Illustrated by Barry Blitt and Victor Juhasz
I suppose you could think of me as a buff buff (if I were in better shape I could call myself a buff buff buff). The difference between a buff and a buff buff, I would say, is that the buffs are almost all convinced they have the truth, an alternate truth, a suppressed truth, a conspiratorial truth, but the truth. They know the answers. The buff buff still has questions, the buff buff is willing to admit uncertainty, to evaluate both the evidence and the fantasies of the buffs for what they tell us about the thing itself—the crime around which the subculture of buffdom has bloomed. And for what they tell us not just about the buffs, but about ourselves, about the fantasies, the longings and the consolations that are embodied in buff theories.
Disney prez Bob Iger with host Regis Philbin
Illustrated by Barry Blitt and Illustrated by Victor Juhasz
FEBRUARY 7, 2000 BY JIM WINDOLF
IT’S TOM WOLFE VS. THE ‘THREE STOOGES’
IN NOVEMBER 1998, JOHN UPDIKE OH SO QUIETLY KILLED A Man in Full. It was a clean kill. Issued from Mr. Updike’s New Yorker pulpit, the review of the big Tom Wolfe novel seemed mild, gentle and fair: “A Man in Full still amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form. Like a movie desperate to recoup its bankers’ investment, the novel tries too hard to please us.” Soon after, in The New York Review of Books, Norman Mailer aggravated Mr. Wolfe further by calling him “the most gifted best-seller writer to come along since Margaret Mitchell.” Mr. Mailer hit upon that zinger only after a long review that seriously took into account Mr. Wolfe’s strengths. “Extraordinarily good writing forces one to contemplate the uncomfortable possibility that Tom Wolfe might yet be seen as our best writer,” Mr. Mailer wrote midway through. “How grateful one can feel then for his failures and his final inability to be great—his absence of truly large compass.”
Mr. Updike, 67, and Mr. Mailer, 77, smelled blood. Both reviews moved in on Mr. Wolfe’s greatest weakness: his quivering need to be perceived as a great author. For all his bluster and devil-may-care attacks on literary establishments from The New Yorker to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Mr. Wolfe, at age 68, is desperate to be accepted into the literary pantheon. He longs for, lusts for, posterity.
Sensing his ambition, Mr. Updike, in his quietly devastating way, and Mr. Mailer, in his best barroom-brawler style, used their reviews to deliver the bad news, leaving Mr. Wolfe as wounded as the high school valedictorian who receives in the mail a thin envelope from Harvard.
Illustrated by Drew Friedman
Over a year later, Mr. Wolfe is still stung by their words. “There are these two old piles of bones, Norman Mailer and John Updike,” he said in a November 1999 interview with The Charlotte Observer. “Updike took nine pages in The New Yorker, Mailer took 11 or 12 pages in The New York Review of Books, to try to say this is not literature.”
He went on to argue that Mr. Updike and Mr. Mailer won’t take any best-selling book seriously—a pretty shaky line of attack, given that both Mr. Updike and Mr. Mailer have had their No. 1 hits.
Enter John Irving, on behalf of the “two old piles of bones.” Asked, on a Canadian TV talk show, Hot Type, to comment on the “war” Mr. Wolfe was having with Mr. Mailer and Mr. Updike, Mr. Irving said, “I don’t think it’s a war, because you can’t have a war between a pawn and a king, can you?”
Then the 57-year-old author of The World According to Garp and Trying to Save Piggy Sneed called Mr. Wolfe’s novels “yak” and “journalistic hyperbole described as fiction.” Asked if he disliked Mr. Wolfe because of his popularity, Mr. Irving said, “I’m not using that argument against him. I’m using the argument against him that he can’t write…. It’s like reading a bad newspaper or a bad piece in a magazine. It makes you wince.” He added that on any page of any Tom Wolfe book, he could “read a sentence that would make me gag.”
Mr. Wolfe soon visited the set of Hot Type, for a retaliatory interview. “Let’s take Irving,” he said. “He’s our prime subject today. His last, A Widow for One Year, is about some neurotic people in the Hamptons. They never get to town. They’re in the house. They’re neurotic…. Irving is a great admirer of Dickens. But what writer does he see now the last year constantly compared to Dickens? Not John Irving, but Tom Wolfe…. It must gnaw at him terribly.” (Nice stuff. Never mind that, even in reviewing Mr. Irving’s Long Island novel, critics continued, knee-jerk, to compare him to Dickens.) Mr. Wolfe also lumped Mr. Irving in with Mr. Updike and Mr. Mailer. “I think of the three of them now—because there are now three, as Larry, Curly and Moe—it must gall them a bit that everyone, even them, is talking about me.”
