The New York Observer
Presents
The Kingdom of New York
Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots
As Seen by The New York Observer
Introduction by Peter W. Kaplan
Contents
Our Illustrators
Interviews
The Kingdom of New York
1987-1990
1991-1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
Searchable Terms
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
OUR ILLUSTRATORS
Barry Blitt has been contributing weekly caricatures to The Observer since 1991, when then-editor Graydon Carter called and asked for a portrait “the size of a softball.” Mr. Blitt’s work also appears regularly in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vanity Fair and many other publications.
Former “angry young man” Philip Burke first met Peter Kaplan at New Times, to which, along with The Village Voice, he was contributing mostly political caricatures. Among copious other magazine and newspaper work, he had long-running stints at Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone before joining The Observer’s rotation in 1994.
Aside from illustrating a monthly cover for The New York Observer since 1993, Drew Friedman’s work also appears in Time, Newsweek, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Mad and many others.
Robert Grossman has done cover illustrations for more than 500 issues of national magazines such as Time, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone and The New Republic. Today his work can be seen regularly in The Nation, The New York Times and The Observer. His 1977 animated film, Jimmy the C., earned an Academy Award nomination.
Victor Juhasz has drawn for Time, Newsweek and The New York Times as well as (since 2005) The Observer. He is a frequent contributor to the National Affairs section of Rolling Stone and serves on the board of directors of the Society of Illustrators.
Interviews
Arthur Carter
Michael Thomas
Graydon Carter
Jim Windolf
Terry Golway
Susan Morrison and John Homans
Peter Stevenson
Candace Bushnell
Frank DiGiacomo
Jared Kushner
THE KINGDOM OF NEW YORK
BY PETER W. KAPLAN
CAMELOT IT WASN’T.
But the Kingdom of New York that The New York Observer was founded to cover was an island paradise with fiefdoms, rulers, turf battles, borders and a brutal hierarchy that seemed impossible to describe to Boston or San Bernardino. Its voracious royals thought a great deal of themselves, bought a lot for themselves, dressed accordingly, traded in secret insults, spent fortunes on town cars, lounged at ritzy restaurants, brought their battles into private schools and charity balls with the idea that it was a game worth winning.
They were our beat. They picked up their own phones! And they were endlessly available: socialites who climbed mountains, debutantes who joined the Colony Club, authors at each other’s throats, bistros clawing for clienteles, TV executives struggling for prime time, senators sucking around presidents, first ladies trying to become senators. And physical torment: classy ladies pioneering nether grooming, botulism in the forehead, high colonics, special formula enemas, face-lifts, private-school kids snorting Ritalin. Sex, and plenty of it, in the City.
The Kingdom was a topography of power, with its Manhattan moats and turrets, its courts in media, politics, society, its residues of Edith Wharton, Walter Winchell and Weegee. It may have been a generated haze, but it was all ours.
There were other papers, but they didn’t seem to be having much fun. The city was going through a revolution, up from the muck of the 1970s when it was razzed by TV comedians, and Central Park West apartments were being given away for cigar money. New Yorkers gave the keys to the Kingdom to the hard-nosed mayor in exchange for security, cleanliness, order. Money seemed to self-propagate. The city hummed with a focused purpose. Now and then in its history, New York makes sense, has a middle class, takes care of its kids and its streets, its businesses.
Into this territory waded The New York Observer in 1987. Arthur L. Carter, who owned The Nation magazine, and The Litchfield County Times in Connecticut, had the idea of publishing a power elite weekly. At first, The Observer mystified the town of killers with what seemed to be a quiet little invention, embroidered with pen-and-ink drawings and a photograph of Central Park on Title Page. The paper began somewhat gently and innocuously, stacked up in the lacquered lobbies of Upper East Side apartment buildings. But it changed quickly. The Observer couldn’t have been spawned a minute earlier than it was. The rise of the money culture created a lovely narcissism, which made the 1990s the screwball decade it became. Its driven, self-fascinated cast of well-dressed characters—gorgeous and grotesque, cruel and generous, utterly without a concept of where they would live if there were no New York—generally got pleasure from being onstage.
Most of them had to be personally experienced to be believed. There was Alfonse D’Amato, the junior senator who proposed to the glamorous gossip columnist Claudia Cohen and called himself “The Frog Who Got Kissed by a Princess” before the relationship ended; Fred and Mary, the celebrity newsstand owners on Hudson Street in Tribeca who served as the downtown media gossip filling station; Julian Niccolini, the smooth Vittorio De Sica–like co-owner of the Four Seasons; Robert De Niro, the world’s greatest screen actor, who was determined to turn Tribeca into the movie capital of the East; John F. Kennedy Jr., the rollerblading Superman of North Moore Street; Harvey Weinstein, who looked like he didn’t have taste, did, pummeling Hollywood into a supplicant’s kneel; Puff Daddy; P. Diddy; Sean Combs; Mary Boone; Huntington Hartford; Shoshanna Lonstein; Al Sharpton; Cindy Adams; Christian Curry; Mark Penn, the pollster who failed; Lucianne Goldberg; Col Allan; Liz Smith; Ethan Hawke; Donna Hanover; Judith Regan; the Friars Club…They were each gifts that kept on giving.
