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

by The New York Observer

  Mr. Cox actually seems to think Manhattanites have a sickness. He cites an issue of The American Economic Review of June 1991: “The authors compared consumers in New York and Moscow. In Russia, if you told two people they could both become richer, but one would become wealthier than the other, they would take the proposition, no problem. In New York, people surveyed rejected this scenario. Only in New York would people rather be poorer, if they knew that at the same time, someone else wasn’t getting ahead either.”

  Well, exactly! How are the bankers going to plant their seed in the perfect blond receptacle if another man, who’s got more hair and better cufflinks, has just bought a larger apartment?

  MAY 24, 2004 BY KATHERINE ROSMAN

  Long Before the Hiltons…

  LONG BEFORE THE SYKES, THE MILLERS OR THE HILTONS, THERE were the Harveys: Evelyn, 87, and Jacqueline, who turns 90 on June 1. One worked for Condé Nast till she could take it no longer; the other climbed the ranks as a publicist. One went through man after man until she settled on one 15 years her junior; the other had a brief, exotic stint as an executive’s wife in the ’burbs. They were Manhattan’s original fabulous sisters. Still are. While the Sykes prance before Patrick McMullan’s camera and the Hiltons dance on sticky tables, the Harveys exert their “It”-ness the old-fashioned way: They apply red lipstick and saunter to one of their two preferred “watering places”—the bar at the Gramercy Park Hotel, or Gramercy Tavern—and get properly soused on stiff gin martinis: stirred, not shaken.

  On this particular evening, the Harveys had opted to dash out to the hotel bar, just across the southernmost block of Lexington Avenue from the 950-square-foot Gramercy Park apartment they’ve shared for 40years. Jacqueline, who when standing is shaped like a comma, was escorted by the sisters’ 30-year-old afternoon aide, Fernela Frederick. The spryer Evelyn zipped ahead to secure their preferred perch: two red velvet brocade chairs situated in a corner that allows for easy storage of their walkers. “It’s impossible for the Harvey sisters to walk into the room without people taking note,” said Danny Meyer, the co-owner of Gramercy Tavern (which the sisters simply refer to as “the Tavern”). “Our staff loves serving them, our guests love sitting next to them, and our bartenders love stirring martinis for them,” Mr. Meyer said.

  “His great thing is he knows exactly how to train his people,” Evelyn remarked a bit patricianly.

  Big Met Meet-Up: Renee, Anna, ALT and Hugh

  Illustrated by Victor Juhasz

  Illustrated by Victor Juhasz

  MAY 31, 2004 BY DALE PECK

  DROWNTOWN LOCAL

  ROLAND EMMERICH HAS A PARTICULAR jones for seeing New York City burn. The Day After Tomorrow is his third film to feature scenes of the wanton demolition of New York. Unlike the wave in Deep Impact, the wave in The Day After Tomorrow is just high enough to wet the face of the Statue of Liberty, but leaving her head and upraised arm sticking out of the water. I was reminded of a beachgoing mom who’s decided to smoke and swim at the same time, determinedly holding that cigarette above the waves.

  Alas, Lady Liberty’s torch seems to have gone out long ago. The statue’s dousing failed to achieve cinematic impact, eliciting little more than slightly embarrassed titters from the Ziegfeld audience. The laughter was a reminder that New Yorkers, living under the continually implied threat of actual destruction, no longer seem to invest much in mocked-up cinematographic fantasies of that end.

  The point is not that New Yorkers are living in fear, but that we’re not. We are neither offended nor horrified by these particular images because we have disinvested in the idea of our own destruction, opting instead for the safety of statistics. Another way of saying that 2,801 people died in the World Trade Center is to say that seven million New Yorkers didn’t. This is one of those rationalizations that is either very brave or very foolish, but it is, to all appearances, and for all intents and purposes, the way things are now.

  JUNE 7, 2004 BY PHILIP WEISS

  Roger W. Straus Adored A Rascal—And So Did I

  ROGER STRAUS’ FUNERAL WAS a dirgelike gathering at Temple Emanu El with solemn talk from the rabbi about Guggenheims and the Torah and Roger’s Calling. The newspapers have kept up a Gregorian chant as well. Next fall, there will be some packed memorial where the Gods of Literature descend on golden wires to extol Roger’s contribution to the culture.

