Dining Out: Dave Zinczenko's Water-Colored Memories
We were trawling through the Times's Sunday Vixen-quality blowjob of Dave Zinczenko - a blowjob which makes July's Forbes profile of the Men's Health editor look like a cursory handjob from a scabby-fisted crackwhore by comparison - when we started to wonder: When was it coming? Sure, we saw the bit about the Pussy Palace in the Hamptons that he shares with Dan Abrams, but when would we get the anecdote about the death of GQ icon Art Cooper? Well, it was down near the bottom, but the article did comply with the law that any profile of Zinczenko must, at some point, recycle this story. How has the legend of Cooper's tragic demise evolved over the years? After the jump, a quick look down the ages.
Family and friends of Art Cooper, the former GQ editor who fell tragically ill at the Four Seasons on Thursday, say they'll be forever indebted to Dave Zinczenko. Zinczenko, editor of Men's Health magazine, was having lunch with Cooper when the 65-year-old suffered a stroke. "They'd never met before," a close friend of Cooper tells us. "Dave helped Art out and then went with him in the ambulance. He stayed by his side all day and was there when [Cooper's] wife arrived. But he still stayed, long into the night." Despite his lunch companion's best efforts, Cooper was reported to be gravely ill.
Cooper loved eating and drinking as much as he loved great magazine writing, and his favorite place to enjoy the former while talking about the latter was at Manhattan's Four Seasons restaurant. It was there that he suffered the stroke while lunching with David Zinczenko, editor of Men's Health.
Media Life Magazine, June 10, 2003
"I cannot go to a gym without cringing, watching the idiotic, ineffective and downright dangerous exercise routines personal trainers put their clients through," Men's Health editor in chief David Zinczenko writes in his September issue. Zinczenko goes on to describe a friend, "65 years old and about that many pounds overweight," who showed up to lunch complaining that a workout had left him with a sore neck, and left in an ambulance, "felled by a massive stroke. Did the workout kill him? It's possible."
On the day several years back when Art Cooper died, he and Dave lunched at the Four Seasons. "I was telling him about Best Life, and I said, 'Is there anything you could do to help us?' There was no non-compete clause with Conde Nast, and Art said we ought to talk more. But he felt ill and went to the bar to lie down. Next thing, Julian (the co-owner) was calling an ambulance. It was a massive stroke."
(Mr. Zinczenko was having lunch with Art Cooper, the former GQ editor, at the Four Seasons in 2003 when Mr. Cooper suffered a stroke and died. It is a memory that Mr. Zinczenko recalls with tears in his eyes, explaining that it conjured memories of his father's death.)
