No doubt he would find reason to boast of his latest impersonation of a senior statesman while a guest on The Charlie Rose Show. Mr. Zuckerman’s pretensions, his utter cluelessness, became evident when he announced that Mr. Kosner was being hired to revamp the tabloid’s Sunday edition. It was inevitable that these two smug, back-scratching mediocrities would find each other. Mr. Kosner is fresh from running Esquire, turning an eminent literary showcase into a men’s consumer pamphlet about the six best mustards in town and premature baldness. No doubt Mr. Kosner is going to bring that same sensibility to the Daily News, which will further dilute the newspaper of the New York worker into a dispensable curiosity, a pale simulacrum of its former self.
The Sunday Daily News has been hemorrhaging readers for the last several years. And Mr. Zuckerman’s solution is to hire Mr. Kosner—the only editor around who would work for him. Their task is made considerably more difficult by the likely fact that neither man reads the News, anyway.
Now, if the puffed-up Mr. Brill reads his own publication, we feel sorry for him. Only someone as profoundly solipsistic as Mr. Brill could have invented Brill’s Content, which sounds like hair cream (“A Little Dab’ll Do Ya!”) and should be. In fact, if you happen to use hair cream, then you must like this dull, humorless, self-important magazine. Still, it must have taken real brainstorming to create a magazine about journalists that even journalists don’t read. Mr. Brill, whose screaming tirades have scared away anyone who worked for him who had a modicum of talent and self-respect, thought he could sell a mass-market magazine on the premise that America just couldn’t wait to read about conflicts of interest in book review sections. Amazing! And this man presumes to judge the news judgment of the nation’s editors. The very premise of this magazine is a stunning display of arrogance and pomposity, and its conceit offers a revealing glimpse of Mr. Brill’s absurd pretensions. Steven Brill, the arbiter of American media?
Please. Willian Allen White, maybe. But not Steven Brill.
Director Martin Scorsese confronts The Observer ’s avatar
JUNE 28, 1999 BY GEORGE GURLEY
HEY! YEAH, YOU! WHAT’S YOUR GAY QUOTIENT?
In New Ambiguous Age (Hello, Brad Pitt!), It’s No Longer Easy as ‘Gay’ or ‘Straight’ Liv Tyler, Pete Hamill, Bob Grant, Kurt Andersen Take Part in our Casual Survey
IT USED TO BE EASY. YOU WERE EITHER GAY OR YOU WERE straight. Maybe certain oddballs belonged to that category known as “bi,” especially in the 70’s. But for the most part, you got to identify yourself as one thing (heterosexual) or the other (homosexual), and that was that. That was O.K. But how about this: Just how gay are you? What percentage? Editor-turned-novelist Kurt Andersen described his own gay quotient. “I often talk to certain friends of mine, certain heterosexual friends, I might add, I often say, ‘Well, that’s because I’m gay,’ as a jocular explanation of, for instance, the fact that I don’t like sports, to take the coarsest example of my gayness,” he said.
So what’s the percentage? Mr. Andersen asked if he could assign himself two separate percentages: “If I could give myself two scores, one on the sexual, one on the cultural, I would put myself much higher on the cultural,” he said. “I’d say 0 to 1 on the sexual and, like, 20 on the cultural, or maybe more.” As evidence of his cultural gayness, Mr. Andersen offered: “I do all the cooking in my household. I dress up in women’s clothing most nights. That’s a joke. I read Rules of Interiors with an unseemly degree of interest.” Architecture? “Yeah, architecture, there you go, that’s a gay interest. What else? I actually like gay people. I would say if you gave me 10 random heterosexuals and 10 random homosexuals, I would like more of the homosexuals than the heterosexuals.”
