The Peeler Guy: Making Mint $5 at a Time

[jeffrey]

By night, Joe Ades dines with his fourth wife at exclusive restaurants, sips Veuve Clicquot at the Pierre, and goes home to a three-bedroom Park Avenue apartment. By day, he is something else altogether. At 72, the “peeler guy” in the Turnbull & Asser shirts is a New York legend.

In the early 90s a man named Joe Ades began showing up in the bar at the Pierre, Manhattan’s famously posh hotel on the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 61st Street. Joe liked the crowd at the Café Pierre, but the real draw for him was Kathleen Landis, the dimpled, piano-playing house chanteuse who still entertains there five nights a week. Joe was a five-nights-a-week man as well, always seated at the same round table with a front view of the baby grand and a back view of Landis. He drank only champagne, and never alone. His usual brand was Veuve Clicquot. On most nights he casually ordered a bottle, which always appeared with two champagne glasses—one for himself, the other for Landis.

Even by the standards of café society, Joe cut a noticeably soigné figure in his classic, British-made Chester Barrie suits and bold shirts and ties from Turnbull & Asser. The clothes went well with his English accent and late-period Sean Connery salt-and-pepper beard. He looked so distinguished and was so free with the bubbly that the Café Pierre crowd, Landis included, at first had him pegged as one of the “owners”—the tycoons who actually live at the Pierre in stupendously high-end co-op apartments...

The Gentleman Grafter: Entertainment & Culture: vanityfair.com