58 new york | september 16–29, 2019
CindyAdamssays,stridingthroughthefoyer
of the Park Avenue penthouse she purchased
in 1997—with her own money, she wants you
to know—and today shares with her 17-year-
old Yorkshire terrier, Juicy. “Three and a half
pounds of pure selfish,” she calls him. (Trans-
lation: the most beloved thing in her life.)
They live in theatrical splendor, with the
phone ringing off the hook as if it were the
pre-texting era and people still knew that
the best stories are whispered directly into
an understanding ear. The apartment was
once the home of billionaire tobacco heiress
Doris Duke, who bought it in 1965 and
hired Tony Duquette to decorate it. Adams
left some of his most distinctive details—like
the glossy black ceiling in the living room—in
place even after she made the nine-room,
4,200-square-foot apartment her own.
Today, it is an utterly personal monument to
the triumph Cindy Adams has made of her
life and what it took for her to get here.
“I don’t know what she dropped,” Adams
says, pointing to the large crack in the traver-
tine floor left over from Duke’s tenure. It runs
all the way to the living room, where light
pours in through the floor-to-ceiling plate-
glass windows overlooking the terrace onto
which she never goes (the better to preserve
her astonishing complexion). They match the
ones in the apartment next door, which
Duke’s neighbor, film producer Sam Spiegel,
had put in. “We had to stop traffic on Park
Avenue when those glass panes and some
tables were craned in,” Adams says. “It was
illegal. Like I care.”
She moved into the place with her hus-
band, the comedian Joey Adams, at a time
when he was ailing and having difficulty
navigating their previous “much nicer”
apartment on Fifth Avenue. Adams is a New
York girl, born in 1930, who grew up on the
Upper West Side. She dropped out of high
school over a requirement that she take
a sewing class, she says, and was working as
a photographer’s model when she met Joey
on a radio program (they married in 1952).
He was her mother’s age. “I would have loved
to have been a six-foot-tall blonde model and
married a brainy man,” Adams says. She was
pretty and charismatic—a pageant queen,The Living Room
Adams holding
Juicy, her
Yorkshire terrier.The Library
A Russian artisan worked
on the apartment for two years,
making magic with fabric.
Adams found the furry stool
and area rug in Africa.design hunting
“I thought if it was good enough
for Doris Duke, it’s good enough for me,”
(previous spread)
The Office: Cindy Adams’s
war room, where the gossip
still lands. The walls and
ceiling have been plastered
over time with her front-
page scoops.