The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots
Page 69
This was a party honoring the Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards nominees, and the aggressive accessory du jour was out in full force, encasing the feet of everyone from the actress Ashley Olsen (high-heeled, black and strappy, paired with short shorts and a blazer) to the female servers wearing spare, proletarian versions as they proffered pork skewers.
Designer Cynthia Rowley sported a pair of her own design: nude platforms with a faux armor-plate stretching over the front of her foot and extending to the ankle. They looked like a softer version of the now-impossible-to-find black $770 Dior Extreme Gladiators worn by Sarah Jessica Parker in the new Sex and the City movie. “These are sort of orthopedic Spartan shoes,” said Ms. Rowley, who said she’d been inspired by the 2006 film 300, about the 480 B.C. Battle of Thermopylae.
Of course, the Spartans were Greek, which gladiators were not, but no matter: Footwear is having an ancient moment.
Illustrated by Robert Grossman
JUNE 9, 2008 BY DANA RUBINSTEIN
CLIENT 9 TO 5
Eliot Spitzer’s got a new day job at dad Bernie’s real estate empire. But will Big Business welcome former Sheriff of Wall Street?
BY ALL ACCOUNTS, ELIOT SPITZER NEVER IMAGINED that Spitzer Enterprises would be his life’s work. His father Bernie’s real estate empire, the one he built from scratch, would finance Eliot’s ambitions. Not circumscribe them.
But that was then. This is now. And apparently, the deposed governor is adjusting.
Mr. Spitzer, who just a few months ago was said to contemplate White House ambitions, now ascends every weekday to the top of the Crown Building, according to sources familiar with the Spitzers. More precisely, the ex-governor reports to the 22nd floor of 730 Fifth Avenue, the French Renaissance-style masterpiece his father co-owns with the Winter Organization.
It’s apparently the closest thing to a nine-to-five job Mr. Spitzer has had since his hypocrisy and lust transformed him from a left-wing hero into the left’s own version of the Rev. Ted Haggard—a man guilty of doing that which he so publicly condemned.
But what, precisely, is Mr. Spitzer doing in his father’s office?
Mr. Spitzer wouldn’t tell us. A call to Spitzer Enterprises at 2:30 on Monday afternoon revealed he was there and in a meeting. He never called back.
But a real estate insider close to Bernie Spitzer said the family was trying to suss things out.
“He’s going into a fully established real estate empire. It’s all there for him,” said a real estate consultant. “No one in the real estate world will, pardon my French, give a shit about the prostitutes.”
In fact, given the back-slapping, meat-and-potatoes culture of New York real estate, Mr. Spitzer might even find himself a star.
“Guys in our industry, if he started attending real estate board functions, they’d get a kick out of it,” said the consultant. “We live in this sort of perverted, celebrity-driven world.”
Centerfolds just a few floors down from his desk. Central Park just two blocks away. A view of the city from his window. Forget the past, Mr. Spitzer. You’ve got it made.
A selection of favorites by RJ Matson
JUNE 23, 2008 BY FELIX GILLETTE
NYTV: TIM RUSSERT, MAN OF AMBITION
AT 1:30 P.M., THE LINE OF mourners on Mount Saint Alban in Washington, D.C., for Tim Russert, NBC Washington bureau chief and host of Meet the Press, who died so suddenly last week at the age of 58, stretched all the way from the front doors of the St. Albans School Refectory out to Wisconsin Avenue.
‘IF IT’S SUNDAY, IT’S MEET THE PRESS’
When he first took over as moderator of Meet the Press in 1991, the chance that he would give new life to the long-running program was considered a long shot at best.
At the time, This Week With David Brinkley was the dominant force in Sunday morning public affairs programming. The previous year, This Week on ABC averaged roughly 3.6 million viewers, compared to Face the Nation on CBS, which had averaged around three million viewers. Meet the Press was limping along with a meager 2.6 million viewers.
