The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots
Page 46
On the way out, I passed Mr. Modine again. I told him his wife had beautiful feet.
“You’re a sick man,” he said.
SEPTEMBER 2, 2002 BY GEORGE GURLEY
Coultergeist
ANN COULTER, AUTHOR of the No. 1 best-selling nonfiction book in America—Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, a small book coruscating with giddy bile—was 20 minutes late to lunch at Michael’s, the sunlit media-centric restaurant on West 55th Street. I’d been so excited to meet the glowing scimitar of the American right that I hadn’t fallen asleep until 5 a.m. the night before.
Now I was worried that Ann had backed out. Had she figured she’d be un-welcomed, hissed at, throttled at the hub center of the media elite?
Her book has been No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction since the first week it came out, in early July, which means that the people who dismiss her also have to deal with a secondary emotion: envy.
No one at Michael’s really noticed Ms. Coulter when she showed up, a sluice of sweat dripping off her long, perfect New Canaan nose, apologizing profusely—radio interview, subway, late for everything. She was wearing a simple black dress and black closed-toe heels. She looked nice, not evil.
“I’m never an insider,” Ms. Coulter said, looking around the room, not recognizing anyone. “No, I don’t know who they are, I don’t care who they are. I don’t want to go to their cocktail parties, and I no longer want to bother writing articles they ask me to write, only to have them killed when they discover, ‘Oh, maybe we don’t want to publish a conservative after all.’”
So just write books? I chirped.
“That’s right,” she said. “That’s right. The American people like me; editors don’t. I’ve arranged my life so that I am unfireable. I don’t have any bosses. The only people who can fire me are the American people. That’s part of the reason I’m not anxious to have a TV show. Who’s gonna give me a TV show? I didn’t work for an impeached, disbarred president who was held in contempt by a federal judge. That’s what they look for in objective reporters.”
In the cab, I told Ms. Coulter that although back in college I’d been comforted by writers like Tom Wolfe, Camille Paglia and Dinesh D’Souza (“I’ve dated him, I’ve dated every right-winger,” Ms. Coulter said), I remembered feeling that that nauseating political correctness was the way the world was going to be and I had to accept it.
“And then you moved to New York and it was true,” she said. “The rest of America hates New York,” she said, laughing. “I love that, I find it very comforting.”
There was nothing wrong with me?
“No, we’re living in an insane asylum,” Ms. Coulter said. She said she “takes joy in liberal attacks. It’s like coffee. I mean, usually when I write up a column, I know what’s going to drive them crazy. I know when I’m baiting them, it’s so easy to bait them and they always bite. That is my signature style, to start with the wild, bald, McCarthyite overstatements—seemingly—and then back it up with methodical and laborious research. Taunting liberals is like having a pet that does tricks. Sit! Beg! Shake! Then they do it.”
The cab stopped outside the Empire State Building. Her long, skinny legs stretched to the sidewalk.
“You’re never going to get rid of liberals altogether,” she said, laughing. Ann Coulter practically glowed at this thought.
I looked up at her from in the taxi. She seemed very tall against the sky.
SEPTEMBER 9, 2002 BY PHILIP WEISS
INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMP
A FEW WEEKS BACK, A FRIEND handed me model Janice Dickinson’s autobiography and said it was a juicy tell-all, but under that was a cold understanding of the currency of fashion: the drooling agents and clients, the callous celebrities, the routine personal abuse, the blurred line between prostitution and modeling, etc.
I read No Lifeguard on Duty at once and wasn’t disappointed.
Young Janice would break down doors to make it, dress like a French whore, do almost anything to get what she wanted. And so would the men she ran into. “You really can sing,” Muddy Waters told her, and she believed him, and believed Bill Cosby when he told her the same lie—that is, until she didn’t want to go to bed with him and he blew her off.
I called Regan Books and learned that Janice Dickinson was coming to New York. I could meet her at the Omni Berkshire Place on East 52nd Street.
I’d been in the Guggenheim room on the second floor all of 10 seconds when I understood Janice Dickinson’s true nature: She’s a viper.
