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

by The New York Observer

  The twist was in his generous fascination with the way people did things. In a culture that cares more for who people are than for what they do and how they do it, George peered curiously, and with great respect, into the way the game was played. He conveyed the work that went into the game. He revealed both to the players he played with and the readers reading him a new idea in American sports writing: Winners rarely feel like winners. Victory is what the onlooker feels, not the participant. From his vantage point inside the game, Plimpton could see that triumph was expressed not by the exhausted warriors but by their spear-carriers, the fans. Victory had become something to go out to the stadium to see, no longer earned only on the field. His work conveyed, above all, an almost melancholy sense of the price paid by the man in the dust of the arena.

  Journalism set Plimpton apart, and therefore placed him in his natural element, which was to be isolated and alone even among a crowd of people. Of all the things George Plimpton did, and the Paris Review office was nothing if not a living museum of the artifacts of a singular career, the magazine itself was always closest to his heart. “I would feel that a limb had been amputated,” he once confided, “if The Paris Review stopped.”

  Once, in 1960, it almost had. After 25 issues, the editors, now in their 30s, with careers and families, met in New York to decide the magazine’s future. Matthiessen and Guinzburg had both moved on to newer projects and voted for closing down The Paris Review. Plimpton, still the editor, was held to account for the lateness of issues and general inefficiency. For his part, George was frustrated and angry at having been abandoned by the other founding editors; he wanted everyone to stay on and work harder. Factions formed, tempers flared, everyone had too much to drink. Finally the poetry editor, Donald Hall, soothed the room with a speech about the magazine’s first principles. George, left with the choice to shut the shop or carry on alone with new talent, credited Hall as “the man who saved The Paris Review.” But it was Hall who got closer to the truth that defined Plimpton’s whole life: “George never gives up on anyone.”

  George invented himself. In Paris at the age of 26, he had no idea what he would do with his life. He thought maybe he would come home and get involved in television, the coming thing. Then he stumbled on his first real invention, “the Paris Review interview.”

  George and the other editors created an alternative to criticism. They let the authors talk about their work themselves. The Paris Review’s first issue featured an interview with E. M. Forster, in which the old King’s College don demystified the Malabar Caves scene in A Passage to India by revealing that he had consciously created it as a substitute for violence. The Paris Review interviews, Writers at Work, are the indispensable companion to postwar world literature. Plimpton, who interviewed Ernest Hemingway for issue No. 18, thus made an art form of going to writers better than he and talking about what it was really like to write. There, in other words, was the template for his whole career as interested participant on Centre Court at Wimbledon or at the 18th hole at the U. S. Open or in the backfield of the Detroit Lions football team.

  Illustrated by Philip Burke

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  Journalism set Plimpton apart, and therefore placed him in his natural element, which was to be isolated and alone even among a crowd of people.

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  As with so many things in his life, the New York of the 1960s and of his prime was the sunlit city of pretty girls in their summer dresses. He seemed merely amused by pretty girls: He concealed how hard he had taken it when the love of his youth jilted him. The story was allowed to show its nose, but that was all: At Harvard, a faunlike Radcliffe girl named Bea was smart, with a purpose in life besides getting a man. The romance was serious on both sides, but Bea was cautious—perhaps she could see that being married to this young man was a career in itself—and turned George down.

  He was a celebrity in a minor key. He was famous in a gentlemanly way. He was criticized for being a publicity hound, but in fact, though George loved being famous and worked very hard at it, he never opened the windows on his private life. He never alluded to his childhood, or to episodes of personal pain. He was always George Plimpton, Amateur, and he lived in a world in which painful passions do not exist on the page.

  George talked incessantly about money. Money was a routine topic of conversation in The Paris Review’s editorial office—a surprise to me, at eighteen. In my own middle-class family, the subject of money was an embarrassment. George had an aristocratic unembarrassment about money.

  His concern about money centered always around the baby he’d fathered in Paris and been stuck with by his fellow founders. He worried, perhaps, again, out of guilt: George always knew that of all the choices in his life, the “most sensible one,” he once told me, “would be to drop The Paris Review.” But he didn’t, and from the moment he tapped Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, his Harvard roommate, to be The Paris Review’s first publisher while they were running with the bulls in Pamplona, to the somewhat less glamorous but no less loyal publishers of the 1970s (Ron Dante, the music producer and creator of the Archies; Bernard F. Connors, the Canadian soft-drink king), to the creation in the 1990s of a sensibly endowed Paris Review Foundation, fund-raising was foremost on his mind.

