Chapter 2

EASTSIDER MAXENE ANDREWS An Andrews Sister finds stardom as a solo

2-2-80

Maxene Andrews, riding high on the wave of her triumphant solo act that opened at the Reno Sweeney cabaret last November, is sitting in her dimly lit, antique-lined Eastside living room, talking about the foibles of show business. As one of the Andrews Sisters, America's most popular vocal trio of the 1940s, she made 19 gold records in the space of 20 years. But as a solo performer, she more or less failed in two previous attempts -- first in the early 1950s, when her younger sister Patty temporarily left the group, and again in 1975, after her hit Broadway show _Over Here_ closed amid controversy. Not until 1979 did Miss Andrews bring together all the elements of success -- good choice of songs, interesting patter between numbers, and a first-rate accompanist. The result is an act that is nostalgic, moving, and musically powerful.

"For years, our career was so different than so many, because our fans never forgot us," she recalls, beaming with matronly delight. "I could walk in anyplace in the years I wasn't working, and they'd say, 'Maxene Andrews -- the Andrews Sisters?' Everybody was sort of in awe. So I was always treated like a star of some kind. But it's nice to work; it's a wonderful feeling to be in demand."

She is a bubbly, husky, larger-than-life character of 61 with ruddy cheeks and a firm handshake. Deeply religious, sincere, and outspoken as always, she remains first and foremost an entertainer.

"I stick to the older, standard songs by great composers," says Maxene of her act. "You know -- Rodgers and Hart, Irving Berlin. ... My partner is Phil Campanella, an extremely talented young man who plays the piano and sings harmony. ... All the talking I do between the songs is ad libbing. I have never been successful at trying to do material that was written for me."

She's returning to Reno Sweeney on February 6 for a two-week engagement, then filming a TV show titled _G.I. Jive_ before taking her act to Miami and Key West. Nightclub work, she says in her high, bell clear voice, "is not my future. I would like to get into concerts and I think that's a possibility -- probably a year from now."

LaVerne, the eldest of the sisters, died in 1967. Patty stopped speaking to Maxene five years ago because of salary disagreements for _Over Here_. The contracts were negotiated separately, and when Maxene balked at accepting $1000 a week less than her sister, the national tour was abruptly canceled.

"I never in my wildest dreams thought that we would separate, because we've always been very close," says Maxene sadly. "When people say, 'You're feuding with your sister,' I say that's not the truth. Because it takes two people to fight, and I'm not fighting anyone. She's just not talking to me.

"It took me a long time to be able to handle the separation. I used to wake up every morning and say, 'What have I done?' But now I just throw it up to Jesus, and I leave it there. I hope and pray that one of these days we can bring everything out in the open, and clear it up. I love Patty very much, and I'm very surprised that she's not out doing her act, because she's very very talented. She's been doing the _Gong Show_, which I -- it's none of my business, but I would highly disapprove of. I think it's such a terrible show."

Maxene owns a house outside of Los Angeles, and was "born again" a couple of years ago at the Church on the Way in Van Nuys, California. When she's on Manhattan's East Side, which is often, she shares the apartment of Dr. Louis Parrish, an M.D. and psychiatrist whom she describes as "a true Southern gentleman."

The Andrews Sisters, who recorded such hits as "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen," "Rum and Coca Cola," "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree," "Apple Blossom Time," and "Hold Tight," arrived in New York from Minneapolis in 1937 and took the city by storm with their wholesome, sugar-sweet harmonies and innovative arrangements. Soon they were making movies as well. _Buck Privates_ (1940, which featured Abbott and Costello and the song "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy," was Universal's biggest moneymaker until _Jaws_ came along in 1975. "I didn't particularly care for making movies," comments Maxene. "I found it very boring and very repetitious, and certainly not very creative. But working with Bud and Lou was a lot of fun."

