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

by The New York Observer

  That’s a kind of miracle! And, let it be shouted from the rooftops, this is a miraculous production. In its spare, fluent magic-realism, George Wolfe and his team have created visions for us. Set designer Robin Wagner and lighting designer Jules Fisher have achieved their very finest work. The vast, dizzying canvas moves effortlessly from epic fantasy to reality—from mad dioramas at the Mormon’s Visitor Center, to Roy Cohn ripping his IV from his body in a shattering nightmare image of blood and plague, to the ultimate vision of heaven in chaos as a celestial San Francisco at the barricades.

  Yet I feel in my gut that all concerned would have still killed for three or four weeks more work on part two. In the heat of Broadway deadlines and Mr. Kushner’s urgent last-minute rewrites, there is looseness to some of the writing within the colliding scenes. The muscularity of the drama dips, for example, in the reunion of Harper and her gay husband; the moving and forgiving kaddish for Roy Cohn, spoken with the help of the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, is undercut by a graceless “Sonofabitch!” and Louis’ amazement at being in bed with a gay Republican would be an easy laugh in an underground theater. There can be too many jokes, though not necessarily in the sense of the Emperor’s advice to Mozart, “Too many notes.”

  I mean the missing note of the genuinely spiritual. The angel, jokey, novice, speaking in tongues, is as much an angel of death offering the potential prophet Prior death. (Die to be reborn as prophet or savior.) In the most moving speech of the play, the dying Prior rejects prophetdom and chooses life: “I want more life.” And the heaven he witnesses shows the gods in disarray, and God heartlessly absent. I wish only that Mr. Kushner had brought the leading player on stage. Bring God on! For had there been a genuine debate between them, Prior’s choice of life on earth would have been more astonishing, the dice would not have been loaded, and this fantastic drama would have looked into the vision of light.

  It is, if you will, the legitimacy of the spiritual that I feel is missing. And God knows how Mr. Kushner might have achieved that. But when in the quiet, peaceful, almost wistful end, we are left with the near-blind Prior and his friends by the stone angel of Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, it is his courageous spirit that speaks of longed-for change. In this messy, scintillating, turbulent drama of loss and betrayal, of an entire era of American life and death, his spirit asks for change in all of us, for understanding, commitment and love. In its entirety, Angels in America has been an unforgettable journey.

  * * *

  GEORGE GURLEY INTERVIEWS MICHAEL M. THOMAS

  Illustrated by Barry Blitt

  Arthur Carter came to see me in the fall of 1987. I’d been writing a column for Manhattan, inc., but I had quit because Herbert Lipson, the publisher, wouldn’t run a humorous column of mine about Ralph Lauren, because he was trying to get advertising. And so I started up at The Observer. My column, the Midas Watch, generated attention, I think, because, well, I’m a great believer that the bad guys have names and that if you don’t name the names, the whole point of the exercise is lost, you just keep saying, “unnamed sources.” Also, I grew up in this world of Wall Street, and I knew a lot of the people and I wasn’t very impressed. The one thing that most of them lack is a sense of humor about themselves, so you could tweak in pretty short order. I used to be a sort of mainstream person in New York society, and I soon found myself on the outside. I had to resign from certain boards I was on, because I was going to write about the people who were on them. And the reason I called the column the Midas Watch is because of the transmutational power of gold. Everything Midas touched turned into gold, and my take on it was, we were living in a society in which, increasingly, everything that gold touched turned into some kind of virtue.

  I always thought that the worst thing that ever happened to journalism in New York was when [New York Times publisher] Punch Sulzberger accepted the presidency of the Metropolitan Museum, because that meant he would be soliciting money from people his newspaper might want to write about. I used to say that the problem today is most journalists want to dine with people they ought to want to dine on. And to me, gossip, properly defined, is what people really don’t want said about them. In one of my first columns, I wrote, “This is not a bulletin board for PR people the way Liz Smith’s column is.” Liz Smith stopped speaking to me. A friend of mine!

  Do you think that if more people on Wall Street had been reading your column, it might have made a difference in the current crisis?

