The New York Times, by Corey Kilgannon, October 21, 2008

Marie-Dennett McDill loved the Carlyle Hotel.

She stayed there whenever she was in New York, and adored the regular entertainers like Bobby Short and Eartha Kitt at the Café Carlyle, and the pianist Loston Harris in the lively Bemelmans Bar. She loved the uniformed elevator men and bellmen and the family of longtime staff. She loved that Central Park was only a short block away.

So when Mrs. McDill, who grew up in society in Washington and was enjoying an outdoors life in South Woodstock, Vt., learned she had terminal cancer this summer, her family immediately booked her a suite on the eighth floor for an open-ended stay, but one they sadly knew would not be open-ended enough.

“The family came to me and said, ‘We want to check her in till the very end,’ ” said Alexandra E. Tscherne, director of residences at the Carlyle. “It was a unique request, one I’ve never had previously. They wanted her set up in one of her favorite places, and they didn’t know how long it would last.”

It lasted 10 weeks. Mrs. McDill died in her sleep in the Carlyle last Wednesday.

Mrs. McDill was youthful and full of energy at 71 and spent her days outdoors gardening and painting, so it was shocking to her three children when she learned at the beginning of August that she had a fast-spreading cancer.

“It wasn’t a fight for life anymore, but a matter of time,” said her son Thomas Gardner.

The family hired 24-hour hospice care, but Mrs. McDill, at least until the very end, was in sufficient mental and physical shape to enjoy her final stay at the Carlyle. The hotel, at Madison Avenue and 76th Street, is one of New York’s most luxurious, with a long list of celebrities, presidents and royalty who have stayed or lived there.

Even as she was dying, she would take walks in Central Park in the daytime, and in the evening sit in a back booth in Bemelmans Bar, looking at the whimsical illustrations of New York City on the wall by the artist Ludwig Bemelmans, best known for the Madeline children’s books, and listening to Mr. Harris play. She loved Cole Porter, and she would pass requests to the waiter.

The family hired Mr. Harris to play Mrs. McDill’s favorite songs at her memorial service at St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue on Saturday. It was a sophisticated, poignant and kick-up-your-heels affair, almost like something out of a Cole Porter song. Mr. Harris played “Just One of Those Things” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

Month-to-month suites at the Carlyle are always expensive, but less so during the summer months, when they cost about $17,000 a month.

“It wasn’t a search for extravagance, but a search for comfort. It wasn’t the inexpensive option, but it was the greatest comfort we could afford, so of course we would do that for her,” said Mr. Gardner, chief executive of the Motley Fool, a financial information company he founded with his brother, David Gardner.

Staffers helped her with chores related to her impending death, said Ms. Tscherne, who agreed to sign as a witness to Mrs. McDill’s will and even ran across the street to get a notary public.

The family hired two attendants from Brooklyn to care for Mrs. McDill: Rose Marie Moore and her sister Shirley Innis. In the evenings, Ms. Moore would sing spirituals for Mrs. McDill.

“She would put her head back and close her eyes and ask me to sing ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.’ She’d say, ‘Give me the long version, Rose,’ ” said Ms. Moore, who took the subway from East New York to stay in the Carlyle with Mrs. McDill.

“It was like low class to high class, going in there,” she said. “I would call her my queen, my majesty, and she called me her princess, and treated me like one.”

Ms. Moore sang “Swing Low” again at the memorial service on Saturday, and family members recalled Mrs. McDill as hardly the demure society type, but more like a Katharine Hepburn character.

After graduating from Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School in Washington, she dreamed of art school, but wound up going to Manhattanville College in Purchase, N.Y., obeying the wishes of her father, H. Gabriel Murphy, part-owner of the Washington Senators baseball team, which later moved to Minnesota and became the Twins.

Mrs. McDill’s first husband was Paul Gardner Jr., a lawyer. After a divorce, she married Jonathan McDill, formerly in charge of cataloging for the Dartmouth libraries. He died in 1998. As a gardener, she took design cues from formal French and Italian gardens and added her own resourceful touches.

She loved the paintings of Henri Matisse and the writing of Mark Twain and Robert Frost. She sold a few paintings but gave away many more. She rarely bothered with computers or cooking.

“It was not that she could not cook, but that she did not,” David Gardner said.

After the memorial service, some of her friends said they were rethinking their own send-offs.

“People came up to me and said, ‘We’re changing our plans for our funeral – we want it to be fun,” Thomas Gardner said. “The only sad thing was that Mom wanted to keep living.”

Peopleweekly.com, by Janet Murphy, May 28, 2008

The New York premiere may have kicked off at 6 p.m., but the cast and crew of Sex and the City: The Movie partied ’til three in the morning, with two after parties!

