Mr. Breslin comes from another tradition—the one of Damon Runyon (whose biography Mr. Breslin wrote), Joseph Mitchell, A. J. Liebling, Meyer Berger, Murray Kempton and Pete Hamill—terse, atmospheric writers who celebrated ordinary people in the bars, offices and waterfronts of a New York where the Irish, Italians and Jews were still considered ethnic. That New York is irretrievably lost, and gone with it are the columnists who helped create the myth.
Mr. Breslin did not think the kind of operatic stories he specialized in are rarer these days. “If you keep fucking looking, you’ll get them! You gotta look!” Does he have a formula for bringing life to his columns? “Yeah,” he said with a growl more ebullient than menacing. “Writing!”
APRIL 19, 2004 BY ALEXANDRA WOLFE
SEXY SCIONS SELL SELVES
SITTING IN HIS WHITE MINIMALIST corner office in his company’s 30th floor headquarters on East 57th Street, Eric Villency, the president of Maurice Villency, a home-furnishings business started by his grandfather, looked like a man who had recently had a manicure. Since he joined the company in 1999, Mr. Villency has been working at rebranding it, and the plan has meant spiffing up not just the furniture, but himself as well. Leaning back in his chair next to the wafer-thin conference table he designed, Mr. Villency smiled behind his nerd-chic dark-rimmed glasses and said, “I think every single person has a personal brand, and it represents who they are in their professional life.”
Mr. Villency’s girlfriend, Olivia Chantecaille, knows all too well the pressures he faces. Though it might seem that Ms. Chantecaille’s forte is her regular appearances in Gotham and New York, a fact that she wishes were better known is that she is also the creative director of her family’s high-end makeup line, Chantecaille.
She knows that she hasn’t made it to the level of the Lauder cosmetics dynasty yet, but she likes to think that she and Estée Lauder’s granddaughter, Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer, the company’s vice president for advertising and a kingpin of the New York social circuit, could be in the same league: “I think people kind of think of us together, kind of like the makeup sisters.”
Ms. Zinterhofer may be the closest thing to the Brooke Astor of her generation. Like Mrs. Astor, Ms. Zinterhofer’s name is synonymous with upperclass elegance; she attracts the right kind of guests, those who would go to the New York Public Library spring benefit but could skip Paris Hilton’s birthday party. But the difference between Ms. Zinterhofer and Mrs. Astor is that the latter didn’t have a product to hawk—and that divide says everything about how New York society has changed.
APRIL 19, 2004 BY SHEELAH KOLHATKAR
Suzy Wetlaufer Preparing To Be ‘Neutron Jackie’
ON A RECENT AFTERNOON, SUZY Wetlaufer walked into her kitchen and started screaming.
“Oh my God!” she shrieked, staring at a large cardboard box that had arrived via FedEx from Saks Fifth Avenue. “It’s my wedding dress! It’s my wedding dress!”
It was two weeks before her wedding to retired General Electric chairman Jack Welch, and Ms. Wetlaufer, the 44-year-old former editor of the Harvard Business Review, had plenty to do.
“It’s going to be a beautiful wedding,” she said. “But it’s not about the wedding, it’s about the marriage.”
And what a courtship it has been. Ms. Wetlaufer met Mr. Welch in October 2001, a month after he retired as the head of G.E. She was then editor in chief of the Harvard Business Review; her intention was to interview Mr. Welch for a cover story. But they became romantically, infamously involved while working on the article. Mr. Welch’s second wife, Jane Beasley Welch, found out about it by reading their e-mails and telephoned the Review to complain. Ms. Wetlaufer lost her job in the ensuing scandal and was portrayed in the press as a promiscuous gold-digger; meanwhile, the details of Mr. Welch’s lavish retirement package were scrutinized as he and his wife haggled over his fortune, estimated to be between $450 million and $900 million. Their divorce was settled on undisclosed terms in July 2003.
When I asked later whether she and Mr. Welch had paid a high price to be together, Ms. Wetlaufer smiled and said, “What do you think, having seen our life?”
APRIL 26, 2003 BY GABRIEL SHERMAN
THE NETFLIX NEUROSIS
WHEN KURT ANDERSEN WANDERED INTO THE LIVING ROOM AT A recent Manhattan dinner party and noticed a stack of firehouse-red Netflix DVD envelopes sitting on the coffee table, he felt an instant sense of belonging.
