NOVEMBER 29, 1999 BY WILLIAM BERLIND
THE NEW YORK WORLD: NEW YORKERS LAUGHED AT Y2K HYPE, BUT NOW THEY’RE FINALLY SCARED.
OVER THE PAST YEAR NEW YORKERS have heard dire predictions about the millennium—from computer meltdowns, to power outages, to economic collapse—and they were blasé. They figured it was all hype. Let the rubes spend New Year’s Eve in a bomb shelter with their canned goods and transistor radios. We’ll be just fine, thank you. If the computers want to make like it’s 1900, we can play along. We’ll just listen to Scott Joplin and wear boaters and spats and go for a stroll in the park.
And yet…and yet…well, there is the small matter of the American Red Cross—not known as a particularly alarmist organization—telling people to make preparations. “Stock disaster supplies to last several days to a week,” goes the advice on the www.redcross.org Web site.
While some citizens remain less than impressed by the possibility of some Y2K-related disaster, the city is taking the matter seriously, fearing that something could go wrong when those estimated one million people celebrate in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
According to Brendan Sexton, the president of the Times Square Business Improvement District, there will be about 5,000 police officers on duty that night, when the crystal ball drops—2,000 more than last year.
Mr. Sexton said the blocks around Times Square could be emptied in 90 seconds or less. You know, just in case.
“But what could go wrong?” Mr. Sexton asked.
Rudy’s Bunker: The mayor’s command center at 7 World Trade Center
Illustrated by Victor Juhasz
DECEMBER 13, 1999 BY FRANK DIGIACOMO
THE TRANSOM: It’s the Last Party of the Century
THERE IN THE GREAT HALL OF THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM of Art, Mick Jagger loomed above them all. Mr. Jagger was dressed in a white Kangol newsboy’s hat, a white double-breasted jacket with dark piping, orange pants and a sheen of sweat, and his arms, legs and even his magnificent lips seemed to be flying off in different directions before a sea of rapt Rolling Stones fans. Back in the late 70’s, some photographer had clicked his shutter and captured an explosion-a conflagration of sex and abandon, charisma and style that, even in two-dimensional photographic form, still thrills.
On Dec. 6, that image of Mr. Jagger, projected two stories high, served as a counterpoint and a challenge to the sleek crowd of 850 people who had gathered below for the Met’s celebration of its new Rock Style exhibition.
Though the hall was packed with hundreds of tycoons (Peter Brant, Ted Forstmann) and actors (Charlize Theron, Milla Jovovich, Natasha Richardson, Liam Neeson) and designers (Gucci’s Tom Ford, Calvin Klein, Dior’s John Galliano) and models (two words: Kate Moss) but curiously few rock stars, the room was not emitting one-tenth of the electricity that that 20-year photo of Mr. Jagger had captured.
That’s because the gentrification of celebrity that began in the 1990’s—with the rise to power of the fashion stylist and the publicist—is essentially complete. Slowly, the sex, passion and spontaneity of celebrity have been supplanted with the more calculated qualities of taste, stylishness and ironic detachment. Sometimes one gets the sense that the whole celebrity sweepstakes is rigged. As when subscribers to Vogue got their January issue announcing the winners of the VH1-Vogue Fashion Awards days before the live event was cable-cast.
And the Met’s Rock Style exhibition itself turns out to have been the perfect complement to New York’s last big celebrity party of the millennium. All of the outrageousness—the Bob Mackie dresses and the Elvis jumpsuits—was kept behind a thick wall of glass.
And celebrities who embody the Age of Calculated Detachment were front and center at the gala. At the end of the red carpet, past the greeting line formed by the gala’s co-chairs—Vogue editor Anna Wintour, Estée Lauder’s creative marketing executive director Aerin Lauder and fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger—were Jerry Seinfeld, the master of ironic indifference, and his fiancée, Jessica Sklar, and Gwyneth Paltrow, the tidy sex symbol of the moment. There was also billionaire Ronald Perelman, his steady, actress Ellen Barkin, and Miramax Films co-chairman Harvey Weinstein and his wife. Elsewhere were actress Heather Graham and her boyfriend, director Ed Burns, who were certainly not behaving with detachment, according to those who saw the couple giving each other mutual tonsillectomies near one of the bars. Also in attendance were former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger; actress Elizabeth Hurley; husband-and-wife singers Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown; and socialites Patricia Buckley, Nan Kempner and Alexandra von Furstenberg, who wore a floor-length leather dress.
