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Gene Cavallero Jr., Who Ran the Colony Restaurant, Dies at 92

Gene Cavallero Jr. in a Colony dining room in 1971. He closed the restaurant that year.Credit...Librado Romero/The New York Times

Gene Cavallero Jr., who took over his father’s fabled Manhattan restaurant, the Colony, and maintained it as a gilt-edged gathering place for the social elite and the international jet set, died on June 4 in Phoenix. He was 92.

His death was confirmed by his son Gene Cavallero III.

Mr. Cavallero teamed up with his father at the Colony in the early 1950s, sharing the all-consuming task of cosseting a highly demanding clientele that regarded the restaurant, at the corner of Madison Avenue and 61st Street, as an extension of their living rooms and its owners as their personal concierges.

The Colony occupied a lofty perch in New York City’s dining scene. Founded in 1919 and bought by Gene Cavallero Sr. with two partners in 1922, it struggled initially, known for its clientele of playboys trolling for dates and businessmen with their mistresses.

The heiress and socialite Virginia Fair Vanderbilt put it on the map when she wandered in for lunch, decided she liked the place and recommended it to her friends, despite its louche reputation. “It was a place frequented by — how do you say — the demimondaines of New York,” Gene Sr. told The New York Times in 1959.

The cream of New York society followed Mrs. Vanderbilt’s lead, pulling in their wake the mix of celebrities and socialites known as cafe society. The Duke of Windsor decided that the little bar at the front of the restaurant was great fun, and planted his flag there. The Colony was now it, and would remain so for decades.

“It was fun, fun, fun — refined, polished, glamorous, giddy,” the fashion and society columnist Aileen Mehle told Vanity Fair in 2000.

By the time Gene Jr. took over the restaurant in the mid-1950s, it was playing host to an endless procession of boldface names: Lee Radziwill, Jacqueline Kennedy, Charles Revson, Frank Sinatra, Orson Welles. Diana Vreeland and Truman Capote added their names to the list.

Like his father, Mr. Cavallero played the roles of confidant and fixer for his customers. The Colony extended credit to loyal clients down on their luck. It sent meals to their apartments when they were unhappy or ailing. It set aside a private room for their dogs, who could recline on poofy satin pillows and eat special meals from silver trays. The Colony was, Mr. Cavallero told The Times, “the most expensive neighborhood boardinghouse in the world.”

The fashion designer Oleg Cassini brought Grace Kelly and her mother to the Colony to propose marriage, unsuccessfully, to Kelly, the future princess of Monaco.

It was Mr. Cavallero who first got wind of the impending marriage of Mrs. Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis, another frequent patron. “It took only two Colony dinners for me to see where they were heading,” he told The Times in 1971, the year the restaurant closed.

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The bar at the Colony, in 1943.Credit...Eric Schaal/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images

The news traveled fast. “I telephoned Earl Wilson and told him, ‘Earl, you always tell me I owe you a big one,’” Mr. Cavallero told Vanity Fair, referring to one of the best-known gossip columnists of the day. “‘Well, here it is.’”

Gene Julius Cavallero Jr. was born on Dec. 23, 1923, in Manhattan. After graduating from Loyola School, he attended Cornell. But he was expelled for punching a teacher and enlisted in the National Guard.

He spent the war years working for what was then called Grumman Aircraft Engineering on Long Island and, relying on his father’s extensive contacts in Europe, apprenticed at hotels in Switzerland, France and Italy.

Returning to the United States, he worked briefly at the Knickerbocker Hotel, where his father had once been a waiter, before joining his father at the Colony. One of the most important hires of his tenure was a young Italian waiter named Sirio Maccioni, who was quickly promoted to maître d’hôtel and went on to create his own celebrity restaurant, Le Cirque.

In 1950 Mr. Cavallero married Patricia Mahoney, the daughter of Francis Mahoney, a New York State senator. She died in 2007. In addition to his son Gene, he is survived by another son, Francis; a daughter, Catherine Oursler; and four grandchildren.

With the 1960s, the Colony began to show its age. Mr. Cavallero banned miniskirts, then relented. He tried to bar pantsuits, but again gave in.

Still, a residual glamour adhered to the restaurant. Photographers dispatched by John Fairchild, who became publisher of Women’s Wear Daily in 1960, snapped pictures of Betsy Bloomingdale, Amanda Burden, Jill St. John and other regulars as they left the Colony after lunch.

But as the 1970s loomed, terminal fatigue set in. The new social set found other places to dine. Gael Greene, the saucy restaurant critic for New York magazine, drove the final nail in the coffin in a lethal review titled “Colony Waxworks.” Mr. Cavallero, bedeviled by rising rents and union troubles, decided to call it a day.

“People don’t dine these days, they simply eat,” he complained to The Times in a front-page article on the restaurant’s demise. “But rather than turn the Colony into a hash house, I prefer to close.”

After selling the wine cellar to a customer and giving away the silver, Mr. Cavallero sold the Colony’s lease to a Long Island restaurateur, Carl Demler, who reopened it in 1973, without success.

Mr. Cavallero wrote “The Colony Cookbook,” with Ted James, and opened a nightspot, Club Cavallero, on East 58th Street. In 1977 he moved to Phoenix, where he briefly ran a soufflé restaurant called Raffles.

“Listen, the Colony was fun, a pleasure, a challenge every night,” Mr. Cavallero told Vanity Fair. “We did exactly what we set out to do. We made everyone happy.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: Gene Cavallero Jr., Whose Restaurant Was a Haven for the Elite, Dies at 92. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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