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

by The New York Observer

  He then sat in Mr. Leno’s chair and interviewed Seinfeld’s Jason Alexander and actress Mimi Rogers. He had been giving prep cards for the two actors. Ms. Rogers started to tell Mr. O’Brien how hard it was to be a model. He listened politely for a few seconds, then said, “Hey, wait a minute. Being a model is not a hard job. Turning a crank in a factory, now that’s a hard job!”

  Mr. O’Brien’s contract with The Simpsons runs through November, but Gracie Films, the company that produces the show, has been very supportive of his career move, according to a source at the show. During the weeks between the audition and the announcement, observers were amazed to see Mr. O’Brien’s Ford Taurus still parked each day in the Fox lot. “The people he was negotiating with were shocked to find out he’s still at work, writing Simpsons episodes,” Mr. Daniels said. “They expected him to be in his apartment, chewing his nails.”

  On April 18, Mr. O’Brien celebrated his 30th birthday with a few friends. They ate chicken wings in his sparsely furnished apartment, near the old ICM building in Beverly Hills. Mr. O’Brien said he worried that Mr. Shandling might drag out negotiations. Then he amused his friends with stories about the model who lives downstairs from him, who thinks he is a nerd. Someone remembered a cartoon Mr. O’Brien had drawn 10 years ago for the Lampoon. In the cartoon, a pharaoh is looking out over the pyramids that have just been built in his honor. “I like it,” the pharaoh is saying, “I really like it.”

  * * *

  “We all knew he was the funniest person we had ever met in person,” said Greg Daniels, a Simpsons writer. “Our big question was: Can he dunk it when the lights are on?”

  * * *

  SEPTEMBER 20, 1993 BY A.D COLEMAN

  PHOTOGRAPHY: A Kiss is Just a Kiss? Doisneau le Poseur

  A CURIOUS AND (FOR ME) REGRETTABLE CHANGE HAS OVERTAKEN my relationship to Robert Doisneau’s often marvelous photographs of Parisian life: I’ve stopped believing them.

  Recent events surrounding Mr. Doisneau’s images, “Le Baiser de l’Hôtelde Ville” (“Kiss by the Hotel de Ville”), made in Paris 1950, suggests that it is necessary to discard one analytical strategy and adopt another in regard to this photograph—and by implication, to large chunks of the œuvre of Mr. Doisneau, who is now 81.

  After seeing a magazine reproduction of the famous photograph in 1988, Denise and Jean-Louis Lavergne—now in their 60’s—maintained that they were the young lovers immortalized in this now internationally iconic image, and insisted that they were entitled to share in the profits.

  The reason they lost the case was not just that they’d failed to meet the burden of proof. The photographer’s representatives produced irrefutable evidence—in the form of contact sheets showing the couple in the photograph at different locations around the city, and contracts—proving that this photograph was part of a series commissioned by Life magazine, and that Mr. Doisneau had hired his subjects (who were definitely not the Lavergnes) to play roles in this staged tableau.

  A statement issued on Mr. Doisneau’s behalf makes the point that while the photographer is known for his candid photographic style, he has “never claimed that he does not use models.” This is, to say the least, disingenuous; the 1950 issue of Life in which the image first appeared—as part of a spread of Doisneau pictures of kissing couples—included text that described them all as “unposed pictures,” an assertion the photographer never repudiated.

  SEPTEMBER 20, 1993 BY CANDACE BUSHNELL

  WALLFLOWERISH PRINCE OF CONDÉ NAST IS BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD’S OWN MENCKEN

  JAMES TRUMAN WAS HOLDING a gift-wrapped sexual device in his hand.

  Seconds earlier, on the rooftop party deck at the downtown offices of Details, Mr. Truman, the magazine’s editor in chief, had been asked to present the device to the managing editor. She was getting married in three days. Mr. Truman, who has the wiry haunted looks of a 60’s rock star, approached the device with a gangly sort of trepidation, then picked it up gingerly between thumb and forefinger. An expression of horror, amusement and confusion crossed his face. Without missing a beat, he turned the device on through the wrapping. “One should never give gifts without the batteries,” he said.

  When the bride-to-be gushed her appreciation for the presents—which in addition to the sexual device included antique mother-of-pearl-handled fish forks—Mr. Truman gave his trademark Oriental bow. It is a gesture that seems designed to smooth over those awkward moments when a kiss on the cheek would be too familiar and a handshake too cold. Mr. Truman has his explanation for the bow: “I get very embarrassed when people are nice to me,” he said.

