A mere six months after Mr. Giuliani left City Hall, there are increasing signs that he is seeking to ride his post–Sept. 11 popularity all the way to the White House. Even as his allies boost his prospects among insiders, Mr. Giuliani has launched an open-ended national campaign, building a base in the Republican Party by stumping for candidates across the country and becoming one of the most effusive advocates for Mr. Bush.
Since leaving office, Mr. Giuliani has discussed his performance under fire before scores, if not hundreds, of audiences. It’s a subject he never tires of addressing. It figures prominently in speeches and in commercials for Republican candidates across the country.
“Not forgetting it means not forgetting what actually happened,” he said, “as opposed to some highly euphemistic version of it.”
JUNE 17, 2002 BY BLAIR GOLSON
MANHATTAN TRANSFERS: VILLAGE SWANK
WHEN THE CASTING CALL WENT OUT FOR WHAT WOULD eventually become the Oscar-winning film Boys Don’t Cry, Hilary Swank was a Hollywood hopeful with little but her starring role in the fourth installment of the Karate Kid franchise under her belt—and barely enough money to make the round-trip flight to New York for the audition. She and husband Chad Lowe (Rob frère) have had no shortage of access to remunerative roles: She got her start as a ditzy minor player in the 1992 movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer; he’s been on Melrose Place. But it was her performance as the transgender Nebraska teenager Brandon Teena and subsequent (though less notable) efforts—the fizzled bodice-ripper The Affair of the Necklace, the supernatural thriller The Gift—that seem to have made the 27-year-old actress’ financial circumstances more comfortable: She’s now preparing, with Mr. Lowe, to feather a cozy townhouse nest in Greenwich Village that came with a $4 million price tag.
“We always dreamed of having a place in New York,” Ms. Swank told The Observer. “And as soon as I walked in, I knew this was it.”
Ms. Swank and her husband recently signed a contract on this four-story residence on a tree-lined street. The house is full of original detail—from pocket doors and hardwood floors to etched moldings and multiple glass chandeliers. It has a large, landscaped garden, eat-in kitchen, wood-burning fireplace, and a large master bedroom with his-and-hers bathrooms. The house’s parlor floor has a living room and library, and the children’s floor has a large central skylight and kitchenette.
Both now seem to be hoping that the artistic mojo of the Village rubs off on them.
“It’s all about balancing art and commerce,” Mr. Lowe recently told a group of film students.
Illustrated by Barry Blitt, Drew Friedman and Victor Juhasz
JUNE 24, 2002 BY JASON GAY
TOM’S CRUISE BLUES
AT THE ZIEGFELD THEATER ON MONDAY, JUNE 17—WHERE TOM Cruise’s new movie, Minority Report, was getting the full premiere treatment—the red-carpet territory was calm until—whoooosh!—Jerry Maguire swooped in, shortish, friendly, black-suited, black-booted, scruffy, stubbly and looking like a World Cup goalkeeper. The place went nuts. Mr. Cruise poured himself into the willing crowd, clutching hands, swirling his name on glossy photos, flashing his midlife braces and sucking up so much Manhattan air that pretty much everyone else—including his boss, gray-bearded Steven Spielberg—had to feel a little oxygen-deprived.
He’ll be 40 on July 3, and the media has generally agreed to state that he is the biggest star on the planet. Every one of his pictures is met with the deferential P.R. sound of non-rocking-the-boat commercial respect; the press is preconditioned to respect Mr. Cruise’s professionalism and commercialism.
He looks great, he sounds great; sometimes you swear he even smells great. The 5-foot-7 Mr. Cruise is a little guy who doesn’t play the little guy; he is popularity personified, and reminds no one of a person they ignored in high school.
Still, money and power and celebrity can be nasty buggers, and together they have conspired to trap Mr. Cruise in a neat box of fame that is good for the June 2002 market but possibly problematic for the actor himself over the long term. We are told repeatedly of how affable Mr. Cruise is by people who meet with him and know him, but to the public Mr. Cruise is now less a person than a fantastic performance car, fast and clean, with a controlled edge of recklessness. Mr. Cruise has become, essentially, a commodity, a living product placement.