The Gangs of New York gang: Daniel Day-Lewis, Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio
Illustrated by Barry Blitt and Philip Burke
SEPTEMBER 9, 2002 BY NYO STAFF
More Notions From Larry King Jr.
I HAVEN’T BEEN merry in years.
Do I want to overhear the conversation you’re having in public? No.
How did cows survive in the wild all those years?
Those of you wearing CBGB’s T-shirts purchased at Urban Outfitters are not fooling anybody. Not that you can win with the whole T-shirt thing anyway.
Swearing a lot is old hat.
Why doesn’t Jerry Seinfeld buy the Mets?
I thank God for the overweight punk girls who slept with me in college.
I’m getting too thin-skinned to suffer through the ordeal of Starbucks.
Tom Golisano. Your punch line here.
Illustrated by Barry Blitt and Philip Burke
Charlie Rose wasn’t taking any chances with those replacement hosts, was he?
Women are beautiful. Men are ugly.
War and Peace is slightly better than Anna Karenina.
Why hasn’t there been a new dance step in the last 10 years?.
I feel exhausted after reading movie reviews by Elvis Mitchell or A.O. Scott.
Everybody knows that TV is sapping our energy.
Note to 3:30 p.m.: You’re an unpopular time of day.
Can’t grocers make berry prices more stable?
Shakespeare could do it all.
Let’s not commemorate Sept. 11.
I’m going to get up at 7 tomorrow and get things done. This time I really mean it.
If you don’t love water, you and I have a problem.
Illustrated by Barry Blitt and Philip Burke
OCTOBER 21, 2002 BY GREG SARGENT & JOSH BENSON
EL-IOT! CAN SPITZER GO TO 1600?
WHEN ELIOT SPITZER WAS growing up in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, he and his two siblings played a somewhat unusual game at the dinner table.
“We had an assignment process,” said Bernard Spitzer, Eliot’s father, a real-estate developer. “We would go around the table, and one of the three children would be asked to raise a topic for discussion.”
Three decades later, the pressure is still on Eliot Spitzer, the state attorney general who is an overwhelming favorite to win reelection to a second term next month.
“Would I like him to become president? Of course,” said the elder Mr. Spitzer. “I’d love to spend the night in the Lincoln Bedroom.”
And would the attorney general himself like to be president?
“I think he would,” the elder Mr. Spitzer said. “It’s his very nature.”
It’s in Mr. Spitzer’s nature to be ambitious—both for his office and for himself. He has transformed the attorney general’s office from a sleepy patronage mill with little institutional power into the scourge of corrupt business leaders, producing headlines across the country. By using the attorney general’s office to wage a one-man assault on Wall Street, Mr. Spitzer is turning himself into the Tom Dewey of the 21st century.
He won’t talk about it, but he is almost certainly running for governor in 2006—provided, of course, that the current Democratic candidate, Carl McCall, loses to the incumbent, George Pataki—and his main selling point is likely to be his aggressive prosecution of Wall Street executives.
“He wants to be governor, for sure,” s
aid City Councilman Eric Gioia, who helped run Al Gore’s New York operation in 2000. “Any governor of New York is automatically on the short list for President. It wouldn’t surprise me if, in the back of his mind, he thinks that in 10 or 20 years the White House is a legitimate and obtainable goal.”
DECEMBER 1, 2002 BY JOSH BENSON
GORE’S TV WAR: HE LOBS SALVO AT FOX NEWS
AMONG THE MANY PROBLEMS facing the Democratic Party, according to former Vice President Al Gore, is the state of the American media.