They were at the last party of the millennium, looking back at the year and trying to make sense of it.
For Gucci’s Mr. Ford, the year was about exorcising the past. “Every decade matures at its end,” said Mr. Ford, who noted that much of the culture of the 1990’s was about revisiting trends of earlier decades. And here, just a few weeks from the end of the year, he added, “Everything around is looking real tired.” Yet here in this crowd, Mr. Ford said he did not see the past, but rather the future. “I look around and I don’t see many people here who are going to be dropping dead anytime soon,” Mr. Ford said. “We’re it.”
Mr. Ford was certainly it when it came to Vogue editor at large André Leon Talley, who was wearing a full-length couture leather tunic designed by Mr. Ford that had been embroidered with gold flowers in what Mr. Leon Talley called “Renaissance Baroque” style. “Feel the softness of the leather,” said Mr. Talley, who was wearing matching leather slippers, also couture. Mr. Leon Talley’s effusiveness attracted the attention of designer Arnold Scaasi, who said to him: “Are you trying to explain that drag?”
Meanwhile, Mr. Seinfeld was doing an expert job of not having to explain his and Ms. Sklar’s plans for the future. When the Transom asked the couple, “Have you set your nuptials?” Mr. Seinfeld replied, “I’m wearing boxers tonight.” Ms. Sklar doubled over at the punch line, as she seemed to do every time Mr. Seinfeld cracked a joke.
As Ms. Paltrow walked into the dinner with her father, Bruce Paltrow, the Transom asked her whether 1999 had been more about the past or the future for her. “It’s been mostly about the present,” she said. “That’s my best achievement ever.”
Taking up that Zen-like theme, a saucy-looking Elizabeth Hurley told the Transom, “I’ve been living day to day, thank you very much.”
* * *
GEORGE GURLEY INTERVIEWS TERRY GOLWAY
Illustrated by Barry Blitt
I can tell you a little bit about the old days, pre–Graydon Carter. I started at the paper in April of ’90, I was 35, the staff was Michael Tomasky, Charlie Bagli, Clare McHugh, Helen Thorpe, Robin Pogrebin. Most in their early 20s; Bagli was maybe 36. Ken Paul was managing editor and John Sicher, who was Arthur Carter’s lawyer, was the editor and was also the editor of the Connecticut paper Arthur owned, The Litchfield County Times. Really, Ken Paul was the guy who made the paper run. He had run Newsday, he’d been in papers for years. The Observer back then was very low-key, very discursive, the headlines were very earnest. It didn’t have the attitude.
The staff was crowded into half a floor of the 64th street townhouse. We were one on top of each other. This was of course before voice mail, and even though I was older and more experienced than the three women, I was still low man on the totem pole. I sat next to Bagli, who was always working the phones, and anytime another call came in on his other line, he would snap his fingers at me to pick up the line. And I did it! Until finally once I said to him, “Charlie, I can’t do it!” And that was it. He never did it again. Charlie is this sort of rabid reporter digging out things, which I never was; I was a writer more than I was a reporter. September of that year Tomasky left, so now all of a sudden I got the Wise Guys column and I was expected to write a 1,500-2,000 news story a week in addition to Wise Guys, which was 1,800 words. It was a lot of stuff to write, and some of it was good and some of it wasn’t. It always
wound up being true at The Observer, you didn’t have the luxury you thought you were going to have—“Oh, I work for a weekly, I’ll take two or three weeks to work on a piece.” That never really happened there. The workhorses of the paper were expected to produce. The paper was best known back then for Michael M. Thomas, who did the Midas Watch, and Hilton Kramer, the art critic. And Michael was a bomb thrower. Richard Brookhiser was there—he was sort of the young hotshot new William F. Buckley. And then we had John Hess on the left, an old lefty New York Times guy, and we had Howard Fast—who was a communist! Sid Zion was here, briefly. So Graydon comes on. Arthur does this purge in 1991, where Sicher gets his throat cut and Graydon gets put in, and talk about oil and water. Graydon Carter and Ken Paul—you could not have asked for a worse mix. I remember once Ken was trying to conduct an editorial meeting with Graydon there and Graydon made a few asides at Ken—a little sarcastic. Ken was very sensitive and politically correct and Ken was describing a story where he wanted to hear some African-American voices or Hispanic voices, that was the new New York, and Graydon said something like, “Yes, I guess we should get somebody handicapped in there, too.” Something like that. Then at one point we had a story about Al D’Amato and in the headline Graydon wrote something like, “You say D’Amato, I say tomato.” And Ken—this just did not compute! I remember Ken being very upset about that and I think that might have been his last issue.
