There are aspects of New York most New Yorkers never see except in movies. The view from a tower suite on the 26th floor of the Carlyle, a storied hotel on the Upper East Side, is one.
From windows facing all directions on Monday night, guests at a party celebrating the debut of the Zodiacs Collection — a line of astrology-themed scented candles linked to a perfume priced at $1,100 a bottle — were afforded a cinematic panorama of skyscrapers, pencil towers and streetlights outlined by an inky autumn twilight.
The party was hosted by Cassandra Grey, a beauty mogul who seems to know everyone in the entertainment business. If she appeared very much at home in the suite that made sense, given that she used to own it with her husband, Brad Grey, a former chairman of Paramount Pictures who died in 2017.
The actress Demi Moore, the “Saturday Night Live” producer Lorne Michaels, and the “Real Housewives of New York” alumna Carole Radziwill could easily gaze through the floor-to-ceiling windows to see a glittering spectacle easy to characterize as a postcard view, were it not for the fact that New York is the only city in which the reality outdoes the postcards, as the film director Milos Forman once observed.
But, of course, no one was really looking at the view.
“Did you see Lily Allen?’’ someone said to Ms. Moore.
She had not.
There was a reason for that. Although Ms. Moore had arrived punctually by the standards of local etiquette (7 p.m. for a 6 p.m. party), she wasn’t in time to glimpse the British singer-songwriter Ms. Allen, who had come to the Carlyle dressed to break the internet.
Ms. Allen’s cameo was a stop-off en route to the annual the Council of Fashion Designers of America awards ceremony at the American Museum of Natural History, 18 blocks away from the Carlyle on Central Park West. It was a rare public appearance for Ms. Allen since the drop of her new album, “West End Girl,” which details in song the dissolution of her relationship with the “Stranger Things” actor David Harbour.
She arrived wearing a translucent slip skirt by Colleen Allen slung well below her belly button, and a minuscule bralette. Page Six was quick to characterize the outfit as an example of “revenge dressing at its finest,” although, as Ms. Allen recently told Interview, “I don’t need revenge.”
Much as the Carlyle occupies a special place in the mythology of sophisticated Manhattan nightlife, suite 2601 holds unique meaning for Ms. Grey. It was here that she often stayed with Mr. Grey, whom she married in 2011 before a gaggle of celebrity well-wishers that included Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. The Greys liked the place so much that they bought it that year for $15.5 million, only to sell it back to the hotel a few years afterward.
The 3,000-square-foot space was fitted out to Ms. Grey’s tastes by the architectural designer William Sofield, and it was here that she brainstormed Violet Grey, her beauty products business, the predecessor of her latest venture, Madame Grey, which centers on a perfume with a cost per ounce equivalent to that of Beluga caviar or cocaine.
“Brad stayed at the Carlyle for 35 years,” said Ms. Grey, who was dressed in a power suit belonging to her late husband, one of many subtle references to her own complex back story.
Among the detours on her way to serial beauty entrepreneurship, as she tells it, Ms. Grey (nee Cassandra Huysentruyt) spent parts of her childhood living on a farm in a rural Quaker community in North Carolina and in a tepee. She didn’t finish high school, married Mr. Grey in 2011 and became a bosom pal to the storied Hollywood superagent Sue Mengers. After Mr. Grey’s death, she entered into a long relationship with the D.J. Samantha Ronson.
Ms. Ronson was at the party on Monday, dressed in a suit and chewing on a toothpick. Ms. Mengers attended, too, in spirit. A framed photograph of her stood on a side table, part of a miniature shrine that included a silver-lidded crystal vessel she had bequeathed to Ms. Grey.
Ms. Grey’s late husband saw his entry into the Carlyle as a symbol of his success. When he walked into the lobby, Ms. Grey said, “Brad always felt like, as this Jewish kid from the Bronx, he’d finally made it.”
Earlier in the week, at her fifth-floor apartment on the Upper East Side, Ms. Grey had conducted a reporter on a tour of her back pages, including objects collected over the years and mined as inspiration for her business ventures: home as mood board.
Skittering about the place were her Birman cats, Pebbles and Priscilla, and an English longhair named Cat Moss. One of the three sharpened its claws on a white slipcovered sofa bought at an auction of Joan Didion’s household goods in 2022 and refurbished at considerable cost.
“They’re destroying everything,” Ms. Grey said amiably.
Wherever one’s eye fell lay objects both precious and pedestrian — things she inherited or acquired on her travels or unearthed at the estate sales she haunts or bought with a click during her late-night peregrinations across the internet.
