Death of the last playboy

After a long illness, Harry Jay Katz died peacefully early Tuesday. He was 75. This is a remembrance.

He was generous to a fault, sometimes to the wrong people, capable of the grand gesture and the petty feud. Harry Jay Katz stood above the crowd, sometimes to look down on them, sometimes to lend a helping hand, usually in the form of cash.

He was dashing, durable, and diplomatic, and for a half-century he lived in the limelight and spun stories like a spider. In the old days, they would have called him a raconteur.

Blessed with a high IQ and a quicksilver mind, Harry was endlessly creative and inventive, and usually well-oiled with vodka, in recent decades Ketel One. He called vodka "my drug of choice." He seldom actually got drunk, but the booze sometimes unleashed awkward inner demons.

It was the vodka that began his slide into illness more than two years ago. He was rushed to Temple University Hospital because, in layman's terms, his innards had rotted out. Drinking a quart a day might do that to you.

I met Harry in the early '70s and called him "Bon Vivant" or "Man About Town" or "Playboy" or "Celebrity Without Portfolio" more than a decade later in my gossip column. He was all of that. After his marriage to Debra Renee Cruz, he became "Reformed Playboy" in my column, and Dan Gross' and Molly Eichel's and Jenny DeHuff's after that.

I saw him marry a features writer at the Daily News, then divorce. Then he married the heiress (and executive) of the Weight Watchers empire, who died. Finally, he met and married a gorgeous native of Guam. There was an earlier marriage I did not witness.

Scattered among the four wives were four children and seven grandchildren to whom he was good.

His father, Laurence, was a manufacturer who held the patent on seamless panty hose, which made the family rich beyond belief. The father gave his children more wealth than affection.

Harry didn't have to work, and usually he didn't, but he did serve in the Army (ours). I knew he was infantry; he claimed to be a paratrooper.

At the peak of his energy and pub-crawling activity, he wanted to open a Playboy Club here, when Playboy was hot, right on Broad Street. Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo stopped that.

HJK owned a weekly newspaper called ElectriCity. A libel suit stopped that.

He reopened and ran the (now-gone) Erlanger Theater and a Center City steak house called Hesch's. He created a syndicate called the National News Bureau to service college newspapers and the Philadelphia Film and Video Commission, because he felt Philadelphia needed one.

He hosted a radio talk show and was a fountain of ideas for books and movies.

While he lost the battle to open a Playboy Club, he did get Pennsylvania law changed so that alcohol could be charged on a credit card.

Along the way he befriended Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Frank Stallone, Chaim Topol, Peter Falk, Liza Minnelli, Andrea Marcovicci, Geena Davis, John Cassavetes, Maria Shriver - and dated Grace Jones, among (many) others.

He loved being around celebrities and loved being treated like one. He demanded the spotlight, and once he had it, he commanded it. In his heart, he was a showman.

He was rich, famous, addicted to printer's ink, happy, boisterous, but suicidal a couple of times in his life. I visited him in the mental hospital his kids sent him to when they found him overdosed on the floor.

He was uncharacteristically mad at them, but what they did saved his life and he soon realized that.

I smuggled cigarettes into the hospital. I refused to bring him booze.

That breakdown followed a hit job on him in Philadelphia Magazine and an earlier one in Philadelphia Weekly, the latter written by a former friend.

It's not that anything reported was untrue, but the articles were personal, vicious, and lacked balance, and, yes, class.

Another disappointment was not getting to be city representative after he tried pulling strings to land the job. It was unlikely he would be appointed city rep, I told him, because of his rep. The mayor would be afraid Harry was going to seduce some dignitary's wife.

As the head of his self-created Philadelphia Film and Video Commission, he became a de facto city rep, greeting visiting celebrities and handing out Liberty Bells. It was a gracious gesture and the celebs probably thought it was coming from the city.

It's wasn't. It was all Harry's idea.

No one remembers that, but everyone remembers the woman who died in the hot tub in his East Falls home. That clearly was an accident, not his fault at all.

"I'm a product of my own bad press," he once said.

Harry could be very persuasive. That's probably how he bedded well over 1,000 women - by being persuasive, charming them, showering them with gifts, using charm, booze, whatever it took.

His formational decade was the 1950s, when aspirational men seemed right out of Guys and Dolls. His friends included millionaire-turned-City Councilman Jack Kelly and City Councilman-turned-Congressman and Ambassador Tom Foglietta.

They ran around Center City in the '60s and '70s when there was a nightclub circuit, with Artemis (2015 Sansom) at its center. This was the Jet Set that replaced Cafe Society.

Millennials think there was no Philly nightlife before they arrived with pop-up beer gardens and Uber. I don't blame them for not knowing, because it's lost in the haze of history.

The guys of Harry Jay's generation - and he could be cross when his middle name, Jay, appeared in print as middle initial J. - were not touchy-feely and in touch with their emotions. Not in public, anyway.

It was a different way of conducting yourself. If the model wasn't Nathan Detroit, it was JFK, not Barack Obama.

Despite the macho exterior, his own feelings could be easily bruised, and I did that once or twice. Sorry, boychick.

When he was transferred from a nursing home to Einstein last week, Harry knew it was his last stop and he gave the DNR order: Do Not Resuscitate. Life as an invalid was not worth living.

When not in Full Charm Mode, HJK could be crude and lewd, but loaded with more shtick than a borscht belt comic. He was hilarious and surprising, observant and incisive. He was good at reading people.

He lived in a three-story, six-bedroom house in East Falls that had belonged to the family and eventually became his. He loved the old house, classic clothing, eating in expensive steak houses, and driving his block-long 1996 white Caddy. It made an impression. Harry always loved to make an impression. He loved to make an entrance.

Harry knew when to use "who" and "whom," and loved telling bartenders to shake his vodka martini at ear level, "like in the movies."

They don't make movies like that any more.

And they don't make people like Harry Jay Katz.

stubyko@phillynews.com

215-854-5977 @StuBykofsky

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