After Sex’s big New York homecoming at the Radio City Music Hall and an after party at the Museum of Modern Art, the film’s inner circle – including Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Jason Lewis and director Michael Patrick King – celebrated the night away at an exclusive after-after party at The Carlyle hotel.

Around midnight, with husband Matthew Broderick, Parker escaped the MOMA, arriving at the hotel’s legendary Bemelmans Bar, which she requested (she had her honeymoon at The Carlyle in 1997). They intimately enjoyed cocktails and mini-burgers before the arrival of some of Parker’s closest friends and colleagues.

Nixon, who arrived at 1 a.m., held hands with her partner Christine Marinoni all night, while sipping the night’s signature drink, The Bradshaw.

Other SATC staples included Mario Cantone, costume designer Patricia Field and Willie Garson – who seemed shocked by the size of the crowd, announcing, “I thought this was supposed to be a quiet and intimate little get together!” But he eagerly joined the party goers as they danced to jazz and old standards played by the Loston Harris Trio.

Despite being the only ones left in the room at 3 a.m., Nixon, King and producer John Melfi chatted away. According to a source, King, who wrote and directed the big screen reunion, looked like a kid in a candy store, saying, “This was THE party of the night!”

The New York Times Music Review, by Stephen Holden, March 31, 2008

Fundador, a Spanish brandy reputedly favored by Ernest Hemingway, conspicuously entered American popular song literature in 1964 with the Cy Coleman-Carolyn Leigh hit “When in Rome (I Do as the Romans Do).” Ms. Leigh’s racy lyrics in this paean to self-indulgent tourism insist, “Don’t deplore my fondness for Fundador/You know how a Fundador can lead to a few/And baby/ When in Rome I do as the Romans do.” It was performed on Saturday evening at the 92nd Street Y by Karen Ziemba as an amused tribute to Anita Ekberg’s trance-dance in the Trevi Fountain in “La Dolce Vita.”

Karen Ziemba and Jay Leonhart performing in “I’ve Got Your Number,” part of the Lyrics & Lyricists series at the 92nd Street Y.

That edifying nugget of trivia was dropped by Deborah Grace Winer, the host of “I’ve Got Your Number: Romance, the Rat Pack and Carolyn Leigh,” the newest program in the 92nd Street Y’s Lyrics & Lyricists series. (Its final two of five performances are Monday.)

In some ways the show is a sequel to last season’s homage to Rosemary Clooney, a program also conceived by Ms. Winer and featuring several of the same performers. This year, besides Ms. Ziemba, James Naughton and Debby Boone, the roster includes the suave singer and pianist Loston Harris. Once again the musical director is John Oddo (Ms. Clooney’s former conductor), whose inventive swing arrangements for five musicians, including the bassist Jay Leonhart, create a robust big-band sound.

Ms. Winer, recently named the overall artistic director of Lyrics & Lyricists, is the author of “On the Sunny Side of the Street: The Life and Lyrics of Dorothy Fields.” In examining the life of Ms. Leigh, who died in 1983 at 57, Ms. Winer places her as the successor to Fields, not only because both were women in a male-dominated field but also because both collaborated with Cy Coleman, and both wrote songs from a female perspective. Leigh’s lyrics, Ms. Winer astutely noted, were “Fields’s lyrics put through psychoanalysis.”

Demure and glamorous, Ms. Winer is ideally suited to the delicate task of infusing the long-running series with new energy without upsetting its staid format, and her new show refines a polished blend of scholarship and anecdotal biography. Her illustration of Ms. Leigh’s feminine perspective is the 1958 ballad “It Amazes Me” (also sung by Ms. Ziemba), whose self-critical narrator, looking at herself through the eyes of a lover, finds her passion (in Ms. Winer’s words) simultaneously “requited and unrequited.”

The unrequited part, Ms. Winer implied, was Ms. Leigh’s own self-doubt. A fierce perfectionist, she kept a worry book.

The show’s nifty matches of performer to material included Mr. Naughton’s “Westport,” an obscure comic number about suburban adultery from a 1957 Julius Monk revue; Mr. Harris‘s boyish “I Won’t Grow Up” (from “Peter Pan”); and Ms. Boone’s torchy, lovelorn “On Second Thought.”

How formidable an artist was Ms. Leigh? In her greatest lyrics, including “You Fascinate Me So” (Mr. Naughton), “(How Little It Matters) How Little We Know” (Ms. Boone), “Witchcraft” (the entire cast), she could go one-on-one with the best of Cole Porter and come up even.

“I’ve Got Your Number” repeats Monday at 2 and 8 p.m. at the 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue, (212) 415-5500; www.92Y.org/concerts.

