JUNE 2, 1997 BY WARREN ST. JOHN
The Secret Selling of Thomas Pynchon
IT WAS AN ODD PLACE FOR A THOMAS PYNCHON SIGHTING: ALONGSIDE John Grisham, Mary Higgins Clark, Danielle Steele and Dr. Seuss in the upper reaches of the New York Times best-seller list for June 1. Every Pynchon novel, of course, is an event: They arrive like comets, once every decade or so, carrying not just fine writing but faint radio signals transmitting clues about Pynchon himself. Mason & Dixon, however, answers more questions about the book-buying public than it does about its famously reclusive author. For the book’s audience has expanded hugely beyond Mr. Pynchon’s loyal, inbred literary groupies; the 773-page, $27.50 novel with the gorgeous peach-toned cover is this summer’s book to be seen with. The fact that it is a very difficult book to read has only increased its cachet as an intellectual fashion accessory. But that’s just fine with Mr. Pynchon’s publishers, Henry Holt and Company, who are successfully pulling off a cheekily misleading marketing campaign for the invisible author’s challenging novel.
Mason & Dixon is actually being called the “easy” Pynchon novel. Echoing a number of critics, Yale University professor Harold Bloom said, “It’s remarkably relaxed and, for Pynchon, a happy book….”
Cathy Melnicki, the book’s publicist at Holt, said Mason & Dixon is “a really accessible, kind of familiar, two-guys-go-into-the-woods story…the ultimate Odd Couple, a ‘friend’ book.” Then she mentioned the bonus: “Reading Pynchon makes people feel smart,” she said, “and people like to feel smart.”
Illustrated by Robert Grossman
JUNE 9, 1997 BY PHILIP WEISS
LAY OFF THE SOCIALITE! JON KRAKAUER LEADS VILIFICATION OF EX-MRS. PITTMAN
I’M AN ASTERISK TO THE GREAT Everest disaster of 1996. A couple of months before she left for base camp, I went shopping for gear with Sandy Hill (then Sandy Hill Pittman). We dipped into a little hardware store on 17th Street, and in a minute she had the yarmulked owner and everyone else swarming at her elbows trying to find stuff for her. She was wearing Prada boots and a $500 crocodile belt and lectured me briskly about the best duct tape and how to pee out the leg of your shorts. “I’m not doing anything like hiking.” I felt put down.
My schadenfreude toward Sandy is today a popular feeling. Among the tents of Manhattan base camp, there’s an almost universal feeling that Ms. Hill is evil. As Peter Wilkinson said in Men’s Journal, she’s the “chief villain, the Susan Lucci” of the Everest trip.
The destruction of a bold, single woman, once the toast of the town on her MTV husband’s arm, has been a ghastly thing to watch. It’s happened because of a lot of sniggering articles reporting the climb, because of gossip and because of Jon Krakauer’s best seller, Into Thin Air (Villard).
Mr. Krakauer isn’t the first person not to like Sandy Hill. Countless magazine profiles and whispered comments portray an insensitive and materialistic woman who knows how to use people. Those faults might be excused in a greater talent, but her failure to display appropriate humility post-Everest angered others, causing them to overlook the truly impressive aspects of her character. And the belief that she killed anybody on Everest is absurd and cruel. Yes, she was gross, but a close study of the facts in Mr. Krakauer’s splendid account shows that if fault for the deaths is to be found, it must be found elsewhere.
Senator Bill Bradley plays keep-away from Al Gore
Illustrated by Drew Friedman
AUGUST 4, 1997 BY GEORGE GURLEY
HAMPTONS ’97: THE NEW-MONEY DUDES ARE HERE
EAST HAMPTON, JULY 29—THE Vipers were out on Route 27, big throbbing Dodge Vipers. In the driver’s seats of these $60,000 sports cars were guys who looked like that newest breed of weekend Hamptonite, the bonus babies of the rising Dow. They were ready to spend whatever it took to get in on the glamorous scene they had heard so much about, but guess what. There they were, stuck in traffic, all revved up with no place to go.
This season, many of the longtime summer residents and the A-list party creatures have made a decided effort to go into a kind of social hibernation. For this is the summer the Hamptons rebelled against being the East Coast Hollywood.
