If a Nordic God were to appear to me he would look like Alex Baker. He’d be tall and lean but muscular with well-developed thighs from years of running and he’d smell of green apples. I often thought if only he weren’t gay and a heartbreaker! I had a mad crush on him that I somehow sublimated into a lasting friendship but others weren’t so lucky. I asked him once why he’d broken up with a perfectly lovely guy he was living with and he said: Basically it’s because he’s a bore, and I’m a whore.
That may have been, but I couldn’t have found a better, or more fun, friend. He looked at dozens of apartments until he found the perfect one for us in a brownstone. (And when the lease ran out he moved us because I couldn’t deal with it.) On April 6, 1983, we drove across the George Washington Bridge, down the West Side Highway into a chic, garden apartment with a platform bed and a galley kitchen. Alex was there to teach me the ropes. He set up and ran the catering business.
We partied at the China Club and Studio 54 until they closed the bar at 4:00 a.m. and brought out bowls of shaved ice to cool us down. We’d walk home through Central Park all aglow in pink as the sun rose, high on life and mescaline. We often marvel that we’re both still alive. Now he’s gone as many friends have gone, too, this year and last at age 64. The median age is going down. That’s not fair!
I met Alex when I came to cook at Harley Baldwin’s for a fabulous party for food writers that eventually resulted in a magnificently beautiful article in Cuisine Magazine. There Suzanne Hamlin wrote one of my favorite lines about eating my food: She said that it was “almost like discovering colors.”
Harley and I met at Craig Claiborne’s celebration of his book A Feast Made for Laughter and he decided to take me under his wing. But he grew exasperated with me when he took me to David and Leslie Newman’s 25th wedding anniversary party at Elaine’s. One because I had never heard of Elaine’s and two because I did not know that David and Leslie had written the screen plays for Bonnie and Clyde and the first Superman. I would become good friends with them, too. But in the meantime it would be Alex’s job to educate me in the ways of New York.
Alex had been an official tour guide of the City of New York and he was always sprouting out interesting little tidbits about city history, most of which I don’t remember. What I do remember are his clever quips.”Is this a case of out of sight, out of mind?” or “absence makes the heart grow fonder?”
Darling Alex: In your case it’s definitely the second.