By May of 1992, Robert Novak and William Safire were lining up with a bunch of Beltway tastemakers to declare Russert the next big thing. Within a year of Russert’s on-air debut, Meet the Press was regularly beating This Week in the ratings in the D.C. market. By 1995, Russert and Co. had racked up a number of weekly wins against This Week in the national ratings. By 1996, Russert had essentially chased Mr. Brinkley into retirement.
Before he ever set foot in the Meet the Press studio, Russert spent years devising press strategies for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Governor Mario Cuomo and eventually for NBC News. “When Tim was wearing his old hat of press strategist and campaign strategist, we had many conversations about the press and how it works,” said The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta. “He was a great tactician. He was a very shrewd political press guy.”
JUNE 30, 2008 BY SPENCER MORGAN
Bear Naked Tradies
The professional death of a brilliant Bear Stearns salesman
“ANYTIME BEAR WAS INVOLVED with another bank—we always had to go a level deeper, even though at the end of the day it does not matter, but the idea was to prove that we were better than the other bank,” said a junior investment analyst, who jumped ship just as the ship was sinking.
Being the best on the trading side was a little trickier. Bear didn’t have a lot of liquid, so to make the big bets that would feed the Bear, everything had to be leveraged to the gills.
Enter Ralph Cioffi (pronounced Cho-fi). A Bear man through and through. Born in South Burlington, Vt. Running back at Rice Memorial High, St. Michael’s College in Colchester, studied business and bodybuilding, too.
Like everyone else, he was looking to take advantage of the housing boom, but do it better, riskier, more profitable—the new Bear man. So he creates a new type of collateralized debt obligation, CDOs, which are mortgage bonds that are sliced and diced into bundles with differing default risks. They’re called Klio Funding, and they were catnip to the $2 trillion mother lode of money-market accounts. And mortgage bonds have the highest ratings, so they could be leveraged up the wazoo. In some cases, banks like Citigroup and Barclays were giving out loans of 20 bucks to 1. And why not, the housing market is booming, prices are going up. If a guy defaults on his loan, well, he or the bank can sell the house at a profit. The more mortgage bonds Bear buys, the more fees banks make, and the more likely they are to want to make more loans to make more fees.
A guy who worked with him said the thing about Mr. Cioffi, which is symptomatic of the Bear culture, is that he was promoted from a salesman position to a money manager position.
“So what does he do in this new position? He sells, sells, sells his fund on investors, and then leverages the investments, basically raising money very successfully.”
Other investment banks began to buy these bonds. Bear the scrappy pit bull had the white shoes tap-dancing to its tune. Man, that must have felt good.
Then the ass fell out of the housing market. People couldn’t afford their mortgage payments, the ratings of the bonds went down. Investors tried to get out while they could, but the raging pit bull had a problem. The trick about mortgage bonds is that you have to be able to sell them, and when they’re leveraged 20 times over, the price can only fall so much before you lose money. So they lost everyone’s money. Everyone’s.
In March 2007, Mr. Cioffi told a colleague, “I’m sick to my stomach over our performance in March.” And he wasn’t kidding. And because he was a Bear man, he felt more than a little sick. How sick? Bear sick.
JULY 14, 2008 BY PETER W. KAPLAN
NEVER HOLD YOUR BEST STUFF: CLAY FELKER’S NEW YORK WAS POPULATED BY HEROES AND SCOUNDRELS, DUCHESSES AND BEAUTIES
WHEN I THINK OF CLAY FELKER, WHICH is often, it’s at the Peacock Alley in the Waldorf Astoria. I had just come to The Observer in 1994 and I was scared and sweating. Clay offered to meet with me once a week and kick around story
ideas. I used to bring a stack of napkins. They were, by the end of breakfast, black with scrawl: call David Garth, Milton Glaser, Mrs. Astor; water, Moynihan, women and money, Brooklyn as the new Paris, Columbia vs. N.Y.U., water mains, Murdoch, CBS News, power.
There were Felkerian adages:
Never hold your best stuff.
Put something shocking at the top of the page.
