The Turtle Bay town house where the editor Robert Gottlieb spent much of his life backs onto a communal garden, shared by the entire block. “Sondheim lived on the end,” Gottlieb’s daughter, the filmmaker Lizzie Gottlieb, said recently, pointing out buildings. “That was Bob Dylan’s.
E. B. White and Katharine White lived there.
Janet Malcolm and Gardner Botsford were there—we used to go over to watch ‘Battlestar Galactica.’ ” Sometimes Gottlieb would edit the neighbors’ memoirs. “I was ten years old and someone knocked at the back door,” Lizzie said.
“It was Katharine Hepburn.” Lizzie and her mother, the actor Maria Tucci, were cleaning out the house. Gottlieb, who ran Simon & Schuster, Knopf, and , died last year, and Tucci decided to move out.
“I always wanted to live on the Upper West Side,” she said. It’s closer to the theatres. They weren’t ready to sell, but they were offloading stuff.
They’d engaged iGavel Auctions to deaccession some of his thousands of books, many inscribed. (The auction ends on June 26th.) Gottlieb was also a prodigious collector of kitschy knickknacks.
Some of those (“Three Life Size Figures of Pugs”) are on sale, too. Most of the sorting was happening on the parlor level. On a side table was a porcelain Miss Piggy, wearing a flowery Sunday hat.
“He did Miss Piggy’s memoir at the same time he was doing Jacobo Timerman on torture,” Tucci said. Tucci wore a black shirt dress. Lizzie was in jeans and a.
