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PROJECTS — Risk and Grace
Risk and Grace by RANDY FERTEL
“No one’s going to love you like I do,” sang Mary McBride recently at the 20th anniversary party for Sally Susman and Robin Canter. As The New York Times recently noted in the “Vows” column covering McBride’s wedding to Leslie Klotz, that’s her song “that makes you cry on the Brokeback Mountain movie soundtrack.” It was that “Vows” column that convinced Robin to choose McBride to play their party. So Robin explained when she and Sally took the stage at the Players Club to welcome their guests. “Sight unseen, music unheard, I just knew.” Risky business. Risk seemed to be the theme of the evening. Just inside the door a large placard quoted a letter of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville West that Robin had sent to Sally early in their courtship (and has carried around “on a ragged piece of paper” for the past 20 years): “Heaven preserve me from littleness and pleasantness and smoothness. Give me great glaring vices, and great glaring virtues, but preserve me from the neat little neutral ambiguities. Be wicked, be brave, be drunk, be dissolute, be despotic, be an anarchist, be anything you like, but for God’s sake, be it to the top of your bent! Live fully, live passionately, live disastrously. Let’s live you and I, as none have ever lived before.” The Players Club is located in a Greek Revival townhouse facing historic Gramercy Park. Decidedly committed to “pleasantness and smoothness,” not to say stodginess, the former “gentleman’s club” had been transformed for the evening. The same histrionic portraits of famous histrions — all men except for a portrait of a famously trouser-wearing Sarah Bernhardt — still adorned the dark paneled walls, but the furniture in the inner sanctum had been supplanted by Barcelona chairs and plush sofas and pillows — everything in “wicked” black and white. Nearby, a couple was overheard arguing over exactly which anniversary they had come to celebrate. Was it the 10th? The 20th? With a grin, the gentleman wondered aloud to his spouse, “were there lesbians 20 years ago?” Sally and Robin’s risk was, as Hilary Rosen’s toast explained, to be “radical in their traditionalism.” Rosen is President of OurChart.com, a social networking website that grew out of Showtime’s The L Word; she was also for many years head of the Recording Industry Association of America. Hilary met Sally in Washington when a mutual friend spoke of “this great young woman who is gay but doesn’t know any gay people. She is a hot shot like you.” Which gave Hilary pause: “competition in the lesbian hot shot category wasn’t what I was looking forward to.” They met and became fast friends. “We plotted together.” One of their plots was a party Sally threw at a home where she was house sitting. “Even then I was a good influence on her,” joked Hilary. That’s where Sally met Robin, around the pool. At the time, Sally was working on the Hill for the Senate Commerce Committee led by that bastion of South Carolina charm, Fritz Hollings. Now she’s head of global communications for the Estée Lauder Co. Still politically engaged, she is a member of the New York finance committee for Senator Clinton’s presidential campaign, and a “Hill-raiser,” or top fundraiser. For their first date Robin, who worked at a legal firm, drove up in a vintage Rolls Royce to take Sally on a tour of the Capitol’s famous sites followed by a candlelit dinner at McPherson Grill. Robin remembers being nervous on the way to pick up her date. As casually as she could manage, she made small talk with the chauffeur, “so — I guess you have a lot of tales to tell...” To which the driver deadpanned, “many tales, none to tell.” Over the following weeks Sally played hard to get. But before long they tumbled on their deep affinity: both women were both willing to risk everything for their radical commitment to the tradition of family. Though their commitment to commitment risked alienating their families of origin — both Jewish — Robin and Sally stuck it out. “It gets easy after the first 18 years,” Robin quipped to my bride of six months. Unable to marry, unwilling to break any laws, Sally resisted for 10 years Robin’s wish for even a public display of their commitment. Robin is now a stay-at-home mom and triathelete. In her toast, Hilary noted that Lily, their adopted daughter of 13, was nowhere to be seen. “You’re probably mortified by your parents, Lily, and probably hiding,” Hilary, her godmother, offered, but “it is inevitable that you will look back someday and realize that the people who felt like your boring parents were truly radical idealists forging a new path for themselves in a society that was sometimes less than accepting.” Then their extended families, including perhaps an unseen Lily, raised a glass in their honor. Robin turned to Sally, “now I can ask you what I have wanted to ask for 20 years . . . ,” breaths were audibly held, “. . . will you dance with me?” Their jitterbug was a perfect articulation of their union: perfectly in step, fluid, graceful, sexy. Both wore cocktail dresses: Robin’s silver-gray, low cut and sleeveless to highlight her slender figure and athleticism; Sally’s elegant and black, with a flourish of feathers at the knee that flowed as “sweetly” when Robin twirled her on the dance floor as the famed “liquifaction” of Julia’s 17th-century poetic clothes. The room was filled with old guard conservatives and young power brokers and political consultants and fashionistas. Straight, gay, young, old, all smart — all had turned out for Robin and Sally. Many joined Robin and Sally and shook their own tail feathers.
To the raunchy, rollicking beat of the Rolling Stones “Honky Tonk Woman,” Mary McBride closed her moving set with familiar, beloved words: Through many dangers, toils and snares Or at least to the Players’ Club. Robin and Sally created amazing grace in abundance that night, as they have over the course of two decades. And counting.
Randy Fertel Fact checking: Robin Canter, 212-228-1201, racanter@att.net Bernadette Murray Fertel 917-498-1335, Bernadette.murray2@verizon.net Hilary Rosen, 202 370-2711, hilary@ourchartinc.com
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