Steven Spielberg’s house, a little mansion in East Hampton called Quelle Barn, has been quiet lately. And among other movie people and celebrity moguls—with notable exception of Long Island natives Billy and Alec Baldwin—the notion of putting oneself on display at a party heavy with publicists and paparazzi is no longer considered good form.
Robert De Niro, for one, has been spending time in Montauk this summer—but by staying away from the usual hot spots, he has managed to avoid serving as the subject of gossip items and paparazzi shots. Michael Douglas also managed to get in some golf at the National Golf Links without drawing any attention. Steve Martin, too, has been coming out this summer—but only to see his actual friends, rather than enduring the scrum of parties. Billy Joel is also in hiding. The only one out of synch with the times, it seems, is Donald Trump, who got photographed the other weekend bashing a piñata with a stick at a child’s birthday party; unfortunately, Mr. Trump was not wearing a blindfold.
Meanwhile, standing behind counters of gift shops and taking the orders in the restaurants and country clubs, are the townspeople—some of whom are growing more and more restless with the beautiful invaders.
Illustrated by Drew Friedman
SEPTEMBER 22, 1997 BY TISH DURKIN
Al Sharpton Wins in Never-Never Land
THE REV. AL SHARPTON WAS ABOUT TWO HOURS LATE FOR HIS Sunday-night stop at the Mount Calavary Fire Baptized Holiness Church in Bushwick, Brooklyn, but with someone else at the wheel in his purple campaign van, he could sit back and make big plans. “You’ve got to get Don King to get the Garden,” he said to a reporter along for the ride. “James Brown to open it up, and Rudy and I to debate. A great New York night!”
It was a great New York thought, and at that moment, before talk of uncounted absentee ballots started to smudge the sureness of the fact that Mr. Sharpton had forced Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger into a runoff for the Democratic mayoral nomination to face Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, it sounded almost sane. Only the other night, Mr. King had addressed a rally of star-reaching Sharptonites at the National Action Network in Harlem. And just an hour or two before, Mr. Brown, a longtime father figure to Mr. Sharpton, had introduced him onstage at a twilight concert in Central Park. Mr. Giuliani might not be up for Madison Square Garden with all the trimmings, but then, if he were obliged to debate Mr. Sharpton under any circumstances, the spectacle would take care of itself.
Not a few reporters were secretly cherishing the prospect, however remote, that a general campaign otherwise crumb-dry of charisma might be overtaken by a figure positively pouring with it, and vaguely, warily wondering what such a campaign might drag to the surface of the city.
NOVEMBER 17, 1997 BY FRANK DIGIACOMO
JUDITH REGAN DRIVES TWO AUTHORS BONKERS
WHEN THE MORNING DELIVERY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BROUGHT news on June 27 that Harper Collins had canceled more than 100 titles from its publishing list to cut costs, Ellen Hawkes turned to her longtime companion, Peter Manso, and said: “We should be so lucky.”
At the time they read the article in their Berkeley, Calif., home, Ms. Hawkes and Mr. Manso, accomplished book authors both, had been collaborating for almost a year on a biography of the deceased model and actress Margaux Hemingway for Regan Books, the Harper Collins-owned imprint run by publishing’s brash wonderwoman, Judith Regan.
But all was not well between the authors and their editor. They claimed they had not been in contact with Ms. Regan since September 1996. She had, however, made her presence felt in a phone call on June 6 to Ms. Hawkes’ agent, Marion Rosenberg. “They are assholes, unprofessional beasts, reprehensible, unprofessional motherfuckers,” she told Ms. Rosenberg (who took notes).
The authors themselves were no shrinking violets when it came to memos. “Judith (and we) have all along thought
of this as a ‘woman’s’ book,” they wrote to Mr. Manso’s agent, Elaine Markson, when they learned that Ms. Regan wanted a shot of Hemingway “with breasts visible under [a] sheer wet dress” on the book’s cover. Ms. Markson at one point wrote Harper Collins’ general counsel, James Fox: “Please inform Regan Books that, like E.E. Cummings, there is some shit I will not eat.”
