But his most notorious line was his attempt to invoke the modern aristocrat’s great struggle between his dueling low and high impulses. “I’m reading a book and I’m thinking about a pussy, but I find when I get the pussy, I’m thinking about the book,” he said.
JANUARY 29, 2006 BY MICHAEL CALDERONE
Woody New York
His $26 M. Townhouse Buy Sets an Expensive Trend
IN HUSBANDS AND WIVES, MIA FARROW’S CHARACTER memorably tells her husband, played by Woody Allen, that he isn’t serious about moving to Europe, because he “couldn’t survive off the island of Manhattan for more than 48 hours.”
Nevertheless, it has been rumored from time to time that the acclaimed director might someday go through with the move across the pond.
Most recently, such speculation was fueled by the fact that the 70-year-old auteur used London as the location for two feature films, the critically acclaimed Match Point, released last December, and the forthcoming Scoop.
Although Mr. Allen temporarily took up residence during shooting in a ritzy neighborhood near Hyde Park, he won’t be giving up on New York just yet: The ink just dried on his $25.9 million townhouse contract, as The Observer reported on Jan. 19.
Whether or not the real estate market is slowing down “dramatically” (says Mayor Bloomberg) or simply has cooled a bit, there are very few trophy homes to go around for the most discriminating buyers. So, despite the fears of a bursting bubble, such properties have still been moving. Since last fall, five townhouses have sold for above $20 million, with three on East 64th Street alone.
Illustrated by Barry Blitt
Although Mr. Allen’s deal certainly won’t break the overall record price paid for a townhouse—the $40 million dropped on the Duke Semans mansion—there is little doubt that it will smash the current townhouse record for price per square foot.
In early November, Louise Beit, of Sotheby’s International Realty, listed the 20-foot-wide townhouse for $25.9 million. At that considerable price, the luxurious residence—measuring 6,400 square feet, according to city records—is asking $4,047 a foot.
While several ritzy developments have yielded sales at that lofty price point, the previous townhouse record for price per square foot was $2,471.
Hillary in Wonderland, met by confounding Cheshire Democrat Obama
Illustrated by Victor Juhasz
FEBRUARY 12, 2006 BY MICHAEL CALDERONE
MANHATTAN SWEPT UP IN ZILLOW’S MIDNIGHT RIDE
AT MIDNIGHT ON FEB. 8, THE MYSTERIOUS NEW WEB SITE CREATED by the swashbuckling Web entrepreneur Richard Barton was scheduled to go live. If all goes as planned, it’s going to be a weird moment.
The story of Zillow.com has been, from start to finish, an anachronism: a stealth start-up formed in a whorl of rumor by an old god of the Internet boom; funded in a venture-capital frenzy; and launched far ahead of schedule as competitors got wind of the plan and raced him to the market.
The icing on the cake is that, this time, the whole thing is founded on speculation about one of the most hotly contested sectors of the economy: the real estate market.
“Zillow.com today announced the launch of its beta real estate site, offering free, unbiased valuations on more than 40 million homes across the United States, with data on an additional 20 million homes. All consumers need to do is enter an address.”
Creepy! The number it crunches out for the address you type in even has its own name: It’s the property’s “Zestimate.”
It will include historical value changes for each home. It will find data on all comparable home sales in an area. It will offer satellite and aerial views of each home. And it will include individual data on each home.
Is this what everyone was so nervous about?
Swiss hunk Roger Federer ruled the U.S. Open
Illustrated by Philip Burke
Illustrated by Philip Burke
MARCH 26, 2006 BY JASON HOROWITZ
City Girl Squawk: It’s Like So Bad—It. Really. Sucks?
“I LAAAAAHV A DIIIIIVEY BAAAAAAHR,” said a girl with a voice that could crack the ice in her vodka tonic. It was her third drink. She was in her late 20’s, had thick, dark eyebrows and straight, shiny brown hair worn in a long ponytail. She looked like a million other girls in New York: attractive but not pretty, stringy but not skinny, smart but not all that intelligent.
“People’re li-yike, ‘Oh my Gaaaaahd. You luh-iiiiive abuhuuuuv Fawer-teeeeenth Shtreeeeet?’”
More than the pearls or the diamond-stud earrings, what really identified this New Yorker was her voice: those long, whiney vowels; that touch of an early-morning grumble; that lazy, whistling “s” and glottal stop that hushes the “t,” even in such cherished words as “bachelorette.”
Is it a new dialect? A new accent? Or is it The Affect? Whatever it is, a distinct group of young women in the American Northeast are speaking with warped syllables that are a linguistic love song to their own exclusive milieu.
