Spencer Morgan

Darren Aronofsky was a serious young man, a nature boy. He grew up in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn, where the beaches were beautiful but cluttered with trash. His interest in the environment took him to Alaska to study the behavior of seals.

“There was a moment, we were kayaking around,” he said of the trip with the School for Field Studies, a charity on whose board he now sits. “I was eating a candy bar and I dropped the wrapper in the water and it went under. And I realized that that thing was going into this pristine environment that I was in and there was no way of ever taking back what I had just done.  read more »

Call him the Teflon Don of New York nightlife!

As suspected by nightlife blog Down by the Hipster and others, nightclub impresario Noah Tepperberg’s Marquee was not shut down earlier this summer solely because of a water main break. Documents from the Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control filed on July 8 charge that a months-long undercover sting yielded seven different occurrences of “storage, possession, use or trafficking of a controlled substance” at the club, and one instance of “storage, possession, use or trafficking of marijuana.”

The alleged body of evidence resulted in charges against the club owners, Noah Tepperberg and Jason Strauss, for failing “to exercise adequate supervision over the conduct of the licensed business,” and on July 18 an emergency summary order of suspension of their liquor license was put in effect.  read more »

Imagine you are Levi Johnston. Like all 18-year-old males, you feel you own the world. Makes your mouth water. Hey—keep your tongue in your mouth! You can’t let them know what you’re up to. But they’re not going to know what hit ’em. Right now your playing field is the ice; you kick ass. But the wider world is also hungry for your tear-it-up testosterone. And you’re gonna see it all.

Then suddenly: Well, we all know what happened. Bristol happened to you and then Sarah Palin happened to all of us.

“There are lots of dropouts,” said Gabriel Weaver, a 32-year-old lawyer who lives in Los Angeles and grew up in Wasilla.  read more »

Just when the era of exclusivity seemed to have peaked in this town, Socialista mastermind Armin Amiri has decided to open an all-night diner—with a guest list from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m.

“It’s gonna be upscale diner food, like Florent, but a couple notches up food-wise,” said Mr. Amiri, who is a former Bungalow 8 doorman and a working actor.

The yet-to-be-named diner will open in the ground-floor space that formerly housed Café Socialista, which Mr. Amiri closed in June.

The Café wasn’t working, Mr. Amiri says, because the food was “almost a Jean-Georges style,” he said.  read more »

Mark Warfel was always a swimmer. As a child, his parents owned hotels in Florida on the Gulf of Mexico, and Mark and his brothers were always in the water. Later, he was on the high-school swim team in Huntington Beach, Calif.

One day while doing laps, he looked up and saw an older man climbing out of the pool.

“It must have left an impression because I’m still talking about it,” the doctor said, leaning back in his chair behind his desk at the Warfel Institute for Rejuvenation on West 16th Street. “But yes, I saw this man, and it struck me—great body, youthful body, old face.  read more »

On the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 16, Randy Weiner, managing partner of the Box, was on the phone with the Transom, hours after a late-night District 3 Community Board meeting gone “horribly wrong.” The six-member board—which covers the Lower East Side and Chinatown—voted unanimously to deny the burlesque theater’s application to renew its liquor license (an official recommendation to the State Liquor Authority will not be ratified until the full board meeting on Sept. 23).

The Box, where tables sell for roughly $1,000, opened to the public on Valentine’s Day 2007 and, Mr. Weiner said, “does a steady and growing business”; he said their shows cost upward of $50,000 a week and the club now employs 80 people.  read more »

Giovanni Luciano got busted using his friend’s credit card at the Manhattan nightclub Bungalow 8 in May 2007. He’d been passing himself off around town as an heir to Dolce & Gabbana. The Post dubbed him “Bungalow Thief.” He got 2 to 4 years for grand larceny.

I wrote to him at the Greene Correctional Facility in Coxsackie, N.Y., two hours north of Manhattan.

