The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots
Page 15
“For There Is No Difference: For All have Sinned and Come Short of the Glory of God.—Romans.”
After chapel service, there was more soup in hard rubber bowls. Mr. Gilliard’s small kitchen was far cleaner than the Plaza kitchen. Every surface was wiped and gleaming. There was no waste. Ladles were carefully replaced on the stove hood. The menu was simple, and somehow much more thoughtful than the Roman-style menu of the wedding night.
But what the men said about the food was true: It wasn’t tasty anymore. It was a bit of a mishmash, with its clashing ingredients, bland and gluey. All food inhabits its particular social conditions, no matter where it comes from. A soup line must move fast, several hundred pounds in an hour, and the soup must stick to a hungry man’s ribs. The chef has no time to plan; he discovers the identity of his diverse perishable ingredients that morning. His meal cannot be salty because some of the men have hypertension. And so forth.
Donald Trump’s splendid food had become a sort of fodder. Now and then, the tongue hit a bit of gristle.
Many men did not wait for more. They said goodnight and went out the front door. As they did so, they passed an old doorstop set out on the counter. A page thumbtacked to the bit of wood had vital information.
“WEATHER,” was the heading. “Low 40’s. Rain. TOMORROW. Low 40’s. Wind.”
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All food inhabits its particular social conditions, no matter where it comes from. A soup line must move fast, several hundred pounds in an hour, and the soup must stick to a hungry man’s rib.
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MAY 30, 1994 BY MICHAEL M. THOMAS
THE MIDAS WATCH: Jackie’s Quiet Elegance Ennobled the Nation
I WONDER WHAT MRS. ONASSIS WOULD THINK OF what’s been written about her in recent days. For example, the notion that she was an “embryonic feminist.” I expect, were she in a position to comment, that she would have some pithy response.
I only met her once, about a dozen years ago. A mutual friend brought her to a small cocktail party I was giving for an English friend. She asked me why I wrote such awful things about people. She had a fine, wry way about her and a twinkle. I replied, as I recall, that awful is as awful does.
Mrs. O. was quality, folks. That is, she ended her days as such, which was no small feat considering she came from an East Hampton social scene that, intellectually, made Newport look like the Macdowell Colony. How hard it is to remember that she was only 31, younger than most of my children, when she precipitated into the White House. She was a kid, and thank God for that, because she brought a kid’s enthusiasm, liveliness and joy in things to her official role.
In the last decades, Mrs. O. withdrew from a world she had been so instrumental in creating. Having preached the Crusade, as it were, she took a hard, frank look at the way her parfit Christian knights were behaving, and betook herself to a nunnery. She was by all accounts a damn good editor, and in that respect alone will be sorely missed, for such are few. I remember some years ago encountering my beloved mentor John Pope-Hennessy, the greatest expert of painting and sculpture of the Italian Renaissance. Aware that his memoirs were being prepared for publication, I mildly asked who was editing them.
The “Pope” looked down his nose at me, like a sharpshooter squaring up in cross hairs, and in a voice dripping with the natural scorn of the cosmopolite for the rube, said: “Why, Jackie O., of course!”
In that offhand “of course” was articulated a world of respect.
JUNE 20, 1994 BY ERIK HEDEGAARD
‘PLEASURE PLUS IN THE 12-PACK, PLEASE!’ A BOUTIQUE FOR ‘NO GLOVE, NO LOVE’ ERA
IT WAS A WARM FRIDAY NIGHT in Manhattan, on the cusp of summer, birds flickering, and it was extra crowded inside the Greenwich Village specialty shop known as Condomania. There were college students there, Kenneth Cole preppies, hipsters, double-daters, blacks, whites, Asians, weary, grinning Hoosier tourists.
A female customer entered wearing a jumpsuit, a backpack, and her hair in a twist. Seeing what she wanted, she snapped it up and presented it to Arli Silver, the long-haired fellow at the cash register.
“Pleasure Plus in the 12-pack!” Mr. Silver said. “That’ll be $11.75.”
The woman paid and took her condoms in a white plastic bag decorated with the Condomania logo, which is a squiggly silver-edged condom enclosing the word “Condomania.”
