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

by The New York Observer

  Acolytes claim colonic irrigations rid their bodies of that ill-defined, New Age bugaboo—toxins—and help prevent colon cancer; some people do it to kick-start a diet, although it’s clear that you don’t lose fat from a colonic.

  How does it work? Rudy M. Cooper, who has practiced colon therapy on New Yorkers for the past 12 years, explained every last detail: “A speculum, or scope, is inserted in the rectum. The scope, or speculum, has two tubes attached, one for water to enter and one for waste to exit. The therapist has control over the water entering the person, er, client. And after the speculum or scope is lubricated and inserted in the rectum, the water is brought into the system, slowly, until the colon itself is filled to the extent that it is able to be filled.

  “And the colon therapist—I guess people have different styles—but then they start massaging the abdomen and bringing in the water as needed for the procedure of breaking down the old waste and helping the system to evacuate organically.” At Ismail Kibirige’s office at the SoHo Professional Health Center, one wall is plastered with head shots of the models and actresses who are his regular clients. Mr. Kibirige said he sees about 250 regular clients.

  A reporter who wanted to have a little something in common with the princess decided to pay a visit to Mr. Kibirige’s immaculate office. Mr. Kibirige played an inspirational tape about colonic irrigation and got started.

  As the tube was inserted, the reporter remembered Grand-ma’s thermometer; as the water flowed in, she felt a little seasick; as the stuff traveled out through tube No. 2, she got that woozy-in-the-intestines feeling typical of a terrible hangover. The session lasted nearly an hour. The bill came to $65.

  “I’d say in the last two years membership has nearly doubled,” said Bill Tiller, president of the International Association for Colon Hydrotherapy. “We now have about 1,000 members who are practitioners. It’s a very large movement.”

  APRIL 1, 1996 BY JIM WINDOLF

  THE NEW YORK WORLD

  IN THE NEW ISSUE of Harper’s, novelist Jonathan Franzen almost knocks himself out trying to explain why serious fiction is still relevant in a culture dominated by TV. He makes his argument in a fake prose that makes you want to reach for the nearest remote.

  Some lines from Mr. Franzen’s essay are quoted below, followed by appropriate remarks:

  “I, too, was dreaming of escape…”

  I, too, am an ass.

  “A quarter century…”

  Wouldn’t that be the same as 25 years?

  “When I got out of college in 1981…”

  Ah, the heady days of ’81!

  “I found a weekend job that enabled both of us to write full time…”

  One of those $50,000-a-year weekend jobs that you hear so much about.

  “Broadcast TV breaks pleasure into comforting little units…the way my father, when I was very young, would cut my French toast into tiny bites.”

  Oh, the pathos!

  “When the Ayatollah Khomeini placed a bounty on Salman Rushdie’s head, what seemed archaic to Americans was not his Muslim fanaticism, but the simple fact that he’d become so exercised about a book.”

  I knew something seemed archaic to me about that.

  “My Hollywood agent, whom I’ll call Dicky…”

  Dicky? Naughty, naughty, Mr. Franzen!

  “…television has killed the novel of social reportage.”

  No, you did.

  “…elitism doesn’t sit well with my American nature…”

  But it sure sits well with Edith Sitwell.

  “My belief in manners would make it difficult for me to explain to my brother, who is a fan of Michael Crichton, that the work I’m doing is simply better than Crichton’s.”

  Give me your brother’s number. I’ll tell him how you feel.

  “I took a job teaching undergraduate fiction-writing at a small liberal arts college.”

  Just tell us the name of the college, you big wimp.

  “I happen to enjoy living within subway distance of Wall Street and keeping close tabs on the country’s shadow government.”

  I’m sure you do, junior. I bet you ride the rails every couple days to give those guys a good going over.

  “I’m still waiting for the non-German-speaking world to get the news that Kafka, for example, is a comic writer.”

  Extra! Extra! Kafka Comic Writer, Sez Dopey Young Novelist!

  “…ours is a country to which hardly anything really terrible has ever happened. The only genuine tragedies to befall us were slavery and the Civil War.”

  There was that little slavery problem but otherwise…

  “I spent the early 90’s trapped in a double singularity.”

  That’s funny. I spent the early 90’s trapped in an elevator.

