Meanwhile you were always conscious of the fact that the paper was owned by this eccentric guy, Arthur Carter; he’d made a bundle on Wall Street in the 1970s, and he loved owning this newspaper that poked holes in the self-importance of Wall Street guys, society people, political players. We’d have lunch at Gino’s, the place with the zerbras on the walls; he’d tell me how I was going about my love life all wrong. He’d order for you if you weren’t quick enough to order for yourself—you had to know before you even walked in the door what you were going to order, and be ready to call it out the moment any waiter or busboy came within earshot; otherwise, you’d eat what Arthur decided you should eat. He’s a very unpredictable, hilarious guy. One of his favorite things to do was to show up in the office on the Monday holidays, because we never got them off—Memorial Day, Labor Day—because of our deadline schedule. So you’d be sitting at your desk and all of a sudden, there’d be this guy who looked like a young Kirk Douglas in a cashmere sweater standing next to your desk.
Peter Stevenson is executive editor of The New York Observer.
Then one day Kaplan shows up, after Susan left, so now you have a madcap eccentric owner and a madcap eccentric editor. Imagine Dennis Hopper and Crispin Glover in a twoman bass boat.
You and Jim Windolf played a lot of pranks.
It was like a smoking break, but good for your lungs. Windolf was the one who talked me into it. We invented a Singaporean gossip columnist, John Wu, who used to call people up; he’d say he had his own gossip magazine, Night Beat, and was doing an item on them, something completely fabricated, of course—like we’d call Glenn Birnbaum, the owner of Mortimer’s, and say we heard there were a bunch of socialites playing in a baby pool there last night, and he’d be outraged, and we would still say, “O.K., so we can print that you deny it?” And of course that would push him over the edge. Later, we made John Wu a Singaporean billionaire who wanted to invest money in various projects. Other times he was John Wu, guerilla publicist—we’d call people up and say, “I’m doing some guerilla publicity for you guys, when can I expect my payment?”
Tell me about an average day there. Where’d you go out to lunch?
Kaplan loved this coffee shop called the Gardenia, where it cost $20 for a sandwich; it had green walls, like it was designed by Laura Ashley on a bender. It was on Madison around 69th Street. Famous neighborhood people would be there, like Wayne Gretzky, Jackie Mason, Richard Lewis. Joe DiMaggio was there. The thing is, when Kaplan sees someone famous, he doesn’t quietly stare, he’ll see DiMaggio and boom out, “The Yankee Clipper!” He sees Kitty Carlisle Hart and shouts, “Mrs. Hart!” It’s what everyone else is thinking, but Peter’s like a kid, he blurts it out, gleefully, which is really funny.
You wrote the Monica Diaries column.
When the Clinton thing was breaking, one afternoon for some reason I started writing a parody of a 21-year-old Beverly Hills girl’s diary of her affair with this cute guy who happened to be president of the United States. It probably said a lot more about my neuroses than Bill Clinton’s. Monica’s mother didn’t like them, because she thought we were making her daughter sound like an idiot, so she wrote a letter. We stopped it—no need to upset the girl’s mother.
Can you talk about some of the people you’ve edited? Alex Kuczynski?
Alex was a giddy blast. She always would have 10 ideas at story meetings and eight of them would be terrible and two would be brilliant. Once she found out that all these models were getting colonics to slim down; a bunch of the world’s most beautiful women lining up in Soho for enemas is a funny piece.
Illustrated by Barry Blitt
Warren St. John?
One piece of his I edited was about Kathryn Harrison, who wrote a memoir called The Kiss about having an affair with her estranged father when she was in college. And Warren, being a good reporter, said, “Well, I’m going to find the father and get his side of the story.” So he tracks the guy down, sweet-talking these file clerks with his Alabama twang; he finds the father, and it turns out the guy has no idea his daughter had written this book. And he gives Warren an interview. So we’re about to go to press, and the day before we’re getting calls from Kathryn Harrison’s agent saying you can’t publish this piece, because this man’s new family doesn’t know about this event in his past and it will shatter them. Now Kathryn Harrison was doing lots of publicity, she’s going on Good Morning America. So we’re thinking, if you don’t want your dad’s new family to find out about the book, it might not be such a good idea to talk to Diane Sawyer about it while America is eating Cornflakes. And indeed, it turned out the guy’s kids had seen the ABC segment, knew all about it, before we ran our piece. So in that respect, we weren’t villains, and yes, finding the dad was a cheeky thing to do, but it was also the right story to do.
