Stephen Greco's Blog: Over a Cocktail or Two

A Higher Orbital

Back in 2014, when people read this passage about my character Peter, a gay advertising executive, opinion was divided: some thought Peter was cool to be involved in such work, while some thought he had drunk the Kool-Aid and sold his soul. I’d be curious for any opinions now…

Excerpt from Now and Yesterday(Kensington, 2014), by Stephen Greco:

The voltage of advertising hit him right in the face that day, as he stepped off the elevator and into the atrium. The girls at the reception desk were smiling a little more magnetically than usual, their voices galvanized as they spoke into headsets, directing calls, while in back of them, on a thirty-foot expanse of video wall, large-scale animations representing the company’s biggest clients fluxed with provocative flash. The kids tripping up and down the atrium’s jungle-gym stairway and across the main floor seemed a little sparkier than usual. And outside the Gymnasium, a large meeting room off the main reception area, a young woman in dark leggings and a cropped jacket, clearly a member of the client team inside, was standing next to a refreshment table, emitting signals that were apparently terribly important into her cell phone.

It was a big day at the office: important clients were everywhere. Peter nodded to a colleague, a creative director, who rushed past him with a delegation to greet an A-list television star waiting in the reception area with an entourage. A new series, Peter thought, or a voice-over for some high-profile campaign. Upstairs, in his own private warren of offices, where Peter was headed, key members of McCaw’s communications team were spending the day with Peter’s top people, led by Tyler, going through an inaugural series of conceptual explorations.

The great work begins.

Peter loved it when the office felt this electric. The sheer energy of being inside a major ad agency at the dawn of the Age of Truly Global Mass Culture was like a drug. Madison Avenue was now the undisputed control room of civilization, whereas Washington and Hollywood were only its rec rooms. Actions like voting and going to the movies seemed quaint, now that the purchase and consumption of the right soft drink or the right body wash promised to put the experience of Life Right Now into focus. More than in politics and entertainment, the higher processes fibrillating the top levels of advertising were charged with the full juice of vast national and global conversations, of the collective unconscious itself; and the people involved in these processes, even when not actually working, existed in a higher orbital, spiritually, than everyone else; they inhabited a better place than Earth, a possible planet where the abundance of everything good was a given. For not only were these young ad execs among the best and the brightest, the most creative, self-actualized, and best-paid individuals of their generation, they could depend on the daily exhilaration of work and play at the font of contemporary civilization, the source of ideas that functioned for consumers like answered prayers.

Being in this line of work, wielding its lightning, was an ultimate privilege, Peter often mused—ten times better than riding to a party in a limo with Nick’s one-time friend Madonna and her crew. At the agency, Peter got to create campaigns—movements!—that would sweep whole continents with messages about products and services so beneficial that people would spend trillions of dollars on them; and along for the ride, in that traffic of wants and needs, aspirations and means, came fresh ideas about self and family and nation and world, which brought life on Earth forward, upward. Talk about illuminati! Here was the true elite. Tyler and the rest weren’t hoo-dooing around with naïve, medieval travesties of so-called secret, ancient wisdom. They were serving humanity by generating enlightenment from moment to moment, conjuring new values and powers and orders and blessings—which was the chief thing, Peter felt, that separated him from Jonathan and the other gentlemen of their generation, who had devoted themselves to older values and powers and orders and blessings. Those guys were a little less aglow…

Two Shelfmates and a Quiet Thrill

One of the quiet thrills of being an author isn’t necessarily seeing your latest book in a store—although of course, that never gets old. It’s seeing your last book—or the one before that—still holding its own, maybe even sitting beside the newer one.

I had that experience recently at a few Barnes & Noble stores, where Such Good Friends: A Novel of Truman Capote & Lee Radziwill and The Last American Heiresses were side by side, each with a few copies on display.

Now, publishers don’t share sales figures with authors, so I don’t always know how things are going numerically. But a physical shelf presence—especially for a book that’s been out a while—usually means reorders have happened, and readers are still finding their way in. That matters to me.

If you’ve picked up either book—or passed one along to a friend—thank you. If you happen to spot them in your own bookstore travels, I’d love to know. And if you’re just discovering these stories now: welcome. I hope they take you somewhere rich and unexpected.

Brought to You by No One Who Cares

May I veer from books for a moment?

