The takeaway from today’s New York Times article about a lawsuit over actress Faye Dunaway’s Upper East Side apartment is not that she’s another movie star unfairly using New York’s rent stabilization laws to keep a posh pied-á-terre in the city. (Although, evidence suggests that she does live in West Hollywood and is using the $1,048.72-a-month East 78th Street walk-up as a living space for her son, Liam Dunaway O’Neill.) No, the point the paper seems to try to make is that Ms. Dunaway is … kind of … poor:
Ms. Dunaway, 70, does not appear to be living glamorously. The home in California is a nice but not flashy house on which she still carries a mortgage, according to the lawsuit. Her car is a 2007 Toyota Corolla … Ms. Dunaway’s current apartment is also a vast departure from the 20th-floor apartment she inhabited at the Eldorado earlier in her career. That apartment, one of the first projects completed by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects, in 1969, featured curved walls and mirrored doors.
And check out the digs up on 78th. It’s practically a roach motel!
Ms. Dunaway rented her current apartment on the Upper East Side on Aug. 1, 1994, in a six-story yellow brick building with fire escapes in the front. The name next to the outdoor buzzer reads “F. Dunaway.” The building’s hallway floors are green linoleum. Its cream walls are chipped, and pink marble steps lead up to her third-floor unit. Her front door is painted aquamarine and has the names “Dunaway/ONeill” and “PT Bascom” listed by the black doorbell. There is a simple brown doormat with black trim.
Oh God. Bet if you went inside, the clothes would be hanging on wire hangers. The horror!!