Tish Durkin?
Tish, she went to Baghdad for us, right after the war “ended.” We had to outfit her with $10,000 in cash that she wore in a body belt—credit cards weren’t going to be much use over there—and she got herself to Baghdad and started filing terrific narratives. Baghdad was a pretty big bowl of fruit for The Observer to try and pick from, and Tish did beautifully. She also fell in love with an Irish-American guy over there and ended up marrying him. A few weeks before their wedding, their best man, who was Iraqi, was assassinated.
Sex and the City?
Candace Bushnell and I were friends, she’d been doing articles for the paper, and together with Candace, Kaplan and I came up with this column, and handed it to her, and it was like a race horse bolting out of the gate. On a weekly basis, she was coining terms like toxic bachelors and modelizers. She was always a tremendous pro, always filed on time. You know that Flaubert line, be bourgeois in your life so you can be violent in your work. Aside from her society nights, Candace has always had a real domestic side, cooking pork chops, cozy socks, Jane Austen novel by the fireplace. And I think that’s what allows her to go so far out in her writing. My job as her editor was just to help Candace be Candace, help her trust her instincts. And I remember—in what seemed like a tremendously short span of time after the column started—one day coming back to the townhouse from some dumpy lunch place and there were the big lights and huge trailers and army of PAs blocking the sidewalks. It was HBO filming a scene from Sex and the City, right across the street from the stinky little office where we’d conceived the thing, and that image, the juxtaposition, stayed with me for days.
* * *
Illustrated by Drew Friedman
2003
Casual use of F-word gains currency in polite society
Architect Daniel Libeskind wins competition to reconstruct World Trade Center
James Frey aspires to be greatest writer of his generation
$1.8 billion AOL Time Warner Center is priciest single-building project in U.S. history
Former Clintonite George Stephanopoulos joins Sunday-morning TV biz
New Yorkers demonstrate against invasion of Iraq
Anna Wintour hosts Goddess-themed ball; former assistant publishes roman à clef
Veteran writer and editor Michael Kelly dies in Humvee crash
Raines falls: Howell out, Bill Keller in at Times after reporter Jayson Blair’s disgrace
2003
JANUARY 19, 2003 BY TOM MCGEVERAN
THE MAN WHO IS ALMOST THERE
WHEN BERLIN-BASED AMERICAN architect Daniel Libeskind unveiled his plan for the World Trade Center site last month to members of families still grieving the loss of loved ones in the Sept. 11 terror attack, several of them wept.
Unlike any of the competing proposals, Mr. Libeskind’s plan did something that had profound meaning for the bereaved: his design called for a new tower that would be set in the old foundation, which remained behind when the towers collapsed. The actual pit—the enormous bedrock-lined hole in the ground where the World Trade Center once stood—would be left virtually untouched, a testament to the memory of the dead.
For m
any of the families, Mr. Libeskind had deftly captured the emotional contradictions inherent in building a new commercial center on what is effectively a mass grave. His design embodied a series of wrenching questions: How can we merge mourning and morning commuters, retail and remembrance? If the site is made beautiful, is tragedy faithlessly forgotten? If it is raw, and bares the scars of loss too vividly, will it maintain the requisite respect for the dignity of the dead?
Mr. Libeskind, the son of Holocaust survivors, a man who arrived in New York harbor by boat in 1960, is undoubtedly the man who has the best chance of uniting the cacophony of interests squabbling over the site’s future.
Consider his design: It calls for a crystal spire whose foundation is firmly set in the pit—it has come to be known as “the bathtub”—a hole that is lined with ancient bedrock that, for millennia, has kept the waters of the Hudson River at bay. The spire rises up out of the pit, and as it does, it appears to repeat the lines of the Statue of Liberty, spiraling upwards and thinning out like the line from the strong shoulders of the statue to the hand held aloft, its torch topped by a copper flame. The upper stories are set off by gardens that seem to hang in the sky.