  “I got a letter from Don DeLillo.”

  Me, too. That Don. Nice enough guy, but his letters really get on your nerves.

  Illustrated by Drew Friedman

  MAY 6, 1996 BY ALEX KUCZYNSKI

  Sandy Pittman Social-Climbs Mt. Everest

  BASE CAMP, MOUNT EVEREST, APRIL 22: “THIS IS SANDY HILL PITTMAN…And I’m calling from base camp, at 17,500 feet…” Sandy Pittman’s voice broke and she bent forward, collapsing into the rasping hack known to Tibetan mountaineers as Khumbu cough. She brought the phone back to her mouth to finish the sentence: “…at Mount Everest.”

  She paused, then went on in a whisper, gripping the phone in hands bigger than many men’s. “It’s bitterly cold tonight. The temperatures are subzero”—she coughed the wheezing, hard cough—“and it’s pitch black.” The wind, which can reach 100 miles per hours at base camp, was whipping the camp tents in the background. “It’s so dry up here. We’re doing extremely strenuous activity and it’s extremely cold and dry. It burns”—she coughed—“burns the insides of your lungs.”

  New York, April 26: 41-year-old Sandy Hill Pittman, madcap Manhattan socialite, former fashion editor and avid outdoorswoman, is attempting for the third time to conquer the summit of Everest, first reached by Sir Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa companion Tenzing Norgay in 1953.

  The base of the Lhotse face, April 19: “We spotted the bottom half of a human body,” said Ms. Pittman. “It was dressed in a climbing suit, leather boots and crampons. There was no head or arms. The discovery was a macabre ending to an otherwise successful climb.”

  Sharon Hoge’s Park Avenue apartment, April 25: “Would you ask her whether I should bring a long-sleeve or sleeveless dress for Katmandu?” said Ms. Hoge.

  Base Camp, Mount Everest, April 25: “I’m standing on Mount Everest,” said Ms. Pittman. “And I’m not wearing a dress. So I really don’t know what to say.”

  JUNE 24, 1996 BY CANDACE BUSHNELL

  SEX AND THE CITY: SEX LIVES OF SERIOUS JOURNALISTS: HE’S A FEMINIST, SHE’S A REAL MAN

  MEET JAMES AND WINNIE DIEKE. THE PERFECT COUPLE. They live in a five-room apartment on the Upper West Side. They graduated from Ivy League colleges (he, Harvard; she, Smith). Winnie is 37, and James is 42—the perfect age difference, they like to say. They’ve been married nearly 10 years. Their lives revolve around their work and their child. They love to work. Their work keeps them busy. Their work separates them from other people. Their work, in their minds, makes them superior to other people.

  They are journalists. Serious journalists.

  Winnie writes a politics-and-style column for a major newsmagazine. James is a well-known and highly respected journalist—he writes worthy 5,000- to 10,000-word pieces for publications like The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker.

  Here are a few of the things Winnie and James agree on: They hate anyone who isn’t like them. They hate anyone who is wealthy and gets press. They hate people who do drugs. They hate people who drink too much (unless it’s one of their friends, and even then, they complain about the person often). They hate the Hamptons (but take a house-there, anyway, in Sag Harbor). They believe in the poor. They believe in black writers. (They know two,
and Winnie is working on becoming friends with a third.)

  Winnie believes (no, knows) that she is smarter than James, and as good a journalist as he is, and as good a writer. She often thinks that she is actually better than he (in every way, not just journalism), but he (being a man) has gotten more breaks. James’ style of writing and her style of writing (which she picked up from James, who picked it up from other writers of his tall, gaunt, khakis-and-button-down ilk) was not hard to figure out how to do, once she understood the motivation.

  Winnie is deeply bitter and James is deeply bitter, but they never talk about it. James is scared of his wife. She doesn’t seem to be scared of anything—and that scares him. When Winnie should be scared—when she has an impossible deadline, or can’t get people to cooperate on interviews, or doesn’t think she’s getting the assignments she wants, she gets angry instead of scared. She calls people and screams. She faxes, she e-mails. She marches into her editors’ offices and has “hissy fits.”

  Everyone is just a tiny bit scared of Winnie, and James is scared that one of these days, she won’t get the assignment, or she’ll get fired.

