Word: helmsleys
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...week of performances. Doing her operas one at a time, with no cast changes, enables her to approximate the ideal of festival conditions. That gives her performances a snap and cohesion rarely matched at, say, the Met, which does a different opera every night with shifting casts. Says Gilbert Helmsley, Caldwell's lighting designer and all-round production factotum: "She knows she makes good theater. She knows she makes good opera. I will never forget her sitting in her dressing room in 1974 and inhaling the applause for her Barber of Seville. Deep down inside, you know, she knows...
Caldwell relaxes on these junkets, joking, shopping, making friends. But once back home and inside the theater, says former Production Assistant Seamus Curran, "Sarah goes through people like water." Especially stage managers. "She eats them," says Lighting Designer Helmsley. The stage manager must follow schedules meticulously and see that everyone else does too. It is not an easy task when the boss disregards any regimen. Caldwell may rehearse her singers from morning to midnight, then keep a crew on until 4 or 5 a.m. for lighting rehearsals. During the latter, says Helmsley, "she invariably goes to sleep...
Snob Appeal. Helmsley's gamble on the Park Lane is all the more remarkable because it ignores the hotel industry's growing reliance on conventions and banquets as a primary source of revenue. Like its older Manhattan neighbors, the Plaza, St. Regis-Sheraton and Pierre, the elegant Park Lane is designed mainly to lure well-heeled individual travelers, whether they are in New York for business or pleasure. Helmsley spent nearly $50,000 for each room, many of which are lavishly decorated with original paintings. Overnight rentals vary from $32 for a single...
...Helmsley, a tall, spare man of 62, is used to taking risks in real estate, and has done well enough at it to become owner of the firm (now called Helmsley Spear) that hired him in 1926 after he left high school. He is one of the nation's largest real estate operators. Helmsley either manages or has an interest in properties worth $2.5 billion, including Manhattan's Empire State Building and Tudor City apartment complex, office buildings in Chicago and Detroit and apartment houses in Los Angeles, Houston and San Francisco...
Canyonized City. Despite the recent moves of several major corporations out of New York (TIME, April 26), Helmsley is convinced that his native city is still a good investment; he currently has interests in newly rising buildings that will add 3,300,000 sq. ft. of office space to the canyonized city. "The companies that are moving out are being replaced by new companies and by expansion of old ones," he says. Other builders agree: fully 25% of the office space currently under construction in the U.S. is located in Manhattan...