Illustrated by Victor Juhasz
‘I couldn’t stop crying and my parents came home and they were like, “What’s wrong? This isn’t right—you’ve seen lots of movies.”’
—Jamie Beilin, student at the Spence School
NOT SINCE FRANK SINATRA OR THE BEATLES HAVE NEW YORK CITY teenagers found themselves so willing to surrender themselves en masse to a pop cultural sensation. But this time, the subject of hot adolescent devotion is not a sexually liberating singer, but a decorous movie—Titanic, that gaudy romantic blockbuster—and the boys are expected to shed tears right along with the girls.
The movie has captured teenagers, but it wasn’t really intended for them. Ancient virtues and vices—love, honor, pride, courage, cowardice, greed—are all up there on the screen, writ large with the help of the record-setting $235 million budget. For kids who have grown up in a broken-down, whacked-out metropolis and who have been educated in a climate where parents and teachers and therapists tell them there are no real answers, this is something incredibly new.
So in Titanic, supposedly jaded city kids have found something they can really throw themselves into, body and soul. They enter the theater knowing they’re going to witness a doomed love story and the horrible deaths of 1,550 passengers, and that’s why they go see Titanic again and again—so that they can feel something, so that they can weep.
But the act of seeing the picture over and over, and sobbing along with it each time, is something that might not sit well with parents. Jamie Beilin, a 17-year-old junior at the Spence School who said she’s only applying to colleges with film schools, is a seven-timer. “The first time I went and saw it was on a Monday and I came home and my parents weren’t home and I was just crying so much and I couldn’t stop crying and my parents came home and they were like, ‘What’s wrong? This isn’t right—you’ve seen lots of movies,’” she said, all in one breath.
APRIL 27, 1998 BY GEORGE GURLEY
RECLUSIVE HEIR HUNTINGTON HARTFORD EMERGES FROM HIS BROOKLYN LAIR
GEORGE HUNTINGTON HARTFORD II, the 87-year-old heir to the A.&P. grocery fortune, was worth $100 million about 50 years ago. Now he lives in a four-room apartment on Ocean Avenue in Flatbush, Brooklyn. From his bedroom window on the eighth floor, he can see graffiti on walls and subway trains running above ground. He said he hasn’t set foot outside in a year.
Things started off all right for Mr. Hartford. He was a rich boy in the roaring 20’s, graduated from Harvard in 1934 and served in the Coast Guard during World War II. Then he came into all that money.
Now he was facing the TV, lying in bed. Bill Cosby was on, but the sound was off. Mr. Hartford’s white hair reached almost to his shoulders. On the bedside table were five coffee cups, a TV Guide, a tube of Ben-Gay, cashews, a squeeze bottle of chocolate syrup, and a photo of his daughter Juliet.
“Here I have all the money and everything—I probably have more trouble than a guy who didn’t have any money,” he said.
APRIL 27, 1998 BY WARREN ST. JOHN
Tom Wolfe’s Magnum Opus Is Ready!
FOR A LITTLE OVER A WEEK NOW, the most coveted invitation in the Manhattan magazine world has been for a seat at a wooden table in a conference room at Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s Union Square West offices. There, Tom Wolfe’s new novel, Red Dogs, exists as a foot-high stack of paper, typed in his usual triple-spaced lineation. Mr. Wolfe and his publisher have been keeping the novel under wraps, inviting fiction editors from the few magazines Mr. Wolfe considers worthy of excerpting his work to peruse the manuscript in Farrar’s offices. Bids for first serial rights were due in the fax machine of Mr. Wolfe’s agent, Lynn Nesbit, by 11 A.M. on April 21.
The catch here is that Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Ms. Nesbit and Mr. Wolfe are hoping to reap close to $1 million for first serial rights to the novel, an unheard-of sum for any magazine to pay for a novel excerpt. Bidders say a figure approaching $100,000 is much more likely.
For days now, those lucky few fiction editors have scurried to the publisher’s office to have a look at one of the most anticipated novels in the last few years. Vanity Fair’s Doug Stumpf has come by for a peek, as has The New Yorker’s Bill Buford and Esquire’s Adrienne Miller. Jann Wenner, editor and publisher of Rolling Stone, is the only other potential bidder for the serial rights.
