BRYAN HITS THE WALL: HANDSOME INVESTOR’S $60 MILLION GOES POOF! AS HE TAKES DOWN MALONE WITH HIM
J. SHELBY BRYAN IS TALL, smooth and charming—seductive, even. He is an incomparable salesman. A blend of old Texas money and East Coast establishment gloss, the 54-year-old Mr. Bryan offers something for everyone.
Vogue editor Anna Wintour left her husband for him. President Clinton shmoozed Manhattan Democrats in his Upper East Side salon. And on Feb. 29, cable titan and notoriously discerning communications investor John Malone took a $500 million stake in his high-flying Colorado-based telecommunications company, ICG Communications Inc.
Finally, though, Mr. Bryan had offered more than he could deliver.
When Malone’s investment vehicle, Liberty Media, and two other blue-chip investors—Thomas Hicks of Texas-based Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst Inc., and former Morgan Stanley mergers and acquisitions ace Eric Gleacher of buyout boutique Gleacher & Co.—invested $750 million in ICG ($230 million from Hicks, $20 million from Gleacher), the stock was trading at $28. Today it trades at around 62 cents.
Socks the cat evades scooterful of celebs
Illustrated by Robert Grossman
OCTOBER 16, 2000 BY ALEXANDRA JACOBS
Das Boots: Women Beg for Torture, Wrapping Calves in Tight Leather
BOOTS ARE BACK. EVERYWHERE YOU LOOK, SOME WOMAN IS stalking around in a little noting of a skirt and tall, snug boots. Sexy, right? Not so fast.
Andrea Brake was sitting in the shoe store Otto Tootsi Plohound on lower Fifth Avenue early in September, ready to plunk down $300 for the right pair.
“I got about midway up my calf,” said the lithe graphic designer and yoga enthusiast. “I was smooshing the flesh, to no avail.” As indifferent salespeople rushed around trying to serve a crush of boot-mad New Yorkers, recounted Ms. Brake, “I developed a blister on my index finger.”
Vanessa Mobley, a 30-year-old editor at Basic Books, recalled looking on, aghast, as a friend tried on boots at the Calvin Klein store in Soho. “They had been built to some arbitrary circumference. The people at the store tried to convince her that there was this whole method of squeezing her flesh like a sausage. They barely fit. And she bought them anyway!’”
The last time knee-high boots were this popular, in the hippie-dippy 70’s, women had soft, ethereal, pliant calves. A couple of aerobic decades, however, have carved a new, firm, decisive calf. Which has left scores of women chagrined about not being able to zip up this season’s boots.
NOVEMBER 6, 2000 BY FRANK DIGIACOMO
CAN GENIUS CHEF ALAIN DUCASSE RECOUP AFTER HIS GRAND BOUFFE?
ALAIN DUCASSE AT THE ESSEX House, which is closed on weekends, was undergoing a deep cleaning. The restaurant’s tables and harlequin-hued silk banquettes had been moved or upended so that a team of men brandishing vacuum nozzles and polishing cloths could do their stuff.
As Mr. Ducasse bid adieu to the men, he could not instruct them to suck up and take away, along with the fallen brioche crumbs and stray wisps of tartufi di Alba, the demi-glace of negativity that has clung to his first months of doing business in New York. In a city that loves its restaurants and has conferred rock-star status to many of the chefs behind them, the arrival of Mr. Ducasse—the only man in history to have earned eight Michelin guide stars for his work in Europe—should have been interpreted as further evidence that New York is the culinary capital of the world.
But something went missing in the translation. Though Mr. Ducasse was no stranger to this city, he landed here without having mastered its language, its culture and, most of all, its press. Within weeks of opening his doors, Mr. Ducasse was not feeding New York. New York was feeding on him.
NOVEMBER 6, 2000 BY NYO STAFF
It’s Al Gore for 21st Century
BILL CLINTON’S PRESIDENCY WILL NOT BE REMEMBERED, IT is safe to say, for its reverence for tradition and for the majesty of the presidency. It’s a job, the president has said of his office.
No, it is not. Harry S Truman and Ronald Reagan, two men from the apogee of the American Century, may not have agreed on much, but both revered the institution of the presidency and respected its traditions. Like Mr. Clinton, neither Truman nor Mr. Reagan came from elite backgrounds; they were not and did not aspire to be aristocrats, but they surely prized the nobility and dignity of the republic’s highest office.
