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

by The New York Observer

  Illustrated by Philip Burke and Drew Friedman

  SEPTEMBER 6, 1999 BY ALEXANDRA JACOBS

  Women Warriors Invade the U.S. Open; How Coach Brad Gilbert Remade Agassi’s Game

  Illustrated by Philip Burke and Drew Friedman

  TWENTY YEARS AGO, YOU WENT TO THE U.S. OPEN TO SEE BJORN Borg, John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors. Now you go to see Anna Kournikova, Venus Williams and Martina Hingis–a triumvirate Ms. Hingis cheerfully dubbed “the Spice Girls of tennis.”

  If to sit in Arthur Ashe Stadium at the height of the tournament as airplanes roar past is to feel that one is at the very heart of the urban jungle—forgetting for a moment the 45-minute subway ride to Flushing—then these young women are its new rulers, its lionesses. They’re the ones strutting and preening and stalking the baseline while the rather simian Pete Sampras, the newly hairless, emasculated Andre Agassi and that wussy Aussie Patrick Rafter, with his pliés, his zinc oxide and his topknot, do their thing and quickly flee the court.

  The new, big rackets—which have rendered the men’s serves un-returnable and their rallies short and boring—are feminine. Their sweet spots are larger. Gone is the old racket press, a sort of corset.

  Tennis, as a spectator sport in America, is mostly accessories, body parts and attitude. So: The sports bra has replaced the tennis sweater. The long, waxed thigh has replaced the hairy, clay-smudged calf. And the brattiness that Mr. McEnroe made acceptable has given way to the schoolgirl insouciance of Ms. Kournikova, Ms. Hingis and their juicy pop-culture counterparts.

  JULY 26, 1999 BY FRANK DIGIACOMO

  JOHN KENNEDY, NEW YORKER

  NEW YORK DOESN’T HAVE ROOM TO BURY ITS VERY important dead. Ulysses Grant, of course, is up on Morningside Heights. A few old bishops rest in the crypts at St. John the Divine, and some cardinals lie under St. Patrick’s. Some dusty patriots fill the yard way down beside Trinity Church. But when Gershwin or Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis or even Thurman Munson dies, they’re honored here, then sent away for burial in greener, more sacred ground, and New York feels palpably lonely without them. This morning, New York feels older without him.

  John Kennedy led an exterior, sometimes sunny life in this sometimes dark city. He was part of the brotherhood of his family, but he also lived a life apart, which was his own, and the city helped to set him apart. The New York of John Kennedy stretched from the duchies of Upper Fifth Avenue, where he grew up, to the warehouse district of Tribeca, where he lived his married life; from the green football fields of Central Park to the wrought-iron gates at Collegiate School on West End Avenue; and from the bright, flag-flying offices of George magazine, where he was founding editor, to the perky murals in the Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle, where Ludwig Bemelmans figures of little, snow-dotted, sledding New Yorkers recall the elegance and fun and playful wit that was New York before…everything. John F. Kennedy Jr. lived his life bathed in so much unwanted light that it is almost impossible to imagine him searching the opaque darkness over the Atlantic for some recognizable glimmer that would help him re-establish his bearings.

  He lost his reference, the aviation experts speculated as the 24-hour cable news coverage desperately chased their tails. He could not find the horizon. These were odd phrases to hear in connection with a man whose inner compass rarely failed him when the eyes of the world were watching. And usually when the world was watching, the pictures and words were coming from New York, the city that Mr. Kennedy had called home since 1964. Here in this metropolis that has consumed so many wealthy, handsome scions with vainglorious notions of power and mortality, Mr. Kennedy had actually managed to define himself, not as some media-inflated myth, but as a man of his own design, right down to the ever-present chain that connected his wallet and keys to his belt.