Later in the interview, Mr. Andersen revised his level of sexual gayness: “I have never had, faintly, a sexual feeling about a man, I don’t think,” he said. “So ‘1’ if you want to be p.c., but ‘0’ if I were going to be honest.” All this artful hemming and hawing brings to mind the great Henry James, God rest his probably gay soul. If he gazed upon his own era and saw in it The Awkward Age, let us look at our own and declare it the Ambiguous Age. Even the greatest, most solid American historical personage of all, Abraham Lincoln, the rail-splitter himself, is entering the terrain of sexual uncertainty. Two upcoming biographies—one by sex researcher C.A. Tripp and one by gay firebrand Larry Kramer—will argue that Lincoln had a homosexual bond with his dear Illinois friend, Joshua Speed. The two men shared a bed, upstairs of Speed’s general store, when they were struggling bachelors. There have already been some homoerotic hints in the beautifully made 1998 biography Honor’s Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln, by Douglas L. Wilson. Mr. Wilson reported that Lincoln and Speed “regarded themselves not only as close friends but as something like soul mates” and that both were miserable upon getting married. “When this shall reach you,” Lincoln wrote in a letter to Speed in 1841, “you will have been Fanny’s husband several days. You know my desire to befriend you is everlasting—that I will never cease, while I know how to do anything.”
This touchy area is the kind of thing that interests scholars now. In the Bill Clinton era, during which one cultural hero after another has been revealed to be frail and human, people can accept shades of gray. There was a lot of hooting, but Mr. Clinton managed to stay in office—and with an approval rating higher than Jimmy Carter’s. In the Ambiguous Age, the pinup boys come complete with…interesting questions. The latest heartthrob, the Latin singer Ricky Martin, has told members of the press: “What I say about sexuality is, I leave it for my room and lock the door.” That didn’t stop The Advocate, a gay magazine, from trying to break that door down, with a cover story titled “Ricky Martin: The Gay Connection.” And yet the girls are still screaming; they’re comfortable in that sexual gray area. Another case: Movie star Brad Pitt is exposed in a 30-page photo spread in W. The pictures show him with his mouth wide open; lying on a cement floor, face down, with his naked buttocks visible; standing near a grizzly bear in a holding cell; with his hands in his pants; and making various ecstatic facial expressions.
“They had a photo of Brad Pitt the other day,” said Bob Grant, the very conservative talk-show host on WOR-AM. “I said, ‘Gee, I wish I had that waistline, I wish I had that chest.’ But that doesn’t mean I want to go up to Brad Pitt and give him a big hug.” He was asked if he might be 2 percent gay. “I couldn’t even quantify it,” he said. “It’s nonexistent. I’ll tell you one thing: I can admire a good-looking guy, I can see somebody like Tom Cruise, somebody like that, and say, ‘Gee, I wish I looked like him.’ That doesn’t mean I want to take him to bed.”
Sexual theorist Edward Stein is working on a book called The Mismeasure of Desire: The Science, Theory, and Ethics of Sexual Orientation for the Oxford University Press. Mr. Stein, who earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at M.I.T. and is now working toward a law degree at Yale Law School, believes those mid-1990’s notions of sexual identity will soon seem stale. That elaborate University of Chicago survey from 1994 that found less than 10 percent of the adult male population to be gay? “Take it with a grain of salt,” he said. And he will seek to cast doubt on the ideas that sexuality is genetically or neurologically based.
“Most of that research of which I am critical assumes that sexual orientation is like a light switch—either you’re gay or you’re straight,” said Mr. Stein. “Or it assumes that it’s more like a dimmer switch, that either you’re strongly attracted to either men or women. But, in fact, it might turn out to be much more complicated.” “What percentage are you?” he was asked.
“It depends on whether you mean behavior or fantasy life or identity, but in the end…roughly 85 to 90 percent.”
The next night at the Loeb Boathouse there was an American Foundation for AIDS Research benefit. Fashion designer Betsey Johnson said she was 49 lesbian, 20 percent “gay man” and 51 percent straight. O.K., so it didn’t add up—that’s ambiguity for you. Singer Foxy Brown was “100 percent heterose
xual.” Chris Eigeman, who played the Wildean wit in Metropolitan and a gay nightclub promoter in The Last Days of Disco, said he was 0 percent. Why? “Because I’m married, obviously,” he said. Lisa Ling, the new, 25-year-old addition to ABC’s The View, said she was 1 percent gay. And actress Liv Tyler, whom the paparazzi caught mid-smooch with Drew Barrymore at the Oscars? “That’s my business!” Ms. Tyler said. “I love everybody—man, woman, I find women beautiful, I find men beautiful, I find animals and trees—I’d like to shag a tree sometimes!”
