There was another piece you did on The New Yorker’s 70th anniversary party—people like Harrison Ford, Rudolph Giuliani, Barry Diller, Larry Tisch, Joseph Mitchell. You wrote about the feeling of disconnectedness and you had a quote from a veteran journalist: “[Tina Brown] invited all the right people but then left no room to invite some of the wrong people.”
That’s a great line about New York because as Kaplan used to say, New York is about “shit and perfume.” And it’s true, with New York you’ve gotta have both. And that’s why right now, New York is a very sterile place, because there’s no fringe area. Even Brooklyn. It’s about money—it’s all about money now.
Tina Brown was a recurring subject in The Observer.
She was. Which is one reason she called me a scumball. “You’re just a scumball,” she said. I think she meant to call me a scumbag, but I got the point. It was at a party and there were one or two members of her public relations team around, and they were put in that weird position of supporting her even as they were wincing at what she’d said. So that was interesting. I will say this about Tina. Most people in our business can throw a punch, but they can’t take one. Tina can. She really got battered near the end of Talk’s run—and if I’m going to be completely honest, I was part of the mob that thrashed her. But she picked herself up off the canvas and she’s still out there swinging.
Can you say something about getting that sort of frosty reception and The Observer’s reputation?
Look at Letterman, look at Esquire in the ’60s, look at The Observer. They were all places that were accused of being mean-spirited, and in the end it’s undeserved, because when people drink the Kool-Aid at a point in the culture, you need someone to say, “Hey, wait a minute here, this is all bullshit.” And everyone else is so invested in the bullshit, they try to kill the messenger.
Anything else about the energy back in the mid-’90s compared to now?
You know what started to creep in—and I wrote about this when I first noticed it in the Hamptons. Suddenly, it wasn’t enough to throw a party. Your potato chips—you know those multicolored potato chips, Terra Chips? They began to sort of advertise those at parties. Everything was marketing and product placement. It wasn’t a party anymore. It was a Skyy Vodka party. And I remember that same weekend going to a Donna Karan boutique opening where this singing messenger showed up with the DKNY logo shaved into his head, and that was the moment for me when parties weren’t fun anymore. I mean, on some level, parties are usually about selling something—even if it’s just the host’s ego—but in the ’90s they became particularly brazen. They were pure business. And you were only invited if you could in some way contribute to whatever the endgame was. I remember a number of phone calls during which publicists fairly pleaded with me to mention the name of some brand or another that had provided the alcohol for an event. And that’s where I think things started to go off the rails for New York. The other thing that happened is that, at some point, people started paying publicists to curate their parties, and the crowds became homogenized and dull.
Tell me about [Observer founder and owner] Arthur Carter…
Arthur was very good to me. Most newspaper owners look at their gossip columnists as necessary pains in the ass. They’re good for business because they bring in readers, but they also generate countless angry phone calls from the owner’s rich and powerful friends who are inevitably the targets of the columnists. Arthur was remarkably fearless in that regard. I’m sure he got plenty of those calls, but they didn’t bother him. In fact, I think he kind of liked them because they told him that people were reading his paper. Another thing I’ll always remember about Arthur was that when I first started at the paper, I would sometimes run into him outside the Observer townhouse in, say, August, and I would be sweating through my T-shirt. And he would be wearing a sweater and there would not be even a bead of sweat on him.
You want to say something about what the 64th Street office was like then?