  The people who were trying to spray water on this Wall Street thing over the last few years, like Jim Grant and myself, see it was a young man’s game, we don’t have an effect. We’re living in a world in which young people haven’t paid much attention to their elders. I told 60 Minutes’ Steve Kroft two years ago that all hell is going to break loose in the subprime mortgages and he ought to go talk to Jim Grant; this is going to be a huge deal. But they don’t want to do it before the fact, they’d rather do it after the fact, when they can go around pointing fingers.

  So one of the reasons I decided to give up writing the column is that at the end of all that time, it had made no difference. If you think that going into the Century Club and have three septuagenarians come up and say “Well, I love reading you in The Observer” is the be-all and end-all of life, well, that’s something else.

  I will say, blame for the mess on Wall Street lies with guys my age, people in their 70s. You’d bump into them and it’s always the same; they’d look at you and say, “I don’t know what these young guys are doing, but they’re making me a lot of money.” Whereas when I was starting out, and dealing with 70-year-olds at Lehman Brothers, they were all scared shitless—they’d been there in ’29. They’d been through it, and they were watchful. That’s the one thing that you can indict my generation for, completely, is allowing this to happen on Wall Street, for not warning the new guys by pointing to the lessons of our parents’ generation. The new guys had seen nothing but up. We should have known better. The 50-year-olds couldn’t have known better, they were in thrall to their computers, they believed what their computers would tell them.

  What’s your take on Bernie Madoff?

  Well, first, the last thing any of these people involved with the Madoff thing were was greedy. They were conservative! When you have capital, you wish to increase it. That’s not greed; that’s just common sense. Greed is an overused word. Where Madoff was so smart was that he delivered conservative returns but he appeared to be doing so consistently. I mean, a greedy person goes for the gold ring every time! But look, his clients were experienced businessmen. You can’t feel sorry for people who have no excuse for being that stupid. This isn’t some window cleaner who’s being offered a $600,000 mortgage. These are people with hundreds of millions of dollars, with broad experience of finance. These are people who could have picked up the telephone, but it just worked all so nicely. They were making a lot of money, it was consistent, it was safe.

  What do you think needs to happen?

  We have to somehow de-velocitize trading. It doesn’t make any sense if Citicorp stock goes up 7 percent one day, down 7 percent the next. The other thing this does is that it’s almost eliminated Buffet-type investing, because you can’t feel safe. It doesn’t matter if you own a good stock. You own Apple, Apple’s got 10 billion in cash, its earnings go up 20 percent a year. But if these guys at the hedge funds want to beat up on it in the short term, they can ruin the stock! It becomes what they call a broken stock. Great company, broken stock. So how do you invest?

  Is it similar to what happened in 1987?

  Eighty-seven was nothing, ’87 was over in a couple weeks. This is systemic, with all this liquidity worldwide, where suddenly we’re discovering that U.K. police departments in places like Nottingham can’t pay their officers because they’ve lost all their fucking money in an Icelandic bank. Now I ask you, what business does a Nottingham police department have in putting its operating funds there just because some smartass in Nottingham said, “This Icelandic ba
nk will give you 12 percent.”

  You’ve written a lot about the Hamptons.

  When I started going there—I have a picture of me sitting on my mother’s lap in 1938; it says “Mrs. Joseph A. Thomas and her son Michael, prominent members of Southampton Summer Colony.” There was nothing out there. Now, everything is denser. This money seeped in everywhere.

  Michael Thomas, a former partner at Lehman Brothers, has written the Midas Watch column, on and off, since 1987. His eighth novel, Love or Money, will be published this year.

  What New York characters did you like writing about the most?

  Well, the people I picked on! The premise of the column was that if you call attention to your advantages and to your wealth often enough and loudly enough, it’s going to occur to someone else to come and take them away from you. And it was fun to tweak these guys. To me, the all-time bad guy during this period was Greenspan. Alan Greenspan was full of shit the first day I met him, which was 20 years ago. Basically what I was looking for was to pop the personal balloons. I mean, I like Henry Kravis, he’s a nice guy, but when Henry was being the little king, he needed to be tweaked! And he’d get pissed off at me! Mort Zuckerman’s the same way. Poor Mort’s been publishing the same fucking newspaper for years. Nobody’s ever said to him at a dinner party, “Gee, Mort, that was interesting what I read in the Daily News today.” So he’s kind of fun to tweak. The key to the column was, I really had no ambitions, George, that would be compromised by speaking my mind in the column in any way that I thought would get the job done effectively. Whether it was tweaking or hammering or piercing or whatever. I didn’t care about being invited places.