  Money is the key theme—dignity the dominant gift conferred—in his final note to subscribers. It arrived the week before his death as a small printed insert accompanying the dazzlingly chic invitation to the magazine’s gala 50th anniversary revels. Under The Paris Review’s insignia—talon-gripped dip pen and liberty cap with tricolore cockade—George took note of the fact that the party on October 14 was going to be, in fact, a fund-raiser and that, for some, the ticket prices would be “relatively high.” Was George taking pity on the poor subscriber in Kansas City, Kansas, because the cheapest seat would be $500 and it’s a long way to New York? Well, no, probably not—but he wanted us all to know that we were welcome, and he turned what might be seen as condescension into a high compliment: “We tend to think of our subscribers as those we would like to have with us at such an occasion and thus the invitation.” And having done the cosmopolitan thing, he then wastes no more time before pointing out that if you happen to be unable to come, you still have several options: You might like to make a contribution to the Paris Review Foundation; or simply buy an extra subscription for a friend through The Review’s new Web site; or—the purest of Plimptonian salutes—“simply raise a glass on the 14th of October.” He signs off in even purer faith, a classically wistful-sounding Plimpton promise: “In any case, the 50th anniversary issue will be reaching you next month.”

  DECEMBER 21, 2003 BY TISH DURKIN

  Saddam Bagged, Bizarre Baghdad Doesn’t Bug Out

  BAGHDAD—IF YOU DIDN’T KNOW THE DEVIL himself had been put behind bars, you never would have guessed.

  The jig was up, the news was out, the DNA was in, the dictatorial hair had been probed for lice on international television…. Yet, to all outward appearances, the streets of Baghdad did not know and did not care.

  I had gotten into a car for a vivid, perhaps even dicey, ride through Saddam Hussein’s capital after its last piece of sky had fallen. It turned out to be a scavenger hunt for signs of anything at all.

  I went to Al Sadr City, the massively Shia, largely impoverished area where the resilience of sewage has long since tempered the euphoria of liberation—but where the waning of affection for America has, nonetheless, done little to dilute the venomous hatred of Saddam. There, the streets were quiet—but not, it bears noting, one murmur more quiet than usual. The shops that were always open late were open late tonight, and through their windows could clearly be seen one vignette after another of business as usual: a storekeeper putting cans on the shelves; a shoe salesman accepting dinar notes for plastic sandals.

  On the way home, on a flashier, busier thoroughfare, I came across a merry convoy of about a dozen cars with their horns blaring, full of singing, waving passengers. Sure enough, one of the pa
ssengers had a foot-high hairdo and a sugar-spun veil; it was a wedding procession.

  In context, the insistence of normality seemed all the more bizarre. Iraqis, as the wedding indicated, are great markers of milestones. Weeks before, when their national soccer team had won a big game, these same people had erupted in celebratory gunfire that was so loud and lasted so long that I truly, if briefly, believed that the civil war had come at last. Moreover, since the occupation began, many Iraqis had given many indications that the capture of Saddam would be the biggest milestone of them all.

  Perhaps the Iraqis’ ambivalence now has less to do with what they are facing than with who they are—or who they think they are. And, in many of their own minds, who they are seems surprisingly hard to sever from who Saddam is.

  Which is not to suggest that they don’t hate him and want him dead.

  It’s complicated.

  “What is complicated?” asked Ahmed Chalabi, the Pentagon’s favorite member of the American-appointed, pre-emptively marginalized Iraqi Governing Council. This was on Sunday afternoon, right after the announcement, and Mr. Chalabi was standing outside the marble headquarters of the 25-member council.

  Mr. Chalabi, along with several colleagues, had been wandering now and again out of the building to meet the gathering press. The complications he was dismissing were not emotional but judicial, and they were already bubbling up on the burner of What Next For Saddam.

  “There is a process,” he said, referring to the war-crimes tribunal that had been set up. “There is an investigation.”

  “There is going to be a trial,” an aide pointed out.

