On a sunny afternoon in his 1,500-square-foot penthouse, Marvin Shulman launches a chat with an ironic note of showbiz (“Now let’s talk about ‘me’.”) and a laugh. Despite many years as the business manager to Tommy Tune, as well as a long association with the late Michael Bennett of A Chorus Line, Shulman’s apartment has very few traces of his past career, save for an office with enlarged variety ads and posters from Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Follies and such. It was goodbye to all that New York jazz 10 years ago when Shulman moved with the Joe Allen crowd. “I’ve known Joe for over 40 years, but I think dd Allen his wife back then and a designer, was the first one here. So I moved here, bought a house and invested in a restaurant.”

A modern, forward-thinking sort, Shulman — working with interior designer Paul Ziotas — slid into his condo epoch four years ago with his black Labrador Tina, and set about keeping things airy, simple and low maintenance. “Originally, you had to walk through the third bedroom to get to the terrace, so we knocked through the wall. That room is very minimal now, just an Eames lounge chair, two Parsons-style tables and an art
piece by Paul Jasmin. We also knocked through and opened up the kitchen, took the plaster off one concrete pillar and put all the cabinets along the dead wall with the refrigerator.”

The bamboo floors are the perfect accompaniment to the white-on-white simplicity of the living room, furnished with an Italian leather sectional accented by a custom-made bench, a glass Barcelona coffee table and a marble Saarinen piece. In the dining room is another Saarinen marble table, along with two Pierre Paulin “tulip” chairs and a Florence Knoll credenza topped off with an old toy horse that Shulman found in a vacated apartment. On the wall is a three-piece Nancy Grossman collage made with leather scraps and other found materials. In the
master bedroom is more art — a collage by Laura Paresky Gould, incorporating photographed sections of the American flag — and more classic furniture such as a Heywood-Wakefield desk. The bed is situated across from a “floating” bureau built into the wall, constructed of wood painted in white lacquer and sand-blasted glass sliding doors.

In the guest bathroom, Shulman has given vent to a bit of whimsy with four identical images of himself — a la Andy Warhol — adorning the walls: “Tommy Tune’s assistant, Peter Glebo, is also a photographer and he found someone who could turn his photograph of me into wallpaper. Today, I’m wearing the same outfit from the shot in the bathroom. I suppose it’s another case of life imitating art.”