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

by The New York Observer

  Candace Bushnell wrote the Sex and the City column for The New York Observer; her most recent novel is One Fifth Avenue.

  Illustrated by Barry Blitt

  What was it like being with Mr. Big, writing about him? And Mr. Big was based on?

  [Vogue publisher] Ron Galotti. I was crazy about him and I was in love with him. We were together for a year and a half. If there was something about Mr. Big in the column, I would show it to him and he would always say, “Cute, baby, cute.”

  You think sex and relationships are less messed up than they were 15 years ago?

  Oh, no, I think that they’re probably just as messed up. It may even be worse because young women say that they don’t even go on dates.

  What about Peter Kaplan?

  Ahh, the mysterious Kaplan! We always wondered if he ever read anything that went into the paper. Kaplan would always have his door closed, pulling his hair out. And then if you had a meeting with him, he would always say something really unfathomable. The big-picture thing! You’d come out and be laughing and wondering, “What the hell was he talking about?”

  If you wanted to have a meeting with Kaplan, you had to schedule a meeting—and then he’d never be there! Stevenson and I would have lunch and Kaplan would come, at this lousy little cheap French bistro on Madison Avenue. But the bottom line about working for The Observer is that it was really fun. And it was hilarious! There were always funny things going on. We used to try to find out what pieces New York magazine was doing and we would try to scoop them. And Maer Roshan was working for New York and once he had a big story due on a Thursday. And we came up with this plan: I went out with Maer and I made him stay out all night. And then he was so hung over, he couldn’t make it to work, and he couldn’t get his story done. Very fiendish stuff.

  Why do you think the column became a hit so fast?

  It was the ’90s, and there were all of these single women in their 30s who hadn’t found Mr. Right. And that was, at the time, somewhat of a phenomenon. Nobody really knew what to think about these women—because there weren’t supposed to be single women in their 30s. When I first started writing the column, that really got around: The frightening truth of being a single woman in your 30s! And when I wrote about the toxic bachelors, I interviewed different men, and they said, “If a woman’s over 35, I don’t know that I want to date her.” So there were things in that column that were frighteningly real. And I think the column touched on a lot of things that we’re still talking about. From the beginning, there were women who read that column and felt it addressed their secret fears, and made them feel as if they weren’t alone, like they weren’t the only ones having these thoughts. Every column was in a sense a little morality tale. The story about the modelizers, for instance, ends pretty grimly, with the modelizer saying that he got this girl pregnant, she wants all this money and she’s having a baby, and he’s 32 years old and he feels like an old man. So I would always try to have a little twist at the end, as if to say, you know, everybody’s a little fucked up.

  * * *

  Illustrated by Drew Friedman

  2004

  The Brits are back—again: Charles and Camilla tour our shores

  Ugg! Fuzzy shearling boots blight city

  Absolut rip-off: Nightclubs spin patrons in $200 jeans with $300 “bottle service”

  The most lusted name in news? Anderson Cooper is CNN’s new superstar

  Comedian Chris Rock knocks ’em dead with Black Ambition tour

  Caitlin Flanagan chronicles domestic life as pallid emo boys frustrate New York women

  Retired GE chair Jack Welch charges up his babe Boswell, Suzy Wetlaufer

  Right-wing commentator Bill O’Reilly sued for sexual harassment

  Loafer-clad Republicans pad over alien planet New York City for political convention

  2004

  JANUARY 5, 2004 BY ALEXANDRA JACOBS

  Ugg! Fuzzy Boots Blight City

  IS THERE ANYTHING MORE TO say about Ugg boots, the heinous shearling footwear that women are wearing all over Manhattan, even in the formerly delicate-ankled quarter of Nolita?

  How about: Stop wearing them? How about: Be glad that the boots are back-ordered from the manufacturer until the spring; be glad that they’re going for three times their $150 price on eBay. That’s good. It will give you time to stop and think before you buy, you big ol’ fashion sheep.

  Ugg boots originate in Australia, but like many other “but they’re sooo comfortable” trends of the past year—velour track suits, etc.—the blame for their popularity may be pinned squarely on Southern California. Embraced 25 years ago by shaggy, tolerant surfers, Uggs caught on more recently with celebrities like Jessica Simpson and Pamela Anderson. Their sleek Barbie beauty is supposedly thrown into stark relief by the dowdy boots—which simply make the rest of us look like militant lesbian activists.

  Uggs are, in a word, awful.

  Illustrated by Victor Juhasz

  JANUARY 19, 2004 BY GEORGE GURLEY

  ’SPLAIN IT, ALI!

  THE MORNING SHOW LIVING It Up! with Ali and Jack, which debuted last Sept. 15, hadn’t been on CBS for two weeks before the critics were bitching away.

  Some were kind, but numerous others pointed out the lack of chemistry between Ms. Wentworth, 39, and co-host Jack Ford, 53, and noted the “nonexistent” ratings. In early December, the Daily News reported “rumblings” that if Martha Stewart beats her insider-trading case, CBS will return her show to the Ali and Jack time slot.