Women are the best reporters.
Point of view is everything.
Personal is better.
Never hold your best stuff.
There were instructions about calling writers, some of them too young, some too old, some cronies, some princes, some just right. There were design edicts about tearing the front page into pieces, using more illustration, less photography, bigger type. There were declarations about making the paper more “female,” with more ideas.
“It’s a newspaper of interpretation,” he used to say. Then: “Point of view is everything.”
The last statement is as true as anything I know about the kind of journalism Clay Felker taught a generation of reporters and editors. For him, point of view was everything. It was not only an edict, it was a revolution. Clay came from a generation that was killing the newspaper writer, in which the dominance of The New York Times and the mystical insularity of William Shawn’s New Yorker were so powerful that the blaring, clattering bumptiousness of New York newspapers that had come to dominate the press in the 19th century through the Menckenian 1920s was being squashed into a white-collar, gray-suited blur.
Clay Felker, of Webster Groves, Mo., son of the managing editor of The Sporting News and the women’s editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, of Duke University, of Life, Esquire and the New York Herald Tribune, had a different point of view. Somewhere on this earth and even within this city there are still men and women who remember when Clay Felker was a giant with a delicate smile whose melodic, brassy belt could stop New York cold; there are fewer who remember before that, when he still was a jostling, ambitious, impossible tyro, whose ambition—which he would turn into a journalistic petrochemical—was still burbling: He was the young Life magazine reporter who ended Joe DiMaggio’s reign in center field at Yankee Stadium by proving that his arm was ailing. Clay liked to tell the story of Gary Cooper showing up at a photo shoot near the end of his life and creating the illusion of vitality with an almost indiscernible move of the tip of his cowboy boot.
But nothing Clay did was a tiny tip of a boot. Clay reinvented the American magazine in New York magazine with huge type and big noises, journalistic ambition, the salvaged egg he pulled from the ashes of the collapsed Herald Tribune. Vitality was his game, ambition was his fuel, manliness was his strength. As a younger man, he was a blasting force of nature; as an older man, he became the sweetheart of the Western world, beloved to students, girl reporters and acolytes.
He reinvented the American magazine, not just in New York with New York, but with his noise and chest-bumping assault on the power structures in the city. Clay Felker, who you may not have heard of, but who was the last great magazine editor of the 20th century, was a strange amalgam of exuberance, innocence and pragmatism.
Clay wrote two pieces for this newspaper. He never seemed quite as certain about himself as a writer as he might have, and I’m sorry, for one, that he didn’t complete the autobiography he started. But his Felkerian ideas were as vivid on the page as they were when he belted them. He wrote this soon after Sept. 11, 2001:
“The people who come to New York will continue to be ambitious, looking for more than just work, looking for advancement and the possibility of realizing their dreams. The city thrives on the young, the marginalized and the outcasts—people who live on the edge, driven by necessity to creativity.
“Once more, New York now faces the dangerous opportunity of creative destruction. For people accustomed to living on the edge, out of the terrible tragedy can come the spark of creativity that will give rise to something new: a new belle époque, such as those in the late 40’s and 50’s, and again in the 90’s. It will take a while. But a new city will grow out of the shell of the old…. The ambitious, striving, swarming culture of this wounded place is what will re-create New York City, once again, as the world’s greatest.”
And he wrote this three months later:
“New York’s historic role has been that of an idea factory, where ingenious and capable people, packed together, take raw materials from around the globe and transform them into products and services they sell back to the rest of the world—at higher prices. Whether it’s managing money, designing fashions, solving knotty legal or marketing problems, or translating ephemeral ideas into art and entertainment, New Yorkers thrive by charging high fees for their advice and services.
“This commercial alchemy—the advice and ideas—depends on a critical mass of ambitious and highly creative people, and New York is home to more of them than probably any other metropolis in the world. It may cause outsiders to feel jealous or inferior. But they’ll seek it out anyway, with all its irritating confidence and street smarts.
“That’s what New York does.”
