“Sex?” she said. “In New York?” Her eyes were mysteriously azure. “Sure.”
I often can see the keys of The Observer’s last typewriter as we banged out the words: S-E-X A-N-D-T-H-E-C-I-T-Y. We knew right away it was good. It was so good that we immediately tried to change it to something cleverer. Candace’s first column was a pretty standard report on a downtown sex club. But after a few weeks, Carrie Bradshaw showed up and that was that. We knew it was a hit when angry readers, particularly single women scraping the walls and floor of the dating market, began calling to cancel their subscriptions.
The paper began picking up. It got press and developed a national reputation. It was the 1990s and, I have to tell you, we thought we were a little bit in heaven. We had four amazing front-page illustrators, each with a different style—Robert Grossman, Victor Juhasz, Philip Burke and Drew Friedman—who were like a great four-man starting rotation of pitchers, with the astonishing caricaturist Barry Blitt as the closer. We knew we were getting somewhere when it was reported to us, apocryphally or not, that Michael Eisner, the CEO of Disney, had slammed down a Drew Friedman front-page illustration of his No. 2, Michael Ovitz—as Mickey Mouse’s beleaguered Sorcerer’s Apprentice—in front of Ovitz on the Disney board table.
The Observer believed that there was some importance in letting the reporters go for it, even if it occasionally meant losing the owner acquaintances who had portrayed themselves as his friends. Arthur Carter didn’t mind turning the whole town—billionaires, restaurateurs, gallery owners—into Margaret Dumont to the paper’s Groucho. I sat with him a couple of times where social acquaintances literally turned their backs on him. Arthur generally preferred the paper to cronies. At lunch one day, I asked him if he liked making his friends angry. He looked at me seriously, as though I were not only insane but deeply insensitive. “I don’t like it,” he said. “Not one bit.”
* * *
A topography of power, with its Manhattan moats and turrets, its courts in media, politics and society, its residues of Wharton, Winchell and Weegee.
* * *
But occasionally maybe he did like it one little bit. He told me he had gotten a wake-up call in bed one Wednesday morning from an angry mayor who didn’t like the fact that The Observer had run a feature on one of his country homes. “But Mayor,” Arthur said, “why didn’t you call me yesterday, before the paper came out? I could have done something about it then!”
For a few minutes, we at The Observer were what Hildy Johnson called “the white-haired boys.” We went to Elaine Kaufman’s bar, and Elaine bought us drinks. Frank DiGiacomo’s Transom was making running characters of Pat Buckley, Pat Cooper, Triumph the Insult Dog, Anna Wintour and Harvey Weinstein. New York was a movable feast, a banquet table where the dessert talked back.
Why? Maybe it was that we were new and honest, and the old guys were getting older. We were, and they were. Across the room from me right now is a big bound edition of The Observer from 1995, with a story that could only be loved by an archivist of exquisite trivialities: “THE OBSERVER 500: Power! Measured N.Y. style—In Gossip Inches.” In agonizing, pre-digital hours, we compiled a list of who had been mentioned most in the New York news columns, by number of mentions. Here’s how it went:
O.J. Simpson
Madonna
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani
President Bill Clinton
Barbra Streisand
Michael Jackson
Donald Trump
Diana, Princess of Wales
John F. Kennedy Jr.
Elizabeth Taylor
That was another world. New York was suddenly perceived as a new kind of power capital. The stock market kept rising. People began chortling about the “World Wide Web.” It was going to be our great new communications industry! You could dial it up. Mobs of jolly suburbanites roamed the streets at night. Sushi joints and gourmet pizza places began opening on every street corner and people had the money to buy art. When middle-class people start buying art, you can tell your grandchildren, something is seriously out of whack. The Yankees won four World Series in five years and even the Mets won a pennant. Skinny ladies mobbed Cipriani and La Goulue, and Julian Niccolini seated the Four Seasons like it was the U.S. Senate.
