The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots

by The New York Observer

  Since editors can’t possibly compete with the ready-made narratives celebrities provide, they have slowly begun to erase themselves. The new model of the women’s magazine editor is not a dictator, not a queen, but a girlish and conspiratorial chum. (How can you dictate, after all, in a world of eBay and casual Friday? How elite can you be when most socialites have day jobs?)

  The youthful Ms. France is the ultimate self-erasing editor, posing for her editor’s letter quite literally in the closet. “I’d like you to think of Lucky as your personal shopping playground,” she writes, “overseen by that one friend who knows exactly which jeans are the most butt flattering.”

  Her magazine goes on to present no stories, no advice on job hunts, no how-to, no horoscopes (finally!), no vision of your ideal life, just first-person squibs from her editors accompanying photographs of items, items, items—the reason why magazines were existing all along. It’s crass, perhaps—note the $68 dish-drying rack on Chapter 1996—but there’s something honest about it. Something even brave.

  Lucky is a women’s magazine as project. By its editor’s fiat, its pages are meant quite explicitly to be annotated, doctored, torn up and out. One of its pages is covered with peel-off stickers—a rip-off from the popular Bliss spa catalog, one person who worked on the magazine remarked—to flag the items that the reader wants to buy. In the initial test issue, the stickers read “maybe” and “yes” one read “yes!”—to indicate, one supposes, that one must-have item. In the current issue, all the yesses are adorned with exclamation points. Shopping as never-ending orgasm.

  DECEMBER 25, 2000 BY FRANK DIGIACOMO

  text-align="center">Ring-a-Ding-Ding! Bill and Hill’s ‘Crat Pack’ Blows In

  HIGH ON THE 34TH FLOOR OF THE GRAND HYATT, DEEP WITHIN the force field of Secret Service men and federal agents in riot gear, they stood in a loose group around the woman who hours before had been elected New York’s junior senator. Hillary Clinton stood staring at an open copy of a hot-off-the-presses New York Post that bore front-and-back “Election Extra” news covers. “CAPITOL HILL” blared one of the headlines above what is probably the most tasteful picture of Mrs. Clinton that Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid has ever run.

  Around her stood VH1 chief John Sykes, Talk magazine editor in chief Tina Brown, her writer-editor husband Harold Evans, actress Uma Thurman, mook thespian Joe Pantoliano, writers Lucinda Franks and Stanley Crouch, Democratic operative Patricia Duff, monologist Anna Deavere Smith, opera singer Jessye Norman, and Ben Affleck, who was getting the googly eye from Chelsea Clinton as they stood on the perimeter of the crowd.

  “Now Rupert’s got to like you,” said Mr. Sykes to Mrs. Clinton.

  She had won, and there in the suite at the Grand Hyatt, you could already feel the world changing. Her enemies were equivocating and her sycophants were drawing closer.

  Illustrated by Drew Friedman

  DECEMBER 25, 2000 BY GEORGE GURLEY

  text-align="center">THE OBSERVATORY: WARNING! WASPS ON THE WEB!

  DAVID PATRICK COLUMBIA WAS SITTING at Swifty’s, a clubby restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, inches away from a table of society figures eating lunch. There was the ageless philanthropist Carroll Petrie; jewelry designer and walker Kenneth Jay Lane; cabaret singer Yanna Avis, wife of the rent-a-car mogul; fashion designer Mary McFadden, wearing a fur hat; and the slim, silver-haired society lunch date, John Galliher. As Mr. Lane broke into snatches of Cole Porter, Mr. Columbia leaned in and told me, “I’m not a part of society. I’m an outsider. I don’t aspire to be an insider. I could be at that table and not feel like an outsider. But I am not an insider like those people are with each other. I like to see these people. Very powerful creative forces. Not writers of the great American novel, but characters in the great American novel, which is even better than the writer. Every single person at this table. Really interesting stories. Tremendous lives, big lives. Somebody else might read that and say, ‘Yeccch, he respects them? If he knew what I know!’ What they really mean is all these people have amazing powers. Because they do!” In September, Mr. Columbia created a Web site, NewYorkSocialDiary.com. Through the magic of digital photography and Mr. Columbia’s late-night typing, each morning people can see what happened the night before at the Waldorf Grand Ballroom, at a ballet benefit or at an exclusive dinner party. But the real secret of Mr. Columbia’s success? He’s actually nice to the people he covers.

