Last Call at Elaine’s by Brian McDonald (St. Martin’s). “Her eyes,” says MacDonald of his inimitable boss, “possessed the unlikely combination of shyness and defiance.” A surprising alchemy to be sure, and one that has allowed Elaine Kaufman, legendary proprietor of her Upper East Side kitchen kingdom, to handle and host the beautiful, the brainy, and the big-time for nearly half a century. In delightfully anecdotal jargon, MacDonald, mixologist turned social historian, offers a page-turning portrait of the ultimate literary salon (saloon?) in New York, recounting the fortunes of high-types and overachievers who still today make the unprepossessing depot on Second Avenue their second home. Last Call is a joyous ride through a gossip columnist’s dream Blackberry book: from Woody and Norman, Jackie, Pacino, and Plimpton, to Barbara Walters and Susan Cheever, to DiMaggio and Steinbrenner, each found their favorite libation conjured by MacDonald’s talented hands. At Elaine’s tables and Brian’s bar, Phil Specter would leave an even $500 (even if the bill demanded only a twenty), Jack Nicholson would flash a grin and a wink, and the culture-shaping minds of Joanna Malloy, Harvey and Bob Weinstein, Richard Johnson, Liz Smith, George Rush and Dominick Dunne would linger at their tables. Part social diary, with MacDonald’s photographic memory enshrining for posterity the story of “the scene,” the sleek read is also part personal memoir, a lugubrious and transparent documentation of our beloved bartender’s descent into alcoholic hell—and his bruising battle back out. After a professional life spent brushing up against the City’s elite, MacDonald wins his own place in the sun by telling artfully a tale of the luminaries and the lonely, the drunks and the dreamers. (We’ll wait patiently for those other two rulers of Restaurantville’s gilded refectories to unravel the story of Swifty’s, from the manger called Mortimer’s to the fabulous Fête!)

Lovehampton by Sherri Rifkin (St. Martin’s). Advice for those seeking a romantic summer fling: abandon the bulging bars of the City’s summer and head for the glamour and glitter of that southern Long Island soundbar—and let Rifkin’s riff on the classic beach season love story be your guidebook. The first proper beach read of the summer, Lovehampton is a playful subversion of the elegant etiquette that defines the South Fork, delightfully organized around Rifkin’s rebellious Unwritten Rules. The first: There is no other place to be between Memorial Day and Labor Day. As true for the drink-drenched, boisterously bacchanalious youth as for the high-class muckety-muck that shut their windows to the de trop dilettantes. The summer share contingent described in Rifkin’s punchy prose and frolicking dialogue offers an expected sampling of catty females, horny males, huge dollops of sex, yuppie lingo, and ruffian spirit—all mixed with a bit of gin (and not a drop of cloy) into a book that is what it claims to be: a beach read with attitude. Hampton’s Unwritten Rule #50: Most, if not all, unwritten rules are meant to be broken. Or at least ignored.

In the Hamptons by Dan Rattiner (Crown). In his introduction to Rattiner’s pleasant little history, Ed Albee takes issue with the author’s analysis of a controversial letter penned by John Steinbeck during the Vietnam years. Albee’s slight rebuttal is a fitting opening, as In the Hamptons seeks not to settle arguments—who lived here before whom, who actually was the greatest artist in East Hampton, whose liquor store really is the oldest—so much as it sets out to honor the rugged yet refined landscape that has long been the home and hideaway of the honorific, to bear tribute to the sands and soirees where such arguments were begun. Rattiner’s tales have the flavor of oral history, the passing along of stories from friend to friend—the time Rattiner shrugged off a chance to interview a young Richard Nixon on the beaches of Montauk, the day de Kooning toppled from his stool, that softball game where Bill “Bubba” Clinton umpired with a silly grin. In these narratives, the evidence of a life well-lived on a well-carved shore, Rattiner bottles the spirit of a rural enclave turned glamorous destination. In a characteristic tale, the author joins with a determined Giorgina Reid to arrest the crumbling of the Montauk
cliff face, thus saving the iconically rugged and glorious lighthouse.
Rattiner does the same in this treasury, preserving the myth and
mystery of the shoreline, making sure memory erodes not, and that
the light stays always on.

QUICK PICKS:
In the “sad-but-true” category: the latest from memoir master Augusten Burroughs, A Wolf at the Table (St. Martin’s). With none of the laughs of Running with Scissors, but all of the dark, brilliant prose and terrifying transparency of Dry, Burroughs’ latest gift of memory hypnotizes and disquiets, unsettling readers with another public performance of private trauma. In the category of “enticingly embargoed:” Barbara Walters’ Audition (Knopf), in which the first lady of broadcast journalism shares a life full of backstage (and bedroom) secrets, questions posed to heads of state, and of course, the dish on the glorious debacle that is The View. Few (men and women alike) reach the bar she’s set, and her patient memoirs are required reading for students of American media (and perhaps one soon-to-be-deposed CBS anchor). And in the category of “debut fiction (...sortof):” James Frey’s Bright Shiny Morning (HarperCollins), a multi-charactered piece that shatters the neophyte’s illusion of that land of opportunity Los Angeles, and reminds readers that several million of us fell in love with Frey’s earlier writing for a reason other than his bruised and somewhat fabricated tale of redemption: he’s quite simply a talent. (We’ll leave it to our friends at thesmokinggun.com to reveal that—shockingly!—the novel’s actually true.)