“The media is kind of weird these days on politics, and there are some major institutional voices that are, truthfully speaking, part and parcel of the Republican Party,” said Mr. Gore in an interview with The Observer. “Fox News Network, The Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh—there’s a bunch of them, and some of them are financed by wealthy ultra-conservative billionaires who make political deals with Republican administrations and the rest of the media…. Most of the media [has] been slow to recognize the pervasive impact of this fifth column in their ranks—that is, day after day, injecting the daily Republican talking points into the definition of what’s objective as stated by the news media as a whole.” Mr. Gore has been airing his views during a nationwide promotional book tour that marks his re-emergence in public life after a self-imposed exile following his loss in the 2000 presidential election. Now, as Mr. Gore considers another presidential campaign, he’s determined to confound his ponderous image by unveiling a new Al Gore—one who doesn’t hesitate, as he puts it, to “let ’er rip.” Hence his controversial criticisms of President Bush’s foreign policy, and his surprise announcement in favor of a government-run universal health care system. And hence, in a phone interview with The Observer, his extensive criticism of the media, which is hardly a conventional way of launching a national political campaign. Actually, Mr. Gore may have little reason to hide his views about the media, for his re-emergence, while generating a massive amount of attention, has also inspired ridicule from commentators of all ideological persuasions. Conservatives seemed delighted by his return, remembering his awkward candidacy in 2000, and many liberals have been quite frank in wishing that he would simply disappear. But Mr. Gore has a bone to pick with his critics: namely, he says, that a systematically orchestrated bias in the media makes it impossible for him and his fellow Democrats to get a fair shake.
Illustrated by Barry Blitt
NOVEMBER 18, 2002 BY FRANK DIGIACOMO
Who’s Master Now?
THE STORY OF COMEDIAN LARRY David’s introduction to his friend and fellow comedian Richard Lewis’ psychotherapy group is the stuff of show-business legend, but it’s worth repeating, if only for the glimpse it affords into the mind of the guy who created HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm.
“I introduced him to psychotherapy,” said Mr. Lewis, who is a regular guest star on Curb and, by his own estimation, has been in therapy for some three decades. This particular episode took place many years ago in New York, from which both men hail.
“He only went once,” Mr. Lewis said. After the traditional group session, many of the same patients would gather at an appointed destination “and sit around with coffee and donuts and have another two hours.”
“I’ll never forget: We were on the East Side, at someone’s apartment after the therapy session. It was like 10 people moaning and groaning,” Mr. Lewis said. “And Larry stood up and said: ‘I can’t stand this. I don’t need this. I don’t want to hear this.’ And he ran out of this person’s apartment.
“He had 10 neurotic people chasing him down First Avenue for almost like 30 blocks, thinking he was in denial—and he might have been—but he hated this form of therapy,” Mr. Lewis said. “And he went into this phone booth—like Superman.
“I’ll never forget it,” he said. “We’re all knocking on the phone booth, saying, ‘Larry, we love you, come back, it’s O.K.’ And he said, ‘No! Get away from me, you whack jobs.’ And he never came back. He might have gone to therapy privately—I think he did,” Mr. Lewis said.
“He just could not stand to hear people moan and groan.”
Both men are now in their mid-50’s and Mr. Lewis called it “heightened reality” when they have a scene together in Curb. “When I know what the scene is, the homework is so done. I’m me, he’s him, ‘Action,’” he said. He even likened it to appearing in the comedy equivalent of John Cassavetes’ Husbands. “You know, there was that camaraderie between Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara in that movie in particular, and Cassavetes, that was just so astonishing,” he said. “And that’s because they were close and they did have those feelings.”
* * *
GEORGE GURLEY INTERVIEWS PETER STEVENSON
Illustrated by Barry Blitt
Go on. Give me the goods.
George, don’t eat a banana while you’re interviewing me; it’ll make me anxious. Is this on? Is it Radio Shack? O.K. I moved to New York, to Brooklyn, in 1985 and I worked at Manhattan, inc., a magazine that covered New York business the way Vanity Fair covers Hollywood. Peter Kaplan was my boss. During the interview, he kept telling me not to take the job. I started as Peter’s editorial assistant, Clay Felker was the editor, Kaplan was his No. 2. Clay brought the whiff of New Journalism with him, he was the real deal—he’d invented New York magazine, he had fans and real enemies, he’d dated famous actresses, he knew everybody—Gloria Steinem, Jimmy Breslin, Tom Wolfe, Rupert Murdoch, David Frost—his bark could knock you a foot off your chair, but he was also tremendously encouraging to young reporters. My first task was to type up cards for Peter Kaplan’s Rolodex—he had hundreds of those pink message pads that his previous assistant had taken his phone messages on; he’d saved a stack of them, so I typed up the cards on an IBM Selectric II typewriter—the ones with the golf-ball-shaped gizmo that smacked the paper to leave the imprint of the letters. So I’d type in these names—Binky Urban, Nora Ephron, Wendy Wasserstein. The joke is, Peter has a photographic memory for phone numbers—if you tell him your number, he’ll remember it for years. So he never actually looked at the Rolodex.
