In Manhattan these days, it’s hard to find a girl who isn’t doing the Tuck. Across West Chelsea bars, sleek boutiques in Madison Avenue and grungy boîtes of the Lower East Side, the women of the city can be found peg-legging their jeans and parading around with them scrunched into the legs of their boots like crumpled bed sheets. They’re pulling sculpted stiletto boots up over trousers and walking around with them in plain view, like a pair of knee socks. Or they’re rolling their jeans up so that they rest just where the boot ends, thus shortening the appearance of their legs by about 40 percent. And somehow they seem to think this is a good idea.
MARCH 6, 2005 BY PHOEBE EATON
Anthony Weiner, In Mayoral Run, Models On Koch
WOODY JOHNSON WAS at the annual winter cocktail party for the Queens County Democrats, making the rounds, cranking up support for a stadium on the site of the M.T.A.’s West Side railyards. Only suddenly, he had a gate-crasher: Days earlier, Cablevision offered $600 million to the M.T.A. to plunk some apartments and offices on the site—six times more than what Mr. Johnson was bidding. Trans-Gas would soon be flashing $700 million at the M.T.A., too, and the State of New Jersey was jumping up and down to sell the Jets on a less magnificent setup entirely. It was turning into a messy food fight, and everyone knew it.
Congressman Anthony Weiner was cheering all of this mayhem from the sidelines. Though he hadn’t yet declared his candidacy, Mr. Weiner was very publicly running for mayor, largely on the issue of where Mr. Johnson could stick his stadium.
Illustrated by Barry Blitt and Drew Friedman
Somebody finally dragged Mr. Weiner over to shake hands with Mr. Johnson. There was some strained chitchat about Chad Pennington’s injured throwing arm before the elephant in the room laid a great big fart: “It’s gonna be terrific to just get on the No. 7 and go right to the stadium,” another guest said to Mr. Johnson.
“Yeah,” Mr. Weiner chimed in, “even if you’re going in the other direction!” Mr. Weiner plucked two cubes of cheddar off a tray and headed for the door.
Diane Sawyer makes nice in the morning
Illustrated by Barry Blitt and Drew Friedman
MARCH 13, 2005 BY MARK LOTTO
HACKS OF PASSION
ON A SLOW NIGHT, ANNE, A 23-YEAR-OLD ASSISTANT AT an art consultancy, will get drunk at home with her friends and, instead of watching a movie or gossiping about men, they’ll break into one of their old boyfriends’ e-mail accounts. “My friends and I have a few glasses of wine, and it’s like, ‘Let’s go read [his] e-mail!’” Anne said, making an inbox sound like a pirated cable box—free of charge, only slightly criminal and endlessly engaging. The girls guffaw at his misspellings and giggle about his dating mishaps. They are as careful as cat burglars and never get caught. According to Anne, “It’s fun! It’s so entertaining.”
And also rather common. Manhattan marriage counselor Sharyn Wolf, author of Guerrilla Dating Tactics: Strategies, Tips and Secrets for Finding Romance, said that a lot of her clients have either committed this crime or had it done to them. “Men’s passwords are the easiest to figure out,” Ms. Wolf said. “Go home and change yours tonight!”
But who says passwords need to be guessed, anyway? Who says e-mail accounts need to be hacked into? These days, girlfriends and boyfriends, husbands and wives, girlfriends and girlfriends, casually swap the passwords to their Gmail, AOL and Yahoo! accounts out of convenience—or they lovingly swap to prove their intimacy and their absolute confidence in the relationship and in one another.
“There’s a level of trust in relationships where, if I’m with someone for a while, yeah, I give them my fucking password, because I want them to know I’m not hiding anything,” said Anne’s roommate Jennifer, 26, who works at a corporate law firm and is blond, frightfully smart (though not about this) and Maxim beautiful.
E-mail intimacy hasn’t brought couples closer together; instead, it has broken hearts, wrecked long marriages and crippled new relationships. In truth, swapping passwords or sharing computers is actually less a signal of faith than it is a test, too tempting and too easy to fail.
“When you snoop, you’re not looking for the concert seats he’s going to surprise you with, you’re looking for something that’s going to break your heart,” Ms. Wolf warned in her best Cassandra mode. “When you snoop, you will always find something. You snoop to confirm something. It will always be there.”