Harvey Weinstein, the co-owner of Miramax, devoured the moment. He did what New York movie producers had been trying but failing to do for decades—he hijacked Hollywood. He beat Steven Spielberg for Best Picture in Spielberg’s own hometown. Meanwhile Graydon Carter’s Vanity Fair party replaced Swifty Lazar’s—it was a New York conquest. Rap stars consorted with CEOs, and bought tables at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute Ball and became real estate moguls, and Robert De Niro’s crew established Tribeca as the nether glamour sector of the city, confirmed by the residence of the star of stars, chiseled, gleaming, unmatchable John F. Kennedy Jr., so transparently heroic that women dropped in his path and Seinfeld devoted an episode to Elaine’s aerobics-class lust for him.
The entire thing astonished us. When at last there was a national crisis, it turned out there were endless wirings between the chubby, mirthful intern who managed to deliver a pizza to Bill Clinton and New York: Monica fled here; her family was here; so was Linda Tripp’s tireless right-wing literary agent, Lucianne Goldberg, who manned the phones day and night, guiding reporters. Was there no sitcom plot to be left unexplored? And when the president decided to recompense his wife with a power base of her own, he called Congressman Rangel and installed her—where else? She became our senator.
NEW YORK WAS SEIZED BY A SEINFELDIAN bantering amorality. It was a sushi and ice cream town. Money voyeurism prevailed, coddled by Clinton Years prosperity. By 1998, Carrie Bradshaw and her HBO buddies were trawling the city for practical love. New York was the world’s richest, coolest burg, a never-never land on a perpetual Thursday night. Everybody worked, few bled. It was implausible that anything could go wrong. But by the time it did, we could console ourselves with one thing: We knew it wouldn’t last.
Needless to say, it didn’t. I won’t weigh you down with our particular version except this: A newsroom that had rarely wept found itself that Tuesday, a day that we were planning on the usual weary coverage of the mayoral primaries, charged with making a screaming shift from a Drew Friedman cover illustration of Michael Jackson’s birthday party to printing up a headline that said only: September 11, 2001. I had been tromping all the way down Second Avenue as the firetrucks went roaring by, heading south from the Bronx and Westchester.
I remember coming into the office and finding our toughest editor slumped on his desk, his head covered with his hands. We were not, as Ma Joad told Tom, kissing people, but there was a great deal of hugging that day. I called Drew Friedman and he faxed in a black-and-white drawing of the Statue of Liberty besieged in black billows; we hand-tinted it in the production department. By evening, we could smell the first wisps of that particular acrid, chemical smoke blowing up to East 64th Street from downtown.
The giddy days were done. New York was no longer a comedy.
But in many ways, The Observer became a better newspaper. It wasn’t that it sobered up and stared deeper into its beats. It’s that the generation of reporters who showed up became more committed to reporting the city. It was after 2001 that we got some of our best reporters and editors, resolute young hard-nosed journalists who loved print but began taking charge of the Internet. They just seemed to keep landing at the doorstep of East 64th Street, then when we moved, to lower Broadway. More and more, they knew journalism and politics and carried their own little digital cameras and wanted to write not once a week, but as often as they could file. Less and less did they buy a copy of any newspaper. When I first started at The Observer my standard question to applicants was: How many days a week do you buy a daily newspaper? The age kept going up and up, until relatively few bought anything beyond the massive Sunday Times: Sic transit gloria Monday.
* * *
What were those papers about?
A civilization that loved itself a little too much and created its own inky portrait. Now the world has changed.
* * *
A great deal has changed in New York City for newspapers since 2001. One thing, of course, is the World Wide Web. The New York Observer was made to be, designed to be, a newspaper paradigm. But it is no longer a newspaper.
