The Studio 54 of Culture

On the eve of its seventy-fifth birthday, the New York Public Library is suddenly an uncontested social success, with the hottest board in town. Full of bookworms by day, writes ARTHUR LUBOW, but social butterflies by night

ARTHUR LUBOW

Paloma Picasso and Calvin Klein, Jackie Onassis and David Rockefeller, Bill Paley and Bill Buckley—they are coming to the New York Public Library, and they are leaving their reading glasses at home. High heels are clicking on the marble floors, champagne bubbles are floating to the ornate wooden ceilings. Instead of the sour odor of crumbling paper, the aroma of rumaki wafts down the marble balustrades. Could this be the public library? It feels more like the Temple of Dendur. Not the Temple of Dendur as it stood on the Nile, serving the cult of Isis, but the temple as it lies at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, encapsulated in a monumental glass hangar. A hot spot for parties since the late seventies, the temple couldn't be more postmodern. Its jokey juxtapositions, its ahistorical allusions to historical grandeur, set the style for the fashionable event of today.

The Library, too, is a temple, and what it lacks in antiquity it makes up for in marble: 530,000 cubic feet of it, for the opulent interiors and foot-thick walls. In a city where real estate is parceled out by the square inch and skyscrapers take from the air what the ground can't provide, the Library extends in low-rise majesty along two blocks of Fifth Avenue. Ascending the wide stone steps to the Corinthian-pillared entrance, a visitor quickly forgets the insectlike hiss of "sins, sins" from the young men outside on Forty-second Street, dubious-looking fellows with names like "Gizmo" and "Panama," who are selling what they claim is sinsemilla (primo marijuana). Inside the grand entrance hall, one climbs a massive carved-marble staircase, lit by chandeliers and lamps on marble posts, to the main reading room on the third and top floor—a Belle Epoque hall with fiftyfoot ceilings festooned with stucco cherubs and long wooden tables carved with the seal of New York. Reading side by side in the light of the bronze table lamps is a representative mix of the city's population, from prepschool students to homeless street people. Anyone can use the Library.

During the day, that is. By night the crowd changes. It's a little ironic that the New York Public Library, which architecturally surpasses other Beaux-Arts libraries (such as Boston's) because its designers sensitively attended to its library function, should be such a hit as a party backdrop. (Still, imagine what Isis must be thinking uptown at the Metropolitan.) With its marmoreal vistas and its scholarly mystique, the Library has become the venue of choice for many of the classiest events in town. It is where the American Book Awards were presented last November, and where the International PEN conference opened in January. It is where Henry Kissinger and French ambassador Emmanuel de Margerie went to salute the Statue of Liberty, where Jackie Onassis held a book party, where green eggs and ham were served for Dr. Seuss's eightieth birthday. "If you pay tribute to scholarship, the Hilton bar is not the right place,'' says Library president Vartan Gregorian. "It's insulting to have literary events in hotels.'' Not that you have to be bookish to love the Library. It's where the Council of Fashion Designers of America hands out its awards, including one this year for lifetime achievement to Katharine Hepburn. "New York is very low on beautiful buildings with big spaces," notes fashion consultant Eleanor Lambert. "The Library has the ambience of having scholarly importance, and that has to help, too. It's not just one more hotel."

For a long time the Library sprawled as sleepily as the two stone lions that guard its entrance. "It was just dim and dusty and nobody paid any attention to it," says Aileen Mehle, who writes the "Suzy" society column. "It could have lain there forever until someone recognized it's a great place to give a party." This recognition came gradually, the outcome of a series of events that began in 1976, modestly enough, with a lunch. The guest at that lunch was Richard Salomon, who by building Lanvin-Charles of the Ritz into a cosmetics giant had become a very rich man. The hostess was Brooke Astor, who had attained her financial clout by marrying the great-great-grandson of John Jacob Astor. (When Vincent Astor died in 1959, he left Brooke his personal foundation along with a personal fortune.) The subject of the lunch was the Library. Since Vincent's death, Mrs. Astor has sat on the board of the Library, representing the family interest. The creation of a public library, which was eventually absorbed into the New York Public, had been the only significant philanthropy of the patriarch John Jacob, the richest man in America when he died in 1848. In two decades, Mrs. Astor had watched the Library slide to the edge of a financial abyss. Once open every day, the central Library building closed first on Sundays, then on Thursdays, and shortened its hours on the other days. Without money for preservation, irreplaceable books were crumbling. Money for book acquisition was drying up. The roof leaked. Someone had to do something, and Mrs. Astor hoped that Salomon would be the one. She asked him to join the board of trustees as its chairman.