  That is all well and good. Roger was a great publisher. But to know Roger, and love him, wasn’t really about Literature and Culture. I’m trying to remember if I ever saw him wield a pen. Roger loved pleasure and fun and mischief, Roger fled bores like the plague. Roger never had a pious, sober or correct thought in the three years that I hung around him. Why is it that the people who do anything interesting seem to take themselves so unseriously? Roger W. Straus Jr. was an elegant rascal; Roger was bad.

  He squirmed when writers wanted real money, but he loved to tip them grandly, like waiters. My wife shook Roger down for $2,000 for a book party, although Roger then instructed her carefully on how to throw it.

  “Invite everybody and don’t get too big a room. I like a party where everyone had to breathe at the same time. Don’t spend anything on the wine. Have you ever been to a cocktail party where someone said, ‘Oh boy, this wine is good!’” Laughing his velvet laugh. “Now that is a bad party.”

  John’ed at the Hip: Kerry and Edwards

  Illustrated by Robert Grossman

  JUNE 7, 2004 BY ANNA SCHNEIDER-MAYERSON

  The Public Life of Joyce Wadler

  ON THE AFTERNOON OF MAY 26, THE NEW YORK TIMES’ BOLDFACE Names columnist, Joyce Wadler, arrived at Cipriani 42nd Street to cover furrier Dennis Basso’s fall fashion show, toting a leopard-printed umbrella and pen-marked leather bag. In a crowd that included Ivanka Trump, Chloë Sevigny and P. Diddy’s mother, Janice Combs, Ms. Wadler, 56, had an incongruously auntie vibe with her carrot-colored shag hairdo, shoulder-padded black pantsuit and men’s Cole Haan loafers, which she bought after too many years of jamming C-width feet into narrow shoes.

  Later, Ms. Wadler got confused, pointing to a dark-skinned Indian woman and thinking she was Padma Lakshmi. Told that it wasn’t, the Times woman was unperturbed. She has mulled wearing a button to such events that reads “Who the fuck are you and why should I care?” “This is my life at these things. I stumble through,” she said. “Who? What?”

  “This is The Times’ excuse for a gossip column. They don’t want to do gossip—they’re afraid of it,” said the New York Post’s gossip eminence, Liz Smith, over Memorial Day weekend, speaking by phone from ABC reporter Cynthia McFadden’s house in Connecticut. “They don’t let what’s happening be the story,” she continued. “They thrust themselves into the story. And then they complain in the column that nobody will talk to them and treat them right, and then if anybody does talk to them, they make them sound like idiots.”

  JUNE 7, 2004 BY RACHEL DONADIO

  THE ANTI-FEMINIST MYSTIQUE

  “THE CARDINAL RULE TO LEADING a happy life is that you must never, under any circumstances, Google yourself.” Newly minted New Yorker staff writer Caitlin Flanagan—provocatrice, chronicler of contemporary domestic life, self-described anti-feminist—was speaking on the phone from her home in Los Angeles.

  She was discussing what she has learned in the aftermath of her controversial March cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, “How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement,” a sprawling, 12,000-word polemic in the guise of an observational essay. Ms. Flanagan argued that upper-middle-class women have achieved their goal of having both a career and a family more often than not by employing—or, she maintained, exploiting—other women lower on the class ladder: nannies, on whom they don’t always bestow the same benefits they demand for themselves, like Social Security and maternity leave.

  Tapping into the turgid well of upper-middle-class women’s guilt, the piece drew “an extraordinary number of letters,” according to Julia Rothwax, a spokeswoman for The Atlantic Monthly Two
years in the works, the nanny story is her longest essay and by far her most problematic. In it, Ms. Flanagan confessed that not only did she stay home after her twin boys were born, but she also employed a nanny to help care for them, and someone else to do domestic chores—in fact, she confessed that she has never even changed a sheet since she got married. Then she wrapped it all up with a zinger: “When a mother works, something is lost.” And added, “If you want to make an upper-middle-class woman squeal in indignation, tell her she can’t have something. If she works, she can’t have as deep and connected a relationship with her child as she would if she stayed home and raised him.”

