Cindy Adams, New York's Queen of Gossip, Keeps Everyone's Secrets
Cindy Adams, the New York Post gossip columnist and “reigning queen of gossip,” is the subject of a new Showtime series, Gossip Starring Cindy Adams. In honor of the new show, we’re republishing our profile on how Adams became one of New York City’s most legendary confidants.
“You’ll have to excuse me, I’m wearing a $10 hairpiece,” says Cindy Adams. The 89-year-old grande dame—who is almost as well known for her love of animals as her 40-year-old gossip column—has recently lost a beloved Yorkshire Terrier, Juicy. “I haven’t been to the hairdresser; I haven’t been anywhere this week. It’s awful.”
Despite her obvious distress, Adams, whom one journalist recently termed “the last newspaper gossip columnist of the old school in New York,” looks smart: dressed in a boucle jacket and sporting a pendant cast by the actor Anthony Quinn (a friend), with her towering chestnut coiffure and perfect makeup, she is regal in bearing. Her plush, nine-room penthouse—a real-estate agent tells me it’s “one of the few true must-see Manhattan apartments”—is equally impressive.
She bought the Park Avenue pad in 1997, when her husband, the comedian Joey Adams, was gravely ill. “I had to decorate it, organize it, buy it with my own money,” she says. The former home of Doris Duke, it retains many of decorator Tony Duquette’s characteristically slick, 1960s touches, plus plenty of Cindy Adams flair; the boudoir is now papered, floor-to-ceiling, with all her New York Post covers.
In person, Adams is very much like the column she still pens four times a week for the Post: wise-cracking, pithy, opinionated, as tough on herself as anyone else, and as redolent of the Borscht Belt as the Plaza. Her subjects are wide-ranging, encompassing Broadway theatre, society scandal, real estate, clothes, restaurant openings, rivalries, Hollywood, Russia, hot dogs, dog-dogs—whatever or whoever interests (or irritates) her on a given day.
Her vast circle of acquaintances is well-represented, as are reminiscences, and as such the column functions as a sort of unsentimental peek into an old New York, in which nothing of interest exists below 14th street, the front banquette at La Cote Basque spells social victory, people adore animals but wear heaps of fur, the Internet barely exists (Adams doesn’t even use a tape recorder), and gossip columnists hold staggering sway.
But it would be wrong to read her merely for nostalgia; she’s a much more complicated and interesting voice than that. In fact, just last week it was announced that a documentary series on Adams is in the works for Showtime and set to air in 2021.
Adams writes in a sort of brusque, Runyonesque shorthand; every sentence has the air of an urgent and dismissive telegram. And each one ends with her catchphrase—“Only in New York, kids, only in New York”—printed in bold. Adams says: “The Post has tried to trademark it, but they can’t, because you cannot trademark the name New York. And everybody’s ripped me off. They use ‘only in New York,’ but they don’t say ‘kids.’ It’s only-in-New-York-comma-kids.”
Either despite or because of its longevity, her column is still what one Manhattan publicist terms “coveted space,” and Adams herself commands the respect of a royal—out of affection, tradition, or fear. “Cindy could have had you killed,” says a former New York tabloid gossip columnist. “She had influence with the mayor, with the governor, with the Today show. I don't know if it was only because of the column or a combination of that and her powerful friends, but she had a lot of sway.” Adds another, “You have to pay your respects. It’s not optional.”
I have been reading Cindy Adams all my life. And while I’ve certainly gleaned a lot of nuggets about disgraced socialites’ divorces and district attorneys’ vacation homes over the years, another pleasure is in her consistency: in an ever-changing city and world, Cindy Adams is one of our few immutables. Irascible and flamboyant, yes—I still don’t understand why she wasn’t an eminence at the most recent Met Gala—but also reassuringly civil (without ever really being “nice”), Adams is of the lost world where cross-aisle friendships proliferated, and ideological differences could be left at the coat-check.
“I know you. I trust you,” Marisa Tomei told Adams at a recent Broadway opening, “so it’s all OK. Just write whatever works for you.” Says a fellow gossipeuse, “During awards season I remember A-list stars making a beeline for her on the red carpet. I didn’t quite understand why—I had a much larger platform—but celebs breezed right by me to talk to her.”
One publicist puts it this way: “In a certain sense, she’s not impressed by anyone, which can be reassuring.”
Lately, her column has attracted readers eager for another kind of intel, although it’s not news to her longtime fans. Adams has been friends with Donald Trump since the pair was introduced by Roy Cohn in the early 1980s—“some kid he was piloting around whom I'd never seen,” she says—and has been chronicling his boldface vicissitudes ever since. “Donald did the security when I bought the apartment,” she says. “He’s done a lot for me.”
