EGN NEWS DESK
Bruce Newman, a New York antiques seller as soon as often called the Cecil B. DeMille of his occupation for his outsized persona and lavish wares, died on Feb. 9 at his house in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 94.
The trigger was congestive coronary heart failure, in line with his daughter, Emily Greenspan.
Mr. Newman, a dashing determine in impeccably tailor-made black fits and scarlet pocket squares, was the proprietor of his household’s enterprise, Newel Galleries, which was based through the Thirties as a prop home for theater and movie productions and ran for a trip of a small store underneath the Second Avenue El in Manhattan.
During his reign, Newel was in full, overwhelming flower by the Eighties, housed in a five-story constructing on East 53rd Street, close to the East River, every ground teeming with two centuries’ price of treasures, most costing upward of 5 figures. The enterprise was a glittering antiques mall for set designers, party planners, decorators, society lions and Hollywood royalty.
Vintage carousel horses? Check. Ruhlmann desks? Yes! Benches from the Paris Metro? Of course. French Victorian eating chairs swirled in bronze trim? No must ask. Mr. Newman carried all of it and in staggering quantities: Victorian wicker. French salon furnishings. Art Deco. Art Nouveau. Gothic revival. Biedermeier. Directoire. English Arts & Crafts. Renaissance and Medieval items, and the “high quality camp” or “fantasy furnishings” he favored — bizarre and kooky items embellished with legendary creatures; chairs sprouting antlers, torcheres bedecked with gargoyles, commodes atop griffin toes.
Paul Rudnick, the playwright, screenwriter and writer, referred to as the store “a beautiful cross between Hogwarts and the warehouse on the finish of Citizen Kane.”
Mr. Newman was like a Hollywood agent, Stephen Drucker, the design editor, stated.
“He was all the time promoting, all the time exaggerating just a bit — which you each knew,” he added. “He really liked the hunt and the scheming required to get stuff.” (It was Mr. Drucker who, in a House & Garden article, described Mr. Newman because the DeMille of his commerce, a moniker Mr. Newman liked, and so it caught.)
When Queen Elizabeth II visited Manhattan within the mid-Nineteen Seventies, the royal advance phoned Mr. Newman requesting a throne for her to sit down upon earlier than a dinner in her honor on the Waldorf Astoria resort. Mr. Newman had simply the factor: a Louis XV throne, which he reupholstered with blue silk, including a bolster so she’d be extra comfy.
The royal anecdote is one among many from Mr. Newman’s 2006 memoir, “Don’t Come Back Until You Find It: Tales from an Antiques Dealer,” a wealthy superstar dish.
Jackie Kennedy was a well mannered and thorough shopper; a 12 months into her husband’s presidency, she toured Newel to fill their weekend home in Virginia. Michael Eisner appreciated Black Forest furnishings and requested for a reduction — Mr. Newman by no means gave reductions. Michael J. Fox, he stated, was speedy and decisive. When Mr. Fox as soon as selected a dented silver candlestick, Mr. Newman identified the imperfection. “Yeah,” the actor replied. “That’s why it’s lovely.”
In the early Eighties, when Claus Von Bulow was between trials for the tried homicide of his spouse, Sunny Von Bulow, he bought Mr. Newman two 18th-century Venetian lacquered commodes, which, Mr. Newman wrote, got here from the couple’s Newport, R.I., property. He assumed that the sale was to boost money for Mr. Von Bulow’s authorized payments. Years later, when Mel Bourne, the manufacturing designer for “Reversal of Fortune,” the 1990 film concerning the trials, was procuring at Newel for props, he snapped them up.
On Barbra Streisand’s first go to to Newel, Mr. Newman fed her a rooster sandwich. “Nice place you bought right here, Bruce,” she informed him. “I prefer it.”
She knew her stuff, Mr. Newman wrote: the distinction between Art Deco and French 40s in addition to the names of the nice furnishings designers of the ’30s and ’40s: Jean-Michel Frank, Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann and Jules Leleu. Yet later, on a go to to her Central Park West house, Ms. Streisand proudly confirmed him a kitschy pink and blue porcelain mirror, its body coated with cupids, flowers and ribbons.
What did he assume? Mr. Newman recalled her asking. He famous delicately that it was not probably the most lovely object.
“I do know,” she informed him. “I purchased this mirror with the primary buck I ever earned singing. I maintain it right here to remind myself of the time once I didn’t have any cash.”
Bruce Murray Newman was born on Jan. 27, 1930, in Brooklyn. His father, Meyer Newman, had a enterprise delivering props and furnishings to theatrical corporations that had been renting to the silent movie business, which had manufacturing services in Queens and the Bronx. His mom, Evelyn (Kantor) Newman, was her husband’s bookkeeper.
Meyer Newman went bankrupt within the years after the 1929 inventory market crash and later began his personal theatrical rental firm, at first by promoting the household’s personal furnishings and different furnishings from a Second Avenue storefront and delivering them from his Nash rumble seat coupe. Bruce recalled being traumatized because the household home emptied out.
To construct up his stock, Meyer Newman despatched an worker, Sam Goldberg, to trawl Park and Fifth Avenues in a horse-drawn wagon. When tenants on the wonderful house homes redecorated within the early Forties, they sometimes didn’t name public sale homes to haul away their previous stuff and promote it — they simply threw it out. Thus, constructing supers had to determine a approach to eliminate the “rubbish.” Enter Mr. Goldberg, to whom they paid a couple of dollars to cart all of it away.
Meyer referred to as his new enterprise Newel Galleries, and Bruce joined it when he was 15. He studied inside design at Pratt, graduating in 1953, then went to work for his father full-time.
In 1965, he married Judith Brandus, on the time an assistant personnel director on the Hertz Corporation. She later wrote the copy for Newel’s distinctive adverts, which had been designed like superstar portraits: An Art Nouveau armchair, for instance, appeared underneath the headline “For the Price of a Small House, You Can Own This Extraordinary Chair.” (Mr. Newman was happy with his extravagant costs.)
Meyer Newman died in 1972, and Bruce took over the enterprise three years later.
He moved to California in 2016. In addition to his daughter, he’s survived by two grandchildren and a sister, Marilyn Laundau. Judith Newman died in 2023.
In 2001, Mr. Newman bought Newel to a nephew, Lewis Baer, whose son Jake Baer is now the corporate’s chief govt. Thanks to the variety of productions now filming in New York City, a lot of the enterprise is as soon as once more leases — profitable, to make certain, however the purchasers are maybe not as thrilling because the characters Newel as soon as served.
In Mr. Newman’s day, even leases might trigger a stir in Manhattan’s social circles. In 1988, Newel equipped the gilded palm bushes that fashioned the chuppa at Laura Steinberg and Jonathan Tisch’s marriage ceremony, in addition to $250,000 price of Louis XV bronze centerpieces and candelabra to decorate the reception on the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
All of the treasures had been rented from Newel — and returned. But in The New York Times protection of the occasion (underneath the headline “Candlelight Wedding Joins 2 Billionaire Families”), the reporter Georgia Dullea famous that the antiques had been from the Steinbergs’ personal assortment.
Mr. Newman was incensed by that assertion and demanded a correction, because the journal Manhattan Inc. later reported. Ms. Dullea declined as a result of Gayfryd Steinberg, the bride’s stepmother, had declared that the antiques had been her personal. But when The Times reached out once more, to do a follow-up article on how Ms. Steinberg was pretending to personal issues that didn’t belong to her, Mr. Newman refused to take part and dropped his request for a correction.
His delight had been stung, however not sufficient to malign buyer.