  I began trading e-mails with the show’s publicist in hopes of meeting Ms. Wentworth, an actress, author of The WASP Cookbook and wife of the former Clinton adviser George Stephanopoulos, who hosts the Sunday-morning political talk show This Week on ABC.

  Last summer, there had been rumors in the New York Post about the couple. Their marriage was in trouble. George resented Ali’s success. Ms. Wentworth decided to take action and told The Washington Post, “Come on, do you know of many strained marriages that make love twice a day?”

  Mr. Stephanopoulos is a constant on Living It Up! He gets mentioned several times an episode. Ms. Wentworth thinks they complement each other well.

  “He’s much more serious, and news is much more devastating to him, and I kind of lighten that up,” she said. “But vice versa: He has gotten me much more immersed in ‘Wow, this happens in Palestine?’ But it’s a good balance. I think if we were both, you know, ‘Whoa-ho-hoho!’ about everything, we would be the most annoying couple.”

  FEBRUARY 2, 2004 BY PHOEBE EATON

  THE HOLLYWOOD BEAST ROARS

  IN MARCH 2001, JOE ESZTERHAS was diagnosed with throat cancer. It was now or perhaps never to release Hollywood Animal (Alfred A. Knopf), a 736-page monster truck of a memoir that lumbers into bookstores this week.

  In the 80’s and much of the 90’s, Mr. Eszterhas was Hollywood’s best-paid screenwriter, sometimes receiving more cash for a script than the film’s director. Some of these movies were hits. Some weren’t. One could count on seeing cartons of militantly smoked cigarettes and, in his late-period panty movies, ruttish lesbians and multiple grand-mal orgasms.

  How insufferable was I? he asks several times in the course of the book’s introduction. The answer is all too apparent, but he clearly prides himself on the particulars: the Concorde tickets, the “A-list pussy” that rubbed up against his leg. Mr. Eszterhas’ movies grossed more than $1 billion, so he comes by his bragging rights honestly. Still, one can’t help but wonder if it was merely an accident of geography that neighbor Bob Dylan’s mastiffs often chose to relieve themselves in front of his Point Dume house.

  FEBRUARY 9, 2004 BY FRANK DIGIACOMO

  The Bling of Comedy

  IN ONE OF THE BACKSTAGE hospitality rooms of the Theater at Madison Square Garden, Chris Rock sat on an ass-battered couch, arms folded tightly, and talked about the ambition in his “Black Ambition” tour.

  “I want to have it so tight that it works in front of every audience: rich,
poor, a strip club and the Senate. Literally like that,” he said. “If only smart people like your shit, it ain’t that smart.” He let out a laugh, a heh-heh-heh that was a cross between Eddie Murphy and Phyllis Diller. Heh-heh-heh.

  “The greatest artists of our time were pop. Beethoven was pop!” Mr. Rock said, putting an emphasis on that last word as if he were participating in a poetry slam. “Beethoven was the fucking Justin Timberlake of his time. You know what I mean? Louis Armstrong, that shit was pop! It wasn’t like just some cool-shit jazz people that listened to it. That shit was pop. Picasso was pop. Motherfuckers are eating burgers and going, ‘That Picasso shit is good.’

  “So, that’s what you strive for,” he said.

  When I said he had talked a lot about President Bush, Mr. Rock stopped me. “I’m talking about the president. In my last special, I talked about Clinton. I haven’t picked a side. I’m still where I’ve always been. It’s my job to talk about the president, no matter who he is,” he said. And a little later, worried that he’d be perceived as being co-opted, he said what generations of comics have said, “You want me to take a political stance. That’s career suicide.”

  Well, did Mr. Rock think that Republicans or Democrats were better at creating the kind of distractions to which he was referring earlier? “People like distraction,” he said with a smile that suggested he was not going to be fooled into committing career suicide. “Nobody likes to sit down and write a novel. You can’t wait for something to distract you.” He laughed. “Nobody wants to do work. Hard work ahead of you? Look, a bunny rabbit!”

  But Mr. Rock has clearly not given up on good old American democracy. During his show, he says something that seems shocking at first—then he explains himself. “I love to see the flag burn, because it lets me know I’m in the right spot,” he says. “People only hate the winners. People hate the Yankees. People hate the Cowboys. People hate the Lakers.”

  In other words, Mr. Rock, like the other big comedians in the Pantheon—Redd Foxx, Bill Cosby, Lenny Bruce and Will Rogers—likes being in the free speech vortex of the world. “Come to my show, laugh,” he said. “I kind of write a show the way I write it because I don’t really take any laughs for granted. My whole philosophy is even if you don’t think it’s funny, hopefully you think it’s interesting.

  “It’s jokes, man,” he said after the show. “It’s jokes.

