~BAIRD JONES/RIP
SATURDAY – FEBRUARY 23, 2008
PAGE SIX – THE NEW YORK POST TODAY REPORTS . . “We’ll miss you, Baird Jones”
quote:
“BAIRD JONES went out with a bizarre bang this week – the way he would have wanted it. The wacky 53-year-old publicist, who claimed to have invented the sport of midget bowling and had a bottomless well of celebrity stories he fed to Page Six and other gossip columns, was found dead of an apparent heart attack yesterday in his Greenwich Village apartment – after neighbors noticed newspapers piling up at his door for several days. . . Jones was ‘a one-of-a-kind character, a true New York eccentric,’ said publicist R. Couri Hay. ‘He was always completely loaded, but was always lucid.’ As to whether Jones is watching all of the fuss over his passing from a perch in heaven, Hay quipped: ‘Heaven? He’s lucky if he’s in purgatory!'”
here’s the last artlovers photo of Baird Jones – just as he’d like it to be – with a pretty young girl – he’d be promising p.r. – on his arm !!
BAIRD JONES, in his ubiquitous YANKEES cap, with aspiring graffiti artist, MELLITZA, strolling down 27th Street, for a night of summer art gallery openings, Chelsea, NYC, JULY 12, 2007
PHOTO: NANCY SMITH
THE DAILY NEWS reports: that Jones died Thursday night. (FEB 21, 2008)
. . . and that police said “there were no signs of foul play and no drugs in the apartment.”
“A friend of his told the Daily News that Jones, the son of People Magazine co-founder Cranston Jones, recently complained about being ‘sick as a dog’.”
“In 1995, while covering Arthur Miller’s 80th birthday party for The News, Baird Jones asked the playwright about the most intimate details of his relationship with Marilyn Monroe, Miller, fists clenched, chased him out of the party.
“After graduating from th Buckley School and Columbia University and earning several advanced degrees, Jones became one of the city’s first club promoters, working the door of Studio 54 in its prime.”
see: THE DAILY NEWS ARTICLE
and our very fave photo of BAIRD:
the original caption read:
“on the left, celebrity maven BAIRD JONES, recently profiled in the New York Times, with DANIEL REICH, at the JACK PIERSON opening, ‘Early Works’, DANIEL REICH GALLERY, DEC 15, 2005 (… a little more than just a handful of people would have paid good money – to have seen that scarf pulled just a little bit – tighter !!)”
PHOTO: NANCY SMITH