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

by The New York Observer

  The piece had been rerun in the magazine’s “The New Yorker Goes to the Movies” issue, which was being celebrated on that night. The magazine’s Los Angeles bureau editor, Caroline Graham, suddenly appeared with a video camera and captured the reunion of writer and subject. Standing just out of the frame, Lassie’s trainer commanded the dog to sit, raise a paw and speak.

  Would that all celebrities were so easily persuaded! (Or were, at least, so mindful of their handlers’ instructions!) Such were the feelings of editors and publicists at The New Yorker—and also at Vanity Fair, which sponsored an Oscar-night party at Morton’s in West Hollywood—as both of the Condé Nast publications competed to assemble the ultimate Hollywood party of this year’s Academy Award season. For weeks, The New Yorker’s Tina Brown, Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter, and their staffs had been working the phones with publicists and agents, trying to pull together party lists glittering enough to fill the gap left by the death of the high priest of Oscar pomp, Irving Paul (Swifty) Lazar. For some three decades, until he died late last year, Lazar had hosted Hollywood’s indisputably A-list Oscar-night bash, in recent years at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago restaurant.

  The hierarchy needed Swifty on Oscar night to concentrate on Hollywood’s power crowd and play bad cop when, for example, the governor wanted to bring bodyguards. (He wasn’t permitted to, but Madonna was.) Lazar’s passing had left a void, and the hierarchy-happy top editors in S. I. Newhouse Jr.’s magazine empire, among others, seem to be raring to fill it.

  APRIL 24, 1994 BY LISA GUBERNICK

  DE KOONING’S UPTOWN UPSTART ART DEALER SLOUCHES TOWARD SUCCESS DESPITE SLUMP

  IT WAS 30 MINUTES INTO HIS gallery’s second exhibition of the year and already he wanted out. “I feel like a sitting duck,” he said, hands clasped together at his waist, head tilted to one side.

  These are times that call for a certain anxiety. In the three years since Mr. Marks opened his Madison Avenue art gallery, the market for contemporary art has been nothing short of disastrous. Prices at auction are a fraction of what they once were, prices at private sales often worse. Scores of galleries have shut their doors. Where the 80’s called for a certain flash and sinew, the 90’s are soft-spoken, restrained. Matthew Marks, retiring, his carriage the fleshy stoop of someone used to weighing considerably more than he currently does, is a man of the 90’s.

  APRIL 24, 1994 BY PETER STEVENSON

  A MOODY 70’S SCION GOES HOME

  RICK MOODY SAT UP IN THE PASSENGER seat of a rented Dodge sedan, in nervous anticipation of his first trip in years to the monied ur-WASP town that lies at the core of his new novel and of his own half-conquered anxieties.

  Besides rereading Mr. Updike, the other thing Rick Moody did before writing The Ice Storm was take a long drive with his father. “I figured the drive would be a way to have a heart-to-heart about what I was planning to write,” he said.

  The elder Mr. Moody, now an investment consultant in Manhattan, was reticent about the idea of his son writing a novel about New Canaan in the early 1970’s.

  “Why do you want to write about all of that?” he asked.

  “It’s my life,” said Rick.

  “No, it’s not,” said his father. “It’s my life.”

  “And that,” said Mr. Moody, “was the end of the conversation.”

  MAY 30, 1994 BY D. T. MAX

  Gourmet Garage, Eli Zabar’s Food Fight Proves Cherimoyas, Ciabatta Don’t Mix

  THE UNEASY RETAILING EMBRACE BETWEEN ELI ZABAR, THE two-fisted proprietor of the pricey 20-year-old Madison Avenue restaurant E.A.T., and the three partners of the 1 1/2-year-old discount Soho vegetable emporium Gourmet Garage is officially over, bringing to an end what one customer characterized as “a six-month war of attrition between chicken pot pies and mesclun salad.” The two organizations will disentangle their merchandise and fixtures by June 1, when the cavernous warehouse store they shared near York Avenue on East 91st Street, whose exact name has always remained something of a mystery, will officially become Mr. Zabar’s to stock as he pleases under the name Eli’s Vinegar Factory.

