“I take the attitude of the character. It’s a song performed by a lady who’s putting herself down. It has nothing to do with what I think. But if you’re talking about the phrase, as far as I know, I made it up.” Had he spent a lot of time at places such as La Grenouille and Quo Vadis, observing society ladies at lunch? “No, no, no, no. I’m not a chic restaurant-goer, and I don’t eat lunch.”
It actually went back to his mother, he explained. Etta “Foxy” Sondheim was a socially ambitious Seventh Avenue dress designer and a pal of Molly Berns, the wife of the co-owner of ‘21,’ the still-famous former speakeasy at 21 West 52nd Street frequented by businessmen, politicians, and celebrities. “My mother and Molly used to have lunch there all the time,” Sondheim recalled, “and occasionally I would be invited. So the ladies who lunch for me are the denizens of the ‘21’ Club. Some of these ladies were very chic, and they wore hats to lunch. And they also hung around our house a lot. My mother liked people who were rich. We’re not talking about the F. Scott Fitzgerald rich. We’re talking about Central Park West rich. It was much more an upper-middle-class than an upper-class existence. Many of the women worked in the fashion industry. Mollie Parnis was a friend of my mother’s, and Jo Copeland too. These were the top designers—their clothes would sell at Saks and Bergdorf’s. They were the Donna Karans and Diane von Furstenbergs. My mother also had a lot of friends who were silent-movie stars who married well, people like Colleen Moore. That was the circle. So I grew up with all those ladies playing mah-jongg in my mother’s living room. And picturing them, the phrase ‘the ladies who lunch’ just popped into my head.
“My mother had a lot of pretensions,” he continued. “One of them that she picked up from some of her tonier friends was ‘luncheon,’ which always struck me as a screamingly funny word. ‘I’m having luncheon at “21,” ’ she would say. I think ‘lunch’ is one of the funniest words in the world. That’s one of the reasons I used it.”
A long wonderful article about "The Ladies Who Lunch"- literally and figuratively
Vanity Fair
