Now that’s changed.
The changes to look for next? It’s hard not to see them coming. The girls will either read The Rules, which say that girls must never ring up boys, or else move to Boston and Cambridge, where, for some reason, when Cupid strikes, the targets stay struck and get married. New York’s Asians will finally become a bloc no politician can write off, which will be obvious to all when the mayors start making ritual visits—and they will—to the other side of the international date line. Meanwhile, Latinos will take their turn dominating the ranks of public employees, from the marriage-bureau clerks to the school principals, just like the Irish, Italians, Jews and African-Americans before them. The Asians will get theirs later. The artists and architects will finally shake the over-valued urge known as “style” and head in a revolutionary direction known as “content.” The cabby and the shrink will be succeeded as New York characters by the house-call computer swami and the diversity consultant. The bond market will become a heaving crap shoot, and the line bankers, as well as the I-bankers, will have themselves a boom with esoteric instruments such as Joshua Tree Federal 10-years. (I didn’t say when.) The aging, flimsy glass-box office buildings of midtown and lower Manhattan will house artists’ studios. (Nice light, but don’t give up your lease in Jersey City yet.)
One thing won’t change: lunch.
Illustrated by Drew Friedman
2002
Rudy Giuliani leaves the city to his designated mayor Michael Bloomberg…
…who promises to bring a trimmer New York into the 21st century
Susan Lyne takes helm at ABC
George Pataki enters the elite group of three term N.Y. governors
New Yorkers stop cooking, go crazy for raw meats and vegetables
Jerry Seinfeld builds private garage on West Side for fleet of Porsches
Ann Coulter says that "you're never going to get rid of liberals altogether"
We attend the wedding of Liza Minnelli and David Gest
2002
JANUARY 7, 2002 BY GREG SARGENT
MIKE’S ICY INAUGURAL: BLOOMBERG SIGNS ON, ASKING FOR SACRIFICE
ON AN INAUGURATION Day charged with anxiety about the city’s future and uncertainty about the abilities of its new chief executive, Mayor Michael Bloomberg offered the first hints of his leadership style, suggesting that he would subject the city government to the same sort of treatment that chainsaw-wielding CEO’s bring to bloated corporations. He vowed to cut mayoral staff by 20 percent and challenged the public advocate, city comptroller and City Council to do the same—a pronouncement that didn’t exactly inspire his bundled-up listeners to leap to their feet. Many of them, after all, work for the City of New York.
“We will not be able to afford everything we want; we will not even be able to afford everything we currently have,” Mr. Bloomberg said.
Illustrated by Barry Blitt
Standing on a broad platform built atop the steps of City Hall, Mr. Bloomberg often seemed awkward and nervous, his head swiveling mechanically back and forth between two Plexiglas teleprompters that hovered at eye level on either side of the podium. The speech was larded with the sort of rhetoric one might expect from a second-tier candidate for student-council president, not the newly inaugurated mayor of New York:
“We will go forward; we will never go back.”
“We can never abandon our future.”
Meanwhile, there were signs everywhere that the third branch of municipal government—that is, the reporters who inhabit Room 9—was already trying to retake territory it lost during the Giuliani years.
Verbal scuffles broke out between reporters and harried Bloomberg aides. At one point, a reporter and a Bloomberg aide wrestled over a plastic cup brought in for the festivities; the goodies weren’t for members of the press, the aide said.
At another point, a Bloomberg aide tried in vain to banish a group of reporters to a small space out of the way of visiting dignitaries.
“This is not the fucking Giuliani administration,” one reporter snapped at the aide. “Things have changed now. It’s morning in New York.”
JANUARY 7, 2002 BY JASON GAY
NYTV: The Not-Quite-So-Idiotic Box: Television’s Triumphant Return
HAS ANY INDUSTRY ENJOYED A BIGGER POST–SEPT. 11 REPRIEVE than television? Just four months ago, television as we had known it was presumed to be in its final lap, gray and limping for the home stretch, soon to be surpassed by delivery via the Internet, by broadband, by service on demand. So certain we were of the medium’s imminent obsolescence that the very act of watching TV the old-fashioned way—sitting down on the couch for the early evening news or, heavens, a Thursday-night sitcom—had taken on an air of ritualized retro-quaintness, like drawing a bath or listening to a record by phonograph.
