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

by The New York Observer

  With all of this new visibility for gay men, this nationwide consensus on their cuteness and sartorial smarts, it has been difficult to find a prominent gay man—a gay man with any cultural or political power—speaking on television about the serious issues facing gays right now.

  So recently, it seemed, it had been time to break out the Skyy Vodka and cranberry juice to cheer the Supreme Court’s June 26 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down the 17-year-old ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick, which upheld states’ rights to outlaw sodomy. Fearmongers on the right, and their perennially hopeful counterparts on the left, were already talking about the inevitability of gay-marriage rights as a result of the majority’s decision, which went beyond simply striking down the Texas law to offer gays a measure of the same “privacy” afforded women under Roe v. Wade. The decision placed gays’ rights to determine the course of their own lives over the government’s interest in preserving “morality.”

  * * *

  Gay men whose daydreams of a wardrobe splurge are set against the efficient, Muzaked quietude of the Men’s Wear-house on Sixth Avenue in Chelsea. (It’s all in one place!) Joe Shmo, that is, but gay.

  * * *

  But before long, a Gallup poll found an unexpected reversal in the country’s feelings about gay marriage: In the space of less than two months, popular support for extending legal rights to gay unions had dropped eight percentage points, from 57 percent to 49 percent. Buzz-kill!

  President George W. Bush was happy to end the party early. Answering a question from a reporter about homosexuality in a White House press conference on July 30, Mr. Bush told reporters: “I believe in the sanctity of marriage. I believe a marriage is between a man and a woman. And I think we ought to codify that one way or the other, and we’ve got lawyers looking at the best way to do that.”

  That such dark moments in the progress of gay causes can co-exist with a happy makeover show in which mincing style experts remake straight men for the benefit of their wives and girlfriends shouldn’t come as a surprise. If the straight world has long been willing to stomach the prospect of a gay man in the local hair salon or department store, it’s another story when it comes to one’s family, school or church. And to the extent that one allows gays into one’s household—Vice President Dick Cheney, after all, has a gay daughter; George and Laura Bush are said to have included gay couples among their guests in the governor’s mansion in Austin, Texas—it must not be publicly understood as an endorsement of their “lifestyle choice.”

  Illustrated by Robert Grossman

  So it follows that what American families watch gays do on-screen, or in the privacy of their own living rooms, apparently is their business. But don’t ask them to support gays’ right to marry or to adopt children.

  It’s somewhere in the haze of the inevitable Queer Eye hangover that the politically significant work has to begin. It’s probably useless to issue a call to arms to my fellow shmomosexuals of the world, to unite and take over; when the paint cans and the tinting solutions are cleared away and America has finished its country paté on little slices of baguette, sometime around the clever nightcap of this media homo-party, Congress will return to work and the right-wing stink tanks will start churning out the propaganda. And there is no hairstyle or stick of Ikea furniture that can protect us then; it’ll mostly be us nursing America’s belligerent hangover, because it’s mostly, in the end, just us who are out there.

  A Literary Lion in Winter: Norman Mailer

  Illustrated by Drew Friedman

  JULY 6, 2003 BY ALEXANDRA JACOBS & MARIA RUSSO

  @#%*! IT’S A FOUR-LETTER SUMMER

  ONCE THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE’S most shocking, egregious, off-limits word, it’s become just another cultural noise, thrown around with the casualness of a summer softball, appearing on your TV, on your answering machine, at a newsstand near you, from the mouth of your son, your mom, your congressman, your philosophy professor, your dentist, your waiter, your basic innocent virgin on the street.

  Note to the reader: Are we off Title page yet? If we are, we might as well get on with saying what we mean:

  It’s the Summer of Fuck!

  The door slams too loud, the waiter comes too late, the drinks are mixed too strong, the traffic’s too bad on the L.I.E., the mother-in-law is coming, the Yanks are behind, the Mets are ahead, T-3 is good, The Hulk isn’t. You stub your toe—fuck! You hear good news—fu-uhck! You hear amusing news: You’re fucking kidding! You hear amazing news: No fucking way!