In the mental iconography of the New York culture junkie, the Netflix queue has joined the line of must-have life accoutrements. The kind of person who fixates on arranging just the right titles on his built-in bookcases now spends countless hours searching the Netflix Web site.
The queue, according to many Netflix addicts, has its own existential pleasure. Sure, you can only have up to eight Netflix DVD’s out at once—but with more than 18,000 movies beckoning you to click your mouse and virtually no limit to the number you can keep in your online queue, it’s not hard to see why Netflix has inspired a citywide frenzy of cinematic aspiration. Never mind the mundane reality of actually finding the time to watch them.
“It’s just so easy to keep a constant Netflix queue running in your head,” said Jodi Kantor, the New York Times Arts and Leisure editor.
MAY 3, 2004 BY SHEELAH KOLHATKAR
Bottle Boobs Buy $300 Vodka
IN THE EARLY HOURS OF A RECENT Sunday morning, the plebeian masses outside Marquee were growing restless. Women teetering in heels pleaded with the gatekeepers while their men-folk placed frantic cell-phone calls. Most aspirants were turned away; the place was already throbbing and packed to the rafters, threatening to explode and spray sweaty prepsters all over West Chelsea. The only hope for many outside was to wave a credit card and utter the only password that comes close to guaranteeing passage into Manhattan’s inner nightlife sanctum these days: “Bottle service!”
The time-honored New York City tradition of velvet-rope profiling based on looks, coolness and connections has given way to a cruder calculus: In the ultimate triumph of money over beauty, the willingness to drop hundreds on a bottle of Absolut has become the major criterion for admittance to the city’s desirable nightspots, especially for those who would otherwise be rejected for the old reasons. Like Vegas high rollers, cretinous bores with a little space left on their MasterCards rule the night—until that bottle of Grey Goose goes empty.
Director Howard Hughes inspired Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator
Illustrated by Drew Friedman
MAY 10, 2004 BY CYNTHIA OZICK
THE MODERN ‘HEP! HEP! HEP!’
WE THOUGHT IT WAS FINISHED. THE OVENS ARE long cooled, the anti-vermin gas dissipated into purifying clouds, cleansed air, nightmarish fable. The cries of the naked, decades gone, are mute; the bullets splitting throats and breasts and skulls, the human waterfall of bodies tipping over into the wooded ravine at Babi Yar, are no more than tedious footnotes on aging paper.
It has awakened.
In “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!”—an 1878 essay reflecting on the condition of the Jews—George Eliot noted that it would be “difficult to find a form of bad reasoning about [Jews] which had not been heard in conversation or been admitted to the dignity of print.” She was writing in a period politically not unlike our own, Disraeli ascendant in England, Jews prominent in liberal parties both in Germany and France. Yet her title points to something far deadlier than mere “bad reasoning.” Hep! was the cry of the Crusaders as they swept through Europe, annihilating one Jewish community after another; it stood for Hierosolyma est perdita (Jerusalem is destroyed), and was taken up again by anti-Jewish rioters in Germany in 1819. In this single raging syllable, past and future met, and in her blunt, bold enunciation of it, George Eliot was joining bad reasoning—i.e., canard and vilification—to its consequences: violence and murder.
As an anti-Semitic yelp, Hep! is long out of fashion. In the 11th century it was already a substitution and a metaphor: Jerusalem meant Jews, and “Jerusalem is d
estroyed” was, when knighthood was in flower, an incitement to pogrom. Today, the modern Hep! appears in the form of Zionism, Israel, Sharon. And the connection between vilification and the will to undermine and endanger Jewish lives is as vigorous as when the howl of Hep! was new. The French ambassador to Britain, his tongue unbuttoned in a London salon, hardly thinks to cry Hep!; instead, he speaks of “that shitty little country.” European and British scholars and academicians, their Latin gone dry, will never cry Hep!; instead they call for the boycott of Israeli scholars and academicians.
In the time of Goebbels, the Big Lie about the Jews was mainly confined to Germany alone; much of the rest of the world saw through it with honest clarity. In our time, the Big Lie (or Big Lies, there are so many) is disseminated everywhere, and not merely by the ignorant, but with malice aforethought by the intellectual classes, the governing elites, the most prestigious elements of the press in all the capitals of Europe, and by the university professors and the diplomats.
