Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  The next white limo pulls up, and another tall, young, bosomy blonde steps out, wearing a dress very much like the first woman, tight and sequined but chartreuse. And her escort looks just like the first man, except he has longer sideburns and military decorations pinned to his dinner jacket. A paparazzo shouts, “GI! Over here, GI! This way, GI! This way, Joe!” Has George also read somewhere that the star of Ben-Hur has an identical twin who works as his stunt double? Or is he getting them confused with the identical twin sons of the Gulf War hero who are going to take turns playing the toddler Jesus on the new CBS series Savior next fall? Whoever this couple is, photographers shoot and citizens cheer. But now George detects an edge of amusement in the smiling eyes and hoots of the onlookers, something verging on disrespect, not the pure, grateful, shaky awe he sees on the street and in restaurants when he’s with Angela or the other NARCS stars. Maybe it’s some Vegas vein of embedded irony.

  Out of the next white limo emerges a young black couple, both very pretty. Flashes, applause, a little less applause. Her dress, kelly green, is tight and sequined, cut just like the last two.

  “Yo! Yo!” A fat white photographer in a ratty satin “We Are the World” jacket and an Us magazine baseball cap is shouting at the woman. “Black Barbie! Black Barbie! Shooting for Jet! Over here! Give us a smile over here! Without Ken, please! I need a one-shot, Black Barbie!” The woman obeys, sliding out of her escort’s grip and pivoting toward the photographer, who snaps away.

  As the line of white limos all pull forward a few feet, each waiting its turn to disgorge more Kens and Barbies, George reaches into his jacket for the pink plastic oval ticket marked VIP in seventy-two-point glitter letters and steps through the crowd, past the security men, onto the rainbow-colored conveyer and into BarbieWorld.

  The interior is a three-level shopping center decorated in Camelot mod. The pinks come in even more varying intensities and textures, along with a lot of silvers and golds. Every BarbieWorld employee is under thirty, and both genders have the look of tarted-up Protestant missionaries or very wide-eyed adult film stars. In the Date Zone, one of three restaurants, there’s a (pink) telephone on each table from which diners place orders for deep-fried fat-free cheese sandwiches. The gym offers karaoke aerobic dancing, and life-size “As If” portraits—live, giant-screen video images distorted by means of a very convincing digital effect to reduce apparent body mass by up to 20 percent. The basement Equestrian Center, which a sign says will feature white ponies exclusively, is still under construction. Barbie Home is a large pseudo-apartment where Barbie ostensibly lives (like Santa in his workshop in Macy’s), and where all of the furnishings are for sale. BarbieWorld has what one of the guides describes as four separate “wearables boutiques,” or clothing stores, for girls and women—Barbie Baby, BarbieWear, Maximum Cute (for teenagers), and Madame Barbie (sizes up to 24). Doll clothes for Barbie (and for every friend and hanger-on she has ever had) are available at the Totally Perfect Mall, a warren of seventeen separate “fashion miniboutiques” packed into an acre of floor space.

  There’s a hair salon, two stories high, for adults as well as children, for humans as well as dolls. Up in a second-floor loft area, a male guide sounds like he’s leading a tour at Cape Canaveral or the Supreme Court, describing the BarbieStyle Beauty University as “the world’s first and only fully equipped hair-play mezzanine.” BarbieStyle Beauty University consists largely of several endless counters with scores of Barbies bolted into doll-size leather salon chairs, as well as a dozen real, Barbie- and Stacey-like women, sitting in full-size salon chairs between the counters. Patrons (or “groomer apprentices”) may comb, brush, and style—but not cut or permanently color—the hair of both the dolls and the women. Ordinarily, the hair-play mezzanine will be open only to girls fourteen and under (until the class-action suit on behalf of little boys is filed), but tonight, because of Swank City’s grand opening, adult men are invited to try their hands at combing, brushing, or styling (but not cutting or permanently coloring). George sees the two Wall Street assholes from the elevator waiting in the human hair-play line. They are joined by a third Wall Street asshole, a young black man who says, “Zig! Shepley! Viva Las Vegas, gentlemen!” Each man is drinking a Cosmopolitan, which is the free pink cocktail du jour at BarbieWorld tonight. “¡Excellente!” replies the one who won’t watch NARCS because Angela Janeway is a liberal. Seeing these three doesn’t literally make George ashamed of being a man, a well-to-do heterosexual man who has voted Republican a few times, but it does tip the somewhat delicate balance of George’s Vegas-reveling mood in an unhappy direction.

