Mr. Zimmern declares his stylistic kinship with Soho (and makes a point of standing out from his distinctly Midwestern neighbors) by alternating between pairs of blue, pink and yellow Cole Haan sneakers. In a yellow pair and over his third cup of coffee, he explained: “New York is the place where we did our using. There are too many temptations. If we go back to New York and use, two things happen: We either end up in jail or we die.”
“You can have a lot more real friends here than you can in New York,” said Mr. Prem, the former stylist, who hastened to add that he grew up in an apartment sandwiched between Peter Duchin upstairs and Roy Lichtenstein below. “In New York, you have a thousand acquaintances and two friends. Here, it’s easier to differentiate between people who really like you for you, and people who only want to know you because they want something from you, mostly because people here are so bad at that kind of manipulation.”
Some of Minneapolis’ ex-New Yorkers haven’t been back to the mother city for years; when they do return, it is usually for short, clandestine visits. (“I get pavement paranoia immediately,” said Mr. Gaynor.)
When Hazelden’s new recruits arrive at Minneapolis International Airport (“This place is not as backwards as people think—they have an international airport,” Mr. Morse said), they’re told to go to carousel 14, where they will be picked up by the Hazelden staff. Like Mr. Zimmern, who had 15 stiff drinks on the plane, most arrive at this quiet, clean and spacious airport drunk, high and clinging to their portable phones. “I kept thinking, ‘How will they know me?’” Mr. Zimmern remembered. It wasn’t a problem.
The main Hazelden treatment center, founded in 1949, is a series of low, modern buildings on 488 wooded lakefront acres about 45 minutes out of the Twin Cities. In-patient treatment here lasts for about 28 days. New arrivals tend to feel that “a terrible mistake has been made; there’s someone sleeping in your room, and more important, you have to make some phone calls,” in the words of Mr. Grace. After the 28-day treatment, many patients are free to return to their former lives. But some are not. The most difficult cases are assigned to the Jellinek Center, an extended treatment house for those who still have a hard time admitting they’re addicts. Patients there spend the next four to six months writing 5,000-word essays (called “sections”) on all aspects of their lives, from family relationships to business, among other therapies.
Other graduates go directly into a Hazelden-run halfway house in St. Paul, which, said Mr. Zimmern, is like taking a course in Daily Life 101: “You learn how to do the little things: Get up in the morning, make your bed, return phone calls.” Part of the program’s prescription for rehabilitation is taking a menial job. Mr. Beavers scooped frozen yogurt in a mall; Mr. Zimmern cleaned toilets; everyone knows former bankers who washed dishes and lawyers who sold shoes.
* * *
New Yorkers go to Miami because they want to. They come to Minneapolis because they have to.
* * *
When they talk about their new home, Minneapolis’ New York transplants sound an awful lot like suburban apologists earnestly justifying their moves from Manhattan to Westchester or New Jersey: “You can go to the movies and not have to stand in line, or pull your car right up to the bank,” said Mr. Morse. But Minneapolis, unlike Scarsdale, perhaps, is also the sort of place where the locals “have trouble pronouncing lasagna. They call it ‘lagonia,’” said Adam Gaynor, who works nights in an Italian restaurant and delivers potato chips two days a week.
In Minneapolis, almost everyone lives with a roommate—sometimes up to four at a time. (“Here, you’re like a raw, exposed nerve, pulsing and vulnerable. You don’t want to be alone,” Adam Gaynor said.) In the evening, people travel in packs of up to 10. (“I still go out every night, but I never stay anyplace long,” Mr. Prem said. “In New York, you leave a party because you don’t want to miss the next big thing. Here, you leave because it’s boring.”) Although some rehab graduates, like Mr. Prem, go to nightclubs and can handle hanging out with “normies”—annoying recovery speak for people who can drink and take drugs and still get to bed by 1 A.M.—the preferred venues for socializing are coffee shops like the aforementioned Day-By-Day Café or Muddy Waters.
At Muddy Waters, Mr. Gaynor’s black-and-white photographs of fellow Hazelden graduates hang on the walls—sharp in the middle and blurry around the outside—in serene contrast to the atmosphere: blaring new rock ’n’ roll and leather-jacketed punks, some with nose rings as thick as worms. “Strange things can happen to people in recovery,” Mr. Gaynor said.