At first I was a little intimidated because everybody was real literate, dressed real nice, but fairly quickly, I felt at home. It was after the first few columns that I did. They had gone over pretty well, and Susan Morrison, who had hired me away from the New York Post, was really supportive and she immediately kept her promise to get me writing features. And yet, though The Observer was as serious as a heart attack when it came to journalistic standards, there was a slight whiff of Animal House about the place. Warren St. John, who was a reporter then, had brewed homemade beer with a Barry Blitt caricature of Arthur Carter on the label. You could regularly hear the political editor Terry Golway yelling “Buuulllshit!” at the top of his lungs whenever something didn’t pass his smell test. And there were some world-class pranks being pulled by [writers and editors] Peter Stevenson and Jim Windolf. Also, remember what we used to do? Drinks in the backyard after closing. On like the second or third Tuesday that we were out there, the deputy editor, John Homans, came up to me. Stevenson and Windolf always used to describe Homans as standing with “arms akimbo” because he stood a certain way, but he was one of the people who initially scared the crap out of me because he didn’t mince words and had the physique of a Parris Island boot camp sergeant. Anyway, he complimented me on some item I’d written that week and I remember standing there with my bottle of beer, thinking: “This is so cool.”
You called Elaine Kaufman the patron saint of journalists. Was Elaine’s your favorite?
Elaine’s and the Four Seasons were probably the two places where—even if I hadn’t gotten a single story out of them—I felt part of the city. Elaine’s was the only place I ever felt I belonged—that and The Observer. I once said to Elaine, “Why have you always been so kind to me?” and she said, “You seem like a nice kid.” I’m glad she didn’t think I was a “yutz,” which was a word I once heard her use to describe someone she didn’t like. One night, I was at a party downtown and I was talking to [Page Six editor] Richard Johnson and he was with [his then-wife] Nadine, and Nadine had these models that she was repping. And I was with my wife. And we said, “Let’s go to Elaine’s!” There were so many of us that we got split up. So I walk into Elaine’s with Richard and two beautiful models—both three feet taller than I was—and Elaine gave me the hairy eyeball and wouldn’t come over to our table. She was really cold to me. Fifteen minutes later, my wife showed up and Elaine was fine. That’s when I realized that Elaine has a moral code that’s very interesting. She also has one of the best shows in town: I’ve seen Al Pacino there; Woody Allen. I met Phil Spector there; Peter Wolf and Robert Altman; Anna Strasberg; Esther Williams. I’ve dined with Bobby Zarem; Gay Talese. And I swear I once saw Tony Danza sit down with Arthur Miller. The sad thing is, I’m at a stage now where I have an 11-year-old son. I can’t afford to eat at Elaine’s as much as I once did. And I miss it.
I can’t afford the Four Seasons anymore, either, although one of my favorite things in life is to sit at the bar, order a martini straight up with lots of olives and just take in the sights. I could stare at those undulating chain-mail curtains for hours, but what I really love is to watch the two general managers, Alex von Bidder and Julian Niccolini, deal with all the egos who swan into their little kingdom. Alex is courtly, precise and has impeccable manners. My sense is that he caters to that portion of the power crowd that wants their dining experience to be soothing and self-affirming. But Julian is all about drama. Like many Italians, he’s a bit of a sadist. He isn’t cowed by power, and he has a pretty wicked grasp of politics—the backroom kind. The Four Seasons is his domain and when you go there, you must submit to his rule, no matter how powerful you are. If you understand this about him, he will make you feel like royalty. If you don’t, well, you’ll probably never go there again. I also think Julian knows that, despite their charmed lives, a lot of his customers are bored out their skulls.
What was the strangest story you ever did?