  The rooftop restaurant is called Barbie’s International After-Hours Penthouse Bistro, but the name aside, it is authentically handsome, actually glamorous.

  “Welcome to the Penthouse, sir,” says a young man with a Spanish accent. “I’m Klaus.”

  On the sound system are Miles Davis and John Coltrane playing “Oleo.” A Willem de Kooning painting (bought for $12 million, a sign says) is suspended in midair by cables over the bar. Un-pink drinks are being served. George orders a Jack Daniel’s, neat, from a European waitress, French or Belgian. He wonders if all the non-American employees are relegated up here, where the theming requires no one to portray Barbie or Ken and so there’s no effect for the foreign accents to ruin. This is the one place in BarbieWorld where the lighting is dim and where the sexual subtext of the Barbie ethos is rather less sub. George didn’t notice from down on the Strip that the dome itself, a hundred feet wide and fifty feet high, is a slightly greenish glass half globe, etched with longitude and latitude lines and the outlines of the land masses of the Northern Hemisphere. Unanchored by work or family to his middle-aged present, he’s sliding once more back to age fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, thrilled speechless, watching Stanley Kubrick (the first-class monochrome serenity of the spaceliner in 2001, the Korova Milk Bar in A Clockwork Orange) and reading Playboy.

  The spherical tip of a silver Barbie’s International After-Hours Penthouse Bistro swizzle stick sticks up from George’s drink, pointing at him. On it are little swizzle-ads for the Working Assets Titanium MasterCard—FROM EACH ACCORDING TO HIS/HER ABILITY, TO EACH ACCORDING TO HIS/HER NEED®—are spelled out in black on one side, LIVE WELL, BUT LIVE GOOD® on the other. Every time a cardholder charges something, each of several dozen leftish causes receives a fraction of a cent. Lizzie ordered Working Assets Gold MasterCards for herself and George. George rarely uses his card, as Lizzie reminds him once a month when she pays the bills. He finds the ostentation embarrassing—money ostentation, as with any gold or silver credit card, plus righteousness ostentation, like illness-specific dinner-jacket lapel ribbons. The show of charity is supposed to sanitize the show of venality, but to George it only makes it worse. He finishes his Jack Daniel’s just as the waitress brings his second.

  Near the spiral staircase tube that leads to the Penthouse from BarbieWorld proper, George notices a small sign that says UNACCOMPANIED CHILDREN ARE WELCOME IN THE PENTHOUSE BEFORE FIVE P.M. THANK YOU! What’s the drinking age in Nevada—twelve? Fourteen on school nights? Then he watches a middle-aged black woman clomp slowly up the tube, followed, sure enough, by a child, a white girl of ten wearing a blue leather Ann Demeulemeester dress. And right behind them, also holding the little girl’s hand, Ben Gould, wearing a tuxedo.

  “Because little kids aren’t really supposed to be here now, honey,” Ben says. “This is the grownup area of BarbieWorld. And also because it’s your bedtime. Watch your step, Sasha! You know, if you were home in New York, it would be nine-forty!”

  “My home is in Connecticut, Daddy.”

  “Look, Sasha! It’s Uncle George!”

  Sasha points. “That’s not Uncle George,” she says, happy for the opportunity to contradict her father. “That man is brown-skinned. And Uncle George lives near the docks, in the stinky fish market in New York City. And he’s not my actual uncle, anyway.”

  Sasha, who was a grim, whiny, demanding chil
d even before Ben and her mother divorced, turns away and walks right up to the bar. Her nanny silently follows.

  “I want a Shirley Temp—wait, what type of ginger ale do you use?” she asks the bartender.

  The bartender glances toward Ben and winks. “Shasta, madam,” he says. His accent is Australian.

  “Then I’ll just have a Pellegrino. But with four cherries in it.” She rejoins her father, who is now at George’s table. Her nanny remains one pace behind.

  “See, Uncle George just has a tan, honey,” Ben tells his daughter. “Sorry we’re late. Sasha was cleaning out some SKUs downstairs. Can you say hello to Uncle George?”