“Everything’s easier in Minneapolis, but you’ve got to do something, you can’t just hang out or you’ll go crazy,” said Taylor Burr, sitting in the office of the Burr/Holland recording studio in the Uptown section of Minneapolis, an area that is “sort of what I imagine Greenwich Village must have been like in the 60’s.” (Transplanted New Yorkers never tire of analyzing their adopted city in terms of Manhattan equivalencies.)
Two things happen to the New Yorkers who remain here, he said: “They either lose all their ambition and drop out, going to meetings and working their menial job and paying $300-a-month rent.” Or, like Messrs. Beavers, Morse, Burr and Holland, they embrace the big-fish-in-a-small-pond theory of life, in which being a New Yorker is a distinct advantage. “Coming from the streets of New York has given me a savvy I can take anywhere,” Mr. Morse said.
Mr. Burr puts it this way: “When I was in New York, I felt lost. There you are, this young man who wants to do all this cool stuff, and no one cares. Here, we’re one of the three cool recording studios. We couldn’t do this in New York.”
“In New York,” said Mr. Beavers, “you start off trying to get what the other guy’s got. There’s always that pressure to be the amazing one-shot deal. I wanted to produce movies, but I didn’t want to work at it. I’d get fucked up and call Jack Nicholson’s office, and then three days later it was like, whoa, the guy’s not calling back.
“Minneapolis is about reality,” continued the man who, during one of his last nights in New York, used an umbrella to destroy a plant at the Mark Hotel because he saw snakes in it. “If you want to do something here, you can do it. And for about one-fifth of the cost.”
“It’s really about economics,” said Jon Levy, 30, a partner in a local law firm who’s lived in Minneapolis for six years. “I want my kids to have the kind of [Park Avenue] upbringing I had, but I don’t think it’s possible in New York anymore. It’s not safe.
“On the other hand, what’s kind of cool is that it’s real white bread here. No one has any idea what we as New Yorkers have been through and seen. No one really knows how bad it gets. Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a movie directed by David Lynch.”
Others feel the same, though for different reasons. “I believe that Minnesota is a spiritual vortex,” said Jim Lynden, a Californian who has been in Minneapolis for 20 years and is an uber-sponsor for recent New York recruits like Mr. Zimmern and Billy Grace. Gray-haired and dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, Mr. Lynden has the sort of serene, unwrinkled face that is due either to a careful avoidance of the sun or an untroubled soul. “When the glaciers receded, they left a lot of ferrous iron in the ground, and this iron is acting as a magnet, drawing people here. They’re coming in on a spiritual quest, and they’re learning humility. I don’t think all of them will stay here, but I imagine these creative, intelligent people learning to be humble, and then going out all over the world to create and spread the message.”
“If that’s true,” said Chuck, a local hardware store owner, “then it’s time to move out of Minneapolis.”
MAY 17, 1993 BY ROBIN POGREBIN
A STAR RISES AT THE MESA GRILL
HE CALLED HIMSELF THE SUSAN LUCCI OF THE JAMES BEARD Awards. But this year, unlike the soap opera star who has been nominated 14 times for the Daytime Emmy Awards without winning, Bobby Flay broke his losing streak. On May 3, after being nominated in 1991 and 1992, Mr. Flay, the chef and part-owner of New York’
s Mesa Grill, was finally named Perrier-Jouet Rising Star Chef of the Year at the Beard Awards.
His victory brought to a close two long years of pretending not to care, yet kind of caring, two years of watching other chefs go up onstage to accept the award.
It wasn’t as if Mr. Flay desperately needed the award for his ego, which seems healthy, or for his business, which is booming. The 28-year-old chef has already been widely hailed as a kitchen Wunderkind, earning two stars from The New York Times in 1991 and accolades nationwide. And although the James Beard Awards have been called the Academy Awards of cooking, they are only three years old and have yet to translate into significant publicity or profit for its winners.
Nevertheless, the awards, established by the James Beard Foundation in Manhattan and given to cookbook writers as well as chefs, are one of the few tributes of their kind in the restaurant world. And since candidates are selected from all over the country, the possibility of being honored before a black-tie audience of distinguished peers, decorated with a gold-plated medallion engraved with the late Beard’s bald image and sent off with an oversize bottle of Perrier-Jouet Champagne on a pedestal, has become downright appealing to chefs like Mr. Flay.
