“When I was younger I could remember anything whether it had happened or not!” said Mark Twain.

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I tried to speed-read through the new Michael Gross book, Rogues’ Gallery, which is all about the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Mr. Gross is a good reporter, ever-digging, fanatical about details and without cooperation from the Met, he has produced a fascinating history of the museum, its place in the world, its place in the New York social firmament and its ups, downs, ins, outs, plus the trajectories of its various directors.

Nobody at the museum will be pleased with this book and they most fastidiously did not cooperate.

Michael’s history of how the museum came to be, its history, its deal making, its descent into more conventional money-raising commercialism all seem to be pretty accurate to me. (I don’t think the museum would still be with us without the commercialism that has had to be substituted for sheer philanthropy.)

But in the end, the writer sets up his devastating attack theory on the designer Oscar de la Renta and his wife, Annette, two pillars at the top of the City’s social strata. This really goes beyond the pale.

And I don’t agree with the Gross condemnation of what he thinks is “social climbing.” But this is indeed going to start a firestorm of controversy.

If you think the current ongoing trial of Anthony Marshall (in the matter of his mother Brooke Astor’s end of days) is something, well — you ain’t seen nothing yet.

I feel a fabulous, realistic, well-researched book on the history of the museum is marred by this diatribe. And furthermore, it’s pointless. Rich people support good causes. Rich people sometimes get their names on things as a result. Philanthropy is ever questioned and motives are up for grabs.

But we have in New York the glory of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and that’s what really matters. 

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The English are dangling an offer before the 89-year-old eyes of our famous New York District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau. They’d like him to join something called the SFO, examining corruption among certain British arms manufacturers. 

My hero, Mr. Morgenthau, will soon step down from his New York job after 35 years. But his wife, Lucinda Franks, wants him to simply retire and write his memoirs. “He knows so many secrets,” says she.


Robert Morgenthau; Image: Wikipedia

I hope Bob’s chief secret will be to remain at the head of the Police Athletic League, one of my all-time favorite charities helping children.

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The Oscar winner Kate Winslet tells the Daily Telegraph’s Anita Singh that she is annoyed with people who think she is “middle class” just because she speaks English well. Kate clings to her “loving but impoverished background as the daughter of out-of-work actors who struggled to pay the bills.”

How well I remember interviewing Kate back before she finally nabbed the Academy Award she so deserved. She was struggling with a stroller, underdressed and, like any mother, worrying about picking her children up from nursery school.

We sat upstairs over a deli down in Greenwich Village and she couldn’t have expressed herself in more of a downplayed manner. Kate said her acting school had been paid for by the Actor’s Charitable Trust. Her parents still live in the Berkshire town where her mother recently won a local competition for perfect pickled onions. 

Kate and director husband Sam Mendes may soon move back to England so she can be near her parents.