Graydon was fantastic to me. Look, I was covering nitty-gritty Manhattan politics. At one point I presented a story idea and I was naming people like Hank Sheinkopf, who of course later becomes much better known. Graydon said to somebody afterward, “I had no idea who Terry Golway was talking about, but you know it sounded like a good idea.” So Graydon left me alone, and after he left he actually asked Arthur Carter to give me a raise. And Arthur brought me in and said, “I want you to know, Graydon left a present for you.” So I’ve always had a warm spot in my heart for Graydon. We had a nice ride there, it was only about a year. He left abruptly.
I started in newspapers when I was 17 years old, in 1973, doing sports. I started at the Staten Island Advance the day before I graduated high school. I was a 17-year-old nerd and most of the sports reporters at the Advance were ex-jocks. I played sports in my day but I’m not, you know, 6-foot-2. But there was one sport that was opening up, and that was high-school girls’ sports. No one wanted to cover them. I mean, I was 17! These girls were only a year younger than me! I said, “I’ll cover high-school girls’ sports!” Are you kidding me! I’ll get a byline, I might even get a date!
I’ve read newspapers since I was a kid. Some of my first memories are reading about John Kennedy’s assassination. So we always had newspapers in the house. When I was in my senior year of high school, one of my teachers, I knew he was a part-time sportswriter at the Staten Island Advance. It was April of my senior year, I was working at the A & P making $1.05 an hour, and I was the worst stock clerk in history—in four weeks, I had to go on sick leave twice, because I had dropped a carton of Coke bottles—they didn’t have plastic back then—and I scratched my eye. And then once when I was mopping the floors, I pulled my back. I remember thinking, I gotta do something else. So I cornered this teacher and said, “Mr. Berganzi, is there any chance I can get a job at the Advance?” I was at the Advance Advance a month later. I wound up staying in the sports department for five years and then I went on to cover news. I became city editor and political columnist, jack of all trades. I left the Advance in ’86 or ’87, I was editor of a magazine called Empire State Report and then I came to The Observer. I was a kid from Staten Island. All I ever wanted to do was work for a newspaper in Manhattan and none would hire me, and I felt privileged every day I went to work at The Observer. I never forgot what it was like to get those goddamn rejection letters from editors at the New York City newspapers, dailies—I applied to all of them. Now, eventually, I got job offers from all of them, as a result of working at The Observer. Basically I’ve had a byline in all of them
Terry Golway is director of the Kean Center for American History at Kean University and author of several books, most recently Fellow Citizens: The Penguin Book of U.S. Presidential Addresses, with Robert Remini.
* * *
* * *
There was that brief period where we thought, did we just send a 23-year-old down to his or her death?
* * *
* * *
Illustrated by Barry Blitt
At The Observer we played pretty straight under Ken, but once Graydon came, the rules changed and we were able to open up the paper to more opinion, more Observer attitude, and that was great. We didn’t have to write these cold, objective news accounts—he said, she said, you figure out the truth—we were able to bring an attitude that, if you look at the way The Observer started to transform under Graydon Carter and then you look at the Metro section of The New York Times, The Observer attitude is there. And it’s not a coincidence either. The Times wound up hiring so many Observer people. Once Kaplan gets here, the mid-’90s, and all of a sudden we’ve got Bagli and we’ve got [Michael] Powell and myself and we’ve got all these other good young reporters, and they’re given this latitude. I think the other newspapers, but particularly The New York Times—I think [New York Times executive editor] Howell Raines stood up and said, “Yeah, that’s what I want.”
What do you remember about 54 East 64th Street?