  Illustrated by Barry Blitt

  Given the young fellow’s excellent grooming and the perfect English in which he swirled such phrases as “phoner with Stephanopoulos” into his mobile telephone, it was hard to imagine that he and his boss had never heard of O.J. Simpson, and therefore of the potential for the trials of celebrities—let alone allegedly genocidal celebrities—to spin off in ways that were unpredictable, even dangerous, for society as a whole.

  In any event, they would be learning about this phenomenon soon.

  The complications arising from the spectacle of Saddam, captured alive and kept that way for months at least, range from the wildly colorful to the dry but defining. On one side of this spectrum, there is the wild, wild card of how Saddam plays as a defendant. If catching Saddam can have its public-relations perils for the Americans, it is foolhardy to assume that trying Saddam will not. Until Sunday, I must admit, I would have laughed at the notion of negative fallout from either one, except among those Iraqis who have supported Saddam all along.

  Then the Americans pulled him out of a rat hole looking like hell, and televised him getting his tongue depressed and his tonsils lit up.

  Fascinatingly, no matter what the regime had done to them or their relatives, almost no one I spoke to seemed to be reveling in his humiliation, and many seemed to feel that they somehow shared in it.

  This does not mean that people don’t want him punished, but it does suggest the possibility for public sentiment toward captive and captors alike to change in the coming months, depending on what is done with Saddam.

  Not even the people who helped formulate the war-crimes tribunal are clear on how it will work or what its limits will be. On Monday morning, Dara Nooraldin, a judge and a member of the Governing Council, gave an interview to three Western reporters.

  “This is not a revenging court,” he declared.

  Then one of the reporters asked whether the Iraqis might consider doing something along the lines of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, in which members and enemies of the apartheid regime fully confessed to their former crimes, in exchange for which many were pardoned.

  “In South Africa, were the same crimes committed as were committed here?” he asked.

  Well, some pretty serious stuff went on there, the reporter replied.

  “Did they used to bury them alive?” Nooraldin challenged. “Or kill children with poisonous gas?”

  The reporter then allowed as how they used to stick tires around people’s necks, douse them in gasoline and set them on fire.

  “And they were forgiven for these crimes?” asked the judge.

  “Yes,” said the reporter—correctly or incorrectly, I don’t know.

  “Oh,” said the judge, and then paused for a moment, as if this revelation were a freshly formed cushion and he needed to sit back on it for a second. This he did.

  “Maybe the same thing will happen here.”

  And maybe, all present thought but did not say, it won’t.

  Power Punks! Chelsea Clinton, Gifford Miller, Adrien Brody, Jay-Z, Chloë Sevigny, Drew and Karenna Gore Schiff

  Illustrated by Drew Friedman

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  GEORGE GURLEY INTERVIEWS CANDACE BUSHNELL

  Illustrated by Barry Blitt

  What was life like before you came to The New York Observer?

  I moved to New York at 19. I was doing a lot of fiction writing, and I went to acting school for a couple of months—I had an agent and this idea that I would do TV commercials to support myself as a novelist. The first writing I ever got paid for was a children’s book for Simon and Schuster. It was Dress the Bear instead of Pat the Bunny. I got paid a thousand dollars; I don’t think they ended up publishing it, but I got paid. Then in the early ’80s, I was an assistant at Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, then a staff writer at Self, writing about everything from microwaves to relationships to fashion designers. And I freelanced for places like Mademoiselle and Esquire. I was friends with Morgan Entrekin and Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis, so I knew people in publishing. You know, for me, that time was glam but no money. I had this little studio apartment, a girlfriend and I lived in the same building and our apartments were never quite finished; she never had a kitchen sink, I didn’t have a bed—I had a piece of foam. We’d go to Kentucky Fried Chicken on the corner of 74th and First Avenue. We never got our hair done, we didn’t get manicures. It was a struggle and there were times when it was frightening. My apartment was robbed and they took my mink coat, some old ratty mink coat.

  But you still found yourself at fancy black-tie parties, like at the Met’s Temple of Dendur?