The beauty of the design is that by rising up out of the pit, it proceeds upward from memorial to cultural to retail to office uses. And so the business end of the new structure appears conceptually at the other end of a vertical spectrum that is grounded in the memorial. “I don’t think there’s a disjunct there,” he said.
JANUARY 22, 2003 BY JOE HAGAN
MEET THE NEW STAGGERING GENIUS
AT 33, JAMES FREY HAS A HUMBLE ambition: He wants to be the greatest literary writer of his generation. Film director Gus Van Sant has compared him to “a young-guard Eggers”—which means Dave Eggers had better be prepared to, you know, throw down.
“The Eggers book pissed me off,” said Mr. Frey, referring to the best-selling and critically beloved A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. “Because a book that I thought was mediocre was being hailed as the best book written by the best writer of my generation,” he said. “Fuck that. And fuck him and fuck anybody that says that. I don’t give a fuck what they think of me. I’m going to try to write the best book of my generation and I’m going to try to be the best writer.”
Mr. Frey has thinning, curly hair, a slightly doughy build and a Southern California drawl. “And maybe I’ll fall flat on my fucking face,” he conceded, “but I’ll fall flat on my fucking face trying to do it.”
MARCH 16, 2003 BY JOE CONASON
IRAQ’S NUKE THREAT LITTLE MORE THAN MYTH
OF ALL THE CONSTANTLY CHANGING REASONS FOR WAR ON IRAQ that have emanated from the White House since last summer, there has been only one that ever sounded compelling: the prospect of an atomic bomb wielded by Saddam Hussein.
Biological and chemical weapons are frightening as well as illegal. Missiles and warheads sound scary. Shadowy links to terrorism raise the specter of Sept. 11. Yet as knowledgeable experts would explain, if they could get anyone to listen, Iraq lacks the capacity and the motive to attack us with chemical or biological weapons.
But if Saddam possesses a nuclear weapon—or could someday build a nuclear weapon—then he would be almost as dangerous as Kim Jong Il. If he got a nuclear weapon, Saddam could threaten Israel, or smuggle it into the United States. That’s why hawkish pundits and politicians, including President George W. Bush, emphasize the potential Iraqi bomb as their favorite casus belli.
Uttered last September by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, the best line has been repeated ominously many times since: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” Mr. Bush warned last fall that, according to our intelligence sources, “Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program…And he is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon.”
After three months of inspections by the United Nations—underwritten by the threat of military force—we now know that those warnings were grossly exaggerated. Iraq has not reconstituted the extensive nuclear-weapons program dismantled during the previous round of U.N. inspections. The facilities in the U.S. satellite photographs are still in shambles, and aren’t being used for any illegal purpose. The aluminum tubes were unusable for uranium enrichment. And the documents that show Saddam tried to buy uranium from Africa, which were cited by the president in his State of the Union address? Oh, they were forged.
Those classified papers, provided by Britain’s MI6 and then intensively reviewed by the C.I.A., were brandished as proof that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium from Niger in 1999. Officials from both countries denied any such deal, and the U.N.’s independent experts confirmed their denials, finding that the documents had been crudely faked. (Another published description was “transparently obvious.”)
Illustrated by Barry Blitt
So far, spokesmen for the U.S. and British governments have not tried to deny that the uranium documents were bogus. Asked about the fake papers by Tim Russert on NBC’s Meet the Press, Mr. Powell replied blandly: “If that information is inaccurate, fine.”
With all due respect to the secretary, the appropriate word isn’t “inaccurate”—and it isn’t “fine,” either. It is horrific to contemplate that someone would fabricate a document to foment a war likely to kill thousands. It is humiliating to think that American intelligence services cannot distinguish a fake of that kind—or, worse still, would consciously pass along such a fake to an international authority. It is troubling to realize that the quality of information used by the president as he prepares for war may be no better than that.
And it is impossible not to wonder what other lies and myths are being spread to justify this war.
