Ben Stiller—shown here at a reading and signing for Jenifer Estess' book, Tales From the Bed, in Los Angeles—will receive the first Project A.L.S. Jenifer Estess award on May 6 in New York.
Regular readers of this column (hi Mom!) hopefully discern an attempt at something more than just a cocktail party rating system. It’s the mesmerizing, but intimate, web of event sponsors, producers, attendees, and media who shuffle and reappear that interest me—it’s what Frank DiGiacomo dubbed “Zero Degrees of Separation” in one of his annual New York Observer roundups of New York’s most mentioned personage.
Well, Frank, a loyal Project A.L.S. supporter, wasn’t on hand for the maiden New York Design Fair opening night toaster benefiting Project A.L.S. and sponsored by House & Garden on February 9, but his all-worlds-collide theory was borne out yet again. I realized this when I introduced the magazine’s publisher, Joe Lagani, to Project A.L.S. co-founder Valerie Estess. Joe’s pretty and peripatetic wife, Donna, is the senior vice president and publishing director of Cosmopolitan, a former client of mine. (Side note: The magazine’s “Fun Fearless Female” awards were cleverly rethunk this time around.) It turns out the Laganis are homesteading in what was Estess’ childhood home. Stay with me here, please.
Mr. Lagani and Ms. Estess commiserated on the horrors of the interim owner that separated them (and that owner’s mausoleum-style hot tub in the master bedroom, which neither the previous nor current owner could cotton to), and it came up that Valerie had come a knocking at her former residence this past Halloween. She was dragging her kids around and decided to use the holiday as an excuse to peer in on the old place.
“I bet Donna does a good Halloween,” I ventured, interrupting a major real estate bonding. They both just looked at me. “I remember once driving around in a car with Donna, pre-Halloween, and showing her some pipe-cleaner spiders I happened to have in my bag, leftover props from a Family Fun magazine TV segment. She pounced. ‘Oh! I have to have
those for my son Joey. They’re brilliant!’”
Now Donna is a successful and fancy lady who can afford just about anything she wants. And these little critters had seen their moment in the sun, their legs akimbo, their little shaky eyes coming unglued from their furry heads. But I surrendered them to her. A moment of sheer glee ensued. Whatever floats your boat, Donna. By coincidence I had emailed Donna out of the blue just the day before for a favor.
Anyway, Valerie’s annoyance at my interrupting her chat with a Condé Nast benefactor vanished. “Oh my God. I used to make those dumb spiders.” (We’re closing in on a point here, promise.) I had forgotten that Valerie had worked at my former firm, Ted Inc., and been the Halloween point person for many moons.
Zero degrees of separation.
So I realized that the tangled strands of Estess sisters, and the nonprofit juggernaut that they built, had to be recorded here for posterity. When Valerie inevitably wins the Nobel Prize for Project A.L.S advances in stem-cell research, I don’t want her forgetting her humble roots as a Halloween prop master and media hawker (she was excellent, FYI).
Valerie’s story is of course inextricably entwined with that of her sister, Jenifer Estess, who passed away in December 2003.
Jen was a founder and executive director, in the 1980’s, of the Naked Angels, a progressive theater company known as much for their giant Hamptons bashes as for their quirky, big-name-but-no-makeup productions.
The Naked Angels had big-time, lightning-in-a-bottle buzz. Thus Jenifer’s best pal, In Style’s Martha McCully, then beauty editor at the fledgling Allure, wisely brought the celebrity magnet cause to the doorstep of her editor, Linda Wells, and it was my job to publicize the arrangement.
Those were heady days. The East Hampton police shut us down at their airport (I escaped with the cover blowups). Revlon got involved, and I say with complete sincerity that it was the dawning of the gift bag era.
Then, somehow, the steam escaped, Jenifer was unceremoniously ousted, and the galas went unmounted. Cue Melissa Manchester’s “Don’t Cry Out Loud,” and you’ve got the picture.
So Jenifer came to camp out at my firm, where I was keeping house with my cousins Bevinn and Gillian, and occasionally my brother, Kip. Sensing the family vibe, we soon had Valerie on the wagon as well.
Jenifer was not a regular employee; few memos materialized from her desk. She was more like our in-house surprise guest. She’d bluster in at odd hours, noisily interrupt whatever productivity we had cooking, and once all eyes and ears were on her, she’d pick up the telephone and ask people to keep it down.
Oh, but the girl could work a phone.
One of our important clients in that era was Town & Country, and truth be told, making noise about the nation’s oldest society magazine was slow pushing it around. Then one day in May 1994, tragedy and opportunity struck simultaneously in our little office. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, after a private convalescence, passed away.
