It was the best show in town, society chronicler Dominick Dunne once wrote of Mortimer’s, a brick-walled restaurant on the corner of 75th Street and Lexington Avenue—provided you could get a table.
From this distance, it’s not easy to characterize or even understand the appeal of a joint that occupied a special place in Manhattan’s social landscape from 1976, until it was abruptly closed after the death of owner Glenn Bernbaum in 1998. and even beyond. Widely acknowledged as the club-like place featured in Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities”, Mortimer’s was so modest that scenes from the movie were filmed elsewhere because, as Mr. Bernbaum himself once said, “people of the Midwestern wouldn’t do that.” I don’t understand the simplicity of the place.”
The decor was basic at best: bare brick walls, lanterns in school buildings, a curved bar left over from its day as a drawing room, and curved wooden chairs with hard seats that Vogue editor André Leon Talley once complained of being “hard on your bum.” ” goods. On the menu were nursery items such as chicken hash, salmon croquettes and creamed spinach, reasonably priced (a burger in 1976 cost $1.90), because as Mr. Bernbaum once pointed out, no one is as cheap as the rich.
The clientele at Mortimer’s has always been the draw, and it was indeed a star-studded bunch, as evidenced by “Mortimer’s: A Moment in Time,” a new coffee table book by Robin Baker Leacock, featuring images of Mary Hilliard, due out next month by G- editions. The book highlights a vanished social landscape populated by the affluent, well-connected, celebrated, and sophisticated group that befits Marlene Dietrich’s long-ago observation about New Yorkers being constantly hungry for anything but food.
By broad consensus, Mr. Bernbaum, a nice former clothing industry director who, as part of his second act after retirement, bought a building on the Upper East Side, was a miser. With no background in the hospitality industry, he set up his restaurant on a corner, sandwiched between a Catholic church and two now-defunct gay bars, and then basically ran it as a private property.
“It was basically a club,” the writer Bob Colacello said in an interview.
A man of contradictions, Mr. Bernbaum was rude and kind, distant and warm, sad and often cuttingly funny. “Cerberus of the Upper East Side,” Peter Bacanovic, a technical director and long-time Mortimer habit, recently characterized the man. But unlike the hound of Hades, Lord Bernbaum guarded the gates of his domain ferociously against those he regarded as the unwashed social dead, spoiled and fawning over the favorites who passed by the gate.
It’s instructive to think about how small in the pre-digital world was that group of largely self-selected elites who seemed to rule New York. The Capital “S” society thrived in those days. Fashion was effectively controlled by John Fairchild, the snobbish publisher of Women’s Wear Daily. A close-knit group of “confirmed bachelors” such as Mr. Bernbaum, Bill Blass and socialite Jerry Zipkin — who probably had a better hotline to the Reagan White House than members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — subtly wielded their power on the social stage. Graceful young debutantes hopped around in Christian Lacroix pouf dresses. And the ladies who had lunch really did—if you can call a meal three bullshots and a craven. Smoked a cigarette in a Dunhill cigarette holder.
That’s how the editor, novelist and one-time gossip columnist William Norwich described his introduction to Mortimer’s shortly after it opened in 1976. most of his patrons were, through the dazzling people watching.
Invariably on Sunday, 1B, a table to the right of the window would be occupied by Diana Vreeland. Nan Kempner was close by and so was the fashion board and philanthropist Judith Peabody, crowned with her signature bouffant nimbus. On any given day, alone or in combination, as Mr. Dunne noted in Vanity Fair, chances are you’ll see heiress Gloria Vanderbilt, Barbara Walters, Jacqueline Onassis, Estée Lauder, William S. Paley, Fran Lebowitz, Henry Kissinger, Claudette would see. Colbert, Katharine Graham, Mike Wallace, Lord Snowdon or Greta Garbo.
Few of these A-list movers and shakers survive in the collective memory any longer, and so it’s like a document from a bygone age that the book earns its hefty $85 cover price.
Perhaps one way of looking at Mortimer’s is the sum of New York society in the days “before PR ruled the nightlife,” as Ms. Leacock said from her home near Palm Beach, Florida. out at night because you have to be on a list, and that list didn’t exist then.”
Or if it did, it was mostly in the mind of a sniffling, eccentric, and autocratic restaurateur, a man who never took reservations, but who, of course, as he told Vanity Fair, painstakingly ran a joint where we “take care of our friends .”