  This did not go over well in many quarters. A common reaction was: Who is this privileged woman to suggest that because I go to work, which I have to do out of necessity, I am not connected to my children? And since when is hiring a nanny necessarily exploitation? Or, as one blogger wrote, “How to Make a Caitlin Flanagan / Take: / One jigger of [anti-gay activist] Anita Bryant / One jigger of [actress and children’s advocate] Jane Russell / One jigger of [right-wing firebrand] Ann Coulter / A dash of pretentious language (for faux sophistication and New Yorker credentials) / One quart of self-entitlement, an expendable income / Mix. Serves establishment.”

  Ms. Flanagan appears to be reeling still. “The nasty things they write!” she said in her breathy, high-pitched voice. “They really hate me!”

  JULY 5, 2004 BY ROBERT SAM ANSON

  Bill Tells All…Stop Him!

  OUR 42ND PRESIDENT IS FAMOUS.

  Famous for putting duties off to the last possible moment (and sometimes beyond). Famous, too, for the fact that when he finally gets around to whatever he’s supposed to be doing, be it going after bin Laden or telling the truth, any shortcomings will be excused, rationalized, blamed on others. Most famous, perhaps, for inflicting on one and all the intimacies of a life untidy in the extreme. That’s part of why he’s so hypnotizing. Who can turn away from a 10-car pile-up?

  All these traits (and a number of shining ones besides) are neon-lit in My Life, the most exhaustive explication yet of the tangled psyche of William Jefferson Clinton—though assuredly not in ways intended.

  Since the Monica dish is the principal reason Knopf’s already booked a record two million–plus orders, let’s get that out of the way first:

  Bill had to sleep on the couch for a stretch after fessing up that there was more to his acquaintance with “that woman, Miss Lewinsky” than he’d been letting on—news, he writes, that left Hillary looking “as if I had punched her in the gut.” A year plus of once-a-week, all-day counseling sessions (far more attention than terrorism seemed to be getting at the time) banished the first lady’s divorce musings.

  As for what got him into this fix in the first place, Mr. Clinton unfurls a Couch Canyon laundry list. There’s the “old demons” that have always haunted him; the “parallel lives” he alternates between (sunny on the outside, tormented on the in); the “Don’t ask, Don’t tell” credo he learned as a child; the determination to “drain the most out of every moment of life” that was the legacy of his father’s early death; perhaps even a bit of the fright that Mr. Clinton remembers accompanying his sexual awakenings.

  Once the Dr. Phil recitation is over, though, Mr. Clinton piles opprobrium on himself. As he phrased it during his 60 Minutes sit-down with Dan Rather on Sunday evening, “I think I did something for the worst possible reason—just because I could.”

  About Monica herself, we learn next to nothing. Her entire life is summed up in part of one sentence on page 773 giving her employment history at the White House and Pentagon.

  Much of what we do learn about the events that gained her book royalties and a handbag company that’s reportedly on the rocks is not new. Nor are Mr. Clinton’s self-diagnoses. The Washington Post’s former White House correspondent, John F. Harris, notes that in his 1992 campaign biopic, The Man From Hope Mr. Clinton speculates that growing up in an alcoholic household made him eager to please. He also points out that in 1998, shortly after he’d admitted to lying about Monica, Mr. Clinton told his cabinet that beneath the genial surface lurked deep anger that resulted in liaisons with Ms. Lewinsky.

  Illustrated by Victor Juhasz

  He’s succeeded, at least, in polarizing literary opinion. Dan Rather awarded My Life “five stars on a scale of five,” hailing Mr. Clinton’s craftsmanship as the equal of the acknowledged genre master, Ulysses S. Grant. But in her front-page Times review, Michiko Kakutani pronounced the same book “sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull—the sound of one man prattling away, not for the reader, but for himself and some distant recording angel of history.” And that was just throat-clearing.

  Much has also been made of the Exxon Valdez of bile Mr. Clinton dumps on Ken Starr, the point man of the vast right-wing conspiracy. This one, you gotta feel Bill’s pain. If somebody turned your sex life in all its kinkiness into a libel-proof best-seller; nearly got you fired; locked up one of your close friends for a year and a half because she wouldn’t blab; dragged your wife before a grand jury through a howling mob of reporters; drained your life savings in legal fees; made you a national laughingstock; and put an asterisk after your name that will remain until the end of time—you might avail yourself of payback opportunities, too.