Illustrated by Philip Burke
Illustrated by Philip Burke
DECEMBER 15, 1997 BY PHILIP WEISS
The Dark Bourgeois Heart of Woody Allen
WOODY ALLEN OFTEN LIKENS his work to magic, and his haunts in the Manhattan Film Center inside the Beekman apartments feel a little like the magician’s back rooms. On Dec. 2, the day after Mr. Allen’s 62nd birthday, I was shown into a screening room that was also doing double duty, with record albums on one wall and canisters of film along the other.
I sat in a brown armchair and then abruptly, like a trick, Mr. Allen appeared on the muskrat-colored couch, wearing a tasteful muted palette of gray and olive and black scuffed shoes and gathering a dark pillow defensively to his stomach, said, “I’m at your disposal,” in a gentle voice.
“Do you have a name for your penis?”
Woody Allen looked aghast.
“What?”
Maybe it was the wrong question to start with. I guess I’d felt justified because it’s a bit from Mr. Allen’s new movie Deconstructing Harry.
But seated across from me now, he seemed white-faced, sincere.
“You know, it’s in the movie. ‘Do you have a name for your penis?’”
He shook his head. “No. But that is the strangest question I’ve ever gotten from a journalist.”
* * *
GEORGE GURLEY INTERVIEWS JIM WINDOLF
Illustrated by Barry Blitt
You started the New York World column…
We looked at old newspapers like The New York World in the ’20s, and they had a column in there called the Conning Tower, and it was kind of modeled on that. The Conning Tower was by Franklin Adams; he was on the outskirts of the Algonquin Round Table.
In the Transom you had the news about things that happened that week, and New York World was more of the feeling of the city or things that may not have been news, but described the mood of the city. And funny things. I wrote a short one: “Lunch Excuses.” Nice little hundred words. There were a lot of hundred- or two-hundred-word things and Talk of the Town didn’t have that. So that was one of the things we could do differently. Sparrow I liked because when I was covering the media, I covered his protest of The New Yorker: Sparrow was in this group of poets called The Unbearables who protested The New Yorker, and Sparrow had this great quote: “Our poetry is as bad as anything published in The New Yorker so we deserve to be in there as much as anybody else.” And when I actually read the stuff I really liked it—it was so beautifully readable and funny, as opposed to the crap in The New Yorker.
What was it like when Graydon was the editor?
I’d been a teacher—taught English at Friends Seminary, and I decided I didn’t want to be a teacher anymore, so I applied to 20 newspapers and the only place I got a response was The New York Observer. Luckily, I really knew Spy well: At the interview I was able to know what I was talking about because I’d read Spy. I started on November 11th, 1991. Helen Thorpe was writing Off the Record, Charlie Bagli doing real estate, Terry Golway doing politics, Claire McHugh doing the Transom and Robin Pogrebin doing a mix of Broadway, feature stories, news stories—for some reason she had the Andrew Stein beat. I think she was the one who reported he had 30 wigs for the month, so that it looked like natural hair coming in—he’d start each month with his shortest wig and then work his way through as the month went on. I thought that was a great detail and that made me realize that there was something different in The Observer. It wasn’t the same as reading The Times.
Before Graydon took over, this guy John Sicher was the editor. He wasn’t really a journalist. I think in the first issue of The Observer the cover was a picture of a duck pond in Central Park. Kind of this pastoral view of New York: Let’s treat New York like it’s a quaint small town. When Graydon came in, he brought in the satire, the insider’s look at different industries, especially media and gossip. He did it with the writers who were there. Spy was a magazine made up of writers who were witty; The Observer was different because you had someone like Charlie Bagli, who was just a straight-ahead reporter who got news. And Terry Golway was serious about city politics. He came from the Staten Island Advance and it was not a joke to him. And Graydon took people like that, with their heart and seriousness, and brought in the hard edge and satire. Graydon had yellow Post-It notes and before the reporters got there, he would put a Post-It note on each desk; he would have their assignment on that Post-It. I was amazed. How does he know what’s going to look good in the paper a week from now? The other thing was, Graydon at that time had a side deal to write for Vogue. One of my jobs was to fax his article to Anna Wintour and it really was a shock to me—like, “So he’s working with them?” Like somebody Spy had mocked.
