The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots
Page 41
“What’s funny is the name: Craft,” said Mr. Davis. “‘Craft’ presumes there’s a craftsman there making beautiful things. If you want to work your own lathe and make your own ugly chair, then don’t call it ‘Craft.’”
Whether Craft perseveres or becomes another bump on the New York restaurant road remains to be seen. But there is something very now about this restaurant—this notion that, after too much carefree extravagance, improvidence and heavy cream sauces, we want to take care of our spoiled little selves again.
“We maybe need to have a shrink on staff full-time,” joked Mr. Colicchio. “It’s definitely bringing up some issues.”
APRIL 30, 2001 BY MOIRA HODGSON
LABOR OF LUNCH
“MY EX-HUSBAND WAS ALWAYS a pain about his food,” said an English friend over lunch at Craft. “He once actually asked a waiter if he could have the roast beef on the menu without the roast beef.”
He would not have been considered a pain at Craft, a new restaurant in the Flatiron district. Here the menu just provides the bare bones. You put your meal together yourself.
As a friend and I tried to create an imaginative dinner for ourselves one evening, I wondered what the chef would do with customers who ordered, say, gnocchi and red cabbage to go with sweetbreads.
“If I were him, I’d refuse to cook for them, of course,” said my friend, who had been eyeing the sweetbreads himself. “I’d come out of the kitchen with my knife and stare at them. You have to be fearless in this restaurant. It places the responsibility for your dinner squarely on your shoulders.”
CRAFT * * *
43 East 19th Street (between Park Avenue South and Broadway) 780-0880
Dress: Casual
Noise level: Fine
Wine list: Excellent, with unusual wines at fair prices
Credit cards: All major
Price range: Main courses, lunch, $20 to $26; dinner, $20 to $30, excluding vegetables, which range from $6 to $12
Lunch: Monday to Friday, noon to 2 p.m.
Dinner: Monday to Friday, 5:30 to 10 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 5:30 to 11 p.m.
* Good
* * Very Good
* * * Excellent
* * * * Outstanding
No Star: Poor
JUNE 6, 2001 BY JOSH BENSON
SUPER CHUCK FLIES AGAIN!
THE CAMERAMEN GATHERED outside the P.C. Richard & Son appliance store on 14th Street were already griping. It was Memorial Day, and they were waiting for Senator Charles Schumer, who was disturbing their beach-and-barbecue day to talk about air conditioners.
Illustrated by Barry Blitt and Drew Friedman
Once Mr. Schumer arrived, he set about decrying President George W. Bush’s efforts to roll back air-conditioning efficiency standards. This picture of the earnest, fist-pumping Chuck Schumer—clad in a stars-and-stripes tie and spending his holiday weekend in front of a bunch of cameras, surrounded by visual props (in this case, boxes of air conditioners on the sidewalk) and denouncing the latest Republican outrage in the hopes that someone was paying attention—seemed drearily familiar. But this time, things were different. “Today, I’m calling for the president to back off from his proposal,” said Mr. Schumer, pausing as a bus roared by. “If he won’t”—at this point the Senator broke into a broad smile—“as a member of the Energy Committee, now in the majority, I’m going to call for hearings.”
JUNE 11, 2001 BY ALEXANDRA JACOBS
Good Witch Glenda Comes to Bazaar as Classy, Chilly Kate Gets Gate
ON FRIDAY, JUNE 1, THE DREGS OF KATE BETTS’ HARPER’S BAZAAR staff were summoned to their deposed editor’s stripped-down office, where they confronted their new leader, Glenda Bailey, for the first time.
After a few jokes, the new editor in chief assured the assembled that she wasn’t planning to turn the venerable fashion monthly, historically Pepsi to Vogue’s Coke, into another Marie Claire—the boppy, sexually frank Hearst title whose circulation she has increased more than 50 percent since she arrived from England five years ago.
The response: awkward silence. It was as if Glenda the Good Witch, with her cloud of frizzy, reddish hair and vivacious manner, had descended in a bubble to wave her wand over the ailing Bazaar.