He remains, on the cusp of his fifth decade, a youthful ideal, even as faint facial lines begin to appear and crow’s feet form around his green eyes. He is, quite clearly, an adult, but still a tough sell as an adult. Perhaps this is why—rather than the knee-jerk belief that it would turn off audiences—Mr. Cruise has still yet to take that transformative role that allows boys to become men, as Paul Newman did with The Hustler and Hud.
JULY 15, 2002 BY JOE HAGAN
Martha Still Living
MARTHA STEWART may or may not wind up in deep trouble as a result of the current ImClone stock investigation, but the mess has already begun to impact a significant part of her media empire: print advertising.
Advertising drives Martha Stewart Living, so if the Krafts and Doves and Pepperidge Farms of the world decide to yank their ads, Omnimedia would be in for some serious pain.
Not surprisingly, Ms. Stewart’s sales team is trying to stem the potential flow. According to several people who have met with ad reps from Ms. Stewart’s magazines recently, the team is insisting that Martha Stewart Living is about the content of the magazine and not about the person—an argument that would have sounded ludicrous a month ago.
Illustrated by Barry Blitt, Drew Friedman and Victor Juhasz
So far there are no measurable results upon Martha Stewart Living from June’s onslaught of bad press.
Still, given their long lead time, ad buyers must now deliberate purchasing space in a magazine named after a woman who could be in serious straits by the time their advertisements appear. “If, in three months, she’s really in deep shit, there could be a problem,” said Joe Mandese, the editor of Media Buyer’s Daily.
JULY 22, 2002 BY STANLEY CROUCH
WHY I BUY HIS STORY
Illustrated by Barry Blitt, Drew Friedman and Victor Juhasz
NO MATTER HOW ECCENTRIC Michael Jackson is, no matter how self-serving his charges might seem, he is bringing to the surface an old story, full of exploited figures, that is still very much alive—and among the lessons of his rise and fall from grace is a cold hard fact that black artists and entertainers have to grow up and realize: In show business nothing is guaranteed, regardless of the color of the person making the promise.
It was a little over a week ago that Mr. Jackson made the charge that the recording business is racist and that his case is about the essential nature of color prejudice. “If you’re fighting for me, you’re fighting for all black people, dead and alive,” Mr. Jackson said.
What is most significant about Michael Jackson and his battle with Sony is what it says about the world we’re still living in: When it comes to the music industry, even those who have brought in billions—even Michael Jackson—can find himself in a position to play the race card and deserve a hearing; the denigration of black people is far from over.
FEBRUARY 4, 2002 BY CLAY FELKER
CITY OF AMBITION WILL RISE FROM ASHES OF 9/11
AS THE HEAD OF CHASE MANHATTAN BANK, A GREAT International power, David Rockefeller’s appointment book filled up as much as a year in advance. So I was surprised to receive an invitation to lunch with him at his headquarters near the southern tip of Manhattan.
It was the late 1960’s, and his passion then was building the World Trade Center along with the governor at the time, his brother Nelson. I, on the other hand, was the editor at New York magazine, where we’d been questioning why the Port Authority wanted to engage in a real-estate project instead of improving mass transportation—its very reason for being. We were not alone. Local real-estate developers argued that the city had plenty of office space already and complained that the last thing they needed was a government ag
ency to enter the game.
When I joined Mr. Rockefeller in his office at 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza, he took me to the window overlooking the construction site. Oddly enough, it looked much like ground zero today.
He understood that some people didn’t share his vision, but he argued that it would be a great thing for the city, for the whole region. At lunch, he went into more persuasive detail. I was impressed with his commitment as a New Yorker to the future of the city as the great international financial capital it was.
But as we sat together, something else crossed my mind. Maybe he wanted to make his own mark, revitalizing lower Manhattan just as his brother Nelson had done to midtown with the construction of Rockefeller Center a few decades earlier.
