The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots

by The New York Observer

  SEPTEMBER 14, 1992 BY JIM WINDOLF

  Tina Brown’s Debut: Oct. 5 New Yorker has Vanity Flair

  “I’M THE HAPPIEST GIRL IN THE WHOLE U.S.A.,” ROBERT GOTTLIEB declared the other day, describing his state of mind upon leaving his job as editor of The New Yorker. The remark, a reference to a 1972 country and western hit by Donna Fargo, was typical of the man known for his fascination with popular culture and kitsch.

  Although some of his staff portrayed him as “zombie-like” and depressed since publisher S. I. Newhouse announced in July that he would be replaced by Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown, Mr. Gottlieb insisted that he couldn’t be more content. “I am feeling absolutely fine, like a helium balloon that’s waiting to be untethered,” he said. “Of course I’ll miss it, but I am also looking forward tremendously to being free of it.” When asked what he might do next, Mr. Gottlieb became reflective. “The older I get, the less need I seem to feel to be a player,” he said. “But if interesting work comes along—not in publishing!—I suppose I’ll give it a try.”

  Ms. Brown moved into The New Yorker’s offices at 20 West 43rd Street on Sept. 8, a week after returning from a vacation on a dude ranch in Wyoming.

  NOVEMBER 25, 1991 BY JOSEPH OLSHAN

  MANHATTAN LIFE: INTERVIEW: HAROLD BRODKEY: PROUST OR JUST POUTY

  With Mr. Brodkey’s The Runaway Soul no longer long overdue, but actually out, Joseph Olshan discovers that sitting down with the author to talk about the novel is to invite the scrutiny of a world-class scrutinizer.

  Few novels have been so anxiously awaited as The Runaway Soul. The 835-page book tracks every psychological nuance in the life of its narrator-hero, and has been nearly 30 years in the writing. The author has been teasing the public with rumors of its completion for nearly half that time. In 1977, the anticipation of an imminent publication of the novel, then called Party of Animals, reached such a pitch that the normally unflappable New York Times reported on the front page, “Brodkey Delivers.” Never before has there been an unpublished novel so discussed, or second-guessed. Thus far the author of only two books of short stories published with a gap of many years between, Mr. Brodkey has been compared, by the major players of the New York literary-industrial complex, to Proust, Wordsworth, Milton, even Shakespeare.

  I met Mr. Brodkey under the awning of his apartment building on West 88th Street. Although the evening was mild, the imposing 6-foot 2-inch author was dressed in a raincoat and a foul-weather hat with a crenulated brim. Out of sync with the weather, he peered down at me, his ink-colored eyes at once fiercely calculating and soft, his beard fashionably trimmed.

  Now, in a small Japanese restaurant on the Upper West Side, Mr. Brodkey sits glaring at me. Our conversation is barely 10 minutes old, the food is not yet ordered, and we are being harangued by a woman dining next to us, who keeps making suggestions about the menu.

  She only further irritates Mr. Brodkey, who has just been asked what he considers an audacious question: whether, according to an interview published in The Washington Post in 1986, he appropriated some of the aforementioned critical comparisons and wondered publicly if his own writing might be “the rough equivalent of a Milton or Wordsworth.” Or even Shakespeare?

  Mr. Brodkey is constantly misunderstood and misinterpreted, which is hardly surprising in someone who is both a genius—as he unquestionably is—and an egomaniac. The problem is only exacerbated by the fact that he speaks in long sentences, freighted with insights, which invariably plunge into unintelligible mumbling.

  “Not only did I make these comparisons, I don’t understand them,” Mr. Brodkey now continues. “If the person making a remark is a critic [like Harold Bloom or Denis Donaghue], someone you respect highly, do you say, ‘What’s the joke?’ Or do you smile and blink? It may be the only praise you’ll ever get. You obviously can’t accept that remark. You translate it to be ‘That must mean I’m really good.’ The quickest way to push somebody out of society is to call them a genius.”