What Condomania sells—condoms and condom-related merchandise—it sells more of than any other store on the face of the planet, and it hopes to be selling a lot more of it beginning June 18. That’s when the Gay Games start here. Condomania, which grosses over $200,000 a year in condom sales, has more than doubled its inventory of condoms to try to cover any surge in demand.
Actually, Condomania, which is located at 351 Bleecker Street, is both store and chain, with two outlets in Florida and another in Los Angeles. Though pharmacies and supermarkets continue to dominate the $400 million condom industry, Condomania Inc. more than holds its own on a per-store basis. The average U.S. drugstore sells $12,000 of condoms a year. The average Condomania sells 10 times that amount.
Condomania owner Adam Glickman has plans, too. Industrywide sales have been relatively flat since the go-go years of the late 80’s, which followed former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop’s announcement that only condoms can protect against H.I.V. But that doesn’t deter Mr. Glickman.
JANUARY 31, 1994 BY MARION HUME
THE OBSERVATORY: The Best Customer in the West
NAN KEMPNER IS THE COUTURE customer. She has earned her prized ringside seat in the gilded salon of the Hotel Intercontinental in Paris not by being a movie star, like Catherine Deneuve; nor by being a doyenne of the press, like Suzy Menkes; but by spending. And spend she does.
Nan has known Yves Saint Laurent since he was young and skinny. They met when her mother, Irma Schlesinger, took her daughter to Paris and to Dior in 1958. There, Nan, who claims she had only been slightly embarrassed to turn up at school wearing white gloves and carrying a hand-painted lunchbox each day, fell in love—with a white, sleeveless sheath dress and matching white overcoat with ermine cuffs, which costs far more than her clothes allowance.
So she cried. And she cried and she cried, until a gawky boy in glasses, the assistant to Mr. Dior, emerged to see what the fuss was about. Nan kept on wailing until the vendeuse reduced the price to within her not inconsiderable means. The pattern of a lifetime was set.
Saint Laurent is stocky now, but Nan is still slim, “the same size as I was when I married,” she said—to Thomas Lenox Kempner, a banker, and now chairman of Loeb Partners in New York. Nan’s exaggerated slimness has benefits. “Yes, it is useful,” she explained, “because I get to buy the mannequin’s dresses at discount.”
It is also useful because Yves has always designed best for a skinny tall body, the female body shape that most resembles his own as it was once, in a prime that had him posing gaunt, lanky and naked for his own perfume advertisements.
This mother of three and grandmother of six has said, memorably, that she wants to be buried naked, “because there are bound to be stores where I’m going.” What she leaves behind will join the clothes she has already given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “or be sold at Christie’s, wouldn’t that be marvelous?” she mused.
AUGUST 22, 1994 BY FRANK DIGIACOMO
SOCIETY DAME OR HOLLYWOOD POLITICO? THE TRIALS OF MS. DUFF, PERELMAN’S FIANCÉE
PATRICIA DUFF SPOKE QUIETLY and hesitantly, as if her words were meant more for someone at her end of the telephone call. “I don’t want to talk on the record. Ronald would prefer that I don’t,” she said. “I don’t think I should, either.”
Ms. Duff was referring to Ron Perelman, the billionaire cosmetics and media mogul whose child she is expecting in January and who, judging from the number of times she excused herself from the conversation, was hovering while she tried to explain why she did not want to be profiled.
“People in Los Angeles weren’t that interested in my life
,” said Ms. Duff. “It’s strange to me that there seems to be all of this interest now. I don’t get it.”
Quite frankly, Ms. Duff’s life has become much more interesting since last August, when rumors that she had been seen at Mr. Perelman’s sprawling East Hampton estate, the Creeks, preceded the public announcement in September that she and her husband, former TriStar Pictures chairman Mike Medavoy, had separated.
OCTOBER3, 1994 BY JIM WINDOLF
BROWN’S TWO YEARS AT THE NEW YORKER: ‘I FINALLY THINK WE’VE GOT IT RIGHT’
FOR HER FIRST COVER OF THE NEW YORKER, DATED Oct. 5, 1992, Tina Brown, the fourth editor in the magazine’s 69-year history, held an informal contest among the magazine’s artists to see who could come up with a scene commenting on the state of the magazine in general and the editor’s tenure in particular. Edward Sorel was the winner, and he has drawn covers commemorating Ms. Brown’s anniversaries ever since.