  Sasha, looking out at the lasers, says nothing.

  “Hello, Sasha!” George says. “How’s school?”

  “I’m the second smartest in my class.”

  “Best little Sasha in the whole world,” Ben says.

  Ignoring her father’s boilerplate compliment, she says to George, “My school is lots nicer than the real Spence.” Sasha’s mother moved last summer from East Seventy-eighth Street to Connecticut, and enrolled Sasha in Spence/Greenwich, which is a new affiliate of the Manhattan private school—“along the lines of the Guggenheim in Bilbao,” the parents and administrators like to say. Like the Guggenheim, the Greenwich parents even paid for a famous architect, Robert A. M. Stern, to design the school. “It has an indoor velodrome,” says the girl, “an art gallery, and a conflict-resolution lab, with a doctor.” George knows about the gallery, since the Times just reviewed its Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibit.

  “Do you like BarbieWorld?” Uncle George asks.

  She screws up her mouth and sighs. “It’s not like I imagined it. I thought it up. It was supposed to be like a whole city. This is just a mall. And the Ken and Barbie people look cheap. Why don’t those lasers move, Daddy? I want them to make pictures in the sky.”

  “The people who run the airport said no, sweetheart.”

  “They should be fired.”

  “That isn’t nice, Sasha,” Ben says. “You’re tired, aren’t you, pumpkin? Kiss Daddy good night. You and I have a very early flight to catch tomorrow morning.”

  “But it’s our plane,” Sasha says. “We don’t have to catch it. We can get on it anytime we want. The pilot works for you.”

  “Night-night. Etta, we’ll have breakfast at about eight-thirty tomorrow. All right? Thanks.”

  As the little girl leads her handler to the spiral staircase, she says, not looking back, “The croissants at the hotel suck.”

  Ben leans toward George with an excited grin. “Sick, isn’t it?” George knows he means BarbieWorld. “Wait until you see the show. A documentary crew flew in to film it for the Whitney! The goddamn Whitney Museum of American Art! How great is that?”

  “Sasha didn’t make you sign an NDA?” George says. George didn’t know what NDA meant the first time he was handed one, a year ago, but since then he has signed a nondisclosure agreement every other month. Journalists are supposed to disclose; grownups, businesspeople—players—are not.

  “Hey! No joke, man. Her mother’s lawyer called and wanted to negotiate a lifetime royalty from this place for Sasha. A percentage of gross! I told him, look, asshole, I’m just a limited partner, and it was not really her idea—her dolls gave me the idea—but I’m not about to negotiate against my kid. She can have my entire interest in the thing, which is jack, like five million, today.” He pauses. “The daily implosion was her idea.” Every evening in the atrium of the hotel 1960, a large-scale model of the hotel itself will be “demolished” with internal explosive devices.

  “You know, you look like a producer! With that tan you could almost pass for a Jew! And without that drink. Your wife says hello, speaking of the tribe. We just got off the phone about this new Microsoft offer. I told her to hold out. If she’s bamboozled those pricks into paying five-point-five, she can get them to pay ten. Seven-five, anyway. But she sounded like she’s already broken out the champagne.”

  George smiles and nods with a generic manly meaningfulness, Que sera, sera, not wanting to let Ben know that he knows nothing about any new Microsoft offer. He holds up the Working Assets swizzle stick to change the subject. “Now this is sick. Your idea?”

  “My idea was to give a percentage of the net directly to NOW and NARAL and a bunch of women’s groups. Barbie paying feminist reparations. It became this,” he says, flicking the swizzle stick with an index finger, “the pussies, because this way the protection money is spread around to so many different groups it’s like we’re not confessing any specific wrongdoing.” He shakes his head and says, unsmiling, “It’s a joke.”

  George watches the three Wall Street assholes trot up the stairs. As they get to the top and head toward the double-wide express elevator down to Swank City, the black Wall Street asshole is holding up a hand for one of his white buddies to sniff.

  “So, all these Wall Street assholes—”

  “Hey! You can’t use that phrase,” Ben says. “It’s like if I said ‘nigger.’ ”

  “So, are all these Wall Street assholes you invited actually friends of yours?”

