“Bill, you look like you want a cookie.” Lilly Pulitzer—Lillian Lee McKim Pulitzer Rousseau, to be exact—looked knowingly at my husband, Bill Rollnick, who in turn looked as if he had been caught with his psychic hand in the cookie jar! Our barefoot hostess disappeared. Out came a freshly baked tray of ginger snaps from …
“My recruiting key: I looked for people first, athletes second. I learned early on that you do not put greatness into people, but somehow try to pull it out,” said Herb Brooks, who coached Team U.S.A. to gold in the 1980 Winter Olympics. Here, the people (and athletes) of Quest, as they remember the greatness …
More often than not, holiday traditions are defined by what’s served, the food that becomes vetted and favorite for generations: Roast Turkey and dressing at Thanksgiving, Standing Beef Rib Roast or goose and Yorkshire pudding at Christmas. You get it—your family has its own, as does mine. Nancy Reagan’s Christmas tradition—one she’s served every year …
Have you ever planned to go somewhere with three people, hoping the third one doesn’t show up? Well that happened to me 32 years ago. Ralph Lauren was going to take a New York Times writer and me to his ranch in Colorado for a story we were doing. Mr. Lauren and I were sitting …
A few years back I was spending the weekend with the designer Oscar de la Renta and his wife, and they took me along to dinner at a neighbor’s on Saturday night. We were in rural Connecticut, and the scene and the house we visited were straight out of a Norman Rockwell illustration. The dinner …
Real estate remains a hot topic in contemporary conversation, especially because of the past 30 years of rising prices. The interest in the subject is almost entirely devoted to that and, occasionally, to architecture. My interest is more personal and based on nothing but curiosity, and the writer’s scent of drama that exists in every …
Most of the time, if you move to a new city far away from the one you grew up in, you end up making another kind of family: the family of beloved friends. I’ve now done this twice, both in New York and in Los Angeles. This family, not the one you were born into, …