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

by The New York Observer

  Lunch was just O.K. I do remember once at Lutece, Richard Nixon came over to say hello, and it sticks in my mind that he gave us a business card, which I thought was very funny. Anyway, after about the first six months, people started actually reading the paper. But I wanted my friends outside New York to read it as well, so I came up with a hundred-person comp list and I would mail the paper to them every week. Now unbeknownst to me at the time, Si Newhouse makes a twice-yearly world tour of his properties, and he’s in Europe, this is like the spring of 1992, and everywhere he goes, in Paris and London, his editors have a copy of this pink newspaper on their desk. I think he came back with the thought that “everybody’s reading this thing!” and that the editor must be onto something. A couple of months later, he called me up for a chat.

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  It was sort of the mop-up period from the ’80s. There were still these bloated human floats from the ’80s parade, and the ’90s hadn’t established themselves.

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  Small circulation doesn’t matter if you find the right 10,000 readers?

  Back in the day, before blockbusters like Jaws and Star Wars, movies were platformed—they’d open in a couple of theaters in New York and L.A., lock in their reviews and some good word of mouth, and then roll out to other cities. At Spy we knew we didn’t have much money and we aimed for an initial circulation of 25,000—a small number, but if we got the right 25,000, we figured we could build it out from there. And The Observer’s circulation was similarly small—and still is, relatively, but it hits the audience that it is going for.

  There were like 13 of you in that one-half of the fourth floor? And the bathroom situation—not so good?

  I brought a brakeman’s cup to the office.

  And the staff that was there?

  I didn’t go crazy. I’ve never been one to immediately come in and toss a lot of people out. One of the people who I found instantly difficult to deal with was Charles Bagli, who covered real estate. I got into lots of fights with him. But about six months in, we got to know each other, and I grew to appreciate that he was the most valuable reporter on the staff. He now works for The Times.

  What about the transition from the Spy sensibility to The Observer?

  Well, if it’s a newspaper that’s coming into your house every week, it’s got to be a lot cheerier and kinder than a satirical monthly. Also, I wanted to avoid using all the same tricks we had used so effectively at Spy. So I went out of my way not to make it mean. I meant it as sort of a cozy publication for the Upper East Side. I was very influenced by P. G. Wodehouse’s Psmith, Journalist, which is set in the teens in New York City. Psmith, who is one hell of a character, steps in and takes over a small, sleepy paper and endeavors to bring it to light. I was very inspired by that book.

  Graydon Carter is editor of Vanity Fair.

  Illustrated by Barry Blitt

  I’m told that every Wednesday you would put Post-It notes on each reporter’s desk with their assignments for the next week. How did you know what you wanted from each?

  I would go out at night and come back with tons of little scraps of paper with ideas on them and sort of empty them out on my desk and divvy them up among the reporters.

  What were you paying people?

  A hundred dollars a week or something. Not a lot.

  Do you remember a moment that you thought this was really working, clicking?

  Well, you’d go to a dinner, and all of a sudden, for the first time, someone would say, “I read that article about such and such in the paper.” I also started getting calls—this was before email and just after faxes. You can tell in an instant when what you’re putting out there is beginning to be read. About six months in, I knew that the paper was hitting that certain segment of New York I was looking for.

  What about that time in N.Y.C., 1991, was that a good time to be doing this?

  It actually was. It was sort of the mop-up period from the ’80s. There were still these bloated human floats from the ’80s parade, and the ’90s hadn’t yet established themselves.

  What about what the other publications were doing at the time?

  Other publications—like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal—told you about the world. But my goal for our readers was to tell them about their world. If you lived between 53rd Street and 96th Street, and Fifth Avenue and the East River—that’s who we were going for in that first year. And my plan was that once we knocked out the East Side, we’d go down to the Village and come up the West Side.

  So you needed another four years or something?

  Three years, for quote-unquote total New York domination.

  Were there certain people you couldn’t write about?