  These days a lot of people are being very nice to James Truman. This was not the case three years ago when the mop-topped Englishman presided over the complete deconstruction and reconstitution of Details. Founded in 1982 as a hiply deadpan black-and-white guide to downtown club life, the magazine was purchased by S.I. Newhouse’s Condé Nast Publications in 1988 with the aim of polishing it into a national twenty-something men’s fashion glossy, with politics and culture subsumed under style. Suddenly, there were articles on basketball sneakers and rave parties, feature stories on River Phoenix and Vanessa Williams; teen sex surveys! It was MTV on paper. Wayne-and-Garth’s and Beavis-and-Butt-head’s favorite magazine. Readers of the old Details hated it.

  Illustrated by Barry Blitt

  But with its 268-page September issue, Details is one of the hot magazines of the year, with circulation up from 355,000 to 455,000 this year and ad pages climbing steadily. Not yet 40, Mr. Truman is the young prince—complete with modified pageboy—in the decidedly hierarchical court of Condé Nast. “James invented the magazine from inside his head,” said Mr. Newhouse, who is said to dote on Details.

  Mr. Truman’s editing style is easygoing. “I learned at The Face that the editor is not an all-powerful figure. I’ve always found that people’s own standards are higher than any standards you can impose on them. If they’re not, you don’t want them around you anyway,” Mr. Truman said.

  For all his boyish elusiveness, Mr. Truman and Details now share a history. He’s even starting to reminisce. “In the third issue, we ran an article on penises,” said Mr. Truman with a fond grin. “It seemed like a unifying characteristic of our readers. Advertisers thought it was disgusting that we even acknowledged the existence of penises.”

  Heh heh heh heh. Cool.

  OCTOBER 18, 1993 BY TERRY GOLWAY

  Biker, Screenwriter, Club Crawler…Add Top Finance Aide to O’ Donnell’s C.V.

  LAWRENCE O’DONNELL JR. SHOWED UP ON TIME FOR HIS 8:15 P.M. appointment in a fashionable Capitol Hill restaurant, an extraordinary achievement in a city of very important people who always seem to have one more call to make and one more fax to receive before leaving their offices. Right away, Mr. O’Donnell, who is the staff director of the Senate Finance Committee, made clear that in Washington, he is a little different.

  But then there are other ways to reach that conclusion. After all, he did roar up to the restaurant aboard a huge Harley-Davidson.

  “Yes, I’m part of the cult,” he said, stripping off his black leatherbiker’s jacket, his helmet gripped in his left hand. “I go to Harley-Davidson dealers the way other people go to museums.” His face, unlined, with a prominent chin, sports a 5 o’clock (in the morning) shadow. Just then, a limousine-load of important people in the uniform of imperial Washington went by, sizing up Mr. O’Donnell with puzzled looks.

  “This is behaviorally the most conservative city in America,” explained Mr. O’Donnell, switching effortlessly from biker mode to sociologist mode. “There is a uniform code of dress and a uniform code of behavior and a uniform code of ambition. And it is the uniform code of ambition that enforces the other two.”

  Mr. O’Donnell, however, seems to revel in breaking the code. As staff director, under its chairman, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, of the Finance Committee—the institutional gatekeeper on matters relating to funding and taxation, which is to say,
all matters—Mr. O’Donnell ordinarily would be among the keepers of the code. Instead, he is that most uncommon of species, a free spirit adept in the ways of power.

  MAY 10, 1993 BY JOHN HEILPERN

  CRITIC AT LARGE: ANGELS IN AMERICA: INDEED, THE MILLENNIUM APPROACHES

  THERE CAN BE NO DOUBT THAT TONY KUSHNER’S Angel’s in America is as great a play as you have heard. Part one, titled Millennium Approaches, which has just opened at the Walter Kerr, is triumphant—the finest drama of our time, speaking to us of a murderous era as no other play within memory.

  Its scope and daring, fully realized in George C. Wolfe’s superb production, sends us reeling from the theater, convinced we must have witnessed some kind of miracle. As with all great stories, it evokes these three compelling words: What happens next? At the end of three and a half hours—and 30 mesmerizing scenes—I’m certain I was far from alone in thinking, “Tell us what happens next! Bring on part two!” The angel-messenger has arrived, crashing through space and closing part one. That’s some end, some fantastic beginning.

