So: Why wasn’t Mr. Amis smiling?
Three days earlier, Mr. Amis was preoccupied.
“If I had known that my teeth would become a theme of public debate and make headlines in the tabloids and Time magazine,” said Mr. Amis, “I would have committed suicide without hesitation a year ago.”
Mr. Amis was about to fly to New York, to kick off the three-week American book tour for his new, celebrated, vilified novel, The Information. This novel about literary envy has aroused wrath in England for the size of its advance ($750,000), and sparked public fascination about Mr. Amis’ teeth, which are now surely literature’s most famous diseased body part since John Updike’s psoriasis. Mr. Amis, who is being fitted with new teeth by a high-priced New York dentist, has been attacked in England as a sort of corrupted, treasonous Brit, for his decision to replace his suitably ghastly English chompers with an American Colgate smile. It was as if, by fixing his teeth, he was embracing the smug, rich, sexually prolific, best-selling Gwyn Barry character in the new novel, and abandoning the rotting, impotent, unpublished, powerless-but-lovable (and very British) Richard Tull.
“The work wasn’t really a cosmetic job,” explained Mr. Amis, “it’s profound reconstruction.”
He went on. “Our teeth are the way by which we actually live, and I had become very neurotic about mine. They are your naked bones. They are the sensory focus of your life.”
MAY 15, 1995 BY FRANK DIGIACOMO
THE OBSERVATORY: IT’S 1 A.M. AS SIX GREAT CHEFS FEAST ON THE CITY THAT HAS MADE THEM STARS
IT WAS WELL AFTER MIDNIGHT at the Blue Ribbon restaurant on Sullivan Street in Soho, but Laurence Kretchmer, the 29-year-old co-owner of Mesa Grill and Bolo restaurants, hadn’t yet ordered the first bottle of wine. Most of the boys hadn’t shown up yet.
The boys happened to be a regular gathering of six of New York’s hottest young chefs who meet after work most Saturday nights at the Blue Ribbon to gossip and trade secrets.
Most Saturday nights at the Blue Ribbon, the table closest to the entrance is occupied by this den of chefs. And just as the Algonquin Round Table of the 1920’s and 30’s gathered to commiserate about their literary careers and their love lives, and to zing wisecracks at each other, the Blue Ribbon round table gathers to share horror stories about customers from hell, culinary techniques, business gossip and, of course, the trials of making a romantic relationship work on a chef’s insane work schedule.
The crew includes Bobby Flay, the celebrated red-haired 30-year-old chef of Flatiron District restaurants Mesa Grill and Bolo; his business partner, Mr. Kretchmer; Tom Valenti, 36-year-old chef of Cascabel; Alan Harding, chef at Tribeca’s farmer-friendly Nosmo King; Matthew Kenney, the darkly handsome, quiet, 30-year-old chef-owner of Matthew’s on the Upper East Side; and Mario Batali, the 34-year-old bearded, ponytailed chef-owner of bustling Pó in the West Village.
Mr. Kenney sat down. He was swaddled in a bulky sweater topped by a heavy coat. “I’m freezing,” he said quietly. “Whenever I leave the kitchen, I’m ice cold.” Then Mr. Harding sat down. Mr. Batali peered at the wine bottle. He did not appear cheered by the label.
“What was that face for?” Mr. Flay said.
“It’s a little early for pinot noir for me, Mac,” said Mr. Batali.
“We should order some oysters,” someone said.
“Where’s Valenti?” Mr. Flay wanted to know.
“I think Valenti went home,” said Mr. Batali.
“He’s a punk,” said Mr. Flay. But five minutes later, as if summoned, Tom Valenti arrived.
And the Blue Ribbon round table was complete. Mr. Flay sat back into the plush red-orange fabric of the banquette that his crew occupied and smiled.
JUNE 5, 1995 BY TISH DURKIN
ANOTHER FINE MESS: PENN AND SCHOEN, LEAKPROOF POLLSTERS, RUSH IN FOR CLINTON
ON THE WALL BEHIND THE RECEPTIONIST hangs a picture of Ed Koch, circa 1977, and behind him stand two young lords of the realm: one rotund, rumpled and bookworm-like; one thin, taut, bookworm-like.
