It sounds like the plot of a rom-com, but we hear that a high society band leader, Alex Donner, was once a divorce lawyer by day while playing weddings by night!
Donner recounted the ironic job juxtaposition while playing a recent gig with his orchestra at Upper East Side haunt, La Goulue.
Hampton Sheet publisher Joan Jedell, who was at the event among a clutch of socialites, told Page Six Hollywood: “Donner told some life stories between tunes — like when he was doing divorces during the week as a lawyer and weddings on weekends with the band.” Then he’d go back to crooning songs from the Great American Songbook by Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Lerner & Loewe, Cole Porter and more.
When we caught up with the maestro Donner — a graduate of Princeton, the Sorbonne and Fordham Law — he was in Casablanca on his way to Marbella, Spain, to visit Spanish socialite Marquesa Barbara San Damian and La Goulue owner Jean Denoyer.
“Yes, I started out doing divorces during the week as an attorney, weddings on the weekend with my band,” he confirmed to us, recalling that he, “played a ‘second time around wedding’ for a divorce client [and Texas oil heiress] in the biggest destination wedding in India’s history hosted by the Maharajah of Jaipur which led to my first love, music full time.”
Donner also recalled that during his career he got to know, “Leonard Bernstein, President Trump, Joan Collins, Roy Cohn, Rudy Giuliani, Rebekah Harkness, President H.W. Bush and Queen Noor while doing 1,000 Weddings and 500 benefits with my bands. Still love every minute of it.”
Thirty years after his last cabaret shows at Cafe Carlyle, Donner has sold out La Goulue twice, and more shows have been added — Oct. 23 and Nov. 20.
Donner also plays big bashes in LA, many of which are protected by NDAs. When we asked if he’d even been approched by Hollywood, he said he’s had inquiries from producers over the years to turn his tale into a film, but “was too busy with my career at that point.”
