Sex and Vanity

After the ladies had been escorted into the adjacent dining room where the more discreet crowd liked to be seated, Cecil sank contentedly into his antique kilim embroidered chair. “Between those ladies, everyone who’s anyone will know the news before the sun sets on the island. Which reminds me…” He fished his phone out from his jacket pocket and began scrolling through his Instagram. “Holy Moira Rose! It’s trending! The proposal video is trending! 27,084 likes already! Cornelia Guest just liked it! Prince Joachim of Lichtenberg just re-grammed it! Oh, excuse me, I must show this to the ladies. Lucie, come. Quickly, Lucie!” Cecil leaped out of his seat, dragging Lucie along with him.

“Well, I guess Cecil is part of the family now,” Marian said with a shrug.

Freddie gave his mother a look. “Yeah. I think we’re gonna have to stop using those coffee mugs from Zabar’s.”

“SOCIAL GRACES”

by Geoffrey Madison Columbus

If you were anywhere near the Upper East Side yesterday, you might be forgiven for thinking that some hotshot director was filming a movie on location at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There were ballerinas and daredevil acrobats, there were Broadway dancers, there was a marching band. However, this was no film that brought Fifth Avenue traffic to a standstill but Cecil Pike in the midst of a Marvel-budget-sized wedding proposal to Lucie Churchill. Cecil, no stranger to this column, is the dashing charmer who has been proclaimed the biggest catch in the universe by every magazine, blog and social media outlet that matters. He’s the GQ-handsome bon vivant and heir to the ginormous Pike billions, first gushed in the oil fields of Central Texas and then multiplied exponentially thanks to the genius of his force-of-nature mamacita, Renée Mouton Pike, one of the world’s leading investors, who never misses a brilliant start-up opportunity or a chic party anywhere in the universe, thanks to her private India Mahdavi–designed Boeing 757. The less socially attentive might recognize Cecil from his cameo appearances on Antiques Roadshow, where he schools the experts with his encyclopedic knowledge of 16th- to 18th-century European antiquities. This, after all, is a guy who goes deep-sea diving in search of Spanish shipwrecks and has a classics degree from Oxford. Pike mère et fils are esthetes extraordinaire, having restored Buckley House in London to its former glory with the help of Jacques Garcia at the whispered cost of more than half a billion (pounds, not dollars!), and are said to be doing the same to an ancient fort in northern Rajasthan. The lucky lass Lucie, a rising art consultant who’s on the speed-dial of every wannabe Mugrabi these days, is the exotically beautiful daughter of Dr. Marian Tang and the late Reginald Churchill, a true blue-blooded New Yorker descended from generations of Churchills, Barclays and other Knickerbocker Club types. We haven’t seen such a classy union of old money and new money in a while, and this will be one beautiful power couple to put on your radar, not to mention a power wedding. You heard it here first: the nuptials are rumored to be taking place this autumn at a little dive in the Persian Gulf called the Louvre Abu Dhabi.

*1 A preschool in Odessa, Texas.

*2 Yes, that’s really what they call the body paint combination at Bentley. I personally prefer the “Silver Tempest over Damson,” but I figured no one would know what the hell that meant.

*3 That would be the late María del Rosario Cayetana Paloma Alfonsa Victoria Eugenia Fernanda Teresa Francisca de Paula Lourdes Antonia Josefa Fausta Rita Castor Dorotea Santa Esperanza Fitz-James Stuart, Silva, Falcó y Gurtubay, the Most Excellent Eighteenth Duchess of Alba. As the world’s most titled aristocrat, she was five times a duchess, eighteen times a marchioness, eighteen times a countess, fourteen times a Spanish grandee, once a viscountess, and the twenty-ninth Lady of Moguer. She also took part in a bullfight in Seville. Olé!

II

821 Fifth Avenue

UPPER EAST SIDE

Even in the thin air inhabited by Manhattan’s stratospherically high-end property agents—where no one bats an eyelash at a $35 million listing—821 Fifth Avenue was considered hallowed ground. It was built in 1918 to the most exacting standards of luxury, and each apartment in the twenty-one-story building occupied an entire floor, creating sumptuous mansions in the sky. But it wasn’t the size of these residences that made the building so renowned; rather, it was the plain fact that 821 was considered to be one of the top five most exclusive buildings in Manhattan. Two ambassadors, one retired Supreme Court justice, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and even a deposed European monarch were politely turned down from purchasing by its notoriously difficult co-op board.