The contemporary Big Lie, of course, concerns the Jews of Israel: they are oppressors in the style of the Nazis; they ruthlessly pursue, and perpetuate, “occupation” solely for the sake of domination and humiliation; they purposefully kill Palestinian children; their military have committed massacres; their government “violates international law” their nationhood and their sovereignty have no legitimacy; they are intruders and usurpers inhabiting an illicit “entity,” and not a people entitled as other peoples are entitled; and so on and so on. Reviving both blood libel and deicide, respectable European journals publish political cartoons showing Prime Minister Sharon devouring Palestinian babies, and Israeli soldiers bayoneting the infant Jesus.
Yet the modern history of Jews in the Holy Land overwhelmingly refutes these scurrilities. It is the Arabs, not the Jews, who have been determined to dispose of a people’s right to live in peace. Is there any point now—after so many politically willed erasures of fact by Palestinian Arabs, Muslim populations in general, and a mean-spirited European intelligentsia—to recapitulate the long record of Arab hostility that has prevailed since the demise of the Ottoman Empire?
What use is there, in the face of brute political and cultural intransigence, to rehearse the events of 1948? In that year Arab rejection of an independent Palestinian state under the UN partition plan led to the invasion by five Arab armies intent on crushing nascent Jewish sovereignty; whole sections of Jerusalem were destroyed or overrun. Nineteen-forty-eight marked the second, though not the first or the last, Arab refusal of Palestinian statehood. The first came in 1937, when under the British Mandate the Peel Commission proposed partition and statehood for the Arabs of Palestine; the last, and most recent, occurred in 2000, when Arafat dismissed statehood in favor of a well-prepared and programmatic violence.
And though the Oslo accords of 1993 strove yet again for negotiations, most energetically under Ehud Barak, both the Palestinian leadership and the Palestinian public chose killing over compromise—this time with newly conceived atrocities through suicide bombings, always directed against civilians, in buses, cafés, restaurants, supermarkets, or wherever Israelis peacefully congregate.
* * *
In “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!”—an 1878 essay reflecting on the condition of the Jews—George Eliot noted that it would be “difficult to find a form of bad reasoning about [Jews] which had not been heard in conversation or been admitted to the dignity of print.”
* * *
This is the history that is ignored or denigrated or distorted or spitefully misrepresented. And because it is a history that has been assaulted and undermined by worldwide falsehoods in the mouths of pundits and journalists, in Europe and all over the Muslim world, the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism has finally and utterly collapsed. It is only sophistry, disingenuousness and corrupted conscience that continue to insist on such a distinction. To fail to trace the pernicious consistencies of Arab political aims from 1920 until today, despite temporary pretensions otherwise, is to elevate intellectual negligence to a principle. To transmogrify self-defense into aggression is to invite an Orwellian horse-laugh. To identify occupation as Israel’s primal sin—the most up-to-date Hep! of all—is to be blind to Arab actions and intentions before 1967, and to be equally blind to Israel’s repeated commitments to negotiated compromise. On the Palestinian side, the desire to eradicate Jewish nationhood increases daily: It is as if 1948 has returned, replicated in the guise of fanatical young “martyrs” systematically indoctrinated in kindergartens and schools and camps—concerning whom it is cant to say, as many do, that they strap detonators to their loins because they are without hope. It is hope that inflames them.
Among the sophists and intellectuals, the tone is subtler. Here it is not Jewish lives that are put in jeopardy so much as it is Jewish sensibility and memory that are humbled and mocked. Pressing political analogies, however apt, are dismissed as “confused” or “odious.” When history is invoked, it is said to be for purposes of coarse extortion: Israel is charged, for instance, with “using” the Holocaust as sympathetic coinage to be spent on victimizing others.
I would not wish to equate, in any manner or degree, the disparagement of Jewish memory and sensibility with anti-Semitism, a term that must be reserved for deadlier intentions. Disparagement is that much lighter species of dismissal that is sometimes designated as “social anti-Semitism,” and is essentially a type of snobbery. Snobbery falls well short of lethal hatred—but it conveys more than a touch of insolence, and insolence in a political context can begin to be worrisome. It vibrates at the outer margins of “that shitty little country” it is, one might say, not helpful.
