The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots
Page 16
Le Trapeze was, as the French say, Le Rip-Off.
DECEMBER 19, 1994 BY JIM WINDOLF
OFF THE RECORD: Granta Claus Coming to New Yorker Town
THE NEW YORKER NAMED BILL BUFORD, THE EXPATRIATE EDITOR of Granta since 1979, as its new fiction and literary editor on Dec. 13. Mr. Buford will replace Charles (Chip) McGrath, who will leave the magazine in February to edit The New York Times Book Review.
Mr. Buford’s new job—which begins April 1, 1995—will give him first crack at manuscripts by famous writers who habitually send their work straight to The New Yorker. “In a lot of ways, The New Yorker was a kind of irritating model for everything I was doing at Granta,” he said. “People were always sending their stories to The New Yorker first. If we ever got a story from a well-known author, we could usually dust it and detect The New Yorker’s fingerprints.”
Mr. Buford, 40, was born in Baton Rouge, La., and is the author of Among the Thugs, an account of hooliganism among British soccer fans. Under his direction, Granta went from a Cambridge University student magazine with a few hundred readers to one of the most acclaimed and widely read journals of fiction and reportage, with a circulation of 100,000. Mr. Buford, who is also the publisher of Granta Books, said his successor will be selected by Rea Hederman, the publisher of The New York Review of Books who is also Granta’s principal shareholder.
Granta was the first magazine in Britain to publish such writers as Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff and Jayne Anne Phillips—a school the magazine dubbed “Dirty Realism” in a 1983 issue.
Mr. Buford said he might remain in Cambridge even after he begins working for The New Yorker. “I’m going to hold on to the house in Cambridge,” he said. “Europe is a very dynamic place right now. The collapse of the Soviet Union has opened up Europe in a way that is fascinating to witness.”
Illustrated by Barry Blitt
DECEMBER 19, 1994 BY PETER STEVENSON
EDITOR OVERBOARD! KNOPF JETTISONS LISH, JUMPSUITED SUPERGURU OF NEW FICTION
A FEW DAYS AFTER HE HAD been fired from the Alfred A. Knopf publishing house, Gordon Lish sat in a bar where he has gone for a number of years because “no one in the building comes here”—the building, of course, being 201 Alfred A. Knopf and its parent company, Random House.
Still strikingly handsome at 60, though smaller than one expects given his outsized reputation as a combative, charming, blue-eyed Svengali to an entire school of fiction—not to mention to scores of writing students—Mr. Lish was oddly costumed for midtown Manhattan: He wore a beige jumpsuit with a zipper from neck to crotch, unzipped enough to show a white long-john shirt. He also wore a wide brown leather belt with its end dangling, and brown leather ankle boots. A lifelong sufferer of psoriasis, his hands looked painfully raw, and he twisted them together as he spoke.
Mr. Lish’s voice was hoarse—from the six-hour classes he teaches and from grief: In early fall, his wife, Barbara, died of Lou Gehrig’s disease (“At the end we were up to nine nurses”), a loss that, when it came to his own fictional inspirations, left him feeling, he said, “emptied out…. The desire has gone out of it, and fear doesn’t take its place so much as a sense of absence.”
“It’s best to understand that the meeting at which this was presented consisted of myself and Sonny Mehta,” he said. “It’s fair to observe that the matter between us was self-evident. This might seem a wonderfully ironic thing to say: a minimalist approach to spoken language was altogether effective.”
Illustrated by Philip Burke
1995
“Oprah…Uma…Oh no”…David Letterman flops as host of the Oscars
Models Naomi Campbell, Elle McPherson and Claudia Schiffer front Fashion Café
Magician David Blaine casts kooky spell on downtown celebrities
Boy toy at the Bowery: Jann Wenner steps out with clothing designer Matt Nye
Nix on Triple-X! Mayor Rudy Giuliani scrubs sex shows from city
Entertainment reporter Claudia Cohen and Senator Alfonse D’Amato are an item
Literati chew up author Martin Amis for visiting high-priced New York dentist
Pollsters Mark Penn and Douglas Schoen plug away for Bill Clinton
Gossip columnists Rush and Molloy are Daily News’ Nick and Nora
1995
FEBRUARY 6, 1995 BY ANDREW COHEN AND ALEX KUCZYNSKI
THE OBSERVATORY: NOT-SO-VICIOUS CIRCLES
EVERY FRIDAY NIGHT AT 8 o’clock, in a worn brownstone across the street from the Nuyorican Poets Café, 10 or 15 writers crowd into Steve Cannon’s living room and convene another session of the Stoop on East Third Street. Stoop members read each other’s work, ridicule one another’s literary tastes (“Is this an aesthetic or a mental condition?”) and drink Ballantine Ale 40-ouncers, while Mr. Cannon, former City University professor and fixture of the Nuyorican, shouts abuse and encouragement. At first glance, the assembled M.F.A. candidates, Puerto Rican hip-hop poets and single mothers from Brooklyn don’t much resemble the toujours gai, poker-playing Round Table, or the front room at Gertrude Stein’s Paris flat. But trade the beer can for a martini glass and the plaid shirts for pearls, and the idea is generally the same: Steve Cannon and cohort Bob Holman, director of the poetry program at the Nuyorican, have given birth to a salon.