I was born in 1950 and grew up watching TV. For decades we accepted the intrusion of commercials into programming, and sometimes even welcome them when they were particularly clever. And the ratio of commercials to programming stayed relatively stable for a long time. Then media business models and consumer behavior started changing radically—we can go into specifics of all at that another time—and today, in 2025, all but expensive, so-called “premium” TV has made itself unwatchable. Commercials are too intrusive.

When you look into the television channels with the highest ad loads, here is what you learn. Channels with the highest ad loads per hour are:

1. A&E Group: 17 minutes and 49 seconds.
2. ABC: 17 minutes and 36 seconds.
3. Viacom (Spike, MTV, BET, Comedy Central): 17 minutes and 26 seconds.
4. Discovery Communications: 17 minutes and 14 seconds.
5. Fox Television Network: Approximately 15 minutes in 2015.
6. TBS: 15 minutes and 31 seconds in 2015.
7. TruTV: 15 minutes and 17 seconds in 2015.
8. NBC Universal: 14 minutes and 41 seconds.
9. Warner Media: 14 minutes and 32 seconds.
10. CBS: 14 minutes and 11 seconds.

See? A quarter to a third of every TV hour is now consumed by commercials (as opposed to 6 to 9 minutes per hour, pre-1960). Viewers find this intolerable, and even media executives—unable to invent anything beyond the “pay more” model—must find it quietly humiliating. To make matters worse, the figures above—the most recent that are publicly available— come from uneven reporting periods, some as recent as 2019, others from as far back as 2015. The trend, however, is clear: as ad loads have ballooned to unbearable levels, television has betrayed not only its audience, but also the actors, writers, directors, and producers whose work is chopped up and buried beneath an avalanche of commercial interruption. And even when audiences remain tuned in, they’ve learned to tune out—mentally armoring themselves against the nonstop assault.

Yet the tools to measure this erosion of impact have all but vanished. That’s because firms like Nielsen and iSpot stopped reporting ad loads by individual channel after 2016, shifting instead to vague, platform-level averages. The detailed data still exists—but it’s been sequestered behind expensive paywalls and sold only to industry insiders. Why? Because “minutes-per-hour” metrics have become politically toxic: networks with bloated ad loads don’t want to appear greedy, and those with leaner loads don’t want to look like they’re losing the game. Meanwhile, the newer metrics—those designed to convince advertisers that consumers are still absorbing and responding to commercial messages—are little more than wishful thinking dressed in data. No one is seriously tracking the collapse of advertising’s actual impact on the consumer mind, let alone the diminishing resonance of good storytelling or well-reported news. What was once a vital cultural medium has quietly set itself on fire. And for anyone not paying extra to escape the flames, the experience of watching television continues its slow, dispiriting decline.

Easter-ish Eggs

Can I claim that The Last American Heiresses contains literary “Easter eggs” if the hidden references I am referring to are contained in books of mine that are yet unpublished or self-published long ago?

If a reader of Heiresses cared to know more about Ollie’s friend Mrs. Welland—Elizabeth “Liddy” Prescott Welland— they'd find more about three generations of Prescotts in the yet unpublished Church Lake Road, a kind of dark comedy about the failed rehab of Mrs. Welland’s nephew, Cort. And if a reader wanted to know more about Nancy Creamer Russo, who sells Doris Duke some lovely suits and a very important accessory that completes Doris’ desired Charity Lady Executive look, they would find it in the yet unpublished Mid-Century Modern, a story about three Prescottville women (actually, one of them’s a very teenage girl who foils a school shooting) whose lives span seventy or so years of village life.

And if anyone’s interest in knowing more about Selwyn Stanfield, whom Doris and Ollie meet as a young businessman in London in 1969, at the Mangrove restaurant, then again as a billionaire in New York in 1979, at the Museum of Modern Art, then there’s lots more about Selwyn and his calculating wife MaryAnn in The Culling (2008) and Other’s People’s Prayers (2009), both available on Amazon.

(Then there's a sweet and, for me, quite short sci-fi tale set in Prescottville in 1947, about a young vet, home from World War II, who meets an intriguing girl who's definitely "not from around here" and asks his help with a mission that may or may not threaten the entire world.... Yet to be titled, yet unpublished.)