  Illustrated by Drew Friedman

  “Look at Bill Cosby. Look at Dick Gregory. As far as who’s the bigger activist, who’s got more stuff done.” Mr. Rock cupped his hands around his mouth and whispered, “Bill Cosby.” Then he said, “That’s how you do it. Do I want to march down 125th Street or do I want to put myself in a position to give Tuskegee [University] $40 million? That’s where it’s at. That’s the real gangster shit. That’s the real activism.”

  MARCH 1, 2004 BY RACHEL DONADIO

  Naomi Wolf Makes Much Ado About Nuzzling At Yale

  NAOMI WOLF WAS ON THE phone on Feb. 24 speaking about her cover story in this week’s New York, in which she accuses literary scholar Harold Bloom of having placed his “heavy, boneless hand” on her inner thigh when she was an undergraduate student in 1983. In it, she also depicted Yale University as an environment where sexual “encroachment” is tolerated, and where, to this day, students are afraid to come forward about their troubling experiences.

  But in opening up a 20-year-old case of sexual harassment at Yale, Ms. Wolf had also opened up any number of questions: about the university, about Professor Bloom, about her own journalistic techniques, and about the reliability of using older anecdotal memories brought to bear on long-buried circumstances.

  Apparently banking on the fact that Ms. Wolf’s celebrity—as well as that of her accused sexual “encroacher”—would blind readers to the fact that neither Ms. Wolf nor New York magazine made any attempt to find any other accounts of Mr. Bloom behaving in a sexually inappropriate manner toward a student, the piece converted Mr. Bloom instantly from best-selling Shakespeare authority to sexual predator. New York didn’t offer Mr. Bloom a conventional journalistic forum in which to respond, such as by having a disinterested reporter report and write the piece; instead, Ms. Wolf acted as a combination memoirist and reporter.

  MARCH 15, 2004 BY CHOIRE SICHA

  MR. ANDERSON COOPER, SUPERSTAR

  Illustrated by Philip Burke

  THE DAY BEFORE HIS FIRST vacation in a good while, in a jewel box of a West Chelsea teahouse, Anderson Cooper sat reading The New York Times beside a small reflective pool. Sleek in his near-black pinstriped suit, he looked like a commercial. The teahouse was otherwise empty. The titanium-haired CNN anchor was drinking from an obnoxiously tall glass of juice with humongous chunks of fruit in it—and he was pulling it off with élan.

  Two origin myths of Anderson Cooper are propagated; both are true. In the news-world version, he’s a scrappy youngster who paid his dues with a borrowed camera on his shoulder. He slept on hotel roofs and worked the Third World crisis tour until someone would put him on TV. He’s a hard-core news man with the blood on his Betacam to prove it.

  Then there’s the Page Six version of Anderson Cooper: flashy Manhattanite in sharp tailored suits. Dalton fed him to Yale. Not only is his mom the designer-jean queen, his great-aunt Gertrude founded the Whitney Museum. He writes for Details, for chris-sakes. All this means that Mr. Cooper is, in fact, the epitome of the East Coast media elite that Fox News and their gang harp on. “I’m sort of guilty on all those counts—I’m from New York and went to an Ivy League school. I do think how one is born and how one chooses to live one’s life are often two different things—or should be two different things,” said Mr. Cooper. He seems in his chronically polite and understated way to be saying by this: Fuck off.

  Last September, CNN plunked down the contradictions of Mr. Cooper in the middle of their evening lineup and threw a buttload of money into advertising, promoting his elite face in a 7 p.m. show that consciously traffics in the meanings of his double life. The show is self-conscious and self-referential, very nearly MTV-styled. It begins in breaking news and ends with just-shy-of-cruel digs at pop culture. Mr. Cooper is far from traditional anchor material, which makes the show inherently interesting.

  But as far as numbers go, the experiment hasn’t worked yet. In the cable ratings war, CNN has been thrashed. Mr. Cooper pulls a bit under half a million viewers. In the same slot over on Fox News, Shepard Smith gets around three times that. Still, focus-group research released in house at CNN last week shows Mr. Cooper testing strongest of all their anchors, a CNN source said, and the hope at CNN is that ratings will follow.

  Never mind: At a time when cable news is a cesspool of partisan shit-stirring, rehashed war feed and cheery, white-toothed weatherman smiles, Mr. Cooper distinctly stands out. He’s turning out to be something even more unexpected than the Gen-X sex symbol/anchor of his do-me CNN marketing: the return of the TV journalist as humanist.

  APRIL 12, 2004 BY RACHEL DONADIO

  Breslin Bites Back

  Illustrated by Philip Burke

  IT WAS ONLY A SMALL HEADLINE, BURIED DEEP IN THE METRO section of The New York Times on April 8—” Minister Says Breslin Falsified Interview About Homosexuals”—but as a sign of the newest chapter in the history of American journalism, it might as well have been a front-page splash.

  Whatever its outcome, the flap represented a peculiar clash of journalistic cultures: between the once bold and brash, now old-school narrative New Journalism of Jimmy Breslin’s generation, and today’s newspaper journalism, which in its sobriety and extreme attentiveness to accuracy is more akin to the old old school.