Outraged for being outed by Barbara Walters
PUSSSYKATT
HE'S been a loving companion of Philip Johnson for 43 years without incident
and without drawing attention to himself, but David Whitney has finally spoken
out about how furious he is with Barbara Walters for outing him.
"I'm going to kill that woman," Whitney says, only half-jokingly. It's an old
feud, dating back to the mid-'70s, when Walters upbraided Johnson, America's
greatest living architect, for keeping Whitney out of sight. She insisted that
Johnson start taking his lover out in public.
"I didn't have to go to the parties until she got into the act," Whitney
complains in the July issue of W magazine. Until then, he had left the
socializing to Johnson while he moved in more artistic and creative circles.
"The assumption [by Walters] is that I wanted to be at Jayne Wrightman's when I
really didn't want to be at Jayne Wrightman's, believe me," he says.
(Walters confirms telling Johnson, at a Kitty Hart lunch and with Jackie
Kennedy Onassis at their table, that he should bring Whitney out with him. "I
said, 'Philip, here is this person you care about, who is so important in your
life. Why don't we ever see him?" the ABC newswoman recalls.)
That's about the only gripe Whitney, who is 63 to Johnson's 96, has about life
with the great man. They seem as comfortable together as any long-married
couple and still chuckle about the 90th birthday celebrations for Johnson when
Whitney told the distinguished audience that "Philip was still good in the
sack."
Whitney recalls their love-at-first-sight meeting when he was a 23-year-old
student at the Rhode Island School of Design and walked to the nearby Brown
campus to hear Johnson lecture. They've been together ever since, living at
Philip's famous Glass House in Connecticut and the woodsy retreat Whitney
designed for them in Big Sur, above the wild Pacific Coast.
Footnote: W has another wicked little piece in the July issue. They preview a
series of drawings by Hamptons landscape artist Perry Guillot. Perry has
imagined a privet hedge featuring the good, the bad and the ugly in the history
of Southampton. Prominent among them is a caricature of Lizzie Grubman clipped
off at the knees, "like she did to those people," the artist says.
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