In the diaries, 21 Club is a recurring place to meet, eat, celebrate, and conduct conversations that move between work and private life. The club’s narrative importance comes from these collisions: a dinner becomes a vantage point on a strained celebrity relationship, a planned interview yields an intimate account of former sweethearts, and a birthday celebration is measured first by who has not arrived. Across the entries, it serves as a social setting whose meaning is made by its guests and by the diarist’s attention to their entrances, appearances, and alliances.

A Dining Room for Social Observation

On June 28, 1977, the diarist took a cab to 21 Club, where Vincent Fremont picked him up. At dinner he sat with Peter Beard and Harry Horn, whom the diary identifies as being from Kenya, while guests streamed upstairs to a birthday dinner for Egon hosted by Diane von Furstenberg. The club’s overlapping gatherings brought different social circles into view at once: the diarist was at one table, aware of another party assembling above.

Mick Jagger arrived in a lime suit with Jerry Hall. The diary records his conspicuous, unsettled behavior—singing to himself, repeatedly putting on and removing his sunglasses, and appearing so unsteady that the waiters seemed worried he might pass out. He directed his attention toward Vincent, but the diarist later learned from Fred Hughes that this was a diversion: Jagger was passionately in love with Hall, and Bianca Jagger might be in trouble. Hall said she needed to leave; when Peter Beard offered to accompany her to get a cab, she said Jagger would drive her. The club scene thus becomes a place where an apparent quarrel is reinterpreted through later information, and where a small exchange about leaving carries the larger relationship into view.

Conversation and Work at the Table

On January 31, 1978, a dinner at 21 Club was meant to provide an interview with Joel McCleary. The tape recorder malfunctioned, but the evening produced a different kind of account. The diarist sat beside Lynn, who said that she and McCleary had once been sweethearts but never married: she was a Marxist, he a hippie. She described their difference not as a minor disagreement but as the reason they could not make a life together. They met once a year to tell each other off, a pattern the diarist compared to the premise of the play Same Time Next Year.

Lynn also described McCleary’s changing appearance and its political usefulness in her view: he had once been very thin and was now heavier, which she thought helped him present himself to voters. She recounted her guru’s claim that a thin man would become homosexual, a stereotype the diarist partly entertained by comparing it with models. The dinner’s intended journalistic purpose therefore gave way to a more revealing conversation about political image, bodily appearance, and the persistence of an old relationship. Lynn mentioned working with a foundation associated with a Pillsbury family member; when the diarist asked her for money, she said she could give only to people in New England.

A month later, on March 6, Jamie Wyeth invited the diarist to dinner at the club. He picked up Catherine Guinness, and the two had an enjoyable time gossiping about Wyeth’s European trip with Bo Polk and Rudolf Nureyev. Guinness ordered a black velvet made with Guinness and champagne. Andrew Stein sat at the next table with his girlfriend; Ossie Clark came by; and Tom Sullivan arrived after traveling in Florida with Margaret Trudeau, who was waiting outside in a limousine. A short account of dinner thus accommodates art-world travel, political and social connections, and the comings and goings of the wider party without treating them as separate from the meal.

Celebrations, Delays, and Social Performance

The club is also the setting for an awkward birthday dinner whose progress the diary follows minute by minute. On the way there, Tom Sullivan had offered to collect the diarist and Catherine Guinness in his limousine but did not arrive, so they took a cab. At 21 Club, Jay Mellon was sitting alone. The guests had been expected at nine; after an hour of drinks, no one else had appeared. Guinness went upstairs to check whether the party might be in another room, but found nobody there.

The diarist went out to call Eartha Kitt and ask where she and her daughter Kitt were. Kitt answered and said her mother had gone out with Barry Landau. The birthday gathering’s first development was therefore not the arrival of its guests but the discovery that one expected attendee had made other plans. Lou Reed finally arrived at about ten, bringing a one-inch television as a present. The diary notes that he was sober and charming, and contrasts his bow-tied suit with the diarist’s and Mellon’s dark suits and everyone else’s lighter clothing. Fred Hughes then arrived with Nenna Eberstadt, who was dressed in white and gave the diarist a small present; Sullivan arrived later and gave him the shirt off his back, making him wear it. The delayed arrivals, gifts, and mismatched clothes make the dinner a record of social performance as well as a birthday occasion.

A Stop in a Larger Itinerary

On September 27, 1978, 21 Club appears not as the evening’s destination but as its first timed stop: Roberta di Camerino’s at 5:30, Barneys New York for Giorgio Armani at six, and the Museum of Modern Art for the Rolling Stone anniversary at 6:30. The compressed schedule places dinner in a sequence of fashion and cultural engagements, showing how readily the club could function as one appointment among several in a tightly arranged social night.

Taken together, these entries give 21 Club no fixed atmosphere independent of its company. It is a table from which the diarist watches a romantic complication surface, a setting for a conversation that outlasts its failed recording, and a room where absence can be as telling as arrival. The recurring location connects meals, interviews, gossip, and celebration, while the diary’s close attention to timing and gesture turns ordinary social movement into the substance of the account.