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Let us sing now of Cindy, 90 years young today, the Big Apple’s sustaining heartbeat and life force whom we have never needed more. She has been The New York Post’s reigning celebrity columnist for 40 years. She does it all by herself. No “leg man,” no “additional reporting by.” And she’s the best ever to mount her smiling likeness atop a half page of glamour, scandal and laughter.
From her very first scoop — her 1980 interview with the deathbed-bound Shah of Iran — Cindy Adams personifies and celebrates all that’s special about our beloved, beleaguered hometown.
Hotelier and Studio 54 co-founder Ian Schrager calls Cindy “the lighthouse of New York. I can’t think of the city without her. She’s up there with the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building.”
She’s the original Queen of All Media — a popular TV and radio personality and biographer of Actors Studio founder Lee Strasberg and Indonesian strongman Sukarno long before she first brightened The Post’s pages.
She’s our inspirational tour guide through all of the city’s roller-coaster peaks and valleys — happy and prosperous times, but also 9/11, the Wall Street crash, Hurricane Sandy and now the worst catastrophe of them all.
Cindy is unshakably loyal to those she cares about — but be lousy to her and she’ll get you, as she likes to say, “in this life or the next one.” Above all, she is loyal to New York City. Although a confidante of presidents, moguls, artists and dictators, Madam Adams’ first love is the Big Apple.
Hundreds of her front-page scoops (some presented here) festoon the walls and ceiling of her office at her Park Avenue penthouse, encrusted with art she and her late husband, Joey, collected from every remote corner of Asia. The headlines include such gems as “Gimme the Plaza,” when first wife Ivana Trump tried to wrest the hotel from The Donald in their divorce case, to “Secret Hotel Romps of Donald and Marla,” to her interviews with deposed dictator Manuel Noriega (whose pineapple-like face “wasn’t pretty,” she said).
And who can forget “Hunk finally does it” when JFK Jr. passed the bar exam on his third try?
Her column was born over tea at the Mayfair Regent soon after her Shah interview. What should she write about? Broadway, Hollywood, Studio 54, Liza Minnelli and Joan Rivers, sure. But I reminded her that she’d seen more of the world than anyone alive. She was on a first-name basis with, as Joey said, “presidents, kings, emperors.” She leaped at the idea to weave them in with Rockettes and starlets and late-night comedians. And the rest was history.
Cindy’s supernaturally alert eyes and ears miss nothing. She scooped all the sports writers when the Yankees obtained pitcher Randy Johnson in 2004. It wasn’t Woodward-and-Bernstein sleuthing: she eavesdropped on a team executive at Peter Luger steakhouse hours before she broke the news.
Young journalists glued to smartphones can learn from her low-tech technique. I saw her at Elaine’s one night when she was near-voiceless from a sore throat, little notebook and pen in hand, leaning over the bar and furiously scribbling notes like a cub reporter hungry for her first byline.
Nobody can make me laugh harder than Cindy can — sometimes without saying a word. I’ll take to my grave her bemused expression when a clueless Plaza Palm Court waiter greeted her as “Mrs. Zimmerman.” And the time she saved me from Paul Newman’s ire in a restaurant after The Post had run an unflattering story on him by introducing me, sans affiliation, as “Mr. Queasy.”
Like the boldfaces she’s glorified — Trump, George Steinbrenner, Leona Helmsley, Barbara Walters, her best friend, Judge Judy, and her beloved pups Jazzy and Juicy — Cindy’s been called “larger than life” and a “metaphor” of the city. Both true, but she’s better than that. She’s a 100 percent, funny and flirty New York real girl under a Dennis Basso fur coat and St. John red sequined dress. Cindy is unafraid to get her hands dirty — sometimes literally. Draped in a Nicole Miller-designed New York Post blouse and jacket, she cheerfully washed dishes with the rest of us at a house party to celebrate the newspaper’s rescue from near-collapse in 1993.
That rescue was in large part due to Cindy’s tireless effort to find a backer when our then-owner went bankrupt. She perched atop a delivery truck in the freezing cold, ancient cellphone in hand, at a “Save The Post” rally. But her contribution went beyond inspirational leadership. She connected financier Steven Hoffenberg with the governor and the paper’s banks just in time to stave off a shutdown.
Chutzpah? She wore a fur hat to an ASPCA meeting. She committed the mortal no-no of talking business with Hillary Clinton at the University Club, causing a “potted plant” — i.e., a stiff employee — to kick them both out.
And can she write! Although she once claimed, “I don’t judge, I just report,” nobody else can compress such hair-bristling emotion into a few column inches.
We planned to celebrate Cindy’s birthday with her at a wild-and-crazy, only-in-New York party today. History intervened. But until the nightmare passes, as it inevitably will, consider what she told the editor of this newspaper a few weeks ago when he asked if the pandemic, which locked down her celeb subjects like the rest of us, might deter her from filing her column.
“Fear not, sire. I can continue,” she replied.
We will carry on, too. Thank you, Cindy, for leading us back into the light.
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