“What are you talking about?”
“Someone’s been coaching you on what to say.”
“This is about us. Not about anyone else.”
“See? There you go again.”
“Why do you have to make this harder?”
“I’m not making it harder. I have to get a cigarette.”
“I have to go to sleep. Why won’t you let me sleep?”
“You don’t deserve to sleep.”
“I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“You haven’t done anything right, either. I want to get to the bottom of this coaching business.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Someone’s been telling you what to say. It’s an old shrink trick. When you’re in a difficult situation, you keep repeating the same phrase over and over again. That way, you can’t have a conversation.”
One hour later:
“What are you doing? Who are you seeing? What time are you getting home?”
“Early. I’m getting home early.”
“You’re out of control.”
“I am not. I’m home at 11.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I could have you followed. How do you know that I’m not already having you followed? I’m rich enough to have you followed.”
This was several weeks after Carrie had begged to be taken to a mental institution.
(To be continued…)
OCTOBER 21, 1996 BY BEN PROFUME
THE NEW YORK WORLD: OFF THE MENU
THERE’S A DEEPLY SICK TREND overtaking Manhattan’s restaurants.
It used to be that only the very rich had the narcissistic arrogance to order “off the menu” at their favorite lunch spots. Remember the vile Roy Cohn, biting into an off-the-menu tuna sandwich at “21”?
Well, like many bad habits, ordering “off the menu,” or O.T.M., has dribbled down to the common folk. Go into any diner and you’ll see some fellow sticking his nose into the kitchen, asking something like, “What meat do you have fresh today?” Said fellow doesn’t bother to consult the menu—that’s for the little folk, not Diner Man.
We’re not talking about the well-known “high-maintenance eater”—you know, the person who asks to switch sauces, or get dressing on the side, etc. O.T.M.’ers are much more hard-core: They’re into power, not taste. Only an idiot, they think, would order from the actual menu.
If you, too, would like to feel that little throb of power, there are distinct rules:
Consult the menu, find the most complex item, which the chef has clearly spent days or weeks creating—but ask for it done plain, no sauces, no spices, etc., thereby insulting the chef’s intelligence. For example: “I’ll have the red snapper with mango chutney in whole wheat phyllo pastry—but can I just get the snapper, broiled plain, and a lemon slice? Thanks.”
Set the menu aside, look sincerely into the waiter’s eyes and say, “You know something?
I’d just like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich today. Thanks.”
By ordering something so ridiculously, anachronistically plain (a favorite O.T.M. ploy), you’ll seem haimish, etc.
Ask for Diet Coke “but with ice on the side.” This lets your fellow diners know that you’re hip to the New York custom of overloading a glass with ice to displace the costly soda.
Call the beleaguered manager by his first name—clasp his hand, smack him on the back—even better, speak to him in his native Greek, Italian or Spanish. This shows your pals what a man of the people you are. Never mind that the manager has dreams of shoving a metal spike through your throat.
A noteworthy O.T.M. subspecies is the Gourmet Coffee Shop O.T.M.’er. It takes lots of training to join this group, since many of the wait staff at gourmet coffee shops are recovering O.T.M.’ers and can easily out-attitude the neophyte O.T.M.’er. But an expert practitioner was seen recently at Commodities Coffee Shop in TriBeCa. He clearly had years of experience, so don’t try this at your local joint:
He approached the woman behind the counter, leaned his face over the stack of bran muffins, and said in a faux-intimate voice, “I’d like a coffee with a little skim milk—but not as much as yesterday. Thanks.”
With this one simple request, the customer’s arrogance and narcissism dovetailed beautifully. Notice how he simply assumed that the woman behind the counter would remember exactly how many millimeters of milk she had poured into his cup the day before, that she has had nothing better to do with the last 24 hours of her life than remember how much skim milk this guy likes in his coffee.
We’d say more, but our waiter is here.
NOVEMBER 18, 1996 BY LORNE MANLY
MEDIA UPSTART FELIX DENNIS SERVES MANY MISTRESSES, MANY MAGAZINES
FELIX DENNIS, BRITISH MULTIMILLIONAIRE, international playboy and self-described “mad fucker,” whirled back into the living room of his East 49th Street apartment and thrust a sheet of paper into a reporter’s hand.
