Elaine's restaurant

Elaine's restaurant is a recurring New York meeting place in the diaries, less a static backdrop than a social stage. Over lunches and chance encounters, artists, actors, editors, and other figures exchange stories and test one another’s public identities. The restaurant’s significance lies in the way ordinary visits repeatedly open onto spectacle: a celebrity changes persona before an audience, a guest recounts a quarrel, or a card trick becomes the evening’s obsession.

A Social Stage

On January 12, 1977, Jamie Wyeth and Arnold Schwarzenegger joined the diarist for lunch at Elaine's restaurant to discuss Schwarzenegger’s film Pumping Iron. The gathering also brought together Delfina Rattazzi, then a reader at Viking for Jackie O, as well as Victor, Pat Patterson, and Charlotte Curtis of The New York Times. Paulette Goddard came downstairs at the Ritz Towers wearing all her jewelry and joked that it might have belonged to the diarist if he had made different choices. The lunch thus folded professional connections, celebrity history, and playful personal exchange into one table’s conversation.

Another visit, in early March 1977, gathered Jamie Wyeth, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Rudolf Nureyev. The social traffic extended to the entrance: a friend of Lester Persky’s introduced Neile McQueen, while Arnold arrived with three young women, one of them a sportswriter for The New York Times who was in love with him. The restaurant’s role in these accounts is not simply to host famous people; it places their entourages, admirers, and intermediaries in the same frame.

Encounters and Performance

The lunch with Paulette Goddard also carried the residue of a publishing project. The diarist recalled hours spent with Bob recording her life story for a book sought by Mr. Jovanovich, and mused that someone with Goddard’s history of marriages to Charlie Chaplin, Burgess Meredith, and Erich Maria Remarque ought to have had vivid stories to tell. Elaine's restaurant therefore appears as a place where work and sociability overlap: professional efforts to elicit a life story sit alongside jokes, introductions, and assessments of the people present.

A later lunch with Jamie Wyeth, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Rudolf Nureyev produced a striking contrast between Schwarzenegger’s stock answers about fame and his changed manner when he passed through a lobby crowded with screaming fans. The encounter began at Elaine's restaurant, but the diary’s account makes public attention itself the revealing spectacle: the idol’s self-presentation altered when the audience was physically before him.

Games, Gossip, and Consequences

In another account, Andrea Portago described going to Elaine's restaurant with Dennis Hopper and playing backgammon with Elaine. Portago won the first game, Elaine won the second, and Portago won the third after initially falling behind. Elaine became angry, called her a rich bitch, and told her not to return. The episode gives the restaurant’s convivial social life an edge: competition could expose a host’s temper and turn an evening’s entertainment into exclusion.

The restaurant also furnished a scene of astonishment. A man Elaine introduced performed a card trick, flashed a deck, and correctly guessed the chosen card eight times. The diarist remained preoccupied with how it had been done, treating the feat as a puzzle with almost limitless implications. The episode sits beside the restaurant’s celebrity gossip and social maneuvering, but shifts the focus from who knows whom to the fascination of an unexplained performance. A later report from Jamie Wyeth added another layer of romantic gossip: Nureyev had apparently fallen in love with Erskine, who nearly yielded, and Nureyev ended the exchange by suggesting they could simply watch television. Across these visits, Elaine's restaurant links public figures to intimate anecdotes, while the diary preserves the shifting boundary between an ordinary meal and a story worth retelling.