Mr. Flay, whose closely cropped red hair and freckles give him a boyish look, breezed in wearing an Armani checked jacket and khaki pants. “This year, I’m very relaxed,” he said. “I haven’t thought about what I’m going to say if I win. I’ll just get up there and wing it.”
JUNE 21, 1993 BY PETER STEVENSON
That’s Mrs. Parker to You, Broderick! The Brat Pack in Round Table’s Clothing
DURING THE LAST WEEK OF APRIL, A SMALL, FINE-BONED WOMAN with straight auburn hair checked into the Algonquin Hotel under an assumed name. She requested a suite on an upper floor and a refrigerator stocked with Evian water and fruit juice. She spent a good part of each day at a secluded table in the hotel’s Rose Room, chain-smoking and chatting with guests who had come at her request. The mystery woman was actress Jennifer Jason Leigh, gathering nuance and information for her role as Dorothy Parker in the Fine Line Features film Mrs. Parker & the Round Table, which is being produced by Robert Altman and directed by Alan Rudolph.
The film, which started shooting June 14, is the most expensive and ambitious project in what seems to be a new Dorothy Parker-and-the-Round-Table feeding frenzy. In early June, guests at the Algonquin could pay $50 to eat “Lunch at the Algonquin” alongside such postmodern Round Tablers as Jules Feiffer, Roy Blount Jr. and Phyllis Newman—sponsored by Toyota. And on Aug. 20, the hotel is offering a “Dorothy Parker Weekend Package,” part of the month-long Dorothy Parker Centenary in honor of what would have been the cranky writer’s 100th birthday.
JUNE 28, 1993 BY MIMI SHERATON
MEMO TO SEATTLE: HOLD THE COFFEE!
“I love coffee, I love tea…I love the java jive and it loves me…”
LOVE IT OR NOT, JAVA JIVE IS hitting the charts again, but not as the coolly hot jazz classic of the early 1940’s. Today’s ubiquitous jive hypes the new-wave espresso bars that are sprouting up all across the country and, most recently, in Manhattan. With a breathless, messianic zeal probably induced by caffeine high, food writers everywhere are heralding the coming of coffee paradise.
Converts to this new religion turn northwest when worshipping, facing the mecca that is Seattle, and Starbucks is their prophet. A coffee importer, roaster and wholesaler since 1971 and, in 1987, the creator of the Seattle-style espresso bar, Starbucks is represented along the West Coast and in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Boston, among other cities.
In truth, Americans nationwide imbibe oceans of miserable, overheated, weak, acrid coffee, a combined result of penny-pinching by restaurateurs and the customer’s lack of discernment.
Yet, as a frequent visitor to Seattle, I have never really grasped the appeal of Starbucks’ espresso. I have also been disappointed with beans from the similarly celebrated Peet’s of San Francisco and by cupfuls at the Coffee Connection in Boston’s Quincy Market.
Better than New York coffee shop coffee they are, but is better than terrible necessarily good?
MAY 17, 1993 BY WARREN ST. JOHN
SCHLESINGER, UPDIKE UNITE IN REVOLT AT AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS
ARE CERTAIN OF AMERICA’S most illustrious artists and literati more illustrious than others? That question has tormented the 250-member American Institute of Arts and Letters for 89 years, and the dispute has recently come to a head. At issue is an elite, 50-member inner chamber known as the American Academy of Arts and Letters. From time to time, egalitarians in the institute have tried to break down the walls of the inner sanctum, only to be defeated by elitist factions. But late last year, a group led by historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., economist John Kenneth Galbraith, painter Jack Levine, composer Lukas Foss and author Elizabeth Hardwick succeeded in persuading academy and institute members to unite.
Of course, many in the academy think unification is an extremely bad idea. The opposition was led by Henry James biographer Leon Edel and counted among its ranks eminences like novelists Louis Auchincloss and Ralph Ellison and painter Andrew Wyeth. When members gather on May 19 at the McKim, Mead & White–designed West 155th Street headquarters for the annual awards ceremony, they will go as equals, for the first time since 1904. Now everyone will be a member of the academy; the less distinguished institute has been abolished.
