I'm in shock and tears at the awful deaths of Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle. Rob made so many classic movies of my youth -- Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, Misery, A Few Good Men -- that his legacy will be burnished into my soul forever.
My favorite, of course, is his 1989 classic When Harry Met Sally ... Rob and Nora Ephron collaborated to make one of the greatest romantic comedies ever.
I've blogged about it numberous times of over the years (read it here) but I'll simply add this: at a time when NYC was going through a rough patch (rising crime, the Crack epidemic, government corruption, severe racial tensions) Rob and Nora gave the world this beautiful, hopeful, and very funny movie that celebrated love and NYC. It was a shot of joy in a difficult time and for that New Yorkers will always be grateful.
Rob and Nora are now gone but we will enjoy their work forever. RIP.
The world of NYC real estate is cut-throat and, in the new Netflix series The Beast In Me, it's both metaphorical and literal.
The plot to this series is pure sensationalist thriller yarn -- dead wives! dead kids! trophy wives! domineering parents! broken families! horny FBI agents! and money, money, money!
It's total nonsense. But it's really well done and quite entertaining.
The plot involves a woman named Aggie, played by the always amazing Claire Daines, who is the author of a hugely successful book that got her a Pulitzer Prize and a big house in Oyster Bay ... but is now grieving her dead son, her failed marriage, and a horrible case of writer's block on her follow up book. She then meets her creepy neighbor Niles Jarvis, scion of a powerful NYC real estate family, who many suspect killed his wife (but was never charged criminally) and whose family is trying build a massive projects in Manhattan called Jarvis yards -- that is facing stiff community and political resistance. Niles is played by Matthew Rhys and man, oh man, he was is one scary dude in this series.
Events and intrigues ensue, secrets are hidden and revealed, and it's all a lot of pulpy fun.
The reason I'm reviewing this show is that while The Beast In Me is pure sensationalist thriller, it also has a Power Broker-Chinatown angle that is quite intriguing -- namely, it makes us ponder who rules and controls the fate of great cities, how and why are these rich and powerful and murderous people allowed to control the future of millions, and how it impacts us all.
Probably the world's greatest playright, Tom Stoppard, has died.
Plays like Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties, The Coast of Utopia plays, and so many others, were like nothing that had ever been seen before. Stoppard's use of language was brilliant, complex and yet captured your mind and emotions in equal measure.
He was a true genius.
I saw several of his plays on Broadway -- revivals of Jumpers, Arcadia, The Real Thing (in 2000 and 2014) as well as new plays like The Invention of Love and, most recently, Leopoldstadt. I reviewed this last play, his great swan song, in 2023, as well as the 2011 revival of Arcardia and the 2014 version of The Real Thing. Read them here.
And yes, Stoppard also wrote for the movies, winning a screenplay Oscar for the 1998 hit Shakespeare in Love. It had the great line, "That woman ... is a woman!"
Two amazing things about Stoppard's life and career are worth noting.
First, his native language wasn't English. He was borin in Czecholslovakia, escaping the Nazis with his mother in the 1940s, before landing and living the rest of his life in England. From there he would not only learn his new country's language but take it and mold it into magic for six decades. Stoppard is an open-and-shut case for why immigration, and welcoming migrants, is a smart thing to do.
Second, when my parents got together in the late 1960s, they went to the original NYC production of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (I actually have one of their Playbills in the family files). Forty-odd years later my wife and I got together, in part, via our mutual love his plays. Kismet.
RIP Sir Tom. We'll probably never see his likes again.
Here is a local NYC news review of The Real Thing from 1984. "Put the right words in the right order and you can nudge the world a little bit."
There are, and have been, royal scandals galore -- Mrs Fitzherbert! Mayerling! Rasputin! Wallis Simpson! Epstein! Megxit!
And, of course, Diana.
Her notoriously failed 1980s marriage to the then-Prince of Wales/now King Charles III has become the stuff of legend.
The irony is that, while the marriage itself was a failure, as a royal union it was a huge success: Diana produced an heir and a spare, and they've now produced heirs and spares. The marriage of Charles and Diana may not have lasted but its legacy has kept the dynastic royal line for the House of Windsor secure for the rest of this century.
But did you know that the future Monarchs of the United Kingdom have not only American but also NYC blood?
See, Princess Diana's great-grandma was a New York-native named Frances Ellen Work. She was a classic "dollar bride", a rich new money American who married a broke English bloke with a title.
The marriage was as big a disaster as Frances Ellen's great-granddaughter's -- and Frances' father forced them to get divorced and bring her two sons back to America (much like Queen Elizabeth would force her son to divorce Diana and hand over their two sons). Frances Ellen's rich American father not only hated his British ex-son-in-law but gnerally hated the lust of Britain's nobility for American women and money.
And here we get to a hinge of history.
Frances Ellen's father stipulated in his will that his sons must never go back to England. They must agree never to set foot in the UK or forfeit their $14 million inheritance. But, when the old man died, the sons appealed to their relatives -- who had also inherited money -- to see if they would agree to waive this clause and let them get their cash without the travel restriction. They agreed. And then one of the sons, Edmund, moved to the UK, married a woman named Ruth, and they had a daughter named Frances. This Frances then married Viscount Spencer and their daughter Diana would then go into history.
Imagine, for moment, if Edmund's relative's had so no. Imagine if they had enforced this clause. Edmund wouldn't have moved to the UK, married, and fathered Princess Diana's mother. And the course of British and world history would be very different.
But it's not. And one day the crown of the UK will be worn by someone with NYC lineage.
Listen to this great podcast about the life and legacy of Frances Ellen Work. It's a story of booze, bucks, broads, gambling, divorce, and glittering crown.
It's impossible to imagine a time when the United States and Russia were strong allies. Since the rise of the Soviet Union more than 100 years ago, the relationship between the US and Russia has been fraught, to say the least.
But in the 19th century, Russia was America's best friend in the world.
Both countries, both great continent-spanning collosuses, were at odds with the then-greatest power in the world: Great Britain. Britain, still smarting from the loss of the America, wanted to kneecap the young republic by supporting the Confederacy in the Civil War. In fact, most of Western Europe at the time wanted to support the South -- they wanted access to Southern markets, particularly its cotton, and, like Britain, the other European powers wanted to keep America divided and weak.
Not Russia.
Russia wanted to check the Western European neighbors by keeping America strong. So in 1863, as the Civil War raged, and to prevent the Confederate Navy from attacking Union ports, sent its Atlantic Squadron to New York Harbor. They were welcomed as friends, Russian sailors were the toast of the town, the bond between the two great nations deep and strong.
So strong, believe it or not, that when President Lincoln was killed the next year, the Russian Tsar Alexander II made all of the empire mourn. Lincoln and the Tsar, though they never met, had a lengthy correspondence and both were liberators of their people (Lincoln, the slaves, the Tsar, the serfs). And then, in 1867, the US and Russia did a little real estate -- the Russian sale of Alaska to the US. Oh, and Russia had a naval base in California.
That's how close the two countries were. And then, in the 20th century, it all fell apart.
But at least in 1863, when the Russian navy hit NYC, there was nothing by bonhomie.
