Elaine's is a recurring setting in the diary: a restaurant where dinner can become an interview, a celebrity encounter, a place to exchange gossip, or the first stop in a longer night out. Rather than serving merely as background, its tables bring together figures from entertainment, art, fashion, and publishing. The diarist records both the social spectacle and its small dissonances—the extravagant bill when he has not eaten, the guest who seems to have passed out with his eyes open, the celebrity greeting that may or may not be due. Taken together, these visits make Elaine's a vantage point on how New York's social world is performed and negotiated.

A Table for Conversation and Performance

On July 6, 1977, the diarist went to Elaine's with Sharon McCluskey Hammond and Robin Lehman, whom she had only recently met. He immediately connected Robin to his father, who had left a wing to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The restaurant's ordinary business of ordering dinner gave way to a comic display of money and status. Steve Aronson insisted that he could afford to hear the menu, and Sharon theatrically summoned it; later, he left $40 on the table. Valentine thought that was already too much for two people, but the bill came to $148. The diarist had eaten nothing, while Robin and the two others had spaghetti or steak, and no one had drunk anything. The episode makes the meal memorable not for its food but for the contrast between the performance of effortless wealth and the surprisingly large bill.

A later dinner with Julia Scorsese and Barbara Feldon shows the restaurant as a place where sociability could become uncomfortable as well as lively. After Barbara left, the group cabbed to Elaine's, where Julia continued praising the diarist and proposed arranging a date with the writer of Annie. Her suggestion that he meet some “real men” left him unsure what she meant. Conversation then shifted to the way Martin Scorsese made films: Julia described rehearsals and videotapes, followed by performers redoing selected material on camera, with the plot changing during production. She discussed the original New York, New York story, in which Robert De Niro's character entered the record business, and said that Martin was editing three films, had cocaine problems, and was taking medicine after blood poisoning. She also said she had written much of Taxi Driver. When the diarist argued that audiences were drawn to stars and new faces more than to directors, producers, and writers, Julia took offense and defended her husband's role in creating Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel. The dinner thus became an exchange not only about filmmaking but about who gets recognized as its author.

Julia also described giving Robert Altman the idea to set A Wedding in Chicago rather than Los Angeles, and said the producers had given her three days off. As the evening wore on, she became increasingly drunk and emptied her pocketbook onto the table, spilling credit cards. The diarist gathered them and put them back while the dinner came to $70. The scene's movement—from flattering matchmaking to a debate over film authorship and then to a practical act of care—captures the shifting social demands that recur in the restaurant entries.

Gossip, Work, and the Social Circuit

On October 10, 1977, Elaine's offered a less polished image of the publishing world. Bob Weiner was upset because New York magazine had rejected his article about Stevie Rubell. He appeared to be nearly passed out, yet remained sitting with his eyes open. The compact detail makes professional disappointment visible in the middle of a public dinner rather than in an office or formal meeting.

At another dinner, the diarist arrived with Chris Makos and Catherine Guinness after an outing to a Mets game. They were there for Bob's dinner with Baron Leon Lambert, who was associated with a Belgian bank. Catherine wore a T-shirt asking about Palestine, a pointed choice given her family history: her great-grandfather, Lord Moyne, had been assassinated in Palestine in 1944 by the Stern Gang, and her step-grandfather was Sir Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Fascist Party. Catherine asked Leon whether he was Jewish; he said that he was half-Jewish and that his mother was connected to the Rothschild family. Despite the charged exchange, Bob thought Catherine and Leon seemed to hit it off. Elaine's could hold, in one conversation, personal provocation, inherited political histories, and an apparently successful social connection.

The restaurant also appears as a hinge between dinner parties and nightlife. On one occasion, a dinner arranged around Rod Stewart and Alana Hamilton proved to be Swifty Lazar's party at Elaine's, with the Erteguns and Rod's manager or assistant also present. The atmosphere initially seemed stiff: Rod looked miserable, and the guests wanted cocaine, but none was available. When Françoise and Oscar de la Renta left, the mood changed dramatically. The diarist was struck by how much the departure of just two people altered the whole table. Rod and Alana's matching black and white mink coats supplied another visual note of the evening's social display. The group then went to Studio 54, where Truman Capote occupied the DJ's crow's nest as a kind of private office and stayed until morning. In this account, Elaine's is not an isolated destination but one stage in a night that moves from dinner to a club.

Encounters, Recognition, and Awkwardness

On January 7, 1979, the diarist had dinner at Elaine's with Phyllis Diller, whose meeting had been arranged by Barry Landau. Diller eventually realized that the person before her was the same man who had asked to draw her foot when she was beginning her career, around 1958. Her recognition collapsed decades into a single exchange: she identified him as the foot fetishist. The remembered request, long detached from the diarist's present identity in her mind, returned as an unexpected form of recognition. Tommy Smothers and Tommy Tune were also there; Tune praised Elaine's food, a judgment that the others seemed to find inexplicable.

A passing sighting of Rudolf Nureyev prompted a different kind of social calculation. The diarist wondered whether a person who saw a celebrity at Elaine's should remain cool to avoid bothering them or embrace them, as Diana Ross sometimes did. The uncertainty makes the restaurant a setting in which recognition itself becomes a question of etiquette: fame makes a familiar face visible, but does not dictate the right response. Elsewhere, the diarist's account of another evening includes a dinner at Elaine's with Rod and Judy Gilbert, Pat Hickey, and Hickey's girlfriend after a party he had wanted to leave. Catherine had wanted him to continue on to the restaurant. There, Richard tried to get him to drink tequila, while an uncertain possible sighting of Candice Bergen passed without conversation. The entries preserve how often social life depended on deciding whether to stay, speak, drink, or withdraw.

Art, Entertainment, and Private Appointments

In August 1980, after a screening of Union City, the diarist went to Elaine's to meet Tammy Grimes. Helen Frankenthaler came to the table while very drunk and waved off an offer to meet Bianca Jagger. Instead, she wanted the diarist to come meet Clement Greenberg and Kenneth Noland at her table. The evening then turned toward an older anecdote: the diarist reminded Tammy that he had drawn her feet and insisted he recognized her voice in television commercials. She had previously denied it, but now admitted that he was right. Elaine's again became a place where present company opened onto earlier encounters, and where an artist's or performer's public identity could be tested against a private memory.

Another dinner with Sharon Hammond and Ann Barish brought Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, and Jean Doumanian into the restaurant's orbit. Sharon was preparing for eyelid surgery the next morning and spoke of later getting silicone injections in her cheeks; her companions tried to persuade her that she did not need the procedures. Dustin Hoffman walked by without greeting the diarist, while David Merrick was treated as the evening's hero, with people coming over to shake his hand. The diarist felt that nobody would acknowledge him, until Jack Carter, arriving with the Secret Service, came over to say hello. The reversal—from perceived neglect to a greeting that made the evening feel successful—shows how recognition at Elaine's could be measured through small public gestures.

A Recurring Social Observatory

The visits to Elaine's range from lavish dinners and industry gossip to a rejected article, a remembered foot drawing, and a guest's spilled credit cards. Their significance lies partly in that range. The restaurant repeatedly gathers people whose work and public images circulate beyond the dining room, but the diary attends to what happens when they share a table: who pays, who leaves, who is recognized, who feels ignored, and how quickly a mood changes. The diarist's close attention to these details makes Elaine's more than a backdrop for celebrity appearances. It is a recurring social observatory, where status is displayed but also unsettled by awkwardness, appetite, money, memory, and the uncertain rules of greeting another person.