And then there’s that rare situation where deception brings two people closer together. Molly, a 24-year-old writer, found her new boyfriend’s e-mail open on her computer. They’d only been dating a few weeks, and he checked his mail just before getting into bed. Even though her boyfriend was lying a few feet away from her, she just couldn’t help herself.
“It was the sent e-mail, the e-mail from him, that really interested me,” she said. “I wanted to go back to the dates around the beginning of when we met and see what his impressions of me were, and what he said to people about me.”
What she found was an e-mail he had written to one of his friends around the time of his and Molly’s second date, something to the effect of: “She came over last night. Well, you know, physically, she’s not everything I would want, but I find her so amazing in so many other ways that I just want this.”
Molly sat there for a while, frozen, not knowing what the hell to do next: “I mean, also because it was exactly what I was looking for. There it was, a very concise statement of what his impression of me was—to a friend, being very candid.”
To snoop or not to snoop, to confess or not to confess: Molly’s dilemma is typical. In the end, what’s worse? Breaking into someone’s e-mail, violating their trust, looking like a psychopath? Or is the ugly truth discovered in the purloined e-mail the real infraction?
Or maybe not. When Molly got into bed, she lay there for a while, stiff as board, completely confused. Her boyfriend noticed immediately that something was wrong, and when he probed her, she confessed what she’d done.
“To my shock, he didn’t back off at all, he didn’t shy off at all,” Molly said. He told her: “I did write something about you not being my physical type, and it’s true. You’re not the type of girl that I’ve gone out with before, and you’ve completely shattered my type.”
Before Molly, he’d mostly dated “gym rats, all-American blond waifs.” Molly is more voluptuous than waifish, her hair a very dark shade of honey blond—she’s plenty cute enough to inspire conversions. Finally, after hours in bed fighting and talking, he convinced her that he was one of the sincerely converted. He wasn’t angry; more than anything, he seemed “scared” that what he’d written would cause him to lose her.
“After that, I felt invincible, I really did,” said Molly. “I felt like I’d opened the closet and looked at my worst fear, and there was nothing else to fear after that. I guess that’s not totally true—there’s infidelity.”
Molly then vowed never to snoop again, but she speaks of it with the eloquent nostalgia of a drug addict just barely clean.
“It’s a thrill,” she said. “Especially having him in the room while I was doing it. It was a weird high. I felt thrilled.”
APRIL 3, 2005 BY GEORGE GURLEY
Bungalow Gate
“RESERVATIONS ONLY, RESERVATIONS only. I can’t, sorry, man, we’re packed inside. Guys, we are packed. We have no more tables. We’re done.”
It was late Friday night outside Bungalow 8, the super-exclusive nightclub where New York’s most glamorous and beautiful young people enjoy conversation, flirting and something stronger than soda pop. Located on a bleak stretch of West 27th Street between 10th and 11th avenues, the club can hold at most about 150 people and turns away the great majority of the people who wish to enter.
Armin, the dashing 33-year-old Iranian doorman, was wearing a fur hat and a blue cashmere coat over a $1,800 suit. He was standing behind the velvet rope he’s manned since the club opened in 2001.
“This place has given me a power more than I coul
d ever imagine in my life,” he admitted. “I’ve had congressmen’s offices giving me a call trying to get people in. Then you have President Bush’s daughters coming in: sweethearts. I don’t care what people say about Bush, here comes his daughters and I’m this refugee boy. I wasn’t letting them in the first couple of times, until I got a call from Fabian Basabe…. That’s the beauty of America, do you know?”
APRIL 3, 2005 BY BEN SMITH
REALLY RICH RUDY
IN 2001, RUDY GIULIANI WAS Time magazine’s Person of the Year. By 2002, he was Consulting Magazine’s Consultant of the Year. And in another year or two, it was widely assumed, he’d be on another step in his rise, whether as vice president or in a cabinet post. Then it would be on to the White House.
Instead, Mr. Giuliani has dug into his position in the private sector, where he has found unprecedented success in a new kind of consultancy that sells today’s highest-valued commodity: pure, crystalline security.
