Ladies!(The Talk of the Town)(Cindy Adams)(Interview)

"Hello! I'm your hostess!" Cindy Adams was saying as she stood in the entryway of her Park Avenue apartment, welcoming a small group of women to a ladies' tea for Marianne Williamson, the New Age author, and Ellen Burstyn, the actress and memoirist. Adams did not know all her guests, since the party had been conceived in Burstyn's public-relations office rather than in the generous heart of New York's saltiest gossip columnist, but she struck a note of instant intimacy.

"Can I tell you, these crappy dogs just cost me nine hundred dollars to do their teeth, and that's with the fifteen-per-cent discount the vet gave me?" Adams asked, as her two Yorkies, Jazzy and Juicy, swirled around her feet in a brown-and-black blur, before disappearing behind a concealed door into the kitchen. The apartment, she explained, had belonged to Doris Duke before Adams and her late husband, Joey, bought it, a decade ago, and while its silk-upholstered walls and lavish chinoiserie reflected Adams's taste, a few traces of Duke remained. These included a black vinyl ceiling in the living room, embedded with spotlights ("She had fluorescents; I have Lalique," Adams said), and a large ceramic bathtub, used by Adams as a storage space for old magazines. The bathtub was behind another of the apartment's concealed doors, which Adams flung open to reveal her combined dressing room and office, the walls and ceiling of which were covered with laminated tabloid front pages displaying Adams's scoops.

"The apartment is huge, but I live in this room and the kitchen--don't we all live in one room?" she said. One of the guests, Gloria Vanderbilt, nodded in agreement, whereupon Adams complimented her on her blouse. "It's from Takashimaya," Vanderbilt said. "They have a sleeveless one like it."

"I don't even take a shower in sleeveless anymore," Adams replied.

Burstyn, who was to appear that evening at the 92nd Street Y with Williamson, stood under Duke's black ceiling and explained that her memoir, "Lessons in Becoming Myself," concerned her life's spiritual journey. "I'm a Sufi," she explained, with a beneficent smile. "I like the expression 'I am one cell in the mind of God.' " Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of the best-selling memoir "Eat, Pray, Love," was telling Parker Posey that she had recently bought an eighteenth-century Presbyterian church in New Jersey to live in. "It's very Yankee, with fifteen-foot wavy-glass windows," Gilbert said, before adding that Julia Roberts had signed on to star in the movie version of her book. Gilbert said that she had asked her sister, a historian, whether she should beware ...