  No, in fact, it was the opposite. One time when I was having lunch with Arthur, I said, “Listen, I just wanted to give you a heads up, we’re going to do a story on Sandy Weill.” And he said, “Oh no, fine, do it, do it, it’s fine.” And I thought, “My God, what a great person to work for,” because Sandy Weill and Arthur had been partners in their brokerage firm in the ’50s and ’60s, and I thought, editorial-independence-wise, “That’s encouraging.” A little later, I told him we were going to do a story on Arthur Leavitt Jr. (another of his former partners) and that the piece might be a little tough in places. And Arthur said, “Absolutely fine!” And then I thought, “Wait, is he playing a game of chess I don’t know about?”

  So you got a call from S. I. Newhouse in June of ’92?

  Yes. As I said, he kept seeing The New York Observer on his rounds. And we knew each other socially. He asked if I was interested in either The New Yorker or Vanity Fair.

  Which were you thinking?

  The New Yorker—we had spent five years ridiculing Vanity Fair. And so for two weeks, I worked on a plan for what I would do at The New Yorker, and then one day it changed to Vanity Fair. I have no idea what happened, but I assume it had something to do with Tina Brown. Years later, I told him about the comp list and that that was why he kept seeing it during his travels back in 1991. He just laughed.

  What do you think of The Observer’s future?

  I can’t figure out why it doesn’t make money. I think it’s a seriously great paper. It’s a top-notch paper, it matters and it’s read by a certain number of the right people.

  We have the same shirt on, don’t we?

  How very good of you—the hallmark of a great reporter.

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  Illustrated by Drew Friedman

  1996

  Bill Clinton celebrates his 50th birthday at Radio City Music Hall

  Gallerist Mary Boone ditches “homogenous” Soho for uptown digs

  Mike Ovitz, over? CAA power agent now: Walt Disney’s No. 2

  Does my butt look big in this bankruptcy? Barneys files for Chapter 11

  David Foster Wallace’s 1,079-page novel Infinite Jest gives readers hernias

  Private-school kids snort Ritalin for that extra oomph

  Journalist Michael Kinsley quits print for clean Slate on the World Wide Web

  Rich New Yorkers stream into clinics for high colonic irrigation

  Madcap Manhattanite Sandy Pittman social-climbs Mount Everest

  1996

  JANUARY 8, 1996 BY ROB SPEYER

  N.Y.C. Sperm Count Tops That of L.A. in 20-Year Sample

  UNBEKNOWN TO THEM, NEW Yorkers may possess the ultimate weapon in their struggle against Los Angelenos for bicoastal bragging rights. Dr. Harry Fisch, a Park Avenue urologist and fertility specialist, has discovered that New York City men have more potent sperm than their Los Angeles rivals. Dr. Fisch is expected to present his finding at a conference of the American Urological Society in May in Orlando, Fla. Until then, the good doctor, who conducted his research at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, is offering few specifics about his report: “I’m very concerned that it will come out in The National Enquirer,” he said from his car phone. “I want to be famous in an academ
ic sense, not as a joke.”

  Dr. Fisch studied sperm samples donated over the last 20 years by men to sperm banks in New York and Los Angeles. He found that New Yorkers consistently have both higher sperm counts and better semen quality, according to several medical sources familiar with the report. Appropriately, the New York semen was collected at a depository in the Empire State Building, that phallic monument to the city’s virility.

  Medical experts contacted by The Observer believe that Los Angelenos can blame the inferior state of their semen—which can have a major impact on one’s ability to conceive children—on several factors: warm weather, pollution and drugs. Not to mention that carefree L.A. lifestyle. Dr. Joseph Feldschuh, director of Idant, the Manhattan sperm bank that Dr. Fisch used, suggested that L.A. men may simply be having too much sex. “Sexual frequency makes a difference,” said Dr. Feldschuh. “If you have an ejaculation every day, your sperm count drops.” The doctor paused thoughtfully. “It’s a real possibility.”

  JANUARY 15, 1996 BY PHOEBE HOBAN

  MARY BOONE DITCHES SOHO FOR THE UPTOWN BOONIES

  DOWNTOWN IS DEAD. AGAIN.

  At least according to Mary Boone, who ought to be in a position to know. After nearly 20 years on SoHo’s main street, the Boonette, as Robert Hughes once dubbed her, will this spring vacate her thrice renovated premises at 417 West Broadway and move uptown—to 745 Fifth Avenue, just across from Bergdorf Goodman and cater-corner from the Warner Brothers Studio Store, with her own Eloise-style view of the Plaza. After years of looking for a suitable space, Ms. Boone is finally bidding the downtown art world goodbye. And, as far as she’s concerned, not a minute too soon.