Kaplan had a distinct style at the time, sort of Camelot meets Warhol. Peter was, and is, very close with the Kennedy family—I think the family sees Peter as their resident Talmudic sage—and he’d also spent time with the Warhol crowd. So by the mid-1980s, his personal style reflected this tension inside of him. He was already wearing what he wears today—Paul Stuart blue blazer and khakis with scuffed leather belt and blue button-down shirts, club ties—but he also had vestiges of his 1970s self. The sandals—he wore these sandals he’d bought in Mexico, he wore them year round, rain, snow or shine. He didn’t wear them with socks, at least he spared us that. And he wore this hat—it was very Carnaby Street circa 1969, this floppy hat, the kind of hat Marianne Faithful wore when she traveled with the Stones, maybe velvet, anyway very floppy. Peter called it a sombrero; of course, it was nothing like a sombrero, but try telling him that. Each day Peter would pin a carnation to the hat. It had to be a fresh carnation, and he was obsessive that it be a different color each day. Guess whose job it was to bring a fresh carnation to the office each morning? Luckily for me, I was living on West 19th Street by then, and the flower market is West 28th street, and it opens before dawn. I don’t think Peter ever thought I’d be able to bring a different colored carnation in every day, for this hat, and so when I did—which also involved, by the way, lots of arguments because he’d fuss that the peach carnations were just day-old white carnations I was trying to sneak past him—when I succeeded at this absurd task, I think he started to see me as someone he might work with a long time.
Manhattan, inc. collapsed in the wake of the Black Monday stock market crash of ’87, but at the same time Kaplan had been working on starting up an Esquire-type magazine, Smart for Men, so I went to work as a writer there; we were told a Japanese group was funding us.
One day, a young woman named Candace Bushnell came bursting in, she had long blond hair and little round sunglasses, looking exact
ly like Meg Ryan in The Doors movie, and she calls out in this booming, reach-to-the-cheap-seats voice, “Which one of you is Peter?!” And Kaplan and I look at each other, we’re both thinking, “Here we go.” And that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Candace and I went out to lunch to talk about story ideas; she drank vodka and ate a steak.
A few days before we were about to go to press with the first issue of Smart for Men, Peter and I went to see Scorsese’s Goodfellas during lunch, and when we came back to the office we were told the magazine was folding—immediately. The Japanese money had vanished. The staff was told to leave the building, guards were watching to make sure no one took anything. So we hid the computer server, which had the text and photo and layout files for that first issue, in a gym bag and carried it out past the guards. Various articles in that issue were then published elsewhere.
After a few years of freelancing, I came here; Susan Morrison hired me as a writer in 1993. It was a pretty rough crew, a combination of real newspaperman like Terry Golway and Charlie Bagli, along with a row of pomaded interns who were sons and daughters of Arthur Carter’s rich friends. And you’re working on East 64th between Park and Madison, so every time you want to go out for a sandwich you’re bombarded by the wealthiest ZIP code in the country. People in mink coats and bedroom slippers, that kind of situation. Susan was an unbelievable editor; she’d come from Spy, she had this lightning sense of humor. And even though we were a madcap publication, she always kept the drumbeat of a newspaper; no matter what you were reporting, you should have every detail The New York Times would have had.
This is also before the Internet was anything except a rudimentary e-mail service. There wasn’t a Google, there weren’t bloggers, there weren’t news Web sites because newspapers didn’t have Web sites, so if you were on a story, you knew—if you got there first, of course—that your story on someone really could become the clip on that person, or that event, for months or even years at a time.