October 13, 1995

In Death, Nicole Simpson Counters Domestic Violence

It is no secret in New York City's elite social circles that many of the poshest private parties feature only male waiters in a kind of modern-day outgrowth of a butler culture. But while it may be no secret, the American Civil Liberties Union says it is illegal. On behalf of a waitress, the A.C.L.U. filed a sex discrimination suit in Federal district court in Manhattan yesterday against Glorious Food Inc., a caterer that is a fixture of Manhattan's society circuit. The suit charges that the company, bowing to its wealthy clients' preferences, often bars its waitresses from working parties in private homes, which pay the best tips.

Mayor Sharpe James has been fined $44,000 for turning a charitable group that he founded into a political fund-raising arm and failing to disclose how its money was gathered or spent, said Frederick Herrmann, executive director of the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission.

WITH its marquee name not once but twice in its title, "Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is attracting the expected crowds. Never mind that it is a show about a largely technical business: deciding which paintings in the museum's collection Rembrandt painted and which ones he did not. For years now, the debate over his works has captured the imagination of a public that does not ordinarily seem to care much about such disputes. Scholars are always reattributing works that have big names attached to them, but the same ballyhoo rarely attends the announcement that a Rubens, say, is really a Theodoor van Thulden. So why Rembrandt? Many headlines have been generated by the pronouncements of the Rembrandt Research Project, a team of Dutch experts whose business for the last 25 years seems to have been gleefully knocking one after another beloved "Rembrandt" from its pedestal, so to speak. Vociferous reactions by distraught owners account for some of the headlines. But probably there would have been no project in the first place had Rembrandt not been, well, Rembrandt.

In September 1993, Arnold P. Cohen arrived in Eldersburg, Md., as chief executive of the London Fog Corporation, the raincoat maker. He soon announced that he was closing the company's five plants there, moving production overseas and the headquarters to Darien, Conn. "The reality is that the fashion industry is located in Manhattan and we wanted to move closer," Mr. Cohen told reporters.