that I shall never meet them...
...Big-time players seem to have apartments and houses all over the world...
...Meanwhile I also have my eye on the Hamptons estate of the late Howard Gittis, described in the Wall Street Journal as the “right-hand man of takeover artist Ronald Perelman...
...JOSEPH EPSTEIN...
...I felt as if I were living at Versailles, in an apartment down the hall from the Duc de Saint-Simon...
...I call a person rich,” says the character Ralph Touchett in Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, “when he can meet the demands of his imagination...
Vol. 13 • January 2007 • No. 18