Ah, but that’s not why we’re here, on East 92nd Street. Why we are here has rather to do with the piece of paper on the front desk. It is a questionnaire that starts off, “If the election were held today, would you vote for…?” The men over Mr. Koch’s shoulder are the pollsters Mark Penn and Douglas Schoen, and, in December, the Democratic National Committee put Penn & Schoen Associates on retainer. Now they are the men behind the president of the United States.
How two low-profile workhorses came to acquire a role in the fortunes of a politically embattled chief executive is, according to some, a great New York story of how two fast kids from Horace Mann hooked up at The Harvard Crimson, stuck together through the thick and thin of political warfare from Manhattan to Mobile to Manila, and landed at the front door of the White House. Or, say others, it is a rather tidier tale of how two guys got a deal that’s better than they are.
In 1994, Mr. Penn and Mr. Schoen were working for a Mississippi Democrat named Ken Harper. Mr. Harper lost the Senate race to incumbent Republican Trent Lott, who was getting advice from Dick Morris, an old acquaintance of Mr. Penn and Mr. Schoen. Mr. Morris had in recent years become a Republican consultant, but not before forging an unbreakable bond with Bill Clinton. Friends say Dick Morris brought Mr. Penn and Mr. Schoen to the attention of the D.N.C. because Mr. Clinton needs first-class polling. Period.
But Washington whispers that Mr. Clinton really wants to hire Mr. Morris, but that he cannot afford to be seen getting advice from a Republican. Not to put it too bluntly, but some are saying that Penn & Schoen are, in effect, beards for Mr. Morris.
“My understanding is that Dick Morris will be paid through Penn & Schoen,” said the head of a major Republican polling firm in Washington, D.C. “You have to be honorable to one side or another in this business…. Dick Morris has decided he can have it both ways.”
“It would be unseemly for the D.N.C. to write checks to the same guy Trent Lott is writing checks to,” echoed an equally prominent Democratic pollster, who expressed doubt that Mr. Penn and Mr. Schoen have ever spoken with the president. (They say they have.)
But perhaps Washington’s most stunning comment on the subject of Penn & Schoen, received from all the Clinton colleagues contacted by The Observer: silence.
Polling Horace Mann.
Both Mr. Penn and Mr. Schoen came to their passion for electoral politics—statistical division of—alarmingly early. Above one of Mr. Penn’s couches hangs the first poll he ever took, circa 1968. Eighth-grader Mark Penn found the faculty of the Horace Mann School to be more liberal than the average American.
Mr. Schoen had graduated from Horace Mann two years earlier. At 16, convinced that his would never be the athletic glory of which he had dreamed, Mr. Schoen found an outlet for his competitive juices in the City Council race of his mother’s friend from temple, Robert Low. Soon young Mr. Schoen was ringing doorbells; one of his first campaigns was that of Assembly candidate Dick Gottfried, whose campaign manager happened to be Dick Morris.
By the time the two arrived at Harvard and hit The Crimson—day editor Mr. Schoen sent cub reporter Mr. Penn to cover a women’s softball game—they were already consultants, masquerading as undergraduates.
As an Oxford Ph.D. candidate, Mr. Schoen wrote a book about the Tory populist Enoch Powell. Meanwhile, Mr. Penn, the computer scientist, having graduated from Harvard in 1976 and gone on to Columbia University’s law school, so engrossed himself in the campaigns of Brendan Byrne, Ella Grasso and others that he stopped “maybe a course” short of getting his law degree.
By 1976, the combination was going full-throttle out of Mr. Penn’s apartment. Political consultant David Garth, once a summer boss of Mr. Schoen’s, brought them on board Ed Koch’s 1977 mayoral race, where, said Mr. Schoen, “we developed constant daily tracking, but saw how Garth used it to develop a winning strategy.”
They seem to have no New York Democratic connection left unmade—including
that with Clinton confidant Harold Ickes, who hired them to poll for David Dinkins in 1989. “Harold is a very shrewd political actor,” said Mr. Schoen. “He’s always been very kind about our work.”
But Washington is determined to keep them under a hot lamp. “Penn & Schoen’s numbers are fine, but their analysis is mediocre at best,” said one prominent pollster. “If you had to come up with the top 10 list of pollsters, they would not be on it.”
“The Beltway rap,” Mr. Penn said, “is, ‘They’re accurate, but can they tell you what it means?’ No—we just throw darts at it.”
JUNE 12, 1995 BY ANDREW JACOBS
Chastity Zones to Scrub Up Sex City: Talese, Sailors Weep for Dirty Old N.Y.C.