And then suddenly there we were, riveted, like we thought we’d never be again. News, of course, was the catalyst. Had anyone thought they’d see another moon walk, another television event that would match that 1963 bulletin from Dallas? Television felt as important as ever; the vaunted “shared experience” had returned. It also was in better shape than expected: Today’s networks and correspondents, considered vapid underachievers compared to their forebears, managed to perform capably under trying circumstances.
A couple weeks back, Tim Russert had Jack Welch on his CNBC program, and television’s reinvigoration came up. Mr. Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, the owner of NBC, had been a noted television hand-wringer: He was someone who could remember Edward R. Murrow’s ashtray, and yet was utterly convinced of the medium’s frailty. He had embraced the Internet, and rumors were persistent that he would have sold NBC to someone for the right price. And then there he was, three or so months after the attacks on New York and Washington, rhapsodizing the cathode.
“Television has a real place. It brings—it tells a story in a way nothing else does,” Mr. Welch said. “Now, obviously, the Internet’s going to have an enormous impact on regular communications and on other things, but it will become tied together. But you need the content, you need that to tell that story. You need to let people feel the emotion of what’s happening when real stories break. And that’s what television can do better than anything else.”
Illustrated by Barry Blitt
JANUARY 31, 2002 BY GEORGE GURLEY
TALK STOPS, TO STUNNED SILENCE
THIS HAS BEEN A ROUGH SEASON in the print media, but few were surprised by the deflation and slow settling to ground of the grand balloon known as Talk.
For like some turn-of-the-century hot-air balloon, there was something unwieldy about Talk: It didn’t travel as fast as other, more modern forms of communication, or as fast as it should have to match its editor’s aviatrix-like instincts. And as others of its style began losing air and drunkenly spiraling down, Talk’s short flight looked imperiled as well, despite the truly glittering smile of its captain, who continued to wave and express confidence all the while in its incessant descent until it dropped—klump!
FEBRUARY 4, 2002 BY JASON GAY
NETWORK PRESIDENT PLANS TO RESTORE ABC’S HAPPIER DAYS
SUSAN LYNE, THE NEW PRESIDENT dent of ABC entertainment, was in a cheery mood. Ms. Lyne, 51, was sitting in her airy office on West 66th Street, mulling over ratings for the previous night’s debut of Rose Red, a new Stephen King miniseries. The numbers looked solid.
But after riding Regis Philbin to ratings dominance in 2000 and early 2001, ABC’s fortunes have fizzled. The network is currently mired behind CBS and NBC, and tangling with Fox for third place.
FEBRUARY 4, 2002 BY GEORGE GURLEY
How to Schwing Your Way Onto Saturday Night Live
AMY POEHLER, ONE OF the newest cast members of Saturday Night Live, was having lunch at Serafina on Lafayette Street. She wore a red sweater and jeans, said “Yes, sir” to the waiter and referred to me once as “the gentleman.”
I told Ms. Poehler if I asked a question she didn’t like, she could say “skip.”
<
br /> “‘What’s your bra size?’” Ms. Poehler said, erupting. “Skip! That’s your first question: ‘How do you like to do it?’”
After 11 episodes of SNL, Ms. Poehler, 30, is becoming more visible, appearing in as many as five sketches a show. But when she took a knitting class recently, the teacher was suspicious. The teacher asked Ms. Poehler: “They introduce you in the beginning?”
Recently, however, she had opened a bank account at Citibank, and the guy at the bank was impressed. “He goes, ‘Saturday Night Live! How’d you schwing that?’” Ms. Poehler said. “And I’m like, ‘How did I schwing it? I just schwung it.’”
Ms. Poehler grew up in Massachusetts. Her parents were schoolteachers.
“My mother took too many Valiums and smashed the mirror,” she said in a fake theatrical voice. “My father came downstairs, and he said, ‘You stupid drunk,’ and slapped her. And I ran to take the car and meet the teenage hoodlum by the Dairy Queen, and I got pregnant by my professor, robbed a liquor store. And I used to throw up in empty milk cartons and hide them under my bed.”
She was kidding around, of course. Ms. Poehler attended Boston College, joined an improv troupe, got hooked and moved to Chicago in 1993 to study at Second City. She lived cheaply, rode her bike everywhere, did catering.
“I was never desperate,” she said. “I sucked dick by choice, not by necessity.”
