I’ve been trying to write this post for 6 weeks now. It’s tough to sum up some things, but this is to honor my dearest friend. Here goes…
My best friend of nearly 50 years, Cary Lynn Richardson, died on November 4, 2024 in New York City. She was diagnosed almost a year ago with esophageal cancer and began treatment in April of 2024. I moved back into the brownstone we bought together nearly 30 years ago in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn to help her out and manage her care.
The radiation and chemotherapy treatment went relatively well for five weeks, but there were multiple complications. She had a hard time eating and continued to lose weight goings in and out of the hospital (mostly being in) throughout the summer and into the Fall. Up until then, she was a private chef working for antiques dealer, Barbara Israel for the last 10 years and when she couldn’t work anymore, she effectively retired on her 65th birthday.
This year it seemed everything was happening all at once. While she was getting treatment, I helped her sell her Downing Street brownstone to a local couple, hire movers, and an organizer to pack and move to her new house, a 1930s Craftsman, two minutes from my Speegle Studio in the Catskill Mountains in Jeffersonville, New York. She was excited about designing and updating new place and coming to stay with me in Merida, Mexico, where I am now writing this from.
After the brownstone was sold, I moved into the parlor floor of our old pals, John Fischer & Angel Zimick’s brownstone in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn in order to go back and forth to the hospital daily to be with Cary during the month of October. The last month of her life was mostly in the ICU.
She died just after two o’clock in the afternoon November 4th at Mt Sinai hospital, in a private room with a beautiful view overlooking Central Park. It was just us, more or less as it’s been the past 6 decades, since we were teenagers in South Houston, Texas.
And so now we go back to the beginning…
We first met in 1976 in the Drama Club. I was a sophomore and Cary a junior at South Houston High School. Cary insisted that we had met the year before, which makes it right around 50 years that we were friends. Among other things, we performed together in the school talent show, dancing to Car Wash, by Rose Royce, in our side-tied off white denim overalls on an empty stage in front of the entire school, which for me was as brave as it gets for a teenager in 70s Texas.
Cary was the pretty, popular girl with an easy laugh and VERY long blonde hair. She was on the drill team, which performed routines during football games, so she was well-known in our 4A high school of 2500+ kids. I was fairly well-know for my accomplishments too, in both theater and the journalism departments, but I was teased for my “gay voice” and called a fag. Cary was always my defender.
We started “dating” and I asked Cary to the prom. That same year, “Take Carrie to the Prom.” was the slogan for Brian DePalma’s horror classic Carrie. Cary’s name was constantly being misspelled in that way. She was actually named after Cary Grant and was born on Elizabeth Taylor’s birthday, February 27, 1959. Cary made her dress for the prom, a classic all-white number (below left) with a white feather boa and I wore a black tuxedo and bow tie. I thought we looked SO sophisticated at the time and for teenagers in 1977, looking back, I guess we did.
My senior year I was the ad director and art director for the yearbook, The Palladium and the newspaper, The Forum. and our journalism advisor, Diane Stafford, was a pivotal person in all our lives as she allowed myself and my two best friends at the time, Angela Clark, yearbook edtor and Rob Johnson, the newspaper editor. Even though Cary and I started to date, my crush was on Rob, a track star and the smartest guy in our 4A school. I decided to confess to Cary that I was bi, which in the 70s was the road to gaytown. Rob was the second person I told. They both, as they would say back in the day, “cool about it”.
Cary and I would get dressed up, take our fake IDs and go to a discos in the Montrose, and drink White Russians, play backgammon and dance the night away. After she graduated, Cary got a job at a local bank and while still a senior, Rob & I landed jobs with Houston City Magazine, me in the production department at $2.75 an hour. We moved into our first apartment together and I introduced Cary to my co-workers and she was hired as the receptionist, but within a month or so she moved into ad sales at the age of 20.