Now the twin towers are no more, leaving us to wonder again about the direction of New York itself, the larger question whose answer will almost certainly tell us what to do with those 16 acres that, once more, stand nearly vacant.
It is becoming apparent that Lower Manhattan will not be the financial center that it was before. There is an inexorable movement away from it, not only to midtown or New Jersey, but also to the far-flung corners of an electronic world that no longer needs a grand metropolis from which to provide financial services.
As cruel as it has been, a disaster on the scale of Sept. 11 can be looked upon as an opportunity to recast the future. San Francisco, for one, has had its share of devastating earthquakes and fires, but emerged each time with new vitality and a new identity.
The economic promise of New York lies in its historic ability to adapt and re-create itself. After all, the great port that first gave the city its dynamism was superseded by manufacturing, then by financial services. Now, another future beckons—if it isn’t already here.
Where are we headed? A good guess would be that the divinations of men who understood the historical currents of their times point the way.
Some years ago, I went downtown to have lunch with Felix Rohatyn at the investment bank Lazard Freres. We were joined by the head of the company, the legendary and massively powerful Andre Meyer. The process of consolidation among financial firms was picking up speed, and Mr. Meyer wanted to talk about it.
* * *
It is becoming apparent that Lower Manhattan will not be the financial center that it was before. There is an inexorable movement away from it, not only to midtown or New Jersey, but also to the far-flung corners of an electronic world that no longer needs a grand metropolis from which to provide financial services.
* * *
“No matter what happens,” he said, “people will always need expert advice. And Lazard will still be here to give it, when most of these others have gone.”
Another glimpse of the future came in a conversation Tom Wolfe and I had with the visionary of the electronic age, Marshall McLuhan. He told us that in the future New York (meaning Manhattan) would become Disneyland.
When one would ask for clarification of his startling oracular bulletins, Mr. McLuhan, in his typically mystical manner, would simply say, “They are only probes.” But what he was driving at was that the business of Manhattan would overwhelmingly become tourism. With its great hotels, restaurants, entertainment, cultural institutions and shopping emporiums, the island would become an enclave where only the privileged—and the temporary—could afford to live.
I saw something like this happening to Paris when the great designer Milton Glaser and I were asked by the publisher of Paris Match and the daily newspaper Le Figaro about the possibility of starting a New York– style publication there. The cost of living in the French capital was driving most ordinary people to the suburbs or the outskirts—so much so that even the French Disneyland was located well outside the city.
When fate takes a hand and speeds up the future, as it did on Sept. 11, the dimly sketched outlines of what was already occurring stand out more clearly.
New York is not going to become Disneyworld, of course, and for the most critical financial transactions—especially the kind of deal-making that requires face-to-face negotiations—Manhattan will remain irreplaceable. But visitors coming here to spend money, either as tourists or business people, will ultimately edge out financial services as the city’s economic engine.
Right now, New York is currently the recipient of wide admiration and sympathy. But those sentiments will undoubtedly revert to more normal geocentric attitudes, and people will focus on their own self-interest. The rest of the country is fond of saying, “We’re all New Yorkers now.”
But they’re not.
New York’s historic role has been that of an idea factory, where ingenious and capable people, packed together, take raw materials from around the globe and transform them into products and services they sell back to the rest of the world—at higher prices. Whether it’s managing money, designing fashions, solving knotty legal or marketing problems, or translating ephemeral ideas into art and entertainment, New Yorkers thrive by charging high fees for their advice and services.
This commercial alchemy—the advice and ideas—depends on a critical mass of ambitious and highly creative people, and New York is home to more of them than probably any other metropolis in the world. It may cause outsiders to feel jealous or inferior. But they’ll seek it out anyway, with all its irritating confidence and street smarts.
That’s what New York does.
