45 Years Later, Everyone Still Comes to Elaine's

Forty-five years ago, Elaine Kaufman, who was running a restaurant in Greenwich Village, used her life savings to buy an Austro-Hungarian bar at 88th Street and Second Avenue.

Elaine’s became, of course, a famous literary refuge, saloon and restaurant. It has been haunted by writers, filmmakers, playwrights, artists and actors, but also by politicians and police officials. A couple of hundred guests crowded Elaine’s for several hours on Sunday evening to mark the 45th anniversary of the restaurant.

Woody Allen, his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, and their older daughter sat at the bar while waiting for Ms. Kaufman to arrive.

Among other Hollywood-type guests on hand were the actor Richard Dreyfuss, the actress and singer Lainie Kazan, the film producer Martin Bregman, the television screenwriter David Black and the photographer Jessica Burstein.

Several of Ms. Kaufman’s most famous literary customers — like George Plimpton, Norman Mailer and David Halberstam — have moved on, but the writers Gay Talese, Frederic Morton and Bruce Jay Friedman, all still quite active, were present, as was Lewis H. Lapham, who was the longtime editor of Harper’s Magazine until 2006. The mystery writer Carol Higgins Clark stopped by as well.

Elaine’s is a rare place that brings together not just cultural fixtures, but also figures from the worlds of law enforcement and politics. George E. Pataki, the former governor, and Charles A. Gargano, the state’s former economic development czar, have been to Elaine’s recently. Every mayor since Robert F. Wagner has dropped by, and not only because Gracie Mansion is just a few blocks away.

Among the public servants, current or former, who were at Elaine’s on Sunday were Louis F. Garcia, who is retiring as the city’s chief fire marshal; Chris Policano, a former journalist and City Council aide and now a spokesman for the United Federation of Teachers; Linda Fairstein, the crime novelist and former chief sex crimes prosecutor for the Manhattan district attorney’s office; and Michael F. McCann, a former senior official at the Police Department who later oversaw security at the United Nations before forming his own security company, McCann Protective Services.

A phalanx of public relations people were at Elaine’s, including Peggy Siegal and Bobby Zarem, two publicists who have occasionally lately been at odds with each other. Some members of the Fourth Estate also were at Elaine’s, including Larry Sutton, an editor at People magazine; David Zinczenko, editor in chief of Men’s Health; and Murray Weiss, a longtime crime reporter for The New York Post. (Disclosure: At least five journalists from The Times were there.)

“There was a lot of reminiscing about the people Elaine has thrown out of the place, about the close encounters among people who no longer wanted to see each other, about the night that someone came in and told us that the married mayor of New York City was ‘on a date’ across the street at a dive bar (oh, those were the days!),” the gossip columnist Roger Friedman noted in his column on Fox News’s Web site.

The history at Elaine’s is certainly colorful.

Ms. Kaufman was arrested in 1998 for scratching a customer, Jim Sorrels. Assault charges were later dropped, as were civil lawsuits that Mr. Sorrels and Ms. Kaufman filed against each other. (Mr. Sorrels died in a fire last year that was apparently caused by careless smoking. “Elaine Foe Is Killed; Fight ‘Victim’ in Apt. Fire,” The Post’s headline declared.)

Ms. Kaufman, a Manhattan native who grew up in Queens, turned 79 this year, and as she has acquired something of the status of a living legend, the restaurant has come under some literary attention.

In 2004, HarperEntertainment published “Everyone Comes to Elaine’s: Forty Years of Movie Stars, All-Stars, Literary Lions, Financial Scions, Top Cops, Politicians and Power Brokers at the Legendary Hot Spot,” by A. E. Hotchner, a longtime customer and writer.

And this month, St. Martin’s Press is publishing “Last Call at Elaine’s: A Journey from One Side of the Bar to the Other,” by Brian McDonald, who worked at the restaurant for 11 years as a bartender and became friends with Ms. Kaufman. The book “is the deeply personal story of how a bartender became a writer, fell off the wagon and got back on, and found himself through the window of a very famous restaurant,” according to the publisher’s publicity materials.

In 1983, Enid Nemy wrote in The Times about a celebration of the 20th anniversary of Elaine’s. “One of the reasons Elaine’s has outlived a lot of other restaurants, and achieved the fame it enjoys, is that the regulars aren’t only customers but extended family,” Ms. Nemy wrote at the time. In 1988, noting the restaurant’s 25th anniversary, Glenn Collins of The Times wrote, “Elaine’s has always been a club for those on a personal, first-name basis, so to speak.”

In both respects, it seems, not much has changed.

(news from new york times)