7.19.10: New York Heat | New York Social Diary

New York Heat

Walking west into the 85th Street tranverse. 5:00 PM. Photo: JH.

July 19, 2010. New York Heat. The only word for it. Humidity too, but Heat. Like a radiator full blast. We’ve had a lot of it this summer, and that’s what we had this past weekend in New York.

I happened to be one of those who doesn’t have air conditioning – something that actually shocks people. I do have fans, and they are on, but it’s not the same as the A/C. It’s a personal choice; I grew up without it in the hot Northeast and I’m used to not having it, and I don’t want it. Those machines take up a lot of the little window space I have for light (to come in), and it’s actually quite comfortable without in both day and night.

The city is very quiet on these hot days, as you might imagine (if you’re not here). It’s almost as if everyone’s left town, and while many do, it’s mainly that people are staying inside and chilling as best they can. JH took a 20-minute Sunday afternoon stroll on the Upper East Side to give you a better sense of the days here ...

One of the empty fountains alongside The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In front of The Met.

Ancient Playground at 86th Street and Fifth Avenue.

85th Street tranverse.

86th Street and Fifth Avenue, southeast corner.

Looking east on 81st Street between Fifth and Madison.

79th and Madison Avenue, northeast corner.

79th and Madison Avenue, southwest corner.

78th and Madison Avenue.

Looking south on Madison Avenue from 78th Street.

Dr. Robert Butler died a couple weeks ago at 83. While he is well known and I had heard of him, it wasn’t until reading his obituaries that I kept thinking: “how do I know this man?”

Dr. Butler was a gerontologist and it wasn’t lost on me that I am of an age where people forget (I have a memoir on one of my bookshelves by the late Duff Cooper -- “Old Men Forget” and it always makes me laugh when I notice it.

This past weekend there was an obit of Robert Butler in the FT. He was an amazing man with a most interesting background – interesting because of the hardship that he faced at the beginning of his life and how it motivated him and translated into his work that took him all the way to the end of his life.

Dr. Butler was born in Manhattan in 1927. His parents, obviously with a bad marriage, split up before he was a year old and he was sent to live with his maternal grandparents on their farm in Vineland, New Jersey. His father died soon after in some kind of mishap related to his inability to cope, and his mother committed suicide by jumping off a bridge, abandoning their child to the fates.


	Vernon Jordan, Robert Butler, Barbara Walters, and Donald Marron

The child was fortunate to have loving grandparents who looked after him, but when he was seven his grandfather disappeared (no one told him he had died). The death, which occurred in the middle of the Great Depression, broke his grandmother financially. She and he moved from the farm to a cheap hotel where they subsisted on government surplus food, she took in sewing, and the boy sold newspapers. Eventually the hotel had a fire, burned down, and they lost the last of their belongings.

Just reading about that situation is almost enough to discourage even the most optimistic, but the boy’s grandmother (who was then in her sixties) found a way to keep them going. It was this resoluteness and energy of hers that inspired him throughout his life. It eventually provided the bases for his lifelong studies that not only made his reputation professionally but opened up a new way of thinking about ourselves as human beings in the natural process of aging.

In the late 1960s, Dr. Butler, having identified the subject for debate and exploration coined the term “Ageism.”

I was in my late 20s in those days which were characterized by the Viet Nam War and the great upheaval of “liberations” in our society. It wasn’t uncommon to read articles in popular magazines about 30 being the cut-off age for those who were worth listening to and those who weren’t. Anyone over 30 was considered irrelevant, or at least their thinking was, by us “ageists” (twenty-somethings).


Robert Caplin for the NY Times.

In retrospect the whole thing seems absurd, but the Baby Boomers (still under 30) thought they were something. And of course if you think you’re something, knowing it all goes with the territory. Time has tempered and rearranged a lot of that attitude for some, but it continues to persist among a lot of us.

It was partly this behavior that provoked Dr. Butler’s study. Clearly remembering the strength and breadth of his “aging” grandmother when he was a small child, he had little patience for those of us who treated the elderly like lame-brained, handicapped “seniors” and said so.

He wrote several books about his experiences and what he had learned, including Why Survive? Being Old in America, which won him a Pulitzer for non-fiction in 1976. In it he wrote: “We have shaped a society which is extremely harsh to live in when one is old. The tragedy of old age is not the fact that each of us must grow old and die but that the process of doing so has been made unnecessarily and at times excruciatingly painful, humiliating, debilitating and isolating through insensitivity, ignorance and poverty.”