That’s what Clay Felker did.
Hosanna! Obama rides triumphantly to the Democratic convention in Denver
Illustrated by Victor Juhasz
Illustrated by Barry Blitt and Robert Grossman
SEPTEMBER 1, 2008 BY FELIX GILLETTE
NYTV: It’s a Maddow, Maddow World; MSNBC’s fresh-faced host glows under the hot lights in Denver
A FEW MINUTES BEFORE 11 P.M. on Aug. 25, Rachel Maddow was sitting behind a desk in a double-decker, alfresco television studio her television network, MSNBC, had erected near the old train tracks that cut through downtown Denver, from which Ms. Maddow was to punditize to the public from the near environs of the Democratic National Convention.
Just a few years ago, the 35-year-old Stanford University graduate, Bay Area native and Rhodes Scholar hadn’t even been in journalism. But then she gave up academics and activism, and somewhat improbably landed a talk show on the liberal radio network Air America. From there, she parlayed her success into regular appearances as a progressive political pundit on the cable news shows.
And now she was charged with doing what former MSNBC general manager Dan Abrams had failed to do—that is, hang on to Mr. Olbermann’s younger viewers in the crucial hour following MSNBC’s hit show Countdown.
SEPTEMBER 9, 2008 BY JONATHAN BINES
THE NEW YORK WORLD: BLACK COMIC INTRODUCES MCCAIN
What up, RNC!
(cheers)
You white motherfuckers!
(laughter)
This conference so white, Helen Mirren tried to snort it!
(laughter)
Y’all the whitest white people in the history of white people.
Even Barbara Bush sitting here right now going: ‘These are some white motherfuckers.’
(laughter)
Look at this place. I can’t believe this shit! Y’all couldn’t find one single brother?
(shouting)
There is? Where?
(shouting)
Yo, what up, brother! Looks like you the only chocolate chip in the cookie.
(laughter)
You look like a fly in a glass of milk, yo. Swim! Swim for your life!
(laughter)
Alaska in the house!
(Cheers)
Where the baby daddy at?
Where he at?
(crowd noise)
You knocked her up, man?
That’s cool. That’s cool.
(silence)
You know that word ‘abstinence’—you know that mean ‘no fucking,’ right?
(laughter)
I guess they didn’t make that clear at the seminar.
(laughter)
‘So I just use this abstinence, that mean we can fuck all we want, right?’ No!
(laughter)
But you know I feel you, man. I do. Because the fact is, you live in mot
herfucking Alaska! What else is there to do but fuck?
(laughter)
Just fuck! That’s all there is to do! Just fuck!
(laughter)
That’s all Alaska is. Just a bunch of crazy white people fucking!
(sustained laughter and applause)
And you know he got to marry that girl, too. Because…her momma done shot a moose.
(laughter)
’Cause when a girl’s momma shoot a moose, that’s, like, a red flag for me. I take that shit into consideration. I do! It’s like, ‘Yeah, you fine. No doubt. You real fine. And you got a great personality. And you drunk.
But…ain’t your momma the one done shot a moose? I’ll be seeing you later on.’ I practice abstinence with moose-shooting-momma-having bitches.
(laughter)
But it’s time to bring out the white man you’ve all been waiting for. This man is so white, he makes y’all look Mexican.
(laughter)
He spent five long years locked up in a POW camp, and returned a national hero.
(applause)
And fucked every white woman in America.
(sustained applause)
’Cause five years—that makes you horny. And women, they looove to fuck war heroes.
Basically, if you were white and female in 1973, you were fucked by John McCain.
(“USA! USA! USA!”)
And then he married a fine rich white girl whose daddy owned a beer company.
(laughter, applause)
And he wants to be president?
Sheeet, you already got money, beer and pussy! What the fuck you want with the presidency?
Quit while you’re ahead! You’re 72 years old—just drink, fuck, and play golf, you dumb white motherfucker!
(raucous laughter, applause)
Ladies and gentlemen, the next president of the United States of America, John McCain!