  The sex act it used to so scandalously denote is barely conjured by the word any more; it’s a linguistic tailbone, the vestige of a previous incarnation. It’s the word that Superman would use for emphasis if he could have: What the fuck! It’s a stand-in for the black cloud that would rise above Charlie Brown’s head in Peanuts: Fuck me. But it’s lost its bite, its Anglo-Saxon threat. And what it’s gained in currency—and a new range of multi-expressiveness—it’s lost in its former beautiful, lupine lethality.

  What the four letters express best, according to Aaron Karo, 23, a stand-up comic who lives in the Gramercy area, is “exasperation.” Mr. Karo has found fortune in the word. He attended the Wharton School of Business, where he wrote a monthly e-mail newsletter called “Ruminations on College Life,” famously signing off each column with the phrase “Fuck me.” After Simon & Schuster made it into a book (excising the F-word), he quit an investment-banking job and is in talks to do a sitcom.

  “I don’t think fuck is the new damn,” said Mr. Karo. “I think it’s the new the.”

  Gosh.

  JULY 20, 2003 BY SRIDHAR PAPPU

  King Calm Keller Takes Over Times, Quiets Kvetchers

  AT 1 P.M. ON JULY 14, BILL KELLER stood before the top editors and managers of The New York Times in an 11th-floor dining room at the paper’s West 43rd Street headquarters.

  Like a latter-day Mikhail Gorbachev, charged with bringing reform and openness to the dark corriodors of the Kremlin, Mr. Keller told them there would be no personal recriminations as a result of the previous scandal-rocked months at the paper under former executive editor Howell Raines, who was asked to resign when mounting trouble at the paper in the wake of the Jayson Blair affair threatened to swallow the paper’s leadership whole. He would not, he told his new subjects as they ate their lunches, “divide the paper into Friends of Howell and Friends of Bill.”

  SEPTEMBER 14, 2003 BY GAIL SHEEHY

  9/11/03: The Past as Pre-History

  TWO WEEKS AFTER THE ATTACKS of 9/11 created a Ground Zero in New York, I went looking for the emotional Ground Zero in the suburbs. I found it in Middletown, N.J., only 20 miles across the bay in physical distance but as remote as one of the Trobriand Islands in its complacent consciousness. That was, before nearly 50 people were robbed from Middletown and environs.

  I started my explorations of Middletown as a student of anthropologist Margaret Mead; I had learned that when a highly significant event opens a fissure in the normal patterns of life, a writer must drop everything and go to the edge, where she will see the culture turned inside out.

  There is no middle in Middletown. It was a large, sprawling, fragmented township divided into 12 separate enclaves. The bigger the house and the broader the lawn, the less likely the occupants would know their neighbors or imagine they would ever need to rely on community. It was a microcosm of suburban America.

  People ask me, What can we do on 9/11? The simplest act of recognition that we are now living in a New Normal would be to walk across the lawn to someone you don’t know and say, “You’ve lived here a long time, and I’ve lived here a long time, and we don’t know each other. I’d like to get to know you, so that if a day comes when we need each other, we will have already made the connection.”

  New Yorkers protest the Iraq war

  Illustrated by Robert Grossman

  OCTOBER 5, 2003 BY ALEXANDRA JACOBS

  KELLER’S PIPING HOT LAUNDRY!

  YOUNTVILLE, CALIF.—“I’
M TERRIFIED OF GOING BACK TO NEW York, New York,” said Thomas Keller, the chef at arguably the best restaurant in America—and by the time his pastry guy’s little bombardment of desserts has arrived, like a hail of bullets covered in sugar and gold leaf, who can argue?

  “It’s almost like this sport,” is how Mr. Keller described cooking for strangers. “It just gets tough sometimes when you get into a situation where you don’t know.”

  The next day he’d be leaving for New York, where he and several corporate partners plan to unveil an entity he describes as “the French Laundry, but not the French Laundry” on the fourth floor of the forbidding new Time Warner building in Columbus Circle. There is a tentative name picked out, a Latin word that he refused to divulge, fearing premature analysis from the city’s notoriously oversalivating food press.

  “It’s a scary thing,” he said

  OCTOBER 5, 2003 BY SRIDHAR PAPPU

  ANNA’S MINI-SHE: TEEN VOGUE EDITOR PREPS FOR WINTOUR

  “I THINK THEIR LIFE IS SO hard,” said Amy Astley as she sat talking about the young people who fill the pages of her magazine, Teen Vogue.