As for the new editor in chief’s personal image, which was causing some consternation among the lower ranks of the fashion community last week, it could be said that Ms. Bailey follows in the exuberantly shabby tradition of the beloved Ms. Tilberis. Said one defender, “I think her hair looks best wild.”
JULY 2, 2001 BY GEORGE GURLEY
Lights! Cameras! Hamptons Vérité!
ON A FRIDAY EVENING IN JUNE, TWO BLOND HEIRESSES WERE getting dressed for a party. Nicky Hilton, who is 18, and Amanda Hearst, who is 16, were in Ms. Hilton’s parents’ sprawling home in Southampton. The only thing that made this scene any different from countless other summer evenings of countless young worthies getting dressed for a party near the beach was the presence of a Sony movie camera, a boom microphone and a film crew. The girls’ pre-party ritual was being filmed for Barbara Kopple, the Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker. The cameras will roll until Labor Day, at which point Ms. Kopple will sit down in an editing room. Roughly eight months later, the result will be broadcast by ABC in four hours over two nights. The working title is The Hamptons Project.
Another of Ms. Kopple’s characters is Joan Jedell, a photographer and the publisher of The Hamptons Sheet. Ms. Jedell had buttonholed Ms. Kopple’s crew on the streets of Sag Harbor. “You should be talking to me; I’m the voice of the Hamptons,” she told them. Ms. Jedell said she thinks Ms. Kopple should zoom in more on “the elitist kind of Hamptons.”
“I don’t get their point of view,” she said. “Theirs is an all-around general non-glitzy focus, although the glitz will be part of it, but isn’t all of it. Whereas in my life, it’s all of it. I don’t look at the fucking crap all over the place. I mean, I can look at that in Manhattan; I can go down to the Bowery if I want. The Latino dishwashers, the Mexicans, the fishermen—I don’t even focus on the locals. They hate us, anyway. If they’re going to do something like this, and if they are going to include this well-rounded Hamptons, who’s gonna care?”
Illustrated by Barry Blitt and Drew Friedman
JULY 16, 2001 BY FRANK DIGIACOMO AND DEBORAH SCHOENEMAN
Grubman Crackup: It Was a Bad Night at Conscience Point
LESS THAN 24 HOURS AFTER 30-year-old publicist Lizzie Grubman put her Mercedes in reverse and allegedly plowed into a bouncer and a group of 15 people who were waiting to get past the velvet ropes at Southampton’s Conscience Point Inn, the damage to the well-worn Cape Cod-style nightclub had been patched up and painted over well enough that it was almost possible to forget the bloody faces and broken limbs of the previous night.
But four days into the media storm that was precipitated by the incident, it has become clear that repairing the human damage—to the injured, to Ms. Grubman’s reputation and to the family, friends and business associates who have been affected by her actions—is going to require much more than shingles and nails. Already a small group of expensive men well acquainted with crisis—including public relations executive Howard Rubenstein, Southampton attorney Edward Burke Jr. and Manhattan attorney Edward Hayes—have begun plugging the ugly hole Ms. Grubman put into her well-manicured world, now that she has been charged with six counts of first-degree assault, one count of reckless endangerment, one count of second-degree assault and one count of leaving the scene of an accident involving physical injury. (Ms. Grubman posted $25,000 bail; a court date was set for Sept. 5.) And they are attempting to secure loose lips and quell angry voices in both the Hamptons and Manhattan, in the hope that eventually everything will seem as smooth and seamless as Conscience Point’s shabby-chic façade.
But that is no easy task in this part of the world. For every acquiescent member of the New York establishment who’s friendly with Ms. Grubman or her extremely successful father, entertainm
ent attorney Allen Grubman, there is an ambitious, frustrated striver on the wrong side of the velvet rope looking to shake things up. For every couple that spends tens of thousands of dollars to summer in the Hamptons, there is a year-round resident who resents the conspicuousness of these weekenders. And for every publicist who shares Ms. Grubman’s client list, there is one who covets her success.
Illustrated by Drew Friedman
AUGUST 6, 2001 BY ALEXANDRA JACOBS
THE OBSERVATORY: SAVING SILVERMAN
ON JULY 11, THE COMEDIAN Sarah Silverman made a typically kittenish appearance on the couch of NBC’s Late Night with Conan O’Brien: She nibbled fruit, briefly clasped her breasts and performed a pre-scripted joke in which she uttered the word “Chinks,” a slur for Chinese-Americans. It got a medium laugh.