Now to say that Jenifer was obsessed with Le Jackie would be a gross understatement. She was a close friend of John Jr., and she absolutely vacuumed any knowledge or gossip about our nation’s favorite first lady, and became tigerlike if anyone dared even hint a nonreverential thought of the style icon.
Because the century-old Hearst magazine had a treasure trove of photos and articles on the former Ms. Bouvier, our wallflower client was suddenly being asked to dance the hullabaloo. Jenifer imperiously marched me over to the magazine’s offices, where we confiscated every scrap of Jackie-phenalia. We delivered the lot over to some high-priced photo-reproduction house and waited on the sidewalk as Jenifer silently contemplated her role in helping to burnish the Jackie image.
The next morning Jenifer called at 7:30 AM (I had up until then never laid eyes on her before 10:30) to get me to open the office so she could commence sending messengers with art packages to all the TV shows. She began her efforts by hastily assembling a shrine over her inbox, complete with chiffon scarf and wrap-around sunglasses, which she would periodically put on while trying to convince CNN to use Town & Country pictures in their round-the-clock tributes.
Town & Country editor Pamela Fiori was a good sport. She had recently met with Mrs. Onassis, so she had something relevant to say, and she agreed to go on the air a few times.
After the media hoopla died down, Jenifer lost complete interest in the account (which soon gently dismissed us) and my company (her next project, the Nantucket Film Festival, was in the chrysalis stage). But we got to keep sister Valerie, who soon recruited another sister, Meredith Estess-Hulbert, as a freelancer so we wouldn’t feel abandoned. The Esteii were somehow always in the house. (Although the fourth sister, Allison, for some reason did not come to work with us.)
Ted Inc. followed Jenifer to Nantucket for the festival’s first year. It was a kooky affair, but we got Vanity Fair to sponsor and Graydon Carter to attend, so it was deemed a success.
But something started to go wrong with Jen’s health. She was dropping things, and couldn’t get out of bed. It was a slow, spooky year. Finally in West Hampton, as her nephews splashed in the pool, she told me she had been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Since my aunt has M.S. and is basically fine, I didn’t think much of it.
But she kept getting worse. One day Valerie called me and asked me to go with her to Gracie Mansion and meet Donna Hanover, who had taken an interest in the disease. Jen was too sick to go, and they wanted someone with an aggressive personality to make sure that they weren’t steamrolled. I was oddly honored.
So we went and had a truly surreal session, planning a press conference to announce the first major New York benefit for A.L.S. We had a huge turnout on a sad, rainy day. I was shocked when Jen arrived in a wheelchair—somehow I just hadn’t factored that into the equation. Her speech was brilliant—informed, passionate, brave…all that. While the official name came later, in my mind Project A.L.S. was conceived in that moment.
For the first gala, Gillian, Bevinn, and I trudged up to Roseland to herd media and stuff gift bags. There may have been a few seating snafus. I recall my dog Hagar was there, which can’t have been legal. They played the Lou Gehrig farewell speech, “I am the luckiest man alive,” which wins the award for most heart-wrenching use of echo, hands down. Jen was still in pretty good shape then, relatively speaking, and she produced the whole evening, on a shoestring.
It was a new hybrid kind of gala that she created, that combined live performance, medical information, high-octane celebrityhood, and serious sorrow, and it was a hit. It wasn’t so much that she got Marisa Tomei, Ben Stiller, Kristen Johnston, and others to turn out; it was that she got them to turn out every single time. No other organization that I know of has anything that comes close, and soon they went from fighting a disease that no one had heard about to raising millions of dollars.
When she asked me to be on the board a few weeks later, I said no, because I saw the effort the Esteii were throwing behind this, and I feared my little company couldn’t handle that much pro bono. But I landed In Style as their first major sponsor (negotiations were not easy), and I’m proud to see they’re still together.
The galas came fast and furious after that. More aggressive than most nonprofits, they started doing two big events a year, flip-flopping the coasts. I made as many as I could. There was a dizzying array of sideshow events. Jen wheelchaired and wisecracked her way down to Washington, D.C., to testify before Congress on funding for research. CBS did a biopic. The Estess sisters had an HBO documentary where it was clear that Valerie had become a national spokesperson for A.L.S., not to mention a full-on blonde.
I remember one of the last times I saw Jen at her 12th Street apartment, where she ruled from her throne bed. I had come by on a whim, and she corralled me into making phone calls for three hours. “Magnificent! You’re a tour de force! Keep calling!”
At her funeral, a handful of late arrivals were packed into a side room, where we watched the ceremony close-captioned. The other stragglers left partway through. Grateful for the privacy, I sniffled and wondered where she had gone.