Mr. Cannon’s Alphabet City apartment—which, in true Stein fashion, includes a small gallery (“I’m the only blind man I know who has an art gallery in his apartment,” said Mr. Cannon, who lost his eyesight to glaucoma two years ago)—is also a stopping place for painters, performers and photographers. It’s one of many multicultural salon scenes that have recently sprung up around the city, accommodating the growing numbers of freelance writers, independent artists and filmmakers and other seekers of community in the naked city. Along with Dorothy Parker’s poetry, salons are coming back.
Illustrated by Barry Blitt
FEBRUARY 13, 1995 BY FRANK DIGIACOMO
THE TRANSOM: Why, Claudia? $80 Million Gossipeuse One-Ups Ron Perelman With…D’Amato
REGIS PHILBIN STARED AT THE sheet of paper he had just lifted from the fax machine. It was the first fax on the Feb. 3 Live With Regis & Kathie Lee, a new interactive segment on the show. “We should have a conference about this,” said Mr. Philbin as he handed it to co-host Kathie Lee Gifford. “Easy,” he warned her. “Don’t read out loud.”
Ms. Gifford deliberated silently, then delivered her opinion. “I think we can answer that now,” she said. “It’s been out.” Mr. Philbin then confirmed what the viewer had asked. Claudia Cohen, Live’s entertainment and gossip reporter, was indeed “dating” the junior senator from New York, Alfonse Marcello D’Amato.
The studio audience broke into healthy applause. A few even cheered. “They’re very comfortable together. It’s a lot of fun. It really is,” said Mr. Philbin. “It’s nice to see Claudia happy,” added Ms. Gifford, who told the audience about a dinner party at her home the new couple had attended, along with Mr. Philbin and his wife, Joy. Before an audience of eight million viewers, Mr. Philbin and Ms. Gifford had advanced New York’s heterosexual-romance-of-the-moment beyond the gossip stage and into legitimacy.
Their duty done, Mr. Philbin and Ms. Gifford promptly dropped the topic, thus ignoring the obvious follow-up: Why, Claudia?
MARCH 6, 1995 BY CANDACE BUSHNELL
A BABY HOUDINI OF THE BOWERY BAR
“I’VE HEARD SO MUCH ABOUT YOU,” MOLLY RINGWALD SAID TO David Blaine, the 21-year-old society happening and illusionist, as he slipped in gracefully next to her at a booth in the Bowery Bar.
Ms. Ringwald, her hair in a smooth flip, was sitting with her publicist Jason Weinberg, who also represents Mr. Blaine. “I just ran into all these people who know David but all from different places,” said Mr. Weinberg. “It’s amazing. Have some champagne.” He motioned for more glasses.
Mr. Blaine smiled and lit a cigarette. He was wearing his signature tiny blue sunglasses and a Dolce & Gabbana jacket. He leaned toward
s Ms. Ringwald and began talking to her quietly. Ms. Ringwald asked someone for a quarter. A few seconds passed and then Ms. Ringwald exclaimed, “Omigod!” Mr. Blaine was pushing a cigarette through the center of the quarter.
“Usually when people build someone up, you’re disappointed when you actually meet them,” said Ms. Ringwald. “But he’s truly incredible!”
David Blaine has become a white-hot player on the downtown social circuit. A combination of card wizard Ricky Jay and one of those handsome, downtown-actor types, he entertains—but only on his own terms. People think that Mr. Blaine is going to be big, big, big, and he thinks it himself.
