Mortimer’s is a recurring dining venue in the diary’s social geography, hosting both planned occasions and crowded lunches. The entries place it at the intersection of celebrity, work, gossip, and private tension: a farewell dinner for Marisa Berenson becomes a forum for stories about Warren Beatty, while a later lunch touches on Bianca Jagger’s legal dispute and a subsequent party brings together people from entertainment and law. The diary offers little description of the restaurant itself; instead, its changing guests and conversations make the place legible as a setting for New York social life.

A Recurring Social Setting

The diary records Mortimer’s across several years and for different purposes, rather than as the scene of one continuous episode. It is a destination for dinner after another party, a venue for a hosted lunch, and a gathering place for a birthday celebration. The narrator’s brief practical details—cab rides, a crowded dining room, and the people already present—anchor these occasions in a social circuit without supplying an address or a sustained account of the restaurant’s appearance.

That pattern makes the venue’s significance episodic. At Mortimer’s, introductions and personal updates sit beside rumor, professional reputations, and the business of maintaining relationships. The same setting can hold an intimate dinner and a packed lunch, while the diary moves quickly from one group of guests to another. Its account is therefore less an institutional portrait of the restaurant than a record of the kinds of encounters the narrator associates with it.

Marisa Berenson’s Dinner in December 1978

On December 20, 1978, the narrator first went to Jackie O.’s Christmas party at 1040 Fifth Avenue, then continued by cab to Mortimer’s for the dinner he had accepted from Marisa Berenson. Berenson, dressed in silver, looked beautiful to him; Paul Jasmin was with her, and she was preparing to leave town. The evening had a personal edge: Berenson was angry with Barbara Allen over Allen’s involvement with Berenson’s husband, Jim Randall, in California, and Allen had not been invited.

At the table, the conversation shifted from that dispute to celebrity gossip. Steve Rubell told the group that Warren Beatty had boasted of sleeping with Jackie O. Bianca Jagger challenged Beatty’s reliability, recalling that she had confronted him at the Beverly Wilshire after hearing that he claimed to be sleeping with her. Her account made the dinner’s gossip openly contested rather than simply accepted: she said she had embarrassed him, while also making a remark about his sexual reputation that prompted Rubell to ask how she could know. The narrator notes that Diana Ross was there and was fun. After dinner, the party continued at Studio 54, linking Mortimer’s gathering to another stop in the same night’s social itinerary.

Lunch, Legal Talk, and the Crowd

At a lunch for Hélène Rochas and Kim D’Estainville, Mortimer’s was already packed, though the narrator arrived first for the gathering after church. Jerry Hall was there, criticizing Bianca Jagger as Bianca pursued a claim for half of Mick Jagger’s assets. The diary places the dispute within a wider discussion of California cases involving people who had lived with wealthy partners; it also mentions a separate paternity case in which Mick had supported a child born outside marriage. Mortimer’s thus becomes a setting where a current legal conflict is discussed through comparison with other cases and relationships.

The lunch was not all serious talk. The narrator joked to Mica Ertegun about turning Ahmet Ertegun gay so he would stop pinching women, then joined in imagining deliberately foolish musical ideas, including a musical about jogging. The diary also records that people were surprised by how much the narrator had been talking lately and thought he seemed like a new person. The busy restaurant frames this exchange as a group conversation, while the narrator’s comment gives the lunch a personal note: the change others noticed was his increased talkativeness.

Parties and Uneasy Company

A later Mortimer’s gathering, recorded on September 17, 1982, was a birthday party for Marisa Berenson’s husband, Richard Golub. The diary identifies Golub as a lawyer connected with Brooke Shields’s courtroom testimony and notes that Karen Black attended. The narrator had just returned to New York and spent the afternoon working with Benjamin before going out with Chris, who had received a negative result on his AIDS test. At the party, the narrator took photographs and left at midnight. The entry places a social celebration beside the day’s work and the immediate anxieties surrounding test results, without suggesting that the party itself resolved those concerns.

In another visit, after seeing Daniel with Cornelia Guest, the narrator went to Mortimer’s and found Fred Hughes there. Hughes’s English accent was unusually loud, which the narrator took as a sign that he was drunk. He was moving from table to table, and the narrator felt apprehensive about what he might be saying at each one. Unlike the dinner’s shared gossip or the birthday party’s photographs, this brief scene centers on watching a familiar guest become unpredictable in public. Together, the entries show Mortimer’s accommodating very different social moods: celebration, lively talk, and the narrator’s worry about a companion’s behavior.