Whether or not it’s true that Trump regularly sends her flowers, she’s certainly done her time at Mar-a-Lago. Trump told the New York Times, “Cindy has always had the beat of New York and its people. She’s understood the inner workings of the city better and longer than anybody.”
Adams sticks unapologetically with her friends, whether that means Cohn, Trump, Leona Helmsley, or Imelda Marcos. (“If you’re indicted, you’re invited,” Joey Adams famously quipped of his felon-studded 80th.) In 2016, she was torn—Hillary Clinton is also a friend, and she says both of that year’s presidential candidates were very supportive after her husband’s death—but the longevity of the bond with Trump took priority.
Her relationships with what became his inner circle (Rudy Guiliani, Anthony Scaramucci, and Kimberly Gilfoyle are also pals) have led to a recent flurry of interest from the press, who don’t know whether to credit her with Cassandra-like prescience. In fact, her defining quality is something even more intriguing: loyalty.
This magnanimity makes for some strange bedfellows and legendarily eclectic gatherings. “They’re like party scenes out of Auntie Mame, a kind of revelry that doesn’t exist anymore,” says Adams’s longtime friend, the Broadway publicist Rick Miramontez.
“She mixes people in the most extraordinary way. I remember being at one party, for her friend Cardinal Dolan. To my left was Mikhail Baryshnikov. To my right, Bill O’Reilly. I can’t think of another event where you’d find that mix of people.”
It can seem like everyone in New York has a favorite Cindy Adams story, an outrageous insult, the clock in her purse, a feud with a client, the time she hid behind a door with Imelda Marcos while Doris Duke came over with $5 million in cash. She’s stayed with the Shah and at the White House. She’s had lunch with Radovan Karadzic.
She’s created a Janovic paint shade and a perfume called “Gossip.” She’s appeared on TV and on film. She’s entertained both the mayor and his nemesis, the governor; she’s even agnostic when it comes to sports. Although she’ll sit in the owners’ skybox at that night’s Yankees playoff game, she also counts the Mets owners as personal friends. “Judy Wilpon,” she says, “is a huge dog-lover.”
A lifelong New Yorker, Adams was raised by her adored mother, Jessie, who encouraged young Cindy not merely to work hard, but to perfect her posture and elocution, and get her nose fixed. “New Yorkers are strong,’ Adam says. “Tough makes it sound like we’re not approachable and we’re rotten people, but we’re strong. And my mother was strong.”
A former beauty queen, Cindy met Joey Adams while still a teenager and working as a photographer’s model, and they married in 1952. Adams has always been vocal in crediting her husband for much of her success.
“Joey was not number one, as a comedian,” she says. “He was not a Seinfeld or a Bob Hope. He was number two, but he was number one in his lifestyle, which nobody really knows. They thought he was just a sort of comedian.” Joey Adams, a prolific joke-writer and Friar’s Club toastmaster, who, according to the eulogy Rudy Giuliani gave at his funeral, “spent his life making people laugh,” was a macher. “He was the adopted son of Fiorella La Guardia,” says Cindy. “Which means, when I got married, I got to know the best judges money can buy. Joey was also then president of the American Guild of Variety Artists.
“So he had every single celebrity’s dossier—phone number, address, everything. So that’s how I knew Reagan. Third of all, he was brother-in-law of Walter Winchell; Joey’s first wife and Winchell’s wife were sisters. So he started out at the age of 18 sitting in the Stork Club, meeting all the top people of the world. Also, he was sent out by President Kennedy to head up the first Cultural Exchange unit in southeast Asia. I inherited all of this, by osmosis.”
Of her own career, Adams says, “At the beginning, I didn’t know what I enjoyed, I was very young. But I fell into it, and those of us who are not stupid, we learn, and I learned that my friends, who I was going to dinner with, were the Frank Sinatras of the world. And then, in came an Australian who nobody ever heard of—who has the name Rupert?—and he knew that New York, a smartass city, needed humor.”
Murdoch, whose picture is one of many in Adams’s foyer, alongside two 1960s-era “Cindy Dolls”—bought Joey Adams’s syndicated jokes column for the New York Post. “And in the early days, we were having dinner together, with all the editors. And they had all the smarts, but they didn’t have the Rolodex. So we helped them. And little by little, I got pushed into doing the column. I’ve enjoyed a lot of it, but it wasn’t my idea. I was going to write the great, brilliant novel, which I still haven’t written, and can’t. I can’t write except how I write. But the way I write? Nobody writes like I do, for the stuff that I do.”