A longtime friend and patron of the author, Mr. Wenner would seem to be a natural partner for Mr. Wolfe’s next big book. He got Mr. Wolfe started on The Right Stuff in 1973 when he hired him to write four articles on astronauts for Rolling Stone, and shelled out big bucks to serialize an early version of Bonfire of the Vanities before its publication in 1987, as well as Ambush at Fort Bragg, a novella outtake from Red Dogs, in December 1996. He has his own copy of the book, provided by Mr. Wolfe.
Adopting typically Wolfian hyperbole, some who have seen the manuscript describe it as “a huge world-creating social satire.” That has not, however, kept the magazine bidders from losing their heads. As The Observer was going to press, at least one magazine had balked entirely at Farrar’s implied starting price of $500,000 for the book.
Farrar publicist Jeff Seroy would say only: “Negotiations are in progress, and it would be foolish to talk about them at this time.”
Mr. Wolfe had a hard time settling on a title for his latest work. The novel has gone from being called The Mayflies in summer 1995 to The Stoics and Chocolate City before becoming Red Dogs. (Sources at Farrar said that Mr. Wolfe is considering Cracker Heaven as a backup title.) In late August 1995, Mr. Wolfe told guests at East Hampton’s Guild Hall, who had gathered to hear him read from his work in progress, that his novel was about real estate development, banking and working-class life—in New York City, of course. At the time, the hero of the book was a 60-year-old tycoon from Georgia living in New York City. Supporting a 29-year-old bride with expensive tastes, he suddenly finds himself $200 million in the hole, not long after Forbes has calculated his net worth at $900 million. Rather than sell off his beloved quail plantation or Gulfstream IV jet, he decides to deal with his coming bankruptcy by laying off some of his workers.
Illustrated by Philip Burke
MARCH 11, 1998 BY PETER KAPLAN
Warren Beatty Shampoos the Sleazy 90’s
While the country gets ready to line up for Godzilla and killer comets, 61-year-old Warren Beatty thinks he can go out and make a brave political comedy with (shhh) ideals. Is he crazy? PETER W. KAPLAN shares nuts with him
IN THE PAST 30 YEARS, SINCE HE has taken control of his own career, Warren Beatty has made at least one big, significant movie in each decade. Now he has directed and co-written a movie for 20th Century Fox called Bulworth. It is the best political comedy of its generation, and one of the best ever made by a Hollywood studio. It’s as good-willed, brave, idealistic, funny, as complicated as the best movies of the 70’s. Most of all, it has a startling optimism about race and America, positing as no studio product has in years that Americans descended from Africans and Americans descended from other places still have a chance to be merged into one country.
Bulworth is direct about race in a way that movies have not been for some time. When Eldridge Cleaver died recently, the papers were filled with the sadness of his gnarled life, with his wild return to America and his crazy crawling to the Republican Party. But Bulworth has a memory about black America, that the 60’s were not a wasted time. When the 26-year-old woman whom Bulworth falls for, played by Halle Berry, begins spouting her own doctrine in the movie, she explains that her mother knew Huey Newton, who was socially active in the hood.
“Huey was tightly wound,” said Warren Beatty. “If you said ‘Hi, Huey!’ it would be like that table.” He knocked on the table. “He was like that all the time. He had a good sense of humor. I remember being at a party with him one night, and he says, ‘Nixon’s going to be gone.’ And I said, ‘I don’t think so, Huey.’ And he said, ‘Nixon’s going to be gone.’” Mr. Beatty laughed. “And I said—oh, I tell this story in the mov
ie—oh, no, I cut it out of the movie. I told this story, and I cut it out of the movie. ‘So you want to make a bet?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ He says, ‘How much?’ And I said, ‘I’ll bet you…’ I think we bet $100. And we put it in a lamp that was hanging from the ceiling, and finally Nixon was gone. I went back there five years later, and I got a stepladder and I went up to the lamp. It was still there.” He laughed, then stopped. “Huey was dead,” he said.
But he blames the decline of quality in American politics on “money” and on the 30-second ad.