  The hazel-eyed, blond-haired ballerina turned editor in chief has such confidence in the girls who read and appear in Teen Vogue that she speaks of being young as though it were synonymous with being talented.

  “They’re so young,” she said. “Having grown up in the hothouse of ballet, I understand.”

  In June 2002, Condé Nast chairman Si Newhouse and Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour pulled Ms. Astley, then nine months pregnant with her second child, to lead the company’s charge into the Gilmore Girls set.

  “People are always saying to me, ‘Don’t you miss Vogue?’” Ms. Astley said. “And I’m like, ‘No, now I work with all the fresh talent.’

  “I want another baby, but I can’t. Because Teen Vogue’s my third baby. And I don’t think I can take care of four babies.”

  OCTOBER 26, 2003 BY GEORGE GURLEY

  My Vagina Monologue

  THE OTHER NIGHT I SAW A TV COMMERCIAL WHERE TWO guys wearing overcoats go to a “streaking party.” Five beautiful women wearing bathrobes open the door. The guys flash them; the women look down at the men’s equipment and don’t react. The guys get nervous and close their coats.

  You can’t get through one day these days without a reference to penis size. It’s always been talked about, of course, but previously there was at least a sense of madcap fun: think of playboy Porfirio Rubirosa, whose infamous “giant pepper mill” Truman Capote likened to “an 11-inch cafe au lait sinker as thick as a man’s wrist.” Now penis size has become something of a giddy cultural obsession. In addition to constant reminders—on television, in movies, on giant billboard underwear ads—men learn of their probable shortcomings every morning in the form of spam.

  “Are you hung like a gnat?”

  Delete.

  “Want to add three inches and fatten up your pipe?”

  Delete, delete.

  “Hey you! Want a huge trouser snake, an enormous Johnson, a purple oak?”

  Delete, delete, delete.

  Not true five, 10 years ago.

  But what about the flip side, I’ve started to wonder: How come no one ever talks about a woman’s “size”? Every straight man knows—even if he doesn’t dare mention this to his wife or girlfriend—that ladies’ packages come in different sizes. And we’re not talking about external aesthetic differences: We’re talking about…the Grip.

  I decided to ask men and women about this serious issue. So I put fresh batteries in my tape recorder and went out into the night. First stop: a fancy Fifth Avenue party.

  Helen Gurley Brown—the original Cosmo girl!—was at the party, wearing a pink Chanel suit. “I don’t think, for women, the size of her vagina is an issue, ever,” she said. “Because she can fit anything into her, no problem. But all the propaganda about penis size not making a difference—I think that’s just propaganda, because it does make a difference.”

  I called Dian Hanson, the former editor of Leg Show and Juggs, another woman who’s has seen a lot of women up close.

  “Of course there’s vaginal variation, and probably as much as penile variation,” she said from Los Angeles, where she’s an editor at Taschen books.

  “I think women can pretty smugly go about their lives not worrying about it,” she said. “Because, historically, guys are so happy to be allowed in there that if the walls are a little loose, they’re just going to adjust their thrust and think they have a small penis.”

  She did say that heavy women tend to be tighter.

  “You’re going to see the most cavernous ones on little, tiny, slender women,” she said. “This is where, to the pornographer, these things become apparent: You say to the girl, ‘O.K., bend over, put your chest on the bed and let your butt stick up in the air.’ These little skinny girls? That thing will blow up like a balloon.”

  I met actress Jackie Clarke, 28, for a drink in Chelsea. Last year she wrote and performed Mail Order Family, a one-woman show at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. The original title had been Big Vagina Monologues, but, Ms. Clarke said, Eve Ensler’s lawyers made her change it. In the show, she had a riff about her “crazy” father, who had married a Filipino woman whom he’d ordered from a catalog.

  “I guess I was 8 or 9 at the time,” she said. “And my stepmother had visited the gynecologist, and she was crying in the kitchen. Apparently, the doctor had made her feel really bad because he was complaining how she was too small and his medical tools wouldn’t fit inside of her.

  “So my dad just started going off trying to make my stepmom feel better. He kept saying, ‘What do you want to be, an American woman? You know, American women, by the time they’re 30, they have mustaches and enormous vaginas. Enormous, floppy vaginas!’