  The next moment he is reaching next to him into the puddle of cloth that is his raincoat. Is he leaving? Is he going to shoot me? “You don’t mind if I tape this, do you?” he says coolly, presumably to protect himself from being misquoted. Naïve on one hand, fervently ambitious on the other, he nevertheless comes across as a bit paranoid. At this moment, the animosity between us is palpable. Mr. Brodkey now admits that he’s frightened of how The Runaway Soul will be received. “Although I, like anyone else, may have my own private dreams of how good I am, I’d rather be mediocre,” he claims. “That I could live with more easily, because at least I would understand what the critics were saying. What’s happened in the past is that people have cited greatness and then gone on to undermine their praise with condemnation. All I really want is to be accepted.”

  If the critics Harold Bloom and Denis Donaghue did compare Mr. Brodkey to Milton, Wordsworth and Proust, each seems to have remodeled his compliment. In a 1985 article for Vanity Fair, Donaghue wrote, “As good as Proust? Why not? Proust, too, was a not-so-young man who couldn’t make up his mind where the next bit should go.”

  “I did not mean to compare him to Proust,” Mr. Donaghue says. “Rather, what I meant is that the mode in which Mr. Brodkey’s writing operates is Proustian. There is the same elaborate working-over of memory. The same autobiographical impulse.”

  “To compare Mr. Brodkey to Wordsworth and Milton is to doom him,” Mr. Bloom says. “There is no point. He is ruminative, given to reveries and many nostalgias, which is Whitmanesque.” He maintains, however, that Mr. Brodkey is a great and powerful writer, whose prose, at its best, is more powerful than any other American writer except perhaps Philip Roth. “But the writing is almost without humor and without much narrative continuity. You have to be part of an elite, with the patience and application to read someone thoroughly who is minutely concerned with the problem of self. He is a difficult writer who has become more difficult.”

  The Runaway Soul may be difficult, it may be long to excess, it may dare to spend a score of pages on a single fit of masturbation, and even longer on a sexual act. But it is a painstaking work of great emotional candor and audacity. Mr. Brodkey has strived to illuminate the tics of personality, the lilt of speech, the idiosyncratic language of the decades succeeding the 1930’s. He has also worked out an elaborate philosophy, which, though difficult for even the most assiduous reader to fathom, is offset by many incandescent passages and one-liners that speak volumes. One is compelled to forgive the novel’s faults for its sheer lyrical brilliance, its intricate psychological depth. And Mr. Brodkey may well earn the distinction of being able to characterize the ethos of New York City in a single phrase, as “raw envy acting as if it were intelligence.”

  In an effort to veer away from literary comparisons, Mr. Brodkey steers the conversation into gossip about the recent publishing party for Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost. “If you’d gone, you wouldn’t have seen Norman and me standing together. I get very claustrophobic. And the party got so crowded that I was forced to spend time out on the balcony talking to Fran Lebowitz. And then I ended up going downstairs in the lobby where I met other guests who were claustrophobic.”

  Such fear finds an antecedent in Mr. Brodkey’s very unusual childhood. He was born Aaron Roy Weintraub in Illinois in 1930. When Mr. Brodkey was 17 months old, his mother fell ill and died from an infection six months later. Upon her death he passed into a self-inflicted catatonia, as though courting death himself. Mr. Brodkey was subsequently adopted by his father’s second cousin, but in his early adolescence his adoptive parents died within a few years of each other. It’s no wonder that his early life was punctuated with a series of breakdowns, that it is hashed and re-hashed in his second collection of fiction, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, as well as in The Runaway Soul.

  If, for the last 25 or 30 years, Mr. Brodkey has been intensely preoccupied with bringing into focus the prisming light of early life, this may explain why he has done a lousy job
protecting his public persona. According to a 1988 interview in New York magazine, for example, Mr. Brodkey claimed that John Updike had him in mind when creating the character of the Devil in The Witches of Eastwick. “Some of the things the Devil said, I have said,” Mr. Brodkey told his interviewer. “I tend to be in a number of Updike books, either offstage or in lesser roles onstage.”

  When queried about this, Mr. Brodkey winces. “Why bring this up? Why don’t you let it die? The Devil began as a composite of other writers, of Ozick, of Roth. When the film came out, I kept getting phone calls from people who recognized things. It was all very upsetting at the time it happened. And it’s not important now. I’ve lived in New York for 30 years and lots has happened, lots have been said.” (An intriguing coincidence is that his second and present wife, writer Ellen Schwamm, published a novel in 1983, How He Saved Her, about a woman who leaves her husband and children for the Devil.)