  Dressed in an emerald-green Hermés jacket over a lapis-blue catsuit, Ms. Boone dug the spike of one high-heeled boot into the limestone floor in her office. “I think the energy and focus of art has shifted uptown,” she announced. “I feel there’s a lack of specificity downtown right now. It’s just about a kind of homogenous tourism. What was once an asset—being accessible on the ground floor on West Broadway—is now a liability. There are people who come down here and go in every door.”

  JANUARY 15, 1996 BY PETER STEVENSON

  ‘Buffalo’ Buford, Literary Gambler, Tries His Luck at Tina’s New Yorker

  ONE AFTERNOON BEFORE Christmas, Bill Buford slid his barrel-chested frame into a U-shaped banquette at “44,” the restaurant in the Royalton Hotel. As The New Yorker’s literary and fiction editor, Mr. Buford was awarded one of the restaurant’s best booths, a luxury he seemed neither to mind nor indulge.

  When Mr. Buford came to The New Yorker last April, there was talk—slivers of it reportedly coming from him—that he was editor Tina Brown’s heir apparent. After all, as an expatriate American in London he had made Granta the most talked about literary quarterly in the world. He was intimate friends with writers like Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Salman Rushdie. He himself had written a well-respected book. He was ferociously social, a big personality. His leaving Granta for The New Yorker made front-page headlines in England.

  But just before the New Year broke over Manhattan, Ms. Brown announced the elevation of two other editors—David Kuhn, to features director, and Dorothy Wickenden, to executive editor. The power seemed to lie with the nonfiction editors, who could bring in the more “glamorous” pieces about, say, Michael Ovitz or CBS. Mr. Buford’s corner of the magazine—fiction and gritty literary reportage—was secure—but still just a corner.

  At lunch, Mr. Buford said he wasn’t giving much thought to being editor of The New Yorker. “It hasn’t been discussed,” he said, then continued: “One of the reasons I left Granta was because I had become ‘Mr. Granta’…. I had derived enormous pleasure from writing a book, and wanted to write more books, and I could see I was never going to be able to as long as I was this ‘Mr. Granta’.” He paused, then laughed. “The New Yorker would be so much worse—it’s a fucking weekly.” He flashed a smile. When Mr. Buford smiles, his eyes are full of dark, manic glee.

  His own turf, rest assured, will be fiercely guarded. “The intermittent interest in things nonliterary, that now appears in The New Yorker, shouldn’t obscure the fact that it is the only publication that is overwhelmingly committed to text,” said Mr. Buford. “It’s a text magazine, and it’s trying to stimulate the kind of writing nearly a million people will buy.”

  Among the writers he has brought into—or back to—the fold are Paul Theroux, Leonard Michaels, V.S. Naipaul, Tobias Wolff, Amos Oz and Peter Carey.

  “What I want to do is get writers to start using the magazine, exploiting the magazine, as a valid and important place to play,” he said. “Writers have become alienated by magazines…. It’s going to take a while, persuading the Peter Careys and Paul Austers not to be so jumpy, not to mention the Don DeLillos and Thomas Pynchons.”

  Mr. Buford took a swallow of his red wine. “The business doesn’t have a sense of play about it. Everything’s become business. It’s become the book that has to sell this many titles, earn out the advance, meet this sales rep’s target, then publicity: 14 cities, 17 cities, 42-city tour—that’s not fun. I want to get some fun in the magazines again.”

  ‘BILL BUFFALO’

  In the early 1980’s, the British poet James Fenton threw a party at his home in Oxford. The cusp of British literary bad-boyhood was there: writers Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Redmond O’Hanlon. There was also a relative newcomer, an American named Bill Buford. He was in his late 20s, and editor of Granta, a Cambridge undergraduate literary magazine that had collapsed in the early 1970’s when the treasurer took all the money and ran off with a girl to Paris. The American was on a mission to revive it.

  “We weren’t used to someone packed with so much testosterone,” said Mr. O’Hanlon.

  “He looked like some sort of exotic creature from the plains,” said novelist Julian Barnes, who met Mr. Buford around that time. “He quickly acquired the nickname ‘Bill Buffalo.’”