He replied, handwritten in all caps: “I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time, to share ‘my side’ of the story … You see Spencer there’s more to my nightlife than you know … I always thought I needed to write a book on how I came and conquered N.  read more »

In the heyday of New York society, a guy could appear out of nowhere with no income and no trust fund and in no time know all the right people and be invited to all the right parties.

It was a tricky Rubik’s Cube to solve—you had to be very attractive, well mannered, sexy, extremely fun, and have at least have one connection to get you going. Then you made your own luck. 

Carlos de Souza was born in the 1950s in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the son of a lawyer and wonderful housewife. 

“I used to do some modeling stuff in Brazil for local newspapers, advertising and things like that,” said Mr.  read more »

Last Friday, noted literary agent Ira Silverberg welcomed a son into the world. It is the second child to be born of his seed; the mothers are two, let us say, “literary” women who live in the West Village.

Mr. Silverberg, who this year moved to Sterling Lord Literistic, likes to refer to himself as a father, not a parent. “For years I’ve had one very close friend who always said, ‘When I have a child, I’d like you to think about being the father,’” he told the Transom. “And years later, I was a single man at the time, and she had a girlfriend and they were the people I was spending most of my time with.  read more »

SAINT PAUL—On Monday night, Internet-guru turned right-wing messiah Andrew Breitbart arrived at the National Review party wearing jeans, a lime green, open-collar button-down and the beginning of a beard. For now, his wavy gray locks were tucked behind his ears.

Waiting in line for a beer, Mr. Breitbart said that at this point he was completely comfortable with his conservative transformation.

“The only thing that still bothers me is the dearth of artists in our party,” he said, looking around the room. He was the only one not wearing a blazer.

Two months ago, he began writing a column called “Big Hollywood” in the Conservative Beltway newspaper The Washington Times, which, among other things, addresses that dearth and more specifically the oppression of artists in entertainment industry whose views don’t conform to the “Hollywood left.  read more »

ST. PAUL—His name may sound unfamiliar, but Andrew Breitbart has built a career helping to create the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post, while also overseeing his own news-aggregation site breitbart.com—and becoming prominent in a largely underground movement of conservatives in Hollywood. Next week he plans to launch a new site (www.breitbart.com/bighollywood) that will give voice to this rogue community in the entertainment industry. 

“I don’t have a set goal of saying like, ‘Jean-Claude Van Damme and Donny Osmond are going to be blogging on my site and you’ve got to come in,’” he told the Transom on Monday evening at the Republican National Convention.  read more »

The scene at a screenwriters’ “boot camp” in Chelsea was not funny. Around 40 or so people had coughed up $400 for four days of seminars, culminating in a final pitch session Sunday afternoon. The room was packed and had the dank air of an AA meeting. Instead of telling gruesome, true-life stories of battles with the bottle, each person got up and tried to sell the crowd on the sheaf of romantic comedy—a wedding photographer gets amnesia!—or action—Die Hard meets Memento!—he or she had been perfecting. The writers, whose median age appeared to be late 30s, introduced themselves first: waiter, bartender, PA, grip, Off Off Broadway theater producer.  read more »

On Sunday night, as Hurricane Gustav bore down on New Orleans and Republican Party elders scrambled to muffle all sounds of revelry from the Twin Cities, Sammy Hagar, the former Van Halen frontman, stood before a microphone at the legendary Minneapolis nightclub First Avenue. He was wearing plaid board shorts, sunglasses, and a logo T-shirt from Cabo Wabo Cantina, a bar he owns in Mexico. Hagar, who had just ripped through a set of his old standards, including “I Can’t Drive 55,” told his audience—several hundred Republican notables—that his band had just come from a gig in Houston.

“The hurricane is going to hit down there and that’s a big shame and all,” Hagar said.  read more »

DENVER—"There's my girl!" Chevy Chase bellowed as Madeline Albright walked into the backroom of the Vanity Fair-Google party on Thursday, August 28. The towering comedian, who was clad in a blazer, T-shirt and jeans, bent down to embrace his old friend. They discussed plans to get together—Mr. Chase promising an e-mail from "his people"—mugged for the cameras, and agreed that Barack Obama had nailed his speech. "If we're seen together, you're in trouble," joked the funnyman.

