| Issue #33, November 10, 2006 |
Who’s Here
Deborah Grubman
Realtor
By Dan Rattiner
Deborah Grubman is a charming and beautiful woman, who, along with her husband Alan Grubman, is one of the more powerful figures in the city of New York and in the Hamptons. Alan is an entertainment lawyer. Deborah Grubman is, by many accounts, one of the half dozen most important real estate figures in the city.
This year, Deborah Grubman is the chairman of one of the biggest charity fundraisers in the City, the Rita Hayworth Alzheimer’s Gala, to be held at the Waldorf Astoria on November 14. As a result, it seemed a good time to get to know her better. We met in New York and I spent an hour or two with her talking about her life.
Deborah Grubman was born in New York City, and raised in Spring Valley, in Rockland County. Her father worked as an Engineer at IBM for much of his life and holds several patents. And so he would commute from their home the short distance to the IBM facility in Fishkill.
Both of Deborah’s parents are Holocaust survivors. Her father was one of the Partisans in Czechoslovakia, and he was arrested and sent to a labor camp. Much of the rest of his family was destroyed. Her mother was from Poland and when the Soviet Army swept through, they arrested her mother’s father, whom they considered to be a Capitalist. When he was taken away, his wife and children — among them Deborah’s mother — were taken to Siberia, where they were incarcerated for the remainder of the war. Her mother and father met in a Displaced Person’s Camp after the war, and they were married in America in 1950.
Deborah went to Spring Valley High School. She was an excellent student and decided she wanted to become a teacher of high school math and science. To that end, she applied and was accepted at SUNY Albany with a full regent’s scholarship, where, during her third year, she got married to her first husband.
“After graduation, my husband and I moved to Miami Beach, and then to Los Angeles. He was in the jewelry business, in manufacturing, importing, retail and sales. I had my first child in Miami Beach, the second in Los Angeles. And I gave up teaching. Then, after fifteen years of marriage, we got a divorce. The kids were 9 and 12. I wondered what I would do?”
Deborah had, at that point, already begun to dabble in real estate.
“When we moved to Los Angeles,” she said, “I wanted to financially contribute to the family. There were, at that time, a large group of Iranians moving into Beverly Hills. The Shah had been deposed. It seemed like an opportunity for me. So I began, as a hobby and to bring in money, to buy houses, fix them up a bit and flip them at a profit. It certainly did help the family.”
The work was fun for Deborah, although for a long time she did not consciously think about why. Soon, however, it became apparent.
“From the time I was little, I enjoyed seeing how people lived.
“I remember in my early twenties, if somebody said would you like to meet at the pub or would you like to come over to the house, I’d always say I’ll come over to the house.”
There may have been some part of this that was her curiosity, but Deborah also believed the visual cues she saw in someone’s home told her a great deal about what people were like. So it gave her confidence to proceed or not to proceed with whatever friendship she had been considering.
“I always liked to look in people’s closets,” she said.
As for where she should settle with her kids now that she was on her own, she decided to return to New York City. It was where she was from. At the present time, she works with the Corcoran Group.
I asked Deborah what else she liked about the real estate business.
“I like everything about it,” she said. “Especially in New York, but everywhere.” She proceeded to elaborate. “If I could learn about people from how they lived, I could become even more involved by helping them buy or sell. Real estate is often about change, about financial changes, about upgrade, about death, marriage and divorce. It is a very pivotal time, sometimes happy or sometimes sad, but for someone like me, always exciting.
“There are basically two kinds of people. The collectors who accumulate things. They will fall in love with a house and keep it forever. It is their home and they wouldn’t part with it for anything. And they fill it with stuff. Often they are packrats.
“The other kind of person can also be acquisitive, but is less attached to it. If you like something they will sell it to you. They like taking something apart and redoing it, then when the process is over, moving on. They consider what they do as part of a creative process. They are traders. And so you have traders and collectors. As a real estate broker, I try to help both sorts.”
In 1989, at a cocktail party celebrating the opening of the Fendi Store on Fifth Avenue, she met Alan Grubman.
“He was smart and he was very funny. He was for me.”
The Grubmans live in Manhattan and have a home in East Hampton. If Deborah came to the party with two kids, so did Alan. Today, all four are out of college and either starting or proceeding on their own careers. The eldest is a girl who is married and expecting and owns her own public relations firm. The second, also a girl, is an attorney who advises charitable organization, and is about to have twins
“I’m about to become a grandmother three times in one year!” Deborah said, happily interrupting her survey.
“The third, a boy, is in the real estate business in Los Angles. And the youngest, another girl, is a writer in Manhattan who just produced a book about Walking Tours of New York.”
It is all-together a very successful family.
Deborah became involved with the Alzheimer’s Gala after being approached by Yasmin Aga Kahn, whose mother Rita Hayworth, died from this dreadful disease.
“That was fifteen years ago,” Deborah said. “I joined the Committee. And we’ve been raising money ever since to try to wipe it out. Probably half of all Americans will suffer from this disease by age 85. It hasn’t been wiped out.”
Come to the gala, a formal affair, white tie and tails, on Tuesday evening November 14 at the Waldorf.
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