. . .Tonya Lewis Lee didn’t want to live in Brooklyn. . .
TOWN & COUNTRY
By Anne Midgette
Photographs by William Abranowicz
Gotham Diary
Tonya Lewis Lee didn’t want to live in Brooklyn.
This was tantamount to heresy. Tonya, after all, is married to Spike Lee, the director of such films as She’s Gotta Have It, Malcolm X and, most recently, She Hate Me. Spike is well known as a black activist, a provocateur-and a Brooklynite.
Tonya didn’t have anything against Brooklyn, but it was hard to live there as Spike’s wife, in Spike’s very well-known brownstone, in a community that thought of Spike as its own property. She had nothing against being well known, either; but she drew the line when strangers started ringing her doorbell at four in the morning.
“Kids would stand in the street and yell up, ‘Yo, Spike!'” Tonya recalls. “I would look out the window and they would say, ‘Are you T-Boz?”‘-a singer in the group TLC.
Tonya does have the aura of a star: a model’s willowy build, an easygoing, natural warmth in her dealings with the world. But rather than being a performer, she’s a lawyer, television producer, writer and hands-on mother of two children (son Jackson is seven; daughter Satchel, nine). And although she leads a high-profile life, she wanted a slightly less public arena for it. “We needed to create our own family existence,” she says. In Manhattan.
Easier said than done in the city’s competitive real-estate market. When they started their search, in the mid-1990s, trendy neighborhoods like SoHo and TriBeCa seemed overpriced. After a year and a half of looking downtown, she decided to broaden the field. “My mother and father kept telling me to consider the Upper East Side,” she says. “I thought, ‘Why would I want to live on the Upper East Side?'”
The answer begins on a sunny, tree-lined street, where the smooth stucco facade of an Italianate palazzo, quietly incongruous among brownstones and apartment buildings, shimmers behind an iron gate. Inside, a looking-glass world seems far larger than even the broad facade indicates: 9,500 square feet, with one big, comfortable room after another. Just across the threshold, an original hardwood floor, freed from the surfaces that covered it for years, gleams richly. In the living room, marble herms with the oval faces and full lips of Art Nouveau beauties support a fireplace mantel. And French windows open onto a private courtyard flooded with its own welling spring of sunlight.
Even for a die-hard Brooklynite, it was an easy sell. “I loved the house,” says Tonya, “but Spike really loved it. He said, ‘Oh, we’re living here. What’s our offer? Let’s make it right here, right now.'” Tonya, whose father was a high-ranking executive at Philip Morris, adds, “I come from a very conservative family, so I said, ‘You never do that. Are you crazy?’ But thankfully he didn’t listen to me.”
The house’s distinctive, spacious layout had attracted other artistic types before the Lees. Built between 1917 and 1919 for a Vanderbilt scion but rejected by her for being unfashionably far east, the house was empty when it was discovered in the 1940s by another Lee-the stripper and entertainer Gypsy Rose Lee. A later owner, the painter jasper johns, sold it to Tonya and Spike in 1998.
They may have been inspired by the energies of past residents, but the Lees took the house in hand, both restoring it – uncovering a wealth of original detail in the process and giving it their own stamp. Working with architect Max Bond, they moved walls, turned Johns’s studio into their dining room, relocated the kitchen from upstairs to a more central area on the ground floor and lived in the front wing of the house (now Spike’s and Tonya’s offices) while the back was being converted into bedrooms. Bond helped select a palette of cool, calming dove- and blue-grays for the walls of the public rooms, where Louis XIV mingles comfortably with basketball memorabilia. The subdued but strong wall colors are also a perfect backdrop for the Lees’ extensive collection of art by African Americans. Two bright Romare Bearden watercolors grace the master bedroom; Gordon Parks photographs line a hallway; and in the living room, the family photos that cover one wall face prints and lithographs by Charles Wilbert White, Charles Alston, Elizabeth Catlett-and Satchel Lee. “People say, ‘Oh, that’s such great folk art,’ ” says the artist’s mother, amused.
Juxtaposing great art and family souvenirs, infusing an imposing and beautiful space with a sense of comfort and a cozy mess of children’s toys: the combinations Tonya has created in decorating her home are reflected in the wide variety of roles she plays in her daily life. As a professional, she produces shows like the documentary I Sit Where I Want, an exploration of racial integration in a New York State high school that aired on cable television last May, on the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. As a volunteer, she sits on the board of such organizations as the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP. As a mother who chooses not to have live-in help, she maintains homes in New York and Martha’s Vineyard, and she takes an active role in the education of her children, who attend one of the most competitive private schools in the city. Tonya’s own memories of the racial prejudice she encountered while attending public schools in suburban Milwaukee and St. Louis contrasted with her more positive private-school experience, so she felt strongly that private schools were a better option for her own children. But it was another big leap for Spike, a committed supporter of public education. “I would say to him, ‘Please be nice. Smile,’ ” Tonya says, describing their preparations for the grueling admissions process. “We need them to get in somewhere before you can say you reject it.”
Tonya’s lifestyle, real-estate search and neighborhood have played into her most recent project, the novel Gotham Diaries, a contemporary satire of black upper-class society in New York, co-authored with her close friend Crystal McCrary Anthony. Tonya and Crystal insist that the novel, published by Hyperion in July, is not a roman a clef, but, Tonya concedes, “You write what you know.” The book itself had a glamorous beginning: the friends hatched the idea in Cannes, where Tanya had invited Crystal to keep her company while Spike conducted business at the film festival. (Crystal, who is separated from former basketball player and ESPN commentator Greg Anthony, had already co-authored one novel: Homecourt Advantage, a story about NBA wives and girlfriends.)
Working on Gotham Diaries was facilitated by the fact that Crystal lives two blocks away from Tonya, in an apartment sold to her by Spencer Means, a prominent New York real estate agent upon whom one of the main characters in Gotham Diaries is based. “It’s like two degrees of separation,” Crystal says of Manhattan’s community of affluent African Americans.
Tracy G. M. James
Tracy G. M. James 