In my feverish little writer’s brain, there’s a certain excitement about telling very different kinds of stories that are framed within a nonetheless cohesive world, as Balzac does in his Comédie humaine series of novels—which I have adored for half a century. Nobody can be Balzac anymore, of course, but he represents a fine benchmark to aim for, no?

The Other Eye of Astarte

An excerpt from Chapter 25, of The Last American Heiresses:

In fact, Barbara had not visited the gift shop earlier that morning, nor the ship’s indoor swimming pool, nor the masseur’s studio. She had knocked on the door of first-class stateroom U-21 at 9:30 a.m. and been admitted by the slender, stylish, middle-aged man that Doris had spotted observing them in the ship’s dining room and Navajo lounge.

“Good morning, Miss Hutton,” said the man, admitting her into the stateroom. He was dressed in a blue blazer with gold buttons and gray slacks. His accent was cultivated Italian.

“Signore Ottoboni,” said Barbara, removing her sunglasses.

Waiting for them at the low table opposite the stateroom’s green-and-gold upholstered sofa were a tray with coffee service and a cubic wooden case measuring about six inches square. As they settled onto the sofa and Barbara reached for the cup of coffee that Ottoboni poured, her thirty-eight-carat diamond ring caught his eye.

“Ah—que bello,” he said, almost involuntarily.

Barbara simpered and brought the cup to her lips perhaps a bit more slowly than she normally would have done.

“Thank you,” she said. “Now please show me the other one.”

Ottoboni unlatched the wooden case in front of them and swung back the hinged lid. On the pinkie finger of his left hand, he was wearing a baroque-style gold ring set with a large burnt- orange citrine intaglio carved with the profile of Apollo. With the grace of a surgeon, he removed from the case a smaller leather box whose lid was embossed in scrolls of gold, opened it, and took from it a small, black velvet bag. Loosening the bag’s silk cord and gesturing toward Barbara’s hand, he said, “May I?” Barbara opened and outstretched both hands to receive the bag’s contents, an enormous unset diamond.

The diamond was of spectacular color, clarity, and brilliance. Barbara inspected it closely, as Ottoboni looked on, satisfied, while taking a sip of his coffee. Instinctively she brought the jewel next to the diamond of her ring, to compare the two.

“The other eye of Astarte,” marveled Ottoboni, in a dramatically hushed pronouncement.

“It is nice,” said Barbara.

The two diamonds might have been mates, the unset one octagonal in shape and just slightly larger than Barbara’s, which was round. Both were of the same blue-white brilliance, magnificent, almost hypnotic in their seemingly infinite depth.

“You see they are sisters,” said Ottoboni. “We believe they are of Indian origin, the Golconda mines, and, as I say, probably cut from the same ancient stone.”

“Yes, I see,” said Barbara, mesmerized by the sight of both diamonds.

When Barbara bought her diamond, from King Farouk of Egypt via the Roman jeweler Giorgio Bulgari, it was described as a Golconda stone, from the legendary diamond mines of southeastern India that were known for their beautiful stones—mines that were pretty well exhausted of diamonds by the middle of the nineteenth century. The legendary clarity of Golconda diamonds is due to their chemistry, Barbara was told: formed of pure carbon and devoid of nitrogen.

“Only one percent of the world’s diamonds are like this,” said Ottoboni. “Classified as 1-1A.”

Barbara’s diamond was known as the Pasha diamond, for a nineteenth-century Viceroy of Egypt under Ottoman rule, Ismail Pasha, who purchased it for the Egyptian treasury. But the pasha ran up so much debt that he was eventually deposed by the Ottoman sultan and went into exile. He took the diamond with him, along with other Egyptian treasures, and sold it to an Englishman, who later sold it to a London firm, who sold it to Cartier, at which point the “Pasha of Egypt” was returned to that country in the possession of King Farouk. After World War II, the high-living King needed money and arranged with Bulgari to sell the diamond on, and of course, Miss Barbara Hutton was one of probably only ten people in the world who could consider making such a purchase. But the octagonal shape of the forty-carat diamond was not to Miss Hutton’s liking, so she had Cartier recut it to a thirty-eight-point-one-nine-carat round and set into a ring. What Signore Ottoboni had told Miss Hutton in Paris, several days before she set sail at Le Havre, when he was introduced as “an independent dealer, very reputable,” was that a companion stone to the Pasha had been discovered in the long-private collection of a noble Bavarian family, and was available for an historic reunion with its “sister,” if Miss Hutton would care to purchase it. In accordance with her wish for discretion, Ottoboni could show her the stone on her Atlantic voyage….