  One wonders if such gifted man is a literary lemming. In 1988, Mr. Bloom was quoted as having said: “There is in Brodkey what Freud characterizes as ‘the need to fail.’ There is an intense psychic suicide going on. The question is whether the creative and personal psychology will sabotage him or will allow him to properly organize and bring forth his work.”

  We finally leave the restaurant and, at Mr. Brodkey’s suggestion, take a stroll through Riverside Park, along a pathway that glints beneath lamplights with a powder of crushed glass, and descends toward the bank of the Hudson. I ask him why the novel has bounced between publishers since it was signed up in 1964. “These situations are two-sided. In one case, the publisher died, in another case it was somebody I liked a lot but I was out of sympathy with. In another case, it was a matter of money. Neurosis went into it. The problem is the way I write. The book at first reading is not completely acceptable.”

  Now ambling through a more forsaken area of the park, we pass an assembly of sinister men, who size us up with feral-looking eyes. Hearing rapid footfalls behind us, I turn to Mr. Brodkey. “This is your neighborhood. Is it safe to be walking here?”

  “No.”

  “So why did you bring me?”

  “A while back you said you liked to take risks.”

  “Not this kind. Let’s get out of here,” I say.

  Picking up the pace, we soon find a set of stone steps that lead back up to Riverside Drive and manage to climb away from the late-night menace. As Mr. Brodkey stands before me catching his breath, I reflect that he has taken a far greater risk in waiting so long, perhaps too long, to publish.

  * * *

  The Runaway Soul may be difficult, it may be long to excess, it may dare to spend a score of pages on a single fit of masturbation, and even longer on a sexual act. But it is a painstaking work of great emotional candor and audacity.

  * * *

  DECEMBER 9, 1991 BY MICHAEL M. THOMAS

  THE MIDAS WATCH: YO, WASP, PULL UP THOSE TUBE SOCKS

  LAST WEEK WE DISCUSSED THE INTERESTING WAY HERBERT Hoover Poppy is CEO-ing the country, which he seems to view as some kind of gigantic corporation and therefore susceptible to the same management techniques that have, over the last 25 years, made American industry the glory of the developed world.

  He is evidently trying to accomplish in the public sector what he never could in the private: to prove himself a glinty-eyed effective manager. Given the utter lack of ability and character which he brings to the task, I suppose you could say H.H.P. is making heroic strides. Nevertheless, as a WASP, I feel about the president the way my Jewish friends feel about the Dersh: God help us, every one.

  He certainly doesn’t have much feeling for the symbolic gesture. Twenty-eight bucks’ worth of tube socks and whatever at the local Penney’s isn’t going to turn the nation’s economic morale around. And frankly, I’m not too impressed with the net net net, cash-to-cash aspect, either: not when I factor in the cost to the taxpayer of the limousines, security people, press hounds, et cetera, needed to get the great man to the mall. I’ll bet we’re talking $10,000 for a bottom line of minus $9,972, although you can bet that we, the taxpayers, got stiffed for the $28, which will find its way into “miscellaneous” on the White House P.R. budget. So it’s $10,000 out of (our) pocket any way you look at it.

  JANUARY 6, 1992 BY CHARLES BAGLI

  ‘Too Tall’ Apartment on Upper East Side to Lose Top Floors

  THE BEHEADING OF THE “TOO Tall Building” on the Upper East Side, whose travails have attracted international attention, is set to begin within six weeks.

  In an unusual challenge for demolition experts, contractors are planning to lop off the top 12 floors of a 31-story tower at 108 East 96th Street, just east of Park Avenue, which has remained empty since it was built 53 months ago. The job is expected to take about 37 weeks, costs $1 million and require some 500 dump trucks to cart away 3,000 tons of concrete rubble.

  The task, which requires the use of hob-knockers, ho-rams, loader dozers, acetylene torches, jackhammers and chain-falls, is not impossible, but it will be extremely tricky. “It’s a dangerous project, not because you can’t take down 12 stories, but because you have to preserve the integrity of the floors below,” said Richie Baris, president of Avalanche Wrecking, a demolition contractor based in Carlstadt, N.J. “The pneumatic equipment could shake the floors below and possibly loosen the face-brick. There’s also a question as to how much heavy equipment you can use in demolishing the structure.”