Before giving that interview, Mr. Wolfe took on Mr. Irving in a statement from his publisher: “Why does he sputter and foam so?” The same rhetorical question could certainly be asked of Mr. Wolfe himself. And Mr. Wolfe has been foaming and sputtering, a full year after those reviews were published, because of his need to convince everyone—himself and the world—that he is no mere journalist or social satirist but a real artist, and one for the ages.
Alongside his main writings, Mr. Wolfe has made a kind of shadow career as a polemicist. The underlying purpose of this shadow career has been to teach people—critics and readers—how to appreciate Tom Wolfe. Through lectures and essays, the author provides his audience with an easy, step-by-step system for seeing Tom Wolfe’s writing as art.
FEBRUARY 14, 2000 BY ANDREW GOLDMAN
Atoosa, Former High School Loser, Is Hearst’s New Cosmogirl Queen
FROM BEHIND HER DESK, ATOOSA RUBENSTEIN TOOK A DEEP breath and knitted her brow, a signal that the 28-year-old editor in chief of Cosmogirl magazine was going to get serious and talk about that night a decade ago. Prom night. “You know, at the end of the day, it was fine,” she said of the prom, to which nobody at Valley Stream North High School in Long Island bothered to invite her. She was nodding her head in earnest. “It was fine.” Back then, Ms. Rubenstein was not the porcelain-skinned, 5-foot-11-inch woman with a wild mane of black hair falling over an Alessandro dell’Acqua sleeveless shell. Instead she was an unpopular, gawky immigrant from Iran in the days when Americans were convinced that Iranians were the only thing that sucked more than disco. “Ayatolla Atoosa,” the kids called the girl from the strict Muslim home who was forbidden to shave her legs (much less pluck her eyebrows) and who had to be in the house every night by 6 p.m.
But now, Ms. Rubenstein is indeed a prom queen of sorts: In late 1998, Hearst Magazines president Cathie Black plucked her from her senior fashion editor job at Cosmopolitan and ordained her the youngest editor in chief in Hearst memory. (She was 26.)
Powered by some ugly adolescent memories, Ms. Rubenstein has positioned herself to be a Tony Robbins for the zitty, the unpopular and the flat-chested, someone they can look to as an exemplar of one who emerged from the same crap-ass situation, and got beautiful and rich. And married.
MARCH 26, 2000 BY NYO STAFF
AT J.F.K. JR.’S LOFT, IT’S OFFICIAL: ED BURNS IS IN, HEATHER GRAHAM IS OUT
FOR THE RECORD, FILMMAKER Ed Burns got the keys to the former loft of John F. Kennedy Jr. at 20 N. Moore Street on May 9, just two weeks after he was approved by the building’s co-op board and about the same time he and actress Heather Graham split.
While angling for the title of Hollywood’s “it” couple in April, Mr. Burns and Ms. Graham took a tour together of the 2,400-square-foot penthouse apartment with a private elevator and a wall of windows to the east. To observers, they seemed almost beautiful enough to inherit the former home of Kennedy and his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, the late Prince and Princess of Tribeca. But then it seemed like someone yelled, “Cut!” The board didn’t want a part-time owner, and actors, directors and writers like Mr. Burns are known to be on location.
“We’re not thrilled to have lots of attention,” said one tenant who was tormented when people mourning Kennedy and his wife made pilgrimages to th
e address last year.
On June 8, a resident of 20 N. Moore told The Observer that Mr. Burns, a Queens native, had already moved in—alone. He bought his new apartment, on top of the nine-story building near Varick Street, for just under the $2.4 million asking price, said brokers. Mr. Kennedy bought it for $700,000 in 1994.
MARCH 17, 2000 BY KATE KELLY
Lizzie Grubman and Peggy Siegal: P.R. Marriage of Year
Illustrated by Barry Blitt
A WEEK INTO THE NEWLY formed Lizzie Grubman Public Relations-Peggy Siegal Company, the two women were eagerly making the point that theirs was the best formula in the best of all possible worlds. The sunny view: Ms. Grubman, a dark-rooted 29-year-old with a successful three-year-old public relations company and a Rolodex full of music and nightclub clients, would join forces with Ms. Siegal, the 50-ish doyenne of the Manhattan movie premiere with a penchant for sit-down dinners at Le Cirque.