“I’m going to let you read it for three seconds. Read fast!”
The words “Bank of Bermuda” and “account balance” flashed by, followed by a number—a big one, higher than $13 million. Just then, the swingin’ Londoner turned publishing mogul snatched the document and danced back to his place on the couch.
Mr. Dennis, 48, was in Manhattan on an autumn afternoon last month to check up on the preparations for bringing his London-based men’s magazine, Maxim, to the United States. Maxim is a kind of Cosmpolitan for men, with cleavage on every cover and sex and money advice on the pages inside. With this rag for the regular guy, Mr. Dennis hopes to shatter the “cozy cartel” of men’s magazines turned out by Condé Nast Publications and Hearst Corporation—such stalwarts as GQ, Details and Esquire.
“I’ve got 10 or 15 million to burn, and I don’t care if I lose it,” Mr. Dennis said.
But for now, despite his fortune of roughly $250 million, Mr. Dennis cannot rightly count himself in the company of S.I. Newhouse Jr. and Jann Wenner and other New York media machers. Until he actually cracks the American market with a general-interest publication—he’s just a crazy Englishman with a big idea and money to burn.
If Maxim’s lowbrow formula doesn’t work in the United States, Mr. Dennis said, he won’t try again to break into the market. “If Maxim flops, I’m out,” he said.
Whatever happens, his regrets will be few. “If most men knew how I live and have lived my life for the last 25 years,” he said, “they would happily take out a shotgun…and they would shoot me without a second thought. And I wouldn’t blame them. Because if I was them, I’d shoot me.”
Illustrated by Victor Juhasz
NOVEMBER 25, 1996 BY FRANK DIGIACOMO
Four-Star Feud: Aprés Bouley, le Déluge
THE REMNANTS OF THE SATURDAY LUNCH CROWD LINGERED over their coffee and petit fours as Daniel Boulud described what it has been like, lately, to feed them. “You know when you try to put a 100-pound pressure into a 10-pound pipe?” said Mr. Boulud, as he shifted in his chef’s whites. “I mean, Pchgh!”
Mr. Boulud unclenched his valuable fingers, pantomiming the explosion.
The chef affected a harried look. He was not convincing.
Mr. Boulud has to know that, in this winter of culinary discontent, he may not be the last chef standing, but he is the best. That is why a lot of powerful people are kissing the former Lyons farm boy’s derriere.
Mr. Boulud seems determined to capitalize on his heightened power and popularity. In April, he and his pastry chef, François Payard, will open Payard, a bistro and patisserie on Lexington Avenue at East 74th Street. But what really has the culinary world talking is the chef and restaurateur’s interest in taking over a familiar and hallowed piece of turf that once belonged to Sirio Maccioni, Mr. Boulud’s boss from 1986 to 1992: the space in the Mayfair Hotel that housed Le Cirque.
“I did not ask them to do this,” Mr. Boulud said of Mr. Bouley’s and Mr. Maccioni’s decisions to
close, then relocate, their establishments. He laughed a dry laugh that turned into a wheeze.
Illustrated by Victor Juhasz
1997
Twilight of the literary beasts: Roth, Mailer, Bellow, Updike roar in their senescence
Bill Clinton rings in second term with Washington power orgy
Good golly! Molly Shannon is Saturday Night Live’s star klutz
Pucker up, Park Slope: Author Kathryn Harrison tells of incest in The Kiss
Sex or sanity? Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft dull depressives’ libidos
Woody Allen lobbies in vain to save beloved Books and Company
The age of expressionless-ism: New Yorkers inject botulism toxin to fight wrinkles
Zut alors, the bistro is back: Keith McNally opens Balthazar
Al Sharpton, Ruth Messinger battle for Democratic mayoral nomination
1997
JANUARY 6, 1997 BY ALEX KUCZYNSKI
Minimalist Chic Shrinks the Big City
IT WAS A WINDY MIDWINTER night in Manhattan, and two women in their 20’s stood outside an apartment in a postwar building. One of them pressed the buzzer.
“Welcome,” said the young man, a lawyer, who opened the door wearing a mandarin collar jacket and black pants. “Oh, and before you come in, could you remove your shoes?”