  “So she’s feeling a little better, and I’m starting to get a little antsy, because I know I’m a full-fledged American and all I can see myself as is a 30-year-old woman with a handlebar mustache and just a gaping oasis canyon of a vagina.”

  Now that she’s all grown up, she said, “I’ve never had any complaints. I think if a guy’s complaining, he’s probably too tiny.”

  Later, at the restaurant 66, I found myself sitting across from hair-salon owner Joel Warren and his Asian model girlfriend.

  “I’ve always thought it was not fair to pick on men and not talk about women,” he said. “It’s a big thing.”

  Dean Winters, an actor who played Ryan O’Reily on the HBO series Oz, joined me for a cigarette outside; he said he agreed with me “a hundred percent.”

  “Every guy at some point in his career has been with a woman and it was like making love to a glass of water,” he said. “I remember one time, I really felt like I was just seriously yodeling into the abyss.”

  OCTOBER 5, 2003 BY DAVID MICHAELIS

  THE LAST GENTLEMAN

  IN THOSE DAYS, THE PARIS REVIEW OCCUPIED A ONE-ROOM ground floor office on the East River with a lion-tamer’s chair hanging from the ceiling. George lived upstairs in a duplex. His first wife, Freddy, and oldest daughter, Medora, lived up there, too, but the first floor of the Plimpton apartment, with its pool table and club-green walls and hunting trophies and general flavor of Harvard and Hemingway, was such a pure expression of George that the whole of the first floor had simply remained a bachelor pad—a clubhouse.

  In those summer mornings, the managing editor, Molly McKaughan, all bustle and energy, opened the office. Next came the three editorial assistants; one with a desk (Jannika Hurwitt), one with a rolling chair (Lucas Matthiessen) and one perched uncertainly between the tiny bathroom, the front door, and the sliver of a storage room (me). I came in one morning to find a rat swimming in the office toilet, which caused hardly any commotion, it turned out, so unflappable was the staff of George Plimpton’s literary magazine.

  By mid-morning, George showed up, looking surprised and amused to find us there: still at work, or at work already. He himself was h
alf-dressed; pale blue Brooks Brothers boxers and a hastily buttoned dress shirt, his hair a mop of semi-tarnished silver, his nose, like the beak of a wading bird, rising as he peered into the office with furrowed forehead. The idea was that he, too, should already be hard at work, but, alas, here he was, just another boyish Upper East Side WASP male in stocking feet, guiltily retrieving the morning paper from the vestibule instead of getting down to work at the bank.

  Half-dressed George would fold himself into his armchair, gloomily pulling on his glasses to look at the topmost query on the pile. Almost immediately a phone would ring, but no one would answer it—it was the Plimptons’ private line. After an interval the intercom would buzz from upstairs, and George would be needed on that line. George’s voice heard up close for the first time in a quiet room made you complicit in a strange phenomenon. Was he serious? “No one who talked the way George did could ever be serious,” the poet Donald Hall recalled thinking when he first met Plimpton in the ’50s. Where was that Brahmin drawl from? Kurt Vonnegut called it a “honk” it was thought to be “British.” George himself described it as “Eastern Seaboard cosmopolitan.” What people didn’t understand was that although it was not a put-on, Plimpton’s accent had a playful aspect that took some getting used to.

  In any case, he made deliberate use of his voice, and what he most often did with it—at least when he was feeling generous—was to make you an intimate by letting you in on the joke. The joke was that stuffy as he sounded, George Plimpton had in fact made a career by taking stands against the professionalism and adultism that was the bane of his generation.

  He triumphed uniquely in this because his career was founded on the expectation that he was not in the end going to win. He did hard work and made it look easy. He had the ability to impart lightness in the form of a touch of self-amusement. He had both the courage to enter worlds where well-trained professionals risked blood and guts and the wit to look at their struggles with the kind of bemusement that puts life itself into perspective. He stepped into the boxing ring with the light heavyweight champion Archie Moore, took the mound as a major league pitcher, and sauntered onto the field as the third-string quarterback for the Detroit Lions—all at a time when sports were becoming increasingly professional and obsessive. Plimpton single-handedly returned sports to pure pleasure, but with a twist, and with hard work.