He hesitated. "If they had gone outside the board for a chairman, obviously the board was in trouble," he explains. "My business career was finished, and I didn't want my last job to be a failure. Also, the Library had been rather Waspish, and I questioned whether a Jewish chairman would be welcome." Mrs. Astor assured him on all these points. Still, he hesitated. "I told Brooke that I would need her substantial help if we were to do anything at all," he says. Or, translated into the vernacular: Put your money where your mouth is. At the lunch, Mrs. Astor promised to give the Library $5 million on a two-to-one match, and, as Salomon recalls, "she later took me by the hand and led me around to people" to raise the matching $10 million. As chairman, Salomon spent much of his time mending lines of communication with City Hall. The city owns the Fifth Avenue building and land, but the privately endowed and supported Library must maintain services. Salomon persuaded the mayor to commit money for "infrastructure" needs, such as climate control for the stacks, while he snared private contributors for the more visible, thus sexier, restoration of reading rooms and exhibition areas.

So much for what Salomon calls "the pre-Gregorian era."

In 1981 the Library acquired a new chairman and a new president. The chairman came first. Knowing that Salomon was ready to step down, board member John T. Sargent, who was then chairman of Doubleday, approached Andrew Heiskell, who he knew was nearing retirement age as chairman of Time Inc. Like Sauternes grapes, nonprofitboard chairmen are best harvested very late in their season. Sargent asked if he might introduce Heiskell to Dick Salomon. No need, said Heiskell; he already knew Salomon, who lives on the floor above him at U.N. Plaza. Walking to work together one morning, Salomon suggested that Heiskell join the board. At the end of the year, if he liked it, he could succeed Salomon as chairman. Heiskell joined, and he liked it.

Before coming onto the board, Heiskell said that as the prospective chairman he would want to have a hand in selecting the new president. "We had a search committee," Heiskell says. "And out of the blue the trustees of the University of Pennsylvania decided not to make Vartan Gregorian the school's president. And he just fell into my lap. I took one look at him. It didn't take me more than three minutes to know—this was it."

A library represents learning, culture, self-advancement. Gregorian embodies those values. Bom in Iran of Armenian extraction (in conversation he still tends to drop the article the in an appealingly exotic way), Gregorian had combined the careers of history teacher and university administrator. A popular provost, he was passed over for the Pennsylvania presidency (ironically, lack of fund-raising experience was a reported reason), leaving him receptive to a bid from the Library. "When Gregorian came, the whole thing came to life," says Salomon. "Before that, you felt you were alone pushing a heavy rock up a hill."

When a cultural institution tries to spiff up its image, the person in charge mustn't seem too much of a huckster, lest the new image come off tarty instead of glamorous. The Metropolitan Museum under Thomas Hoving infuriated traditionalists in a way that the Library, using many of the same tricks, has not. Gregorian remains a scholar (he still teaches history), the calm at the eye of the hurricane. Well, perhaps not exactly calm (in fact, he effervesces), but untainted. "My role has always been that of educator," he says. "I have rarely asked people for money. I explain to them the issues." A onetime impoverished scholarship student, he treats the rich and powerful with the same ebullient solicitude he bestows on his staff. He hugs everyone, from Mrs. Astor on down. Everyone is charmed. "He makes you think he has been waiting three weeks to see you," says one Library benefactor. "He uses your first name three times in one sentence. It's really flattering."

Lively, yet at the same time bookish: it's what the Library needed in a president, and what it wanted when it came time for a party. Looking to raise the Library's freshened-up profile, Salomon, with the help of special-events consultant George Trescher, planned the party that in October 1981 put the Library on the social map—the Literary Lions party. It was a clever idea. "There had been a proposal to do a big deal with a rock group and get five thousand people under a huge tent at $100 a throw," Salomon recalls. "It didn't seem to me that it was the right approach. I thought a library ought to do it on a more intellectual plane." As Trescher observes, "One always tried to do it in keeping with the flavor of the institution."