  At 59, David Patrick Columbia is a big fella, 6-foot-4, with a deep voice that erupts into that WASP-y sound somewhere between a bark and a honk. At lunch, he was wearing a blue blazer, brown tie and khakis. “I sort of made my reputation being nice-ish,” he said. “The world that I cover is often about vanity, greed and venality. But most of us don’t get up in the morning and think, ‘I’m going to be the biggest son of a bitch that ever lived today.’ Most of us get up in the morning and think, ‘How am I going to get through my day? How am I going to make my lunch on time? How am I going to pay the rent? How am I going to keep that secret? How am I going to hide this from him or from her?’ So I sometimes feel if you’re nice, you actually get a much clearer picture of what people are. Because a lot of people tend to behave very badly in New York. It’s like when you see little children behaving badly and parents say, ‘Stop that!’ Well, these are giant little children who don’t have parents to say, ‘Stop that.’ So I try to be the family counselor in my mind.”

  * * *

  GEORGE GURLEY INTERVIEWS SUSAN MORRISON

  with occasional words from John Homans

  Illustrated by Barry Blitt

  Could you talk about how you got the job?

  At Spy we ran a regular column about The Observer, which had just started, making fun of the paper’s boring-ness. The first one read, “It’s about time this city had a weekly—a baby-aspirin-colored weekly at that—as compelling, as daring, as NOW as the tweedy readership whose minor woes it chronicles.” We would then list some typical headlines, for example: “Consumer Official Threatens Milk Suit,” “3-Card Monte: The Game of the Streets.” So when Graydon Carter ended up leaving Spy and going to edit The Observer, it seemed shocking to all of us. But Graydon saw the paper as a bundle of potential, and he completely remade it. After he had been there for a little more than a year, he was hired by S. I. Newhouse to edit Vanity Fair, and he called me and said, “I don’t know what Arthur has in mind here, but you should really come and take this place over.” I was having a lot of fun with Kurt [Andersen] at Spy, and I wasn’t that interested initially. But, at Graydon’s suggestion, Arthur called and summoned me to the office on 64th Street. The Spy offices had always been improvised, ramshackle affairs, with lots of wall board and cheapo architechtural flourishes held together with Elmer’s glue, but I had never seen anything quite like the Observer office. It was a beautiful old townhouse, but overlayed entirely with a kind of acrid ’70s feel—there was mustardy-beige paint on everything and old dust-colored carpeting that had been worn down into something like felt. People were literally piled on top of each other trying to work. But Arthur’s office was a vast paneled space out of Masterpiece Theatre, very polished and woody and calm. When I went to meet him that first time, one of the first questions he asked me was what my SAT scores were. (I later learned that he asked everyone this. I also learned that he had a deep fascination with admissions processes of all kinds—to Ivy League schools, private schools, Manhattan clubs. He loved stories about getting in—and, at his urging, the paper did lots of memorable pieces on the subject.) I was 32 and I was planning to be married in a month, so it wasn’t the greatest time for me to make a big move. But Arthur was very persuasive and I accepted. One week into the job I went on my honeymoon.

  Once I got to The Observer, I remember how every single person I hired always came in on their first day with the same look on their face: “Oh my God, what have I done?”

  John Homans: I did. I left the building until they promised to build me an office. I came in and there was no light
. It was a very unsavory situation. The first thing I saw when I went into the Observer townhouse was Rob Speyer of the Tishman Speyer family, a very loud-voiced, long-chinned fellow who was at that time about 22. And Arthur had this Italian guy who dealt with supplies, Leon, who would guard the supplies. On my first day, Leon had one end of a carton of milk and Rob Speyer had the other end, and they were physically fighting over this carton of milk. And Rob Speyer is a billionaire. And I thought, This is fucked up.

  Susan Morrison: On my first day, I remember saying, “Leon, can I have a box of paper clips?” And he went downstairs and came back and held out his palm and he had three paper clips in his hand. Leon was the requisitions officer. Veteran staffers used to joke that he was Arthur’s father. He was kept in the basement.