  One comes away from this book with the same feelings one has for its author: so many gifts, so appallingly squandered.

  If ever there were a chance for Mr. Clinton’s redemption, My Life was it. Months ago, James Carville called this book “just the biggest thing in his post-presidency.” Mr. Carville was on the money. So, too, were the friends who urged him to reflect, take greater care, stop wasting critical time introducing a Rolling Stones concert and palling with hangers-on not fit to shine his shoes. Mr. Clinton ignored them, as he did in the White House, and does still.

  All that’s left is the “Why?”

  That question Bill Clinton’s answered: “Just because I could.”

  NOVEMBER 7, 2004 BY PETER W. KAPLAN

  SEE YA, EAST 64TH ST.! 17 GIDDY YEARS IN DOTTY SQUALOR

  FOR 17 YEARS, SINCE THE NEW YORK OBSERVER entered city life in 1987, it has existed within a red brick and white-marble-stepped townhouse on East 64th Street. When I entered for the first time, I had an enzymatic sensation I think was shared by many people who worked here—some to their pleasure, some to their horror: I’m home. I’d worked at plenty of publications in New York, but never in a house. As Polly Adler, the great Manhattan bordello madame of the 1920’s, said of her own business, a house is not a home. Except in our case.

  We worked in a home. Four floors, a giant alimentary center-hall staircase, caked moldings, brass chandeliers, glass-fronted oak cupboards, The New York Observer sometimes felt like a Henry James society home or a 70’s swinger pad, with reporters stacked and stuffed in its confines like Hong Kong tailors. Our legal reporter set up his computer in the fourth-floor closet, near the tuxedo that was used by whomever had to go out to a formal evening.

  When I walked in, Mr. Charles Bagli and Mr. Terry Golway were stuffed back-to-back in the front living room, reporters were so close that one yammering diva could stop work for the entire room, turning the whole floor into an instant Eugene O’Neill parlor trauma. Later, a strange and occasionally brilliant agglomeration of writers and editors built up; pretty often, some were seduced to go off to slicker, better-paid indenturements. We lived together like vaudevillians at an actors’ boarding house.

  At this very moment, there are around 20 former Observer employees at work at The New York Times, inmates at The Wall Street Journal, countless refugees in the Condé Nast Building, but does one of them relieve him or herself in a singing office toilet that gurgles 23 hours a day? For ambition’s sake, they cashed in their chance to shower midday in a claw-footed bathtub, or to spy with a vengeance at courtyard transgressions like Rear Window’s L. B. Jeffries: One night, one editor called the cops when he saw a new mother leave her baby on the fire es
cape. Another editor was almost tempted to sin with a writer when an ancient brass door fixture snapped, trapping them inside.

  Visitors invariably had the same reaction on entering the house: It’s so cute! And it was. But the response of editors and writers, who trundled through, tromping on worn carpet, cursing the vents, wondering if the auditory carrying capabilities of the air-conditioning vents would carry conversations to other departments, was baleful. Phone books and files were occasionally hurled from the fourth-floor window out onto the 64th Street sidewalk like a faithless lover’s pajamas.

  Visitors stopped by. The writer Veronica Geng lived down the street and used to offer advice, bartering it for a day with one editor who drove upstate to empty her country house. Down the block, the great luxury mastodon 32 East 64th, home to Mrs. Kitty Carlisle Hart, whose trim gams took her on their evening constitutional past the office every night; she would nod and ask, “How’s the paper?” Across the street, the vaguely decadent Plaza Athénée, with its leopard-skin benches and $12 martinis.

  Movie shoots were common: Al Pacino shouting spittle into the afternoon air, Keanu Reeves grinning at our young reporters. The pavement on 64th Street was wide and clean, a province of billionaires strutting down the street—Ron Perelman and David Geffen. Chanel suits, Giorgio Armani and La Perla, the ritzy underwear store. Next door to the newspaper itself, and down some steps, a ritzy veterinarian, where endless pet crates were carried, and slinky septuagenarian Lauren Bacall looking left, looking right, heading down.

  While up into our building trooped writers: the cheeky, the depressed, the jolly, the mission-driven, the perky. On the first floor, in what had been a grand dining room, the production department: hot waxers reminiscent of—not reminiscent of, identical to!—your high-school paper’s.