Now divorced, Maxene has a 33-year-old daughter named Aleda and a 31 year-old son, Peter, who live in Utah. She has written her autobiography, but it hasn't been sold to a publisher "because I refuse to write the kind of books that they want written today. Ever since the Christina Crawford book came out, that's all the publishers want. ... I think the trend will pass, because we're really getting saturated in cruelty and lust and whatever else you want to call it."

Asked about the changes in her life since her religious reawakening, Maxene says, "Darling, everything has improved. My disposition has improved. I used to be impossible for anybody to work with. ... I'm now reconciled to the feeling that I am never alone, and that in Him I have a partner, and that if I run into a problem that I can't solve, then I'm not supposed to solve it -- because we're just mere mortals."

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WESTSIDER LUCIE ARNAZ To star in Neil Simon's new musical

9-9-78

Bad timing. That's what had plagued me ever since I had tried to get an interview with Lucie Arnaz last June. Back then, I was supposed to get together with her downtown, but our meeting was canceled at the last minute. My second appointment, set for August 31 in her dressing room just before a performance of _Annie Get Your Gun_ at the Jones Beach Theatre in Wantagh, Long Island, now seemed in jeopardy as well. I was kept waiting nervously outside while the house manager insisted that Lucie was engaged in "a very important telephone call."

But when the young star finally emerged, her face beaming with delight, I found that my timing could not have been better. Lucie had just received official word that a major new Broadway role was hers. As we sat down to talk, Lucie was in one of those radiant moods that come only in times of triumph. She had been chosen for the female lead in a new musical, _They're Playing My Song_, which is scheduled to open in Los Angeles in December and on Broadway in February. The show has music by Marvin Hamlisch and lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager. The book is written by Neil Simon.

"I'm a lousy auditioner -- at least, I thought I was," grinned Lucie. "This new musical will be probably the pinnacle of what I've been aiming for. ... It's about a fairly successful lyricist who's not nearly as successful as the composer she's going to work with. Neil Simon has always wanted to do a play about songwriters. It's a very hip, pop musical. It doesn't have regular Broadway-type tunes."

She flopped back on the sofa touching my arm from time to time for emphasis, and chatted on in her mildly raspy voice. Finally she moved to a seat in front of the mirror and invited me to keep talking while she put on her makeup. There is a quality about her that suggests toughness, but this impression melts away under her girlish charm. At 27, Lucie is already an 11-year veteran of professional acting and singing. When she performed at Jones Beach this summer, up to 8,000 people per night came to see her.

Lucie first transplanted herself from the West Coast to the West Side on a full-time basis last winter, although, she admitted, "I had a New York apartment for four years which I would visit every couple of months. For some sick reason, I really like New York. There's a lot of crazy people doing strange things on the streets, but there's also a lot of creative forces here.

"I went to do an interview this morning for my radio show and it started raining. By the time I had walked six blocks I was looking terrible, and it suddenly occurred to me that I would never present myself like that in California. In New York, who gives a damn if you've got water on you when you come to work? On the West Coast, the things that aren't important they seem to put on pedestals." Her radio show, which she started this year, is a nationally syndicated five-minute interview spot called _Tune In With Lucie_.

>From 1967 to 1972 she was a regular on her mother's TV show, _Here's Lucy_. She has made countless guest appearances on other shows, and performed lead roles in numerous musicals. Her parents, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz Sr., were divorced more than a decade ago and have both remarried.

"My mother was here for opening night, then she stayed a couple of days in New York. But she gets too lonely when my brother Desi and I go away for too long. He was here for most of the summer. He was doing a movie called _How To Pick Up Girls_. He played the guy who supposedly knew all about it -- one of the two stars. He said, "It's funny, I meet girls on the street, and New York has the most beautiful girls in the world, and when they ask me what I'm doing here and I tell them the name of the movie, they walk away and say, 'You dirty toad!'" Desi also plays the groom in the new Robert Altman film, _A Wedding_.

"My father is now putting an album together of the music that was recorded for the old _Lucy Show_. Salsa music is coming back now, so he's been asked to make an album of those tapes."