  His mother brought him and his sister to New York to achieve a kind of privacy, and they got that. But Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis insisted that her son become part of the city, and he did that as well. He made the city his Forest of Arden, his Emerald City. And, in a surprisingly optimistic period, John Kennedy made of New York a palace, not a prison—shooting to Yankee Stadium by subway, making Olmsted’s park a playing ground, surfing the rivers of traffic. And when the city conspired to confront him—when the paparazzi assaulted not just him, but his wife, Carolyn Bessette—he went one-on-one; a fair fight between the best-known-guy-in-the-world-in-a-ski-hat up against the mob of the voracious, vulturing press corps. New York liked it. And as an embodiment of New York, he was exactly emblematic of the New York that had taken over from the old, ethnic melting pot. Manhattan in the 90’s became the capitalist capital of the world—it was no longer a place your grandparents had come to; it was the place a generation was setting up camp to remake the urban experience. And John Kennedy lived here like nobody else—and like everybody else. He started a business; tried out suspenders; wore crutches, evening clothes, bandannas; moved on wheels, walked the dog, held the door for his wife, yelled at the paparazzi, fought with his partner in the hallways of Hachette, did quiet work for charities, and avoided phoniness on every front. So he became more than a New Yorker; he became a quintessential New Yorker. He did the whole thing: By day, he was the working stiff, Bruce Wayne going to the office. By night, in a formal suit, he looked like a Rolls coming around the corner. Vital, vigorous, full of fun, generous, confrontational, an unsentimental existential lesson in the joy of daily living. At a Municipal Art Society gala at Grand Central Terminal, Mr. Kennedy pulled aside a waitress. Osso buco had been served that night and he wanted to know if she would put together a bag of leftover bones for his dog, Friday. Larry King and Dan Rather asked him about being the little boy who had saluted, but New Yorkers of his generation didn’t think of him that way; New Yorkers saluted him, sometimes with a wave, sometimes with an envious middle finger, but saluted him nevertheless. When he flopped—like the New York bar—he passed the New York test by non-aversion, meeting reporters head-on. And when he succeeded—most of the time—he averted ever so slightly. By that definition, Mr. Kennedy was very much a New Yorker. Unlike the celebrities whose relationship with the city is an antiseptic one, buffered by town cars and bodyguards, Mr. Kennedy had become intimate with the asphalt in a way that most rank-and-file New Yorkers do not even achieve. He rode its subways and traveled its roads on bicycle and Rollerblade. Chanel president Arie Kopelman remembered that Mr. Kennedy once rode his bicycle to Rao’s restaurant in East Harlem to meet him for dinner. “I said, ‘John, come on, riding a bike in the city is crazy enough, but coming all the way up here? I don’t think it’s safe.’” Mr. Kopelman said that Mr. Kennedy laughed and said, “It’s the only way I can get some great exercise.” As he roamed our precincts, Mr. Kennedy became a poster boy for the new New York that had risen up during the reign of Rudy Giuliani. As he played shirtless in Central Park or braved the paparazzo gantlet at a black-tie gala, Mr. Kennedy sent the message that New York was a playground, not a prison. The world was watching, but those paying the closest attention were those who, like Mr. Kennedy, had been born at the tail end of the baby boom and had settled in the city.

  Illustrated by Drew Friedman

  Now, in their mid-30’s and early 40’s, they saw Mr. Kennedy as a point of reference—albeit an exceedingly handsome one—for what they hoped to achieve. Mr. Kennedy certainly had the looks and the surname to be head of the class. On these attributes, let alone the wealth that he had inherited, Mr. Kennedy could have coasted through life, ending up one of the many titled hollow men who haunt the city’s nightspots with gin and bitterness on their breath. But those who knew Mr. Kennedy said he loved to confound expectations. “He was determined not to do what people expected him to do,” said Joe Armstrong, senior vice president and group publisher of Capital Publishing, who knew Mr. Kennedy and his mother, Jacqueline Onassis. It’s unclear how much of Mr. Kennedy’s need to this was the result of the proto-Truman Show life he lived. Unlike the fictional Truman Burbank, however, Mr. Kennedy knew that he was constantly unde
r surveillance by the media. It was a pressure that he dealt with indifferent ways, but rarely did Mr. Kennedy crack. He had his father’s temper, and occasionally his arrogance, some have said who worked with him, but the media did not see it. Mr. Holtzman, who got to know Mr. Kennedy later in life, said that he was “well aware of the contract” that existed between him and the press. He recalled leaving a Naked Angels benefit and getting into a cab with Mr. Kennedy a few years ago, then watching it become surrounded by paparazzi. “The cab’s window was open and one of the photographers just shoved his lens inside and started shooting away. The flash was going off in the car and the guy wasn’t even looking into his viewfinder,” said the friend, who ended up getting hit in the head with the camera. “I took the camera and shoved it out the window. And as the cab pulled away, John looked at me and said: ‘I can’t do that.’” Photographer Victor Malafronte remembered a moment in the early 1990’s when he was chasing Mr. Kennedy down a Soho street. Mr. Malafronte was on foot and loaded down with three cameras. Mr. Kennedy was on rollerblades and losing his pursuer. “I’m trying to get this gorgeous image of the man skating down West Broadway,” remembered Mr. Malafronte, when suddenly Mr. Kennedy turned and started skating toward him. “I thought he was going to grab me,” said the photographer, but instead his quarry stopped within a few inches of Mr. Malafronte and stuck out his right hand. “He says in the soft-spoken voice, ‘Hi, I’m John.’” Mr. Malafronte said he managed to stammer back, “I know.” But, really, he said, “I was blown away.” Mr. Kennedy let Mr. Malafronte get the shots he wanted, which, he said, made the covers of the New York Post and People. And then he skated away. Mr. Malafronte saw another side of Mr. Kennedy a few days later when he and a documentary crew staked out Mr. Kennedy’s apartment in a van. Mr. Kennedy snuck up on the crew and gave them a tongue lashing. “He had had enough,” Mr. Malafronte said.