  Occasionally. I would go to Saks and buy a frock that was 80 percent off and pretty much got around New York the way young, determined people get around New York. And I had lots and lots of girlfriends. And it was fun! New York’s celebrities then were restaurateurs and writers, journalists like Tina Brown and Graydon Carter. And there were all these restaurants—the McNally brothers opened a restaurant every six months. Like Indochine. Everyone went to restaurants every night. They were like little clubs, you saw people you knew, lots of table-hopping, they were theater! And you could smoke in restaurants. One time Morgan Entrekin and I went to one of those restaurants in Tribeca, and it started pouring rain, and they just cranked up the music and everybody started dancing, because it was raining too hard to leave and it was two in the morning. People would stay at restaurants drinking until one! There were cell phones but only a few investment bankers had them, and they were as big as a brick. And so in order to communicate, to know what was going on, you had to be there. You couldn’t read about it on the Internet. It was about being there. So with The Observer, what happened was Peter Stevenson and I had a mutual friend, Laura Yorke, a young editor at Simon and Schuster, and I sent her 100 pages of a novel I’d been working on. And she said, “Well, I don’t think I can publish this, but I have a friend, Peter Stevenson, he’s an editor and you should meet him.” And Peter Kaplan and Stevenson were restarting a magazine called Smart, and I had a meeting with them. But their Japanese backers disappeared, vanished. Then Stevenson went to The Observer and he called me up. They were in that townhouse, they didn’t even have cubicles, it was a mess. John Homans was there in his dirty Converse sneakers, there were old pizza boxes and bags of food, and that bathroom
! God forbid you should ever go to that bathroom. My first piece was called “Manhattan Transfers” it was about these kids, like Nicky Beavers—who unfortunately, as you know, ended up killing himself, which was really, really sad—and they had gone to rehab in Minnesota at Hazelden. And Hazelden had told them that they should live in Minneapolis, away from New York and temptation. So there was a group of about 20 young New Yorkers who were expats in Minneapolis, being sober. But the problem was that The Observer didn’t have money for expenses. They were going to pay me $500. I had $300, so I took the $300 and I got a cheap flight to Minneapolis and my sister was living there, so I slept on her couch. I wrote the story and Susan Morrison, who was the editor of the paper, liked it. The Observer was the place for quirky characters and quirky pieces, and there was a lot of freedom in how the pieces were written.

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  If there was something about Mr. Big in the column, I would show it to him and he would always say, “Cute, baby, cute.”

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  How did Sex and the City get started?

  By that time Peter Kaplan had become the editor, and I guess he felt that the stories I was doing were popular, people were talking about them, so he and Stevenson asked if I wanted to do a column. We came up with the title Sex and the City and for the first column, they made me go to that sex club Le Trapeze. So I went, I reported it, I did the story. I actually felt we were going to run out of material in about two columns. But after that, I really knew what I wanted to do with the column. First of all, it’s The New York Observer—it was never going to be sexually explicit, ever. It was about what happened, in a sense, before and after sex. Social anthropology, people jockeying for position. We set out to write about things that could only happen in New York—for instance, the second column was about a serial dater, this guy had dated 20 women that I knew. And of course all the girls were friends, and in fact a lot of the women had become friends because they’d all dated this guy. I got the women together and interviewed them about this guy. So at the start, the column was very journalistic. In a piece about threesomes, I sat in a room with guys and interviewed them. Later some of the columns were completely fiction, like the one where Carrie and her friends go to the baby shower in Connecticut. For me the column really evolved from journalism to fiction—writing the column was my way around all the obstacles I faced in becoming a novelist. And the biggest obstacle was nobody was interested in publishing a novel by a young woman about people in New York City; those weren’t the kinds of books they were publishing. Anyway, I got the Sex and the City book deal after six or seven columns. I told Bret Easton Ellis that I thought Morgan Entrekin was interested in buying it, and he said, “You’ve got to get an agent!” Bret called up ICM, spoke to three agents, and one of them, Heather Schroeder, called me back in 30 minutes. And she’s still my agent. One thing that was interesting about the column was that it was really written for a very small audience, the audience that read The Observer, which was a small, sophisticated—I would say fairly well-heeled—audience. It was insidery. And for the audience it was written for, I think that it felt like the truth about their lives, that knife’s edge where ambition meets frustration and where you have people who want things but getting them is complicated. One thing that was a little perplexing, when the book first came out, bookstores would put it in the sociology section.