EXCEPT FOR THE GREASY SCUFF mark that sullied one leg of his bell-bottom sailor’s pants, a man who gave his name as Keith Lancaster was blindingly white, a vision of purity in a sinful city. That is, if one could ignore the nearly naked blonde wriggling on his lap.
“This is what makes New York so great,” the 21-year-old midshipman said with a sigh, just moments after “Cleopatra” had finished performing atop his military whites at Church Street’s All-Star Harmony Theater in Tribeca.
He isn’t the first stranger in town to enjoy the snares of New York’s prolific sex industry and he surely won’t be the last. But if the Giuliani administration has its way, future visitors to this city will be hard pressed to find the licentious charms that led one mid-19th-century traveler, Ole Raeder of Norway, to call New York “the Gomorrah of the New World.”
All this month, community boards throughout the city are debating the merits of a dramatic zoning change that would force up to 90 percent of the city’s peep shows, topless bars and triple-X video outlets to relocate or close altogether. Of the 177 sex establishments counted in 1993 by the Department of City Planning, all but 25 would have to unplug their flashing lights within a year of the new zoning rule’s passage, which lawmakers hope to have in place by Thanksgiving. A few might manage to survive by moving to unfriendly industrial strips on the fringes of all five boroughs, but then only with a 500-foot buffer zone between each business and with an equal gap between a given sex establishment and a school, church or residence.
Combined with the invasion of superstores and Disney’s planned foray into Times Square, the new plan could help to zone unwholesome fun right out of the heart of the city. Critics of the proposed zoning restrictions maintain that such changes would not only turn New York into a bland, sexless metropolis, but threaten the city’s tradition of unfettered artistic expression.
JULY 17, 1995 BY JIM WINDOLF
THE NEW YORK WORLD: THE N.Y. LUNCH RITUAL
SET A LUNCH DATE TWO TO three weeks from the date of your call—but be vague about the place and time. Then, on the morning of the lunch date, fail to call your partner. If he or she also fails to call you, you’ve both got it made—lunch is off!
If your lunch partner remembers to call you, mention how “crazy it’s been around here lately,” and then say, off handedly, “You know what? Tomorrow would be a lot better for me.” If tomorrow’s no good for the other person, lunch is postponed indefinitely!
If the other person is free for lunch tomorrow, promise to call the following morning to set the time and place. Next morning, conveniently forget to make the call. Most likely, your lunch partner will be too proud to call you—and lunch is off forever!
Illustrated by Barry Blitt
AUGUST 21, 1995 BY CANDACE BUSHNELL
SEX AND THE CITY: CITY IN HEAT! SEXUAL PANIC SEIZED RUDY AND MR. BIG
THE CITY’S IN HEAT. DAYS OF 90-plus-degree weather strung together one after the other. Everyone is cranky. No one can work. Women wear almost nothing. August is the month New Yorkers think about sex more than all the other 11 months combined. Everyone is amorous—even the mayor and his lovely wife, Donna, who embraced on WNBC on Aug. 10 at 6:45 A.M., while most of New York was still sleeping. The papers duly reported that the Mayor’s wife was “beaming.”
New York—meaning Manhattan, not the Hamptons, which, thanks to the ocean breezes and chilly social caste system, cannot be said to ever truly be in heat—is a completely different city in August. Like living in some South American country with a corrupt and drunk dictator, skyrocketing inflation, drug cartels, dust-covered roads, clogged plumbing—where nothing will ever get better, the rains will never come, so might as well turn off the air-conditioner and have some fun.
SEPTEMBER 11, 1995 BY JAY STOWE
OFF THE RECORD: New Yorker Staff Heckles Tina’s Roseanne Folly
THE LATEST ATTEMPT BY NEW Yorker editor Tina Brown to fold some Hollywood glitz into her venerable magazine started, naturally, in Brentwood, Calif. That’s where Ms. Brown met with feminist sitcom mama Roseanne in the dining room of her manse on July 25. Roseanne’s latest husband and former bodyguard, Ben Thomas, “left us alone to let our hair down,” Ms. Brown said.
As a result of the meeting, Roseanne will serve as a consulting editor for an upcoming double issue of The New Yorker focusing on women.
Another result: A number of New Yorker writers are grumbling again about Ms. Brown’s judgment. Most notable among them is veteran New Yorker staff writer Ian Frazier, who quit soon after he learned of the latest departure from the magazine’s traditions.
