No man is an island except Coney

He stops his drifting ways long enough for a blowout for 50th

May 6, 2008

Les Coney is a social superhero: He typically leaps through a half-dozen parties in a single night.

So when he turned 50 on April 28, more than 200 luminaries turned out to toast the occasion, and there was a lot of teasing about seeing him grounded in one spot, the Casino, a private club at 195 E. Delaware.

Boeing CFO James Bell said, "Most of us who know Les well know he usually has five or six things to do, so this is just a drive-by."

Another speaker, Goodman Theatre executive director Roche Schulfer, joked, "When you look up 'connect' in the dictionary, it should say, 'to Coney.' " He continued with a Letterman-style Top 10 list of the reasons he was honored to be among those celebrating Coney's birthday. No. 5: "Les can't leave this party early [to go to another one]."

There's a reason his social calendar is packed: Coney is a one-man philanthropic powerhouse. He's a trustee of the School of the Art Institute, the founding chairman of Congo Square Theatre, the immediate past chairman of the Goodman Theatre and a member of Barack Obama's national finance committee. By day, he's an executive vice president at Mesirow Financial.

Partygoers included Ebony magazine CEO Linda Johnson Rice, who hosted Coney at her 50th birthday party in Palm Springs, Calif., last month ("We're both in the better half of our lives now," she said); state Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, who shares a 1,000-point basketball record with Coney's son Javon at Latin High School (Javon now plays for the University of Colorado); actress Regina Taylor ("The Unit"), and director Harold Ramis.

Coney has a cameo in Ramis' upcoming film "Year One," starring Jack Black. "It's a historical epic comedy, and I put Les in a costume," Ramis said. "So it might be hard to identify him out there dressed as a Bedouin."

Blackstone reopening

Nearly a century before my first night out, the favorite hang of Chicago's most glamorous night crawlers was born: the Blackstone Hotel, 636 S. Michigan. It's ba-ack.

The landmark hotel staged a reopening party Wednesday night (it closed in 1999), celebrating a $128 million renovation. From the famed Crystal Ballroom to the lobby's gilded French walnut paneling, every detail was restored -- with just a few modern touches.

More than a thousand guests checked out the posh presidential suite, where President Harry S Truman honeymooned in 1919. Upstairs, in the clubby Smoke-Filled Room (where the term was coined in 1920), a historian discussed Lucky Luciano's first Crime Convention, which was held at the Blackstone in 1931. Scenes from Tom Cruise's "The Color of Money" were filmed there in the mid-'80s, and a "speakeasy" had the movie playing on flat-screen TVs while guests played blackjack, craps and roulette.

Twelve presidents have stayed at the hotel, and in a nod to one of the only 20th century presidents who didn't stay there, author Carol Felsenthal hosted a round-table discussion of her new book, Clinton in Exile: A President Out of the White House.

I asked if she remembered the hotel's heyday. "When I was a kid growing up in Rogers Park, I would go to bar mitzvahs at the Blackstone," recalled Felsenthal. "This place was the to-die-for hotel."

More than 1,000 guests attended, including orchestra leader Stanley Paul, who also remembered it fondly. "I played here in the '60s, and it's where the most glamorous weddings were held," he said. "To see it come back is incredible."