  “Are you nuts? They’re guys I trade with, guys I do business with, sell-side guys. I knew this would be exactly the sort of thing they’d lap up. No, I’ve never set eyes on a lot of these guys before. Even though I may talk to them on the phone every week. But ‘friends’? I haven’t made a new friend in ten years. Besides, most of them probably are assholes.”

  In show business, George thinks, people you deal with a few times a year are, almost by definition, your friends. If you do business with them every week, they would automatically be your very close friends.

  “Come on,” Ben says, jumping up, “get another drink, we’ve got a couple of minutes before the show starts. You’ve got to come see the casino.”

  Sinatra is singing “Witchcraft” over the speaker in the elevator.

  An opening elevator door has never seemed more like curtains parting at the beginning of a play. And given the four steps down into the casino, in the moment before he and Ben make their entrance into the happy, snappy swarm, George has the peculiar mirror-image sensation of being onstage himself.

  “Good evening, Mr. Gould!” says a good-looking young man far darker than any of the Kens over in BarbieWorld. He has Pat Riley hair and an iridescent green dinner jacket. “Welcome to Swank City, sirs.”

  The place is a glamorized dream version of a Vegas casino of forty years ago, not a literal reproduction, which, as Ben says, people today would find cramped and crummy. “That’s why the idiots at ITT just spent two hundred million dollars wreck-ovating the old Desert Inn,” Ben says. Swank City seems old, but the only genuinely old things in the room, according to Jackie, their guide, are two dozen chrome-and-yellow-enamel slot machines—vintage Bally Money Honeys and Watling Roll-A-Tops. “Jackie,” Ben whispers to George, “is his nom de casino.”

  “How can you afford to have so few slot machines?” George asks Ben. “Isn’t that how most casinos make all their money?”

  “You haven’t been down to the basement!”

  “No, the theater, you mean?” George says.

  “On the other side of the firewall from the J and B Theater-in-the-Round,” Jackie explains, “right underneath the hotel 1960, that’s the Rec Room. The Rec Room has distinct period theming elements, a separate entrance, and contains eleven thousand slot machines—”

  “Twelve acres, nothing but people playing slots,” Ben says. “It’s a shame Diane Arbus is dead. You should take a look. No, you shouldn’t, actually.”

  “—with extremely easy access for the handicapped and semihandi-capped,” Jackie continues, gesturing by way of counterexample at all the thickly carpeted steps and platforms here in sumptuous Swank City. “And in the Rec Room we offer free cocktails for AARP members and their companions.” He winks. In other words, George understands, the dreary RV seniors, all the people old enough actually to remember the era being simulat
ed here, are sluiced away, incentivized with giveaway liquor to stay out of sight to pump quarters into nonvintage video slot machines. Here in “the Swank,” as Jackie calls it, the scattered elderly are almost all well dressed or Runyonesque, classy or “classy”—no sweatshirts or New Balances. The idea behind Swank City is not only to evoke the boom-boom Frank and Dean ideal, to be Planet Rat Pack, but also to be the cool superpremium boutique casino, the high-butterfat, high-thread-count casino, the Barneys, the Miramax, the Häagen-Dazs gambling joint. The hotel 1960 has only 720 guest rooms—a quaint, tiny inn by Vegas standards. The lighting in the casino is more variegated than in other places, dramatically unhomogenized, with shadowy zones and hot spots, and the waitresses, dressed in sleeveless, mid-calf satin dresses, are prettier. Because only a tiny fraction of the gamblers who come to the Swank are expected to smoke cigarettes, the designers have equipped the HVAC ducts with devices called cracked-oil foggers that pump in stage smoke near the ceiling to ensure 1960 verisimilitude—“noir without the carcinogens,” as Ben says. The loudspeakers sweeten the ambient sound of the room with recorded tracks of cocktail-party crowds, laughter, and the occasional winner’s shriek or growl, mixed and adjusted continuously to supplement the spontaneous live human sounds.

  As George watches a group of rambunctious, crew-cut young men in white shirts, dark suits, and skinny black ties playing craps—“Give it to Daddy!” the shooter shouts—two women wearing capri pants, one blond and one redheaded, pass by a few feet in front of George and Ben. The one not wearing dark glasses, who’s evidently impersonating Tuesday Weld or Angie Dickinson (as opposed to her partner’s Juliet Prowse or Shirley MacLaine), glances hard at George. George, trying to be a good sport, smiles.