MARCH 11, 1995 BY FRANK DIGIACOMO
THE TRANSOM: Wenner, Nye Step Out in the Age of Outing
“YOU HEARD WHAT FRAN SAID ABOUT THEM THEM, DIDN’T YOU?” The stage-whispered call and response began to make the rounds of the Bowery Bar just moments after Jann Wenner and Matt Nye walked into Mary Boone’s party for Ross Bleckner.
When scandal punctuates the world where the Velvet Mafia merges with the media elite, it is Fran Lebowitz who usually validates the moment with the first punch line.
The line? Informed that Mr. Wenner had left his wife for Mr. Nye, Ms. Lebowitz is said to have replied, “I wouldn’t leave a chair for Matt Nye.”
Of course the largely gay crowd at the Bleckner party loved the remark because it was so bitchy. But humor was also a means of grasping a relationship that for two months had been frustratingly slippery.
But Mr. Wenner has not yet learned to wear his sexuality with the self-confidence that is second nature in Mr. Bleckner’s crowd. Mr. Wenner’s notorious need for control has long been at war with his equally legendary impulsive and compulsive personality, and here was a prime example: At the same time that Mr. Wenner had been privately acknowledging that he was happily involved in a serious gay relationship, he had been actively thwarting the press’ attempts to update his public persona.
JUNE 5, 1995
SEX AND THE CITY: WHAT HAS TWO WHEELS, WEARS SEERSUCKER AND MAKES A SUCKER OUT OF ME? A BICYCLE BOY BY CANDACE BUSHNELL
A FEW WEEKS BACK, I HAD AN ENCOUNTER WITH A Bicycle Boy.
It happened at a book party that was held in a great marble hall on a tree-lined street. While I was surreptitiously stuffing my face with smoked salmon, a writer friend, a guy, rushed up and said, “I’ve just been talking to the most interesting man.”
“Oh yeah? Who?” I asked, glancing around the room with suspicion.
“He used to be an archeologist and now he writes science books…fascinating.”
“Say no more,” I said.
I had already spotted the man in question—he was dressed in what I imagined was the city version of a safari suit—khaki trousers, a cream checked shirt, slightly shabby tweed jacket. His gray-blond hair was raked back from his forehead, exposing a handsome chipped profile. So I was motoring, as much as you can motor in strappy high-heeled sandals, across the room. He was in deep conversation with a middle-aged man, but I quickly took care of the situation. “You,” I said. “Someone just told me you were fascinating. I hope you won’t disappoint me.” I bore him off to an open window where I plied him with cigarettes and cheap red wine. After 20 minutes, I left him to go meet some friends for dinner.
The next morning, he called me while I was still in bed with a hangover. Let’s call him “Horace Eccles.” He talked about romance. It was nice to lie in bed with my head throbbing and a handsome man cooing into my ear. We arranged to meet for dinner.
The trouble began almost immediately. First he called to say he was going to be an hour early. Then he called back to say he wasn’t. Then he called to say he was going to be half an hour late. Then he called and said he was just around the corner. Then he really was 45 minutes late.
And then he turned up on his bicycle.
I didn’t realize this at first. All I noticed was a more than normal dishevelment (for a writer), and a slight breathiness, which I attributed to the fact that he was in my presence. “Where do you want to have dinner?” he asked.
“I’ve already arranged it,” I said. “Elaine’s”
His face twisted. “But I thought we’d just have dinner at some neighborhood place around the corner.”
I gave him one of my looks and said, “I don’t have dinner at neighborhood places around the corner.” For a moment it looked like it was going to be a standoff. Finally, he blurted out, “But I came on my bicycle, you see.”
I turned around and stared at the offending piece of machinery, which was tethered to a lamppost.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
Mr. New Yorker and His Three-Speed
This was not my first encounter with a Manhattan literary-romantic subspecies I’ve come to call the Bicycle Boys. A while back, I was at a dinner with one of the most famous Bicycle Boys, whom we’ll just call Mr. New Yorker. Mr. New Yorker looks like he’s 35 (even though he’s quite a bit older), with floppy brown hair and a devastating smile. When he goes out, he usually has his pick of single women, and not just because the women want to get something published in The New Yorker. He’s smooth and a little sloppy. He sits down next to you and talks to you about politics and asks your opinion. He makes you feel smart. And then, before you know it, he’s gone.
“Hey, where’s Mr. New Yorker?” everyone was asking at 11 o’clock. “He made a phone call,” one woman said, “and then he took off on his bike. He was going to meet someone.”