“It’s money. Money and technology. It should increase democratization. But the technology is not controlled democratically. Technology’s owned by wealthy interests, and so advertising serves the advertiser. And this goes across the board in all areas, in fast food, or politics, or movies, or newspapers.” The last part of which brought up the following question: Would Rupert Murdoch support his movie, the most directly liberal movie in years, a movie that curries applause from an audience when some baby street-gang members packing heat get to tell the L.A.P.D. to go fuck themselves? “Well, I think there’s really only one question,” Mr. Beatty said. “Will they spend the money you have to spend on movies? And the answer to that is…I don’t know. I hope so.”
Illustrated by Philip Burke
MAY 4, 1998 BY WILLIAM NORWICH
FEAR OF PFIZER? THE NEW VIAGRA
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 22, V-DAY, THE day of my Viagra trial.
“Are you really going to write about this?” my friend asked. “It’s like a bad scene from Heartburn. The film.”
Fifteen minutes later, still awkward silences. Then my friend observed that my face and scalp had gone beet red.
“Maybe I’m having a stroke. Do you have the phone number for an ambulance, in case?” I asked.
Then we noticed something else. How to say this in a family newspaper? Well, one found at one’s middle in the middle of one’s life something that hadn’t been quite so quite so in a spell. Perky. Very perky. Really rock hard. That was a little bit of all right. Dr. Lamm had mentioned a handy test. Give a few taps to oneself and see if it remained erect. It did. This pertness remained the case throughout the entire, lovely experience that followed, except for the odd minute of deflation when (1) I pictured my friend’s people in Philadelphia reading this and (2) I found myself thinking about how much Vanity Fair writers are paid.
“So what did you do with the rest of the pills?” a friend asked the morning after. “Throw them away?”
No comment.
MAY 25, 1998 BY GAY TALESE
THE OBSERVATORY: THE MAN WHO KNEW HOW TO SAY GOODBYE
QHEN I WAS GROWING UP IN THE 1940’S, DURING World War II, an impressionable acne-speckled youth in parochial school being insulted daily by the Irish, I also knew I was on the wrong side of the war because most of my uncles and older cousins were in Mussolini’s army, fighting against the Allied invasion of my immigrant father’s hometown in the Southern Italian hills. While this hardly made me feel secure as an American, the reason I was not emotionally driven underground during this time was the music on the radio being sung by a skinny crooner who was the star of the Lucky Strike Hit Parade. To me in those days the only thing that did not seem so terrible about being Italian was Frank Sinatra.
What other Italian-Americans were there in the American mainstream? There was, to be sure, the ever-silent and self-centered Joe DiMaggio, who, while he also served in the American Army, never spoke out in defense of anyone, including himself. He was and remained an interior man, ever distant, cautious, never in the forefront with a social conscience. At best, a male Garbo.
In the political arena there was, of course, the famous Little Flower, Fiorello La Guardia. But he was born in a manner that was less typically Italian, less insular, more savory; he had a Jewish mother, and he was a Protestant. And the other ethnic Italian headliners in those days were the wiseguys—Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello and their confederates in the Mafia.
What I am perhaps overemphasizing here is that the Italian-American experience during the World War II years was marked by a good deal of shame and self-loathing; and for most of the next 50 years, from the 1940’s to the end of the century, the only national figure of Italian origin who spoke out against prejudice and injustice, and who managed to find broad acceptance within the vast American landscape, was Francis Albert Sinatra. To those of us among the 14 million Americans of Italian origin, Sinatra more than anyone else embodied egalitarian opportunism, and was a one-man force for affirmative action, defending not only his own kind but all other minorities.
He was also the one Italian-American movie actor who in his films played romantic roles in ways not done today even by such active Italian-American actors as De Niro and Pacino, to say nothing of all those antisocial Italo types who are habitually cast as overheated heavies—except for this year’s newcomer aboard the Titanic, young Leonardo. Before Sinatra, to find an Italian-American matinee idol who dressed with any stylish elegance on the screen and got the girl, one had to extend back to the silent era of Rudolph Valentino.
