Art: Dismantling an Opulent Fossil

Treasures from Ben Sonnenberg's mansion go on auction

In recent years it was the greatest private house in New York: not comparable to the great mansions of Fifth Avenue at their height of extravagance in the Brown Decades, but an astonishing survivor, a solid, heavy and opulent fossil, that went on living long after estate taxes had killed its rivals. It stood, 37 rooms of it, on the southern side of Gramercy Park, that most Jamesian of Manhattan's squares, and last week it was proceeding, slowly and irreversibly, to come apart, as the photographers, appraisers and people from Sotheby Parke Bernet moved through it, checking and cataloguing, preparing the four-day auction that in June will scatter the mansion's contents for good. What had been the background to a life had already acquired a museum glaze; the invidious perfection of the showroom lay, like a cold sheet of plastic, on every tabletop and drawing. Its memory circuits had been cut.

The dissolution of 19 Gramercy Park is a sad sight for anyone who knew it in its former days, but it has a certain fitness. The house was a stage set; its natural fate was to be struck. The man who inhabited it, the producer, director and short, waddling star of the comedy of manners that unfolded in its rooms for some 40 years, was Benjamin Sonnenberg.

By a stroke of irony that he would, no doubt, have relished, Ben Sonnenberg died last September, at age 77, during the New York newspaper strike. Thus he had no obituaries of any size, and his passing, though mourned by friends, made little news. But then, Sonnenberg's profession was to be the midwife of stories, not their subject. He was one of the first modern public relations men. Indeed he had been at the game so long—"fashioning," as he once put it, "large pedestals for small statues"—that many people thought he had invented the p.r. business. He had not, but Sonnenberg outlived all its other pioneers, and was to ordinary flacks what Rubens is to LeRoy Neiman.

"I gravitate toward people with money," he once said, with winning simplicity. The money brushed off like pollen; at one time or another, Sonnenberg handled the p.r. needs of CBS, Philip Morris, David Sarnoff, Lever Brothers, Samuel Goldwyn, Pan Am, Squibb, Pepperidge Farm and others too numerous to count. A prodigios host and incessant partygiver, he was Manhattan's equivalent of the "talking chief on other, Polynesian islands—the chamberlain who enunciates the real chiefs dicta to the tribe, or, as he put it himself, "I supply the Listerine to the commercial dandruff on the shoulders of corporations." As an American success story, Sonnenberg's was cast in the old epic mold.