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

by The New York Observer

  In the closing minutes, we were instructed on how to use the rubber slides, if necessary, what to do if we smelled smoke (calmly find another method of egress), and to remove sharp objects and high heels from our person—in essence, a refresher course on those indecipherable little cards they stuff in the seatback pockets, where the paper vomit bags used to be. I quietly congratulated myself on having selected 13D, an aisle seat directly behind the emergency-exit row, and on wearing the sneakers and sweatpants that I had hitherto dismissed as inappropriate, “ugly American” flying wear, but adopted with the excuse of my six-month-old pregnancy.

  Who informed the media? I have no idea, and have been unable to find out. What was the landing like? As we glided toward earth, pilot Burke said, “Flight attendants, prepare for arrival,” which set off a fresh round of hollow laughter in the cabin. Then there was mostly silence, except for the attendants’ powerful and surprising incantation of “Brace, brace, brace!” I am not a religious person, but I will admit to mumbling “Please, God,” several times through clenched teeth as the smell of scorched rubber—but, blessedly, no actual smoke—filled the aircraft. Time had an amazingly rubato quality during this whole experience; the hours of circling had gone incredibly quickly, while the final minutes seemed extremely slow. It was a much gentler, if hotter, landing than most. At the time I attributed the heat to anxiety, and the discontinuation of the pressurized air-conditioning. Later, I saw the footage of fire shooting under the plane. When we came to a solid stop and realized that we weren’t going to die, nor was the plane even going to break apart, the silence ended in a loud, collective, spontaneous Whooo! Yeaah!

  What is JetBlue providing as compensation? A refund, plus two free round-trip tickets to the destination of one’s choice, and service representatives bearing goodie bags filled with snacks, a free car service and little clucks of sympathy. The airline is classless, so forget about lifetime upgrades, but at a certain point I felt that I could demand just about anything—massages, male escorts, a lifetime supply of Terra Blues potato chips—and it would be mine. I didn’t want to take advantage.

  I did, however, take advantage of the numerous opportunities for on-air time that continued to cascade my way. But who, exactly, was taking advantage? Good Morning America booked me, along with two other talkative passengers, at 3 a.m. Pacific Standard Time. I consented to this unholy hour partly because the studio where ABC tapes remotes is on Prospect Avenue, about half a mile down the hill from our house in Los Feliz. I figured I wouldn’t be getting any sleep anyway. At 2:45 a.m., the over-solicitous bookers sent a stretch limo—the kind they use at proms, with shaded windows and fake “stars” dotted on the ceiling. At 5:45 a.m., a smaller car came to take me to CNN’s American Morning, where I reiterated the same things I’d said to Anderson and Aaron (I think we’re on a first-name basis now), much less articulately, I’m afraid, to Miles O’Brien. The passing hours had transformed them into bullet points. Catharsis via mass talk therapy had become simple exhaustion. As the day progressed, the phone kept ringing: the Fox News Channel, the A.P., NPR, USA Today, The Daily News, Ellen: The Ellen DeGeneres Show, The Tyra Banks Show(!), Le Parisienne and too many podunk radio stations and small local gazettes to count. I marveled at how deep the media’s penetration was, yet how pointillist. Via e-mail, I was hearing from friends I hadn’t spoken to since seventh grade, from locations as far-flung as Africa and South America, but it would take me well over a day to locate my own parents, who were visiting London with a new, tricky cell phone. Has communication ever been simultaneously so efficient and so inefficient?

  I was taking a call from a jocular New Zealand disc jockey as my husband drove us back to where it all started, the Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, where there was a big billboard advertising the airplane thriller Flightplan, starring Jodie Foster. It would turn out to be the weekend’s top-grossing movie. Sitting on a brand-new JetBlue Flight 292, we held hands and admired a cute picture of ourselves in the L.A. Times, then dozed as my image flickered across the tiny screens.

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  Um, it was tense. Very tense. Though not as bad as you might think: I tallied no screams nor frenzied clicking of rosary beads. As we glided along at 5,000 feet, there were scattered tears, subdued prayers and even jokes from a few wizened, seen-it-all-before road warriors—you know the type.

