The darst dinner/ bono hosts the dating game/ love in the air/ the grammy awards/ two good reasons to resent eric clapton/ a quaker wedding

the rescheduled Ellen Darst farewell dinner is held at the Water Club, a restaurant on New York's East River, in Feb­ruary, one month after the original was canceled because of the death in Paul's family. Adam says he reckons it will be a year before Paul can get over the shock of his brother's death, but the manager is being a sociable host during the cocktail hour this evening. Adam's here and Larry's here. Edge cannot attend—he is deep into a recording project that is being called an EP but may expand to become a film soundtrack, part of a U2 interactive project, or anything else one can do with the music Edge hears running through his hatted head.

That means, as everyone sits down to eat, that the only person missing is Bono. Word has come that the well-organized singer missed his flight and will be along eventually. Meanwhile the guests find seats and tie on the feed bags. Adam recalls what Ellen brought to the infant U2 when they set foot in America for the first time. "Ellen was always a great communicator," Adam says. "She'd explain to us why we were going to this radio station, why that record shop, why we were meeting this person. She brought that influence to the organization and it continues." Adam points out that a big part of the bad feelings in Berlin making Achtung Baby came from forgetting Ellen's rule.

As mentioned earlier, Ellen also brought to U2 an inclination to put women in charge of running their operations. I ask Adam if there is a specific reason they stick to that and he says, "They're the only women we get to meet!" When we get done laughing he says, "I suppose we've always felt very uncomfortable around men who are part of that rock &

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roll culture, that macho thing. A lot of men in rock & roll tend to be overdramatic. They act like queens, regardless of their heterosexuality. They seem to be hysterical, rather than just happy to work away at something. And I think it's a need for female contact within our world. It's a very male-dominated world and we don't feel comfortable with that."

As I scrape my soup bowl it occurs to me that Ellen's greatest gift to U2 was to make every disc jockey, journalist, and rack jobber feel that he or she had discovered the band. She is the proof that there's no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit. Paul announces that like all such U2 functions this will be conducted as "a Quaker wedding," which means anyone might be called on at any time to get up and make a speech.

The soup is just being cleared when a great commotion starts hubbubing back at the door and rolling through the room like one of those cartoon balls of dust, shoes, and mayhem. It's Bono, racing through the restaurant, dragging behind him Naomi Campbell, the twenty-two-year-old top fashion model in the world and icon of Adam Clayton's dreams. Bono is grinning like a maniac as he hauls the somewhat confused-looking Naomi up to the head table, kisses Ellen on the cheek, and plops into a chair while dropping his surprise date into the seat next to him.

Adam looks like an adolescent boy would if the pinup on his bed­room wall had just come to life. His unrequited crush on Naomi is a running joke around Principle. In the U2 tour program each member of the band is asked what he wishes for that he doesn't have. Adam's listed choice is "Naomi Campbell." He has been inviting her to U2 concerts as long as he's known about her. She actually showed up at Giants Stadium last summer but Adam was tongue-tied and she seemed disin­terested. Later, after Bono did the Vogue cover shoot with her pal and fellow famous model Christy Turlington, Christy brought Naomi along to a post-Brit Awards get-together at McGuinness's London apartment. Adam was flabbergasted when Christy brought Naomi over to say hi to him, but he says he chatted so blandly that they lost interest and walked away. I doubt that's quite what happened, but the way he tells it makes clear this woman's ability to raise in Adam the sunken hull of a thirteen-year-old.

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