As ibuprofen is to Advil, mifepristone is to RU-486. Two years ago, the F.D.A. approved its use in the United States following almost a decade of lobbying by abortion-rights activists. Yet RU-486 is still not available in America. Its distribution has been held up pending the result of a nasty Federal court battle between the Population Council, a nonprofit organization, and Joseph Pike, a lawyer and businessman who invests in health care products.
Lawrence Lader, a Manhattan-based abortion rights activist, was so frustrated that he got the generic form of RU-486 approved by the F.D.A. as a stopgap until the problems with RU-486 could be resolved. He found a Columbia University scientist to replicate RU-486, goosed the F.D.A. into signing off on the use of mifepristrone for abortions in less than two years, found a manufacturer to make it and enlisted Dr. Westhoff and Columbia-Presbyterian.
MARCH 3, 1997 BY WARREN ST. JOHN
Mike Nichols’ All-Star Clinton Gamble
IS IT POSSIBLE TO MAKE A FILM version of Joe Klein’s satirical novel Primary Colors without pissing off President Clinton and the first lady?
That’s a question director Mike Nichols has been grappling with in recent weeks, as he gets ready to start shooting Primary Colors, the movie. Mr. Nichols has the makings of a hit: John Travolta has been cast as the pudgy, randy Southern governor based on Mr. Clinton, Emma Thompson as the candidate’s bulldog wife, Oscar nominee Billy Bob Thornton as the quasi-Tourettic redneck campaign staff member based on James Carville, and British actor Adrian Lester as the African-American translation of George Stephanopoulos.
Mr. Nichols, who paid $1.5 million of his own money for the property, has a $65 million budget. Sources at Universal said he has been given total control of the film’s content. And his former comedy partner, the writer and director Elaine May, has created a compressed, astringent screenplay that asks some complicated, nasty questions about politics in our times.
So what’s to worry?
Already, Mr. Nichols is feeling the pressure of earning back $65 million from a political satire. And there is a social cost to Primary Colors as well. An associate close to the project said Mr. Nichols “wants to move the movie away from the book’s specific identification with the Clintons.” But: “Without the candidate fucking people or being a lecherous guy, you don’t have a movie,” said one Universal higher-up. “That’s what you’re selling.”
Illustrated by Philip Burke
MARCH 10, 1997 BY JENNIFER KORNREICH
THE OBSERVATORY: SEX OR SANITY?
WITH THE HELP OF OUR LITTLE friends Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, et al., anyone can be happy nowadays. But something has gone terribly awry in the brave new world of medicated Manhattan: Everybody functions smoothly now, at work or at social functions, but in those private moments, in the quiet of the bedroom…nothing.
More and more frequently, psychiatrists in New York have been bumping into monsters of their own creation: patients who, having cured their depression with those wildly popular anti-depressants, are experiencing a new kind of misery now that the drugs’ most outrageous side effect has left them with practically no libido.
So here it is, a depressing Catch-22 for the not-so-gay 90’s. The urbanite must choose between the agony of depression and the fleeting moments of ecstasy inherent in a robust sex life. It’s all in there, in a recent issue of Primary Psychiatry: The journal estimates that between 40 and 50 percent of people taking the S.S.R.I. (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) class of anti-depressants—which includes Zoloft, Paxil, Luvox and Prozac—suffer from sexual dysfunction.
And in the New York City of 1997, most fashionably medicated, formerly depressed people are choosing Prozac over sex.
MARCH 24, 1997 BY JIM WINDOLF
THE OBSERVATORY From Best Years to Our Years
Fifty years ago, a top-of-the-line Hollywood studio product, The Best Years of Our Lives, stole the Oscars away from Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Jim Windolf explores William Wyler’s unsentimental tear-jerker with some help from one of the movie’s surviving stars, Teresa Wright.
ON MARCH 13, 1947, the president of the Screen Actors Guild, Ronald Reagan, opened the Oscar ceremony at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles with a few words before a movie montage. Then Jack Benny took over as the emcee in the first nationally broadcast Academy Awards show. In the Audience sat producers and directors from the five nominated films for best picture: Clarence Brown’s The Yearling, Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, Edmund Goulding’s The Razor’s Edge, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life and William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives.