  It will cost Mr. Zabar, who bought the building from a condiment maker late last year with an eye to collaborating with Gourmet Garage, roughly $600,000 to get out of his relationship with the produce company, most of whose profits come from filling the greenery needs of fine restaurants. He characterized the payment as a voluntary gesture on a handshake deal in the hopes everyone would walk away happy.

  Now that the marriage is over, both sides are emphasizing their warm feelings: Mr. Zabar now promises to continue to stock mostly Gourmet Garage produce at East 91st Street, where he will soon open a restaurant on the second story. He has already installed a new varnished floor. Mr. Arons and his partners are scouting for large spaces in the Sutton Place area and the Upper West Side, and have big plans to move their crowded wholesale and retail operations from Wooster Street to a 10,000-square-foot space nearby, which will include a two-level café and perhaps even prepared foods, and pots and pans, in direct competition with nearby Dean & DeLuca. “The great thing about restaurants,” said Mr. Arons, sounding a lot like Mr. Zabar, whose bread he said he will stock exclusively, “is they’re c.o.d.”

  JULY 11, 1994 BY RALPH GARDNER JR

  THE OBSERVATORY: THE PRESCHOOL GROVEL

  ON A RAINY MORNING in May, almost 200 smartly dressed mothers and four or five dads filled the Marymount School’s auditorium on the Upper East Side for a symposium on how to get their toddlers into preschool. Once called nursery schools and considered optional, preschools, as they are known, are now obligatory steps in the cutthroat competition to get into the right kindergarten, and from there, the best elementary schools, prep schools and colleges. These parents were hoping their children might win places in the city’s premier preschools a year and a half later, in the fall of 1995. Some of the children were not yet 2 years old. Nevertheless, the parents sat in respectful silence, jotting down notes in their Filofaxes, as the heads of four preschools talked about application deadlines, age requirements, and tried to quash the park bench rumors about how arbitrary and elitist the admissions process is. “There’s this huge Upper East Side mentality that you’ve got to get into the right private school, and the right private college,” explained one mom. “Most of us think it’s bullshit, but you get caught up in it. You just know everyone is making the phone calls, so you say, ‘Oh my God, I better do this, too.’”

  Getting into elite preschools such as the All Souls School, the Episcopal School and the 92nd Street Y Nursery School, on the East Side, and at the Montessori School, on the West Side, is tougher than getting into Harvard, Princeton or Cal Tech—much tougher. Even the cream of the Ivy League schools has admission-rejection ratios of 1 to 5, or 1 to 6, but the odds at these preschools can be three or four times as bad. At All Souls, for example, 550 hopeful families telephoned for applications in the first four days after Labor Day last year. The school conducted a lottery where 130 lucky names were plucked out of a hat and sent applications. Of those, only 30 were accepted.

  Often, more than half the available spots are claimed by younger siblings of children who already attend, by kids whose families belong to the churches and synagogues many preschools are affiliated with, and by legacies, children whose parents attended the preschool themselves. “People are really thinking of themselves as graduates of preschools,” observed Robert Friedman, the president of New Line Television and an Episcopal School father.

  There are many criteria to consider when deciding where to apply, including the preschool’s educational philosophy. One mom said the staff at her son’s pre-preschool (infant academies that teach everything from tumbling to French) persuaded her to send her child to the Temple Emanu-El Nursery School and Kindergarten instead of All Souls because it was “more academic.” “They have all these specialty teachers,” she explained. “There’s a cooking teacher, a gym teacher, a nature teacher. You kind of got the feeling that it was enough that
[All Souls] was a nice place.”

  Location is also key for anyone who had to shlep a howling 3-year-old to school at the crack of dawn with the wind chill at 40 below. But because you live around the corner from your favorite preschool is no guarantee your child will get in. One Park Avenue mother phoned the 92nd Street Y the day after Labor Day—and got a recorded message asking her to call back the day after Labor Day. When she finally got through, all the applications had been taken. “I’ve lived in this neighborhood for 20 years,” she said. “Who are these applications going to?”

  “There’s nothing more difficult for powerful, achieving parents than to be in a situation they feel they have no control over,” Jean Mandelbaum, the director of All Souls School, explained.

  “I heard somebody describe it as the death of the perfect child,” Nancy Shulman said.