“What’s great about me and Peggy is, we really complement the other one,” said Ms. Grubman, who was dressed in a turtleneck sweater and tight, dark blue jeans. “O.K., we totally have—not totally, to a degree—we have different lists, and when we put them…”
“No, no, excuse me. We don’t know the same people,” Ms. Siegal said. “Would you write that down? We…do…not…know…the…same…people. O.K.”
“Yeah, we don’t, O.K.,” said Ms. Grubman. “I’m more young Hollywood, she’s more established Hollywood.”
“She was gonna say old,” Ms. Siegal said, eyebrow raised. “But she held her tongue.”
MARCH 27, 2000 BY RON ROSENBAUM
INSIDE GEORGE W.’S SECRET CRYPT
WHERE IS THE ALL-GIRL BREAK-IN TEAM NOW THAT we need them? Where are the intrepid young women who had the nerve and daring to pull off one of the great investigative coups of our era: to sneak into the triple-locked “tomb” of Skull and Bones, the secret citadel, the sanctum sanctorum, the heart of the heart of the Eastern Establishment, the place of weird, clandestine, occult bonding rituals that has shaped the character of American ruling-class figures from the 27th President, William Howard Taft, to the 41st, George Herbert Walker Bush and perhaps the next one, too: George W., Skull and Bones 1968. The place where generations of Bushes, Tafts and Buckleys and the like lay down in coffins and spewed the secrets of their sex lives. The place where many of America’s top spies and spy masters were initiated into their clandestine destinies. The place where all conspiracy theories converge. The place where the people who shaped America’s character had their character shaped.
But the superspooks of Skull and Bones had nothing on the all-girl break-in team, which managed to outwit their security, slip into the tomb and take pictures of each and every sacred ritual room. Including that dread enclosure I call the “Room With the License Plates of Many States.”
I know because I once held in my hands the fruits of the all-girl break-in Skull and Bones raid. Yes, there came a time when I gazed at some glossy black-and-white prints that revealed the innermost sanctums of perhaps the most secrecy-shrouded interior in America, the interior of the Skull and Bones Tomb on the Yale campus in New Haven.
Illustrated by Philip Burke
It is a space that is likely to have even more attention focused on it in the coming months because an initiate once again is poised to become President. And because of the imminent release of a film called The Skulls transparently based on Skull and Bones. But it was only recently that I began thinking about the all-girl break-in team, which was, I believe, inspired by something I’d written—the first and I think still the only outside investigation of Skull and Bones, its secrets, its legacy, its powerful subterranean influence on American history.
In fact, it is my belief that the all-girl break-in team might be doing W. a favor by demystifying this black hole in his biography: the occult rituals he engaged in twice a week in the bowels of the Skull and Bones tomb in the crucial 21st year of his life.
In fact, if I might engage in a speculative digression about W., who was my college classmate, though barely known to me—I have a feeling there is a part of him that might secretly have approved of the all-girl break-in team’s act of clandestine mischief. An irreverent spirit, something I thought I glimpsed in a chance encounter with him and Hunter Thompson a quarter-century ago at a Super Bowl in Houston.
I can’t recall who was hanging out with whom, but it was January 1974, it was in the atrium of the Hyatt Regency, the Super Bowl headquarters hotel (I was there to write about the spectacle that featured Dolphins versus Vikes that year) and I think it was a mutual friend, a fun-loving preppy guy I knew from college who also somehow knew Hunter and W., who brought us all together in a room in the Hyatt. I don’t remember exactly what went on, but I do remember coming away with a favorable impression of W.
I remember thinking he was one of the preppy types I’d always kind of liked, the hang-loose, good-ole-boy types, many of whom took the interregnum on careerism, which the war and the draft mandated as a cue to break out of the mold a bit, wander off the reservation, poke into the sides of life their trust funds otherwise might have sheltered them from. I sensed what W. liked about Hunter Thompson was that Hunter too was another button-down good old frat boy (once) who went weird but in a good-old-boy way.