For years, I would come in every morning with a bag of doughnuts that this Egyptian coffee guy used to give me, on Lexington Avenue. I would get off the 63rd Street stop and I was one of his last customers, I was getting in about 10 o’clock, and every day he gave me his leftovers. So my routine for years was I had the doughnuts, I laid them out. But on 9/11—I had no idea what happened, and I was on a train in the New Jersey Meadowlands when that first plane hit. And you remember it was primary day in New York, and I was reading The Times, thinking about Mark Green and Freddy Ferrer, because I know I’m going to do that story tonight. And I hear somebody say, “Oh my God, a plane just hit the World Trade Center.” And I didn’t even go to look. Because I thought it was a little Cessna. I’m thinking, I gotta find out everything I know about Mark Green. So then I go to Penn Station, I go to the Q train, and there’s an announcement—because of “an incident”—I’ll never forget it—“because of an incident at the World Trade Center, all subway trains downtown are delayed.” So I said, O.K., well, that doesn’t affect me, you know, I go uptown. I get out and here’s this Egyptian guy and he looked at me—he only had one eye, the other was a glass eye, but they were wide open. I remember him saying, “They’re going to blame us. They’re going to blame me.” I said, “Mohammed”—that’s what his name was—“what are you talking about?” He said, “Don’t you know what happened?” This is the guy who told me. So anyway, this was the guy who gave me the bag of doughnuts every day.
So you get into the office and…?
Kaplan was stuck on a train outside the city—all the trains had shut down. The editors who were there—myself, Mary Ann Giordano, Peter Stevenson—made the decision to send all these young reporters downtown. And then the towers collapsed. We were wondering whether any of our reporters were killed. There was that brief period where we thought, did we just send a 23-year-old down to his or her death? Somehow, Kaplan made it into the city, gave me a big hug and we started to put together the Sept. 11 issue, which went to the printers that night.
The paper changed a lot over the years. Graydon was invaluable in what he did at the paper. He began to make the paper what it became; Susan Morrison also. When Peter Kaplan came, that’s really when everything begins to change, because Peter was a political guy, unlike Graydon and Susan. He and I had grown up reading the same people—we read Teddy White, we read Richard Reeves, and that was the kind of political writing we wanted to do. But unfortunately, not long after Peter got here in ’94—you know, I always feel that in some ways I let down the team a little bit, because by ’96 or ’97, I had pr
etty much lost interest in New York politics. I still feel badly about it because Peter was giving me everything I wanted or at least thought I wanted. I thought I wanted to be Richard Reeves, and if only an editor would give me, had the confidence in me, and say, “Yeah, go! Go to the conventions, go up to Albany, interview Mario Cuomo, get on the plane and fly with George Pataki.” Around ’96, we wanted to do a big profile of Pataki. And Kaplan said. “Get on his plane, he’s flying out somewhere.” Because we were making Pataki out to be, you know, the next president! And my son had just been born, November of ’95. And I remember thinking, yeah, that’s what I should do. I should get on that plane, I should follow George Pataki around, as he’s trying to build a national base—and I don’t want to fricking do it. And I don’t ever want to do it again. I was 41 and it was right around that time that I got my first book contract, and I realized that that was what I wanted to do. Michael Powell came on board not long afterwards and started writing wonderful political stuff and I changed my role. But I always felt badly, because Peter was giving me the keys at a time when I had moved on. Five years earlier, oh my God, I would have been on that plane in a heartbeat. But I was beginning to get these book deals. That’s what I really enjoy doing. I did kind of miss it this year. I would’ve liked to have been up in New Hampshire, I would’ve liked to have covered McCain and Obama and Hillary. But I moved on.
You got along well with Arthur Carter?
I’ve had a wonderful relationship with Arthur, but my favorite story is: Between Hillary Clinton’s election in 2000 and her being sworn in 2001, the Daily News ran a series of stories about the fact that Bill Clinton had pardoned a couple of crooks who had given Hillary money. So Arthur was outraged. Arthur was just pissed off. Arthur has a real moral core to him. So he calls me up, “Let’s do a big editorial saying that if Hillary Clinton had any shame, she would resign.” And she hadn’t even taken office yet! Or she had taken office maybe that week. “So let’s do it big,” he said. And my attitude always was, as an editorial writer—the editorial page is the publisher’s. It isn’t mine. I’m a hired gun. Now if I was offended by some position that Arthur or Jared Kushner took, they would not force me to write it. But it’s never happened. Cultural issues are not something we do. We’re offended by bad government, we’re offended by corruption, and I’m offended by it, too, so I have no problem. Did I think Hillary Clinton should resign? No, I didn’t! But you know, if that’s what Arthur wants to say, I’m going to make the best goddamn case I can. So I did. We started off by saying, “Remember, New York, how you feel today and how you feel having elected this woman whose husband did this and that.” And then it went on. Arthur just loved it. It was on page one of the paper. The next day Rush Limbaugh read that editorial over the air every hour on the hour. Our Web site crashed. We had something like a million hits. New York Observer calls on Hillary Clinton to resign!
The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots Page 35
