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

by The New York Observer

  Even though we hadn’t technically said that; we’d said if she had shame, she would resign. And I have to admit, Arthur and I were astonished at the reaction. We just never expected—the thing I love about Arthur is one time [Mayor] David Dinkins called him to complain about a story I had written about him. And he says, “David, David, what are you so upset about? It’s only in The Observer.” So, you know, Arthur had that, like, “O.K., it’s this little toy I have and whatever goes on, goes on.” He loved that kind of stuff. So Arthur calls me after the Hillary editorial and asks me to lunch. Which he did from time to time. We went to some Italian place under the Queensboro Bridge. And he’s got a glass of vodka, and he had this smile on his face: “Can you believe the reaction?” he said. “Terry, did we call on Hillary Clinton to—am I missing something?” I said, “No, Arthur. I mean, if we wanted Hillary Clinton to resign, we would’ve said, ‘Hillary Clinton must resign.’ But our words really were misconstrued.” Well, yes, we were being mischievous. Absolutely. But Arthur loved it. So we had this great lunch and he had two vodkas, which is the most I’ve ever seen him have.

  Corruption really did offend him. He was offended by shady dealmaking and bad government and wasteful government—it bothered him. Arthur liked bomb-throwing writing. Rarely, I think, would you say that Arthur would say, “That was a well-reported story.” I mean, he knew what a well-reported story was, but he liked attitude. And although a succession of editors can certainly get the credit for installing that kind of attitude, let me tell you that it did come from the top. Arthur knew he wanted lively writing.

  Another Arthur story. Once we went to the opera, and Arthur’s got the best seats in the house. La Boheme. It’s my wife and I and here we are, and it’s probably our first time at the Metropolitan Opera. That box of his is for about 16 people. So we’re with the New York crowd. And Arthur could not have been nicer. But in the middle of the opera, I guess we’re getting to the third act and we’re going to go to dinner at Arthur’s place afterward. It’s 11 o’clock—La Boheme is a long opera. So he said, “You know, listen, we’re going to dinner now, it’s 11 o’clock, and if you want to stay for the last act, that’s O.K., but they all die in the end, so let’s go eat.”

  My other favorite Arthur story is that he was trying to steal Ron Perelman’s chef. I guess when you’re trying to steal someone’s chef, you have that person come in and cook you a meal. So this guy cooked pheasant for Arthur, and he brings it out and I guess—you know, I’ve never had pheasant—but I guess there’s the bird and Arthur takes off the wing or the leg, as you would with a turkey, and starts eating it. And apparently the chef says, “You do not eat the leg of a pheasant! I am not going to work for this!” So the chef wouldn’t work for Arthur, and Arthur told that story about himself, which I love. The fact that he would tell that story—he’s basically saying, “Can you believe what a shmuck I am?”

  You wrote angry columns about Brits in New York…

  It offended me that these Brits can come into New York and assume that they can write about New York. As Pete Hamill once said—he is Irish-American, his parents were from Ireland—he would never presume that he could go to Dublin and edit the Irish Times. I, as an Irish-American historian—I know more about Irish history than many Irish people—the idea of going to Ireland and covering Irish politics? I can’t imagine it. But what the Brits have done—and maybe this is genius—is that they figured that there is this global, international tabloid culture, where it doesn’t matter whether you’re at the New York Post or the News of the World—that it’s all generic. That there is this culture out there, and it’s driven by American popular culture, and New York is the capital of it—so, “Let’s go to New York and you know, write about New York.” That offends me on any number of levels. And Tina Brown posing as a mediator of American politics—again, I can’t imagine going over to the U.K. and trying to mediate between the Labor Party and the conservative party, but there she is, she thinks nothing of being this, this pundit on American politics. Now I don’t deny that you can learn, but they thought and acted as though they can walk right in with their posh accents, and they felt that every American they met would fall for their accents.

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  Did I think Hillary Clinton should resign? No, I didn’t! But you know, if that’s what Arthur wants to say, I’m going to make the best damn case I can. So I did. The next day Rush Limbaugh read that editorial over the air every hour on the hour. Our Web site crashed.

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  Basically, they’re the Greeks during the Roman Empire, and to them we are the uncivilized Romans; they’re going to come here and teach the colonials how to be civilized. I’m talking about everyone from the Tina Browns of the world to the latest Brit import at the New York Post. And it’s not a coincidence that tabloid television and the tabloiding of America takes place in the early ’90s, with this British invasion. All of a sudden you’re reading about things in the New York Post, and then the Daily News, they’ve been Britified. Maybe I’m living in a romanticized world of 1950s New York, you know, the guy comes home with the tabloids stuck in his back pocket, and he picks it up and he’s reading about bread-and-butter issues or crime, which is what tabloids are for, but to me I just felt that something changed in tabloid culture that was bad, that was brainless, that was not good for New York.

  Who made you laugh in the office?

