Cover to Cover

Top lyricist Toni Stern is waxing poetic again with her latest work, As Close As I Can.

The Santa Ynez resident, who wrote lyrics for songstress Carole King in the 1960s and ’70s, most notably “It’s Too Late” for her 25-million selling album Tapestry, wrote her first book of poetry, Wet, two years ago.

The former Montecito resident, who lived in our rarefied enclave for 15 years, has also worked with Gloria Estefan, Barbra Streisand, Faith Hill, Andy Williams, the Carpenters, the Isley Brothers, and Helen Reddy, to name a few.

“My works are about family, place, language, and self,” she told me at a bijou launch bash at Tecolote, the lively literary lair in the upper village.

Toni is now working on her third book, which she says will be a more autobiographical work.

No Brain, No Gain

It was a memorable occasion when 500 mostly fuchsia-clad guests turned out at Fess Parker’s DoubleTree for the Alzheimer’s Women’s Initiative’s fourth annual Your Brain Matters lunch, honoring the late singer Glen Campbell, with the Special Caregiver Award to his widow, Kim, and Patti Davis, daughter of the late president Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, who has written 11 books, including The Long Goodbye, a memoir about losing her father to the disease.

The beano, co-chaired by the tony triumvirate of Katina Etsell, Gerd Jordano, and Anne Towbes, with Leslie Ridley-Tree as honorary chair, raised around $250,000 for the cause to fight the disease, which affects five million Americans, two-thirds of them women.

A woman in her early 60s is twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s than she is to get breast cancer.

Patti, who I first met many years ago with gossip columnist Liz Smith at a literacy bash at Doubles, the oh-so trendy club in the basement of the Sherry Netherland, started Beyond Alzheimer’s, a support group for caregivers and family members, in 2011. She is now producing a TV project about her father, as well as writing a new novel.

Among those joining the purple rain were Rona Barrett, Lois Capps, Jelinda DeVorzon, Justin Fareed, Ginni Dreier, Anne Gersh, Barbara Ireland, Judi Weisbart, Toni Simon, Fred Kass, Alixe Mattingly, Rhonda Spiegel, Roberta Brinton, Val Montgomery, Dana and Andrea Newquist, Chris Hannafan, Peter Jordano, and Pamela Perkins-Dwyer.