The Best Years of Our Lives nearly swept: Wyler won an Academy Award as best director; Robert Sherwood won one for his screenplay; Frederic March won as best actor; Harold Russel (who lost his hands while handling dynamite during the war) won as best supporting actor, and after the ceremony, with the press taking pictures, Cary Grant leaned over to Russel and whispered, “Where can I get a stick of dynamite?”
Sam Goldwyn, who produced the movie, went home, sat down alone in his darkened living room with his Oscar for best picture and his Irving R. Thalberg award, and wept.
Fifty years later, as The English Patient’s producer Saul Zaentz prepares to do some Goldwyn-style weeping with his prospective Oscar, and the Academy Awards also-ran It’s a Wonderful Life has entered the cultural vocabulary of every other schoolchild in America, The Best Years of Our Lives—which went on, in 1947, to become the second biggest grossing movie of all time, after Gone With the Wind—is a nearly forgotten artifact, without cult or fan club, network showing, remakes, miniseries versions or digitally enhanced reissues. And yet, it is as good a movie as it ever was—not antiqued or made laughable by time; in fact, quite the opposite. Its integrity has aged it into a kind of permanent American artifact, with values that are so rock-bound and understated that they put this society, in 1997, into stunning relief.
Of the three veterans returning home in the film, one was a bank executive on the verge of middle age, one was a handsome former soda jerk, untrained to enter the postwar employment market, one was an amputee who had to face his family and who was determined to convince his fiancée to dump him because of his infirmity. For these three, Wyler cast the now pouch-eyed former matinee idol Frederic March as the bank executive, Dana Andrews as the soda jerk, and—after searching through disabled hospitals—was watching a documentary when he spotted an amputee named Harold Russel, whose sincerity struck him. He cast Myrna Loy as March’s wife, Teresa Wright as his daughter (who falls in love with the soda jerk), Virginia Mayo as Dana Andrews’ bombshell cheating wife, and Cathy O’Donnell as Harold Russell’s fiancée.
The best-known scene in the film—and there are a number of greatest hits—is a long, un-dialogued sequence of the desperate Dana Andrews, about to leave town, sitting in the nose of a junked B-17 recalling his battle experiences. He is interrupted by a man who gives him a job as a laborer. It is a victory.
When Bob Dole accused the Clinton generation of never having suffered, never having done anything real, it sounded like the voice of a stern former warmonger chiding the children of postwar prosperity.
But those semifamous (“I’m just a man”) lines were written by a child of the baby boom, Mark Helprin, and perhaps they more accurately reflected the baby boomers’ fear and awe of the men and women who fought a successful war on two fronts than the feelings of the victors themselves. For The Best Years of Our Lives, made when the memory of war was so fresh that it was still unexamined, shows the weakness and unconscious remorse of the men coming home, and women flexing the new muscles they gained while the soldiers were fighting.
* * *
The movie is certainly a product of the Hollywood factory, but it manages to do something that has always been rare in the movies: It shows life as it is lived.
* * *
With the help of cinematographer Gregg Toland, who added to the stylish bombast of Citizen Kane with his pioneering use of deep focus but brought a kind
of centered clarity to this movie, Wyler told the story of three veterans with an unmannered sincerity and directness. He told his cast to buy their costumes off the rack at department stores and to use as little makeup as possible. It is a long way from the perfume-commercial-slick tragedy of that new supposed classic of the war’s aftermath, The English Patient.
Dana Andrews, an actor with matinee idol looks and a drinking problem, played the damaged bombardier who can’t adjust to his sudden loss of status now that he’s a civilian. With his teeth clenched, he delivers the final stinging lines of the movie—a bitter marriage proposal offered to Peggy Stephenson, played by Teresa Wright. It’s a pretty tough ending for a movie that won seven Academy Awards. Fred’s proposal goes like this:
“You know what it’ll be, don’t you, Peggy? It may take us years to get anywhere. We’ll have no money, no decent place to live. We’ll have to work. Get kicked around.” When Andrews reached the end of the phrase, “get kicked around,” he lands on an off note.
