Carole Radziwill's Christmas Quest: Searching for Liam Neeson
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I'm not telling you to search for Liam Neeson. In fact, I'd prefer if you didn’t because I'm searching for him. I met him at a Christmas party one night and my knees buckled. If I knew how to swoon, I would have swooned. And it’s not because he’s a movie star. If you’ve met one you’ve met them all, and I’ve met more than my share.
It was because I got a glimpse of something I hadn’t seen in a while—the kind of man who stands up when a woman walks in the room, and pulls chairs out without fanfare. The kind who opens a cab door for a woman and instead of making her slide over, shuts it and walks around to the other side. The kind who picks a fight with a stranger because he spilled my drink. The kind who handles it.
There’s been some talk lately about “real men” and who they are. The conservative pundit Candace Owens mocked Harry Styles for posing in a Gucci dress on the cover of Vogue, declaring, not that anyone asked her, “Bring back manly men.” On the opposite side of the spectrum, former president Barack Obama invoked another masculine archetype, “the Gary Coopers, the Jimmy Stewarts, the Clint Eastwoods,” to draw a contrast with the current lame duck president: “Even if you are someone who is annoyed by wokeness and political correctness and want men to be men again and is tired about everyone complaining about the patriarchy, I thought that the model wouldn’t be Richie Rich—the complaining, lying, doesn’t-take-responsibility-for-anything type of figure.”
My idea of peak masculinity aligns with Gary Cooper but I will never tire of pointing out the flaws of the patriarchy. These ideas are not mutually exclusive. After all, isn’t what we think of as “manly men” simply core values and good manners? It is a conundrum that we have been obsessing about for a millennium, and one I came face to face with on a snowy December night eight years ago.
My run-in with Liam was free of controversy. It started over the eggnog. I was at Andy Cohen’s annual Christmas party, sitting on a counter in the kitchen watching the booze come and go. Andy’s annual party had started out small and as the years passed and he got bigger, so did the party. But you could count on the original core group of gay men and the stylish women who trailed them to be perched atop his royal blue couch every year.
There were two other things you could count on at this party: the brownies will get you stoned, and one surprise guest will show up. One year it was Madonna with her own chic entourage. She sat in the corner and grumbled about the music. Another year, during his lumbersexual phase, John Mayer showed up in flannel and stayed until the end. Once, I brought Susan Sarandon with me and she started chatting with a woman who looked a lot like Monica Lewinsky. We learned after she left, it was Monica Lewinsky.
On this particular night, I came early and staked my spot. I’d learned over the years that the kitchen was the best place to both be at the party and removed from it. It was backstage but you could still see the play.
I noticed his arrival by the way the people parted as he walked through the room. He came with a friend, a man named Frank. I knew Frank. I’d met him and his wife a few years earlier at a club called Bungalow 8. Frank’s the kind of guy you want to hang with. If you’re with Frank and need a drink one appears, if you’re looking for your purse in a crowded nightclub, he finds it. Frank’s a fixer. He knows all of the bouncers at all the good clubs, and apparently he knew Liam, too.
“Carole, great to see you!” Frank said and hugged me like an old friend. He introduced me to Liam.
“Hello,” Liam said in his Liam accent. “Nice to meet you,” I said back. And then I babbled. I told him how I’d met Frank, and what I’d talked about with Frank’s wife and a funny email she’d sent the next day. Oh my God. Shut up! I thought. I glanced at the half-eaten brownie in my hand. Liam leaned down.
“What was your name again?”
“Carole,” I said. Then, for no logical reason I added, “with an e."
The height and bulk of him was overwhelming, like finding yourself at the base of a California Redwood. I don’t remember what we went on to talk about because a few moments later another man walked past in the overcrowded room and bumped me out of his way, spilling my eggnog. I don’t recall one detail about the second man. I only remember Liam. He put his huge hand on my arm to steady me, and then I could hear his deep Rob Roy Irish voice: “Hey, listen. If you can’t watch where you’re going I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
Liam was going to ask this stranger to leave and it wasn’t even his apartment! The scene plays back to me in extremely sultry slow motion. The bump, the hand, the gentle giant dressed in rugged denim, rising up to my defense. Though had he been wearing a pleated tartan kilt, it would have been equally as swoon-worthy.
“It’s fine. Really.” I said. “No, it’s not fine.” He was upset. Scowling at the man, hand still on my arm. He had a point, and who was I to disagree? He’s Liam Neeson!
He guided me over to a less crowded corner and we… continued to talk. He loved dogs, I told him about my Boxer, Margaret. He said he wanted a whole pack of them, and I said I did, too. He had holiday plans in Antigua, and said his late wife Natasha had loved the island. I mentioned my late husband Anthony’s love of the sea. We were just two party guests talking about islands, dead spouses, and dogs. I can’t recall if there was a lull in the conversation, but I do know at one point he leaned in. “Would you mind if I kissed you?” he asked. I said, “Sure.”
Before I fell asleep that night, I thought of a million things to say besides “Sure.”
He kissed me anyway. Not a French kiss, but a longer-than-hello one. Frank was suddenly right next to us. “Hey, you know, we should all go out sometime," he said. I figured Frank was the key to a second meet-cute.
The three of us stood there for a minute and then got swept into the vortex of the crowd.