MARCH 26, 2006 BY LIZZY RATNER
CITY HEALTH CHIEF: IF BIRD FLU COMES, COVER YOUR MOUTH
AS APOCALYPTIC HORROR FANTASIES go, the threat of an avian-flu pandemic remains blessedly hypothetical. Before it can wreak havoc on a city like New York, it must jump through a tangle of if/then hoops, including (but hardly limited to) morphing into a virus that can hop from human to human and making landfall in the United States. But should if become then, then New Yorkers had better hope it doesn’t happen within the next year or two. At least.
“If it comes, then it’s going to be incredibly difficult to deal with,” said Thomas Frieden, the city’s commissioner of health and mental hygiene and flu-fighter in chief. “If it were to happen in the next year or two, it’s not likely that we would have either effective vaccines or effective vaccinations that would be in use to be taken by the general public. So the most important messages may be very simple messages, such as cover your cough, wash your hands, and don’t go out if you’ve got a cough and fever.”
As the bird flu continues its pathogenic march around the globe, this is not exactly the kind of message that jumpy New Yorkers want to hear.
Illustrated by Drew Friedman and Victor Juhasz
APRIL 9, 2006 BY REBECCA DANA
Katie Cronkite
Good Night, and Good Pluck! Couric Is Moving to CBS News; It’s Being Announced This Morning—Even as You Read This! Worst-Kept Secret in New York Blows, and Schieffer Loves It
KATIE COURIC WILL ANNOUNCE HER INTENTION TO LEAVE NBC on the Today show the morning of April 5, according to a source with knowledge of the network’s plans.
The announcement will come at 7:30 a.m., amid on-air festivities marking Ms. Couric’s 15th anniversary with Today. Staffers said that a highlight reel of her work has been prepared for the occasion. Chances are there will be cake.
And then Ms. Couric will be on her way to anchor the CBS Evening News. A corresponding announcement from CBS will come later in the morning, according to a source familiar with CBS’s plans.
The announcement would cap a veiled but intense image-management campaign on Ms. Couric’s behalf.
Beyond the debates about whether a chipper morning anchor-woman can make suitably serious faces at the evening cameras, there’s the question of what Ms. Couric’s full role at the CBS Evening News will be. Will she be a true managing editor, running meetings and setting news agendas like the men who came before her? Or will she be a pretty headline-reader—“perky,” to use her least-favorite word—the network equivalent of a shiny hood ornament on a rusty Cadillac?
APRIL 16, 2006 BY CHOIRE SICHA
IN JARED’S COTTAGE
WHEN THIS THING DROPPED down on me,” said Jared Paul Stern, “it made it sound like the cops were on the way to lock me up.”
It was cocktail hour inside Mr. Stern’s home in the Catskills on Monday, April 10, a little after 5 p.m. There are no fewer than three bars on the house’s first floor; his Macallan is 12-year. Now it was gin and tonic fo
r him, and a Bombay gin martini with “the bad olives” for his wife, Ruth Gutman, a farm girl from Maine who is known to the gossip community by her husband’s pet name for her, Snoodles.
“But it’s funny,” Mr. Stern said. “You know, I am optimistic that by the time all this is done, really, I won’t be damaged goods. I’ll be better known—and, if anything, at least back where I started, if not better.”
The phone had been ringing and would keep on ringing through the evening with calls from dozens of reporters.
As Mr. Stern absorbed the initial shock of being a front-page scandal, he had decided he was at war with Ron Burkle, the California billionaire who recorded conversations between the two and accused Mr. Stern of extorting cash for favorable coverage in the New York Post. On Saturday night, over the phone, Mr. Stern had said that soon “the story will have shifted off of me and on to more juicy targets.”
And so on Monday he was advancing his version and also suggesting to reporters who called some things he thought they might be interested in printing.
Mr. Stern said that his real friends had stuck with him since the story broke last week. He said one friend, the director Whit Stillman, had told him, “This is going to be the best thing that ever happened; this is great for the clothing line. And I want the movie rights.”
Illustrated by Drew Friedman
APRIL 25, 2006 BY JASON HOROWITZ
HONOR THY TALESE
The Serendipiter Explains His Journey: ‘If You Figure Destination, What’s the Point?’
“JOURNALISM IS VERY SERIOUS, AND WHEN DONE WELL,” said the 74-year-old writer Gay Talese, “it is beautiful.”