Sinatra also had the capacity to change his life, to take risks, to say goodbye and move out, which is inherent in the nature of every true immigrant, to uproot one’s self from all that is familiar and predictable. This is a nation navigated by boat people, but the Italian immigrants’ offspring in America tended to be conservative, politically and socially, marrying within, identifying with a group, searching for security and a guaranteed existence. Sinatra was about stepping out and many goodbyes—leaving the plumber’s daughter in Hoboken, for instance, to remarry with Ava Gardner, which in my view is not necessarily a social step up. Still, it was Frank breaking the patterns and breaking hearts, a quintessential American’s quest for the kind of fantasy fulfillment that he also sang about.
America made love to his music, necked and lied to one another in parked cars in unacknowledged gratitude to his singing. But I remember talking once to Sinatra’s valet in Los Angeles, back in the 1960’s when I was doing a magazine article, and hearing the valet concede that he sometimes overheard Sinatra dialing one telephone number after the other, trying without luck to get a Saturday night date.
I do think that Sinatra was often very lonely, although he dwelled luxuriously within loneliness. In this loneliness, in this solitude, there was a kind of narcissism where his art dwelled in a most selfish and singular way. He could not appease his creative craving and his romantic relationships simultaneously for very long, for I think he was possessed by an overriding need to experience affection on a massive scale, to have one-night stands with the world.
MARCH 23, 1998
THE NEW YORK WORLD: The Monica Diaries
Continued excerpts from several hundred loose pages, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, which were dumped on The Observer’s front stoop and labeled, “The atached (sic) is my story, the story of a white house intirn (sic), in my own words, not that bitch Linda. ML.”
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dear diary,
so I go to WH and betty’s like He’s in there and i give her the look that says AS IF I DID NOT KNOW THIS?? And he’s in there standing by the window and he’s like Hi Mon how are you? and i’m like fine Sir which always makes him crack up a little and he’s like I have a meeting in 10 minutes but they can wait with you looking so good and he sits back in his chair and starts unbuckling and so I sort of sit on the desk and say We need to TALK…and he’s like well is something wrong in your job?? and i’m like NOOOOO, silly—about US…and he’s like Well, what aBOUT us? and i’m like, Well, we need to TALK…and he’s like, YESSSS? and so i say, You know—REALLY TALK? and he’s like, Mon, we ARE talking…and i say Yes, that’s true, but we’re not really TALKING, you know? and so he’s like What do you want to talk about? and I’m like, US…and so he says, Go ahead, but i have this meeting…so i say we need to talk now about how he never shares his feelings?? and I have feelings too?? and we must grow or die which is what that book that
L. gave me said, but now i’m feeling like a dope cause i’m starting to cry which is not in the plans and he stands up and looks in my face and says Mon I care very deeply about your feelings and he’s got his hand on my shoulder and I think he’s going to hug me and give me the comfurt but I feel his hand pushing me down and I say Wait I need more talking and he’s like Well talk is what I do all day I love the way you and I have the DEEPER connexion and I hear the L-word in there but I realize he did not actually say it as meaning he loves MOI and then he says Mon we know each other SOOOOO well we don’t need to talk and then he says something about sounds of silence which I guess is from that poetry book and I see he does have a point but then I think about what L. said about why don’t I get the pleasure and the stuff she said about the two kinds of female orgasms and so I say why don’t you ever at least take me out to DINNER?? we could say its just business, and he’s like Mon i’ll try to work that out one day soon i promise and i’m like well good cause I still get hungry ya know? and he’s like well want me to have betty order you something? and I can tell he’s getting pissed cause his face is all red and his jaw has that twitch so i’m like no i’m not hungry never mind and he sits back down sorta pulling me down with him so my face is in his lap his belt buckle is like ice on my cheek so I give the BJ and after he’s like Mon you made my day with all these meetings you are the fresh air and i’m like What-ever, so he’ll know its MY turn to be pissed…but he gets no hints just buckles up and takes me to the door his hand on my elbow and I say Next time can’t we just sit and TALK? And he’s like yes, let’s do that, and I say promise? And he’s like sure and then I drop the bombs and say oh by the way, I TOLD MY DAD ABOUT YOU!!!…and Creep looks like he’s about to wig out so i say JUST KIDDING!
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The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots Page 29
