Public Lives: Female Bonding Over Cigars
By JAMES BARRON with SHAWNEEN ROWE
NEW YORK -- "If you want to play the boys' game," Star Jones was saying, "you've got to smoke their cigars, drink their Scotch and play their golf."
Well, one out of three: Ms. Jones, a host of "The View," a daytime talk show on ABC-TV, was not drinking Scotch or playing golf, but she was smoking a cigar. For it was a women-only night at Club Macanudo, a cigar bar on East 63rd Street, where Ms. Jones said she was a regular. "This is my 'Cheers,"' she said.
More than 30 women had paid $75 to smoke cigars and eat a three-course dinner, and all but a handful began the evening by smoking and drinking not Scotch but champagne. Standing between Club Macanudo's overstuffed leather couches and wooden Indians, several discovered that balancing a stogie and a champagne flute involved a juggling act that required surprising dexterity.
Ms. Jones is a regular at Club Macanudo -- she has her own humidor there. "This is a very unique way to bond with women," she said.
Like other women at the club, Nancy Stout, who wrote "Habanos" (Rizzoli), a book about cigars and her travels in Cuba, said she was not especially concerned about the health risks of smoking cigars.
"Women are smart," Ms. Stout said. "They don't smoke them all the time -- they smoke about one a month. Some may smoke as many as men do, but it's more of a treat. And there are more additives and more nicotine in cigarettes. Even in Cuba, they're called 'little deaths."'
No Tilley Cover at New Yorker
Eustace Tilley, The New Yorker magazine's favorite cover boy, has undergone a stunning metamorphosis. After 69 years as a monocled, top-hatted Regency dandy in pursuit of a butterfly, he became a pimply punk rocker in 1994. Since then, he has been pictured as a woman in a low-cut dress and a detective.
This year, he was nothing at all. For the first time since the magazine was founded in February 1925, The New Yorker did not publish a Tilley cover.
Maurie Perl, a spokeswoman for the magazine, said that in recent years the annual Tilley cover had appeared on the double issue published in the last week in February and the first week in March. This year, that was The New Yorker's California issue, with a cover by Michael Roberts that showed a man, a woman and a surfboard.
She said that Tina Brown, the magazine's editor and the architect of extensive changes in the design and direction of a magazine once known for its Tilleyesque traditions, was on vacation. "When she was asked about it before she left," Ms. Perl said, "she said Eustace Tilley was out taking a meeting. There's no reason to assume he will not appear again in some future issue."
Star Spotting
It wasn't enough that Bob Merrill, a trumpeter and band leader, saw Meryl Streep in the airport when he arrived in the Virgin Islands.
Hours later, as he climbed onto a friend's sailboat, there she was again, boarding another boat at the same marina. He saw her the next day on St. John and the day after that on Virgin Gorda.
"The boat went into a cove and there she was," he said. "I thought, I hope she doesn't think we're tailing her." |