  But she always does get the assignment. At the potluck suppers (“our salon,” they call it) they host every other Tuesday night (they invite other serious journalists like themselves, and discuss the political implications of everything from the V-chips to rent hikes, to what’s happened to the journalists who were fired from New York Newsday, to the scandal of 60 Minutes pulling its planned segment on the Clinton Whitewater book), Winnie will discuss whatever story she is working on. Everyone will be sitting with Limoges plates on their laps, and they will be eating iceberg lettuce with fat-free salad dressing and skinless chicken breasts, and maybe some rice, and then there’s fat-free frozen yogurt for dessert, and Winnie will say, “I want to know what everyone thinks about the new NBC 24-hour news channel. I’m doing my column on it this week.” When she started doing this, a few years ago, James thought it was cute. But now he gets annoyed. (He never shows it.) Why is she always asking everyone else what they think? Doesn’t she have her own thoughts? And he looks around the room to see if any of the other men (husbands) are sharing the same sentiment.

  He can’t tell. He can never tell. Maybe if people got drunk—but they only drink little, wee glasses of wine. No one they know drinks hard alcohol anymore. James often wants to ask these other husbands what they think of their wives. Are they scared of them, too? Do they ever have fantasies of pushing their wives down on the bed and ripping off their underpants and…(James sort of tried something like that with Winnie, but she slapped him and wouldn’t talk to him for three days afterward.) Mostly he wants to know: Are other men scared of Winnie?

  There are times when James doesn’t feel like the man in the relationship. But then he asks himself what Winnie would say if he told her that. She’d say, “What does it mean to ‘feel like a man’, anyway? What does ‘a man’ feel like?” And since he never can answer those questions, he has to agree with Winnie.

  Fed Chair Alan Greenspan as the Grinch

  Illustrated by Philip Burke

  JULY 15, 1996 BY TODD LAPPIN

  THE OBSERVATORY: Lord Kinsley Is Here to Tame the Web

  MICHAEL KINSLEY HAD HIS ONLINE DEBUT ON JUNE 24, AND EVER since, the Internet has been coughing him up like a hairball.

  Accepting the noble cause, Mr. Kinsley, Harvard graduate, Rhodes Scholar Anglophile, former editor of The New Republic, former co-host of CNN’s Crossfire and prodigy of the cultural elite, set out to create an outpost of civilization in the heart of digital darkness.

  The World Wide Web is an anarchic wild of untamed energy and uncertain geography, populated by hordes of information hunter-gatherers and uppity villagers who add their voices to an unrehearsed chorus of commentary, critique and opinion.

  They see Mr. Kinsley as the embodiment of a smug East Coast media establishment that for decades doled out information to them, like so many beneficent aristocrats handing out pennies to the huddled masses. The Web is nothing if not a forum for class anger against the cultural elite, and it bestows a curious mixture of personal power and humbling populism upon its users. For $10 a month, the cost of an America Online account, anyone can become her own broadcast network. Yet she does so knowing that she’s only one of thousands upon thousands of people spouting off, maybe into the void at that.

  That’s the paradox of the Web, and its beauty, and it is what Mr. Kinsley doesn’t seem to get. As he told Ken Auletta in The New Yorker, “I don’t want to seem like an Internet fascist, but there is a reason why some people get paid as writers and some don’t.”

  AUGUST 5, 1996: BY GEORGE GURLEY

  THE OBSERVATORY: WHY AREN’T YOU AT WORK?

  AS YOU SLIP OUT OF THE OFFICE to a doctor’s appointment, you can’t help but notice them. You see them through the windows of Starbucks, lounging with their tall frappuccinos, laptops on their laps.

  I accosted 100 of these lay-abouts over two recent workdays and asked them: Why the hell aren’t you at work?

  Their answers suggested they don’t believe that the purpose of living in Manhattan is to fulfill grand ambitions. All the city’s bustle and noise serve them as a mere backdrop for their own private musings.

  Unlike the slackers who were the subjects of books, movies and countless articles in the late 80’s and early 90’s, this Manhattan breed doesn’t stew in its own misery. Their constant presence in Barnes & Noble and Starbucks shows they have no hard feelings toward corporate America, and their inactivity shouldn’t be construed as a form of silent protest. These people are quite content, thank you. If they have a goal, it’s to lead lives of relative ease in a harsh city.