Mr. Giuliani has become a tycoon.
Illustrated by Drew Friedman
APRIL 17, 2005 BY JAMES KAPLAN
MR. BELLOW’S PLANET: AMIS, MCEWAN SNATCH SAUL’S HERRING SOUL
ONE OPENED THE New York Times expectantly, two days after Saul Bellow’s death, ready for the Op-Ed tributes that seemed as certain to appear as The Times itself: Surely one or more of American literature’s surviving phallocrats, a Mailer or a Roth or an Updike, would contribute a brief but feeling essay, hastily composed yet sharply observed, glittering with wit and fond (or double-edged) remembrance of the tart-tongued, pint-sized titan, that pluperfectly penetrating colossus of our native literary landscape. Surely there would be four or five hundred words by Bellow’s biographer, James Atlas, or conceivably a feeling homage by a younger American novelist whose life had been changed by reading Henderson the Rain King. One could imagine it all, down to the small, boxlike dimensions of the essays, placed (of course) respectfully high on the page.
Instead, we got Ian McEwan.
When Ian McEwan started rhapsodizing about that barking dog in The Dean’s December, all I could think of, for some reason, was a piece of herring: the herring snack that Charlie Citrine, in the incomparable Humboldt’s Gift, eats at his kitchen counter as he reads the obituary of a Princeton professor who once interviewed him for a teaching job.
In the novel, that herring, together with Charlie’s afternoon whiskey, becomes a Proustian device for stirring up memories of the late poet Von Humboldt Fleisher, the fictional stand-in for Saul Bellow’s real-life friend, the doomed, dazzling Delmore Schwartz.
Yet that herring is more than a Proustian device. It’s also an actual piece of herring—a quint-essentially Jewish food, a nosh which I suspect is, in its homely Yiddishkeit, quite beneath the notice of the likes of Messrs. Amis and McEwan, who prefer metaphorical dogs and the full pitch of “cerebral endeavour.”
There was something even nearer and dearer to Saul Bellow than herring, metaphorical or actual, something I surmise high-toned British writers also have trouble with: the human soul.
We have nothing over the British any longer: We’ve found our own ways of being soulless. Unfortunately, we’re now also Saul-less.
Illustrated by Robert Grossman
APRIL 24, 2005 BY SHAZIA AHMAD
Generation Zzzzzz
JUST OVER A MONTH AGO, A young man found himself in an uncomfortable sleeping arrangement. After a night out with a group of friends, he found himself alone in the home of a senior editor at a well-known fashion magazine. The woman was in her early 30’s, attractive and, according to the young man, angling for some action. But then she said something.
“She was laying there,” he said, “and had taken her clothes off. Then, in completely slurred speech, she said: ‘I just took two Ambien, so anything you’re going to do, you better do it before I pass out.’ She said she hadn’t slept a night in seven years without her Ambien.”
The young man had come face to face with a member of the Ambien Generation, where being turned on takes a back seat to being able to turn off. In this edgy, post-9/11 city, sleep is more and more seen as an inalienable right: Tossing and turning is for suckers. Though Ambien has been on the market since 1993, it’s increasingly begun to occupy the same place in many New Yorkers’ lives as coffee and cigarettes. The city that never sleeps is becoming the city that can’t wait to go to sleep.
MAY 9, 2005 BY GEORGE GURLEY
BOB SAGET’S FULL MOUTH
BOB SAGET WALKED into the lobby of the Hudson Hotel and thrust out his hand. The tall, fit 48-year-old was wearing a zip-up sweatshirt, faded jeans and Converse loafers. I was eager to ask him to tell a famous dirty joke, a joke so well known among comedians it’s the subject of its own documentary, The Aristocrats, which comes out in July.
In the film, Mr. Saget is one of 100 comedians who each tell their own version of the bawdy yarn. His version, I’d been told, was the filthiest—not something you might expect from a guy who beamed into prime time as the sitcom dad on ABC’s Full House and the corny host of America’s Funniest Home Videos. Who was the real Bob Saget?
“Saget was famously dirty in college, 30 years ago,” said the comic magician Penn Jillette, who produced the documentary. “The joke is not that in an R movie, Bob Saget gets dirty; the joke is that in the world, Saget got clean.”