Well she’s back, in the name of the new Project A.L.S. award, at least. The first Jenifer Estess award will be bestowed on Ben Stiller on Friday, May 6, at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. Call Project A.L.S. at 212.969.0329 for tickets.
Posted 03.16.05
Photo: Amanda Edwards/Getty Images
Well, Frank, a loyal Project A.L.S. supporter, wasn’t on hand for the maiden New York Design Fair opening night toaster benefiting Project A.L.S. and sponsored by House & Garden on February 9, but his all-worlds-collide theory was borne out yet again. I realized this when I introduced the magazine’s publisher, Joe Lagani, to Project A.L.S. co-founder Valerie Estess. Joe’s pretty and peripatetic wife, Donna, is the senior vice president and publishing director of Cosmopolitan, a former client of mine. (Side note: The magazine’s “Fun Fearless Female” awards were cleverly rethunk this time around.) It turns out the Laganis are homesteading in what was Estess’ childhood home. Stay with me here, please.
Mr. Lagani and Ms. Estess commiserated on the horrors of the interim owner that separated them (and that owner’s mausoleum-style hot tub in the master bedroom, which neither the previous nor current owner could cotton to), and it came up that Valerie had come a knocking at her former residence this past Halloween. She was dragging her kids around and decided to use the holiday as an excuse to peer in on the old place.
“I bet Donna does a good Halloween,” I ventured, interrupting a major real estate bonding. They both just looked at me. “I remember once driving around in a car with Donna, pre-Halloween, and showing her some pipe-cleaner spiders I happened to have in my bag, leftover props from a Family Fun magazine TV segment. She pounced. ‘Oh! I have to have
those for my son Joey. They’re brilliant!’”
Now Donna is a successful and fancy lady who can afford just about anything she wants. And these little critters had seen their moment in the sun, their legs akimbo, their little shaky eyes coming unglued from their furry heads. But I surrendered them to her. A moment of sheer glee ensued. Whatever floats your boat, Donna. By coincidence I had emailed Donna out of the blue just the day before for a favor.
Anyway, Valerie’s annoyance at my interrupting her chat with a Condé Nast benefactor vanished. “Oh my God. I used to make those dumb spiders.” (We’re closing in on a point here, promise.) I had forgotten that Valerie had worked at my former firm, Ted Inc., and been the Halloween point person for many moons.
Zero degrees of separation.
So I realized that the tangled strands of Estess sisters, and the nonprofit juggernaut that they built, had to be recorded here for posterity. When Valerie inevitably wins the Nobel Prize for Project A.L.S advances in stem-cell research, I don’t want her forgetting her humble roots as a Halloween prop master and media hawker (she was excellent, FYI).
Valerie’s story is of course inextricably entwined with that of her sister, Jenifer Estess, who passed away in December 2003.
Jen was a founder and executive director, in the 1980’s, of the Naked Angels, a progressive theater company known as much for their giant Hamptons bashes as for their quirky, big-name-but-no-makeup productions.
The Naked Angels had big-time, lightning-in-a-bottle buzz. Thus Jenifer’s best pal, In Style’s Martha McCully, then beauty editor at the fledgling Allure, wisely brought the celebrity magnet cause to the doorstep of her editor, Linda Wells, and it was my job to publicize the arrangement.
Those were heady days. The East Hampton police shut us down at their airport (I escaped with the cover blowups). Revlon got involved, and I say with complete sincerity that it was the dawning of the gift bag era.
Then, somehow, the steam escaped, Jenifer was unceremoniously ousted, and the galas went unmounted. Cue Melissa Manchester’s “Don’t Cry Out Loud,” and you’ve got the picture.
So Jenifer came to camp out at my firm, where I was keeping house with my cousins Bevinn and Gillian, and occasionally my brother, Kip. Sensing the family vibe, we soon had Valerie on the wagon as well.
Jenifer was not a regular employee; few memos materialized from her desk. She was more like our in-house surprise guest. She’d bluster in at odd hours, noisily interrupt whatever productivity we had cooking, and once all eyes and ears were on her, she’d pick up the telephone and ask people to keep it down.
Oh, but the girl could work a phone.
One of our important clients in that era was Town & Country, and truth be told, making noise about the nation’s oldest society magazine was slow pushing it around. Then one day in May 1994, tragedy and opportunity struck simultaneously in our little office. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, after a private convalescence, passed away.
Now to say that Jenifer was obsessed with Le Jackie would be a gross understatement. She was a close friend of John Jr., and she absolutely vacuumed any knowledge or gossip about our nation’s favorite first lady, and became tigerlike if anyone dared even hint a nonreverential thought of the style icon.