The restoration of that nobility, the return to a seriousness of purpose, surely must be among the priorities of the next administration. We believe Al Gore is best suited for that assignment.
Mr. Gore is not an ideal candidate. His eagerness to please can be grating, and has led him to make statements that are more silly than deliberate. Still, he is the superior choice. His Republican opponent, George W. Bush, may be charming, but he is a lightweight of scandalous proportions. (This is a man, remember, who wondered aloud if those of the Jewish faith were allowed into heaven.) Mr. Bush is inarticulate not because he has trouble expressing himself, but because he has nothing to express.
We’d prefer a serious, professional politician to a breezy, unfocused and almost gleefully ignorant cipher.
Illustrated by Drew Friedman
NOVEMBER 13, 2000 BY DEBORAH SCHOENEMAN AND DEBORAH NETBURN
Manhattan Transfers
Heiress Libbet Johnson Creates Triplex Condo Priced at $62 Million
LAST YEAR, WHILE RENOVATING her co-op apartment at the River House, 435 East 52nd Street, Libbet Johnson, an heir of the Johnson & Johnson family, rented a condominium in Donald Trump’s Trump International Hotel and Tower at 1 Central Park West. She liked the hotel services (delivery from Jean Georges) and location so much that, over the past year, she has plunked down more than $50 million for a total of six apartments in the building.
Now, she’s putting all but one of those back on the market for $62 million, the highest anyone has ever asked for an apartment in Manhattan—and much more than she will get, brokers said.
Ms. Johnson was in the middle of combining the apartments, more than 20,000 square feet spread over the 49th, 50th and 51st floors, when she fell in love with celebrity hairdresser Frédéric Fekkai. A source said that Mr. Fekkai likes more modest—or cozy—living and persuaded Ms. Johnson to keep only one apartment, which they now share, and sell off the other five. (Or maybe he’d just rather live somewhere else altogether?)
NOVEMBER 20, 2000 BY PHILIP WEISS
Who’s Looking More Presidential: Al the
WHO CAN LOOK less Presidential? George W. Bush’s charm has drained away. He’s gray and his neck turtles out of his suit collar. He erupted in boils, and the photograph he staged of his transition team looked like a dinner-theater version of The West Wing. But at least Mr. Bush is halfway transparent. When Al Gore came out of the White House on Monday to talk liltingly about school children and the democratic process, you had no idea what he was really thinking or feeling. He grinned too much. His family touch-football game for the cameras had the same air of bizarre artifice, like marzipan figures of the Kennedys. And what is he bingeing on to keep all that weight when he works so hard?
It is not as if they are fighting over a principle or an ideology; the only principle is self-interest—on one side the old guard’s dream of restoration, on the other the meritocrat’s dream of advancement. Everyone looks so graspy. When Lawrence Tribe showed up on the streets in Miami, then on Larry King Live, it wasn’t to speak of a stirring principle of civil rights. No, he was just a walking, talking Harvard want ad for the Supreme Court.
So many of the old faces of Impeachment are assembled, with all of Impeachment’s emotion but with none of the gripping issues of Impeachment. One side is for holding the ball and running the clock out, the other is for playing on, but on only one side of the field. In a sense, we are learning now what Impeachment was about: about pure interest, one side against another, a complex factional and cultural struggle of the urban versus the non-urban, the new and the old. And especially now that the lawyers seem to have dug in,
it won’t go away, either. This is only the third quarter. We have another whole bitter quarter to go, and overtime, 2004 and beyond. Did your heart sink when you saw the red and blue map of the United States with county-by-county results? Mine did: that sea of Republican red across the middle of the country, the lakes and rivulets of Democratic blue along the coasts and the upper Midwest. It showed how polarized the country is, along deep lines coming out from the new economy and new sociology. There were any number of ways to look at this map: the city and the country, the Information Age and the pre-Information Age, globalization and isolation, meritocracy and birth, and—especially in the light of Palm Beach—Jews and blacks against Protestant whites. Jim Baker is back, and who can ever forget Mr. Baker’s comment about the political clout of the Jews: Fuck ’em.