Speaking of her hobbies, Lucie noted that "recently I started to build a darkroom in my house. The key word is started. It's hard to get the time. ... And I have been writing songs for the last couple of years. I'm a lyricist. I've sung them on things like _Mike Douglas_ and _Dinah_."

She enjoys all of New York, though at one time "the East Side gave me the ooga boogas. Then I found a couple of places there that were nice." On the West Side, she likes to dine at La Cantina, Victor's Cafe, and Ying, all on Columbus Avenue near 71st and 72nd Streets.

When the five-minute warning sounded in her dressing room, Lucie had to turn me out, but not before she divulged her philosophy about show business. "Am I ambitious?" she echoed. "I don't know. There are people who are willing to really knock the doors down and do just about anything to get there. I'm not like that. Even now, when I go to the market, people come up to me and say, 'Aren't you. ... ?' So I can imagine what it would be like to be a superstar. No, I'm not really looking forward to that."

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EASTSIDER ADRIEN ARPEL America's best-selling beauty author

3-29-80

As a young girl in Englewood, New Jersey, Adrien Arpel was determined that one day she would transform herself into a beautiful woman. After having her nose bobbed, she began to pester the ladies behind every cosmetic counter she could reach, and by the time she graduated from high school at 17, she knew more than they did. That same year she opened a small cosmetics shop in her hometown with $400 earned from baby-sitting. Today, at 38, she is the president of a $12 million-a-year company selling more than 100 beauty products throughout the U.S. and Europe.

Not content with mere business success, she recently turned her talent to writing her first book, Adrien Arpel's Three-Week Crash Makeover/Shapeover Beauty Program (1977). It was on the _New York Times'_ best-seller list for six months, and is still selling briskly in paperback. Miss Arpel received $275,000 from Pocket Books for the reprint rights -- the most ever for a beauty book.

"I have always been a rebel," she proclaims regally, dressed in a stylish Edwardian outfit with padded shoulders at her midtown office. Quite heavily made up, with hot pink lipstick and a Cleopatra hairdo, she looks considerably younger than her age. The strident quality of her voice is reminiscent of a Broadway chorus girl's, yet is delivered in a crisp, businesslike manner. During the interview she rarely smiles or strays from the question being asked. For some reason, she declines to say much about her new book, _How to Look 10 Years Younger_, which is scheduled for publication in April. Instead, she stresses the simple, common-sense rules about beauty that have guided her career from the beginning.

Probably her two most important innovations are her exclusive use of nature-based, chemical-free products (chosen from leading European health spas) and her policy of try-before-you-buy makeup. Complimentary makeup is offered every time a customer gets a facial at one of the hundreds of Adrien Arpel salons, such as those on the first floor of Bloomingdale's and Saks Fifth Avenue.

Whenever she opens a new salon, Adrien spends the entire day on her feet, doing upwards of 35 facials with her own pale, delicate hands.

Upon being complimented for her attire, Miss Arpel gasps, "Thank you!" with schoolgirlish delight. There is something almost surreal in her creamy white complexion. "I think sunbathing is absolutely deadly, and that there is no reason in the world for a woman to sunbathe," she says. Moments later, she admits that "high heel shoes are not very good for you," but that she wears them anyway, "because they're very fashionable. They are something that really can be a problem -- if they're pitched wrong. If you have a good shoe and it's pitched well, you shouldn't have a problem"

Does she think it would be a good idea for women to give up high heels altogether? "No, no. I don't think you'll ever get women to give up fashion. So we can tell what's problems, what's really hazardous, what's going to be injurious to your health, and what's going to just hurt a little bit."

She never thought of writing a book until about four years ago, says Arpel, because "every second when I was away from my business, I spent with my daughter. Now my daughter's 16 and a half, and has a boyfriend, and goes out, and doesn't want to spend every minute with me. This all started when she was about 13." Adrien and her husband, manufacturer Ronald Newman, moved to the New York metropolitan area right after they were married in 1961, and acquired an Upper East Side apartment last summer.