  In late 1997, just months after Diana, the Princess of Wales, had been chased to her death by paparazzi on motorcycles, Mr. Kennedy confronted a group of photographers outside his apartment building by training his own video camera on the group. “You’re looking for a harassment lawsuit,” he told one of them. Mr. Kennedy could have hid behind lawyers and a publicist, but he did not. Just as he did not duck reporters in 1990 when he failed the New York bar exam for the second time. “I’m very disappointed. But you know, God willing, I’ll go back there in July and I’ll pass it then. Or I’ll pass it the next time, or I’ll pass it when I’m 95,” Mr. Kennedy told the press phalanx that had gathered outside 1 Hogan Place. “I’m clearly not a major legal genius. I hope the next time you guys are here will be a happy day.” In 1995, Chris Cuomo, who is related to the Kennedy family by marriage, said that he was studying for his bar exam when Mr. Kennedy contacted him. “He said, ‘I know you’re nervous about this test because of what happened to me. Don’t sweat it.’ He said, ‘Listen, as long as you know who you are and you behave that way, everything will be fine.’” Added Mr. Cuomo: “I think that was the key to his dignity.” When Mike Nichols spoke from the Book of Revelations at Jacqueline Onassis’ funeral in May 1994, his voice a shipwreck, he said: “There will be no more death.” But here we are again, and this time it’s us, our generation, and so the loss, the sense of vulnerability, is ours to bear. We’re all older now. And somehow, New York’s 21st century seems a little colder and more distant knowing that John Kennedy—who was supposed to be in our future, who may be irreplaceable in our lives—is contained forever, back here with our youth, in his father’s century, the 20th. If only he had been able to look out the window of his Piper Saratoga and seen the striated lights of the World Trade Center towers, the glow of the Chrysler Building’s Art-Deco hubcaps, the white streams of the avenues, the Empire State’s block of blue-lit limestone and the streaked spider webs of the Manhattan, Brooklyn and Tri-borough bridges. Then west to the river and home.

  * * *

  John Kennedy led an exterior, sometimes sunny life in this sometimes dark city. He was part of the brotherhood of his family, but he also lived a life apart, which was his own, and the city helped to set him apart.

  * * *

  SEPTEMBER 27, 1999 BY PHILIP WEISS

  THE OBSERVATORY: GET READY, MR. PRESIDENT, FOR CHAPPAQUA ALIENATION

  I DON’T HAVE MUCH SYMPATHY for Bill Clinton, but after spending two days in Chappaqua my heart goes out to him. He’s getting socked away down a cul-de-sac surrounded by McMansions. If his last house was done over, with provincial nuttiness, by Kaki Hockersmith, his new house has been done with bourgeois opulence that screams “rich doctor.” Central air, custom moldings, giant addition and swimming pool. Not a lot of imagination.

  Dentition, one real estate agent told me, describing the dental form of the moldings. Another agent said the kitchen is new and perfect, and the master bedroom suite is two stories. But if Bill gets bored in that bedroom he can’t go out the back door, because that’s the woods. It’s a cul-de-sac with a perfect yellow gravel driveway and specimen plantings, as they say in Chappaqua, whatever specimen plantings are. And no blacks. This is probably the first place Bill Clinton will live without black people around.