The 1992 cover showed a wizened punk with a Mohawk haircut (no doubt Ms. Brown) lounging in a horse-drawn carriage. The top-hatted driver (in the role of the magazine’s unsettled staff) looks uneasy as he clutches the reins. A year later, for the issue dated Oct. 4, 1993, Mr. Sorel drew a voluptuous scene wherein a middle-aged Pan-like creature, his head horned, his feet cloven, holds a crisply folded Wall Street Journal in one hand and a stogie in the other; beside him is a plump woman, fully naked, her eyelids large and lazy, her head resting on his shoulder. The cover coincided with what many staff members said was a brief Pax Romana in Ms. Brown’s reign: She had enlivened the magazine, raising its circulation and its profile in the media, but she had yet to unmake the delicate property that had been passed down to her from editors Harold Ross, William Shawn and Robert Gottlieb.
This year’s Sorel cover, commemorating Ms. Brown’s second anniversary, is different. Like the other two, the illustration has an autumnal backdrop. But this year, it’s an Upper East Side Adam and Eve being banished from Central Park. The cover is melancholy, a modern take on the gloomiest scene in human lore, and it comes after a summer that saw The New Yorker undergo a number of staff changes as it was seduced by the triple temptations of access, heat and sensation.
Adam and Even have been exiled from paradise; with them, The New Yorker. What does it mean? In her two years as editor, the magazine has traveled from its sacrosanct position in the garden of print—unassailed and mysterious—to a new position in the larger media world. More accessible and less mysterious, The New Yorker has been driven into the outside world. You can even find it online, in something called the Electronic Bookstore. Her magazine is part of the noise, part of the belching All-American hype-entertainment news machine.
Two years ago, the magazine’s political coverage consisted of dispatches from one detached and almost unreadable Washington correspondent; its show business or media reporting was a rare and exotic event; its crime reporting was an occasional literary exercise. Now that the magazine has quit Eden, it is burgeoning but still losing money as it draws new readers. It is more fun to read, better-looking, less distinguished, preppier, accessible, often anti-literate and generally rolling in the barnyard of American journalism. Once The New Yorker—yes, The New Yorker!—it is now…a magazine.
“When some of the detractors of the new New Yorker say there was another way the magazine could have been changed, I would say, yes, there was indeed another way,” she wrote. “It would have been to curtail the very long, arcane pieces and simply bet on hot journalism. Much that I loved editing it, I did not want to do a weekly Vanity Fair. To me, the challenge was always to find a way to make quality and intellectually challenging articles reach a much wider audience, to turn on the generation drifting towards television by making use of our weekly frequency with a two-strand mix of more immediate material and the slower, more thoughtful material. Visually, that has meant more contemporary presentation and marketing ideas.
“Of course, some of the older New Yorker writers resent the implications of this. They prefer to think there is a choice and that the choice is simply to go on publishing the slower, exceedingly long kind of piece of the past. It is unpalatable, I guess, for them to admit to themselves that the audience for this has depressingly shrunk, just as in book publishing.”
Ms. Brown’s push to make The New Yorker more topical and her knack for orchestrating mini-sensations in the media have led to a great increase in the number of magazines sold. At the end of 1992, three months after her tenure began, circulation stood at 628,014; as of June 30 of this year, the number had climbed to 816,615. A two-million-piece direct mail drive, sent by first-class mail at great expense, kicked off the circulation surge early in her tenure; but since that time, the magazine has won subscribers out of readers who buy copies off the newsstand, the number of which has doubled on average since she got started. The New Yorker has also made it easier for people to subscribe than it was in the pre-Brown era by offering subscriptions at a base rate of $32 a year, with occasional special offers at $16. The sale days will come to an end in Januarry 1995, when the subscription price will rise to $36.
It remains an immense question whether or not she can make the magazine profitable. Thomas A. Florio, who became president of The New Yorker in January, said that 60 percent of his subscribers are new to the magazine and 40 percent are longtime readers.
And while the number of advertising pages has been down roughly 10 percent over the number of ad pages that ran last year, the magazine sees the drop as a result of a “get tough” policy instituted by Mr. Florio soon after he took over.
