Last February the legendary columnist and author Cynthia Heimel died — here’s my obit. Six days ago Stephen Saban, Heimel’s nocturnal partner-in-crime and droll columnist for the Soho Weekly News and Details in the late ’70s and ’80s, died from pancreatic cancer. I don’t know what my deficiency is, but I only heard today.
Saban and Heimel were major Manhattan scenesters in that overlapping Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan era. They visited every hot Manhattan club, knew everyone, partied’ till the end. I knew and liked Stephen as far as it went; we were always trading notes in Manhattan screening rooms. He moved to Los Angeles sometime in the mid to late ’90s, but he wasn’t at all communicative when I reached out three or four years ago. I tried again after Heimel died…zip. Saban and Heimel were joined at the hip back in the day, but late in life they more or less dropped each other by mutual consent. People can be odd that way.
Details columnist Stephen Saban, Linda Evans in 1985.
Here’s a Saban tribute piece by Michael Musto, excerpted from his 1986 book “Downtown“:
“Stephen Saban, one of the founder/editors of Details and its nightlife columnist as well as a former club doorman, was actually the first to give the downtown scene credibility. (Some say he created the scene so he could write about it.) In 1985, as Details, the monthly New Testament of downtown, grew from a free mailout to a newsstand magazine that reaches over 40,000 readers (grossing in the neighborhood of a million dollars that year), Saban started to reap the rewards of his dedication to 14th Street and below. He became recognized as ‘the Boswell of the night‘ by New York magazine and ‘the Noel Coward of the ‘80s’ by Newsweek. Publicists started returning his calls, though he didn’t always return theirs, and people started recognizing the ‘nobodies’ he insisted on writing about as nobodies worth knowing.
“Saban goes out every night of the week, only rarely awarding himself a night off, which means going to only one or two parties instead of the usual three to five. He’s one of the few predictable facets of New York nightlife — you know that at every major event, no matter what else happens, you’ll find him there, skulking around and observing with a crisp understatement. Saban doesn’t need to make a spectacle of himself; the spectacle is all around him, and his job is to report it, drawing the line only when he feels the information might interfere with his readers’ future fun. Sometimes Saban seems like Marcello Mastroianni in 8 1/2: besieged by swooning and pleading people cooing his name as he calmly tries to figure his next creative move.