Illustrated by Philip Burke
During Impeachment I heard people brag, “I voted for Nader in ’96, and I’m already feeling good about my Nader vote now.” Nader voters defy those red-blue fault lines, they are true independents who have sympathy for both sides, a hard-core 2 percent who refused to be browbeaten out of their vote by the Gore people. The Gore people tried to caricature us as elitists, presumably because Ralph Nader himself owned so much stock in Cisco Systems Inc., but the biggest Nader vote was in Alaska, hardly an elitist roost. Mr. Nader’s vision of America was romantic and nostalgic, reflecting his small-town origins. He complained about the long commutes people have just to keep up with the new economy, and seemed to believe that people would sacrifice their standard of living for simpler lives. They won’t; Americans like buying things too much. But Mr. Nader’s message resonated because he had a grand passion, and the opposition had so little. Who will lecture me about the environment while driving an S.U.V.? Who will lecture about public schools when their kids are in private schools?
Snipper or George the Human Boil?
The Naderites tried to straddle the vast moral divide between the reds and the blues. The seminal event for the reds was Waco in ’93, and you can pile up lawyers’ reports till doomsday but it will not remove the unease people out in the red territory feel over the government’s actions in the deaths of 20-odd children. Blaring rock ’n’ roll music all night long at them during an impatient siege. The blues never cared about Waco, and from ’93 on Democrats were supposed to tamp down all feelings of discomfort with the administration because the economy was so good, and Bill Clinton was a global maestro.
The degree of loyalty maintained by the Democratic side was astonishing, through Impeachment and the campaign-finance scandals, the Sudan bombing, the destruction of women’s reputations. Early on there was a contrary example in Treasury aide Josh Steiner sharing his diaries with Congress, diaries that undercut the official line, but Mr. Steiner was soon packing, and the loyalty mode was established. Trash the diaries or don’t write them. Don’t even think them. And so never during Impeachment did anyone say, “I’m embarrassed that I served as a conduit of rumors to destroy the reputation of a young woman—therefore I will resign.” That red-and-blue map had already taken hold in people’s minds, a feeling of us against them, expressed at once poignantly and ridiculously by Barbra Streisand, who said lately of Mr. Bush, “Our whole way of life is at stake.” She wasn’t just talking about abortion, but a whole set of shared values about how the world works. As if they are really in danger. The fury that Democrats turned on Mr. Nader, and then his supporters, during the late campaign is the freshest example of those loyalty demands. Here again they were largely successful. Mr. Nader had polled close to 5 percent and wound up with 2 percent. Much of Mr. Nader’s losses were obviously Gore people coming home to the Democratic Party; still, it is remarkable to compare the Nader third-party movement with Ross Perot’s and John Anderson’s before. Those men routinely got 7 and 8 percent, even 19. Maybe Ralph Nader’s movement was truly smaller. But the fact is that blue culture is not really tolerant of dissent, and it hammered away at the Nader campaign through the final weeks, effectively. A letter by prominent progressive intellectuals caricatured Mr. Nader as an unstable nut (“dangerous,” “wrecking ball,” “unbelievable,” “incredible”). In The Times, Janet Malcolm compared Nader to Roger Clemens throwing the shattered bat-head. Kate Michelman went on and on about abortion. It had the emotion of a family feud. The Nader chastisers were always somewhat parental. But, like parents, they just didn’t get it. They imagined that they knew what was most important to us, so they could say that Al Gore was better on those issues. But Mr. Bush and Mr. Gore are hard to tell apart, harder than ever. And what if your issue is corporate influence of the political process? What if you are concerned that all the big media are owned by big corporations, and ideas are marketed like Cheerios? The other day, the Times Arts & Ideas page had a deadly story (by Alexander Stille) about progressive American intellectuals being completely ignored in the United States while their ideas are taken up in Europe. Arguments against bio-engineering, redistributive schemes to give every 18-year-old $14,000 to invest in a house or education. These ideas are actively discussed in Europe and shunned here. Because in the culture of globalization, they are heretical. They could send the markets down. And that was always Ralph Nader’s strongest argument: Our democratic discourse is shriveling, it has no room any more for unorthodox ideas.
As a Nader voter, I feel a certain detachment now, watching the factions, seeing the fixer Bill Daley come out with a gallows expression vowing trench warfare and Bob Dole with his strange face-lift warning about Republicans boycotting the inauguration. What hacks they are!