Murdoch tells T&C, “Cindy is a great friend. More importantly, a great journalist! Never a week without breaking lots of news.”
Adams receives her tips from a range of sources. “You can get it through going out a couple of nights a week, through email, under the transom, through PR people. Here’s the thing: A lot of people know things, and they want to tell it. A lot of people will think there’s no point in knowing something secret, if nobody knows they know it. So, it might come in—don’t tell, or don’t put my name on it—but they all want to tell you something.”
Of course, Adams has had plenty of friction over the years: in her own words, “I have never lost an enemy.” Sparring partners have included not just the cities of Boston and Nashville (like many true New Yorkers, she is proudly provincial), but celebrities, press agents, and anyone whom she regards as bad on animals. “She probably likes animals better than she likes most people,” her friend Judith Sheindlin (AKA Judge Judy) tells me. “I'm lucky to be counted among the people that she likes!
Adams is not a lifelong pet-owner. “When I was a very little child in Long Island, I had a dog, Rufus, a black Scottie. But he got run over, and it took me years to get over that. And then, Joey, my husband, had been bitten by a dog when he was a child, so he did not want a dog, he was scared. But seven days after Joey died, I had Jazzy.”
Jazzy—and his successors, Jazzy Junior and Juicy—became well-known figures in New York City, sporting varied wardrobes and dining with Adams at Le Cirque. After Jazzy died of e coli poisoning while in a kennel, Adams worked to help establish New York’s Boarding Kennel and Regulation Act, sometimes called "Jazzy's Law."
The annual Blessing of the Animals—a benediction for four-legged New Yorkers from police dogs to pet iguanas—over which Adams presides will be held this year on December 8th at Christ Church on Park Avenue. Adams is passionate about the event, in support of which she once donned a full Grizabella the Glamour Cat costume at a performance of Cats.
“Animals are New Yorkers, also,” she says. “They should be blessed, just like everybody else.” Although a one time Miss Bagel, she approached the Methodist church down the block about starting the service back in 2008, and the rest is history. “Now it’s so jam-packed crowded that I’m not sure how we can still do it there!”
Last year, the 750-capacity Christ Church was standing room only. “So first we have a procession of police dogs, with their handlers. After that, it’s the farm animals—llama, goats, pigs, chickens, I think we had a camel one year—then the rescue dogs from the Humane Society come down the aisle. They go outside and bless the police horses. Then, everybody lines up: 750 people with their cats, dogs, some idiot brought fish in a bowl, turtles. We’ve had an iguana, we’ve had mice, we’ve had parrots.”
One year, radio personality and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa was spotted with three kittens in his Guardian Angels jacket. “There’s ministers, there’s rabbis, we’ve had the Cardinal, for the Catholic animals.” The event is also notably free of rancor, a New York rarity. “It’s odd, very odd. For whatever reason, people are very happy and excited to be there.” It is, Adams points out, good exposure for the rescue pets up for adoption.
On the day of our interview, Adams has just received Juicy’s ashes, which will live with her predecessors’ in a 17th century Japanese Satsuma urn. “I wrote an obit about Juicy,” she says. “In 39 years, I’ve written an incredible amount of stuff. All kinds of stories, tough stories. Obits of people. I have never received the amount of outpouring that I did from this obit. The Cardinal called; the Governor called. I had 50, 60 letters from people trying to understand the pain of losing a dog.”
In time, she says, she will adopt another. “It’s very painful, but I can’t live without a dog, I just cannot.” As for its name, “It has to be a J, because I’ve had two people in my life, and only two. I have no children, no brothers and sisters. So, my mother was named Jessie, my husband was named Joey—it would be a J.”
Even her catch-phrase has a dog connection. “It happened by sheer, stupid happenstance. I’m walking down the street one day, and a big, fat society-type lady is walking a dachshund. And obviously the dachshund was not doing what he should be doing, and she bent all the way down and she says, “I told you not to do that! Don’t you understand English?!” to the German dog. And I thought, only in New York. Only in New York would some high-class lady be bending down, talking to her dog like that. And I wrote down, only could this happen in New York, kids. And that’s, like, 500 years ago.”
Still, despite the ways in which the city and the industry Adams made her name in here have changed, she doesn’t imagine changing the dateline of her column any time soon.
“There are so many funny things that people say in New York,” she muses. “I mean, where else could anybody live? Sure, there are hassles. But that’s what it is, it’s New York. Where you wanna live—Arizona? Arkansas? I would kill myself."
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