For her own health and beauty regimen, Adrien begins her typical day with jumping rope. She thinks weight training for women is "terrific," but considers jogging the best all-around exercise. "Now, jogging has its negatives. I get up very early in the morning, and if you jog while it's still dark out, it can be dangerous. I also have long hair, and you have to wash your hair after you jog. So for someone that works, I find that I can only do it three days a week."

She has a facial twice weekly. "Facials are not luxuries. They are necessities to peel off dead surface skin. ... Air pollution is the reason. If it wears away stone on buildings, think what it can do to the skin." A facial, she explains, consists of "all different sorts of hand massages to deep-cleanse the skin with coconut-like milk, or some sort of sea kelp cleanser. Then there's a skin vacuum which takes blackheads out -- electric brushes with honey and almond scrubs which clean out the pores. And at the end, a mask. Nature-based again -- orange jelly, sea mud, or spearmint."

Arpel believes that a woman's makeup should be largely determined by her profession. She reveals a humorous side when asked whether a woman stockbroker, for example, should always dress conservatively. "Well, if she was wearing a see-through blouse and no bra in her office, I'd certainly think she had poor taste," she laughs.

A nonsmoker who consumes little alcohol, she confesses to at least one vice: "I drink two cups of coffee in the morning, sometimes more. Also not wonderfully good for you -- but I never said I was a hundred percent good."

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WESTSIDER ISAAC ASIMOV Author of 188 books

10-29-77

In 1965, when the Science Fiction Writers of America held a national convention to vote on the best science fiction ever published in this country, they sifted through hundreds of nominations dating back to the 1920s before coming up with the winners. _Nightfall_ (1941) received the most votes for a short story and the _Foundation_ trilogy won for the best series of novels. The author of both works: Westsider Isaac Asimov.

Had Asimov died 25 years ago, his fame would still be secure. But he remains more active than ever. He is, among other things, one of the most prolific authors in the world, publishing an average of one book and three or four magazine articles per month.

He is sitting at an electric typewriter in his West 66th Street penthouse when the doorman informs him that two visitors have arrived. Asimov is expecting a single reporter; but he says OK, so my roommate John Cimino and I get on the elevator. We stop at the 33rd floor. Asimov, clad in his undershirt, meets us at the door, hangs up our coats, and takes us into the living room adjacent to his working area. Along one wall is a glass-enclosed bookcase containing the 188 books Asimov has written in his 40-year literary career.

"This is my section of the apartment," he says. "The blinds are down because I always work by artificial light." I tell him that John has come along to ask questions about science -- Asimov is an expert in more than 20 scientific disciplines -- while I will be asking about science fiction Asimov complies, and after about 10 minutes, he opens us completely and gives each answer with enthusiasm.

He has lost a little weight recently, and in fact had a mild heart attack earlier this year, but Dr. Asimov is as creative as ever -- perhaps more so. One of his latest projects is _Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine_. It first appeared on the newsstands early in 1977 and has since built up a broad readership throughout the U.S., Canada and Great Britain.

"It was the idea of Joel Davis of Davis Publications," says Asimov. "He publishes _Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine_, _Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine_, and many others. He decided that science fiction was doing well and that he wanted a science fiction magazine -- something with the name of someone, like Ellery Queen. ... He asked me if I was interested. ... I wasn't really, because I had neither the time nor the inclination to edit the magazine."

Asimov found the time. He and Davis worked out a formula for the author to lend his name and picture to the magazine cover and to become the editorial director. Asimov writes the editorials and some of the fiction, answers readers' letters and helps with the story selection. George Scithers, the editor, has a major role in deciding the magazine's contents.

_Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine_ began as a quarterly and if all goes well, will soon become a monthly. Some of its contributors are writers in their 20s who are publishing their first stories. Containing many illustrations and almost no advertising, the 200-page magazine is available at numerous Westside newsstands for $1.