This, in other words, was W. II, the kind of a guy who just might have seen through all the suits and trappings of moral seriousness Skull and Bones attempted to imbue its initiates with, one who might have seen it as a bit silly and pompous and who might have preferred, like some of his fellow preppy prince Hals, to spend time with Falstaffian misleaders of youth such as Mr. Thompson.
If you think of W. I as the guy who was tapped for Skull and Bones at Yale, W. II was a kind of counter-W. I. We know W. II was soon to be replaced, because he’s told us he stopped doing any Bad Things in 1974. Except liquor: It was then he turned into the hard-drinking W. III. To be succeeded in 1986 when he gave up spirits as well by the solemn and preachy W. IV we have today.
My feeling is: Bring back W. II!
APRIL 17, 2000 BY ALEXANDRA JACOBS
The Observatory; Remember the Royalton?
Illustrated by Barry Blitt
THE CONDÉ NAST CAFETERIA has only been open a week, but it’s already clear which part is Siberia.
The 10,000-square-foot, Frank Gehry-designed, track-lighted, fourth-floor space is dominated by a raised dining area enclosed by thick glass petals. The effect is slightly vaginal, accented by hanging chrome lamps that look like Fallopian tubes or sea anemones. Approximately two thirds of the restaurant’s 200 diners will be eating inside this elevated region. Huddled therein on an ecru banquette with one’s morning paper splayed out on a sunny yellow table, watching the late-morning rush of young mermaids picking up their fruit smoothies ($2.75) against a backdrop of sinuous titanium-blue walls, one might conclude that the architect had achieved a peaceful underwater effect.
But at the height of lunch hour, 1 p.m., noise collects inside the aquarium, and fast. Suddenly you’re trapped amid the peasantry, with its lunch pails and clattering forks. Glancing down at the unfinished pale wood floors, you realize you’re at the Royalton by way of Ikea. The occasional loudspeaker announcement of “fire drill on the 32nd floor” does not add to the atmosphere.
The cafeteria—called, of course, Cafeteria—is run by Restaurant Associates, a company that owns some dependable, two-star restaurants in New York such as Cafe Centro and Brasserie, and R.A. has stocked the room with lots of employees in matching gray shirts who lurk and linger, like a troop of super-efficient Oompa-Loompas, ready to wipe down your table the instant you make for the door. You bus your own table, by the way, depositing your tray on a three-tiered conveyer belt. Some Condé Nast employees seem to think this beneath them.
JULY 17, 2000 BY TISH DURKIN
The Hidden Hillary: First Lady Speaks, Very Carefully
THERE WAS SOMETHING about the sunglasses. “I think that one of my problems in communicating effectively is
that I assume too much,” mused Hillary Rodham Clinton, her eyes obscured behind a pair of electric-blue lenses. It was Sunday, July 9. The first lady was seated at a picnic table at a park in Van Buren, New York, after what felt like her 40th—but was in fact her fourth—Democratic picnic during a five-day upstate campaign swing.
“I have been around so long, I have been in so many battles…I think I assume that people know more about what I believe and what my deepest convictions are and what motivates me to do this than perhaps it is fair to assume,” she said.
Illustrated by Barry Blitt
It wasn’t that the sunglasses appeared out of place. Though the weather had been in a mood of rain and wind for most of the day, the sun had just made a sufficiently bold appearance for Mrs. Clinton to ask an aide to bring her a straw hat to protect her complexion. In fact, the problem with the sunglasses may have been how very right they looked.
SEPTEMBER 18, 2000 BY ANDREW GOLDMAN
WHO’S IN THE KITCHEN WITH WALKEN? ALL OF US, AND HE’S READY TO COOK
CHRISTOPHER WALKEN PULLED out a package of jumbo shrimp from the refrigerator and, grasping them in his hands, cut through them with the butcher knife, then ran them under water.
“This is a little dangerous,” he said. “You know you’re never supposed to cut like this. You can cut your hand off. You see, you butterfly it. And then there’s this vein in there. You want to get rid of that. It’s guts, I guess. You want to get those nice and clean.”
Christopher Walken laid the shrimp into a sizzling frying pan, in which he had sautéed some garlic in olive oil. He squeezed an orange into a coffee mug that read “Notre Dame High School, 25th Class Reunion, Class of 1967.”
“I’m going to throw a little more garlic in there,” he said.
OCTOBER 2, 2000 BY LANDON THOMAS JR.
The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots Page 37