Among the more sentimental items on display was a bound copy of the original script for “The Sopranos.” Mr. Grey was a key producer of the series before he rose up the executive ranks. There was also a silver flask Ms. Grey had once presented to her husband, and a matching one given to the couple by Mr. Sofield.
Among the other decorations were a silver cigarette case the newlyweds Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow sent as Christmas presents to close pals in 1966; a leather bound set of Colette’s novels bought for $300 in Paris (“When the woman said, “Three hundred,” I said, ‘Three hundred thousand?’” Ms. Grey recalled); and a weighty cylindrical S.T. Dupont lighter resembling a depth charge, which she plans to replicate as the vessel for her next perfume.
Candles from her new Zodiac line, created in collaboration with her astrologer, Karen Thorne, were arrayed on the floor. Rare or obscure books were piled on tables, desks, windowsills, counters and atop a bronze “Ginkgo” chair by the sculptor Claude Lalanne.
“I love things,” Ms. Grey said. “I love the stories of things and I really use all the stuff in my process. After my brother died, and then Brad died, stuff became more than stuff.”
Throughout the four years when Mr. Grey was battling cancer, making regular trips to Japan for experimental gene therapy that yielded periods of remission, the couple intensified their buying sprees.
As a symbol of their life together, on the day of the party, she took a few of their favorite things to the Carlyle, including the silver flasks, and used them to personalize the suite.
“When Brad was diagnosed, we were suddenly acquiring a lot of art and doing a lot of decorating and spending a ton of money,” she said as waiters circulated with trays of caviar-flecked slivers of smoked salmon on toast points. “It was as if we were building the life we were fighting for.”
Guest at the party formed small groupings, huddling together at times like children after a storm. Some, like Ms. Allen, were merely making a toe-touch, on their way to other things. Others stuck around to dawdle and photograph the objects Ms. Grey had brought from home
Seated on a custom Studio Sofield sofa, the seasoned publicist Alejandra Cicognani surveyed the room and leaned close to a reporter to whisper a truism about New York nightlife: “My darling, you come to leave.”
Glittering in a dark sequined pantsuit, Ms. Cicognani took in a scene populated by men dressed in the casually cashmere style one might term “Haute Bro” and women extensively manicured and coifed. It is not inconceivable that some of those in attendance had even been surgically refreshed by Dr. Steven Levine, a guest at the party and the physician credited with giving Kris Jenner the face-lift that launched a thousand memes.
Suddenly, Ms. Cicognani mentioned that she had been watching reruns of the 1950s TV series “Perry Mason,” paying special attention to the style of its stars, Raymond Burr and Barbara Hale.
“You cannot believe how elegant everybody was then,” she said. “Everything we see now is so calculated that there’s no chic. The minute you dress for Instagram, natural elegance is gone.”
Perhaps that is not altogether true. Consider Ms. Moore. With her long black hair falling straight down her back and wearing ankle-brushing black trousers beneath a slick black trench coat, along with oversize eyeglasses rimmed in black, she possessed a distinct elegance and ease.
At any rate, she seemed unfazed when a reporter inquired not about her latest film project but her collection of dolls. Ms. Moore, as it happens, owns a trove of human simulacra numbering in the thousands. They are stored in a Victorian house bought for the purpose in Ketchum, Idaho.
“The very first one came into my life from Bruce,” Ms. Moore said, referring to her ex-husband Bruce Willis. “He’d left to do press for a movie and when he came home he had this doll. It was a little girl sitting in a grown-up chair all dressed for a party.”
The doll had a slightly sad expression, she went on, the look of someone gussied up yet with nowhere to go. Ms. Moore added that she seldom acquires new toys these days, but often retreats to her full-scale dollhouse when human interactions become too much.
“The thing about dolls is that they connect you to play, but in a still way,” she said.
As she spoke, people around her were posing for selfies, traipsing about or awaiting astrological readings Ms. Thorne was giving in a corner of a sitting room. One of them, apparently, had an ulterior motive: By the end of the party, a silver flask was missing. It was the one given to the Greys by Mr. Sofield on the occasion of their son’s birth.
“I don’t know how they did it, since everyone was photographing and the pictures are all time-stamped,” Ms. Grey said afterward by phone
If she seemed philosophical about the loss of an object so personal it is engraved with her son’s initials, perhaps that was because she had already begun to recast the theft as a potential brand anecdote.
“I’m thinking of writing about it on my Substack,’’ Ms. Grey said. “Whoever took it might read it and decide to return it. You know, no questions asked.”
Guy Trebay is a reporter for the Style section of The Times, writing about the intersections of style, culture, art and fashion.
The post The Hostess With the $1,100 Perfume appeared first on New York Times.