  Heralding what? Perhaps hope, or salvation, in this contemporary epic cradled in sorrow. Yet the story within Mr. Kushner’s vast apocalyptic canvas is intimate (and often wildly funny). It is ultimately mind-bending. There is one gay couple: a young Jewish self-loathing liberal and courthouse word processor who deserts his AIDS-stricken WASP lover. There is a married Mormon couple: A Republican lawyer and closet homosexual, working in the same courthouse, who deserts his unloved, hallucinating wife. And there’s Roy Cohn, Saint of the Right or Antichrist. From that small, unexpected base, Mr. Kushner weaves his glorious tapestry of an entire 1980’s era and the collapse of a moral universe.

  His specific message is a call to arms to the homosexual community in the AIDS era to march out of the ghettoized closet, as the rabbi in the opening scene reminds us of the heroic journey of the persecuted 19th-century Jews from the ghettos and shetls of Europe to the Promised Land of America. The spectral embodiment of Roy Cohn, mythical witch-hunter and closet homosexual dying of AIDS, offers pragmatic guidance to his Prodigal Son, the repressed Mormon lawyer. “Was it legal?” he says of fixing “that timid Yid nebbish on the bench” during the Rosenberg trial. “Fuck legal. Am I a nice man? Fuck nice. You want to be nice or you want to be effective?”

  Angels in America is subtitled A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, though I didn’t quite see it that way. It is memorably about heartlessness and responsibility during the Reagan years and beyond. Its supreme achievement is its portrait of America Lost, perhaps to be regained. In its richness and pain—“Children of the new morning, criminal minds. Selfish and greedy and loveless and blind. Reagan’s children”—I saw Millennium Approaches more as a modern morality play, with a debt to the guilt, justice and iconography of the Old Testament rather than the New. It is, among other things, about Good and Evil, the disintegration of tolerance and cities and dreams. It asks: Where is God? And yearns for an answer, a prophet, a messiah or salvation. It is, in its searing essentials, about love.

  Mr. Kushner is too witty to be preachy. To the contrary, this near-feverish outpouring of visions and ideals is rooted in an episodic economy of means and a wonderful theatricality. For some time, possibly a lifetime, I have been searching in vain for the new American drama of imaginative ideas, a form of magic realism transcending the bourgeois or the naturalism of movies. Angels in America is that landmark drama. It is, on the one hand, painfully concrete; on the other hand, it delights in the theater of magical images. The playwright is good-humored; “Very Steven Spielberg,” says the dying Prior Walter, an esthete, as the world splits open before his eyes (and ours.)

  This writer of plays is therefore justifiably playful. The ambitious narrative sweep takes us seamlessly from Manhattan to Antarctica. You cannot second-guess it for a moment. At the same time, the sheer pleasure Mr. Kushner takes in theater itself empowers him to establish his own conventions and take us anywhere he wishes. It seems reasonable, and irresistible, when, for example, the 13th- and 17th-century British relatives of Prior Walter visit his deathbed for a chat. Those two cheerful angel’s heralds, ghostly survivors of historic plagues, are a theatrical riot. So the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg appears to the dying Roy Cohn to say, “The shit’s really hit the fan, huh, Roy?” Actors double in virtuoso walk-on parts; actresses play male roles, not always, let it be said, with equal success. But the delight of a true ensemble is created and with it, another dimension, a timeless troupe of Traveling Players.

  I could have sworn that there were 15 or so actors in the cast. In fact, there are eight. At least four of the performances scale the heights. The reptilian bravura of Ron Liebman as Roy Cohn gets as near to going over the top as all the great bravura performances must. Is this the role of his career? It would seem brilliantly so (though watch for his brief reincarnation during the action as a campy Tartuffe). Stephen Spinella’s Prior is so transcendentally moving that it is impossible to imagine anyone else playing the role or equaling his mysterious saintly aura. Joe Mantello as Louis, lover of Prior and self-loathing posturing intellectual in search of easy absolution, is exactly right. Marcia Gay Harden as Harper, unloved Mormon in search of escape and a fantasy New World, was first cautious, I felt, in capturing the lyrical (her comic flair is beyond question), but she is a wonderful actress. David Marshall Grant, as her Mormon husband in torture rectitude—again, terrific. So, too, the immensely gifted Jeffrey Wright as Belize, nurse, ex-drag queen and conscience, a role that could easily spill over into high camp, but doesn’t.