The New York Sun, by Will Friedwald | December 26, 2007

One of the best things about New York is the chance to hear the Great American Songbook for the price of a cocktail. If you stroll into one of the East Side hotels, order up a Harvey Wallbanger (or, lately, a cosmo), you are free to sit and listen to an attractive voice singing and playing Rodgers and Hart for as much time as you have. It’s as much a part of the New York experience as Broadway, Birdland, and the folk clubs in the Village. But it’s a tradition that’s lately under fire: The number of hotel-owning mega-conglomerates that are willing to employ a union pianist-singer for three hours a day is rapidly dwindling. One of the most venerable New York piano nooks, the Café Pierre, is closing at the end of the year when the Hotel Pierre shuts down for renovations.

Until now, the outstanding hotel-based pianist-singers have been something that New Yorkers could take for granted. But with the Pierre going dark, I decided to catch up with three of the finest: Daryl Sherman at the Waldorf-Astoria, Loston Harris of Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel, and, at the Pierre, Kathleen Landis, who will be between positions as of January 1.

The Café Pierre is the smallest and most intimate of these rooms: long and narrow and, overall, much like a piano bar on a cruise ship, a feeling enhanced by the regulars who gather nightly. Ms. Landis plays with an elegantly ornamented style, particularly on the “Rhapsody”-like concert arrangement of “The Man I Love,” and sings somewhat like Dinah Shore at her best. At times, she seems less like an entertainer than a card dealer. One table of revelers in the back wants Christmas carols, another table of visiting Parisians demands French songs, while most of the nightly regulars clamor for Gershwin, which has been her specialty since well before her 1998 album “Gershwin: Island to Island.” She not only satisfies all of them, deftly switching from one mode to another, but also tells tales of famous composers who’ve visited the café.

While recounting her meeting two decades ago with the lyricist Mitchell Parish, she spins an ingenious, spontaneous medley of “Stardust,” “Stars Fell On Alabama,” and, for the season, “Sleigh Ride.”

Back in the naughty ’90s, Bemelmans Bar was traditionally the worst place in New York to hear music – mainly because the crowds were so noisy that no music could be heard. And before Mayor Bloomberg, the room was so filled with cigar smoke that it was impossible to either see or breathe. Loston Harris, who has been in residence in the room since the legendary Barbara Carroll was ingloriously deposed, has found a way to make himself heard: He has brought in a trumpeter (Marcus Parsley) to cut through the din, and if that doesn’t always shut them up, at least it provides my ears with a focal point and helps me tune out the extraneous noise.

Early in his career, Mr. Harris made two albums, but his intonation and playing have improved so much since then that it’s a shame he hasn’t released an album since 2003. He has comfortably adapted something of Sinatra’s staccato phrasing on swingers, and his playing continues to derive from Nat King Cole, especially on ballads; on fast numbers, he plays percussive, slightly dissonant chords that seem designed to compensate for the lack of a drummer and also attract attention in the room.

Last Wednesday night, there was a particularly boisterous crowd, and Mr. Harris countered with not one but two trumpeters, Mr. Parsley and one of the great contemporary brass players, Lew Soloff, who was visiting after playing with headliner Steve Tyrell’s band across the hall. They started with Chet Baker’s bright and brassy treatment of “Winter Wonderland.” The mood and tempos were upbeat for the whole set: Even “Angel Eyes,” normally done as a saloon song, was pert and perky. His only ballad this set was Frank Loesser’s “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” which inspired some tender obligato work from Mr. Soloff, and he finished with two numbers inspired by Sinatra’s “Songs for Swingin’ Lovers,” “You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me,” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

The Waldorf-Astoria is still the nicest hotel for listening to music; even though the piano is situated in a space over the stairwell and under an enormous ceiling, with Romanesque columns that go on forever (and, for the season, what seems like the Jolly Green Giant’s own Christmas Tree), Daryl Sherman’s warm and intimate style makes the area seem cozy. Here, the specialty of the house is Cole Porter, since he once occupied a suite in the hotel and Ms. Sherman continues to use his piano. Ms. Sherman’s head contains the most extensive repository of obscure but delightful gems from the songbook since that of the late Charles DeForrest.

She’s particularly strong on rare pieces by Porter, such as, at last Wednesday afternoon’s set, “Let’s Fly Away,” “Where Have You Been?” and “Use Your Imagination.”

I’ve rarely heard Ms. Sherman sing anything written after 1950, so I was thrilled and delighted to hear her do the subtle and moving “Hard Candy Christmas,” a country-Broadway-holiday hybrid from “The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas.” Even so, her most poignant number, oddly enough, was “This Is So Nice It Must Be Illegal,” from Fats Waller’s only major book show, “Early To Bed” (1943). George Marion Jr.’s lyrics, light and funny as they are, play off of the fears Americans had, particularly during World War II, of Nazis, communists, and other forms of totalitarianism: “Quick, let us kiss before it’s illicit – it can happen here!” When I heard that, I couldn’t help but think of how the closing of the Pierre and the encroaching end of the tradition of hotel singer-pianists would symbolize an equally bleak future: It can happen here.