  John Homans: Along with Warren St. John’s beer. When Warren St. John introduced himself, he said, “I’m a poet and a brewer.”

  Susan Morrison: Things were so overcrowded. I remember the elaborate plans for a Quonset hut that was going to be erected in the backyard, because we needed more space—we were having four interns use a door propped on two sawhorses as a desk. And the receptionists! Their names were Angie and Rosalinda, and they had one of those Lily Tomlin–era switchboards with plugs.

  Arthur threw a dinner party at his apartment to welcome John Homans. We were all pretty young and poor, so even just going into Arthur’s house, with all the servants and impressionist paintings, was a little overwhelming. After dinner everyone retired to the living room, and Arthur, who was trained as a pianist, started playing classical pieces. Then Michael Thomas and John Heilpern got him to switch to show tunes and tried to get everyone into a singalong. I think Heilpern was sitting on a lid of the piano. It was an odd, very boozy evening. I’m quite sure that “Old Man River” was performed.

  We young folk were sitting on the couch and I remember you [Homans] looking horrified. I was afraid you were going to quit right then.

  * * *

  * * *

  It was like putting on a show in the barn. It felt like there were no grown-ups around in some ways, and we were free to do whatever we wanted.

  * * *

  * * *

  How did it flow from Graydon’s tenure to yours?

  Graydon made a great success at the paper—he jump-started it—and I built on that. He had treated The Observer like a big high-school newspaper for the Upper East Side and for the media, and that’s why everybody picked it up. It had really good media news, and it happened to be a period where there was a lot of interesting stuff going on in the media. Tina Brown had just taken over The New Yorker, for example. One thing I learned at Spy was that it’s easier to be an editor if you have no sacred cows, if you allow no one to be off-limits. So no one was off-limits. We covered Graydon and Vanity Fair as well as former business associates of Arthur’s.

  Susan Morrison is articles editor at The New Yorker.

  Graydon succeeding in making people read and talk about the paper, and when I got there, I wanted to make it younger. There was a sense, in 1992, that the Upper East Side had a bit of an ossified, geriatric, Town and Country feel—it was the world of Jerry Zipkin, Saul and Gayfryd Steinberg. I wanted to rid the paper of that feel and make it younger, more relevant. Like Graydon, I wanted it to be entertaining and mischievous. Lots of stories about little local conflicts—I remember assigning one of those interns to read the New York Law Journal every day to find obscure lawsuits that would be good stories. We did some oddball trend stories—Phil Weiss wrote, all those years ago, about the phrase “At the end of the day,” which was just becoming ubiquitous. We had no money and no resources. I remember what a huge deal it was to send Frank DiGiacomo, who wrote the Transom, to cover the Oscars (or rather, we did a bake-off story comparing Graydon Carter’s VF Oscar party to Tina Brown’s New Yorker Oscar party). I think Frank was sleeping on someone’s floor out there and he called in his story in the middle of the night. It was the first time we used this newfangled device that none of us had ever heard of, called a modem.

  John Homans is executive editor at New York.

  How was it working for Arthur Carter?

  Arthur took a lot of risks. He let me hire anyone I wanted, and he let me fire anyone I wanted. There were some older columnists when I got there who, while talented, just weren’t contributing enough fresh material. And I think I had to let Taki go. It was the third time I was responsible for firing him! When I worked for Tina at Vanity Fair, Taki wrote a column that I was editing, and one, I think, had too much in common with a piece someone else had written in the Telegraph. So that was that. Taki is an old friend of Graydon’s, and he became a columnist at Spy, and again I edited him, and again we had that, uh, problem. When I got to The Observer, there he was again—writing the same columns (it seemed as if many of them included a reference to the socialite Porfirio Rubirosa balancing a chair on his erect penis).

  What were some memorable pieces?

  When Donald Trump married Marla Maples, they had a huge society wedding at the Plaza. I assigned Phil Weiss to go and hang out in the kitchen, to be there when the vans from City Harvest arrived to pick up the leftover food for the homeless. At about 11 p.m., the City Harvest people came and loaded up all the foie gras and lobster and steak and brought it down to the Bowery Mission. Phil went down, too, and stayed with the scene for about 36 hours, reporting as the cooks made all of those luxury ingredients into stew and then talking to the homeless guys who ate it—Trump’s leftovers. It was a really good piece.

