The Confessions of Addison DeWitt

Addison DeWitt -- Interior Design, 4/1/2001 12:00:00 AM

Gentle readers, esteemed colleagues, and others: This is a sad day in the life of Addison DeWitt. Circumstances beyond our control have dictated a retreat from public life. In response to the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Faleep-al-Starkha—in addition to various pending lawsuits by a passel of mediocrities, failures, and erstwhile jeuns garçons en fleur (you know who you are)—we've decided that it is no longer safe to ply our trade in the salons and along the avenues of our fair, fair city. Which is to say, we will no longer be able to utilize this page as a forum for the enlightened discourse for which it is so deservedly known.

But before we exchange our top hat for our thong, and before we board our four-masted schooner to sail off to the Encantadas, and before we forever deny the limelight the privilege of illuminating our noble visage, we must clear the air of a few issues heretofore shrouded in obfuscation, conjecture, and calumny. At last, we are free to speak our mind, to tell the truth unbridled by the conventions of polite society. To wit:

• Our real name is not Addison DeWitt. It is Addison Horowitz.

• Our brief marriage blanc to Vilma Banky in the 1920s was a sham—a sham!—orchestrated by the publicity boys at MGM.

• For the curious Intervention collector, the blind-item personals that have appeared sporadically in these pages may or may not have included Jack Lenor Larsen, either of the Rashid boys, Murray Moss, Diller, Scofidio, Marc Newson, and Gwenyth Paltrow.

• We murdered JonBenet.

• Pour notre maison? Laura Ashley. Exclusively.

• A riddle: Charlie Sheen is to Hollywood as Herbert Muschamp is to x ?

• You call it the National Design Awards. We call it corn.

• Despite what the caddies up in New Canaan are saying, we did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Johnson.

• We lied when we said that Kitty Carlisle Hart comes to our house for Christmas. We don't celebrate Christmas.

• Pepe is not simply our adopted son.

So there it must lie, my friends, my foes. But despair not! For even as I address you just this once with the intimacy of the first-person singular, even as the Valkyries prepare to conduct me to my own Valhalla of absinthe and blue smoke, even as my faithful Interveners gather to sit the mother of all shivas, our crusade for firmness, commodity, and delight will flower heroically, a beacon of truth and beauty for all those voyagers on the shining path to glory.

Fondly,

Addison DeWitt