  Oh, they may seem harmless enough—but if these happy loafers are not stopped, they will turn Manhattan into an Eastern Seaboard version of San Francisco, where nothing much happens, except that it gets a little chilly at night.

  Here we’ve got all this brainpower and it’s all going to waste in the clean comfort of the Barnes & Noble Starbucks. It’s the middle of the morning, after all, prime working time. The Amish have been out in the fields for hours. The traders on Wall Street are crazed and hoarse. But here…people are watching one another drink coffee. And it’s like this all over Manhattan, in the borough’s 22 Starbucks locations.

  But must we blame the loafers themselves for drifting through the part of the day prized by the hard worker? Shouldn’t Starbucks itself bear some of the blame for bringing Manhattan to the level of some West Coast burg?

  In a telephone interview, Starbucks spokeswoman Jeanne McKay says, “It’s a casual setting, a meeting place to make connections.”

  Yes, yes, Ms. McKay, but isn’t it true that Starbucks provides people with even more opportunity to fuck off?

  Ms. McKay maintains her caffeinated cool. “That’s an individual’s choice and it’s not my place to judge,” she says. “We’re just a business serving coffee. We can’t take responsibility.”

  Can’t take responsibility, Ms. McKay? Very nice. Very nice, indeed.

  AUGUST 19, 1996: BY ALEX KUCZYNSKI

  THE OBSERVATORY: NEW YORK IS GERM CITY! AN INVASION OF E. COLI, OTHER NASTY MICROBES

  YOU MIGHT WANT TO THINK TWICE BEFORE USING THE NYNEX pay phone on the northwest corner of Madison Avenue and East 71st Street. You may want to avoid taxis—at least for the month of August. And that idea you had of taking the kids to see Across the Sea of Time at the high-tech Sony Imax Theater on Broadway and West 68th Street? Skip it.

  According to an Observer investigation, that pay phone harbors flesh-eating bacteria; taxicabs are depositories for infectious respiratory microbes; and one pair of 3-D glasses at the Sony Imax Theater carries Escherichia coli, or E-coli bacteria, one strain of which, not necessarily the one found in our sample, was responsible for the food-poisoning illnesses of hundreds of people who ate contaminated hamburgers in the Northwest in 1992 and 1993.

  A team of reporters, armed with Starplex microbiol
ogy transport swabs, collected viable cultures from the surfaces New Yorkers touch, sit on, lean against and drink from every day. Such as the engagement ring counter at Tiffany, the cafeteria in the Time & Life building, Harry Cipriani restaurant, the front door at Condé Nast headquarters, a suit hanger at Barney’s New York, the Plaza Hotel, a Citibank automatic teller machine, Zabar’s celebrated cheese counter, and 60 Minutes executive producer Don Hewitt’s favorite perch at the Candy Kitchen Diner in Bridgehampton, L.I.—to name just a few. The swabs were placed in sterile plastic tubes and brought to Dr. Philip Tierno, director of microbiology and diagnostic immunology at New York University Medical Center-Tisch Hospital.

  The preliminary conclusions? You’ll never go out into the city without wearing long pants again.

  SEPTEMBER 2, 1996 BY FRANK DIGIACOMO

  THE TRANSOM: A Hillary-Whipped President Parties

  HARVEY KEITEL WELCOMED President William Jefferson Clinton into his sixth decade with a line originally uttered by William Powell in the 1948 movie Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid. Standing on the stage of Radio City Music Hall, Mr. Keitel looked down into the audience at the sleekly turned out Mr. Clinton and told him that 50 was “the youth of old age” or “the old age of youth.” And then the star of Mean Streets added, “Choose your delusion.”

  President Clinton’s birthday celebration was just beginning, but already it was clear that there would be many delusions from which to choose on this 18th day of August, 1996. The Clintons and their support team had landed in New York all right, but it might as well have been a sound-stage replica of the Big Apple. This was high Hamptons season, and save for a handful of loyal Democratic V.I.P.’s and wannabes, the city’s overclass had abandoned its muggy concrete canyons to the tourists. Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee had chosen to celebrate the president’s birthday in a city devoid of its soul.