Prue Bury and the O’Neal’s

Prue Bury and I met in person Monday evening, at the Apthorp Building apartment of Michael and Christine O’Neal. The post before this one has a link to a New York Times article about the O’Neal’s and the Apthorp that includes an audio slide show with Christine, who is a delightful lady, and whose company I enjoyed very, very much.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/03/05/garden/apthorp-interactive/index.html

Prue and the O’Neal’s go back 45 years, to her arrival from London in New York, where Prue lived for five years with her first husband. The friendship with the O’Neal’s stuck, as most friendships seem to do with Michael and Christine. I had a great time listening to Mike, who has many great stories and knows how to tell them.

Mike’s brother was the late actor Patrick O’Neal, who I remember very well from many TV shows in the 60’s and 70’s. O’Neal died in 1994, and it was not an easy death, as his wife Cynthia recounts in painful detail in her heartfelt memoir, Talk Softly.

As I told Prue, Cynthia’s book left a deep and lasting impression on me. Extremely honest in her portrayal of her family and the struggles of offering support services for terminally ill AIDS and cancer patients, Cynthia presents just enough glamour and show biz glitz to provide contrast to the realities of life and death. Talk Softly is touching and filled with sorrow, yet it is not a sad book, and I recommend it highly. (Yes, Prue and I have discussed the possibility of writing her own memoir, and I offered to stop the blog to concentrate on helping her, but for now this is just lunch chat.)

Patrick O’Neal’s credits included Night of the Iguana on stage, and The Way We Were on film. But being a sci-fi fan, what I remember him for is The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, and The Night Gallery.

In 1963, Patrick and Mike opened a restaurant that became a New York landmark, called The Ginger Man, named after a play that Patrick was in that had the misfortune of opening when JFK was assassinated. Later, after renovations, Mike renamed it O’Neals’. Unfortunately, after 46 years, the restaurant closed this past June.

Michael O’Neal owns another restaurant, just down the hill from the Apthorp. It’s a three-season, open-air operation called the Boat Basin Cafe, and that was where Prue and I had lunch on Tuesday, compliments of Mike, before we set off in search of headphones, of all things, as told in the next post.