FEBRUARY 2, 2003 BY TOM MCGEVERAN
Glass Menagerie
THE LARGE GLASS PANELS ARE WORKING THEIR WAY UP THE SKELETON of the AOL Time Warner Center, the mixed-use pair of obelisks stretching 80 stories into the sky over Columbus Circle. The progress is measurable daily. In fact, the massive mountain of commerce—now at its full height—stands confidently astride the street grid, as if it predated all the structures that have risen on the West Side since the grid was established in 1811. At $1.8 billion, it’s the most expensive single-building construction project in U.S. history.
It remains to be seen whether New Yorkers will be impressed with the building’s debut. Indeed, the marketing campaign for the AOL Time Warner Center does not intend to leave that to chance. Its promotional materials appear aimed as much at selling the building to New Yorkers at large as at reassuring its many tenants that theirs was a risk worth taking.
New Yorkers, after futzing for a year and a half with ground zero, are looking for something that will inspire. Will it matter to New Yorkers what the building means, or how AOL Time Warner is structured, when they enter the five-story glass atrium off Columbus Circle this fall?
MARCH 30, 2003 BY CALEB CARR
The Ferocious Spectacle In Baghdad
THE FEROCIOUS SPECTACLE BEING PLAYED OUT IN THE desert, marshes and cities of Iraq is a complicated psychological and spiritual gamble, one that may culminate, during the next few days, in a battle across a ring of chemical fire thrown by Saddam Hussein around Baghdad—his “red line.” This last redoubt may or may not exist, but coalition forces and their civilian commanders have promised to move on the capital regardless, breeding fear throughout the world that civilization’s cradle may soon become its coffin: The historical forces of modernism and medievalism may well have begun the first formal battle in a decisive war.
In planning for this battle, both the American-led coalition and Saddam Hussein have drawn inspiration and methods from the Middle Ages as much as from the Information Age. Yet neither modernism nor medievalism has consented to wear the uniform of just one side.
Consider, for instance, the ambitious opening effort by coalition forces to kill Saddam Hussein, his sons and their top advisers with cruise missiles and bunker-busting bombs. The move was referred to by the Americ
an military as a “decapitation attempt,” a suitably anachronistic title for a tactic that looked for its inspiration and validation not to the modern age—during which such behavior has generally been viewed with distaste—but to medieval and even ancient times.
Subsequent attempts have been made to cut off all the many heads of the monstrous Iraqi Republican Guard, as well as those of Saddam’s supposedly suicidal fedayeen and the various armed Baath political militias. The coalition relied again on its seemingly unlimited supply of technologically complex bombs whose “smartness” has done nothing to temper their essential and spectacular violence. Images of the resulting destruction were soon being shown by newspapers and television networks throughout the Muslim world. Exploiting the tools of information technology, these media organs worked hard and with considerable success to demonstrate that the allied coalition had returned to the old Western (for which read “crusading”) habit of grinding enemy populations into the dust.
In the opening round, the coalition chose the weapons of modernism and the psychology of medievalism; the Iraqis reversed the equation and gained a momentary advantage.
Demonstrating that their embrace of progressive military methods in Afghanistan hasn’t been a passing fancy, the coalition launched its ground attack into Iraq at the same time that its bombs were falling on the country’s urban areas, in line with the fundamental principles of modern mobile, mechanized warfare established by the great armor campaigns of the Second World War. From the first, coalition forces emphasized speed and maneuver over attrition, the need to bypass enemy strongholds rather than subdue them, and a rampaging drive to get at the enemy’s vitals before an effective defense of any one part of Iraq could be managed. But with dreadful suddenness, the age of the coalition campaign’s operational ethos was revealed by Saddam’s defensive plan, which is based on a more contemporary belligerent tactic: terrorism. Elements of the dictator’s most vicious fighters had been detailed among the forlorn Iraqi regulars in the south, who were bypassed by the allies. As the armored columns sped towards Baghdad, the fanatics kept their weapons trained on their countrymen even more than on the invading enemy, and when the coalition lines of supply and communication had been stretched tight, they ordered the regulars to strike. If those hapless men would not obey, the Republican Guardsmen and fedayeen simply tore off their own uniforms and blended into the civilian population. They waited until the coalition had sent all but slender garrison forces ahead and then struck murderously themselves.
The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots Page 47
