The Plaza Hotel is both a venue for New York’s public spectacles and a setting where carefully managed appearances can shift in an instant. In the diary, a formal lunch, a lobby candy shop, and an interview with teen idol Shaun Cassidy give the hotel distinct roles in the writer’s account of business, celebrity, and performance.

A Business Lunch and a Presidential Encounter

The writer and Vincent Fremont cabbed to the hotel for a lunch attended by 600 people, hosted by Gerry Grinberg, head of the North American Watch Company. The paid speakers were Art Buchwald and former president Gerald Ford; the cab fare was four dollars. The scale and formal purpose of the gathering made the Plaza a setting for business and public prominence, but the encounter with Ford soon became personal and comic.

Grinberg took the writer over to meet Ford. Ford initially seemed not to remember having met the writer at the White House, then said that he did. When asked about his wife, Ford replied that she was out shopping. The writer suggested Halston’s, and Ford agreed that she might be there. Although he seemed somewhat out of it during this exchange, he delivered his speech with apparent command, remembering it all. Lunch was steak and potatoes, an ordinary meal set against the high-profile guest list.

The Candy Shop in the Lobby

On the way out, the writer stopped at the Teuscher candy store in the Plaza lobby. The store was said to have candy flown in every day, though the diary records this as uncertain hearsay. The visit began as an attempt to sell the shop an advertisement in Interview; instead, the writer bought $200 worth of candy. The reversal turns a business errand into an unplanned purchase, locating commercial exchange not only in the formal luncheon but also in the hotel’s everyday retail space.

Shaun Cassidy: Interview and Performance

The Plaza also provided the setting for an interview with Shaun Cassidy. The conversation went badly, in the writer’s view, because Cassidy had to keep his answers clean for his young fans. He was tall, had dark circles under his eyes, and gave stock responses. The interviewers wondered whether the circles suggested a secret life, but the diary presents that only as their speculation.

Asked repeatedly what it felt like to be an idol with thousands of girls screaming, Cassidy insisted that fame did not change him. The walk through the Plaza lobby supplied an immediate counterpoint: amid the screaming fans, he seemed to change, and by the time his limousine arrived he had a different personality. The contrast between his standard interview answers and the shift the writer observed in public makes the hotel a place where celebrity’s performance becomes visible rather than merely discussed.

The interview continued downtown, where Cassidy was photographed for Interview by Barry McKinley. The writer describes Cassidy as transforming in front of the camera, seeming to fall in love with himself, while McKinley used blunt, provocative directions unlike the conventional praise the writer associated with other photographers. The writer found the exchange so striking that it was taped. Later, in Cassidy’s dressing room at Madison Square Garden, Cassidy wore stretch pants and brought the band in to lecture them about slowing down and how to turn on thirteen-year-old girls. Together, the Plaza interview and its later scenes show how the encounter moved from polished answers to more explicit backstage performance.