It was the FT obit that I read on Saturday in the Weekend Edition that reminded me of how I knew, or rather met, Dr. Butler. I did a search for his name on the Diary archives and discovered that actually we’d met in Abu Dhabi in 2007 when JH and I attended the Festival of Thinkers sponsored by the Ministry of Education in Abu Dhabi (see NYSD 10.23.07).

Cellphone-itis Dr. Robert Butler, Kathleen Lacey, and Jennifer Raab on their cells with Dottie Herman behind (Abu Dhabi, 10.23.07).

There were many distinguished guests on that junket, and all I had gathered about Dr. Butler at the time was that he was involved in the study of gerontology and aging. I remembered him as pleasant and friendly, unassuming in self-regard, but soft-spoken and courteous. I had no inkling that he was a leading thinker in our time. He struck me as a man who was “older” but very much at peace with himself; a wise man.

In combing through these memories, I suddenly realized that I really became acquainted with the man the following year (2008) at a dinner that Sarah and Dr. Mitch Rosenthal hosted one night at their Upper East Side apartment for several friends including Elizabeth and Felix Rohatyn, Joan Ganz Cooney and Pete Peterson and Barbara Walters.

Barbara’s date that night was ... Robert Butler. Again, the very pleasant and unassuming fellow. I hadn’t remembered him from the Abu Dhabi trip, as it happened; he was simply Barbara Walters’ date for the evening.

At this dinner he was telling us that the Boomers’ generation – those former under-30 know-it-alls – had reached a critical point in the aging process (now reaching 60 and over), and that because it was the largest generation in our history, we were soon going to be confronted with some very stressful and dire financial and economic circumstances that would effect every living American.

Dr. Robert Butler (left) and DPC (across the table) dining on roast camel in Abu Dhabi.

Dr. Butler’s remarks over dinner were delivered in his quiet tone of voice but the warnings were, as I wrote at the time, dire and even catastrophic. He was not one, I should add, to garnish his words with emotional calisthenics. He didn’t need to; it was pretty obvious what he was talking about.

As one of the younger (by not all that much) guests at the table, I offered the possibility that since this was a matter also of an evolutionary nature, perhaps we would be coming up with some workable solutions to what looked (and still looks) like an encroaching disaster. My intentions were sensible – I was searching for the possibility of solutions – but, in the end, lame. The good doctor, at the other end of the table, while helping himself to seconds as they were being passed, merely said: “you’re very naïve to think that.”

I felt like a kid being corrected in class. And nobody likes to think he’s naïve when he’s (trying to be) serious. However, I was being corrected by not only an expert but the man who put the study on the map. And a mild-mannered man as well (there was no hysterical tone or wall of worry in his assessment).

Reading about his life and especially his beginnings in the FT piece, I was recalling the last time I had a glimpse of him – which was that night at the Rosenthals. After dinner I hailed a cab outside their building. Only a moment or two later, the cab stopped for the light on Lexington Avenue, and an attractive couple crossed the street in front of us. I noticed her, of course – it was Barbara Walters – walking arm in arm with the man with the white hair and the kindly expression on his face. To the passing eye, they were simply a goodlooking couple of a certain age casually strolling, probably heading home after a pleasant dinner. Which of course they were. She was easily recognizable, however, the very famous persona; and he, almost modestly unrecognizable to anyone passing by. But, a giant in his naturally unassuming cloak.

Pay attention to this, he was saying to all of us that night in his mild manner and authentic authority. Pay attention. All of us.

The location of Masterpiece art and antique fair. Look Again ... It's really a tent.

Over in London ... Yet another stunning art and antiques fair debuted in London this summer. Masterpiece, founded by top dealers from the late Grosvenor House Art & Antiques fair, Asprey, and the builders behind TEFAF Maastricht, had the English capital buzzing when it opened in an elaborate silk-screened marquee in Chelsea. It wasn't just the dazzling look of the fair and the quality of the art and antiques on offer that drew a well-heeled clientele, but mini-me versions of the Le Caprice restaurant group that were inside the fair.

The likes of Mick Jagger, Julian Lennon, Michael Caine, and Rose Tarlow were spotted tucking into Scott's, Le Caprice, and Harry’s Bar after an afternoon shopping the fair's 118 stands selling everything from limited edition Bugattis, to museum-quality English furniture, to multi-million dollar jewels. The UNICEF Charity Gala, with a silent auction hosted by Sir Roger Moore, brought out the Champagne and even more glitterati. — Sallie Brady for NYSD