  JANUARY 10, 1994 BY PHILIP WEISS

  THE OBSERVATORY: LET THEM EAT CAKE

  THE FOOD STARTED COMING BACK DOWN TO THE Plaza kitchen from Donald Trump’s wedding at 11:30 p.m., and it kept coming for the next hour and a half. The guests had gotten to their dinner late, and all in all had not eaten too much of it.

  First to arrive were the racks of lamb. Scores and scores of them rested daintily on metal trays, and the trays were set into tall file-cabinet-like warmers with Sterno going in the bottom. Robert Crawford lifted the trays out and put them on a steel table. The rib tips of the racks poked up waxily and he used them as handles to drop them into the crimped-aluminum food trays he pulled from a cardboard box.

  A big, soft-spoken man of 46, Mr. Crawford had been making pickups all night for City Harvest, a nonprofit organization that takes leftover food from restaurants and parties and brings it to the poor. December is a big month for City Harvest’s two constituencies. The Plaza had called City Harvest the afternoon of the Trump wedding. Even hours before Donald Trump and Marla Maples exchanged vows, it was a certainty that there would be too much food.

  Mr. Crawford had come into the Plaza at 11 p.m., but it had taken him 30 minutes to walk to the gymnasium-size kitchens, past the elaborate security, the guards wearing earpieces, the early leavers in furs and tuxedos, the press with their cameras. Mr. Crawford shouldered two cardboard boxes and wore a dark green coverall reading City Harvest. He’s created a minor incident by walking through the Plaza’s Edwardian Room. Guests had looked up from candlelit tables. The maitre d’hotel made no effort to disguise his horror.

  “Excuse me, sir, but if you would kindly not walk through the public areas,” he said.

  Mr. Crawford had arrived at the great back stage of the wedding as the fete was winding down. Waiters in tails sank wearily against food trucks. Bottles of half-finished Cristal Champagne sat in a big bucket of melting ice. An armful of long-stemmed white roses lay crushed on the streaked tile floor.

  Now it was midnight and food cascaded back to the kitchen. The roasted baby winter vegetables were arranged artistically, the carrots in a spray at the center bedded on baby squashes, translucent onions and eggplants the size of a thumb. The salmon had begun retruning, tray after tray of it. Heart-shaped steaks, grilled perfectly, covered with a beurre blanc morel mushroom sauce that was no longer fresh. Shrimp in a green curry sauce. Sliced duck breast, a couple of silver trays of that, too. Several whole-roasted turkey breasts speckled with coriander and rosemary. Fluffy beds of white rice.

  And still there was more. Rolled pieces of lox on a silver fish-headed tray. Ziti in marinara with zucchini. Vegetable pate in pretty layers of green, beige and brown. Lobster tail cut into one-inch rounds, a whole silver platter of it barely disturbed by Mr. Trump’s friends. Into the aluminum vat it tumbled, over curried shrimp.

  At 1 a.m. the presentation dishes, the ones no one was meant to eat, made their appearance. A giant whole red snapper standing up on its belly and encased in shiny gelatin, ringed by shiny crawfish. A 10-pound lobster, also varnished in gelatin. Baskets of asparagus tips with the same treatment. White wax figures of dolphins, horse’s heads and owls.

  There was so much food, and so little of it apparently eaten, that the feeling of waste was almost nauseating. Hours before the Plaza chefs had labored over the food, they had created trompe l’oeil checkerboards of black-and-white colored gelatin on the bottoms of the players. Now they tilted those same players in the air over garbage bags with deadened contempt.

  “You don’t want any of this, it’s sat out too long,” a large chef told Mr. Crawford, dumping out several pounds of pate de foie gras.

  Another chef, also in the Plaza uniform of white double-breasted tunic and black-and-white checkered pants, lifted a three-foot circular form of braided bread like a giant fish. He turned it upside down to shake out a mass of smoked sturgeon pieces, as though he were dumping an ashtray. “See this, $20 a pound,” he said.

  Mr. Crawford calmly arranged his haul on a food truck for the long trip out. Sealed aluminum trays towered and teetered up toward the ceiling. Nearly 500 pounds of food.

