AVENUE - November 2004
By Janet Allon
Photographs by Tiffany Walling McGarity and John McGarity

Tonya's Time

Tony Bennett crooned, Wynton Marsalis wailed and a trim Al Roker beamed at his recent surprise 50th birthday party. Despite the star-studded assemblage, Roker's wife, Deborah Roberts, couldn't help noticing the swirl of activity around her friend Tonya Lee. "People wanted to talk to and know Tonya as much as Spike,” Roberts says. "She's sharp, fun, kind and beautiful. Who wouldn't want to have her at their party? But she's also selective about the social events she makes, and she always makes an impact:”

By all accounts, Tonya Lee is stepping into her own light. With a new novel out this past summer, TV projects, two flourishing school-age children, a chic, luxurious and comfortable Upper East Side townhouse, and more social invitations than she can possibly attend, Lee is very much a woman in her prime. Just ask her famous husband. "People are definitely not just looking at her as Spike Lee's wife anymore;' he says on the telephone. "She's always had these talents and abilities, she was just busy doing other things. Everything is always about timing. This was the summer of Tonya."

For one thing, it was the summer of Tonya Lee and her co-writer Crystal Anthony's book tour. The two women, Upper East Side neighbors and friends, wrote Gotham Diaries, a novel that portrays the intersecting lives, ambitions, foibles and betrayals of members of Manhattan's black upper crust. It's a world that has been largely absent on the literary landscape. "We figured, we've seen the world of Sex and the City,” Lee says. "We've seen the world of Dominick Dunne. We wanted to show this world that Crystal and I both know."

Clearly, it is a world that both writers inhabit and ponder deeply. "We wanted to show the nuances of wealthy African Americans,” Anthony explains in a telephone interview. "You know, they're not all athletes or comedians. They are bankers, Wall Streeters, Rhodes Scholars and more.”

The Lee family moved to the Upper East Side six years ago, surprising some Spike Lee fans. The filmmaker's office is still in Brooklyn and he insists he has not forsaken his native borough. But motherhood made Tonya Lee feel more vulnerable in their Fort Greene townhouse. "Everyone knew exactly where we lived,” she says, sitting in her quiet, skylit kitchen. "When Satchel [their daughter, now 9] was born, people were ringing the bell at all hours." The Lees rented in SoRo for awhile and scoured the downtown landscape for a suitable home, but never quite clicked with a space. Then they found this house, a gem nestled behind an unassuming gate on a quiet uptown side street. Here, it seems, generations of a family could be comfortable forever. "Here,” Tonya Lee says, "we are much more anonymous."

The palazzo-like house, complete with a spacious inner courtyard, has an intriguing artistic pedigree. The Lees bought it from Jasper Johns, who had used it as his New York studio. Before that, one of history's more famous strippers, Gypsy Rose Lee, lived there. “My 7-year-old son Jackson says he sees Gypsy Rose's ghost sometimes,” Spike Lee laughs. "Tonya freaks out and says it isn't true, but I believe my son." They both fell in love with the house, but Tonya says Spike fell the hardest. "My husband says he never wants to move from this house,” she says. "This is it."

“Everything is always about timing. This was the summer of Tonya.”

A tour through the 9,800-square-foot home reveals why another move could prove daunting. Spike Lee is quite the collector - his wife thinks "collector" might be the polite word. African-American art and memorabilia, early Basquiat sketches, Romare Bearden watercolors, original Langston Hughes poems and photos by Harlem renaissance photographer Gordon Parks line hallways and stairs. One set of stairs opens into Spike's office, a virtual museum of sports and movie memorabilia - from framed Brooklyn Dodgers jerseys to slates from each Spike Lee films, every surface full to bursting.

Tonya Lee admits she had her doubts about the Upper East Side at first. "I thought it would be a stodgy place. My friends teased me about how I'd become a lady in a fur coat with a small dog on a leash. Now that I'm here, I see it differently. The neighborhood is still in New York City. You still see so much diversity on the streets - racial and economic. Of course, my eye has become accustomed to it, to all the Birkin bags walking on the block.”

A preferred hangout is Amaranth at 62nd near Madison. "They play good music,” Lee says. "The cosmos are great. It's very comfortable." The Post House and Mediterraneo on Second Avenue are also staples, as is Fred's at Barney's for lunch. A favorite nearby boutique is Lingerie on Lex.

Adding to her comfort with the neighborhood is the fact that friends, like Roberts and Roker, are near. The two families socialize regularly. "Al is an amazing cook," Lee says. "We go over there for brunch sometimes." Around the corner, writing partner Anthony lives with her two young children. Halloween is spent with Jeannie Ashe, Arthur Ashe's widow, whose nearby building goes all out for the festivities. Playdates with some of the children's private school classmates are not difficult to arrange with nearby friends. And Spencer Means, the premier real estate broker to New York's African-American elite, whom Lee describes as her "hanging bud,” and who is the inspiration for one of Gotham Diaries' more memorable characters, is just across the park and ready to squire her around to social events that Spike cannot attend. In the summer, the family decamps to Martha's Vineyard, to their house in Oak Bluffs, where, Lee says, they escape the New York scene altogether and socialize with a whole different group of friends.

