Elaine Kaufman, the renowned and rotund proprietress of Elaine’s restaurant, on the Upper East Side, who died, at eighty-one, on December 3, left behind, among her worldly possessions, four hundred custom-made dresses. Last month, she purchased several lengths of fabric, in anticipation of wanting something new to wear in the holiday season.
“Elaine was not thinking of dying,” Linda Clare Meisner, Kaufman’s dressmaker, said the other day at her studio, on Central Park West. “A few weeks before she went into the hospital, we took a car down to Mendel Goldberg Fabrics, on Hester Street, where they get the most luxurious fabrics direct from Europe. This is not the kind of place for buying leftovers on Seventh Avenue! Elaine was saying, ‘Oh, look at that beautiful embroidered brocade over there! It would work well in a coat-dress!’ And soon out comes her AmEx Gold card and she’s spending six thousand dollars for several pieces of fabric. Coming uptown, she was very happy. Oh, dear Elaine—she was such a fabric junkie.”
Meisner, an energetic Texan of sixty-nine, with brown eyes and ash-blonde hair pulled into a tight bun, was a dancer (she once appeared at the Metropolitan Opera) before devoting herself to creating couture apparel. She made the first of her four hundred dresses for Kaufman in 1990. Meisner called it a “triangle dress,” composed of five yards of colorful Italian silk and costing about $2,000. Over the years, Kaufman spent about $800,000 on dresses by Meisner, either triangle style or coat-dress style.
Often the fittings were conducted at midday in Elaine’s restaurant, which, since the insufficiently profitable luncheon trade was ended in 1988, was relatively private, especially in the smaller side dining room known as Siberia. Here Meisner would lay out the fabric on a table and, with an extra-long tape measure of a type primarily used for upholstery, she would lasso Kaufman’s waist. Meisner said, “Measuring and creating clothing for Elaine was like painting a mural in motion.”
Now that Kaufman has departed, Meisner worries about the fate of her client’s wardrobe. She assumes that the dresses are hanging in the gigantic closets of Kaufman’s apartment, around the corner from the restaurant. Four of them are in Meisner’s studio, awaiting repair. (A few years ago, Kaufman sent one back that had never been worn; Meisner believes that she must have associated it somehow with George Plimpton, a beloved customer who had died the day it was delivered.) Not knowing what else to do with the dresses and the six thousand dollars’ worth of unused fabric, Meisner is holding on to them. She may contact Kaufman’s business partner, Diane Becker, but wishes to wait a decent interval before intruding.
Becker, who often sat in Siberia watching while Meisner took Kaufman’s measurements, is now serving as the restaurant’s manager and supervising its day-to-day operation. A slender, hazel-eyed woman, she started working at the restaurant in 1984 as a daytime waitress and manager. In 1988, she became Kaufman’s chief assistant and, most people believe, is her chosen successor.
“Am I the next Elaine?” Becker asked one day last week, at the restaurant. She shook her head. “How could anyone replace Elaine? But she left the restaurant in loving hands, and I and the rest of the staff will care for it and for her customers the way she would have wanted.” She went on, “But don’t think that Elaine is not still running the show. She had a longtime habit—something she picked up as a kid born at the start of the Depression to Russian Jewish parents who emigrated to the Bronx. Whenever she passed a public phone, she’d stick her fingers into the coin return, fishing around for change. At the restaurant in the afternoon, she’d often sit near the two phones and absent-mindedly check for change. I’d say to her, ‘Elaine, since people started using cell phones, you haven’t gotten change out of those phones in years.’ She’d check anyway. And she never got any change.
“A few days after she died, I was at the restaurant, telling Richie, our awning cleaner, that story,” Becker continued. “For effect, I stuck my hand into one of the coin returns and, to my surprise, I pulled out a quarter. When I put my hand into the other phone, I pulled out another quarter. Only this one was accompanied by a penny. That was Elaine getting the last laugh and wishing me luck.”