Sex and Vanity(47)
“Yes, Cecil, we know. And don’t forget she’s also the daughter of one of our country’s pioneering geneticists, Dr. Marian Tang Churchill,” Jackie said graciously, giving Marian a wink.
“Yes, yes, of course,” Cecil stammered, realizing his faux pas. He hadn’t realized Marian would know this particularly glamorous set of ladies.
“It’s hard to believe our town’s most eligible playboy is now officially off the market,” Martha wryly remarked.
“He sure is. And here’s the proof!” Cecil grabbed Lucie’s wrist and thrust it at the ladies, who gasped in unison.
“Stunning! Is it Verdura?” Martha asked.
“What a compliment, Martha. No, it is an original Cecil Pike! The cabochon emerald is forty-nine carats and belonged to the Nizam of Hyderabad. The accent rubies are from my mother, bought from the Pati?o auction many years ago, and then I had Laurence Graff personally select these twelve brilliant cut diamonds to go around the band. All D flawless, of course.”
“It looks like something one of the infantas might have worn in a Velázquez,” Alicia, an art historian, observed.
“You know, that’s precisely what I was going for! I was channeling the Duchess of Alba when I designed the piece, if you really want to know,” Cecil said, his eyes misting a little.
“You did good, Cecil! I’m sure Cayetana would have approved!” Jackie declared.fn3
After the ladies had been escorted into the adjacent dining room where the more discreet crowd liked to be seated, Cecil sank contentedly into his antique kilim embroidered chair. “Between those ladies, everyone who’s anyone will know the news before the sun sets on the island. Which reminds me …” He fished his phone out from his jacket pocket and began scrolling through his Instagram. “Holy Moira Rose! It’s trending! The proposal video is trending! 27,084 likes already! Cornelia Guest just liked it! Prince Joachim of Lichtenberg just re-grammed it! Oh, excuse me, I must show this to the ladies. Lucie, come. Quickly, Lucie!” Cecil leaped out of his seat, dragging Lucie along with him.
“Well, I guess Cecil is part of the family now,” Marian said with a shrug.
Freddie gave his mother a look. “Yeah. I think we’re gonna have to stop using those coffee mugs from Zabar’s.”
“SOCIAL GRACES”
BY GEOFFREY MADISON COLUMBUS
If you were anywhere near the Upper East Side yesterday, you might be forgiven for thinking that some hotshot director was filming a movie on location at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There were ballerinas and daredevil acrobats, there were Broadway dancers, there was a marching band. However, this was no film that brought Fifth Avenue traffic to a standstill but Cecil Pike in the midst of a Marvel-budget-sized wedding proposal to Lucie Churchill. Cecil, no stranger to this column, is the dashing charmer who has been proclaimed the biggest catch in the universe by every magazine, blog and social media outlet that matters. He’s the GQ-handsome bon vivant and heir to the ginormous Pike billions, first gushed in the oil fields of Central Texas and then multiplied exponentially thanks to the genius of his force-of-nature mamacita, Reneé Mouton Pike, one of the world’s leading investors who never misses a brilliant start-up opportunity or a chic party anywhere in the universe, thanks to her private India Mahdavi–designed Boeing 757. The less socially attentive might recognize Cecil from his cameo appearances on Antiques Roadshow, where he schools the experts with his encyclopedic knowledge of 16th-to 18th-century European antiquities. This, after all, is a guy who goes deep-sea diving in search of Spanish shipwrecks and has a classics degree from Oxford. Pike mère et fils are esthetes extraordinaire, having restored Buckley House in London to its former glory with the help of Jacques Garcia at the whispered cost of more than half a billion (pounds, not dollars!), and are said to be doing the same to an ancient fort in northern Rajasthan. The lucky lass Lucie, a rising art consultant who’s on the speed-dial of every wannabe Mugrabi these days, is the exotically beautiful daughter of Dr. Marian Tang and the late Reginald Churchill, a true blue-blooded New Yorker descended from generations of Churchills, Barclays and other Knickerbocker Club types. We haven’t seen such a classy union of old money and new money in a while, and this will be one beautiful power couple to put on your radar, not to mention a power wedding. You heard it here first: the nuptials are rumored to be taking place this autumn at a little dive in the Persian Gulf called the Louvre Abu Dhabi.
CHAPTER TWO
821 Fifth Avenue
Upper East Side
Even in the thin air inhabited by Manhattan’s stratospherically high-end property agents—where no one bats an eyelash at a $35 million listing—821 Fifth Avenue was considered hallowed ground. It was built in 1918 to the most exacting standards of luxury, and each apartment in the twenty-one-story building occupied an entire floor, creating sumptuous mansions in the sky. But it wasn’t the size of these residences that made the building so renowned; rather, it was the plain fact that 821 was considered to be one of the top five most exclusive buildings in Manhattan. Two ambassadors, one retired Supreme Court justice, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and even a deposed European monarch were politely turned down from purchasing by its notoriously difficult co-op board.
Much of this was due to the fact that a majority of its apartments were still held by the original families who had owned since 1918, and few units ever changed hands. To paraphrase the Patek Philippe slogan, it could be said that one never actually owned an apartment in 821—one merely looked after it for the next generation. So the building remained, well into the twenty-first century, a bastion of privacy for some of the East Coast’s most rarefied and discreetly influential families, among them Lucie’s grandmother, Mrs. John L. Churchill, or as she was known to everyone in her exclusive circle, Consuelo Barclay Churchill (privately tutored Miss Porter’s Institut Villa Pierrefeu).