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  GEORGE GURLEY INTERVIEWS FRANK DIGIACOMO

  Illustrated by Barry Blitt

  Who are some of the celebrities and socialites you covered?

  I loved the social women, those really wonderful characters who sort of deserved their stature. Pat Buckley—I was very fond of her, even though I can’t say that I was close to her. Ninety-nine percent of the women who call themselves socialites today—it’s more of a branding term than a cultural one—couldn’t hold a candle to her. Mrs. Buckley had a great sense of humor and a fierce intellect. On the record, she was self-deprecating, but off the record, after a glass or two of white wine, she could be wonderfully wicked. I remember once writing that she was like a Mafia captain. If you tried to talk to her about “society,” she would essentially, say, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, dear boy.” And then she would laugh. She had this amazing laugh that was somewhere between Lauren Bacall and Charles Nelson Reilly. She would laugh and completely disarm me. With her it was a chess game. She gave up very little, and yet she still gave me these great quotes. She enjoyed the game as much as I did, talking to me while she was in her rose bed in Connecticut pruning her roses. And that was the thing that I loved—love—about my job: The access it’s given me to worlds that I would never, ever have seen otherwise. Ever.

  Julian’s Schnabel’s a guy who I had a very stormy relationship with. But I was always fascinated by his supreme self-confidence. Most people, when you challenge them a bit—especially if you’re a reporter—they either run or they cut you out. They marginalize you. You stopped getting invited to their parties. And Schnabel always—well, he did stop inviting me to his parties—but whenever I ran into him, he would sit me down and try to explain his point of view, usually with a great deal of contempt and condescension. I think that probably has a lot to do with why he’s such a good filmmaker.

  One of the most memorable stories I did was the week I followed Martin Scorsese for our Millennium issue. That was when the Observer staff tracked all these different New Yorkers over the course of seven days during the last weeks of 1999. The thing about Scorsese is, if you’re Italian-American, it’s hard not to have him as one of your heroes. I mean, here’s this guy who has done these amazing, visceral films that really convey the anger and blood lust and distrust that I have in the Sicilian subdivision of my genes, and yet, at the same time, he has transcended all of that primal, cologne-and-cuff-links goombah stuff. He’s a scholar who just happens to be fluent in the language of mook, you know? His knowledge of film and literature and history is pretty breathtaking, and, on top of that, he knows his rock ’n’ roll. And I don’t know if this makes sense, but interviewing him was both incredibly exciting and yet also depressing. I probably sat with him for a total of two hours over the course of the week and spoke to him on the phone for maybe another 45 minutes and the guy just blew me away with what he’d read and what he knew. After I left my first interview with him, I remember actually feeling guilty about all the time I’d wasted over the course of my life. I was thinking, Jesus Christ, he was very gracious about it, but this guy seemed to have completely maximized every potential educational opportunity that came his way. No slacking for Scorsese. And even though during that first interview, he told me more than once that he was feeling tired, when he got onto a subject that excited him, it was evident that he’s a man of great energy. I know why he was tired, too. He’d just become a father again. His wife was there and she brought out their baby daughter, Frances is her name, and in retrospect, maybe Scorsese was directing the scene, but his wife handed him the baby while he was standing in
front of this huge, amazing poster for Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast. You know, there’s Scorsese, fumbling a bit with his daughter—the beast and his baby beauty—and I was standing there thinking, “Well, I’ve got my last graf.”

  Off the record, after a glass or two of white wine, Pat Buckley could be wonderfully wicked, like a Mafia captain.

  Frank DiGiacomo is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.

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  Can you talk about some of the great parties?