  If he did manage to escape, there’s nothing for him to do. This is not old-line suburbia, not Cheever’s Ossining or Key Party, Conn. Chappaqua is a family community in the woods. Everyone there tells you that. People move there for the schools, and there’s a stern family feeling about the place. Sheltered meritocracy gone nuts. I bumped into a 9-year-old in the little village, wearing a bicycle helmet and riding a bike with training wheels. Shades of my own bike-fearing Jewish childhood. The real estate agents hand out sheets listing where all the ‘99 high school graduates are going to college.

  “Everything here is for the kids, there’s nothing for adults,” one longtime resident told me. There’s no action. Chappaqua is not even a village, it’s a hamlet. It shuts down at 9 o’clock at night. To make as much money as you have to, to live in Chappaqua, you have to be a mensch in the substantial sense of the word. The men are solid-citizen types, and the women drive SUV’s, and many of them have put aside good careers to raise their children. It has that conservative feeling, even though it is Democratic. A man I ran into at the temple offered that he thinks Bill Clinton’s “conduct” was “a great pity—despicable.” The Baptist minister in town said the thing with the little girl last year took the wind out of his sails.

  The Clintons don’t have taste, don’t have time for taste, something they insist on proving again and again, with Monica Lewinsky, Bill’s neckties and Hillary’s colorful capes. When they get something right, and they do, it is assigned taste, conventional taste. That’s what the Weisberg house looks like: conservative, perfect bourgeois taste, sitting uncomfortably on its tiny one acre, with tacky McMansions around it, and the cul-de-sac, and buses of Japanese tourists already arriving to swing around the bulb end of the cul-de-sac to gawk at the columned porch.

  Illustrated by Drew Friedman

  OCTOBER 25, 1999 BY JOHN HEILPERN

  AT THE THEATER WITH JOHN HEILPERN: Hello, Possums! Dame Edna Spreads Gladdies Everywhere

  WELL, POSSUMS! LET US NOT delay the happy news for a second. The Broadway debut of Dame Edna Everage is a complete triumph.

  Who—or what—is the dame? These are challenging questions, not easily answered. I’m resisting the coy when I say that Dame Edna can’t be pinned down. She’s such an outrageously unique self-invention, she resists classification. She was born in Australia. She is played by a man, Barry Humphries, and, as Dame Edna puts it, “If it wasn’t for him, she wouldn’t be where she is today.”

  A star in England, Dame Edna may have put Australia on the map. John Osborne of Look Back in Anger, an early fan, wrote admiringly 30 years ago: “Her poetic instinct and genius created something that was not there before. That is to say, Australia.” She says she is a housewife, investigative journalist, social anthropologist, swami, children’s book illustrator, spin doctor and icon. She lists her h
obbies as counseling royalty, redefining cultural strategies and posing for photographs with refugees.

  Her motto is: “I’m sorry but I care.” We might feel a little uneasy in her company, but she means well. I last saw her in London 20 years ago, God love us and save us. Then she was more Auntie Dame Edna; today she’s a granny. And, as Dame Edna would put it: I mean that in the nicest possible way.

  NOVEMBER 29, 1999 BY AMY LAROCCA

  HEJ-HEJ, GAP! SEXY, SERIOUS SWEDES INVADE MANHATTAN WITH H&M STORES

  ON THE FOURTH FLOOR OF an office building on Fifth Avenue, 50 New Yorkers were preparing to depart for a three-month boot camp in Stockholm, Sweden—land of Ikea, Nokia and Volvo. The traveling troops—the newest employees of Hennes and Mauritz, Sweden’s version of the sprawling, low-priced, high-style chain stores—were watching a training video. On it, H&M’s goateed chief executive, a 35-year-old named Fabien Mansson, was discussing fashion trends and ethics in manufacturing.

  Fade to H&M’s 65 young designers—all Swedish and wearing tight black pants and sneakers with very big soles—sketching away at their blond wood drafting tables. They were working together. With each other. With the fabric buyers. No egos. No competition. Not a break-out-on-my-own instinct among them. It was like some Scandinavian dream of enforced social compact brought to Manhattan.

  “People will look and say, ‘That is not the price,’” said Per Darj, the lanky, turtleneck-wearing Swede sent by H&M to spread the seed in New York. “But it is!”