  There were a couple more stops that night for Mr. Crawford and Brian Jones, the driver, down the dark, empty streets of Manhattan, and it wasn’t until 2:45 that they pulled into the McAuley Water Street Mission on Lafayette and White streets in Tribeca. The mission is a three-story brick building with a religious bareness about it. There is cheap wooden paneling on the walls and fluorescent lighting. A toothless man named Bob Wasman who writes religious poetry was manning the desk. He wore a wool knit hat and a silver fringe beard and a raised sole on one shoe. When City Harvest arrived, Mr. Wasman called Eric Richards from a cinder block room where he was sitting up studying the Bible. Mr. Richards is the mission’s director of security, a good-looking black man of 37 with a confident manner. He opened the back doors.

  The men from City Harvest brought the food inside. Streaks of leaking green curry sauce formed on the cardboard boxes they used as pallets. They stacked food by the elevator, near a pile of six-pound peanut butter tins donated by the U.S. Government. Mr. Richards woke the resident cook and the two of them stayed up the rest of the morning sorting and storing, and gorging themselves on lobster. How long would it be before he saw lobster again, Mr. Richards asked himself.

  Upstairs, a hundred men lay asleep in steel bunk beds, barely a foot apart. Most of them had been given beds in a lottery 12 hours earlier. Large wooden cutouts on the walls were painted with Bible verses. Other signs laid out the mission’s many rules. A hang-lettered sheet by the bathroom door said to ask the man at the desk for soap. “We Also Provide…Baking Soda for Shoes,” it said.

  The next day at lunch, some reporters came to the Water Street Mission to see what had become of the Trump food. James VarnHagen, the mission’s director, passed around a history of the place. The mission was started a century ago by an Irish-born thief named Jerry McAuley after he found God in Sing Sing. The history had illustrations of Sing Sing. Some of the prisoners wore iron cages over their heads, bolted at the neck, a special form of humiliation for petty offenders. The men at the Water Street Mission are not all that different from the ones who came a century before. It is a place marked by suffering. “You don’t have to tell them they’re sinners, they know they’re sinners,” Mr. VarnHagen said. “They’ve had failures, they’re looking for hope. We encourage them to trust God.”

  There is no pride at the Water Street Mission; there is the opposite of Trumplike vanity. Eric Richards said plainly that he had had a drug habit since he was 12 years old. He was a telemarketer before he lost his job a year ago and went onto the streets. In the mission, he has found his way: He has been rescued the way that McAuley set out to rescue people. “If you don’t have a broken and contrite heart, you’re not going to be able to give up the hold the Devil has on you,” Mr. Richards said.

  At lunchtime, the food was set out in the basement dining room on a wooden table with a plaid cloth. Mr. Var-Hagen said a prayer to thank God, working through Mr. Trump. Some men called the bounty a blessing. One man wondered if Mr. Trump was just
getting a big tax deduction. Then the men pulled back the plastic wrap. The cooks had cut up the filet into neat pieces and arranged it simply on a clear plastic platter. They surrounded it with pieces of duck breast. Next to that was an aluminum tray with turkey breasts and smoked sturgeon and lettuce. Ringing that tray were disks of lobster tail.

  Only a dozen or so men came to lunch, but that night 200 homeless people came for the 5, 6 and 8 o’clock dinners. At 5, the cooks served rack of lamb. Then at 6, they served soup made from Trump filet and Trump turkey and mission beef stock, with Trump winter vegetables and Trump rice. Soup is typical fare at a soup kitchen. It stretches was meat the cooks have, and it addresses the primary concern of the providers—fairness, that no one should get what another cannot have. There may not have been enough beef filet for 100 people.

  The homeless filed in wearing their coats. They ate quickly, bent over their soup bowls. They complained about the food. They joked that they had found a human finger in it or they said it lacked flavor, or they said that the mission reused plastic spoons and so the spoons were greasy. And if the spirit of the Trump wedding was boundless self-exaltation, the spirit of the Water Street Mission was something else, ashen humiliation that many in the place struggled against. A young woman, one of the few women served, put on lipstick after dinner, and a man named Robert, who said he would be riding the subways that night, pocketed the salt and pepper shakers he had brought with him to make the food more palatable.

  A man could get seconds and thirds later. But first he had to go upstairs to the chapel for service. There were metal chairs there, and a chaplain. The message was generally a traditional one, one of man’s personal responsibility to free himself from Satan’s curse of darkness. No talk of dysfunctional families or society’s unfairness. On the chapel wall a Bible verse spoke to the social conditions the food had traversed.