  What about [Sotheby’s former chairman] Alfred Taubman?

  Ah, Lord Tubman! Now he certainly did not like me, poor Lord Tubman. But I called Alfred that because he’d show up at these parties in Southampton dressed as if he was going shooting for a weekend at Blenheim. It used to just kill me.

  You were destroying these people.

  No, I was not destroying them. Because if I had destroyed them, or if anyone could have destroyed them, they would have been destroyed. They weren’t! They went on, they got richer, the invitations continued to pile up. I’ll give you a good example. I had written a column, must have been ’91, which asked how high did the bodies have to be piled at American Express before we could figure out who’s at fault. So I’m sitting at home in Bridgehampton and I get a call from Jimmy Robinson, who was the CEO of American Express. And he said, “You wrote this about me in the paper and blah, blah, blah.” And I said, “Jimmy, for Christ’s sake, this is a newspaper read by about 18 people.” And he said, “Yeah, and I’ve heard from all 18 of ’em.”

  But you know, if you’re getting rich with the taxpayers’ money and you’re worth millions of dollars and you have this massive publicity machine, all I’m doing is, I’m the pea in the princess-and-the-pea act. You’ve got 99 mattresses and if you can feel me down there, you must be pretty sensitive. But they are sensitive, because they have very little sense of humor about themselves. I grew up among rich people, and I came from a privileged family myself; I kind of know where the Achilles’ heel is. The important thing is to figure out what people like least about themselves, or are most insecure about, and emphasize those qualities. Or where just something is in such horrible taste. I used to have fun with Ralph Lauren; I used to say, “You’ve got to admire somebody who can turn a pad of tracing paper and the 1947 L.L. Bean catalog into a billion dollars.” I like nicknames, so he became the Wee Haberdasher. And Jerry Della Femina hated me. I called his daughter out on that stupid Hamptons guidebook. I didn’t understand why, if you go to a place for haven, you try to make a buck out of it by selling the best routes and the back roads and everything else.

  Tell me a little bit about your relationship with Peter Kaplan

  My relationship with Peter is complicated only by the difference in our schedules, I guess is the best way to put it. I’m sitting over here with nothing to do, George, so I can answer any email within five seconds. Peter has answered two emails in 20 years. I love Peter. I am completely devoted to him; I know how hard he works. You know, he’s a kind of hero. I mean, without him, there’s no paper.

  Did you ever regret writing a particular column?

  No, I have no regrets about the column. Well, I mean, yes, I once wrote a column about the Fanjuls, after which Poppy—my late stepmother—called me up and said, “Darling, I have to live in this town.”

  Illustrated by Barry Blitt

  You wrote about your father a number of times, described him as “a man who minced precious few words and the scene will not see his like again.” You wrote that he “once entered a lavish resort drawing room—”

  Oh, yes, Palm Beach. He looked around and asked the hostess, “Did you invite these people or advertise for them?”

  How has New York changed in the past 20 years?

  George, I think everything is pretty much the way it used to be, only with more zeros. A couple years ago, when I had my 70th birthday, we went to Wolfgang’s down on Park Avenue, and you know, I’d almost forgotten that the vilest place on earth is a Manhattan steakhouse at the height of a trading bull market. Because you’ve got all this testosterone in there and all these animals with the cigars, eating steaks practically with their bare hands, but it’s all such bullshit. Because if you’ve worked on Wall Street, you know what it is that they do, and if you know what it is that they do, it just becomes almost inconceivable that they get paid the money they do. For doing that. What Jefferson called “legerdemain tricks on paper.” In my time, I’d get corporations to float bond issues in Europe because I wanted to go to Europe. So I would suggest, “I think we ought to do a $20 million euro dollar, blah, blah, blah.” Next thing you know, off we go to sell the deal in the capitals of Europe. And all the expenses—the hookers at Madame Claude and the meals at Maxim’s and all that shit—that got charged right to the deals. It’s just bullshit! It’s just bullshit.

