New York Diary

Leonard's stern with barbers; Jay's flying Rolex; why are Claiborne's stairs airborne?

Vanities

Would you take a razor to your head just to shave a few bucks off your monthly budget? Leonard Stern does. He started cutting his own hair with a razor 20 years ago, long before the Clintons turned salon appointments into news. But economy isn't his only motivation. "Every barber I ever went to started to ask me for business advice and wouldn't stop talking. I decided the price for peace and quiet was to learn the art of barbering," Stem says. "The last paid haircut I got was the day before I married Allison.'' The marriage worked; the haircut didn't.

POOL PARTY

While their divorce is pending, Paul and Mai Hallingby are under court order to share their Southampton home. Mai and her children sat around the pool this summer, across from Paul and his new friend, Jo Davis, an attorney with Kaye, Scholer. One afternoon, both had invited friends over for lunch at the same time, creating a party gridlock that made guests uncomfortable. "When he realized that she had invited friends over that day, he and his friends got up and left," says his attorney, Joel Sankel. "It was certainly shocking to me that he would bring his girlfriend into the house," says her attorney, Robert Stephan Cohen.

TO THE MANOR CLAIBORNE

After last winter's storms, Liz Claiborne was left with a staircase to heaven. The dunes in front of her Fire Island home washed away, leaving a sizable gap between her house and her private steps to the beach. The village of Saltaire trucked in more sand, an effort Claiborne and her husband, Art Ortenberg, augmented, going as far as removing the steps to facilitate the sand influx. But when they began to rebuild the path this summer, the village ordered them to stop work because their contractor had skimmed off about three feet of the new sand. "We are very conscious of sand in Saltaire,'' explains Martin Berger, a village trustee. ' 'We are perfectly willing to build over the dune so the alleged dune—call it an alleged dune—is not in any manner, way, or shape violated,'' counters the Ortenbergs' attorney, J. Stewart McLaughlin.

AND...

.. .Jay Mclnerney isn't upset about breaking his Rolex. The watch went flying while Mclnerney was playing in East Hampton's annual Artists and Writers softball game. Howard Stringer, who was doing the play-by-play, announced that the timepiece was missing. Soon after, it was discovered in the field and returned to Mclnerney, who handed it to his wife, Helen Bransford, for safekeeping. After the game, Mclnerney realized that the temporary loss was lucky: "The watch would undoubtedly have been destroyed when Alec Baldwin 'Pete Rosed' me'' at home plate.

.. .Anne Bass spent her summer vacation in school. She rented a villa in Cap Ferrat and studied intensive French, even passing up the Paris couture shows so she wouldn't miss class. Also in the neighborhood was Bass's boyfriend, playboy polo player Robert de Balkany, who is, bien sur, already fluent in the language.

.. .Tenth Street Lounge owner Rita Norona invited friends to dinner at Da Silvano for her boyfriend Ian Schrager's 47th birthday. Calvin and Kelly Klein showed up, followed shortly by a singing gorilla. Then came a cop, who walked up to Schrager menacingly before breaking into "Happy Birthday." "This was payback time," explains Schrager, who sent a few singing telegrams that embarrassed his brother in Miami.

..."It came to me in the shower," remembers Tom Guinzburg. "Most good ideas do." His idea is adding some fun to the Sloan-Kettering benefit on October 14: a treasure hunt through the International Antique Dealers show. Committee members Mark Hampton, Edward Lee Cave, and Guinzburg are devising the clues, and the winner gets a dinner for 24 at La Grenouille.

DEBORAH MITCHELL