Much of this was due to the fact that a majority of its apartments were still held by the original families who had owned since 1918, and few units ever changed hands. To paraphrase the Patek Philippe slogan, it could be said that one never actually owned an apartment in 821—one merely looked after it for the next generation. So the building remained, well into the twenty-first century, a bastion of privacy for some of the East Coast’s most rarefied and discreetly influential families, among them Lucie’s grandmother, Mrs. John L. Churchill, or as she was known to everyone in her exclusive circle, Consuelo Barclay Churchill (privately tutored / Miss Porter’s / Institut Villa Pierrefeu).

Consuelo’s pedigree was unimpeachable. Born a Barclay, one of America’s landed gentry families whose storied history went back to the Virginia land grants of King James I, she was on her maternal side the last surviving granddaughter of the Industrial Age tycoon who built the Northeast Atlantic railroads. Her marriage to John L. Churchill, scion to a Gilded Age fortune and president of Churchill Brothers Averill & Co., one of the oldest private banks in the United States, cemented her pole position within New York’s Old Guard, but she had neither the interest nor inclination to follow in the footsteps of Bunny, Jayne, or Brooke and become a society doyenne. Intensely private and cosseted since birth, she never felt the need to make much of an effort. While she once presided over the Fifth Avenue residence, an estate in Southampton, and an hôtel particulier on Paris’s Right Bank, these days she preferred to spend most of the year at her “winter home” in Hobe Sound, Florida, coming to New York only during the fall ballet season.

Tonight, however, Consuelo had made the exception of traveling to the city and opening up the apartment for her granddaughter’s engagement party, which is how Lucie found herself st

anding in the middle of her grandmother’s drawing room in a pretty Zimmermann white eyelet dress, receiving the relatives and friends on her father’s side who had gathered from all over the country on a beautiful late-spring evening and who, truth be told, were mystified by how Lucie had pulled off the feat of becoming engaged to a man they had all read so much about.

“So how did you meet him again?” Teddy Barclay (Rippowam / Phillips Exeter / Harvard) asked his cousin pointedly as he grabbed another pig in a blanket from the istoriato Italian Renaissance platter being held by a uniformed maid.

“We met in Rome five years ago, Teddy. Charlotte and I were touring the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, and Cecil came walking down the hallway with the owner of the palazzo and saw that we were admiring a particularly beautiful painting of Saint Sebastian. So he started telling us about it—even educating the prince about his own art collection. He’s incredibly knowledgeable about Italian art.”

Teddy twitched his nose, unimpressed. “So what precisely does Cecil do these days?”

“Cecil’s the busiest man I know. He’s got dozens of projects. He’s funding about thirty start-ups, he’s on the International Council of the Louvre, he started a nonprofit that restores frescoes in Naples, and he’s—”

“None of those sound like real jobs to me,” Teddy remarked, as he chewed openmouthed on a pig in a blanket.

“Teddy, give it a rest,” his wife, Annafred (Rippowam / Deerfield / Benenden / Saint Catharine’s, Cambridge), cut in.

“But this was only my third piggy!” Teddy protested.

“I’m not talking about the piggy! Stop harassing Lucie. What does it matter what Cecil’s job is?” Annafred said.

Charlie Spencer Houghton (Rippowam / Phillips Exeter / Harvard), an uncle on the Churchill side, jumped into the conversation. “Cecil Pike doesn’t need a job. Billennials*1 these days don’t bother putting in time at the office for appearances’ sake. They just jet around the world with their laptops. Do you know how much that father of Cecil’s personally pocketed when he sold Midland Gas to Texaco? Seven billion. That was in the eighties, Ted, and that was before his widow decided to invest all the money in a little start-up called Google.”

Teddy raised his eyebrows. Now that he had heard it from Charlie, he was finally a little bit impressed.

“Speaking of the widow, Lucie, is it true that Cecil’s mother couldn’t get into 740 Park or 1040 Fifth, so she bought up half a block’s worth of town houses and turned it into a behemoth that dwarfs the mansion that the Qataris built?” Lucie’s preternaturally poised cousin from Boston, Caroline Cabot Churchill Reed (Brimmer & May / Miss Porter’s / Wellesley), who went by Cacky, asked provocatively.

“Um, I don’t know about that, but Cecil’s mother does have a beautiful house,” Lucie replied, trying to be diplomatic and discreet.

“Oh, come now, Lucie, spill the dirt! Are you going to be moving into the Texas embassy? I hear it’s got its own hair salon and an underground pool bigger than the one at the University Club.”