Abel Ferrara, the ghoulishly looking American film director, whose film The Bad Lieutenant has been a perennial favorite ever since I first saw it in the early 90s, especially for Harvey Keitel’s riveting tour de force performance, is one of the most eccentric and cryptic figures I’ve met. From his fertile mind, has poured a ...
One evening in the late 1980s, during my time working at Cafe Nicholson’s in Manhattan, I had a memorable encounter with none other than F. Lee Bailey. This legendary legal giant had built a formidable career spanning over half a century, representing a host of notorious and infamous miscreants. Bailey first captured my attention during ...
Around 1984, during my final year in high school, I was working at an Italian restaurant called Piero’s on the charming island enclave of Bay Harbor in Miami Beach. The establishment was owned by the charismatic and handsome Sicilian, Piero Filpi who had been running another restaurant only a year before called Tiberio at the ...
In the early 2000s, one of Frank Sinatra’s old stomping grounds was reborn when Jilly’s reopened on 41 West 58th Street. For many years, Sinatra and his Rat Pack gang frequented the old place on 256 West 52nd Street, which is now home to the Russian Samovar. They used to hang out there until the ...
Fernando Arrabal, the Spanish playwright, poet, and film director, is one of the wackiest and zaniest people I’ve ever met. Best known for co-founding the Panic Movement—a group of surreal and chaotic performance artists inspired by the god Pan who were pushing the envelope where surrealists had left off by shocking audiences with their bold ...
To Brazilians, the name Jorge Amado is to literature what Antonio Carlos Jobim is to Bossa Nova. In a career spanning 70 years that included 32 books, millions of sold copies, and translations in over 50 countries, Amado is often referred to as the “Pelé of the written word.” Best known for his three novels, ...
Some of my most memorable encounters at Trattoria Dell’Arte happened serendipitously. Like the time I met Abe Feder, one of America’s first modern “lighting designers” who devoted himself to a life of illumination lighting virtually everything he touched, including the Broadway theater, Rockefeller Center, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and the Empire State Building. Or the time ...
Victor Posner, without a doubt, was the nastiest and the most corrupt financier I have ever met. He took corporate malfeasance to new heights, shamelessly plundering the companies he bought and sold like collectible baseball cards, with little regard or sympathy for the people who devoted their lives to building those now-bankrupt businesses. Posner didn’t ...
Ever since I read Gay Talese’s collection of nonfiction writings in Fame and Obscurity, he has been one of my favorite authors. His meticulous attention to detail and deft, almost artisanal approach to selecting the ideal words or phrases to characterize the people or settings that were his topic were frequently arresting—layered but straightforward, and ...