AUGUST 12, 2002 BY GEORGE GURLEY
BARE TOES CLOSING IN…FEEL FAINT
GIRLS, LADIES, WOMEN of the city: I know you love your open-toe shoes, and so do I. They’re very sexy! I love everything about you: the hair, the eyes, the lips, the shoulders, the arms—and you know I’m fond of the breasts, not to mention the belly, the curves, the hips, the rump, the Brazilian bikini wax, the buttery thighs, all the way down to the ankles, and oh—it is all good.
Except for one thing. There’s just one little problem, something you haven’t quite picked up on: Your feet, your toes, displayed so proudly, stuffed into $500 strappies or $10 flip-flops as if on a pedestal for all to behold and admire…
Well, they ain’t so cute.
You may not know it, but in the male mind they can ruin the rest of your physical charms. Yes, your huge, bony, milky-white feet, with enormous, mangled, red-toenail-painted toes—those frightening, E.T. -shaped, elongated toes, those Alien-like talons spreading out and creeping over the edge of your black slides, slithering out like sea monsters to snatch innocents up off the sidewalk, or like the claws of prehistoric birds, ready to grab us by the neck and carry us aloft and dash us against the rocks…. Ladies whom I love, we’re talking dread-primal fear—much more harrowing than Mr. Freud’s vagina dentata.
But women in New York City seem to be blissfully unaware of this fact. Why else would 98 percent of them be wearing open-toe shoes, not knowing (or caring) that only 10 percent of those exposed feet and toes are appetizing, while 25 percent are merely tolerable? Which leaves an awful lot that are…scary!
Spend an afternoon walking around Manhattan’s verdant park land, and you will see legions of women who have kicked off their flip-flops in order to show off grubby, filthy feet slimed with bacteria—and worse—after a day traipsing around midtown, in the grimy subway, in fetid cabs, in anonymous bathrooms…. And now check out these same dogs laid out on the soft green grass or a chair, being offered up for all to see, gnarly toes wriggling around, cooking in the sun, like crabs crawling toward me….
Don’t they know what men are thinking as they check a woman out from head to toe?
It was only about two years ago that I became like this. Before then, I could actually attend a summer cocktail party in the Hamptons without vomit making it to the back of my throat several times.
Take, for instance, a party thrown in East Hampton on July 26 for Marian Wright Edelman, the president of the Children’s Defense Fund. The party had actually been promoted as a “barefoot” cocktail party. I went with the grim, masochistic fascination that drives men to test themselves against th
e absolute worst.
I wisely kept on my loafers and argyle socks. My date’s feet were exposed.
She volunteered that the shiny white stuff on them was wart medicine.
“It’s becoming,” I said.
Back in Manhattan, I thought I’d be safe. I was wrong. More terrifying than the movie Signs was the party after the premiere, held at the Metropolitan Club. It was over 90 degrees outside, and inside was an open-toe-shoe horror show.
There was socialite actor Matthew Modine, wearing sideburns, a pinstripe suit and Birkenstock-like evening sandals. How were his wife’s feet?
“Well, she has dancer’s feet, which I think are beautiful,” he said.
Joni Wilkins, a 37-year-old woman wearing Gucci open-toe shoes, approached and said what a great actor Mr. Modine was. How did she feel about his feet?
“They’re nice feet—needs a little bit of a pedicure, but nice feet,” she said.
Had she ever seen gross feet?
“Absolutely,” she said. “Wiggy toes. Wiggy toes don’t line up straight. Nasty. You can cram them into a Manolo, but they’re still wiggy toes. Wiggy toes are not cool.”
Mr. Modine looked at me. “You are really hung up on this gross-feet thing,” he said. “When you were a little boy, did you have a grandma kick you around the house that had nasty feet?”
I didn’t care for his jokes, so I went to talk to his wife, Cari Modine. Ms. Modine said her own feet were “destroyed.”
“I would definitely describe my feet as those with character,” she said. “I think when you have ugly feet and you show them anyway, it’s indicative of something in you, I think it’s pretty brave.”
She started to bring her feet out from under the table. I braced myself: flip-flops. But her feet were…fine! And I told her so.
“It’s the lighting, honey,” she said.
The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots Page 45
