![]() So Douglas put down $14,950 for three months plus a security deposit. “Bantering, confident, super-flamboyant.” And he said that they were welcome to use his lights and C-stands. “Michael oozed an easy charm,” Douglas recalled. Juliet was a wry, self-contained woman in her late twenties Douglas, who helped manage his family’s real-estate holdings, was a few years older and resembled Newman on “Seinfeld.” They both liked their future landlord. I have used pseudonyms for anyone identified by a single name.) In April, 2012, Tammaro was offering a summer sublet, and it seemed like a perfect place for them to live while Juliet shot the show that they hoped would make them famous: a series of dating-advice videos for YouTube. (Like several others involved with the apartment, they asked that I change their names. Unless they could!ĭouglas and Juliet believed that the place was theirs. They couldn’t all rent the apartment, of course. Even the actress Sean Young sought to be Tammaro’s roommate. to be near her widowed mother a photographer relocating from Berlin with her daughter during a contentious custody battle a South African cost manager hoping to jump-start her life a painter who’d left his girlfriend and needed a place to complete his transformation into a beautiful woman named Nyx. He showed Bon Tjeenk Willink, a Dutch consultant for Bain & Company, photos he’d taken of Kristen Stewart right where they were standing, and, Tjeenk Willink recalls, “He promised, ‘I’ll take you to all the Hollywood parties.’ I thought, I’m going to have the best time in New York!”Įveryone wanted in: an administrator for Madewell clothing who was returning from L.A. He was equal parts trusty Sherpa and romantic-comedy confidant. His sales pitch was devil-may-care: “Are you sure you don’t want to look around more? If it were me, I’d want to take a shower!” But he assured potential tenants that he’d get them membership in Soho House, or discounts at the nearby Sports Center at Chelsea Piers, or a visa for their girlfriend. For years, Tammaro had been Sting’s stylist and groomer, and a warm note from Trudie Styler, Sting’s wife, was posted in his guest bathroom.Īnd now Tammaro was renting out one of his bedrooms, or perhaps the whole place (he couldn’t quite seem to decide), so that, after a possible visit with his friend David Geffen in Malibu, he could spend a year in Sag Harbor assembling a book of his photographs. As he took the official photographs for the Tribeca Film Festival, or posed models for Vogue, as many as seven assistants would be adjusting the lighting, changing the lenses, and serving mojitos to managers and editors and hangers-on. Tammaro shot stars from Tina Fey to Spike Lee, putting his subjects at ease with a Boston-accented purr: “C’mon, baby, you’re so cute-yeah, you’re so sexy!” He used the apartment as his backdrop, and every detail of the scene promised access and glamour. On Facebook, he posted a photo of him and his dog on a rocky beach and captioned it “Family Portrait.” The one constant of his ever-changing décor was Tucker, a boisterous pit-bull-and-shepherd-mix rescue dog. In profile, Tammaro, who was fifty-four, resembled the Indian on the Buffalo nickel, but he was a fey charmer who adorned his shaved head with a driving cap and his arms with a Cartier watch and a gold Hermès bracelet. ![]() The apartment’s owner and impresario was a photographer named Michael Tammaro. Almost everything was dazzling white: walls, floors, furniture-even the books were cloaked in white jackets. The ceilings were eleven feet high, and the windows and pendant lamps flooded light across a wood-burning fireplace, Mies Barcelona chairs, and a West Elm sofa set topped with Hermès blankets. When they visited, Apartment 6-E at 211 West Twentieth Street proved even better than advertised. In the spring and summer of last year, people from all over-from Brazil, Norway, Spain, South Africa, Bangladesh, Japan, even the Upper West Side-pounced on a Craigslist ad for a base camp in Chelsea: a twenty-five-hundred-square-foot loft with two large bedrooms and two baths. If you can’t establish that base-the right apartment-the plunge is swift: you bounce to a friend’s couch, then to a squat in Bushwick, and suddenly you’re at the Port Authority holding a sign for bus fare home. To even begin the ascent requires agility, nerve, and a secure base camp. Manhattan, the vertical city, greets newcomers as a sheer rockface. ![]()
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