March 10, 1991

New York City's Labor Relations Commissioner resigned yesterday, charging that the city's Budget Director had misled municipal unions and Wall Street. But Mayor David N. Dinkins rejected the charge and said his administration had misled no one. The Labor Commissioner, Eric J. Schmertz, said that the Budget Director, Philip R. Michael, had "misconstrued" and "miscast" Mr. Schmertz's description of negotiations of wage deferrals for city employees, in a memo Mr. Michael sent to a major bond-rating agency last month.

THOUGH the recession may have eroded property prices and sales elsewhere, it has had no effect on expensive houses in this ski resort. In the six weeks ended Jan. 25, for example, the Multiple Listing Service reported five new homes -- three of them built on speculation -- sold for a total of $8.425 million.

Every era gets the psychos it deserves, at least in art. Our own violent culture has splattered us with real-life assassins and serial killers who have pervaded our consciousness through television and newspapers and left a disturbing, revealing, often entertaining legacy of fictional lunatics. The past month or so has brought three genres of highly publicized psycho-killers, each an unmistakable product of this cultural moment. Jonathan Demme's movie "The Silence of the Lambs" is more than an artistic and commercial success. Based on mind games between a young woman F.B.I trainee and a psychiatrist who happens to be a most intelligent cannibal, it is the only film in recent memory that deserves to be compared to Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 classic, "Psycho." It is a "Psycho" for our day, intensified for a period more psychologically aware and more inured to violence.

Washington has today a National Gallery of Art toward which people move as if magnetized. For the Washingtonian, it is never out of the news. For the first-time visitor, it has legendary status. For the museum watcher, it is a repository of major art, from Duccio and van Eyck to Matisse and Diebenkorn, that sits still and minds its own business. (It is also, and more controversially, a competitive institution that is conspicuous for its hyperactivity.) The National Gallery bears nobody's name, but it is a matter of common knowledge that without Andrew W. Mellon (1855-1937) and without his son, Paul (born in 1907), and his daughter, Ailsa (1901-1969), the National Gallery as we know it would not exist. Andrew Mellon paid for the building, donated his Old Master collection (which since 1931 had included no fewer than 21 major paintings from the Hermitage in Leningrad) and left the gallery an endowment fund. Ailsa Mellon Bruce in her lifetime was the gallery's single greatest benefactor, and she left her entire collection to it. Since her death, Paul Mellon has sustained the National Gallery of Art to an extent that he will not allow to be spelled out. Today he is the largest and the most discerning donor that the American museum world has known in the second half of this century.

Some years ago, when I was looking for lively material to discuss in a book about diaries, I knew, even before I got the text of her journals, that Betsey Wynne, a British naval wife during the Napoleonic wars, would make the cut. A single heading in the diary's index was enough to satisfy me: dislikes Bombelles family, 119, 157, 164, 165, 170, 174, 175, 177-9, 183, 184, 186, 187, 190, 191, 202, 207, 208, 211, 213, 220, 224, 225, 229, 230, 231, 235, 236, 254, 260, 261, 271. Surely this would be a woman with some personality.