62 new york | september 16–29, 2019
design hunting
The Living Room
The antiques, including a root chair
and Ming pieces, were accumulated
during the ’60s, when Adams and
her husband, comedian Joey Adams,
did a tour of Southeast Asia. “
Did you see the solid silver ashtray
that Roy Cohn gave Joey?”
Adams asks. “He had it inscribed
in his own handwriting.”The Guest Powder Room
The poppy print, which envelops
everything from the walls
to the sink fixtures, looks just
as fresh today as it did
when it was installed shortly
after Adams moved in.after Cindy and Joey made trips to Tehran in
the ’60s, including being guests at the shah’s
infamous three-day celebration of the
2,500th anniversary of the Persian empire
at Persepolis in 1971. Adams’s report of her
hospital visit ended up being her first page-
one exclusive story for the New York Post,
with the byline “The Post’s Own Cindy
Adams.” Since then, she has had some 500
front-page exclusives, many of which are
now plastered on the walls and ceiling of her
office, Duke’s former boudoir, where her
bathtub still resides, festooned with
Duquette’s silver lamé wrapping and full of
old papers and magazines. “Nobody put it
up thinking it was going to be a tremendous
wall,” Adams says. “It actually happened like
Scotch tape by Scotch tape.”
The apartment today is ruled by Juicy,
who is usually in the arms of Nazalene,
Adams’s housekeeper, who cooks for the dog
and her mistress. Adams couldn’t have a dog
with Joey, as he’d had a bad experience when
he was young, but a week after his death,
Jazzy landed in her lap, a gift from friends.
“That’s almost 20 years. I’ve been dog crazy
ever since,” says Adams, who is making her
annual preparations for the Blessing of the
Animals at Christ Church on Park Avenue
and 60th Street, held on December 8. She
started the event 11 years ago because “I just
adore dogs, adore animals. It’s a long story. I
had a dog when I was a child, a black Scottie
named Rufus, and the dog was run over by
a car. I couldn’t get over it for years.”
After joking (I think) to our photogra-
pher that she’ll ruin him if she doesn’t like
his picture of her, Adams has to go. The
phone hasn’t stopped ringing, and she has
to get back to her office, surrounded by her
front-page scoops. ■the onetime Miss Bagel—but six feet tall
and blonde she was not.
Smart and ambitious she was. Joey may
not have had a Ph.D., but he was talented,
popular, and funny, and, as she writes in her
best-selling book The Gift of Jazzy—named
for her first Yorkie—“Joey loved me the way
my mother did. Without reservation.” Plus
“Joey had a lifestyle,” she says. He dressed
beautifully, loved to live large with his pals
(who included Frank Sinatra and Bob
Hope), squired her to the Stork Club, and
lived in the Waldorf Towers. His connec-
tions were the door to her journalism career,
as she started interviewing his friends and
writing articles for TV Guide. Then there
was the life-changing four-month trip to
Southeast Asia, which President Kennedy
proposed that Joey, president of the Ameri-can Guild of Variety Artists, take to entertain
the troops. One of the people she inter-
viewed on the trip was Sukarno, the presi-
dent of Indonesia, who liked what she wrote
so much that he asked her to return to write
what became her first book, Sukarno: An
Autobiography As Told to Cindy Adams,
published in 1963. From there, she incar-
nated her role as the confidante of dictators,
presidents, First Ladies, First Mistresses,
charlatans, and basically the entire cast of
shady, glitzy, and powerful characters the
world loves to hate. As a gossip columnist,
she plays by her own rules, but, she insists,
she doesn’t judge; she just reports gossip.
When the deposed Shah of Iran was
dying in New York Hospital in 1979, Adams
visited him at the request of the shah’s sister,
Princess Ashraf. They had become friends