At Home in Shangri La

An excerpt from Chapter 12, of The Last American Heiresses:

The pleasure palace called Shangri La that Doris built on Oahu, on the other side of Diamond Head from Honolulu, was inspired by the art and architecture of the Near East and Far East. But rather than strictly historical, its design reflected a mix of styles including Moghul, Seljuk, and Ottoman, as well as faux versions of those styles. The project began in 1935, when Doris and Cromwell were on their honeymoon trip around the world, which had been planned to take four weeks and wound up lasting nine months, culminating with a long stay in the United States territory of Hawaii. Lush and fragrant, populated with warm and friendly people, Hawaii seemed to offer more privacy and relaxation than Doris had previously been aware of needing. Instantly she felt at home there. From their suite at the Royal Hawaiian, she and Cromwell spent weeks roaming the island, looking for a suitable place to build, until at last they found a spot that sang to them, a promontory overlooking the Pacific in Honolulu’s exclusive Black Point residential neighborhood. Doris hired architect Marion Sims Wyeth, the same architect who had designed Mar-a-Lago, to work with her on the house’s design. She also bought a large, dockside warehouse on Honolulu Harbor, which would function as a depository for all the larger, museum-level Islamic artifacts and architectural elements she was buying or commissioning from artists, artisans, workshops, and dealers in India, Iran, Morocco, Spain, and the like.

When finished, Shangri La was basically a modernist house onto which all these elements had been applied. The interior was a fantasy-like succession of dazzling salons, terraces, courtyards, and pavilions, whose tranquil atmosphere was enhanced by delicately carved marble wall screens, inlaid with semiprecious stones in floral patterns; lattice-work windows admitting jewel-like beams of light through panes that shimmered in pink and green and lavender; florid mosaic panels depicting mythical gardens; soaring antique columns; massively scaled carved wood doors; elaborately coffered and painted ceilings; an oak floor imported from a sixteenth-century French château; an eleventh-century Moorish mantelpiece purchased from William Randolph Hearst. . . . It may have been located in a territory that was known as a playground for the rich, but for Doris, this was no vacation house. Shangri La was a refuge, a retreat far from New York nightclubs and newspapers, which is why she named it after the legendary domain of beauty and harmony where people did not grow old, as described in the popular 1937 movie of the same name and the 1933 novel by James Hilton that the movie was based on.

“This is the heart of the house,” said Doris, on a small detour through her own bedroom suite. The sitting room featured a small fountain with a delicate acequia—or Moorish-style water channel set into the floor—streaming out to a pool in Doris’s private lanai, which gave onto a larger terraced garden that was built around a lily pond. Her octagonal bathroom of white marble accented with jade featured a fancifully vaulted ceiling, studded with tiny mirrors, worthy of a palace or temple.

“Don’t worry—your bathroom is nice, too,” said Doris, noticing Barbara looking up in wonder. “This one is Moghul. The one in the guesthouse where I’m putting you is Moorish—from a twelfth-century palace in Córdoba….”

Arriving at the Beistegui Ball

An excerpt from Chapter 23, of The Last American Heiresses:

Doris had, in fact, encountered Lady Arabella once before, at Count Beistegui’s legendary 1951 ball in Venice, at his sumptuous eighteenth-century Palazzo Labia. It began simply as a meeting in passing, not even an introduction.

Thousands of spectators lined the Grand Canal that night, jammed together in boats, and crowded on vaporetto landings and on private piers and balconies, watching the flotilla of guests proceed toward the blue-and-white spiral-striped poles of the palazzo’s pier. Doris’s gondola was arriving at around ten p.m., the same time as dozens of other boats, including Lady Arabella’s private motoscafo. Under the Hollywood-level floodlighting that had been set up for the occasion to illuminate the palazzo’s façade and double-story portone, the great door onto the canal—and which also lit up a significant stretch of the Grand Canal itself—liveried servants were darting about frantically with lanterns, shouting, gesturing, trying to direct arriving water traffic as best they could, arranging the disembarkments from gondolas and motoscafi onto the stone steps in as orderly a fashion as possible, so that each party—indeed, each costume—could have its moment to be seen and admired by onlookers, which included the general press. It was a runway moment that would be repeated inside the palazzo at the entrance to the great ballroom, for invited guests and the Count’s selected photographers.