A week later, Ms. Silverman woke up to a jangling phone in the airy lower-Broadway sublet she shares with her Chihuahua-pug mix, Duck. It was her mother calling. “She said, ‘They were just talking about you on The View!’” said the sooty-lashed Ms. Silverman, at 30 still the gamine darling of the mostly male alternative-comedy world, but now the sworn enemy of Guy Aoki, president of the Media Action Network for Asian-Americans.
By the end of the next day, Mr. Aoki’s demand that she apologize had spread to the national press. “When it was just The View, I was like, ‘Oh, I better write this guy a letter,’” said Ms. Silverman. “And then by the end of the day I was like, ‘This guy’s a fucking idiot,’ you know?” NBC quickly issued an official apology and vowed to expunge the joke from reruns. “The truth of the matter is, it’s not a moral issue in terms of the network,” said Ms. Silverman. “They may put this façade on that it is, but it’s about advertisers and the F.C.C. and pleasing them. It has nothing to do with morals; they are void of morals. It’s all about money. It’s all about money.”
SEPTEMBER 17, 2001 BY TERRY GOLWAY
September 11, 2001: Infamy: Assault, Collapse at Twin Towers; City Girds
SPARED THE BOMBS AND SIEGES THAT scarred nearly every other world capital in the 20th century, New York on Sept. 11, 2001, suffered the most catastrophic attack on American territory since the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
Thousands of civilian men, women and children were killed and thousands more injured when two hijacked jetliners crashed into the World Trade Center at the beginning of what was to be just another day in pre-recessionary New York. The famed twin towers, dominant features of the downtown skyline since 1970, collapsed in a sickening heap about an hour after the crashes. Combined with a similar attack on the Pentagon, the casualties for Sept. 11, 2001, very likely will exceed the number of Allied casualties on D-Day, when 2,500 soldiers died and 10,000 were wounded. “The number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear,” Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said during an afternoon news conference. “There was a large number of firefighters and police officers in harm’s way. We don’t know how many we’ve lost.”
As night fell, thousands of families throughout the New York area prayed for loved ones they had not heard from, fearing the terrible news that might come with a phone call, or a visit from a clergyman. Downtown Manhattan, symbol of the resurgent New York, which gleefully laid claim to the title of “Capital of the World,” had in an instant been rendered an appalling slaughterhouse.
President George W. Bush, who was told of the atrocities while he was reading to schoolchildren in Florida, promised to seek out the groups or people responsible. The president was flown to Nebraska, home of the Strategic Air Command, and then returned to Washington in late afternoon. By midday, F-16 fighter jets were patrolling Manhattan’s skies, and all other air traffic throughout the nation was grounded. Sirens—suddenly reminiscent of air-raid warnings in London during the Blitz—replaced the honking horns and chaotic sounds of midtown as streets were shut down to allow access to emergency vehicles, some of them summoned from towns in Westchester County and New Jersey.
Doctors in St. Vincent’s Hospital were, by late afternoon, awaiting casualties that were slow in coming. Dr. George Neuman, head of anesthesiology, said there was great concern about the number of injured people trapped under the massive rubble. The scene downtown was terrifying. People trapped in the towers could be seen leaping from windows, as witnesses on the ground screamed in horror. One eyewitness said one of the jumpers landed on a firefighter, killing both of them.
Crowds gathered in City Hall Plaza, several blocks to the northeast, to watch the tragedy unfold. At 10 a.m., they heard a terrible roar as the first tower, No. 1 World Trade Center, collapsed. Acrid white smoke quickly enveloped City Hall, and people began running north. Police officers shouted, “Move, move, move!” Some people sought refuge inside a subway entrance. Within minutes, the plaza was deserted. An ambulance was parked on a nearby street, seemingly abandoned. Soon, emerging from the thick smoke, refugees began streaming north towards City Hall. “I need a mask! I need a mask!” shouted an Emergency Medical Services worker. Somebody else shouted, “It’s coming!”