In 1995, Ms. Poehler’s group—the four-person Upright Citizens Brigade—moved to Manhattan, found an old burlesque theater, put on crazy fake heads and handed out fliers on Astor Place. U.C.B. turned into a major hit. Ms. Poehler still performs on Sunday nights at U.C.B.’s West 22nd Street theater, in an improv show called “A.S.S.S.S.A.T.” She now lives in Tribeca, with two dogs and a boyfriend.
I had an “homage to Amy” I found on the Internet. Some guy had written a poem: “Methinks you truly are a goddess/Thou are likened to a flower/I hope I don’t make you nauseous.”
Ms. Poehler scanned the poem. “I like this,” she said. “Oh, my! Wow, that’s very nice. My father loves to, like, check out the news groups and tell me about it, and finally I’ll just be like, ‘I can’t, I don’t want to hear anymore about it,’” Ms. Poehler continued. “News groups are brutal: ‘What’s up with the ugly girl?!!! Her face looks like…’ or ‘I’d fuck her, but only from behind!’”
Ms. Poehler said she’s learned how to deal with fame, but she still gets annoyed. “There are certain professions where people feel like if they wanted to, they could do [it], which they could never do,” she said. “Especially SNL–everyone’s grown up with it, they’ve seen it, they have big opinions about it, and they think that you want to hear them. It’s like, everybody I know that is successfully working has worked really hard and really paid their dues. I guess as you get older, it’s like”—and here Ms. Poehler switched to a crazy-old-lady voice—“‘I used to stand outside in Chicago 10 years ago and hand out fliers and nobody came.’”
Ms. Poehler paused. “It’s like the banker guy asking me, ‘How did you schwing that?’” she said. “Oh, I guess I worked 10 years to get on the show. I guess I gave up making money for 10 years. I guess I decided not to do what you did, which was to have a steady job and own a house. I gave up 10 years of that—so I guess that’s how I schwung it.”
MARCH 11, 2002 BY FRANK DIGIACOMO
THE OLD GIRLS’ NETWORK
Illustrated by Drew Friedman
AT THE DRAMA LEAGUE’S ANNUAL GALA ON FEB. 25, singer Elaine Stritch stood on the stage of the Pierre Hotel’s Grand Ballroom and talked about a good friend of hers. “She treats this town like Grover’s Corners in Our Town,” the 77-year-old Ms. Stritch said in her rat-a-tat-tat way. “She wafts her way in and out of Le Cirque like it was Starbucks, and she goes to Starbucks like it was ‘21.’”
Ms. Stritch was referring to gossip columnist Liz Smith, who was being saluted that night at the Drama League’s annual benefit gala, but Ms. Stritch could have been toasting any of the Ladies Who Lunch in this town. And they deserve it. At this moment, when the alpha males who dominated the 80’s and 90’s are petering out, the grown-up women of Manhattan are surging once again.
New York is Biddy City—and before the Merriam-Websters start sailing this way, we mean that as a compliment. ABC News doyenne Barbara Walters, 70, and her colleague Diane Sawyer, 56, are knocking elbows over A-list interviews like it was the 90’s; 79-year-old columnist Liz Smith is typing as fast as she can to bring the world scoops about Liza Minnelli’s sideshow wedding. And Texas transplant (and former governor) Ann Richards moved to Manhattan with her own Biddy Creed: “Here’s what I think about power. The more you give away, the more you get.”
These women—and there are many more of them—are supplying this momentarily cold town with some welcome hot flashes. They set the agenda for what we discuss at cocktail parties, which media we consume and to which charities we give our disposable income.