It’s like he’s on the verge of uttering some final sweet nothing that will smooth down the sharp edge of his proposal and make for a more harmonious ending.
Instead, the phrase just hangs there—get kicked around.
And so it goes with Dana Andrews’ crumpled marriage. He comes home one afternoon to find a guy named Cliff in his apartment with his wife, Virginia Mayo. “Did you know him while I was away?” he asks.
“I knew a lot of people,” answers his bombshell bride. “What do you think I was doing all those years?”
“I don’t know, babe, but I can guess.”
“Go ahead, guess your head off! I could do some guessing myself. What were you doing in Paris and London and all those places?”
And then the unhappy little marriage breaks up: “I’ve given you every chance to make something of yourself,” Virginia Mayo says. “I gave up my own job when you asked me. I gave up the best years of my life, and what have you done? You flopped. Couldn’t even hold that job at the drugstore. So I’m going to work for myself, and that means I’m gonna work for myself and in case you don’t understand English, I’m going to get a divorce. What have you got to say to that?”
It’s a great touch, that Virginia Mayo’s shallow, fed-up character, who wants to get on with it and stop obsessing and remembering, is the one to speak the words “the best years of my life.” It undercuts the title’s seeming tinge of wallowing self-indulgence; it also plays off the indescribably compressed war experience. The phrase refers, ironically, to the war years, when the movie’s characters were apart and scraping to survive. So it’s tacitly understood that the protagonists’ best years are gone, invested in their country’s future, and they’ve spent their youth and now they must try to find a way to negotiate the aftermath. And the aftermath is even more daunting than the war itself—just life—now that the characters are no longer part of a grand cause and must figure out for themselves what to do with the endless years that lie ahead. They have to make their own lives, a condition that has been a given in this country for at least a generation. This purposeless peacetime, in other words, has been hell, with the result that people have distanced themselves as much as possible from what they had during the war: a community at large.
Teresa Wright says the movie shows her character, Peggy Stephenson, waking up. “She probably would not be as advanced in her thinking without the war,” Ms. Wright said. “As she was, the war made her grow up a lot, as it made a lot of people grow up. Even grown-ups grew up a lot. But there came a time after the war when there was a new kind of prosperity—people needing new cars and new homes and things theycouldn’t get during the war. And so a softness set in, even a softness in thinking. I don’t think the people we saw in the film—I don’t think Fred’s (Dana Andrews’) family would go backwards at all, but the average family probably regressed a bit.”
It has become a cultural maxim that the baby boom generation behaved as it did in rebellion against the war generation. But the war veterans in the film who questioned their former place—the unsatisfied drugstore cowboy, the unhappy bank bureaucrat—seem like precursors to the wild characters of the 60’s. It’s not really such a long way from The Best Years of Our Lives to another seminal three-hour movie, Woodstock. But it’s a very long way from The Best Years of Our Lives to its supposedly contemporaneous putative best picture, The English Patient, the entire purpose of which is to show the best year in the life of Count Laszlo de Almasy, who, in real
J.F.K. Jr. (#8) and Rudy Giuliani (#4) were among those on ’97’s Power 100
Illustrated by Drew Friedman
MARCH 31, 1997 BY RON ROSENBAUM
THE EDGY ENTHUSIAST, WOODY ALLEN SERENADES BOOKS & CO.; WILL THE WHITNEY LET IT SURVIVE?
“WHAT ARE THEY GONNA REPLACE it with,” Woody Allen asks glumly, “another expensive foreign clothing store?”
“Maybe a nail salon,” I suggest bitterly.
We’d been speculating about the Whitney Museum of America Art’s plans for the Books & Company space if the museum succeeds—as it now seems intent on doing—in killing the beloved bookstore a second time.
