May 4, 2016

The Real Housewives, owning it—or at least dwelling in it.

Those of you who were spared the three chapters of the saga that was The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills “Reunion” missed something. Well, you missed a lot of things—mainly people accusing Lisa Vanderpump of various machinations involving the rumors of Yolanda Foster having Munchausen syndrome. The last installment centered primarily on whether or not Lisa had said, on the way out of somewhere, “Why don’t you involve Kyle?” and whether this constituted throwing Kyle under the bus, and how long Kyle had known this information, and what it meant if it was true, and if Kyle is Lisa Vanderpump’s toady, and whether or not Lisa Vanderpump has a hard time apologizing, generally. It would be a good exercise in language proficiency to have to translate this entire situation to the proverbial extraterrestrial. Even by the standards of the Real Housewives franchise it was petty to the point of inscrutability—idiotic and exhausting. It combined the moral rectitude of the Weimar Republic with the elegant good taste of a Trump building. Read More

May 3, 2016

Our Daily Correspondent

The Rule of Four

By Sadie Stein

From the cover of Lee Bailey’s City Food.

Lee Bailey’s books are some of my favorite comfort reads. Bailey, a designer and eighties-era entertaining doyen described in the intro to one book as “a model of style, taste, and invention,” was a famous host with the smart set, and in books like Lee Bailey’s City Food and Lee Bailey’s Country Weekends, he provides a glossy, heavily-styled time capsule of a certain moment in sophistication.

Bailey was famed in his day as a host with the most, both in his sleek Manhattan duplex and in the Hamptons country house where he often entertained such guests as Liz Smith and Helen Gurley Brown. “I think I learned almost everything I know about having people to dinner from Lee Bailey,” Nora Ephron wrote in 2000. She identified Bailey’s secret as something she termed the Rule of Four: Read More

May 2, 2016

Our Daily Correspondent

Fabric of Our Lives, Part 2

By Sadie Stein

Karl Herbsthoffer, Junge Dame im Boudoir, 1829.

Last Friday I wrote about an encounter with the platinum card–carrying elite. But this is a two-part story, you see. For many years later, long after that glimpse into the lives of the rarefied, I found myself at the local flea market.

This is a sort of addiction in my family: even when houses are being sold and divested or apartments are bursting at their meager seams or neighbors have called the city to complain about the sheds on our property (depending on the generation), we are incapable of curbing our need for “bargains.” We brake for thrift shops; we brake hard for furniture on the curb; we scour the local papers for tag, yard, or garage sales. Read More

April 29, 2016

Our Daily Correspondent

Fabric of Our Lives

By Sadie Stein

It’s not as if I could afford it. I could never have afforded a nightgown that expensive, and in that moment of my life—marginally employed, tenuously housed, financially and otherwise insecure—I could afford it even less than usual. The week before, a piece of my tooth had fallen out, a jagged shard, its edges brown with decay. I kept it in a dish by my bed. It had become an object of some fascination, but I really needed to go to the dentist.

But I wanted that nightgown so much. I craved it as I hadn’t craved a thing since childhood. It was, in fact, the sort of thing I hadn’t wanted since childhood—feminine and pretty and frivolous. A whisper-thin slip of cotton so fine, so precious, that it transcended price and moved into the realm of the divine. Read More

April 28, 2016

Our Daily Correspondent

Lord of the Wireless

By Sadie Stein

One of the many treasures preserved in the British Library’s audio archive is this vintage lesson in “English Conversation.” As a document of instruction, it’s interesting enough. But it also bears the distinction of being an early recording of J. R. R. Tolkien. Read More

April 27, 2016

Our Daily Correspondent

No Regrets

By Sadie Stein

Marietta Peabody Tree, from the cover of No Regrets.

My mother has been on somewhat of a socialite kick lately. For a while, when I talked to her, she was reading No Regrets: The Life of Marietta Tree. “Someone who ought to have had a lot of regrets,” was her acid review. From there, she moved on to a biography of the famous Cushing sisters. Read More