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In the first week of 2003, I had lunch at the Russian Tea Room, which had gone bankrupt and closed its doors forever in the middle of 2002. Among the still hovering samovars, I ate takein pizza with tomatoes and fresh garlic. Rand Jerris, in the role of host, ate pizza with pepperoni. In low light over the red carpet, and in the rouge reflection from high walls of mirrors, we sat at a red banquette, in the ground-floor dining room, at 150 West Fifty-seventh Street, discussing golf.
The air was economically underheated, but not so much so that you could see your breath. Stained glass had been removed from a ceiling or two. Otherwise, nothing about the restaurant had yet been altered, and its festooned, Las Vegas decor remained as Russian as the Russian River. Everywhere in its six stories the place was eerie, dustless, immaculate, embalmed--spiffily glowing even in the dark. Its football-size "Faberge-inspired" eggs--blown on an island in the Lagoon of Venice by the incomparable Tagliapietra--still dangled from the branches of a golden tree. Dozens of golden bears still danced in the chandeliers; and the huge acrylic see-through bear that once had young sturgeons swimming in its stomach still stood fifteen feet high on its hind legs looking for its next fish. Jerris said that the acrylic bear was far too large for the elevator or the stairs, and would have to depart through dismantled facade, or, he added half seriously, be painted gold and stay put as a testimonial to Jack Nicklaus.
Jerris is the director of the Museum and Archives of the United States Golf Association, which has bought the Russian Tea Room, for sixteen million dollars, in bankruptcy court. The sale includes the eggs, the bears, the knives, the forks, the plates, the punch bowls, and the two-foot cutlasses that gave structural integrity to the Ivan Skavinsky kebab. The sale includes the Chagalls, the Picassos, the Kandinskys, the Kustodiev, the Surikov, the Golovin reproductions on the walls. The sale includes the marching army in the dioramic model of the Kremlin, over which the sun sets, the moon sets, and stars emerge. The United States Golf Association has a different kind of army, a different kind of gallery in mind....