  Anyone ever call up screaming?

  We once reviewed a somewhat cheesy novel by Julie Baumgold, who was married to Ed Kosner, the editor of New York magazine. There was a line in the review describing the author as being in the tradition of Shirley Lord and Nancy Friday—that is, wives of important editors who wrote dirty books. Baumgold was furious. I remember Arthur coming to the office extremely gleeful the next week. He said he had been at a party the night before and had been accosted by Julie Baumgold. She had seen him across the room and had screamed obscenities at him. Arthur loved it. Because I had been at Spy for six years, I was used to that sort of thing. I was used to writing those awkward notes to people or relatives of people who were being mocked in the magazine. I remember writing one to my old friend David Kissinger: “Dear David, just wanted to give you a heads up that your father appears on the cover of the next issue wearing a coconut bra.”

  Memorable columnists?

  Lots. We had Harold Brodkey writing the Runaway Column. He was great. I had a very intense relationship with him. Editing him involved being on the phone with him for hours. Eventually, I gave up the phone and ended up going to meet him at Café Edgar on the West Side. Then he was diagnosed with AIDS. He got sick at the same time I became pregnant, and he liked to talk on the phone about it. He was fascinated, and, in a strange way, consoled by drawing parallels between the baby growing inside of me and the disease growing inside of him. I loved hiring people to write the New Yorker’s Diary—in particular, Jim Collins, Patty Marx and Phil Weiss. John Heilpern was always fun and smart. I remember editing Heilpern over the phone. I would sometimes say, “John, are you lying down?” You could just hear it in his voice.

  John Homans: What was his famous line—it has to be apocryphal—he was married to an editor at British Vogue, Joan Juliet Buck, and supposedly the last thing that happened, she said, “John, the difference between you and me is, I came to America to be a success, and you came here to be a failure.” And he said, “And neither one of us succeeded in our game.”

  What was the atmosphere like?

  We were sitting in a tiny, grungy office, a bunch of underpaid people saying, “Let’s do this, let’s do that.” It was like putting on a show in the barn. It felt like there were no grown-ups around in some ways, and we were free to do whatever we wanted. That was all really fun. It was a little like Spy, but it was different because it was real news. We were trying to break news, and we often succeeded. For those
us who had done time at Condé Nast, it was liberating. There was a lovely sense of camaraderie in all of that. I remember on the day after Thanksgiving (we had to work) lining up all of those doors on sawhorses that passed for desks and serving a turkey dinner to the staff. It was fun. But there was a downside to making it up as we went along. The resources were scant. There were times when I had to pay freelance writers by writing checks from my personal checking account (these would be in the high two figures, of course!) and then I would put their fees on my expenses. That was sometimes the only way I could get writers paid. It was a high-wire act: Just getting the damn thing out every week was a miracle.

  Illustrated by Barry Blitt

  * * *

  2001

  The real millenium begins with Bush Inauguration

  Chappaqua quakes as Bill, Hillary find Starbucks

  200,000 crush grass to hear Dave Matthews

  Inspired jeans designers introduce the Butt Zipper

  Super Senators duel for TV time

  PR princess Lizzie Grubman backs into Hamptons Club

  September 11, 2001

  Wall Street finds distraction in BlackBerry

  2001

  JANUARY 8, 2001 EDITORIAL

  THE SHAMELESS MRS. CLINTON

  IN THE SHORT PERIOD BETWEEN being elected and being sworn in as senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton has already orchestrated two separate multimillion-dollar deals that raise serious questions about her personal ethics and her political loyalty to New York.

  First, for those who were under the assumption that Mrs. Clinton was the next senator from New York, she has proven instead that she should properly be introduced as “the senator from Viacom.” It is stunning how quickly she sold her impartiality to the highest bidder—in this case, Viacom, the media giant that coughed up an $8 million advance for Mrs. Clinton’s memoirs. The New York Times reports that Mrs. Clinton was pushing to collect more of her advance immediately, before taking office, when the Senate Ethics Committee might have had something to say.