Born in Russia and raised in Brooklyn, Asimov graduated from college and published his first short story while in his teens. For many years, he taught biochemistry at Boston University. In 1970, he returned to New York and settled on the West Side. He is married to a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who practices under her maiden name of Dr. Janet Jeppson; her office is on the opposite end of the apartment. She too is a writer, having published a science fiction novel and some stories.

"The West Side, as far as I'm concerned, has more good restaurants than any other place on earth, though I have not been to Paris," says Asimov, who hates flying. He made a trip to Europe last year on the Queen Elizabeth II -- and came back on the return voyage. "It wasn't a vacation," he says. "I gave two talks each way and I wrote a book."

The IRS, he says, cannot believe that he doesn't take vacations. "In the last seven years," he testifies, there has been only one time -- two days in June of 1975 -- that I went on a trip and didn't do a talk. And even then, I took some paper with me and worked on a murder mystery. You see, a vacation is doing what you want to do and to stop doing what you have to do. .. But I like what I, so I'm on vacation 365 days a year."

Asimov's biggest writing project these days is his massive autobiography, which he expects to finish by the end of the year. "It will probably be in two volumes," says Asimov, grinning, "which is unreasonable, considering that I have led a very quiet life and not much has happened to me."

* * *

ISAAC ASIMOV: LITERARY WORKAHOLIC

from _The Westsider_, 12-1-77

Morning has come to the West side. In a penthouse high above 66th Street, a middle-aged man enters his study, pulled down the shades and fills the room with artificial light. Reference books at his elbow, he sits down at his electric typewriter and begins to tap out sentences at the rate of 90 words per minute. Fourteen hours later, his day's work complete, Dr. Isaac Asimov turns off the machine.

In such a way has Asimov spent most of the past seven years, ever since he moved to the West Side from Boston. In a 40-year literary career stretching back to his teens, he has written and published 188 books, including science fiction, science fact, history, mystery, and even guides to Shakespeare and the Bible. Asimov has also written more than 1,000 magazine and newspaper articles, book introductions and speeches.

Though his pen has never been silent since he sold his first piece of fiction to Amazing Stories in 1939, Asimov is now enjoying the most productive period of his career. Since 1970 he has written 85 books -- an average of one per month. He does not dictate his books; nor does he have a secretary. Asimov personally answers some 70 fan letters per week, and he gives speeches frequently. He also finds time for the press.

The following interview took place on a morning late in October in the sitting room adjoining his study. Along one wall was a bookcase approximately 6 by 8 feet containing Asimov's collected works.

Question: Dr. Asimov, have you set any goals for yourself for the next 10 years or so?

Asimov: I'm afraid I don't generally look ahead. Right now my autobiography is the big project ... . I have no ambition whatsoever outside of my writing. I expect to write as long as I stay alive.

Q: Could you say something about your autobiography?

A: It's longer than I thought it would be. As soon as I get you out I'm going to deliver pages 1374 to 1500 to Doubleday. I'm hoping to get it finished by the end of the year ... . It will probably be in two volumes -- which is unreasonable, considering that I've led a very quiet life and not much has happened to me. I guess the only thing is that I tend to go on and on when I'm on my favorite subject.

Q: What made you choose the West Side to live?

A: I can't honestly say I chose the West Side. When I came to New York in 1970, I lived where I could, which happened to be the West Side. But now that I'm here, I like it. I was brought up in New York and went to Columbia ... . I've always identified myself with Manhattan. My publishers -- almost all of them are in Manhattan. Taxis are available at any time. I West Side, as far as I'm concerned, has more good restaurants within walked distance than any other place on earth, though I have not been to Paris. I have learned to tolerate the traffic and the pollution and the litter. When I go to the East Side it looks dull by comparison.

Q: I see that your science fiction story "Nightfall" has been made into a record Albert. And I also remember the movie version of your _Fantastic Voyage_. Do you have plans for making movies or recordings out of your other science fiction works -- for example, the _Foundation_ series?