Of course, they had wonderful story lines. The ideal, which hardly ever happened, was that you could follow them week-by-week like characters in a 19th-century novel published in weekly installments, showing up, disappearing for a few weeks, returning much changed with a new wife or a business triumph or a nice embezzlement. Manhattan in the 1990s was a giddy, baroque city where the stock market rose and crime numbers went down while the unflinching mayor became a national celebrity by ruling his city like an ambiguous hero-villain right out of Batman. Some found life impenetrable. Some took it seriously.
More and more, The Observer reported on mad meritocrats, billionaires and socialites, on the mayor and on which kids got thrown into jail after the prom. We told our writers and editors to speak to its readers just as reporters speak to other reporters—directly.
The paper was born into a Georgian red-brick townhouse on East 64th Street that Arthur Carter had once planned to live in himself. There were four-legged bathtubs on two of the floors, which were quickly packed with newspapers, and the bedroom that Arthur had promised to one of his former partners at Carter, Berlind, Potoma and Weill beca
me the office of the gossip columnist. There was a tiny cage-door elevator that groaned endlessly up and down between the newsroom on the fourth floor and the production offices on the first floor.
One floor down was the publisher’s office, where Arthur sat at a green-leather-topped partner’s desk among a lot of good 19th-century furniture, black-and-white photographs of Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann, a giant red-paisley wingback armchair and a long formal dining table that a series of secretaries kept in high-polish. Up from the center hallway ran a rather grand curved staircase on which trod some of the most enterprising call girls in New York, who showed up to buy personal ads in the classified section. And blurred visitors: Bill Murray, Mike Wallace, Norman Mailer gallantly struggling to the elevator on a pair of canes with a suitcase of cartoons he was determined to put in the paper weekly.
NEW YORK WAS STILL A BIG NEWSPAPER TOWN, WHICH most people never thought would be an antique term—except for anyone who was watching closely. The Observer was a newspaper reaction to The New York Times, the greatest newspaper in America, which continued to dominate the psyche of the literate New Yorker as nothing else ever has or ever will. The Times was magnificent, but its infallibility demanded a retrofit stand-in for all the beaten broadsheets of New York: the Herald Tribune, the World, the Telegram. In the absence of anything else, the Off the Record column acted partly as an ad-hoc ombudsman for a city that otherwise had to take the reporting in The Times as received truth.
When Jayson Blair was caught fabricating stories in The New York Times, we were well prepared. Our Off the Record reporter, Sridhar Pappu, staked out Blair’s house in Brooklyn until he was invited in and got the following quote of his dreams: “So Jayson Blair the human being could live, Jayson Blair the journalist had to die.” The New York Times is the most important newspaper in the world and Observer reporters have always been told to cover it the way The Times covers the State Department.
The Observer is often mistaken for a comedy newspaper. Irritated subjects called it “snarky.” It’s not—it just refuses to be guileless, a pathetic accomplice to big shots. We’re yappers and nippers, but we report by the Marquis of Queensbury rules—on the record and with fact-checkers. The Observer reports on everything that is being written and talked about and thought in a city that can’t bear to have thoughts that don’t show up in print. It’s not parody, or postmodern; it’s just a little newspaper with its own persona. My old boss Clay Felker used to call it a “newspaper of interpretation.” As a matter of fact, it battled what was being called the Age of Irony—we didn’t believe in irony.
We reported on the distillation of a certain Manhattan sensibility, the New York that the rest of America thinks of as New York. We also gorged on the media. Hollywood has movie studios—Warner Bros., Fox, Paramount. But New York has its own big studio system: Condé Nast, The New York Times, Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post and Wall Street Journal, Hearst, Time Warner, the Daily News, plus NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN and Fox. There was an argument by the right-wing nuts that this crowd controls American perception and information. That’s attributing an inconceivable cohesion among them.
Even within The Observer there has never been any particular cohesion. The paper’s bunch of loud, brilliant critics occasionally jumped across the columns at each other’s throats until it was dictated they were off-bounds to each other, and even that didn’t quite do the trick: Hilton Kramer, who had been the super-erudite, emphatic, regal art critic of The Times, took whacks from Michael M. Thomas, the idea-spouting financial-social critic who wrote the Midas Watch column; Andrew Sarris, the dean of American film critics, jousted with Rex Reed, the nightlife-loving astringent culture gadfly who had become a kind of latter-day Waldo Lydecker—who later took on John Heilpern, the raffish, literate drama critic. They were none of them cubs; they wrote directly, without condescension; they were contentious grown-ups who had no use for the dead weight of phony manners and objectivity that had mucked up the polite media.
The first editor of the paper, John Sicher, made a few crucial choices. What Hilton Kramer or Michael Thomas thought was meant to be Title Page news. Power in New York would be stated in buildings bought and sold, or brokered in a small room. To that end, both Charles V. Bagli, who saw real estate as a brutal battle for square feet, and Terry Golway, a lyrical political expert from Staten Island well versed in the lives of Al Smith and the Molinaris, occupied the top of the big broadsheet front page, week after week.