IN LATE 2006, JARED KUSHNER, A SMART, HANDSOME REAL estate scion who saw the future of newspapers, bought The Observer. Jared brought new swagger to the paper: He liked it, bulked up the newsroom, but wanted to publish it as a paper for the new digital present, not the remote fading past. We made two huge, significant changes. The first was that we remade ourselves as a tabloid, a kind of New York Post goes to college. It was like buying a miniskirt. David Carr, the press columnist for The New York Times, wrote that The Observer had used “stacked headlines and narrow columns, to play against type: it unleashed a waterfall of improbable display language splattered with exclamation points, ellipses and question marks that created a libretto before the reader even started the article.” The big front page was a beautiful cacophony. But the world is moving quickly, and the broadsheet paradigm doesn’t have the same intrinsic satiric bite it once did: The gold standard has changed.
The other change was that we leaped into the Internet revolution. It was bracing and it was good. More than that, it was imperative. And it worked. The Observer’s Web site was not only beautiful and stylish, it made sense for the paper. By the homestretch of the 2008 presidential election, our political and media reporters—in Iowa and New Hampshire, through the primaries and the Hillary saga, then into the conventions and the election—had put the paper at the front of the pack. We broke big stories in the campaign. On the very day Joe Biden announced his candidacy for president, a story by political reporter Jason Horowitz quoted him describing Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Bingo! By the last month of the election, the Observer Web site was being visited by two million readers a month. It was a game-changing concept.
But what about the newspaper itself? The ink-smeared salmon-tinted newsprint? Would it become another smoking hulk on the media battlefield? Print has its own metaphysical power to bite back. A tactile, physical page has a relationship with a reader that nothing else does. It’s meant to be engaged and absorbed. An electronic culture is stripped of nuance. Clifford Odets wrote that life shouldn’t be printed on dollar bills—it also can’t be counted in Web page views. The Internet may be the most democratizing event in media history. It has already affected American society and global politics in a way that nothing ever has. And it’s still only primitive. All the wonderful news Web sites we’ve become addicted to—Drudge and Gawker and the Huffington Post—are untethered churners.
Lately, there are Web Geniuses who tell you that editors are a superfluous prophylactic between the information and the reader. I don’t know. One of the few good things I’ve ever heard said about editing was Harold Ross’ comment that “All an editor can do is have a net handy to grab any talent that comes along, and maybe cast a little bread on the waters.” Our own critic Andrew Sarris stated the Auteur Theory of movie directors. Surely, for anyone who cares deeply about the media, it makes sense that Clay Felker and Milton Glaser of New York magazine, Harold Ross of the New Yorker, Jim Bellows at the Herald Tribune and Arthur Gelb of The New York Times were auteurs like John Ford and Howard Hawks. It doesn’t matter if it was in print or it’s on little screens—it’s the catalytic combination of sensibility, aesthetic, storytelling, reporting and morality that matters. The new media is waiting for its Orson Welles—someone who can electrify the literature.
THE NEW YORK OBSERVER HAS ADAPTED TO THE NEW World. Our Web site reports—we’re not really bloggers. We were given the chance to do this through enlightened publishing. The Web Geniuses are nice people, but page views, traffic and emphasis are their business. Aggregation isn’t journalism. It isn’t sensibility or chemistry, and it isn’t comedy or tragedy, either. It’s collecting with a bias. You can’t report by aggregation, or deepen the culture. The aggregators are as essential to the current media crisis as home lenders were to the financial collapse of 2008. They pull up chairs at the table with empty mugs and say, “Fill ’er up—and you’re buying!” These seers will be replaced in the long run; they are the powerful primitives in the media evolution. If journalism is the first draft of history, Web sites are the first draft of journalism.
If newspapers and magazines fold up and go away, it will be a disaster for democracy. Bob Hope had a great joke in the 1950s: “When vaudeville died, television was the box they put it in.” There is a box being built for newspapers as well: an iPhone that your kid will stuff into his back pocket and sit on and smash the screen, which is about right—newspapers carry the protection of the First Amendment but they are not meant to be treated well. Recently, one of The Observer’s reporters wrote: “Readers want to get their news fix and they can’t wait for newspapers to come once a day on their doorstep, or even once an hour, like on blogs. It’s going to start getting streamed right to their fingertips, on mobile devices.” Not shocking to you as a concept, and not so different from newsboys screaming “Extra!” Newspapers are living things that bite and yap, they are essentially beautiful, but they are meant to get streamed right to you, and then mostly disappear. A few of the ideas stay.