  The beheading is the result of an accord reached last April among city officials, the neighborhood planning group Civitas and Queens developer Laurence Ginsberg, whose building is 12 stories taller than allowed by local zoning regulations.

  The 12-story error was the most egregious in the memory of city officials, and the severity of the punishment also appears to have set a record.

  FEBRUARY 24, 1992 BY CHARLES BAGLI

  THE UN-ZABAR WANTS OUT OF STORE; FOOD FIGHT ON THE UPPER WEST

  THOSE FELLOWS AT ZABAR’S ARE at it again.

  Murray Klein, not a Zabar, but certainly a driving force behind the success of the Upper West Side food emporium, claims his partners, Saul and Stanley Zabar, are working him to death.

  In court papers seeking to dissolve the partnership, the 68-year-old Mr. Klein said the Zabars have repeatedly refused to sell him the business, or buy his one-third share for $6 million. Behind this tactic, Mr. Klein claims, it an attempt to prevent him from retiring, so the Zabars can buy him out when he dies for half of what he says is the true value of the business.

  The Zabars, in turn, dispute Mr. Klein’s claim, saying their white-haired partner is simply attempting to subvert the partnership agreement and force a sale. A hearing in State Supreme Court is scheduled for later this month.

  New Yorkers, meanwhile, continue to jam the aisles of what has become a two-story institution that stretches for most of the West Side block of Broadway between 80th and 81st streets, generating sales of $39 million and making Zabar’s the most profitable specialty food store in the country.

  “This is the longest-runnning horrendous partnership in the history of the world, except that it works,” said David Liederman, the cookie king who tried to buy Zabar’s in 1985.

  MARCH 9, 1992 BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

  CURTAIN UP ON MCINERNEY NOVEL

  HITCHENS HADN’T EVEN FINISHED READING Brightness Falls—it was late afternoon and he was de-icing the silver cocktail shaker preparatory to some old-fashioned, feet-up literary immersion—when his telephone trilled its urgent summons. A brisk voice inquired in a friendly but more than just inquisitive tone what precisely he meant by “profiling” Jay McInerney and what, in any case, he meant by reviewing a novel before its official publication date. This was Hitchens’ first ever call from Gary Fisketjon—he knew of people who had waited in vain for such a call from such a one—and the emotions of flattery and curiosity contended for mastery in his finely but oddly chiseled features.

  Hitchens dialed Julian Barnes in his London snooker speakeasy.


  “Call me collect one more time, Hitch,” he quipped, “and I’ll break your arm.”

  “Listen, Jules, I need a soundbite. Your mate McInerney seems to have a lot of protection. His roman is very good, but it’s not as much á clef as I’d been told. Please advise.”

  “The thing to notice,” said Barnes, “is that Jay’s literary development is completely disconnected from his social curve. I think the real curve—the writing curve—goes steadily upward. Whereas in terms of the literary-social melodrama, he’s seen as someone with a terrific early success who then wrote two dogs.”

  Julian Barnes may be right in decoupling McInerney’s fiction from his life, but anyone who knows the publishing racket is still going to be spotting the members of the real-world literary bestiary. There is what could be a misprint in my copy, where a reference is made to the industry of “Proesy and pose.” Mistake or not, it ought to stay in. Here we meet cynical ex-radicals on the make, Jewish paranoid belletrists who spend a Borgesian lifetime constructing unreadable fictional labyrinths and cool black dudes who lend cred, absorb the diss and split the diff. Also, since this is set in the age of the arbitrage casino and the reign of funny money, there are some lycanthropic Bonfire ingredients lying combustibly about the place.

  Ignoring, or perhaps better say reisisting, a heavy-lidded glance from Carol Azul, Hitchens gave the silver shaker a gelid twirl. “Look here,” he said grandly to Fisketjon, “I can’t believe you’re holding this book until June. I bet it’s in the stores before then. But if you do have time, let me save you from a blunder. Victor Propp the fraud is described as being in his 60’s and also as having a father who claimed descent from Isaac Babel. Now if Babel had lived he could still be technically alive, so if you’re going to make not one but two learned references to Russian Jewish letters, you had better…Hullo? Hullo? Hullo…operator?”