New Yorker editors David Kuhn, Deborah Garrison and Ms. Brown herself will go west on Sept. 25 to meet with Roseanne for a three-day brainstorming session at the home of the crass comedienne. Ms. Brown-said she will use Roseanne as an “interesting sounding board.”
AUGUST 7, 1995 BY JEFFREY HOGREFE
LEROY’S FINAL INSULT TO 57TH STREET: RUSSIAN TEA ROOM GOES THEME PARK
IN THE ONE MONTH SINCE Faith Stewart-Gordon agreed to sell the Russian Tea Room to Warner LeRoy, the celebrity restaurateur has been besieged by phone calls from many of her regular customers, whose ranks have included Lauren Bacall, Raquel Welch, Woody Allen, Candice Bergen, Roy Scheider and power-house agent Sam Cohn, who eats lunch in a front booth every day. Said Ms. Stewart-Gordon, a soft-spoken native of South Carolina who has owned the West 57th Street landmark since 1967, “they have complained that they’ll be left homeless” once she turns over what she refers to as “the tearoom” to Mr. LeRoy on Jan. 1. “Nonsense,” she said she has told the regulars. “Warner will take good care of you.”
That, it seems, is exactly what they are afraid of. A flamboyant child of Hollywood whose grandfather founded Warner Brothers, Mr. LeRoy, 60, is the proprietor of Tavern on the Green in Central Park and the creator of Great Adventure, the amusement park in Jackson, N.J.
DECEMBER 25, 1995 BY FRANK DIGIACOMO
POWER! MEASURED N.Y. STYLE—IN GOSSIP INCHES
WALTER WINCHELL MAY HAVE REVOLUTIONIZED the culture of gossip, but somewhere between the birth of Page Six and coming of age of the cyber generation, this black-sheep offspring of traditional journalism emerged as a legitimate media commodity. Because those being gossiped about are increasingly defined, not by what they were born to, or where they dine out, or even whom they marry, but whether they can shell out $5.7 billion to buy MCA, or turn the Gulf Western building into “The Most Important New Address in the World.”
For some time now, The Observer has been saying that a rarefied version of the meritocracy—that over-stimulated group of elite professionals who dominate the corporate, entertainment, media and design worlds—has overtaken the aristocracy, the moneyed socialites who do not work for a living, in the city’s social hierarchy. New York’s original social elite was, of course, defined literally as the 400 couples who fit into Caroline Astor’s Fifth Avenue ballroom, and their inclusion conferred upon them a certain amount of power. But the fin de siècle advent of the camcorder, America Online and Bill Gates has opened up the ballroom considerably. Coincidentally, the Microsoft Era has made more accessible a national obsession that has existed since Winchell’s day. “The thrust of almost everything in American life is toward celebrity,” said Neal Gabler, the a
uthor of Winchell; Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity. “That’s the currency of American life.”
If celebrity is the currency, then gossip is the coin of the realm, an alloy of information and fame that can create opportunities, careers, even people. But gossip also has the power to destroy what it creates. And there is really only one forum where the unique New York confluence of power, money, celebrity and controversy is dissected on a daily basis: the city’s gossip columns. That is where the agenda is set. “The columns don’t report on celebrity,” said Mr. Gabler. “They make celebrity.”
By conducting a census of nine New York-based columns in newspapers and magazines over a period of 12 months and determining quantitatively who appears in boldface most often, The Observer staff has assembled a ranking of New York’s gossip star-system: The New York Observer 500. Those who made the cut also enjoy a certain power, the power that celebrity brings in a society that, as Mr. Gabler noted, is obsessed with it.
Gossip has evolved into what Mr. Gabler called a “common database for all Americans,” but much of that data is generated here. Celebrity has many facets—social, corporate, artistic, international—and no other city can offer as many of them in one concentrated location as Manhattan, an island that also happens to be the media capital of the world. The density and complexity of life here are ideal conditions for the art of gossip. “One of the fascinating things about living in New York is that you know that you are close to power and money and influence and prestige. But a lot of it is hidden behind doors and buildings,” said Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University and director of the Project on Public Life and the Press. “The combination of proximity to and distance from” these hidden worlds of power and influence “creates a natural demand for a form of news that can’t emerge from official channels and conventional journalism and approved newsgathering.”
The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots Page 18