And sadly, Mr. Gore and Mr. Bush seem controlled by their factions. If one of them were presidential, he could lift us out of this. The Frank Capra moment could still happen. George Bush could say, “You know what? I lost the popular vote, and it sure looks like Florida didn’t want to vote for me either, so I’m going to step back now and stop this mess.” He would be the big winner.
For a while on election night, George W. Bush had even played the old-time hero who stands above the fray. When a reporter at the governor’s mansion said that his whole future was on the line, Mr. Bush bridled. No it isn’t! he said. My life will go on fine without this prize, he was saying. But that act vanished in a hurry. Now we see who he is, a nervous Nelly with his father’s lineup card, and determined to win on a technicality.
Al Gore may still have his lofty opportunity to win by losing. But it doesn’t look like it. Outside the White House, his relentless smiling seemed to mask disappointment and rage. What kind of winner will he be—how condescending—and how bitter a loser? Two princes, and not a noble drop of blood between them. They almost make Nixon look good. When he let go of the presidency, his parting words to his staff were poetic, and his wave from the helicopter door was brave and cleansing. Of course, that was his last act. We’re going to have both these guys to kick around for a long time.
* * *
It is not as if they are fighting over a principle or an ideology; the only principle is self-interest—on one side the old guard’s dream of restoration, on the other the meritocrat’s dream of advancement.
* * *
NOVEMBER 13, 2000 BY TERRY GOLWAY
She Wins! BushGore Are DarnClose
Hillary R. Clinton Belongs to You, New Yorkers; First Lady’s Win Is Bigger Than Anybody Thought
IN THE FIRST ELECTION OF THE new century, New Yorkers chose First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton as their first woman U.S. senator, while the presidential election lived up to its billing as Wednesday, November 8, chugged into the East Coast without a winner.
But New York had one. With more then 92 percent of the vote counted in New York, Mrs. Clinton had 56 percent of the vote, to Republican Representative Rick Lazio’s 43 percent. In the astonishing presidential race that seemed destined to drag long into the morning, Texas Governor George W. Bush had 246 votes in the Electoral College, while Vice President Al Gore had 242. Mr. Gore saw an early lead, fueled by crucial victories in Michigan and Pennsylvania, disapp
ear as states in the South and Rocky Mountain regions came in for Mr. Bush. As 1 a.m. approached in New York, the election hinged on Florida, where the vote was amazingly close.
NOVEMBER 27, 2000 BY AMY BERKOWITZ
CRUSHED UNDER THEIR TONS OF BOOKS, L’IL WONKS PUT WHEELS ON BACKPACKS
THE LATEST OBSESSION OF NEW York City’s school kids is the rolly backpack, a backpack with rubber wheels and a retractable plastic handle so it can be towed around.
Macy’s has been selling well over 100 a day.
“My old bag weighed about 45 pounds,” said Chris Dietz, a sixth-grade student at Hunter College Elementary School. “It strained my back a lot.”
DECEMBER 4, 2000 BY DEBORAH SCHOENEMAN AND DEBORAH NETBURN
Manhattan Transfers
Richard Meier Builds Perry Street Palace For Calvin and Martha
CHEF JEAN GEORGES VONGERICHTEN has reserved the 10th floor of the south tower of two Mr. Meier has designed at 173 and 176 Perry Street. Calvin Klein is spending about $20 million on a triplex penthouse in the south tower—and he’s paying Mr. Meier extra to fix it up. Martha Stewart has dibs on the north tower’s penthouse, which came with a $3.75 million price tag. And Mr. Meier has bought one apartment in the south tower for himself.
“The light off the river is so beautiful,” he said.
DECEMBER 18, 2000 BY ALEXANDRA JACOBS
WHERE HAVE YOU GONE, DIANA VREELAND?
IT IS TEMPTING TO DISMISS LUCKY, WHICH IS REALLY MORE OF A telephone book than a magazine, a 200-page telephone book filled with merchandise hand-picked and baldly showcased by editor Kim France and her staff (which includes an Internet editor named Jenny B. Fine; can this person exist?). But think what it means.
It heralds, for one thing, the end of the women’s magazine editor as celebrity; as domineering, matriarchal presence; as “editrix.”
The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots Page 38