A bemused Jay Shaffer, the owner of Shaffer City Oyster Bar and Grill, was taking it all in. “We’re all a little gay,” said Mr. Shaffer, 46. “We all look at a man and say, ‘Gee, that’s very attractive—he’s got great biceps, he’s got great muscle structure.’ We’re not necessarily looking at his manhood.” He put himself down for 20 percent gay. “That means you have enough control and understanding of your femininity, that you can cry, you can create, you can go like this”—he flipped his hand up and down—“like some sort of flaming faggot.”
At a restaurant called Baby Jupiter on Orchard Street, a 23-year-old woman from London, who did not want her name used in this article, said she, too, thought we all have a little gayness in us. “I’ve never slept with a woman but I’d say 7 percent,” she said. “I can’t say I’ve never thought about it, so it doesn’t make me 0.”
When she was 14, this woman was a tomboy, and her mother made her take ballroom dancing classes. Her best friend attended the class, too. “I’ll never forget that girl,” she said. “In the dance sessions you had to have a partner, so, of course, Lisa was my partner. We would dance together and spin each other around. I was still a virgin, I didn’t even know what sex was. We danced together very closely, and it was like a form of communication without speaking. Dancing is a very intimate thing…so we got very into the closeness of it all, and we’d practice dancing very close and no one else was in the room. It was just the two of us. I remember feeling something that I’d never ever felt before, like everything passed through my body, moving, like it never moved before, like feelings and areas, and we never said anything but we danced very well together, and every time she came up close, we’d nearly kiss each other, and she would just touch my breasts, touch my bum, or move around the front. She would just do that, and I would do the same to her. I’ve never told anyone this story. We would touch each other and then after the weeks went on, I remember volunteering to go back there, not just being forced to go back there. We tried to take all our clothes off. It was showing each other parts of our body we’d never shown each other before, and experiencing parts of our lower regions without really knowing. I just remember her touching me down below and feeling like this warm, and I’d do the same to her. We never said anything—that’s the weirdest thing. I was overwhelmed. At 14, I knew what I was doing was wrong. I knew I wasn’t supposed to be with a girl. I felt naughty, I felt dirty, I felt wrong. But I’m glad it happened.”
Another believer in the continuum theory of sexual orientation is Brad Gooch, author of Finding the Boyfriend Within. “I think now with the whole gay liberation movement, people are getting to the point that the relief of coming out as gay isn’t really the total answer or the end of the line or something. There’s more to it than we think,” said Mr. Gooch.
I reached Michael Thomas Ford, the 30-year-old author of Alec Baldwin Doesn’t Love Me and That’s Mr. Faggot to You by phone. He was at home, on his bed. “When you grow up, people give this either-or scenario, so when you pick one there’s this intense pressure to stick with it, like taking piano lessons or something. I would say I’m 99 percent gay, but I would like to reserve that 1 percent if Gillian Anderson, the X Files girl, decides she wants to call. And Xena, who wouldn’t want to sleep with Xena?”
What’s with Alec Baldwin?
“Until I wrote the book, I thought I was the only guy who thought Alec Baldwin was really hot, and then I got hundreds of letters saying, ‘Stay away from him, you bitch, he’s mine.’”
* * *
“They had a photo of Brad Pitt the other day,” said Bob Grant, the very conservative talk-show host on WOR-AM. “I said, ‘Gee, I wish I had that waistline, I wish I had that chest.’ But that doesn’t mean I want to go up to Brad Pitt and give him a big hug.” He was asked if he might be 2 percent gay. “I couldn’t even quantify it,” he said.
* * *
AUGUST 2, 1999 BY GEORGE GURLEY
THE OBSERVATORY: Allan Block Is Worth More Than $100 Million and He’s Seeking a Wife in New York
ALLAN BLOCK IS 44 YEARS OLD. He’s worth over $100 million. Since 1985, he has come to Manhattan nearly every weekend from his hometown of Toledo, Ohio, to give small dinner parties…and to find the right woman.
Mr. Block is a nice enough guy, a man who doesn’t believe in the one-night stand, and he’s beginning to be frustrated by the fact that he has not yet found the woman who will be Mrs. Block. Over the years, he has dated scores of women in Manhattan, taken them to Cipriani and ‘21’, and he has spent many late nights searching solo, at places like Nell’s and Le Club and Au Bar, but no wife yet.