  That we have an ensemble as fine as this, and a production as great as this, is due to the genius of director George Wolfe and the spare, emblematic poetry of his design team (Robin Wagner, Jules Fisher and Toni-Leslie James). In one astonishing scene, Mr. Wolfe frees the stage for a quartet of characters, the gay couple and the Mormon couple. They are separate, emotionally explosive scenes happening simultaneously, like a split-movie screen. They are about the pain and death of love; both scenes, both worlds, become spellbindingly one. At times, it is just incredible what we see at work and at play here.

  I have run out of space and superlatives. Part one of Tony Kushner’s Angel’s in America has arrived! Bring on part two! Save us! Though in Millennium Approaches, I have already seen the miraculous.

  DECEMBER 6, 1993 BY JOHN HEILPERN

  THE ANGEL HAS LANDED: PERESTROIKA HITS MARK

  IN THE HISTORY OF BLIND DATES, WE haven’t looked forward to anything with quite so much nervous anticipation as part two of Tony Kushner’s Angel’s in America.

  But the angel that crashed through the ceiling at the close of part one turns out not to be the fantasy redeemer of our dreams. Mr. Kushner’s fabulous three-and-a-half-hour Perestroika is no sweet fable. It is more uncompromisingly realistic than that, more ambitious than part one, denser, furious (and therefore funnier), sprawling, flawed, more challenging, a feverishly imaginative achievement. In theater terms, George C. Wolfe’s production exists almost literally on another planet. In its thrilling sweep and ambition and chaos, Angels in America remains the landmark drama of our time.

  “Change! Change!” cries the old Bolshevik, blind prophet of the prologue at the dawn of the new age of perestroika, of the exploding of history and the death of all old orders, Reaganism included. Give the old Bolshevik warrior a new theory and system, and he’ll be there at the barricades! Apocalypse or paradise? Doom or change in the AIDS era? Mr. Kushner’s answer is that there is no perfect answer—no system, no book of divine revelation, no God, no savior-angels. In the turmoil, there is Truth, if you will, and the hope that humanity can change, confronting the wreckage and lies of our American lives. “Stop!” the angel seems to be saying on orders from above. “Stop, and look around you.”

  Yet the more painful the message, the funnier Mr. Kushner becomes. Has there ever been a more mesmerizing comic and ultimately pathetic figure than Ron Leibman’s prince of darkness, Roy Cohn? Now dying of AIDS in a Manh
attan hospital, cared for by the ex-drag queen Belize (Jeffrey Wright, terrific again), dosed with AZT, symbol of illicit power and money, Mr. Liebman’s monumental monster creation can even touch our sympathy. “Hold!” he screams to approaching death, as if pushing the button on his third arm, which is his phone—his wire to the outside world, as his deathbed tangle of tubes is his lifeline. Cohn and that leftish intellectual weasel, Louis (Joe Mantello), are the only characters in part two who do not grow and change. We cannot say, then, that Mr. Kushner is “unfair” to both the left and the right. But for me, the whining, overtalking wimp Louis is a case of a dramatic character who has outstayed his welcome. Only once does he speak with blazing conviction. Breaking with his new lover, the Republican Mormon lawyer Joe (David Marshall Grant), he pleads to passionate effect that gays are not a legal technicality, but equal citizens. (And for God’s sake, think and do the right thing.)

  How glad we are when Joe’s wife and Valium fantasist, Harper, finally leaves him in the dust, hopefully to get her ill-fated life in shape. Marcia Gay Harden has grown wonderfully as Harper and gives another superb performance—as does Kathleen Chalfant playing, among other roles, the Mormon Hannah Pitt, a sensible, generous mother, it turns out, and grace note of the play. The extraordinary Stephen Spinella could not be finer as the dying Prior. He’s wickedly comic. “The stiffening of your penis is of no consequence,” the angel tells Prior, who’s at the point of orgasmic ecstasy. “Well, maybe not to you,” he replies. At the same time, Mr. Spinella brings to his character a heroic dimension, taking the ravaged Prior from terrible fear, and even cowardice, to graceful understanding and courage, in the time he has left on earth.