This flavor-keeping principle is applied creatively. For what Trescher calls "the first outrageous party"—held by the Metropolitan Museum in 1967 to commemorate the $1.4 million purchase of a Monet landscape—French hors d'oeuvres and a mermaid in the fountain seemed appropriate. For the Library, Trescher and Salomon concocted something a little more sedate. "We thought, 'One thing we can get is authors,' " Salomon says. "If we could get twenty top-notch authors, we thought we could get hostesses to pay for a table to entertain their chosen guests with a Literary Lion. [The first group of Lions included Lillian Heilman, Louis Auchincloss, Norman Mailer, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Tom Wolfe.] It was a revival of a tum-of-the-century idea in a different way. In a small room, you could entertain almost as in a private home." By staging the Literary Lions dinner in three small rare-book rooms, Salomon ensured exclusivity as well as intimacy. Only about twenty tables seating eleven could be squeezed into those rooms. Going at $10,000 each, the tables sold out, says Salomon, within two days.

The fifth Literary Lions dinner was held last November, as exclusive and successful as ever. The price for a table had soared to $15,000, but in this market, forget about elasticity of demand. No tables were available. They are cherished as jealously as were the boxes in the Diamond Horseshoe at the old Metropolitan Opera House. What makes the event so attractive is not merely the presence of the Literary Lions. No one would want to underestimate the social magnetism of Russell Baker or Kurt Vonnegut, but remember: the hosts include Barbara Tuchman and Katharine Graham, and their guest lists boast such names as Jacqueline Onassis and Oscar de la Renta. This is New York high society the way it sees itself—a mingling of the rich, the wellborn, and the talented. From the point of view of the Library staff, that it takes place inside the Library is the main thing. The $250,000 the party raises is a lagniappe, almost an afterthought. As with the money raised by renting ou,^z:prs for corporate events ($15,000 plus expenses can get you the grand main-floor Astor Hall), it's not so much the money, it's the principle of the thing.

"We're not here to make money on this," Gregorian says of the policy to rent out the Library for parties. "We want to bring people in." His vice president for public affairs and development, Gregory Long, concurs that the Literary Lions party was started "to bring people into the Library"; unlike Gregorian, he makes clear who these people are. "By doing our main business— opening our doors to scholars in the morning— it's harder for us to reach the comers of society ~ that make decisions about our future," Long says. "It was clear to me that we probably needed to do more things and bigger things than Literary Lions." As Heiskell sees it, this question of how to "bring people in" is the Library's peculiar problem. "Big givers to the Metropolitan Museum or the Metropolitan Opera or the Symphony personally enjoy those institutions," he says. "They go there themselves. Very few big givers go to the Library. They're not even aware of the building." As Long says, "All of this could be seen as audience development. Many institutions have a problem developing audiences, but the Library is already heavily used. It's a secondary audience we're developing."

Spenders, not users. The users of the Library, unlike museumgoers, don't even pay to get in. Of course, they are the "primary audience," the end for which the Library exists, but as far as the means for keeping the Library alive, the users are mostly irrelevant. When the Metropolitan Museum, the acknowledged pioneer of institutional-audience development, hyped its mega-shows to boost attendance, its coffers swelled along with its pride. The exhibitions in the Library's restored galleries bring in tourists, but no direct revenues. Indirectly, though, the tourists help, because spenders relish the idea of users. No one likes to drop money into a void.

During the day anyone can use the Library. By night the crowd changes.

Partly in response to this sense of new life at the Library, Mrs. Astor in the spring of 1983 made The Announcement. Like the recruitment of Salomon, which inaugurated the Library's renaissance, The Announcement followed a lunch. This time the lunch took place at Mrs. Astor's Park Avenue apartment. Gregorian was a guest, along with the historian Sir John Plumb, and the year being what it was, conversation turned to George Orwell's 1984. "We were talking about the notion that freedom is not enough," Gregorian recalls. "It can be a free country, you can say whatever you want, but if you have nothing to say, if you don't know anything, what good is that? I talked about 1984 and the manipulation of the populace, the disorientation of culture, the explosion of information." And after the lunch, showing how a good educator can also be a brilliant fund-raiser, Gregorian sent copies of 1984 to Mrs. Astor and the other members of the Library board.

That Christmas Mrs. Astor sent 1984 to dozens of her acquaintances. But before that, she made her most substantial gift. She announced that she would resign from her other boards to concentrate her attention on the Library. "I remember thinking it was like Louis XIV," says a lesser Library benefactor. "It required a proclamation." In fact, Mrs. Astor has continued to expend time and money on other favorite New York causes, including the Metropolitan Museum, Rockefeller University, and the zoo. But The Announcement was an imprimatur, as clear as the seal ''By appointment to Her Majesty the Queen" on a jar of jam.

