Whipped Cream Difficulties

Pat Moore, long-time server at P.J. Clarke’s in New York City.

This is one of those not-so-famous person obits that the paper does well. She was named “Miss Fordham” in her first year at the school and signed to a modeling contract with the Ford Modeling Agency.

The Fords booked her on fashion shoots and in ads for perfume, coffee, mouthwash, crackers, brassieres, cigars and whiskey. “If I can’t have Ambassador I don’t drink Scotch” reads the copy on one print ad from the 1960s. Ms. Moore wears a slinky black cocktail dress and stares into the camera with the cool self-possession of a Bronx girl who knows what she wants.

She also had an interesting personal life, especially after she started working at P.J. Clarke’s.

As a teenager, Ms. Moore had been the president of the local chapter of the Perry Como Fan Club, invited into the studio to watch Como rehearse. An appreciation for smooth Italian American crooners would be a refrain in her life. After her divorce, she dated both Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, though whether the two men overlapped is unclear to her friends.
“The way I heard it was, when Sinatra would come in, Tony Bennett wasn’t allowed to come in the restaurant,” Michael DeFonzo, the chef for the company that owns all five of the P.J. Clarke’s locations (three in Manhattan), said in an interview. “I would always press her about it, and she would say, ‘Stop it.’ She never gave up the truth.”

…

Everyone agrees, though, that both men came to see her at P.J. Clarke’s, and Mr. Bennett was still frequenting the restaurant decades later. If it was her birthday, he brought flowers. If he wanted to take her out for a drink, he would wait in his car at the curb until the end of her shift. If he was hungry, he would take a seat in her section.

…

Few of her colleagues knew about the portrait of her that hung in her bedroom — painted, Mr. Watts said, by Mr. Bennett. Nor did she readily pose for pictures, with the result that no photographs of Ms. Moore hang on the walls of the restaurant where she spent half her life.

That’s the other reason I wanted to post this obit. David J. Schow, noted horror writer, wrote a story called “Red Light” that won a World Fantasy Award in 1987. The premise of the story involves a successful model that comes to believe, every time someone takes a picture of her, they’re stripping away pieces of her.

It’s a kind of subtle, not really splatterpunk, horror story. I commend it to your attention, if you can find it. And I wonder if Ms. Moore ever felt the same way.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2025 at 12:41 pm and is filed under Books, Obits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.