At age 19, when the art director quit, I became the interim art director at Houston City after Francois de Menil, bought the magazine in 1979. (He is the son of Dominique de Menil, the pioneering art patron whose legacy is the Menil in Houston) Francois, in the mold of Jann Wenner (who I later worked for as Art Director of Us Weekly.) enlisted the help of the married fashion duo Kezia Keeble & Paul Cavaco to produce the fashion and their visit to the magazine would change our lives.
In the Summer of 1980 Paul Cavaco called me at the magazine to say there was a position open at GQ as a designer. I hoped a plane to NYC and he got me and interview (he even dressed me for it) But. I didn’t get the job, but after meeting Philip Monaghan and moving in with his roommate Roberta Wagner, a Bloomingdale’s buyer, I landed a job a a designer at Vogue and soon after Cary followed me in ‘82 or 83. She got a job in ad sales and then became the publisher of The Society of Nuclear Medicine, a Sackler owned pharmaceutical publication.
We didn’t live together in the 80s in New York City. Cary lived in Chelsea and we had our own lives but eventually I designed two side by side duplex apartments for us overlooking Tompkins Square Park in the East Village in the newly refurbished Christadora House. Cary decided that she wanted to become a chef, and she opened a gourmet food shop in the lobby of the building. Those apartments were very expensive at the time, mine was $1800 a month– I decided that Brooklyn was the next stop, so in 1989 we moved.
We rented places around the corner from each other in Clinton Hill, both in rentals and eventually, when the owner of the brownstone I was renting, Rogen Brown –an actor and historical brownstone rescuer, who started The Clinton Hill Society– died of AIDS, the brownstone came up for sale. Neither of us had the 10% of the $168,000 for a deposit (yes, for all 4 floors) or could get it from friends or family.
I begged Cary into ask her employer, art collector & 3M heiress Penny McCall to lend us $18,000 for the deposit. We paid it back $500 a month each for 18 months. Buying Downing Street was another big moment that changed both our lives. Sadly, Penny & David were on a trip to Bosnia just as David was becoming the president of Refugees International, when their van drove off a thousand foot cliff in a rainstorm. God Bess Penny & David McCall.
Thanks to the McCall’s loan, we had SUPER fun holiday tree trimming parties with Cary planning the menu, preparing the food, and me on, invitations, ambience decor. That was always our roles and we were NEVER ready when the first guests arrived, no matter how much we prepared, bickering up until the last minute. Cary usually got cornered in the kitchen, as everyone made their way downstairs and talk to her as she cooked.
Everyone always loved being around Cary. Truly. And food was her way of showing her love, as she was quite shy publicly. She was dedicated to taking care of others (you never know ran out of food at a party with Cary) but she often neglected of her self as a result.. As sophisticated as her cooking could be, it was really comfort food. Texas gal.
Cary also worked as a private chef for the past 30 years –at KKR, financier Henry Kravis’ company making lunch for his executives in midtown. She briefly worked for philanthropist Anne Bass and corporate raider Leon Black. She was the private chef for hotelier Ian Shrager for 9 years, first cooking for the family in South Hampton, then for Rita Shrager in the city and later in Rita’s Hamptons house. Rita & Ian were divorced but spent a lot of time together with their young daughters, Sophia & Eva, who hung out many hours in the kitchen with Cary. She also went to St. Barth’s with the family every year on a private jet and loved the years she spent working for them.
I met my partner Roswell Hamrick January 11, 1997 and he more or less moved into the brownstone with us right away. Cary had the bottom two floors and we had the top two. Roswell and Cary got along famously, both likable southerners –they charmed each other. Cary never had a serious relationship and honestly, we never talked about that very much.
Getting married was never in the cards for her, nor kids, but 20 years ago we both got Brussels Griffon puppies who were life-long pals. Jasper (far right) was Cary’s. Jasper died in the summer of ‘23 at 17 and a half and she still cried at the mention of his name. My Lamonte (who I shared with Roswell) died in February of this year at 19 years old.