Tonya Lewis and Spike Lee met 12 years ago at a gala dinner for the Congressional Black Caucus. "We walked past each other,” Tonya says. "He circled back around and proceeded to give me the third degree. 'Are you an actress? A model? A singer? Who are you here with? What do you do? Do you have a boyfriend?'"

Spike was there promoting his film Malcolm X. Tonya remembers thinking it strange for him to be so animated given his enormous public image, but apparently, he was smitten at first sight. One year later they were married.

Spike had been raised in an artistic family, but Tonya Lewis's upbringing was more conservative. Her father was a corporate executive, her mother a schoolteacher, and Tonya was steered to pursue a reliable career path. A concert-level pianist, she practiced corporate law when she met Spike, submerging her more creative side. Marrying the prodigiously successful filmmaker offered her both the financial freedom and the inspiration to unleash it more fully. After the marriage, she gave up practicing law, and poured her energy into creating a prototype for a magazine on black entertainment and fashion; she also started writing. "I think I've always been creative;' she says. "I was what they call a shadow artist. Plus I've learned a lot from watching Spike and how he works. The first thing you write doesn't have to be award-winning. I've come to understand and trust the process."

Her early writing efforts were geared to a young audience. "When you become a mother,” Lee says, "you look at the market and wonder, “what is there for them to read?'" She and Spike wrote a children's book called Please Baby Please, which followers of his movies will recognize as the signature line of the character he played in his breakout film She's Gotta Have It. Tonya has also written and produced thought-provoking television documentaries for young people.

She met Anthony a dozen years ago at a Knicks game. The two women quickly discovered they had more in common than basketball. Both were lawyers and both harbored a desire to write. Several years into their friendship, Lee invited Anthony to accompany her to the Cannes Film Festival, since Spike's schedule would be packed with press junkets and such. Breathing the heady, creative air that is common at film festivals, they resolved to start writing together.

Enter Spencer Means. The former Tiffany salesman-turned-Corcoran power broker had sold the Lees' Fort Greene townhouse, helped Anthony find a home by combining three adjacent apartments in the East 60s, and been enlisted by Tonya to help give her spacious home a more cozy feel. As a broker to many well-heeled New Yorkers, he had stories to tell, and an engaging way of telling them in his native Alabama accent. In Means, the two had their Nick Caraway, their Holly Golightly with a twist, their narrator who is simultaneously an insider and an outsider to a rarefied world. Manny Marks, the character based on Means, evolved into the central figure of Lee and Anthony's Gotham Diaries.

The world of the black elite portrayed and gently satirized in the book is a kind of parallel universe in which the competition for social standing is cutthroat, and the universal desire for advancement and acceptance is evident. "I think it's great that people see that African-Americans like this exist,” says Deborah Roberts, who says she enjoyed the book. "We know lots of people like this."

Realistic, but not real, Manny Marks gets entwined in a crooked real estate deal in an effort to keep up with a lifestyle that is constantly eluding him. His real-life and much more honest counterpart, Means, admits that Manny has in some ways increased his mystique. "It's sort of like Alexis Carrington and Joan Collins,” he laughs. "People want to sit down and talk with me as if I am Manny."

In both the fictional world of the book and the real world on which it is based, the Studio Museum of Harlem's annual gala at the end of October is the highlight of the social season. The institution is one that Lee supports, along with Jazz at Lincoln Center and Kids for Kids. She also sits on the board of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and has helped raise money for educational programs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Now that her kids are a little older, she finds more time to socialize-and the invitations are overflowing. "I want to support my friends' creative projects, because I so appreciate all the people who supported me;' she says. "But I still have to limit how much I go out, otherwise my children get really mad at me."

One solution is to host the parties. "I love throwing parties for no more than 20 people-with candles, good music, good food and good conversation," Lee says. "For me, a good party is made by the mix of people and how everyone gets along. And interesting conversation."

When the weather is warm, friends are invited to enjoy the house's internal courtyard. Lee threw Means a party in her home when he was promoted to vice president at Corcoran. Not too long ago, she and Spike hosted a book party for the Harlem Renaissance photographer Roy De Garva. Wynton Marsalis came to that party, too, this time playing happy birthday to Jackson on his horn.

With some of the hubbub around Gotham Diaries settling, Tonya Lee is busy producing a television series called Miracles Boys and plotting another novel with Anthony. Her husband feels he has to caution her about what might lie in store for those who choose the creative life. "I tell her, people are nice the first time around,” he says. "The second time, they aren't so nice. That's when they take the knives out."