Photo: Patrick McMullan
On Friday we dropped by the Plumm for the memorial celebration for Baird Jones — the promoter, art collector, and gossip reporter who was a New York party-scene fixture for three decades before being found dead in his apartment last month. We expected a sea of eighties clubbers, fellow gossip writers, and open-bar-hoppers. We did not expect Lindsay Lohan.
Yet as the aging crowd nursed its final free drink, the starlet arrived and installed herself on a couch in the back. It was surreal yet, in a way, the perfect homage to a man who devoted himself to celebrity gossip and often put random kooks in the same room as A-listers at the parties he threw.
There were plenty of other characters. A buxom photographer named Tarzaan told us that Jones had “hounded me the last two weeks of his life to give him intimate details of every celebrity that I’ve ever slept with — which he has on tape somewhere,” she confided. “There are some very big celebrities on that list. Everyone from Gabriel Byrne to Pat Metheny.” Singer-actress and New York Underground Museum founder Phoebe Legere insisted Jones had been a misunderstood genius: “This was a man of very, very high intelligence and a very advanced understanding of modern art — the mechanics of it and also the way in which promotion is the blood and bone of modern art.” An intoxicated Ivy Nicholson (once a Warhol star) declared that she and Jones had been “lovers” for one night, then left to dance on top of a big box.
Noel Ashman paused to comment on his legal battle with promoter Ivy Supersonic, who recently claimed that Jones shared her belief that Ashman is a crook. “She’s really clinically insane. She’s using Baird Jones’s dying to get publicity, which to me is pretty disgusting.”
Then Ashman went back to partying — with a very popular party girl who’d probably never heard of Baird Jones. —Darrell Hartman
Related: Baird Jones’s Memorial Party to Be Held at Club He Secretly Tried to Close [Grub Street]
Gossip Guru Baird Jones Reported Dead
