Wall-to-Wall Chic

NEW YORK —  East 60s. 4.5 Rms. Home to the international acclaimed Jet Set! High ceilings, great light, 2 split BRs, 3 marble baths. Best and most luxurious prewar condo in the city.

--Item in the New York Observer

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The ambience is part college dorm and part casting call, part last copter out of Saigon and part “Garden of the Finzi-Continis.” It’s 100,000-lire bank notes for cocktail napkins, wastebaskets from Prada, paramedics darting in and out at all hours. It’s the Upper East Side Manhattan flat that’s home away from home to all the world’s jet-setters, those empty-headed irrepressibles, ever on the go, who define the very term “unearned income.” How can the societally superfluous of five continents all cram into one unprepossessing apartment, sans German appliances and Italian furniture and, most of the time, running water; and why?

Wait, there’s Hidalgo! There’s Solenge! There’s Graf Sturm und Drang von Praxis! (Wally, for short.) Here’s everybody!

But, to continue, isn’t it all a mite too . . . close? “You seem to forget,” yells model/novelist Nikki, cell-phoning novelist/model Jac, across the room, “that there’s a balcony, too.” Just joshing? Hard to know, just as it’s hard to hear oneself think amid the disco beat here in this seething epicenter of the overbred underemployed.

“Oh, but the true jet-setter thrives on claustrophobia,” keens actress/decorator Kiki. “Private jets, clubs, Ferraris, cocktail parties--when you think, ours is a physically cloistered life. In fact there’s just barely room in our world for us! But, of course, we don’t need space. We need incessant, hysterical, brainless activity! Oh, and clothes.”

So that’s why the apartment’s kitchen is a shoe closet? “That, and the fact that a jet-setter almost never actually eats,” bawls film producer/skateboarding champ Lance, a Cohiba in one hand and a Marlboro in the other, teeth clenching the rim of his martini glass. “Our hands are way too busy!” But jet-setters are never too busy to party. “That’s another reason why we can all live here,” shrieks fashionista/documentary filmmaker Mercedes. “We’re never home! And even when we are, we’re too totally and thoroughly wrecked after the nightly rounds to know--or care--where we are!”

And just as well, as in place of decor (“so hopelessly early-’90s decor!” screams screenwriter/real-estate agent Mikki) is the rakish chaos that so complements the gilded-human-flotsam lifestyle. Lost earrings, fabric swatches, Barney’s shopping bags and pizza boxes (from everybody’s favorite takeout place in Milan) vie with sundry Milanese, Muncheners and the nephew of the pretender to the throne of Montenegro for precious resting space on the floor.

Is that the young racing driver/baccarat champion, the earl of Limbo, in the bathtub? What’s Rikki, the painter/poet/caterer, doing in the closet, when he so recently came out of it?

“Lucky you can see him at all,” bellows film animator/ski instructor Wikki. “For instance, we never have found Lupo. Papa over in Rome is just furious. Lupo breezed in here a few months ago to pick up a package from Colombia, and in all the usual hubbub, well, it does happen. Lost in a crowd. His Porsche down on the street must have a thousand parking tickets by now. Of course, he could just be stuck in the elevator.”

“I suppose now that the secret of our whereabouts is out, the paparazzi will be infesting the lobby and the cops will start ticketing all the triple-parked limos,” sighs rock promoter/handbag collector Gigi. “Speaking of which, there’s supposed to be a limo waiting downstairs right now to drive us out to the Hamptons. Do you think we can all fit in?”