  In 2000, when Hillary Clinton ran for the Senate and Al Gore ran for president, Harvey Weinstein and Tina Brown threw an election-night party at Elaine’s that was sponsored by Talk magazine. I think Georgette Mosbacher and Michael Bloomberg’s media company were involved as well. This was before Bloomberg was mayor, and I remember him walking around the room and, at one point, refusing to talk to me for my story. Anyway, Hillary’s victory was apparent pretty early on, but Gore and Bush were back and forth, and I remember Harvey [Weinstein] saying something into his cell phone—he was asking about electoral votes. I don’t know who he was talking to, but he said something like, “See what you can do,” as if he was instructing some secret operative to goose Gore’s numbers. That was when Harvey was totally embroiled in Hillary’s campaign and campaigning for Gore in Florida with Robert De Niro and Ben Affleck. So they have this great party, and at the end of it, Hillary was supposed to come to Elaine’s with Bill Clinton, but she never did. This couldn’t have made Harvey and Tina happy because, if memory serves correctly, it had been implied in the days leading up to the party that they were going to deliver Hillary and Bill—the meta-message being, I guess, that Talk magazine delivers. So, God knows what kind of negotiations went on, but at some point, a decision was made that Harvey and Tina Brown were going to hand-pick a group of people to go down to Hillary’s suite at the Grand Hyatt hotel. I remember Harvey pointing to people in the crowd and then pointing to me. And thinking, “All right, I’ve got it!” And then, once we got to the hotel and the Secret Service let us into the suite, the thing that stayed in my mind was Bill Clinton chatting up Uma Thurman while Harvey debriefed Hillary. Uma looked radiant that night, but I think what she really wanted to do was impress the president with her intelligence, not mesmerize him with her beauty. One of my biggest regrets is that I couldn’t hear what she was asking him—if I moved in any closer, I would have ruined the moment—but she was behaving in that way that actors do when they’re trying to sound like they’re well informed. Clinton reminded me of Snoopy when he used to imitate the vulture. Only this time, the vulture was smiling.

  Illustrated by Barry Blitt

  Speaking of Uma Thurman, there was a period around the breakup of her marriage to Ethan Hawke when Hawke seemed to be at an event in the city every night. I’m exaggerating, but, for a time, I could literally run a picture of him at some shit-ass event every week in the Transom. And I did. Kaplan once told me that he never wanted the party pictures to just be party pictures. He wanted them to be about something. You know, once Robert Benton did this great photo spread in Esquire called “Happy Marriages Are All Alike” in which he photographed couples such as Mickey Hargitay and Jayne Mansfield and Xavier Cugat and Abbe Lane and the whole point of the spread—and you could kind of see it in the body language—was that these couples weren’t happy. Well, I was trying to do a much dumber version of that. You know, I think Ethan Hawke is a really fine actor. I thought he was great in Before the Devil Knows Your Dead and Training Day and Gattaca. And I guess my perspective was, people who are that talented don’t need to go to parties celebrating the unveiling of fountain pens or the opening of Brazilian bikini wax salons or wherever he was going. So, when he started making countless public appearances, I decided to have fun with it. I invented some kind of title or nickname for him—I can’t remember what it was—but I mocked him for a while. I don’t seem to recall that he curtailed his public appearances any, but the weird thing is that one night, I was at a party, and a woman came up to me and grabbed me by the hand and said, “Are you Frank DiGiacomo of The Observer?”

  And I said, “Yes.” And she said, “O.K., could you wait right here? Someone wants to meet you.”

  And after a few moments, Uma Thurman walked up to me and just stared at me. She didn’t say a word to me; she just stared for, like, 5 or 10 seconds and then she walked away. I assumed it had something to do with the pictures I was running of Ethan Hawke, but I couldn’t tell if she was secretly happy that I was twitting her ex-husband or if she was being protective of him. But it was weird. It was almost as if she was going to keep an eye out for me now.

  Did you ever have any tense moments covering the Oscar parties?

  One year, I’d co-authored a piece on Harvey and Bob Weinstein. The gist of the story was that there was a correction going on at Miramax and, I think, that Bob was asserting himself. I went out to the Oscars, and the day before the awards ceremony, Miramax would do this cocktail party where nominated actors such as Dame Judi Dench would do skits from Miramax films. It became a huge thing that we covered every year, and so I walked into that party, at the Mondrian’s Sky Bar in L.A., and Harvey made a beeline towards me with his protectors; I think at one point he had me by the lapels, or maybe he was poking his finger into my chest, but I distinctly remember him saying, “You don’t know me. You don’t know me.” He wasn’t roughing me up, just getting in my face, and I remember giggling awkwardly, because I didn’t really know what to do. I wish I could say that Dame Judi was standing next to him wearing a pair of brass knuckles, but she wasn’t.