Just after the first tower collapsed, grim-faced emergency workers and frantic family members tried to make their way south, while distraught survivors wandered uptown along the West Side Highway and other streets. Some of them were covered in dust and soot as they approached Warren and Greenwich Streets, when they heard a huge explosion behind them. The second tower had fallen.
Along Second Avenue on the East Side, people gathered around shop windows to watch televisions or listen to radios, an image associated with another era of strife. Scores of ambulances—many from the outer boroughs and beyond—raced down the avenue, which was almost devoid of normal traffic. With the subways shut down, people wandered the sidewalks, eager for news.
Illustrated by Drew Friedman
September 10, 2001…The Day Before
By Martin Scorsese Director, Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, Gangs of New York
THAT MORNING, I REMEMBER BEING AWAKENED BY Silas the dog. Usually, my schedule is late morning to late night—I’m usually up until about 2 a.m—but Silas woke me at 8. The poor old dog. He’s very sweet but, you know, he’s had it. He’s got eczema; he’s scratching. I have eczema, too, so I understand. But he’s on the bed scratching, and the bed’s shaking.
I put him outside the bedroom. My wife, Helen, had already gone out. But then he started barking so I had to take him back in.
He woke me up twice.
So I was groggy, but I was also feeling an extraordinary amount of pressure. I usually exercise in the morning, but I didn’t that day because I had to go to a photo shoot for Talk magazine. I had to get there by noon. But I was really consumed with Gangs of New York. We were preparing for a third rough-cut screening, which I think was going to be Sept. 20. The first cut of the film was three hours and 40 minutes. The next was three hours and 20 minutes. When you’re cutting, you want to get as much as possible out. But first, the whole picture has to work before you can realize, “Oh, I don’t need that scene.”
I was eager to get back to the editing room, but between the photo shoot and the dog, I couldn’t get there. The photo shoot, which I wanted to do, took place at the Peninsula Hotel, on the 23rd floor. When I got there, basically I was still sleeping. I met my editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, and publicist Larry Kaplan in the hall with my publicist, Lois Smith, and I didn’t even utter hello to anyone. I hadn’t even had my second cup of coffee.
Everyone else was already there: Griffin Dunne, Jay Cocks, Nick Pileggi, Nora Ephron, Paul Schrader and Jane Rosenthal.
I was still groggy but I was able to say hello to people. I said, “Actually, I’m not late. It was the elevator that was late.” Which was true so I didn’t feel guilty.
The photographer’s camera and the giant silk had been set up on a terrace, near the edge. I looked at it and said, “I have vertigo.” The safety barrier on the terrace was maybe up to your waist. It was like some nightmare: I wake up. I don’t know where I am. I’m thinking of the cut of the film. I want to se
e the baby, Francesca. I’ve got a photo to do on the edge of a 23rd-floor terrace. I looked at the photographer. I said, “I don’t think I can stand there.”
* * *
“I was really consumed with Gangs of New York. We were preparing for a third rough-cut screening, which I think was going to be Sept. 20.”
* * *
They said, “O.K. we’ll move the camera.” I said hello to Griffin. I started to feel better. I hadn’t seen most of these people for a while. While we were talking, Paul Schrader looked over the edge and said, “Look over there. There’s the Taxi Driver suite.” He was pointing at the St. Regis Hotel. When I was doing that film, the rooms I occupied were the rooms that had the oval windows. We were right across from them.
We started talking about Taxi Driver and about that summer in New York in 1975. It was a tough summer. Very hot. Lot’s of rain. Lot’s of edgy violence in the area. It made us all very nostalgic.
Shrader comes from the Midwest, but when he had written the film and had created Travis Bickle, we’d talked about doing Taxi Driver in a different city. We couldn’t get the money to do it here. We thought San Francisco, but he said, “No, New York has the different neighborhoods.” At that time, the stretch of Eight Avenue between 42nd and 57th streets was rough. Schrader said, “You cannot top that.” And I said, “You’re right, we’ve got to do it as a New York film.” It was a defining time in my life, and Paul Schrader’s life and De Niro’s life. Even Cybill Shepherd’s life.
And what happened right before the photo shoot was we all became very nostalgic about New York.