Among the many people that Mrs. Astor has brought into the Library, the most important may be Annette Reed, chairman for this month's seventy-fifthanniversary celebration. Funny, stylish, and popular, Mrs. Reed is a trendsetter and, like Mrs. Astor, an energetic fundraiser. By recruiting Mrs. Reed for the board of trustees, Mrs. Astor ensured the allegiance of the next generation. ''Once Brooke and Annette went, all the other glitterati went," says an acquaintance. The Library board became fashionable. ''You have people fighting to join our board now, and you used to have to beg them to join," says Salomon. Last June, for example, Ann Getty moved onto the board, which was recently expanded to make room for such newcomers. Having just gone into business as a publisher, Mrs. Getty (a friend of Mrs. Reed) sank easily into the Library's embrace. An executive of another nonprofit institution says enviously, ''The Library is a hot board, up there with the Metropolitan Museum, and possibly ahead of the Opera."

The impact of The Announcement and the Literary Lions was revealed to all in May 1984 at the Library's coming-out party: the ''In Celebration of Learning" benefit, hosted by Mrs. Astor. It was a grand party. Guests dined on something called ''veal Minerva." Young men and women, draped and immobile to resemble statues of Architecture, Science, and so on, created a "Minerva's Garden" in Bryant Park, behind the Library. At last, those who had hungered after a place at the exclusive Literary Lions dinners could make the scene at the Library. This is, of course, a venerable marketing ploy. Back in the eighteenth century, Josiah Wedgwood worked indefatigably to place his plates on the tables of the aristocracy, knowing that the middle classes would then happily buy his lowerpriced, mass-produced wares. It worked for him, and it worked for the Library. The "In Celebration of Learning" party attracted 1,500 guests, raising the extraordinary sum of $1.4 million.

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TI ^he Library no longer looks downX and-out. Its stone has been scrubbed clean of decades of grime. "When I first saw the building, I didn't know it was made of marble," says Heiskell. "I thought it was brown granite." BeauxArts rooms that had been masked in Masonite have been rehabilitated. At the same time as the central building was being overhauled, critical funds were coming in for book acquisition, cataloguing, and preservation. Other money went to the eighty-one branch libraries. Huge gifts were made: $1 million from Enid Haupt, $1.2 million from Richard Salomon, $2.5 million from David Rockefeller, and $10 million last April from the Vincent Astor Foundation, which brought the Astor Foundation's contributions to the Library to nearly $20 million. On a smaller, individual scale (it might be dubbed "tourist class"), 22,000 people gave thirty-five dollars or more last year to become Friends of the Library—up a third over the previous year.

In the genteel days of the great cultural institutions, a board could convene each year and divide the deficit among themselves. But with today's costs—the Library's expenses run to $100 million a year—the burden has shifted to professional fund-raisers in development offices. They maneuver for attention, they do a dance to bring people in. "I don't care what gets you into the temple, as long as you get in," says Trescher, the party consultant. It's all admittedly vulgar—which is another way of saying it's more popular, more democratic. The Library is opening an outdoor cafe on its steps, and a gift shop to sell posters and calendars in its entrance hall. The money raised will be negligible, but it's seen as a necessary service. "There's an audience of tourists and people who come in to see the exhibitions," says Gregory Long, "and they want to be able to buy postcards." Unlike the Metropolitan Museum, where the people buying the postcards are also crowding in front of the pictures, the Library may be able to preserve its character along with its books.

"Some Library people are complaining that the exhibitions bring in people who just leave and don't use the Library," says a librarian. "But we don't need more users. All the seats are taken, and the books are falling apart."

The Library is in the right place (a Beaux-Arts monument on Fifth Avenue) at the right time. "Now that it's come out of the shadows, the Library is the perfect New York institution," says a fund-raiser for another organization. "It has intellectual cachet. It's about books, a.k.a. culture. It has a liberal aura, because it provides a real service to the people of New York." The Library casts a welcome glow of professionalism and intellect. "If you see your picture in the paper between Arthur Schlesinger and Kurt Vonnegut," says one Library benefactor, "that gives you a seriousness you don't get standing next to polo players." "There are people who feel that the Library is getting too social," Salomon admits. "But we can't raise the kind of money we have to raise without these events." With a little adroit stage-managing, the entrances and exits can be coordinated with the precise timing of high farce. The tourists shuffling through the exhibition halls won't even see the reading room. At night, as the red-eyed users trudge out, the black-tied spenders can move in.