  Harvey was very serious. He was very angry. And then when I laughed, I think he just realized this was not a good way of dealing. And he just backed away and let it go. And you know what? Maybe I didn’t “know” Harvey, but I think I got him. I think that’s why he kept letting me cover him. Lucky me. Seriously, I have some pretty great memories from the Miramax Oscar-night after-parties. There was always the party and then the much smaller after-party that went until almost dawn. I remember Winona Ryder sitting on the floor of a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel—or maybe it was the Mondrian—by the CD player rocking out to the Replacements’ “Bastards of Young,” which is one of my favorite songs. The year that Shakespeare in Love won, Tom Stoppard was at the breakfast buffet and asked me to hold the Oscar he’d won for the screenplay while he filled up his plate. There’s something about the heft of those awards that makes you feel like a million bucks. Peter Kaplan was there with me that year and I remember him telling me that he saw Stoppard in the men’s room standing at a urinal holding his Oscar in one hand and his Johnson in the other. Kaplan asked him how he felt and he said, “Fantastic.” And another year, I’ll never forget Sir Ian McKellen and his boyfriend slow-dancing with each other as if there was no one else in the room.

  Can you tell me about the Pulp Fiction party, that Oscar party?

  All I remember was that Kaplan kept calling me on my massive cell phone and telling me to steal an ashtray from Chasen’s. And I couldn’t. You know what was interesting about that assignment, for me as a writer? I feel like Peter Kaplan pushed me to another level. That was the second Oscar party that I did. The previous Oscars, the story was Tina [Brown, then editor of The New Yorker] vs. Graydon [Carter, editor of Vanity Fair]. And I did a very skeletal job. The New Yorker party, which was Tina’s gig, was a week before Graydon’s party. The night of Graydon’s party—the Oscars were on a Monday then and I had to file the following day—the Sunset Marquis, where I was staying, had this Oscar disco party going on outside my window, and it kept me up all night. By the time I got up to write, my nerves were all jangled. So the next year, Kaplan kind of sat me down and re-framed the story. Tina had decided not to do a party, but Miramax was doing one at Chasen’s, which was about to close. Kaplan knew somehow that there was a caricature of The New Yorker’s Harold Ross, who was an investor in Chasen’s, on the second floor of the restaurant, and using that as an entry point, h
e spun out this whole thesis about New Yorkers in Los Angeles—you know, outsiders storming Hollywood on its most sacred night. The light bulb went on in my head. I knew where to take it from there—except Kaplan kept calling me about that ashtray.

  What kind of pep talk would Kaplan give you before you’d go cover the Oscars?

  Well, the thing was always, he would get in front of you and say: “Listen to me. Listen to me. Listen to me.” It was at least three times. And then he would look me in the eye really sternly and say, “Do you understand I’m being perfectly straight with you here, Frank?” And that’s when I knew that I’d better listen carefully to whatever he said next. It was like a Vulcan mind meld. Then he would say, “This is what I want you to get—an ashtray from Chasen’s.” Part of the genius of this guy is that he made you feel like you were doing something important: You were contributing to literature. The Observer remains the favorite time of my career. I had the most fun, the most freedom and I grew the most as a writer and a reporter.

  What percentage of the stories you did just came to you, as gifts on your voice mail? Or did it always require getting on the phone, seeing what was going on?

  There weren’t that many gifts. I guess there was a point when some came in. Once we got into that 1996-1998 sweet spot, there was stuff coming in. After Graydon and Susan [Morrison] got it rolling and then with Kaplan, the paper achieved this critical mass. One thing I remember—you know that Mr. Jenkins ad? It was a gin ad. He was this white-haired cartoon figure portrayed as cutout marionette. It was a really annoying ad and, for a while in the ’90s, it was everywhere. And Stevenson went off and did this great thing called “Killing Mr. Jenkins”: There were three or four scenarios on how to kill the guy, and they were really very funny, witty. And I remember coming in the day after it was published and the ad agency called up and they were trying to be cool about it, but they were furious and it was just great. It was one of those moments—like when Windolf and Stevenson correctly named all the winners of the National Magazine Awards before they were announced. That was huge.