The issue flared again in the late 1980’s, when some academy members approached Mr. Updike, then the academy’s chancellor, and suggested that the matter be reconsidered. Mr. Updike, cautious to a fault, declined. “When I was chancellor, I didn’t want to be the one who presided over the dissolution of the academy,” Mr. Updike told The Observer.
SEPTEMBER 6, 1993 BY ROBIN POGREBIN
Scenes From the Stein Marriage
THEY BREEZE INTO THE CARLYLE Hotel like movie stars, flashing white smiles and looking summery chic: former mayoral candidate Andrew Stein in a beige suit and blue shirt, attorney Lynn Forester in a cream-colored pants ensemble that highlights her loose yellow hair.
She sends the lemon wedge back in favor of milk for her cup of tea and says airily that their breakup, which they announced in early August, is all for the best. There will be no alimony or fight over belongings; it couldn’t be more amicable. He adds earnestly that seven of their 10 years married were one long honeymoon until a few years ago, when they just stopped communicating.
Yet there is something contradictory in the otherwise smooth demise of the Stein’s union. Why, after the Council president announced his decision to leave the public sector for the comforts of private life on June 29, did he and Ms. Forester choose to surface only five weeks later on the front page of the New York Post with an “exclusive” hand-delivered to gossip columnist Cindy Adams about their pending divorce?
Perhaps the former couple’s Aug. 3 publicity blitz was necessary because, despite their studied, rather self-contained effort to portray their parting as healthy and friendly, the picture wasn’t quite so perfect.
Ms. Forester—formerly known as Lynn Forester Stein—was more forthcoming on the subject. “It’s true that two or three years ago we knew we didn’t have a fabulous marriage,” she said. “But at the same time, he was embarking on the most important moment in his career.”
MAY 3, 1993 BY PETER STEVENSON
Heeere’s Conan! NBC Goes Generation X: is 6’4” Harvardite the Next Letterman?
WHEN JAY LENO INTRODUCED CONAN O’BRIEN TO a surprised nine million people on The Tonight Show on April 26, it seemed that no one was more surprised than Mr. O’Brien himself. Repeating the phrase “I’m just thrilled,” and looking demurely at the floor, the redheaded, 6-foot 4-inch, 185-pound successor to David Letterman as host of NBC’s 12:30 a.m. Late Night show exuded a little of the shocked disbelief of a beauty pageant winner.
It was Mr. O’Brien’s second appearance on The Tonight Show stage. On the afternoon of April 13, he had rummaged through the closet
in his apartment on the edge of Beverly Hills, pulling out all his sport jackets and ties. He had just been summoned to the Burbank set of The Tonight Show, and he didn’t know what to wear.
A few weeks earlier, Saturday Night Live executive producer Lorne Michaels had called Mr. O’Brien and asked if he was interested in producing the as-yet-uncast Late Night replacement that NBC had charged him with developing. Mr. O’Brien, a supervising producer (that means writer) for The Simpsons, had answered swiftly that what he really wanted to do was work in front of the camera.
Amazingly, NBC took him up on it. Mr. Michaels, who had hired O’Brien as a writer at Saturday Night Live in 1987, arranged for him to audition to be the host of the show. He would be on the stage where Johnny Cason and Mr. Leno had come to rule after many years of struggling, five days before his 30th birthday.
Mr. O’Brien arrived at The Tonight Show set for his audition around 7 P.M. The audience, which he had helped select, was packed with comedy writers, many of them fellow alumni of the Harvard Lampoon—ordinarily a very tough crowd. A live feed had been set up to Mr. Michaels’ offices in New York, where the producer and NBC executives would watch the audition. Communicating over the monitor from New York, Mr. Michaels watched as Mr. O’Brien tried on his pile of assorted jackets and ties, and finally told him which ones to wear.
At 9 P.M., Mr. O’Brien walked onstage to taped Tonight Show theme music, wearing a beige jacket and jeans. The Lampoon alumni in the audience held their breath. “We all knew he was the funniest person we had ever met in person,” said Greg Daniels, a Simpsons writer. “Our big question was: Can he dunk it when the lights are on?”
Apparently, he could. During the monologue, which he performed without cue cards, Mr. O’Brien told NBC executives why they should hire him. “You’ve got a very narrow window of opportunity,” he said, pointing to his large, square head. “I’ve seen my uncles, and in three years, I’m going to have a big, fat, meaty Irish head.”
The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots Page 11
