The Sherry-Netherland, referred to in the diary as the Sherry, serves as both a party venue and a point of departure for social visits in June and July 1977. The entries make it significant less through description of the hotel itself than through what happens there: a New York, New York celebration that lasts until dawn, Julia Scorsese’s invitation to a room after the screening, and a later pickup that leads into a long, uneasy afternoon of praise and matchmaking.

The New York, New York celebration

After a screening of New York, New York, a crowded party at the Sherry kept the narrator from leaving: Julia Scorsese repeatedly urged the guests to stay. Robert De Niro had arrived after dinner with an agent whom the diary describes as wearing funny glasses, and Martin Scorsese’s parents remained late. As the gathering grew increasingly drunken, the narrator stood to make a toast, which others found moving; he could not remember what he had said. Liza Minnelli joked that she would tell the story to her grandchildren, although she had forgotten everything else.

The narrator later called it the best party. He took a copy of the New York, New York album because Valentine wanted it, noticing that Roger Moore had written on it backward, then felt guilty when the theft was noticed. He was also taking painkillers after a neck operation and biopsy the previous week, with the medical result still unknown. When the party finally ended, it was six in the morning; the cab away from the Sherry cost $3.50. The festive scene thus sits alongside physical vulnerability and uncertainty, without losing its account of the party’s exuberance.

A room after the screening

After the narrator sent Julia Scorsese and Liza Minnelli a tree as thanks for the evening, Julia called to thank him and described it as their most memorable night as well. She invited him to come up to their room after the New York, New York screening. At the Sherry party, she pressed him to stay and asked him to be Martin Scorsese’s best boyfriend, explaining that he had few friends. The narrator sensed that his presence and closeness to Martin meant something unusually important to her, almost symbolic, though he could not determine exactly what.

The hotel therefore marks more than the continuation of a film premiere into a party. It is where Julia’s account of the evening gives the narrator an unexpected role in her husband’s social life, and where his own uncertainty about the meaning of that role becomes explicit. The diary preserves the invitation and the appeal to remain, but leaves the symbolism unresolved.

A point of departure for another visit

On July 10, Julia called while the narrator had planned to go to work. She was with a writer friend and intended to meet Barbara Feldon at Serendipity; the narrator went to the Sherry to pick them up. During the outing, Julia said that he had saved her on the night of the New York, New York party: she claimed that he had noticed her away from Martin Scorsese at the table, brought her over to sit beside him, and thereby quieted rumors that her husband was having an affair with Liza Minnelli. She returned to this explanation repeatedly.

The Sherry’s role in this later entry is brief but telling: it is where the narrator collects Julia and her companion before the group moves elsewhere. The episode also revisits the earlier party from Julia’s perspective, turning a moment the narrator had not understood into, for her, an intervention with consequences for the rumors surrounding Martin and Liza. From one gathering to the next, the hotel connects celebrity social life with the shifting interpretations people attach to a seat at a table.