  Windolf and Stevenson, I mean, they really did miss their calling. If we had any kind of vaudeville today…They were hysterical and they added a lot of life to the place. The mid-’90s was a fun time at the paper. That was sort of where felt I was kind of handing off what I wanted to do to Greg Sargent and Josh Benson. They became the young political reporters in my place. I’m proud to call them my protégés; they were great. So now all of a sudden I was the city editor. I’m still the only person who ever had that title. I felt The Observer had maybe gone a little too far on the advocacy end of political coverage, that we were leaning kind of toward The Village Voice and I felt we had to bring it back toward the center. I didn’t want every week to be “Giuliani is a bum, Giuliani is a bum.” You know that there is plenty of bullshit to go around, and let’s call it when we see it. Nothing ideological or partisan about it. So I had Josh and Greg and Andrea Bernstein and myself. I think we succeeded around maybe ’98 or so in making The Observer less ideological and more of a keen, witty observer of politics.

  At that same time, Candace Bushnell shows up.

  I remember hearing about this woman Candace Bushnell, who was literally sleeping on a floor in an apartment, and she just wanted to be a writer. And she was willing to sacrifice for that. And I remember admiring that, even though she was writing about a world I knew nothing about; I said, “Here’s a woman who’s making a sacrifice I would never make in a million years.” There did come a point—I think Bagli and myself and some of the hard-news types—we were a little envious of the publicity Candace got. We felt that the Sex and the City column was overshadowing some other really good stuff that we were doing, but we didn’t blame it on Candace. It bothered us that people were paying more attention to Candace than they were paying to local politics.

  One day I was doing an interview with Pat Moynihan—and I used to talk to Senator Moynihan about once a year and we always had great conversations—I just thought he was the greatest—so I’m interviewing him, we’re in the middle of this conversation, I’ve got the phone and I’m taking the notes—and in comes Candace to that front room. And Kaplan’s there, he’s talking to Bagli—and Candace just starts screaming at the top of her lungs. Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!!!! Now that may have been the day she got her book deal. So she just starts screaming and Kaplan, God bless him, starts screaming back. Ahhhhhhh!!!! And I’m on the phone with Pat Moynihan talking about whether we should put another tunnel under the Hudson River, and I can’t hear him. It’s my one interview a year. So I say, “Excuse me, Senator, hold on one second.” I cup th
e phone, and I stand up and Candace is right there, and I yell, “Shut the fuck up!” And I get back down and continue, “Senator, as we were saying…”

  All of the tensions and all of the resentments that I had about New York and the media just exploded. Here was this woman—and I really didn’t resent her fame—but here was the symbol of what I felt was shallow in New York media. There was she was, live in front of me, and she was disrupting my interview with Pat Moynihan, and I wasn’t going to take it anymore. I feel very badly about that, and I do respect the fact that Candace is leading a life that she actually did imagine and that she worked hard for and she got it, and it doesn’t happen all the time.

  What’s The Observer’s legacy?

  The Observer changed journalism. We showed how you can be substantive, fun and write with an attitude, and I think it’s not a coincidence that so many Observer people wind up at The Times and other places. We’ve changed the standard. You can now write and have some fun. You couldn’t do that in 1989.

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  I do respect the fact that Candace is leading a life that she actually did imagine and that she worked hard for and she got it, and it doesn’t happen all the time.

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  Illustrated by Drew Friedman

  2000

  Al Gore takes fashion advice for Naomi Wolf and hands the presidency to George W. Bush

  Rudy Giuliani runs for Senate, drops his wife and gives the seat to Hillary Clinton!

  George Bush rises above his Skull and Bones past to win the presidency

  Georgette Mosbacher starts a trend of Stepfordizing New York Ladies

  Christopher Walken gets his own cable chef show, Cookin’ With Walken

  Designer Isaac Mizrahi declares that history has ended and so has fashion

  Super-investor J. Shelby Bryan loses $60 million but gets Vogue editor Anna Wintour

  Billionaire Mort Zuckerman unloads on billionaire David Bradley

  2000

  JANUARY 9, 2000 BY JOHN HEILPERN

  FULL OF SOUND AND FURY, SIGNIFYING NOTHING

  THERE WAS TIME ENOUGH during Andrei Serban’s ludicrous 3-hour, 40-minute production of Hamlet at the Public Theater to wonder why nobody ever boos anymore.

  It goes like this: “Boooooo! Boooooo! Get it off!” Or, as Shakespeare himself put it: “Pish! Pish for thee! O poverty in wit! Go mend, go mend! Froth and scum! By cock and pie! Peace your tattlings!”

  My friends, never have I witnessed such pishy tattlings as Mr. Serban’s lunatic display of directorial folly with Hamlet. As the Bard said elsewhere: “I have seen drunkards do more than this in sport.”

  Though it gives me no pleasure, I can boo in print, if I must. But I see you slumped in numbing disbelief at what you’re witnessing, and do you utter a peep in protest? Do you dare? I’ve wondered before why audiences at the theater are so docile. Why should passionate disapproval from the paying customer be considered shocking?