There were of course tons of parties, dinners, trips to foreign lands and back home to Texas to see our families. Cary’s father Tommy & brother Bubba, both died a while ago. He mother, Gloria & sister Kelly are still living as well as nieces and nephews. Cary was very close to her Aunt Pamela, who visiting Cary from California and came to see Cary when things weren’t looking so good this Fall.
Cary didn’t let everyone know of her diagnosis and treatment but there was a core group I tried to keep informed to call text and visit her in the hospital like my mother Joyce Crisp and my brother Tad who both knew her as long as I did, along with Angel Zimick, Roswell Hamrick, Daniel Thompson, Kachin Kobayashi, Janet Meyer, Mary Hayslip who called texted and visited her over the course of 6 months this year. There were of course other friends and neighbor concerned but at a certain point, she could only handle so much outside input,
The doctors and nurses at Mt Sinai but especially her oncologist Dr. Karen Goodman and her associate Kate were so sweet with Cary. She really liked and trusted them and they always cheered her up when they came around.
In a time gone by, Cary and I might have married, stayed in Texas and I would have remained closeted. But for all intents and purposes, we were married, living our own lives and looking out for each other. Ride or die as they say, we could always count on one other. I was talking to Cary for years about selling the brownstone and beginning the next phase of her life, but she LOVED the brownstone, and wanted nothing more than to live there forever with Jasper. But after his death and her diagnosis, she was ready to move on and make a new life upstate and in Merida. (Her below in her happy place, Merida, and my guest house where she would be right now if she was on the planet.)
I guess, since it is all our fates, death isn’t the worse thing that happens, it’s just the last thing. It’s a cliché, but it was a real honor to see her out the door. She had been on a respirator, but when the cancer spread and she couldn’t breathe on her own, there was nothing else that could be done. She was on morphine and not conscious. Our song as always The Emotions, Best of My Love. The doctors said that hearing is one of the last senses to go, so, I played our song. The doctor and nurses left, and it was just us in the end, pretty much as it’s been since we met.
In case you forget how it goes…
Doesn't take much to make me happy
And make me smile with glee
Never never will I feel discouraged
'Cause our love's no mystery
Demonstrating love and affection
That you give so openly,
I like the way you make me feel about you, baby
Want the whole wide world to see
Oh oh, you've got the best of my love…
Love you eternally!
Trey
A few weeks after Cary died, I was upstate in my place watching the Netflix series, A Man on the Inside, about a man (Ted Danson) who loses his wife and goes undercover in a retirement home to root out a thief. The song outro to one episode is the song, For a Dancer. Browne was big when were were in high school, but being a teenager, I’m not sure I paid much attention to the lyrics but now, at 65 facing going through old age without her, the words hit home for me. Hard.
FOR A DANCER (For Cary)
Keep a fire burning in your eye
And pay attention to the open sky
You never know what will be coming down
I don't remember losing track of you
You were always dancing in and out of view
I must've thought you'd always be around
Always keeping things real by playing the clown
Now you're nowhere to be found
I don't know what happens when people die
Can't seem to grasp it as hard as I try
It's like a song I can hear playing right in my ear that I can't sing
I can't help listening
And I can't help feeling stupid standing 'round
Crying as they ease you down
'Cause I know that you'd rather we were dancing
Dancing our sorrow away
(Right on dancing)
No matter what fate chooses to play
(There's nothing you can do about it anyway)
Just do the steps that you've been shown
By everyone you've ever known
Until the dance becomes your very own
No matter how close to yours another's steps have grown
In the end, there is one dance you'll do alone
Keep a fire for the human race
Let your prayers go drifting into space
You never know what will be coming down
Perhaps a better world is drawing near
Just as easily it could all disappear
Along with whatever meaning you might have found
Don't let the uncertainty turn you around
(The world keeps turning around and around)
Go on and make a joyful sound
Into a dancer you have grown
From a seed somebody else has thrown
Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own
And somewhere between the time you arrive and the time you go
May lie a reason you were alive, but you'll never know.
–Jackson Browne