So who’s a Biddy? New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams is; so is WWD Suzy columnist Aileen Mehle. So is Helen Gurley Brown. Real-estate mogul Elizabeth Stribling is a Biddy broker. Lynn Nesbit is a Biddy book agent. Former Texas governor Ann Richards is the new Biddy on the block. Socialite Brooke Astor is Biddy emeritus. Kitty Carlisle Hart is Biddy (ret.). Homemaking mogul Martha Stewart swings between Biddydom and alpha-girl tendencies, Wendy Wasserstein is the Biddy Boswell, and The New York Times’ Alex Kuczynski is a Biddy in training. Rosie O’Donnell and Liza Minnelli aren’t Biddies, but they are Biddy pets. Journalist Alex Witchel has the hottest novel on the Biddy circuit: Me Times Three, blurbed by Ms. Wasserstein and sexy Biddy Sarah Jessica Parker. Publicist Peggy Siegal is destined to become a Biddy. The recently departed Pauline Trigère was one of the original Biddies. Tina Brown was an alpha girl, but if she wants to—which she may not—she’ll be reborn as a Biddy. Lincoln Center chair Beverly Sills was a Biddy who is looking more and more like a sputtering alpha girl. Male biddies? New York’s got ’em. Phi Beta charmer and Sony chief executive Howard Stringer is among the most successful male Biddies. So is Barry Diller, as long as he’s not screaming at someone in the office. Vanity Fair editor in chief Graydon Carter is a north-of-the-border Biddy. Mort Zuckerman is a Biddy, too, although he dreams about being an alpha boy. And the city’s new mayor? Well, he does have Biddy tendencies. Biddies love to socialize, giving lie to the old Mark Twain adage that the wonderful part of old age is that you don’t have to go out.
The patron saint of Biddyhood is Clare Boothe Luce, the author of The Women. Ms. Stritch—who’s a Biddy—starred, along with Gloria Swanson, in a version of the play from which she was expelled in Warren, Ohio, and she’s got a hilarious Biddy-laden story to tell about that experience in her show. For some time now, the Biddy Empress has been Ms. Walters, although she would never admit it. Through a spokesman, she declined to be interviewed for this article—which, to be fair to everyone who did talk to us, was characterized as a piece about grown-up women and power, not a feature on Biddy City.
Still, more than one person interviewed by The Observer recalled a 1996 New York Times piece by Judith Miller which intimated that Ms. Walters could eventually become the doyenne of New York society when Mrs. Astor relinquishes the role. The notion that Ms. Walters—who does precious little charity and board work because it might conflict with her reporting duties—could unite a modern social world that boasts as many niches as Time Warner’s DTV has channels is a sign of how masterfully she wields her power.
And, well, Ms. Miller certainly turned out to be prescient when it came to anthrax.
MARCH 11, 2002 BY TOM MCGEVERAN
Seinfeld Builds a Parking Lot
TEN YEARS AGO THERE was a Seinfeld episode in which George Costanza was locked in an all-night parking siege over one crummy space, spurring a comparative consideration of the “pulling in versus backing in” approaches to parking. That same season there were episodes called “The Parking Garage” and “The Alternate Side.”
I
llustrated by Victor Juhasz
Now Jerry Seinfeld seems to have resolved his parking obsession by building his own lot. He’s planning 20 parking spaces, in his own garage, for his private collection of Porsches—in one of the best neighborhoods in Manhattan—for about $1.39 million.
Seismographs have already been set up on West 83rd Street between Columbus and Amsterdam avenues to guarantee the integrity of the neighbors’ buildings.
Already two years in the making, the garage at 138 West 83rd Street—just three blocks from Mr. Seinfeld’s $4.35 million duplex at the Beresford apartments—has faced delays, fines, denied permits and a neighborhood in need of placating…all of which is nothing compared to the peace of mind that the semi-retired sitcom king will attain once he no longer has to get up at 7 a.m. to move the Boxster.
MARCH 25, 2002 BY SIMON DOONAN
SIMON SAYS: COOKING IS SO TOTALLY OVER! NEW YORKERS LIKE IT RAW
THE NEO-HIPPIE MOVEMENT shows no signs of going away. Last year, it was the infernal Bikram sweaty-yoga craze; this year, New Yorkers are still cooking their bodies—but they’ve stopped cooking their food altogether.
With two restaurants and a catering service in Manhattan, the Quintessence mini-empire is the epicenter of the Manhattan raw lifestyle. I headed to the 10th Street branch, where I scrutinized the menu for clues and found the following screed: “We believe that by eating uncooked food long enough, we will regain the fifth element and the mystical powers of our ancestors.”
I tracked down one of the three owners, a Chinese lady who goes by the Lord of the Rings-ish name of Tolentin Chan, and found her less than keen to talk about that “fifth element” or her ancestral mystical powers. She was, however, a lot clearer about the overall benefits of raw food than some of her Seventh Avenue clients. “I ate a standard American diet, and my health was terrible,” said Tolentin, who in her preraw days suffered from asthma, thyroid problems and continuous colds. “Starch and dairy had coated my lungs with mucus.”
The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots Page 43