  The last lonely boo I heard at the theater was several seasons ago at the end of John Guare’s unfortunate Four Baboons Adoring the Sun. Music to the ears! That boo, pish, raspberry, bird, heckle, protest vote and finger pointed at the Emperor’s suit of clothes was brave in its way, discerning, and certainly of an independent mind. I am for uproar in the theater. I am for the boo. I am for all audiences who put drama critics out of business.

  What acquiescent wimps we’ve all become at the theater! We wouldn’t boo a goose, let alone Hamlet. If we can cheer, why can’t we pish?

  Illustrated by Philip Burke

  JANUARY 30, 2000 BY GEORGE GURLEY

  Georgette Mosbacher Rides With McCain

  GEORGETTE MOSBACHER—THE FORMER REPUBLICAN SUPER wife now serving as the main New York operative for insurgent presidential candidate John McCain—was talking about her 1998 divorce from oilman Robert Mosbacher, a Texan preppy who served as George Bush’s secretary of commerce.

  “When you’ve been married so long,” she said, “you think you have a strong identity—but all of a sudden you have to find out who you are all over again. You have to build another life.”

  With the help of Mr. McCain and the role he has given her in his campaign—she’s a big fund-raiser and his informal adviser—she is in the process of building that new life and remaking her reputation. “There are very few women who are big political fund-raisers,” she said.

  Ms. Mosbacher, 53, was wearing a brown tweed pant suit that showed off her figure very well. Her red hair was up in a French twist. Her bangs covered her red tattooed eyebrows.

  From 1988 to ’92, she was a supreme Washington wife, pilloried in the press for embodying the excesses of the age. She has fond memories of that time, the dinner parties with Margaret Thatcher and all that.

  “Oh, Margaret Thatcher! Here was a woman who never ever apologized for being a woman, never made excuses for being a woman…. She found my dinners interesting, because they were not the usual social babble, but that I do orchestrate my dinners to be a forum, if you will. That’s why I always have everyone at one table, round table, and always throw a question on the table and allow everyone to participate, and that’s my dinner party! She said, to go to a formal dinner party and be challenged intellectually, she said I did it very well. I think she used the term salon…. And now the last time I sat with her she was very intrigued with McCain. She said, ‘You know I think this McCain, you’ve got a winner there.’”

  JANUARY 31, 2000 BY GEORGE GURLEY

  SHE’S SEXY AND OVER 50

  LAUREN HUTTON, WHAT A woman, my God, what a woman. She was in a studio on West 29th Street, on a break from a health-and-fitness-magazine shoot. The 50-something model was wearing jeans and white shirt, through which I could see a bright-colored bra.

  She was moving around in her chair a lot, being all peppy and glamourous, winning me over, making me laugh and messing with my brain. My mouth was slightly open the whole time.

  Besides modeling, she said she’d been writing her autobiography and spending time on her 300-acre Rattlesnake Ranch in the Southwest, where she drives a “hellacious” truck and an “even meaner” Jeep, rides motorcycles and hot-tubs naked. As well, she spends a fourth of her time underwater, scuba diving with ex-Navy Seals and sharks.

  “That’s one of the reasons you go down,” Ms. Hutton said. “A day without sharks is a very bad day—all day in kindergarten. Oh, no, they’re great. You want to go down with schools of sharks.”

  Can you say anything you enjoy doing sexually?

  “You are so cute! You are so cute. Well, one time I was wooed and won for about six years by a guy who just looked me in the eyes, and I was barefoot at the time, and he grabbed a foot and started sucking my toes. That was it! It was over. Now, he was extremely good at this, and he was good at an awful lot of other things, too! You better know what you’re doing before you grab someone’s big toe and pop it in your mouth!”

  Best compliment you ever received?

  “Yes, I was told that my butt was like a rare fruit. But if you put it in there, it will be stolen, it’ll be all over, it will be just like calling someone ‘swell.’”

  She was being beckoned back out of the office. She popped out and came back.

  “You’re much cuter. I like you much better, I’m staying with you,” she teased me, laughing.

  Even with my extra 20 pounds?

  She got up from her chair and made like she was going to attack my belly rolls: “Oooh, just get my fingers and toes in there! Nibble, nibble, nibble, nibble, ha-ha!”

  Two fellas came in, and she kissed them goodbye. Now she was standing, jumping around like a hyperactive kid.

  Ever been in an orgy?

  “Well, let’s see, I have a feeling that those are a lot better in theory than in practice. What do you think?”

  It was time for her to get back.

  JANUARY 31, 2000 BY RON ROSENBAUM

  The Edgy Enthusiast

  Clinton Scandals, Stage III: The Buff Mome
nt

  WE ARE NOW ENTERING Stage III in the Natural History of National Scandals: After the Huh? Moment comes the Buff Moment.

  I love the Buff Moment. I am a student of buff moments, having written about assassination buffs, Watergate buffs, Philby-Angelton-mole war buffs, Mary Meyer buffs (the J.F.K. mistress whose murder in Georgetown in 1964 is still officially unsolved—although I know who did it), Danny Casolaro buffs (the reporter whose 1990 death under mysterious circumstances in a West Virginia motel is regarded as the work of a vast “Octopus conspiracy” by some buffs).