Reminiscing about all this now, during a very different holiday season, is partly about Liam Neeson and partly about inventing the perfect man. The truth is he'd had, noticeably, plenty to drink before he found his way to the eggnog, and his sauntering approach may have been more of a stagger. My brownie, too, I’m sure cast a flattering glow on the whole sequence of events. And there may, or may not, have been a mistletoe hanging nearby.
In that moment, Liam became the full-fledged fantasy of the widow who falls in love with a widower. Sleepless in Seattle but in New York. A tall gallant lovelorn man who would always know to open a door and let me walk in first, who’d make sure there was a driver to meet me at airports and that my health insurance was up-to-date.
He would put his dirty clothes in a laundry basket; he’d make the bed in the morning. He would leave sweet notes in places he’d know I’d look. His breath would be fresh in the morning and he would know the difference between fucking, and making love, and know when I wanted to do which. He’d wait patiently for me to get ready for dinner and then walk the dog when we came back tipsy and tired. He’d understand that “Netflix and chill” might mean binging all four seasons of The Killing or a documentary on Princess Diana.
The French writer Stendhal coined the term “crystallization.” It’s when you project impossibly perfect characteristics onto the object of your desire. And instead of really getting to know them, you just pile on the perfection. Red flags turn into virtues. Had I crystallized Liam Neeson?
After the holidays that year, I had dinner with my mother-in-law. I’d been widowed for nearly fifteen years and our relationship had changed. We had become more like close family friends, ones who make a point to keep in touch.
Lee, like me, was not overly sentimental, and this served us both well. When we got together our conversation was usually about current headlines. She was an insatiable reader and liked to talk about ideas or movies or books. But we also liked to talk about men.
I told her about Liam. She’s always been genuinely interested in whether, or who, I am dating. And when it came to men, Lee was very clever. She thought Liam would make a suitable date. She recalled meeting him years earlier, backstage at The Crucible.
“I’ll call Sherry,” she said in her elegant drawl. Sherry Lansing was the former head of Paramount Studios, and she and Lee were good friends. “I’ll call her in the morning and get his number.” She looked pleased with herself. She said she would then call Liam and arrange a proper meeting, and then a dinner. Although impossibly outdated, that was how Lee rolled.
Early the next morning Lee called. “Sherry has an old number,” she said. “But I’m going to get you Pat’s number.” Pat Manocchia was a family friend who’d been close to my husband and in the early 1990s he opened an exclusive gym on Central Park West where Anthony worked out. My office was across the street so sometimes I’d leave work and meet him there. The only other person I ever saw there was Howard Stern. In fact, it was famous for being the gym where Howard went, and apparently, according to Lee, so did Liam.
I hadn’t seen Pat since Anthony’s funeral in 1999, but in Lee’s scenario we’d pick right back up. I’d get the family discount on a membership and start going to the gym to find Liam. “I know plenty of women who meet their future husbands at the gym,” she said. Lee was old-fashioned but pragmatic.
Had I picked up the phone to call Pat, and had he offered me the family discount, and had I bought Lululemons and gotten on the uptown train each night, I may have run into Liam Neeson. But exercise was never my thing. And I lacked the inclination to search for a man, even a crystallized one.
Instead of Pat, I called my friend Marshall, who is the most dialed-in person I know, and told him about the swoon. Marshall knew a good story when he heard one. “Forget dating him,” he said. “Write a story about trying to find him.”
He began emailing every mention of Liam he could find. There he was at Café Luxumberg, and at the premiere of his new movie. Here he is on Madison Avenue with an unnamed woman, now he’s hosting Saturday Night Live. Each week, emails with invitations and Liam intel filled my inbox.
“It’s the modern-day Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” Marshall said.
“Wasn’t Diane Keaton stabbed to death in that?” I asked.
“You’re impossible,” he said. “It’s a sweet story, and I hear he has big... box office.”
At this point, most of my friends had heard some version of the swoon story. Some of them knew Liam well, including Andy whose overcrowded party was the reason I crystallized him in the first place. I didn’t take Marshall up on any of his suggestions, but I did go to a small dinner where I was randomly introduced to the agent of Liam’s mother-in-law, who by this time, was one of the few people in New York who hadn’t heard my story. He loved it, and said he'd find out if Liam was single. Two days later he sent me an email.
Subject: Liam
“Free and clear. Just fun.”
Not exactly a thrilling endorsement. Then, months later, I ran into a neighbor who was going on Andy’s talk show to promote her play. I texted Andy and asked if I could bartend. “Sure,” he replied. “Liam Neeson’s the other guest.”
I arrived early to the studio and took my spot behind the bar. Liam was running late, coming straight from a premiere. He looked more somber than I remembered. He said hello to everyone on the set, and took his seat.
For the next thirty minutes I stared at the back of the guests' heads. I couldn’t help but notice the chemistry between them. And I wondered if, on that long ago night, in Andy’s crowded living room, anyone had thought the same about us.
Nearly two years had gone by since that snowy December night and the start of my faux search and pretend perfect relationship. The swoon had steadied in the time since. I’d met a man twenty years younger, and he crystallized me. He was tall like Liam, and had that same sparkle in his eye. I had to slide over in the taxi and he left his clothes on my floor but he was fun. Liam, I realized, had unexpectedly crystallized something for me—while I desired a manly man, I did not need one. And that, ladies, is a world of difference.
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