The paper trundled along a little sleepily until Arthur Carter had the inspiration to hire the hugely talented co-founder of Spy, Graydon Carter, as editor in 1991. Graydon Carter ran The Observer for only 12 months, but he remade it with ambition and panache, brought in antique furniture, super-smart acolytes, community journalism, society reporting, British newspaper excerpts and a hopped-up work ethic. The paper immediately bloomed; it hit a note that New Yorkers, particularly Upper East Siders, picked up on. It suddenly stated the case that needed to be made: New York was combat turf but actually fun!
The Observer became visible. Then, the near-inevitable: Graydon Carter eloped, swept away by S. I. Newhouse to run Vanity Fair. Next came the advent of Susan Morrison, No. 2 at Spy. Beautiful, quirky, a demanding editor of tremendous intelligence who understood the subversive fusion of humor and fact, Susan Morrison went to the New York Post’s Page Six and raided Frank DiGiacomo, a tough gumshoe reporter with a literary ear and an armadillo-size, key-locked Rolodex. DiGiacomo treated gossip as reporting, not the other way around.
Susan Morrison also promoted a couple of deadly choirboys with the cold glint of reporters: Peter Stevenson, a 33-year old writer with hyper-developed literary instincts, wrote features, and Jim Windolf, a cultural omnivore who could absorb almost anything, took on the press column. Stevenson and Windolf hunted phonies by day, read novels at night. So it was all set: real estate, politics, society, gossip, attitude.
ONE AFTERNOON IN 1994, ARTHUR CARTER SUMMONED me to his apartment on East 67th Street. His living room was lined with Picassos and Kandinskys and Legers, with a grand piano the length of a Duesenberg. He was wearing a cashmere sweater and sneakers. He was focused and rather serious. We somehow established that his mother had given my grandmother French lessons in Long Island in the 1940s.
By June 1, I was at the paper. I had three main goals:
1. To state New York as the center of the universe.
2. To assign subjective narrative reporting.
3. To hire great cartoonists.
By 1994, New York was creating its own new comic story line, a resurrection of the narrative started by Woody Allen and Sidney Lumet in the 1970s that New York was the only place that mattered. The New York romance had gone cold when the economy did. By 1994, however, it picked back up: NBC’s Thursday-night urban comedies Seinfeld and Friends romanticized the city reminiscent of how Hollywood studio screwball comedies and gangster pictures had in the 1930s. David Letterman’s The Late Show was a powerful statement of the city’s sudden ability to embrace regular, touristy Americans and endow them with a postmodern ironic sensibility, as they tromped into the Ed Sullivan Theater to see the Indiana boy who suddenly, triumphantly owned New York. New York seemed to be a city of wise guys, long-legged working girls, cute college graduates in giant exposed-brick apartments with mysterious means of financial support and funny neighbors. Who wouldn’t want to live there?
Half the parents who bought their kids one-bedrooms as family “investments”—little did they know they were securing the city from urban flight when things would get tough later—believed the adorable Friends fantasy. And it became true! Their sons and daughters graduated from Wharton and N.Y.U. Law, dropped into ludicrously high-paying gigs, found their corner deli owners adorable, their gay neighbors accessible, their bittersweet Saturday nights erased by Sunday brunches in Soho. Manhattan became a haute-bourgeois theme park.
For them, The New York Observer became a kind of pet Pekinese, a hometown paper that was naughty, cheeky,
yappy, occasionally thoughtful, reporting on a population that exulted in its own parties, manners and marital breakups. We became the joyful, exuberant reporters of their image-madness. Sometimes we thought of ourselves as enablers. But what reporters could resist these people? It would have been malpractice to turn away. No matter how mad they were, they generally called to buy their own front-page caricatures.
We culled from the great New York World of the 1920s, the newspaper of newspapers—stylish, fun, writerly, liberal, legendary—the monumentally designed broadsheet that towered above the city, covering politics, culture and society while below, other papers chased ambulances and closed nightclubs. “This is New York,” Ben Hecht had written in his newspaper comedy, Nothing Sacred, “skyscraper champion of the world…where Truth, crushed to earth, rises again more phony than a glass eye.” A few of us sat on the floor with crumbling copies of the World from 1924 and lifted the headline voice.
At The Observer, Jim Windolf became a particular master of the Homeric headline; epigrams abounded: Alfonse D’Amato became “our beloved Alfonse.” Tina Brown became the “Intellectual Property Mogul.” Meanwhile, Peter Stevenson brought back in a writer who was a close friend of his, a skinny, glint-eyed blonde with perfect teeth, Candace Bushnell. Stevenson and I felt pretty strongly that the paper was a little arid and detached from life as we understood it in the city. And Candace was a writer who understood the price—and the value—of everything. We asked her if she would write a column about sex for the paper. If there was one thing about Candace, it was that she was game.
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