  Bill Buffalo was there to drink and do some business. “By the end of the night,” said Mr. O’Hanlon, “he’d signed us all up.”

  A dozen years later, Mr. Buford would come home to his Cambridge house to find Tina Brown had called four times. Why he agreed to come back to America is a matter of some speculation among his friends.

  “He felt he’d done 50 issues of Granta, and The New Yorker was offering such a lot of money he couldn’t refuse,” said Mr. O’Hanlon, “and a lot of debts may have been building up, we don’t know.”

  “He had made a decision to be in exile and remake his life here,” said Mr. Barnes by phone from London. “There must be some emotional and atavistic need to remake your life in your own country.”

  “Men in their 40s either have a difficult time, or they don’t,” said Mr. Amis. “Life either goes in a straight line, or it takes a curve or two. I think Bill falls into the latter, as do I. He’s going through a bit of that right now.”

  Illustrated by Robert Grossman

  JANUARY 22, 1996 BY ERICA JONG

  Spare the Rodham? Hillary Storms New York

  WHEN HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON FIRST APPEARED ON THE NATIONAL scene a few years ago, she was a blast—not a breath—of fresh air. Here was a woman like most American women: a breadwinner, a working mother, outspoken in her opinions and visibly strong. Unlike Nancy Reagan, who secretly manipulated the White House schedules with the aid of her astrologer, or Jacqueline Kennedy, who always cooed softly that husband and children came first, or Barbara Bush, who never tried to influence George with her sensible views of abortion, H.R.C. was a woman of the next century—unafraid of seeming as powerful as she was. Her very demeanor said: Times have changed; now even women have to watch their backs. The protection racket is over, and it’s every Amazon for herself.

  Hillary Clinton makes a lot if people nervous because she is the new American woman. She knows nobody is going to protect her—quite the opposite, they’re going to try to kill her. She knows she has to be twice as tough to get h
alf as far. She is the woman created by the decline of the American economy. She can no longer afford conspicuous consumption. Even if she wanted to stay at home with the kid, she couldn’t afford to. She can hardly remember the last time she got laid and she ain’t mellow. The Republicans created her but they don’t seem to like her very much. As for the rest of us—we’d better get used to her: She’s the New Woman of the Next Century and she’s here to stay.

  JANUARY 29, 1996 BY FRANK DECARO

  BETTER BANKRUPTCY THAN TACKY: BARNEYS IS MANHATTAN STYLE

  THE YOUNG CLERK, IN A TOO-SHORT skirt and too-high heels, stood just beyond the handbags that look like peau de soie origami. She was squared off against a 50-ish blond customer in stretch jeans and Etonic sneakers who clearly was not having a good hair day one recent Saturday morning at Barneys New York. “We’re not going out of business,” the clerk assured the frowzy woman. “We have no cash flow problems!”

  That likely is true. But the owners of Barneys New York—the Pressman family, led by the Levi-wearing, cigar-smoking son named Gene—have fallen on hard times. A few weeks ago, the Pressmans filed Chapter 11 proceedings in U.S. Bankruptcy Court and sued their Japanese partner, Isetan Company. The Japanese retail monolith, as we all know by now, had funded Barneys’ expansion from its original Chelsea location, at Seventh Avenue and 17th Street, to its more swank, $270 million uptown digs and beyond.

  Barneys New York—once a purveyor of off-price suits whose slogan was “No bunk, no junk, no imitations”—now has stores in Beverly Hills, Chicago and other cities in America and Japan.

  These days, though, the Pressmans are on the receiving end of that attitude. The Barneys bankruptcy has touched a nerve with New Yorkers and, at least among journalists, set off a kick-’em-while-they’re-down backlash. Maureen Dowd ripped the store in her Jan. 18 column in The New York Times, describing it as “an NOCD (Not Our Class, Darling) joint” that “features designers so avant that no one has heard of them.” A Newsweek column by senior writer Johnnie L. Roberts ran in that magazine’s Jan. 22 issue with the overline “Revenge” and the headline “It Couldn’t Happen to a Nicer Store.” Mr. Roberts, who contends he was a victim of racism when he was accused of shoplifting six years ago at Barneys in Chelsea, wrote, “See you at the Going Out of Business sale.”