Because the century-old Hearst magazine had a treasure trove of photos and articles on the former Ms. Bouvier, our wallflower client was suddenly being asked to dance the hullabaloo. Jenifer imperiously marched me over to the magazine’s offices, where we confiscated every scrap of Jackie-phenalia. We delivered the lot over to some high-priced photo-reproduction house and waited on the sidewalk as Jenifer silently contemplated her role in helping to burnish the Jackie image.
The next morning Jenifer called at 7:30 AM (I had up until then never laid eyes on her before 10:30) to get me to open the office so she could commence sending messengers with art packages to all the TV shows. She began her efforts by hastily assembling a shrine over her inbox, complete with chiffon scarf and wrap-around sunglasses, which she would periodically put on while trying to convince CNN to use Town & Country pictures in their round-the-clock tributes.
Town & Country editor Pamela Fiori was a good sport. She had recently met with Mrs. Onassis, so she had something relevant to say, and she agreed to go on the air a few times.
After the media hoopla died down, Jenifer lost complete interest in the account (which soon gently dismissed us) and my company (her next project, the Nantucket Film Festival, was in the chrysalis stage). But we got to keep sister Valerie, who soon recruited another sister, Meredith Estess-Hulbert, as a freelancer so we wouldn’t feel abandoned. The Esteii were somehow always in the house. (Although the fourth sister, Allison, for some reason did not come to work with us.)
Ted Inc. followed Jenifer to Nantucket for the festival’s first year. It was a kooky affair, but we got Vanity Fair to sponsor and Graydon Carter to attend, so it was deemed a success.
But something started to go wrong with Jen’s health. She was dropping things, and couldn’t get out of bed. It was a slow, spooky year. Finally in West Hampton, as her nephews splashed in the pool, she told me she had been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Since my aunt has M.S. and is basically fine, I didn’t think much of it.
But she kept getting worse. One day Valerie called me and asked me to go with her to Gracie Mansion and meet Donna Hanover, who had taken an interest in the disease. Jen was too sick to go, and they wanted someone with an aggressive personality to make sure that they weren’t steamrolled. I was oddly honored.
So we went and had a truly surreal session, planning a press conference to announce the first major New York benefit for A.L.S. We had a huge turnout on a sad, rainy day. I was shocked when Jen arrived in a wheelchair—somehow I just hadn’t factored that into the equation. Her speech was brilliant—informed, passionate, brave…all that. While the official name came later, in my mind Project A.L.S. was conceived in that moment.
For the first gala, Gillian, Bevinn, and I trudged up to Roseland to herd media and stuff gift bags. There may have been a few seating snafus. I recall my dog Hagar was there, which can’t have been legal. They played the Lou Gehrig farewell speech, “I am the luckiest man alive,” which wins the award for most heart-wrenching use of echo, hands down. Jen was still in pretty good shape then, relatively speaking, and she produced the whole evening, on a shoestring.
It was a new hybrid kind of gala that she created, that combined live performance, medical information, high-octane celebrityhood, and serious sorrow, and it was a hit. It wasn’t so much that she got Marisa Tomei, Ben Stiller, Kristen Johnston, and others to turn out; it was that she got them to turn out every single time. No other organization that I know of has anything that comes close, and soon they went from fighting a disease that no one had heard about to raising millions of dollars.
When she asked me to be on the board a few weeks later, I said no, because I saw the effort the Esteii were throwing behind this, and I feared my little company couldn’t handle that much pro bono. But I landed In Style as their first major sponsor (negotiations were not easy), and I’m proud to see they’re still together.
The galas came fast and furious after that. More aggressive than most nonprofits, they started doing two big events a year, flip-flopping the coasts. I made as many as I could. There was a dizzying array of sideshow events. Jen wheelchaired and wisecracked her way down to Washington, D.C., to testify before Congress on funding for research. CBS did a biopic. The Estess sisters had an HBO documentary where it was clear that Valerie had become a national spokesperson for A.L.S., not to mention a full-on blonde.
I remember one of the last times I saw Jen at her 12th Street apartment, where she ruled from her throne bed. I had come by on a whim, and she corralled me into making phone calls for three hours. “Magnificent! You’re a tour de force! Keep calling!”
At her funeral, a handful of late arrivals were packed into a side room, where we watched the ceremony close-captioned. The other stragglers left partway through. Grateful for the privacy, I sniffled and wondered where she had gone.
Well she’s back, in the name of the new Project A.L.S. award, at least. The first Jenifer Estess award will be bestowed on Ben Stiller on Friday, May 6, at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. Call Project A.L.S. at 212.969.0329 for tickets.
Posted 03.16.05
Photo: Amanda Edwards/Getty Images