The Woodman had called to express his support for the campaign to save the bookstore. He’d already put in a call to Leonard Lauder, chairman of the Whitney board, who now seems to be the last slim hope for saving the store, as Mr. Lauder’s underlings at the museum seem to be engineering a quiet suffocation of this vital New York City institution through bureaucratic sleight of hand. The Woodman is both impassioned and persistent: He’s enlisting friends in the campaign, and when Mr. Lauder, who has been traveling, did not immediately return his call, Mr. Allen faxed him requesting a talk as soon as he returned. It is to be hoped that all book-loving Observer readers who did not respond to my plea in a previous column to write or fax Mr. Lauder drop everything and do so now, because the situation has become even more dire. The way the Whitney is going about disposing of the bookstore is turning into a classic case study of how power operates in New York, the way a powerful institution deals with potentially embarrassing public relations challenges: by putting on a public face of sweet reason while quietly using bureaucratic maneuvers and delays to strangle the inconvenience it wishes to dispose of.
APRIL 14, 1997 BY JIM WINDOLF
TV DIARY: Happy Midlife, Dave! What, You Worry?
THIS ISN’T EXACTLY DREW BARRYMORE TURNING HER BACK ON the audience and getting up on the desk in the old Ed Sullivan Theatre and giving you a flash of her breasts (Late Show With David Letterman, April 12, 1995), but: Happy birthday, Dave, happy birthday to you.
This is what it has come down to, after all the hard work on those Indianapolis radio and TV stations (1969-1975) and the slugging it out alongside Jay Leno and Jeff Altman at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles (1975-1978) until the long hard years at Late Night With David Letterman (1982-1992) which led not to your rightful place in Burbank, Calif., but to a retrofitted stage in a monstrous, dark, rat-exterminated Ed Sullivan Theater for a maddening network, CBS, which looked so promising when you signed on for $14 million a year, but has since lost the Olympics, National Football League games and truckloads of viewers, but went on to sign…Bryant Gumbel.
Dave, you’re first and foremost a broadcaster, unlike Jay Leno, who is just a comic, and to some extent like Ted Koppel and certainly unlike Bill Maher, who is stealing viewers from you between midnight and 12:30 a.m. but who is truly a scavenger, relying on such grisly grist as the death-cult suicides to provide his show with its only reason for being.
But as Nick Carraway said to Jay Gatsby, you’re better than the whole lot of them put together. (That’s not completely true, but it’s your birthday.) And it’s time for you to grow up!
Illustrated by Drew Friedman
Pataki Pack: Governor George Pataki yuks it up with pals Senator Alfonse D’Amato and Charles Gargano
Illustrated by Drew Friedman
APRIL 21, 1997 BY WARREN ST. JOHN
KATHRYN HARRISON’S DA
D RESPONDS TO HER MEMOIR
AUTHOR KATHRYN HARRISON’S father is a retired Protestant minister, living in a small Southern city, who claims he knew nothing of his 36-year-old daughter’s best-selling memoir The Kiss, with its account of their four-year consensual incestuous relationship, until contacted on April 11 by The Observer.
Allowing that he was “pretty shaken” to learn of his daughter’s book, he said, “You say that Kathryn has said that she had an affair with me? I guess if people want to believe that, golly.”
Asked if he had a sexual relationship with his daughter, he first replied, “The girl writes fiction.” Pressed, he said, “I don’t want to do anything to bring Kathryn into a bad light. My immediate reaction is that you’ve got me with something that I don’t even know a thing about. You’ve asked me about a book that I didn’t know was published. I guess I’m going to have to find out real quick. “I don’t want to call my daughter a liar,” he said, “I don’t want to bring her into question about her standing—but obviously I’ve been brought into question about mine.”
Reached overseas, where she was promoting The Kiss, Ms. Harrison gave a statement through Random House spokesperson Carol Schneider: “In writing this book, I exposed myself and not my father, and everything I have to say is in the book. I have no further comment.”
MAY 5, 1997 BY DEVIN LEONARD AND GREG SARGENT
Brave New Rents Would Make Manhattan a Cold Place
THERE WAS A TIME WHEN PEOPLE might have been forgiven for believing there was at least some paltry reward for sticking it out in Manhattan. Sure, they had to brave the cursing cabbies, the hostile bus drivers, the in-your-face panhandlers, the junkies shooting up in doorways, the muggings, the Third World infrastructure. But there were people so enthralled with Manhattan and all of its grit and glittery promise that they couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, including the outer boroughs.
The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots Page 25