After a hearty laugh, conversation returned to the speech. Ms. Albright said that while the presidential candidate is incredibly charming in person, she was also pleased with the "diplomacy" of the speech.  read more »

Celebrities probably should've been warned that Denver may be the friendliest city in the country. Over the course of an hour or so the other day, four different paparazzi dropped by the coffee shop on the corner of Champa and 18th streets. The conversations went something like the following:

Paparazzo: Have you had any celebrities in here today?

Barista #1: Yes we have! Steven Spielberg was in earlier. He ordered a caramel macchiato.  read more »

Last night the much-discussed Hollywood contingent here in Denver, who have been lending their "visibility" to myriad events and causes all over town, congregated in the V.I.P. section of the Black Eyed Peas concert. Members of the Creative Coalition's hard-working band of entertainers—Alan Cumming, Tim Daly, Anne Hathaway, Spike Lee, Barry Levinson, Josh Lucas, Matthew Modine, Susan Sarandon—were joined by various showbiz colleagues including Jessica Alba and Hayden Panettiere in the balcony area at the Fillmore Auditorium, as Fergie & Co. shook their rumps on stage below.

Meanwhile, local nightclub impresario Jesse Morreale wondered if the glamorous crowd would have enough energy to return for another after after party at the Rockbar.  read more »

Police are gathering in force at the perimeter surrounding the Pepsi Center to prepare for the arrival of an estimated 5,000 protesters, who had been encouraged to march earlier at a free concert by political rap-rockers Rage Against the Machine.

One Denver police officer, standing at the intersection of Auroria and Speer, said: "There are supposed to be 5,000 hostile individuals coming toward us."

Other officers on the scene said they believed the protesters would attempt to breach the security perimeter that stretches for blocks around the Pepsi Center.

Protests encouraged by the group, which vocally opposes the party system, have taken place at earlier conventions. Confrontations with police became violent during the Los Angeles convention in 2000.

DENVER—Wednesday afternoon at the Denver Art Museum, Jennifer Lopez, Capitol File and Viacom honored Marian Wright Edelman for her work with the Children's Defense Fund. Before the awards presentation began, the Daily Transom spied the singer Rufus Wainwright, wearing a plaid blazer, striped T-shirt and sandals.

"I'm gay and out and proud, but in saying that I feel that the gay community could be a little more engaged," Mr. Wainwright said. "You can even spell it out. E-N-G-A-Y." Har!

"I guess one of the reasons I'm so vocal is to get some of my community out there because especially gay men-and those are the only ones I can really speak for-they tend to get a little into the lush life and the dance, the DJs, the disco music, and it's fun and everything, but unfortunately I'm a huge pessimist right now.  read more »

DENVER—“I think the most interesting thing I’ve seen so far is all the secret deals that have been going on,” said the actor Josh Lucas at the Going Green event hosted by Bank of America on Monday night. The American Psycho star is at the Democratic National Convention, making the rounds of the Creative Coalition circuit of events. “It’s been happening everywhere. ‘I’ll give you two tickets to the J.Lo party, you give me two tickets to see Fergie on Thursday.’ It’s been happening everywhere. It’s like serious drug dealing going on.”

Earlier that day, Mr. Lucas had been in an SUV heading to one of the many events sponsored by the  read more »

DENVER—After hosting a lunch in support of helping diabetes patients at the restaurant Panzano, the Creative Coalition gathered its merry band of New York-based celebrities into a back section of the restaurant to get on with the showbiz-oriented non-profit's lesser known agenda this year: a documentary, called Poliwood, featuring their historic voyage to the Democratic National Convention, directed by Barry Levinson.

