Restaurateur Kaufman's items auctioned

Celebrities and everyday New Yorkers came Tuesday to snap up pieces of five decades of joviality at Elaine's restaurant, the iconic Upper East Side eatery.

Dawn Catanzaro, a regular diner, bought a papier-mache carousel horse that sat in the restaurant window. She paid $4,063 for the collectable, originally estimated to sell for between $200 and $300.

"There will be no other place like it again," Catanzaro, who works in fashion, said of Elaine's, which was shuttered in May. She said she would place the horse in the dining room of her Fairfield, Conn., home.More than 230 items from the restaurant and the apartment of its owner and namesake Elaine Kaufman were put on the block at Doyle New York auction house on the Upper East Side.

About $385,000 was made at the auction, which was expected to bring in between $187,000 and $287,000, according to a Doyle spokesman.

Kaufman, a kind of charismatic den mother to the celebrities who gathered nightly at her restaurant, died in December at 81. Without Kaufman as hostess, Elaine's, already embroiled in financial problems, was forced to close after 48 years.

Auction proceeds will help offset the restaurant's debt, said an estate spokeswoman.

Celebrities who turned out Tuesday to purchase a piece of Kaufman's legacy included sexual health therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer and "Bright Lights, Big City" author Jay McInerney.

Attendees swapped stories about the boisterous, bespectacled woman who served up food, drinks and cheer to such notables as Woody Allen, Jacqueline Kennedy and Norman Mailer.

"She was a sui generis. There was no one like her," said Lynn Grossman of the Upper West Side, a writer and patron. "You eat at Elaine's. That's how you became her friend. The saloon was her home."

The auction saw Kaufman's personal jewelry, art and books up for sale as well as her restaurant's bar stools, lamps and register, which sold for $4,063.

"It's bittersweet. You're letting things go but you're also seeing how much people value her and the things associated with her memory," said Diane Becker, the restaurant's longtime manager and inheritor of Kaufman's estate.

In a theatrical turn, photographer Jessica Burstein, a friend of Kaufman's, stood up before the introduction of one lot that included an autographed photo of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and revealed that she had forged McCain's note to Kaufman as an inside joke. The lot was returned by the first winning bidder, than purchased by a second bidder.

Beau Ryan, 52, of Boston, an antiques dealer, bought "table number one," the most desired seat at Elaine's, for $8,750.

Asked if he ever sat there himself, a nostalgic-seeming Ryan answered, "Oh, yeah."