Amidst the commotion, Lady Arabella’s motoscafo, bearing her and three friends, all dressed alike as charmingly menacing “Phantoms of Venice,” in voluminous black satin capes with black tricorn hats, masks, and gloves, chanced to nudge itself in front of Doris’s boat, which had been approaching the pier first. As the motoscafo’s pilot was urgently commanded to go ahead and discharge his passengers immediately, Lady Arabella momentarily lowered her mask to flash a wordless frown of apology to her disguised fellow-guest in the other boat. Then, under a shower of photo flashes and with the help of a liveried arm, the lady resumed her grand progress toward the stone steps. After which Doris, costumed as an eighteenth-century gentleman, in a vivid blue justacorps, long vest, and breeches with matching mask and white wig, and her beau Joey Castro, as Papageno, the cheerful, flute-playing bird catcher from Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute, themselves disembarked and headed into the palazzo under their own shower of flashbulbs.

The glitch in precedence wasn’t necessarily a slight, Doris knew, and under the circumstances, it was perfectly understandable…

Aboard the SS United States

A little teaser excerpt from Chapter 22, of The Last American Heiresses:

It was after running into each other in Venice, in early June, 1957, at a costume party given by Elsa Maxwell on the rooftop of the Danieli Hotel, that Doris and Barbara decided on the spur of the moment to voyage together later that month to New York, where they were both expected: Doris by a current beau, Joey Castro, a handsome young jazz pianist who was then based mostly in Los Angeles and had gotten a brief gig in a New York club; and Barbara by her sixth husband, Gottfried von Cramm, with whom she’d be going on to Mexico, to the Japanese-style house that she was building in Cuernavaca. In order to spend a few days catching up more or less privately, the women decided to sail, and Doris insisted on their going on the SS United States, the most modern ocean liner of the time, “the incarnation of our global superiority since the war.”

Stealthily and separately, Doris and Barbara made their way to Le Havre and boarded the ship unobtrusively, unnoticed by the press. For herself, Doris had procured the ship’s most luxurious accommodations, the Duck Suite, which comprised two bedrooms and a spacious parlor, decorated in an uncluttered, fashionably contemporary style, with gold-leafed aluminum wall panels featuring delicately painted vignettes with ducks. She was traveling with her companion May McFarland, who several years before had taken over Doris’s Independent Aid charity, after dear Pansy died. Barbara had taken one of the ship’s fourteen other first-class suites for herself and her new favorite beau, Jimmy Douglas—a handsome young American, eighteen years her junior, whom she’d met at Maxwell’s party. Both women were so well-known that it was possible they’d be recognized by at least some on board, but in an effort to minimize unwanted fuss, May had seen to it that the ship’s passenger list would identify these first-class travelers as “Miss May McFarland and maid” and “Mr. and Mrs. James Henderson Douglas.” It was “Mrs. Douglas” who deposited with the purser a jewel case containing necklaces, bracelets, and earrings, but not the enormous thirty-eight-carat diamond ring that she wore practically every day; and it was “Miss McFarland’s maid” who was delighted to learn that she could stash her mistress’s jewels in the Duck Suite’s own safe.

Dinner on the first night was informal…

The Last American Heiresses

I'm thrilled to say that my new book, The Last American Heiresses, is now available for pre-order on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The pub date in March, 2025.

"A dazzling novel based on the real, ultra-glamorous lives of Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton, the public rivalry that defined them, and the secret bond that sustained them both, from the author of the acclaimed Such Good Friends.

"Interweaving past and present, filled with sumptuous details from an age of excess, Stephen Greco’s novel is also a mesmerizing story about the nature of celebrity and the transformative power of friendship."

It was a lot of fun to research and write this one, which spans eighty years and imagines the kind of friendship/rivalry that might have secretly existed between these uniquely privileged women... behind the headlines, as it were.

And Because You Might Have a Laugh...

The inimitable Lee Radziwill tells what she thinks is worse at a dinner party: a snob or a bore. And there is plenty more more wit and gossip in the fantastic interview Radziwill did in 2013 for the New York Times' T Magazine, with filmmaker Sofia Coppola and T editor Deborah Needleman: https://youtu.be/yigFNq_cXxs?si=doN_a...