And I was an old intern. I was 28, and I was an intern. I’d go to the library for the reporters: three hours of working microfilm and Xeroxing stuff and bringing it back. And we had a van and Graydon wanted to put wood in his office, so we picked up the wood that was going to be the built-in shelves. We picked up the wood and then [Graydon’s assistant] Kirk hit the brakes too hard and the wood cracked the windshield on our way back. Another time I was bringing Graydon coffee and I completely spilled—like lunged forward—he had a beautiful white shirt and I doused him. And he was nice about it and he told me some story where he had done the same thing to Si Newhouse. The first articles I did were covering community board meetings. Graydon said, “You go to these meetings and there’s always a story, because some people want something and they’re either going to get it or they’re not. And that’s a story.” I got $50 a week for each one. The first real feature story that I did was when adults were starting to play Gameboy. This was 1991; that primitive version of Gameboy. And it was so cool because I never had a Gameboy and I had to get one and figure out how it works. This was the time when adults would play Tetris on their computers. Graydon said he couldn’t understand why adults would do that when they should, at the end of the workday, be getting home for dinner or their kids. When I wrote the article, I wanted to write the most fantastic article of all time, so I wrote this ridiculous 300-word introduction that was complete crazy bullshit, really bad beatnik prose, and the editor said, “If I show this to Graydon, you’ll no longer be working here.” Then I understood: You’re not writing for yourself, you’re writing an article for other people to read. One thing I remember is we were going to have this special daily election issue come out for the 1992 convention. And then Graydon announced he was leaving. And during the meeting where he announced it, Robin [Pogrebin] said, “Well, are you going stick around for the convention?” And he said, “No, I’m going fishing.” He was going to take two weeks off before his next job [as editor of Vanity Fair] started.
* * *
There were a lot of things flying out of Kaplan’s window. We’d be like, “Did you see this article in New York magazine?” and he’d throw it out the window.
* * *
Jim Windolf is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.
I was made the media columnist, writing Off the Record. The first week I wrote the column, Tina Brown took over The New Yorker. Luckily, I knew the history of The New Yorker really well from reading all the New Yorker books as a hobby. It wasn’t like I was preparing to be a media journalist. I just knew that stuff. I enjoyed reading it. And right before I took over Off the Record, one day on the car radio, I heard—just flipping around on AM stations—this song, “I’m the Happiest Girl in the Whole USA.” It was the No. 5 hit of 1971—really bad country pop song by Donna Fargo. So when Tina got the New Yorker job, I called Robert Gottlieb, who was the outgoing editor. And he didn�
�t give many interviews. He answered his phone and I said, “How do you feel leaving The New Yorker?” and the first thing he said was, “I’m the happiest girl in the whole USA.” So I said, “Donna Fargo, right?” and just because I could say Donna Fargo, he stayed on the phone.
And then through a friend of a friend, I knew one person who happened to have a job at The New Yorker. So when Susan Morrison, who came in after Graydon, said, “I need to know what’s happening inside,” I had a mole. I called him at night: “Now what’s happening? Where’s Tina’s office going? Who’s been fired?” For two months: the source that was complete luck. So when something like that appeared in The Observer, the people at The New Yorker would be, “How are they getting this?” And they couldn’t connect me to this person who was working there. I met him once in person but I freaked him out. I felt, “Now I have to act like a real journalist,” so I took him to the Oyster Bar and dinner was 88 bucks. And since he was telling me stuff in secret, when we met in public, suddenly it was like if you’re doing something naughty and you’re doing it in public. Sometimes it’s better to keep your sources very quiet. You don’t want to bring him out in the open and have a good party about it. If I hadn’t had my little mole and my Donna Fargo, I would have failed doing Off the Record and been out of the business in a couple of months.
I had some things that were funny. GQ wanted to see what their readers were thinking, so they put readers in this room and had them look at their magazine. They had a one-way mirror, and Art Cooper, the editor of GQ, was sitting on the other side. The focus group leader said, “Would you read this article?” And the people in the focus group were like, “This sucks, I like Esquire better than this piece-of-crap magazine.” And they kept on going, and Art Cooper got so pissed that he opened the door and went into the focus group. They didn’t even know there was a one-way mirror, so they’re thinking, “Who the hell is this?!” And he told them all off: “You idiots!”
The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots Page 27