  * * *

  1994

  Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City column debuts with tales of swinging

  First Lady of Fifth Avenue Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis dies

  Zuckerman on the rebound? Writer Philip Roth calls it quits with actress Claire Bloom

  Upper East Side parents grovel to get tots admitted to elite preschools

  Voters pick George Pataki, the pride of Peekskill, as new governor

  Cocaine returns to New York nostrils, sometimes cut with heroin

  City Harvest salvages 500 pounds of food from Trump-Maples wedding for homeless

  Tale of hard Knopf: Prestigious publishing house fires editor Gordon Lish

  Ed Kosner leaves New York magazine to become the 10th editor of Esquire

  1994

  JANUARY 17, 1994 BY PHOEBE HOBAN

  Coming Soon to a Bookstore Near You

  PHILIP ROTH’S ART AS A WRITER often imitates his life as a man, but there’s a sad new fact in his life that has not yet made it into his fiction: the celebrated author and his companion of nearly 20 years, the British actress Claire Bloom, have separated. She’s moved out of their country house in Cornwall Bridge, Conn., and their Upper West Side apartment. Mr. Roth, who was recently spotted without her at a party in Manhattan (Zuckerman on the rebound?), is deep into work on his latest book. (This year marks the 25th anniversary of perhaps his most famous novel, Portnoy’s Complaint.) And Ms. Bloom is in Cambridge, Mass., rehearsing for the American Repertory Theater’s production of Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard, which opens Jan 21.

  “Philip and Claire were perfect,” said a friend who knows them both. “I think the fact that she could tolerate him was kind of amazing, and the fact that he gave in to her was kind of amazing. Claire is patient and Philip is manic.”

  “They are two extraordinary people that we love and admire. Our hearts are broken,” said Francine du Plessix Gray, a close friend and a Connecticut neighbor.

  MARCH 12, 1994 BY CAND
ACE BUSHNELL

  COCAINE RETURNS TO PARK AVENUE NOSTRILS; NEW ‘SHNOOF-SHNOOF’ OFTEN CUT WITH HEROIN

  ON A RECENT THURSDAY NIGHT, A TALL, HANDSOME MAN—we’ll call him “Giuseppe Crostini”—parked his late-model Ford in front of a small prewar doorman building in the East 70’s in Manhattan.

  Upstairs in 3c, Mr. Crostini was greeted eagerly by a tall, preppie blond woman.

  A quick and nearly undetectable exchange of an aluminum foil packet for cash took place, and Mr. Crostini left. On his way out, he thanked the doorman for watching his car.

  Despite all that we keep reading about the so-called new sobriety, “Mr. Crostini” and his blond customer are part of a recent trend: the comeback of cocaine. While the perception persists that most (read: fashionable) people gave the drug up in the late 1980’s as hopelessly passé, an informal investigation conducted by The Observer would lead one to believe that plenty of people are still secretly snorting away their paychecks and inheritances. There are even new pet names: the “Bolivian marching powder” popularized by Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City is out; it has been replaced by equally cutesy terms: “schnitzie,” “shnoof-shnoof,” “naza” and “You-Know-What.”

  Illustrated by Barry Blitt

  MARCH 28, 1994 BY FRANK DIGIACOMO

  Dueling Swiftys? Tina and Graydon Vie for Attention of Oscar’s A-List

  THE MARCH 14 PARTY CELEBRATING THE NEW YORKER’S OSCAR-PEGGED movie issue wasn’t scheduled to start for 30 minutes, but already the first celebrity had emerged from the corridors of the lilac-perfumed Hotel Bel Air: Lassie. Following close behind was New Yorker writer Lillian Ross. Interestingly enough, in a 1948 article about the Hollywood blacklist, Ms. Ross had written, “Almost the only motion-picture star who is taking conditions in his stride is Lassie.”