The two women exchanged glances—what kind of party did you say this was?—but politely discarded their shoes and entered the four-room apartment, furnished in little more than an expanse of off-white carpet. In the kitchen, an expensive-looking stainless steel pod served as a garbage receptacle. In the bedroom, a mattress covered with a rough cotton duvet rested on a wooden square. There were no doorknobs anywhere in Apartment 4F. No piles of mail, no loose sweaters, no stray gym socks, no television remote controls. There was Nothing, and there was a whole lot of it.
Illustrated by Robert Grossman
“Don’t you love it?” said the lawyer, surveying his blank kingdom and sipping a glass of club soda (no red wine allowed in the apartment). “Isn’t it so”—his voice dropped a tone—“so min-im-al-ist?”
Minimalism is the latest social-aesthetic disease to sweep Manhattan. After the opulent 80’s and the lackluster early 90’s, minimalism, fueled by the recovering economy, is devouring our retail spaces, our bookstores, our literature, our public figures.
“There has been a definite return to an appreciation of what most people call a minimalist aesthetic,” said Manhattan architect John Fifield. “It’s accessible, for one. You don’t have to know the history of architecture to appreciate the beauty of a simple concrete floor.”
Also, unlike doing your place up in Sister Parish splendor, it doesn’t really take taste to create a convincing minimalist space.
Illustrated by Robert Grossman
FEBRUARY 3, 1997 BY FRANK DIGIACOMO
OH, DONNA! DON’T CALL HER MRS. GIULIANI
SINCE SHORTLY BEFORE CHRISTMAS, THE GOSSIP MILL, TABLOIDS and even The New York Times have carried curious stories about the separate public lives that Donna Hanover and her husband, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, seem to be leading. The last time the couple appeared together in public was New Year’s Eve.
There is also Ms. Hanover’s renewed career focus, which an invitation to a Dec. 12 reception at Gracie Mansion put succinctly: “Broadcast journalist and the First Lady of the City of New York Donna Hanover requests the pleasure of your company.” Note that the career comes first, the city second.
And of course there was the name change. Donna Hanover had appended “Giuliani” during her husband’s second mayoralty campaign. “The mortgage is Donna Hanover Giuliani; the taxes, Donna Hanover Giuliani. In the campaign, and if Rudy is elected, I would prefer Donna Hanover Giuliani, although in a professional capacity, I would continue to use Donna Hanover,” the first lady told a Newsday reporter in July 1993, adding: “I’m comfortable with any combination.” (In the same interview, she also said, “My husband is the most virile man.”)
JANUARY 27, 1997 BY NICK PAUMGARTEN WITH GEORGE GURLEY
BILL CLINTON’S PRESIDENTIAL POWER ORGY
IT HAD THE MAKINGS OF A BAD Beltway joke: Alan Greenspan, Bob Woodward and Andrea Mitchell were strolling arm-in-arm down the ground-floor corridor of the Willard Hotel on the eve of the 53rd Presidential Inaugural. And no one even lost their lunch.
When folks talk about the corridors of power, they don’t usually mean carpeted hotel lobbies or the vast public tundra of the Mall. But in Washington, D.C., during inaugural weekend, the entire city became a thoroughfare for people more often confined to tighter hallways, boardrooms, mastheads and TV screens. It was a vast farmers market of power. And the Willard, on several occasions, teemed with strange and unnerving alliances, byproducts of an incestuous life in the nation’s second-largest one-industry town. The story of Inauguration Day, as delivered on the evening news, was of the temporary truce between the two political parties and of the relative non-pomp of a second inaugural. But what made the day such a sight to behold was the constant flaunting of the cozy relationship between the press and the politicians, between those who deliver information and those who guard it, and those who describe power and those who wield it. And New Yorkers—from Mark Green to Graydon Carter to Tabitha Soren to Bobby Zarem—came to slip under the covers and get a piece of whatever it is people come to Washington to get.
FEBRUARY 3, 1997: BY JIM WINDOLF
Klutzy, Desperate Molly Shannon: Superstar in White Cotton Undies
MOLLY SHANNON IS 32 AND LIVES ALONE in Greenwich Village. She usually walks to work, more than 40 blocks up to NBC, sometimes in a lavender thrift shop coat with a fake fur collar. People are beginning to go up to her, even if they don’t know her name, and she’s already had a stalker.