One of the most bizarre stories I ever covered was the Jackson family reu
nion at Madison Square Garden. The concert must have fallen right at the beginning of September 2001. Drew Nieporent, the restaurateur behind Nobu and Corton, invited me. The show was built around the fact that Michael Jackson and his brothers hadn’t performed together in many years, but there were also some special guests. And one of the first persons onstage was Marlon Brando. He was big and wearing a massive pair of sunglasses. And when he came out, he didn’t say anything. He just took off his watch and stared at it for at least a full minute. Not surprisingly, the crowd started to get restless. There had been this Michael Jackson look-alike—or maybe it was really Michael—popping up in different sections of the Garden driving the crowd into a frenzy, but now they’ve got Marlon Brando staring silently at his watch. Eventually, he did speak and that’s when things got really freaky. Brando started talking about how in the amount of time he had been silent, dozens or maybe hundreds of children had been hacked to death with machetes—I definitely remember him using the word “hacked.” Drew and I were both looking at each other like, “Did he just say what we think he said?” Maybe Brando was making some appeal to charity, but all he did was succeed in confusing and angering the crowd. I mean, they had come to see Michael Jackson perform “Beat It” and “ABC” with Marlon and Randy and Tito, but instead Marlon Brando, whom most of the crowd probably remembered from his insane performance in that remake of The Island of Dr. Moreau, is lecturing them on murdered children. The whole thing was incredibly jarring. Well, the rest of the concert didn’t exactly reach that what-the-fuck level, but then there was an after-party at Tavern on the Green that was like a Fellini film. I wasn’t invited but I got in. I can’t tell you who let me in because to this day he will get in trouble, but the crowd was just the most perplexing collection of celebrities I’ve ever seen. On one hand you had this amazing cross-section of ham-and-cheese actors and singers from the last 20 years of show business: William Shatner, David Hasselhoff and Kenny Rogers. The age of irony was represented by Paul Shaffer and then you had this gaggle of old-school actresses that included Psycho’s Janet Leigh and Ann Miller. Liz Taylor may have been there, too—I know she was at the concert. The scene was weird enough, but then the night climaxed in this really unsettling scene where a crowd of fans swarmed Michael Jackson and his security intervened. Jackson was just being pulled and torn like a rag doll and he looked genuinely terrified beneath his kabuki makeup. People were screaming. It was supposed to be the cover story for the issue that came out on Wednesday, September 12, 2001. I hadn’t finished the story that Tuesday morning when the planes hit the towers, and I didn’t want to finish it, because, you know, the subject matter suddenly seemed irrelevant. I remember, after we closed the paper on September 11, Peter Stevenson and I walked together to the Upper West Side because that was the only way you could get home if you didn’t have a car. I’ve never heard the city as quiet as it was that night.
* * *
* * *
Uma looked radiant that night, but I think what she really wanted to do was impress the president with her intelligence, not mesmerize him with her beauty.
* * *
Illustrated by Drew Friedman
2006
Brit comic Sacha Baron Cohen does boffo box office as Borat
Best-selling memoirist James Frey outed as liar
Another inconvenient truth? As eco-documentarian, Al Gore is bigger than ever
Billionaire Ron Burkle accuses New York Post columnist Jared Paul Stern of extortion
Katie Couric leaves Today show for CBS Evening News
Sweet embraceable YouTube: Disposable culture achieves permanence online
In time of war, Us editor Janice Min dictates Jessica, Jen, Jolie
Stork spin: Docs sell baby sex selection on East Side
Brooklyn beloveds fondle fruits at new Red Hook Fairway
2006
JANUARY 26, 2006 BY TOM SCOCCA
The Awful Untruth
You’ve Probably Had It on Phony Memoir—But Frey Fraud Was Worse Than You Know; Was Explosion Just Delayed W.M.D. Reaction?
“THAT THIS MAN IS STANDING in front of me and everyone else in this room is lying to us is heresy. The truth is all that matters. This is fucking heresy.”—James Frey, A Million Little Pieces, Chapter 1999
First things first: James Frey is a liar. To say someone has lied, flat-out lied, is to make a claim about that person’s internal moral workings: The person knew something was false and said it anyway, deliberately, with intent to deceive. That’s a tough standard. Better to say that what the person said “appears to contradict” the facts—
Enough. James Frey is a liar. (By the way, so is “James Frey.”) His best-selling memoir, A Million Little Pieces, is a fraud. It is a seamless mass of falsehoods, told deliberately, for the purpose of making money.