“It’s not appropriate for any mass consumption,” Mr. Saget said. “This joke is like 70 years old, and the point of it is that it’s the most offensive thing that you can make up. The purpose is to offend, and that nothing is too offensive—nothing.
“My justification is that I find stuff that is horrific funny. I find things that are terrible—terrible, terrible, terrible—hilarious, because how could people be so horrible? It’s my defense. I could sit around crying all day. I’m a very sensitive person.”
He said that he’d never let his kids or his parents see The Aristocrats.
“I can’t really tell you the joke,” he said. “I’ll explain it. It won’t translate on paper. So, O.K., a family goes into an agent’s office….” He paused. “This is not a good joke, by the way…. O.K., a family goes into an agent’s office, and they say, ‘We’d like you to represent us.’ It’s a mother, a father and a few kids. And the agent’s got a cigar, he’s a big guy behind a desk. He says, ‘Whatya do?’ The father says, ‘What do we do? Watch this.’ And they all strip naked and start having sex with each other. The mother and her kids, you know, everybody’s going at it: They’re all having sex. I’m not going to go into the horrible dirty details…. The bottom line is the family is having horrible sex with each other. It goes on and on. And eventually they freeze in place and go, ‘Tadahhhh!’ And the agent says, ‘This is very interesting. Uh, what do you call yourselves?’ And the father goes, ‘The Aristocrats!’ That’s the joke.
“The purpose of the joke, what I thought was funny about it, is that people will do anything to make it in show business,” Mr. Saget said. “Because everybody wants to be famous. Not everybody—smart people don’t. And this is how low someone will go to be famous. They will have sex with their own family. What I find funny about it is the desperation.”
“Saget is the dirtiest motherfucking cocksucker that ever walked the face of the earth!” said Mr. Jillette. “Doing those little bullshit family shows, playing the retarded fucking squeaky dickless dad—that’s not Saget! That’s a joke. You go to a restaurant with Saget and before he orders food, he’ll be talking to the waitress about fucking his daughters in the ass.”
MAY 22, 2005 BY TOM SCOCCA
Metaphysics of a Magazine
THE INVITATION—MY INVITATION—to the relaunch party for Radar magazine arrived in the form of Martha Stewart’s head, in stiff paper, with a stick to glue it onto. Other invitees apparently received other celebrities, but mine is Martha: luridly colored, like a tinted Daguerreotype, and with the eyes cut out to serve as a mask.
The head of Martha on a stick, with its empty eyes, is an unpleasant ico
n. Ms. Stewart herself is more ordinary at first sight. When she presented herself on stage last month at the National Magazine Awards to claim the trophy for Martha Stewart Weddings it took a second to figure out what was going on. Is that…? Did she…? The gathering buzz in the hall certified her identity. Magazine editors and executives applauded.
Martha Stewart is a celebrity who publishes magazines. The magazines exist because the brand identity of Martha Stewart is behind them. At the awards ceremony, a series of video montages had played, interlacing news footage with images of significant magazine covers from various eras. Before Ms. Stewart got up on stage, the clips had reached the mid-80’s. The old covers, previously an assortment of striking single images, had begun to converge on a new look. Stark blank space was filled in with an ever-thickening collection of cover lines, the burgeoning text framing not an illustration but a photograph, and a specific kind of photograph: a portrait of a celebrity.
Radar magazine, editor Maer Roshan said in a phone interview, is “alternately amused and appalled” by celebrity. The cover of the upcoming issue features a not-too-smooth photo composite of President George W. Bush hanging a medal around the neck of Paris Hilton. “No talent? No problem!” the cover line says. “How to be FAMOUS for doing nothing at all.”
This, Radar knows. After producing a pair of sample issues in 2003, Mr. Roshan kept Radar hovering in the public consciousness for nearly two full years without actually printing any more magazines. Now, with the backing of Mortimer Zuckerman and Jeffrey Epstein, the operation is up and running. The summer 2005 issue is due on newsstands next week.
But in the meantime, Radar has quasi-accidentally evolved into a new kind of thing: the celebrity magazine has become a celebrity/magazine. Radar is a celebrity.
The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots Page 55