Sometimes on days off, she’ll walk all the way up into the 100’s. Or she’ll walk downtown, along the Hudson, listening lately to the Smashing Pumpkin’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness on a Walkman. In the evenings, she’ll get a magazine and have what she calls “a lady’s dinner alone.” Late at night, when she can’t sleep, she might smoke seven Marlboro Lights in a row, reading self-help books like Codependent No More or watching her video of George Cukor’s The Women. The Saturday Night Live schedule can screw you up, and sometimes she’s in a diner at 4:30 in the morning.
In the coffee shop by Studio 8H, a beautiful guy gave her an I’m-hitting-on-you look, and she held his stare.
“Do you like that?” I said.
“No!” she said. “God, no.”
Days of Fiennes and Roses: Miramax’s Bob and Harvey Weinstein flank The English Patient’s Ralph Fiennes
Illustrated by Drew Friedman
FEBRUARY 10, 1997 BY WARREN ST. JOHN
THE SAUCY, LITERARY HARRISONS PUCKER UP
THE NOVELIST KATHRYN HARRISON was sitting erect in the cafe of the Regency Hotel in Manhattan, her blond hair pulled back and strikingly set off by a black velvet scarf and beaded black lamb’s-wool sweater. It was an afternoon in late January, and she reluctantly agreed to talk about her decision to write The Kiss, a memoir to be published in April by Random House, in which she admits a consensual four-year love affair, from age 20 to 24, with her father, a preacher. The galleys of The Kiss, had been circulating among Manhattan’s literary set for weeks, where it has achieved a kind of haute seamy status.
“For me, writing is a transaction by which I try to come to terms with myself, and in this case, my past,” said Ms. Harrison. “We’ll see if I’m laying the tinder at my own stake.”
The tinder is already smoldering. A recent Vanity Fair article by Michael Shnayerson, who did not interview Ms. Harrison, accused her of shameless opportunism. “The article portrayed me as calculating and mercenary,” said Ms. Harrison. “It stung.” More articles are on the way from Vogue, Mirabella, and Harper’s Bazaar; The New Yorker is preparing an excerpt.
But by deciding to merchandise her pain, Ms. Harrison surely knew what she was getting into. She is, after all, one-
half of an ambitious literary couple: She is married to novelist and Harper’s magazine deputy editor Colin Harrison, who has just signed a $1 million, two-book deal with Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Some of the sniping over The Kiss may be a case of envy. The Harrisons have the kind of life not a few New York media types aspire to: two writers chipping away at their respective novels in their Park Slope brownstone, sharing child-care duties and talking about books and ideas late into the evening. The fact that Ms. Harrison has written a book that may pass muster with both The New York Review of Books and Oprah Winfrey is also not insignificant.
But certain facts—that it was Ms. Harrison’s agent, Amanda (Binky) Urban, who suggested she write The Kiss; that Mr. Harrison is writing an article for Vogue, about being married to the author of The Kiss—have led some people in the publishing business to agree with one editor who knows the couple, who calls their prepublication behavior “The Colin and Kathryn Harrison show.”
Illustrated by Robert Grossman and Illustrated by Victor Juhasz
Time Inc.’s Norm Pearlstine scales the Henry Luce heights
Illustrated by Robert Grossman and Victor Juhasz
FEBRUARY 17, 1997 BY KATHERINE EBAN FINKELSTEIN
Abortion-Inducing Drug to Make Manhattan Debut, Beating RU-486 to City
A DOCTOR AT COLUMBIA-PRESBYTERIAN MEDICAL CENTER IS ABOUT to make available to New York City women, for the first time, a generic version of RU-486, the compound that chemically induces abortion.
Before March 10, the controversial drug, mifepristone, will be provided at one of Columbia-Presbyterian’s downtown clinics, The Observer has learned. Carolyn Westhoff, an associate professor of clinical obstetrics and gynecology at the Columbia School of Public Health, has been given the go-ahead by the Food and Drug Administration to administer the drug to women on a first-come, first-served basis. She joins only five other doctors in the country who have been given permission to do so.
The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots Page 24