The image of Mr. New Yorker, stealing through the night in his tweedy jacket, pumping like mad on his three-speed bike (with fenders to keep his pants from getting dirty), haunted me. I pictured him pulling up to an Upper East Side walk-up—or maybe a loft building in Soho—leaning against the buzzer, and then, panting slightly, wheeling his bike up the stairs. A door would open, and he and his inamorata would be giggling as they tried to figure out where to put the bike. Then they’d fall into a sweaty embrace, no doubt ending up on some futon on the floor.
A SUCKER OUT OF ME? A BICYCLE BOY BY CANDACE BUSHNELL
The Bicycle Boy actually has a long literary tradition in New York. The patron saints of Bicycle Boys are white-haired writer George Plimpton, whose bike used to hang upside down above his employees’ heads at the Paris Review offices, and white-haired Newsday columnist Murray Kempton. They’ve been riding for years, and are the inspiration for the next generation of Bicycle Boys, like the aforementioned Mr. New Yorker, the writers Chip Brown and Tom Beller, literary agent Kip Kotzen and scores of young book, magazine and newspaper editors and writers who insist upon traversing Manhattan’s physical and romantic landscape as solitary pedalers.
Bicycle Boys are a particular breed of New York bachelor: Smart, funny, romantic, lean, quite attractive, they are the stuff that grown-up coed dreams are made of. There’s something incredibly, er, charming about a tweedy guy on a bike—especially if he’s wearing goofy glasses. Women tend to feel a mixture of passion and motherly affection. But there’s also a dark side: Most Bicycle Boys are not married and probably never will be, at least not until they give up their bikes.
Why John F. Kennedy Jr. Is Not a Bicycle Boy
“Riding a bike is not necessarily a power move,” said Mr. Eccles. “It’s best done by power people like George Plimpton. Otherwise, you have to hide your bike around the corner and surreptitiously take your trousers out of your socks.”
Bicycle Boys don’t ride their bikes for sport, like those silly guys you see riding around and around the park. They ride partly for transportation and, more importantly, to preserve an eternal literary boyhood. Think of twilight at Oxford, riding over the cobblestones, while a woman waits down by the Cherwell River, wearing a flowing dress, clasping a volume of Yeats. That’s how Bicycle Boys think of themselves as they pedal Manhattan, dodging cabbies and potholes.
While John F. Kennedy Jr. is certainly New York’s most famous and sought-after bike-riding bachelor, his rippled athleticism disqualifies him for Bicycle Boy
dom. Because a Bicycle Boy would rather bike through midtown in a seersucker suit than in shorts and a chest-hugging tee. And Bicycle Boys spurn those skin-tight bike pants that have cushy foam padding sewn into the butt. Bicycle Boys are not averse to the chastising pain of a hard bike seat—it helps the literature.
Which may be one reason Bicycle Boys, more than their athletic cousins, tend to get physically attacked. The other reason is they ride at any hour, in any physical condition, anywhere.
“Drunks roar out of their windows at night to send you into a tailspin,” said Mr. Eccles.
One Halloween, Mr. New Yorker was wearing a British bobby’s cape when he rode into a group of 12-year-olds who yanked him off his bike. “I said, ‘I can’t fight all of you at once. I’ll fight one of you.’ They all stepped back, except for the biggest one. I suddenly realized I didn’t want to fight him either.” The whole gang jumped on Mr. New Yorker and began pounding him, until some innocent bystander started screaming and the gang ran away. “I was lucky,” said Mr. New Yorker. “They didn’t take my bike, but they did take some records I had in my basket.” (Note that Mr. New Yorker was carrying “records,” as in vinyl albums—not CD’s—another sign of a true Bicycle Boy.)
Mr. Eccles recalled a similar story. “Two days ago, I was riding through Central Park at 10 at night, when I was surrounded by a ‘wilding’ gang on rollerblades,” he said. “They were almost children. They tried to capture me in a flank maneuver, but I was able to bicycle away even faster.”
But an even bigger danger is sex, as a New York Times reporter we’ll call Chester found out. Chester doesn’t ride his bike as much as he used to because, about a year ago, he had a bad cycling accident after a romantic interlude. He was writing a story on topless dancers when he struck up a friendship with Lola. Maybe Lola fancied herself as Marilyn Monroe to his Arthur Miller. Who knows. All Chester knew was that one evening she called him up and said she was lying around in her bed at Trump Palace, and could he come over. He hopped on his bike and was there in 15 minutes. They went at it for three hours. Then she said he had to leave because she lives with someone and the guy was coming home. Any minute.