“I would say I wish I had been married before now,” said Mr. Block, driving down Route 27 in a rented Ford Taurus on his way to Southampton one recent Saturday. “I never thought I’d be this age and never been married. It was never my plan, you know. I think the conditions, the way it is today, is the reason. I think there’s a war between the sexes going on. I think the female part of the population has been waging a war against the male part. Male and female have always been equal, you cannot compare gender to race, that was never a valid analogy or comparison. There was never a deliberate effort to hold women down. Feminism is basically wrong.”
Mr. Block has a girlfriend who lives in Milan, Italy, but he’s still in the marriage market. He sees the woman from Milan every month, but she may not be too enamored with the idea of setting up house in Toledo. And that’s part of the deal for any woman who marries him. Toledo will likely be her home base.
“I’m proud to be a native of Toledo, Ohio,” he said. “It makes me angry when I hear people who have never been there making statements, ‘That must be one of the worst places in the country!’ One person, one girl, a dumb girl, said, ‘That must be a really awful place!’ And I said, ‘It’s a major metropolitan area! 800,000 people, two major universities, an independent medical college, top museums, outstanding zoo, a museum of science and industry, nice parks, a Great Lake and all the recreational opportunities that that represents. Toledo might be a great place to be married with kids.”
It’s not really so easy, being a wealthy, single man in 1999.
“I would have rather been single in 1950, 1955,” said Mr. Block. “I would rather have been dealing with the woman who wanted to get married or had to get married. I think it would have been a lot easier. I can’t run a house, I can’t even have a nice apartment. I can sign the check. “
In a 1993 article, Forbes magazine put the worth of his family business—the Toledo, Ohio-based Blade Communications—at $600 million.
Illustrated by Robert Grossman
AUGUST 9, 1999 BY FRANK DIGIACOMO
THE TRANSOM: TINA BROWN, LATEST MIRAMAX STARLET
THE NARCOTIC BASSLINE OF ERIC B. & RAKIM’S “PAID IN FULL” HOOKED them as they stood staring at the stage that bore the rapper-turned-talk-show host Queen Latifah. At various places in the crowd, wild-haired Salman Rushdie, former mayoral candidate Andy Stein, and Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, in a dress that showed off her tattoo and her ass, skanked to the rhythm with varying degrees of subtlety and dignity. Socialite writer Lally Weymouth and art dealer Arne Glimcher did not.
By sunset, when the ferries started leaving Battery Park for Liberty Island, the buzz had reached the kind of levels that Miramax reserves for its brightest Oscar hopefuls. And many of those who had not been invited to the Talk celebration had spent the afternoon desperately searching for someone with an extra ti
cket.
Later that night, Ms. Brown would describe the guest list as “totally insane eclecticism” and admit: “I know that I’ve left off mighty people who will cut me forever.”
Yet, though the party’s organizers had rounded up enough respectable celebrity tonnage (especially for August, when most of the meritocracy has left town) to generate ample publicity for the event, one key opportunity was lost. Both Ms. Brown and the Miramax boys have long known how to build a party crowd to make a statement. But any clues that could have been gleaned about the actual point of view of Talk magazine were lost in the darkness and wide open spaces of Liberty Island.
AUGUST 23, 1999 BY NICK PAUMGARTEN AND TINKER SPITZ
WELCOME TO 24-HOUR WALL STREET WORLD!
BACK WHEN MARIA S. WAS MARRIED, before she gambled away $3.5 million, she was a stock market addict, a fool for the action. At Advest Inc., the securities firm where she worked, she traded all day, then went home and thought about stocks all night. She wore earphones to bed so she could tune in to the radio and listen to the stock market reports. She didn’t even take them off for sex.
Maria was way ahead of her time. She was a stock market junkie before it was really possible to be one. She could not trade at night. She could not trade at home. So she took up gambling and ruined her life that way instead. Now, at 56, she’s a homeless ex-con who attends regular Gamblers Anonymous meetings in a midtown Manhattan hospital (hence the anonymity).
Accessible now to anyone with an Internet connection and a credit card, the stock market has become a universal distraction, a ubiquitous entertainment, a sanctioned narcotic. You are either plugged into it or made constantly aware of how foolish you are not to be. In hospitals and schools, in dens and kitchens, the amateurs are mainlining stocks. They have one eye on their day job and the other on their stock portfolio, posted in red and green on their computer screens. Once a barometer of the country’s work, the market now is yet another way to play.
The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots Page 33