The more important gauge of advertising revenue shows the magazine up 2.4 percent over this time last year, according to Publishers Information Bureau. And the magazine will help itself with advertisers with its planned all-fashion issue—a Tina Brown extravaganza set for November that will venture into the territory staked out by her “The New Yorker Goes to the Movies” and “Broadway Jubilee” special issues.
Magazines, magazines; The New Yorker is still an important magazine. But, as E.B. White once wrote in a caption, I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.
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Magazines, magazines; The New Yorker is still an important magazine. But, as E.B. White once wrote in a caption, I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.
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Illustrated by Barry Blitt
OCTOBER 31, 1994 EDITORIAL
ECCE CUOMO: A Flawed Giant Over a Passionless Opportunist
FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 1982, New York voters will be choosing a governor without considering that they may be voting for or against a future president of the United States.
Time and circumstances have dimmed Mario Cuomo’s once-brilliant star, with reason. Mr. Cuomo’s act seems tired after 12 years. His rhetoric has lost its edge. His defense counsel posture is exasperating.
But Mr. Cuomo has brought it on himself, simply by being Mario Cuomo, stubborn and contrarian to the end. He could have retired as Joe DiMaggio did, with the memory of his grace and understated elegance fresh and unsullied. But now, a potentially involuntary and embarrassing departure risks comparisons with Willie Mays’ final year, which ended ignominiously in the 1973 World Series, with the once-nimble center-fielder flat on his back, his legs and agility having betrayed him. He had stayed a season too long.
NOVEMBER 14, 1994 BY TERRY GOLWAY
GOVERNOR PATAKI! PRIDE OF PEEKSKILL DROPS CUOMO; JUMPY VOTERS DECIDE 12 YEARS OF MARIO IS ENOUGH
GEORGE PATAKI, WHO ONLY A matter of months ago was a political unknown with an odd name and a bland demeanor, has put an end to Mario Cuomo’s long reign as the Democratic Party’s best-known voice of hard-knuckled liberalism.
According to network projections, the state senator from upstate Garrison won in surprisingly handy fashion. Exit polls showed him with about 49 percent of the vote, compared with the Governor’s 45 percent. Third-party candidate Thomas Golisano, whose free-spending intrusion into the race was thought to be Mr. Cuomo’s salvat
ion, took only 5 percent.
“The Pataki victory is not based so much on his strength, but on voter exhaustion with the Family of New York,” said Mitchell Moss, director of New York University’s Urban Research Center.
The Cuomo campaign may have seen this coming. As he cast his vote early on Election Day, a grave-sounding Mr. Cuomo said that his prayer would be not “Lord, help me to win,” but “Lord, help me to understand the results and deal with it.” And one of the governor’s operatives told The Observer just before the polls closed that he was advising his colleagues to ask for divine intercession.
NOVEMBER 28, 1994 BY CANDACE BUSHNELL
SEX AND THE CITY: Swingin’ Sex? I Don’t Think So…
IT ALL STARTED THE WAY IT ALWAYS does: innocently enough. I was sitting in my apartment, having a sensible lunch of crackers and sardines, when I got a call from an acquaintance. A friend of his had just gone to Le Trapeze, a couples-only sex club, and was amazed. Blown away. There were people naked—having sex—right in front of him. Unlike S&M, where no actual sex occurs, this was the real, juicy tomato. The guy’s girlfriend was kind of freaked out—although, when another naked woman brushed against her, she “sort of liked it.” According to him.
I started imagining all sorts of things. Beautiful young hardbody couples. Girls with long, wavy blond hair wearing wreaths made of grape leaves. Boys with perfect white teeth wearing loincloths made of grape leaves. Me, wearing a super-short over-one-shoulder, grape-leaf dress…
What did we see? Well, there was a big room with a huge air mattress, upon which a few blobby couples gamely went at it; there was a “sex chair” (unoccupied) that looked like a spider; there was a chubby woman in a robe sitting next to a Jacuzzi, smoking; there were couples with glazed eyes; and there were many men who appeared to be having trouble keeping up their end of the bargain. But mostly, there were those damn steaming buffet tables, and, unfortunately, that’s pretty much all you need to know.