The scene in the backroom featured a pep talk from a frumpy looking guy with a bad toupee on refining the rhetoric of Democratic talking points, followed by a Q&A among the actors in attendance, including Susan Sarandon, Anne Hathaway, Josh Lucas, Richard Schiff, Giancarlo Esposito and others.  read more »

A while back, a friend of mine boasted that he was spending time with a hot transsexual. Now, my friend—let’s call him Ryan—is quite the ladies’ man. Despite his perplexing androgynous style—tight jeans, guy-liner, the occasional wig—Ryan always shows up with a gorgeous young woman on his arm.

Now he was dating a tranny, and talking about it as casually as if he’d recently begun incorporating onions in his scrambled eggs. He went on and on about how she was “totally fucking hot, man. Probably one of the hottest transsexuals in the world; it’s probably between her and some Thai boy.  read more »

The hair-product maven John Paul DeJoria, dressed in a black suit with a black T-shirt underneath, was assessing the hair of Denver during a luncheon hosted by the Creative Coalition this afternoon at Panzano, the downtown restaurant.

“The people of Denver have the nice looking hair,” said Mr. DeJoria, who is the co-founder of Paul Mitchell hair-care products. “I wish they would grow it a little bit longer. I think this is an excellent market for Paul Mitchell.”

Denver isn't such an easy city to get around, especially when the Pepsi Center belches forth its thousands into a relatively small network of streets to fight for cabs.  read more »

DENVER—For all the talk about celebrities flocking to Denver, there weren't too many of them in evidence at a highly anticipated “post-gavel” party last night at Tamayo in the LoDo neighborhood of Denver. Word of mouth on the party, thrown by GQ and co-sponsors, Maker's Mark (bourbon!) had the affair pegged as the big do of convention week, and at around 10 o'clock the streets of “Lower Downtown” were crawling with bloggers in smart party dresses and gentlemen who'd put some product in their hair.

They packed the place, mostly journalists and political types. Dan Abrams was there. So was actor Tim Daly.  read more »

This summer, New York’s best-paid living artist, Brice Marden, and his wife, painter Helen Harrington, have been busy refurbishing the latest addition to his real estate empire: the run-down old hotel he bought in Nevis, the island in the West Indies, in 2006.

“It’s a beautiful old place, but I mean, seriously, who goes to Nevis?” said a source familiar with the layout, which consists of around a dozen cabana huts. “They’ve got all their friends moving there. They’re trying to turn Nevis into the next St. Barths or whatever.

“I think they want to build up the value and then sell it,” the source added, who noted Mr.  read more »

It was the summer of 1984. A few nuns were strolling the streets of La Romana, a resort town in the Dominican Republic, when they heard a baby’s screams coming from a dumpster. The news soon reached the bronzed ears of the city’s most renowned resident, Oscar de la Renta, who at the time was mourning the death of his first wife.

On a recent Thursday afternoon, Moises Oscar de la Renta, now 24, picked me up in a Lincoln Town Car he had hired to run some last-minute errands in preparation for a camping trip he was taking that weekend with two attractive young women.  read more »

Statuesque social darling and Alberta Ferretti publicist Annelise Peterson has been exercising her inner rock star this summer, spending her weekends writing and recording ballads in a dank, makeshift recording studio in the East Village. And according to her producer and co-writer Kenyon Phillips, the girl can sing.

"She's done about five sessions," said Mr. Phillips, who is 32. He recently finished recording his first album with his band Unisex Salon and has since opened up his recording studio, a converted bedroom in his apartment, to a variety of friends and aspiring artists. "I've known [Annelise] since she was 14 and I've always known her to be a great singer.  read more »

John Follini is a 58-year-old contractor from East Patchogue, L.I. He’s spent his life building barns, mending roofs and fences, installing light fixtures—doing the general upkeep required in sprawling homes along Long Island’s North Fork, in towns such as Bellport, Mastic-Shirley and Brookhaven. His forearms are invariably sheathed in a moist film of dirt; he has a gray mustache, a great muscular back. Like most accomplished Long Island contractors, he is a crack shot with a bow and arrow.