Was it really a kingdom? We thought so. Nobody cares about the rococo tales of newspapers but reporters, any more than anyone can make sense of the majesty of the dragon of the printing press itself, with its roar and black ink issue. Now that those dragons are fading, the tales are heading into mythology. What were those papers about? They were about a civilization that loved itself a little too much and created its own inky portrait. Now the world has changed. Will the papers persevere? They will, if they can buy safe passage into the new era. Great cultures are always being declared washed up. The Kingdom isn’t dead. It will exist as long as there’s a reporter and an editor to conjure it. Long live the Kingdom of New York!
1987-1990
Salmon-colored weekly newspaper joins New York City’s media mob
Tom Wolfe roasts yuppie tycoons in The Bonfire of the Vanities
Yow! The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunges 800 points
Buyout king Henry Kravis, designer Carolyn Roehm storm high society
The Whitney bulges with Robert Mapplethorpe’s naughty male nudes
New Yorkers fear nighttime walks in their nabes more than AIDS
Dazzling Diane Sawyer shuns CBS for ABC, marries Mike Nichols
The Ayatollah proves big publicity boost for Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses
Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair is essential reading for the nouveau riche
Takeover titan Saul Steinberg spends $1 million on his 50th birthday party
Manhattan Borough President David N. Dinkins elected city’s first black mayor
1987-1990
AUGUST 31, 1987
THE NEW YORK OBSERVER EDITORIAL
54 East 64th Street, New York, New York 10021
A Note of Explanation The copy of The New York Observer that you have in your hand is a prototype of a new newspaper devoted to covering Manhattan. The editorial content is real and is an indication of what’s to come. The advertising is simulated copy to help convey what our paper will look like this fall, when we go into regular publication.
Manhattan is, above all else, unique. From Harlem and Inwood in the north, through the commercial and residential areas of midtown, and south through TriBeCa to Wall Street and Battery Park City, Manhattan constitutes a huge city complex of 1.6 million people. It contains one of the greatest concentrations of wealth in the world and some of the worst poverty. The rich and powerful in politics, business, media and entertainment make their homes here, and it is the culture capital of the world. But the city is also a place where countless people live in despair and desolation, many wit
hout homes. These extremes are only part if what makes Manhattan a complicated, fascinating and somewhat awesome place.
Covering the city is a tremendous challenge and a huge job. Our goal in launching The Observer is to publish a paper that is lively, penetrating and honest. This is the only way we can expect to attract readers and advertisers. We plan to work hard to create the best newspaper we can each week.
The Bartered Result The political art of the smoke-filled room prevailed last week as the Board of Estimate settled on a compromise that will result in the construction of 11 of the 15 homeless shelters proposed under the original plan offered by Mayor Koch. In exchange for the vote of Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins, a vote Mr. Koch needed desperately for the plan to go through, the mayor promised only one shelter in Manhattan, rather than the proposed three, and agreed to renovate 1,000 city-owned apartments for homeless families.
The construction of 11 new shelters seems on its face a victory for the homeless, and to a degree it is: Any positive step to ameliorate this tragedy is welcome. Yet several aspects of the vote require closer scrutiny.
Shelters are temporary. Many who opposed the plan from the beginning urged the mayor instead to rehabilitate city-owned housing as standardized permanent units. Mayor Koch said this is too time-consuming and expensive. But he was finally forced, under the deal with Mr. Dinkins, to agree to renovate the 1,000 units. Will the city ever get the permanent housing it needs?
What happened in Clinton? Community Board 4, which contains Clinton, was the only board of 15 to agree to accept a shelter, though it suggested moving the location by 50 feet. But no shelter is going up in Clinton. Why?
The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots Page 2
