It is seldom that we meet a voice of real authority in anarchic New York, but we met one the other night at a party for Cybill Shepherd’s new record, which is downright adequate. There were many celebrities standing around in the gloom, and when the TV lights hit them, they stared like deer in auto headlights. David Jannsen, Madeline Kahn, Jennifer O’Neill, Truman Capote, the lead singer for The Eagles, Ruth Gordon, Garson Kanin, Bud Cort, Maureen Stapleton, Rosemary Kent, Michele and Lance Loud, Brenda Vaccaro, and Charles Mingus were all there, as well as a throng of reporters, agents, photographers, and TV people. When Frank Yablans, president of Paramount Pictdures, made a speech about the future of Paramount Records, nobody paid him much mind. He went on talking, and people went on with their conversations. Suddenly Frank Yablans shouted, “You wana keep it down back there?” and the whole room—celebrities, near-celebrities, trend-spotters, pacesetters, pulse-feelers, and tastemakers—fell absolutely silent.
Source: Ian Frazier and/or George W.S. Trow, The New Yorker, May 13, 1974, p. 36.
Psychic Sail
The Chosen Chief of the Ancient Druid Order, Dr. Thomas Maughan, made his first public appearance in the United States recently, but it was pretty hard to tell. Dr. Maughan was a featured guest on New York’s first Psychic Sail, which was held on board the Marine and Aviation ferryboat Kennedy, but he was lost in the crowd of palmists, clairvoyants, astrologers, psychic healers, tarot experts, numerologists, psychometrists, auric portraitists, and other psychics who sat on the wooden benches on the two principal decks of the ferry and did their various things for a crowd of over five hundred paying customers. Most of the customers were young, most looked like patrons of a suburban shopping mall, and many were the kind of people who described themselves as easily hypnotized. ...
The Chosen Chief of the Ancient Druid Order spent the whole cruise sitting in the bow of A Deck, talking to a group of never more than twelve people. He looked like a cross between Samuel Beckett and Santa Claus. He was bald, with a long white beard, bright brown eyes, and white hairs growing out of his ears. He was wearing a white shirt that showed a pair of blue suspenders and an undershirt beneath, and he was drinking grape soda from a paper cup. Gathered around him were a black woman, a high-school girl in a pink skirt, a woman with a streak of silver in her hair and daisy earrings, a man wearing Barry Goldwater-type glasses, a young man in a fake-denim jacket, and a brooding man in a suit. ...
Source: Ian Frazier and Gardner Botsford, The New Yorker, August 5, 1974, pp. 32–33.