His father, who was also in the construction business, taught him to hunt when he was five. Grandpa Follini got in the way of a shotgun while serving as a guide on a bird hunt in East Hampton; he showed young John the pellets in his knuckles.  read more »

This week we published our second profile of the great actor Steve Guttenberg, a sequel – back by popular demand! – to the "The Goot Is Loose", which came out two weeks ago and set off a veritable firestorm. In case you haven't had your fill, without further ado, we present the Goot's own MySpace page.

Quick preview: "Who I'd Like to Meet: Pauly Shore and the divine Bernadette Peters... I always wanted to tap that ass straight 'Hightower' style." (For the uninitiated, that's a reference to the Police Academy movies.) General Interests: "Working out, chasing down perps, helping out the senior citizens in my community, oh ya and crushin' some ass." And of course, his favorite book: "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret" got me through some really dark times."

My editors told me I was crazy. Nuts. As in meshugge. After writing a column two weeks ago about the actor Steve Guttenberg’s move to New York and his hopes for finding true love—a column which they’d O.K.’d under protest—I went back to them last week and announced that it was absolutely essential that I go back to the Goot, as Mr. Guttenberg sometimes calls himself, for more. The original column, I pointed out, had received more than 170 comments on our Web site; Drudge had linked to it; some TV suits had contacted Mr. Guttenberg about a reality show. Clearly, there was an untapped wellspring of American passion for this wonderful actor; in the decades since he first sprang into the national consciousness in the Police Academy movies, he’d remained a lightning rod.  read more »

Since July 13, a steely group of distinguished New York fashionistas—clothing empress Donna Karan, newly appointed Vanity Fair editors Ingrid Sischy and Sandra Brant, and underwear genius Calvin Klein—have been traipsing through the deserts and jungles of Africa.

Longtime partners Ms. Sischy and Ms. Brant are old friends with Ms. Karan. Mr. Klein, 65, is a new addition to the BFF posse.

The foursome will be returning at the beginning of August, and the three-week luxury excursion will explore Ethiopia, Rwanda, Kenya and Botswana.

“[Ms. Karan] said the final leg of the trip will be in the jungle,” said the source.  read more »

“It’s kind of a different way of life, because you can really just live your life one loop at a time,” said Gunner of his life caddying at a very exclusive private Hamptons golf club which is often bathed in a nice ocean breeze. He’s 25; back home in Glasgow, he’s studying to be a dentist. “You always know you’re going back out the next day. So it’s quite a surreal environment. ”

“It’s just something you do between sessions,” said Coco, Gunner’s 22-year-old friend from Glasgow. By “between sessions” he means between bouts of drinking.

While the work itself—digging around for balls in the fescue, lugging two sets of golf bags, praying for the moment when you put that flag in the 18th hole—might at times feel like grunt work, the way of life in the shack—two long pine planks that run along either side of a covered tent, tucked away behind a well-groomed hedge—is rarely dull.  read more »

To its surprise, the Transom ran into designer Christopher Ciccone—SMACK!—outside the Rouge Wine Bar at Paris Commune in the West Village. Madonna’s short, paunchy but sensual brother had flown in from London early that evening and was flying to Los Angeles the following morning—part of the whirlwind press tour surrounding his book, Life With My Sister Madonna (Simon Spotlight Entertainment, $26).

Wearing jeans, black sneakers, a tight black T-shirt and a veil of cinnamon-inflected cologne, he was there to see aspiring Broadway star (and dear friend) Ryan Raftery’s one-man show, Ryan Raftery and Friends: A Solo Act.

“There are plenty of things I left out of the book, and things that the lawyers and editors took out,” Mr.  read more »

About two years ago, Steve Guttenberg walked into the showbiz haunt Crustacean on Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

“I walked in and the maitre d’ made a big deal for me,” said Mr. Guttenberg. The Goot—as he’s known to his friends—appreciated the show. To hear him tell it, eating in public in Los Angeles is a dangerous business for an actor whose last box office hit was Three Men and a Baby in 1987.