“I still stand by the essential truths of the book,” Mr. Frey told Larry King on Jan. 11. Mr. Frey invoked “essential truth” seven times in an hour. It was his main talking point, his defense against an ever-growing portfolio of specific untruths. Essentially, Mr. Frey seems to be, as his book claims, an alcoholic and probably a drug abuser, who went through rehab in Minnesota in the late fall and winter of 1992. Essentially.
That plain essence, however, would not have rung cash-register bells for the publishing industry. It would not have gotten Mr. Frey to the top of the best-seller lists and into Oprah’s Book Club. So the book includes: a double root canal for Mr. Frey, done without anesthetic under treatment-program rules. An illicit romance between Mr. Frey and a beautiful, doomed crackhead-prostitute fellow patient. A series of scuffles between Mr. Frey and various ward mates, some leading to injury. A back story of a childhood as an outcast, of the tragic death of his first love—above all, of wanton, precedent-breaking drug abuse and crime that left Mr. Frey a wanted man in three states and would eventually send him to jail for three months.
None of that happened.
Illustrated by Barry Blitt and Victor Juhasz
JANUARY 29, 2006 BY BEN SMITH
GORE IS BIGGER THAN EVER!
Illustrated by Barry Blitt and Victor Juhasz
A CROWD OF NEARLY 500 IN the Library Theater in Park City, Utah, stayed on through a standing ovation and into the question-and-answer session as Al Gore restated his warnings about the “planetary emergency,” global warming.
Mr. Gore is the star of a documentary entered in the Sundance Film Festival, An Inconvenient Truth, and all the questions were for him.
Mr. Gore had been haunting Sundance since it kicked off, popping in at the Entertainment Weekly party to chat with A- and B-list celebs, but this was the former vice president’s big day. That morning, his new publisher, Rodale, had announced an Andrew Wylie–brokered book of the same title as the film, to be released in April.
At the question-and-answer session, the reporters wanted to know about Mr. Gore’s prospects. Was the film itself covered under campaign-finance laws? Would he be endorsing another candidate for President in 2008—like, say, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? (It was, after all, the Hollywood press.)
“I won’t be endorsing a candidate,” he said. “I am a recovering politician.”
JANUARY 29, 2006 BY LIZZY RATNER
BARON FRANCHETTI GETS READY
29-Year-Old Beauty Boy Brings Own Bread to Bernardin, Wants to Teach Manners
AT AN APPROPRIATELY SOPHISTICATED hour on a recent Tuesday evening, 29-year-old Cody Franchetti relaxed at his table at the four-star restaurant Le Bernardin, explaining what it means to be an Italian aristocrat in 21st-century New York.
“I am an elitist,” he said in his basso Italiano, as a small fiefdom of waiters in neat black suits whisked silently about the restaurant. “I believe in an elite, I believe that people want an elite…because there’s always been one, whether it be an oligarchy or a dictatorship. Those who don’t have want to have more”—he paused as a French-accented black waiter deposited a pre-appetizer in front of him—“and those who have, have different
pursuits.”
As an unrepentant member of the latter category, Mr. Franchetti has spent much of the last decade carefully honing such “pursuits”—none, of course, resembling anything so functional as a profession. He has read the books in his “extensive library,” collected rotary phones, studied the different kinds of marble, experimented with modeling and made weekly trips to his tailor—all in happy, anachronistic anonymity. But of late he has begun cultivating a new interest: He has resolved to make himself a reality-TV star.
“This is a place of display, therefore you display yourself,” he said.
By his own estimation, Mr. Franchetti took his most successful stab at provoking such discussion in Born Rich, the 2003 documentary-cum-therapy-session made by Johnson & Johnson heir Jamie Johnson. In the film, the former model’s stratospheric wealth was exceeded only by his ability to offend. “I find guilt [over wealth] absolutely senseless. It’s basically for old women and nuns,” he said in one scene as he sat in his book-lined West Village apartment, a black Hamburg Steinway off to his right.
The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots Page 59