It is long past time when the duplicitous “rift” between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism can be logically sustained. Whether in its secular or religious expression, Zionism is, in essence, the modern flowering of a vast series of diverse intellectual and pietistic movements, all of them steeped in the yearning for human dignity—symbolized by the Exodus from slavery—that has characterized Jewish civilization for millennia. Contempt and defamation from without have sometimes infiltrated the abject psyches of defeatist Jews, who then begin to judge themselves according to the prevailing canards. Such Jews certainly are not what is commonly called self-haters, since they are motivated by the preening self-love that congratulates itself on always “seeing the other side.” Not self-haters, no; low moral cowards, rather, often trailing uplifting slogans.
Still, one must ask: Why the Jews? A sad old joke pluckily confronts the enigma:
The Jews and the bicyclists are at the bottom of all the world’s ills.-Why the bicyclists?-Why the Jews?—implying that blaming one set of irrelevancies is just as irrational as blaming the other. Ah, but it is never the bicyclists and it is always the Jews. There are innumerable social, economic, and political speculations as to cause: scapegoatism; envy; exclusionary practices; the temptation of a demographic majority to subjugate a demographic minority; the attempt by corrupt rulers to deflect attention from the failings of their tyrannical regimes; and more. But any of these can burst out in any society against any people—so why always the Jews? A metaphysical explanation is proffered: the forceful popular resistance to what Jewish civilization represents—the standard of ethical monotheism and its demands on personal and social conscience. Or else it is proposed, in Freudian terms, that Christianity and Islam, each in its turn, sought to undo the parent religion, which was seen as an authoritative rival it was needful to surpass and displace.
The riddle of anti-Semitism—why always the Jews?—survives as an apparently eternal irritant. The German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, writing in 1916 of “hatred of the Jews,” remarked to a friend, “You know as well as I do that all its realistic arguments are only fashionable cloaks.” The state of Israel is our era’s fashionable cloak—mainly on the left in the West, and centrally and endemically among the populations of the Muslim despotisms. But if one cannot account for the tenacity of anti-Semiti
sm, one can readily identify it. It wears its chic disguises. It breeds on the tongues of liars. The lies may be noisy and primitive and preposterous, like the widespread Islamist charge (doggerelized by New Jersey’s poet laureate) that a Jewish conspiracy leveled the Twin Towers. Or the lies may take the form of skilled patter in a respectable timbre, while retailing sleight-of-hand trickeries—such as the hallucinatory notion that the defensive measures of a perennially beleaguered people constitute colonization and victimization; or that the Jewish state is to blame for the aggressions committed against it. Lies shoot up from the rioters in Gaza and Ramallah. Insinuations ripple out of the high tables of Oxbridge. And steadily, whether from the street or the salon, one hears the enduring old cry: Hep! Hep! Hep!
MAY 24, 2004 BY CHOIRE SICHA, WITH SHEELAH KOLHATKAR AND GABRIEL SHERMAN
YIKES! YOU’RE IN ÜBERCLASS CITY, POST-CAB HIKE
THREE NEW FURIES HAVE SUDDDENLY appeared over Manhattan, inducing faux-shock in the media and nervous laughter at parties. Please welcome the million-dollar apartment, the $200 pair of jeans and the $10 crosstown cab fare—you’ll be seeing a lot of them.
The taxi-fare hike was eight years in the making, but it arrived exactly as the dam was breaking—the one that, for a couple of years there, held prices in the city fairly steady. The result has been a new flood of price hikes in everything from a bagel and cream cheese at Murray’s on Sixth Avenue (now $1.75, up 35 cents from a year ago), to a martini at Whiskey Park ($12, up from $10), to a pedicure at Avon Salon & Spa ($58 for the basic; last year it was $56).
As a city, New York is no longer upper-middle-class—it’s über-middle-class, and the shifting of the ground under our feet is just beginning to register.
“Average income in Manhattan is the highest in the country, at $92,000,” said W. Michael Cox, the senior vice president and chief economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “A person earning $100,000 in Dallas needs to make $266,000 in New York just to maintain the same lifestyle.”
The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots Page 52