“All of a sudden, the maitre d’ says, ‘Get out of the way!’” said Mr. Guttenberg. “And they literally threw me to the side and Tom Cruise came in.  read more »

Captain Stefan Barr said the scallops at the Gramercy Tavern could use a little more salt. He’s been back only a few months from his second tour in Iraq. For 10 years, he was one of the few, the proud, or, as he puts it, “the best”—a Marine. Now he lives in Soho.

Yes, there are soldiers walking among us, dining right next to you, tucking into those same $20 scallops. Some of them probably look just like you or me. Mr. Barr does not. He is 6 foot 5. He has a chest like a well-fed pterodactyl, with long, sinewy arms and giant hands that could easily reach across the table and pop my head off like a cork.  read more »

After Clay Felker passed away Tuesday morning in Manhattan, The Observer spoke to some who knew him well.

Robert Benton

The first time I ever screamed “fuck” in front of a room full of women was when I got mad at Clay at the Esquire offices. We were having this argument that went up and down the hall and I reached my wits end; I just said, “You fuck!” It came out of my mouth before I knew what I had said. Clay could drive you crazy, but you never stopped caring for him.

Milton Glaser

We were once in Paris.  read more »

The Bear Stearns man, the lifer, the one they would have put on the cover of their recruiting pamphlet if they had one—Bear Stearns wants you!—he’s a self-made man. Daddy didn’t put him through Harvard Business School, and if he did, you better keep that to yourself.

Ace Greenberg—the man who put Bear on the map and defined the archetype, Missouri-educated on a football scholarship, started as a clerk, kept his nose to the grindstone, became the CEO—Ace isn’t interested in your business degree. “I want them to have a PSD degree,” he said. “A poor, smart, and deep desire to be rich degree.  read more »

On Tuesday, June 24, just before 2 p.m., the Transom stepped into an elevator and all of a sudden found ourselves gazing at dreamy Top Chef contestant Sam Talbot.

Holy smokes! Er, who’s gonna win Top Chef season whatever?

“I don’t know,” said Mr. Talbot, who wore a tight black V-neck T-shirt that revealed bulging biceps, accentuated by a necklace with a giant shark tooth.

Shucks. So, what else is going on?

“I just opened a restaurant in the Hamptons.” Right, right—that seafood joint, the Surf Lodge. Does he surf? “No, I wakeboard,” said Mr.  read more »

Morgan Freeman and his wife, Myrna Colley-Lee, were the first to arrive. They stepped out of a town car in front of the French restaurant Tocqueville on East 15th Street and made their way to the empty bar area. Neither knew what to expect; the hostess, Ruda Dauphin, had called it a “salon.” They were offered flutes of Ruinart champagne; the Oscar winner asked for vodka on ice.

Ms. Dauphin is a petite, stylish but tough lady who grew up in Brooklyn. Her father was in the shmatte business. She wanted to be an actress, and she married the director Claude Dauphin and they moved to Paris.  read more »

Italian playboy turned workaholic entrepreneur Lapo Elkann recently took on the appointment of Global Ambassador to the biggest hospital in the Middle East, the Chaim Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer, which treats roughly two million Jewish and Muslim patients.

“My companies, they all start with an ‘I’ and end with an ‘I,’” said Mr. Elkann, founder in the past year of both Italia Independent, the lifestyle brand, and Independent Ideas, the advertising agency. He was watching a soccer match at a sports bar on Bleecker Street, hours before he was scheduled to catch a plane to Paris. After a few days there, he was planning to visit Italy for four days, followed by a trip to Iceland, where he’s working on yet another mysterious venture.  read more »

The block of West 11th Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues is lined with brownstones and London plane and Chinese scholar trees as tall as the brownstones they shade. Their leafy branches overlap, creating a cozy green roof over the block, as well as a considerable mess to clean up—one of the trees has a pair of birdhouses attached to its trunk.

Henry Codin has been sweeping the block for over a decade. To some he is known as the Mayor of 11th Street. The city is filled with these neighborhood characters, like the Godmother of East 10th Street, or the homeless twins of East 12th Street between Third and Fourth avenues—they are identical, but one is far grumpier.  read more »