On Monday, April 17, Mr. Talese was in his bright East 61st Street living room, perched on a cracked brown leather couch and under an oil painting depicting a snowy Central Park. He had a strong Calabrian nose, a small, thin mouth, fine white hair and brown eyes that he shielded with his hand when he sought out a memory.
He struck such a pose when he recalled being a young reporter in the 1950’s, fresh out of the University of Alabama, and surrounded by the clacking keys and ringing bells of typewriters on the third-floor newsroom of The New York Times.
“Though I was doing daily journalism, I thought it would be a reference point for the future,” said Mr. Talese, remembering a day in which he was taking a characteristically long, long time to tinker with a story. That’s when a “third-string labor reporter” began badgering him.
“He was saying, ‘Come on, young man—you are not writing for posterity, you know,’” recalled Mr. Talese, dressed now in a sand-colored three-piece worsted suit that’s kept the crease well for its 25 years. “It was a revelation, and not a welcome one.”
A half-century later, and Mr. Talese is still missing deadlines because he labors over sentences for so very long. His ponderous nature and tendency to procrastinate are offered in ample portions in his sprawling new book, called A Writer’s Life. And what a life it is, brimming with failures, missteps, false starts and other assorted frustrations.
Yet Mr. Talese, speaking with unwavering earnestness, apologizes for none of that.
“You are going along for the trip,” he said. “You can’t have a destination. If you have figured that out, then what’s the point?”
Among other things, the book reveals that even Mr. Talese, who is canonized in journalism textbooks for his Esquire profiles, needs to compose the dreaded pitch letter. Granted, these pitches are addressed to acquaintances and editors such as Norman Pearlstine and Tina Brown. But his ideas are shot down. The words don’t come easy. (“Writing is not fun. It is not supposed to be fun.”)
Thanks to A Writer’s Life, more than a decade of Mr. Talese’s pursuits have now seen the light of day. Here is a disgraced Chinese soccer star, a haunted building and the restaurants that inexorably fail in it, a sociological study of The New York Times, civil rights in Selma, and Lorena and John Wayne Bobbitt.
On the afternoon of April 17, he was happy that the book was done. Mr. Talese sipped sparkling water from a wine glass and talked about heading to the theater that night with the writer David Halberstam, an old Times colleague. He sat by the phone, anxious not to miss a call from his wife, Nan, an editor and publisher at Doubleday.
As he sat, elbows on knees, on the living-room couch, he spoke about the last time he succumbed to the pressures of a deadline. He had already left The Times by then and was writing for famed Esquire editor Harold Hayes.
Illustrated by Philip Burke
In the 1960’s, Hayes had given Mr. Talese a last-minute assignment to fill in for James Baldwin, who wrote a story different than the one Hayes had envisioned, and for which the editor had already set the plates for photographs. Mr. Talese wasn’t particularly proud of the piece, “Harlem at Night,” but he got it in under deadline.
During a chance meeting some weeks later, Hayes approached Mr. Talese and criticized the piece. He said that he’d seen better.
“And I said, ‘Fuck you, Hayes,’” Mr. Talese recalled. “I never met another deadline again. I said I’m never going to make another deadline, and I never did.”
That might be one of the reasons Mr. Talese has had such a tough time publishing of late. While his commitment to research is the stuff of legend—spending years at a time getting to know the characters of a story—it raises the question of when process stops and procrastination begins.
“Time is always a factor,” said Mr. Talese, specifying that he meant not only the time devoted to writing, “but before writing—to thinking.”
JULY 31, 2006 BY TOM SCOCCA
OFF THE RECORD: The YouTube Devolution
Want to See Zidane Head Bump, Exploding Mentos, Cringeful Dennis Miller? Come to YouTube, Video Web Site Where Bad Culture Is Reborn Forever
ONCE UPON A TIME, it would have meant something to have watched the Zidane head-butt in the World Cup final live on TV. I did see it. I missed the first 85 minutes or so of the match, then tuned in for the critical juncture. Pow! Right there.
But who cared? The blow was right there—and there—and there: Almost instantly, it was all over YouTube. Anyone in the world could click and replay it. It didn’t matter when or where.
I already knew this when I’d watched the moment live. I realized what YouTube was doing to television when I found myself watching Dennis Miller as he conducted a post-performance interview with the now-canonized turn-of-the-90’s band the Pixies on his talk show. He strolled up to the mike and introduced himself to the lead singer, Black Francis.
“Black, I’m Embarrassingly White Dennis,” Mr. Miller said, and I cringed. Fourteen years after the fact.
The thing about television used to be that once you saw it, it was gone. It was disposable, and it was mostly dispensed with—the old signals, from what we used to watch, streaming out past the Oort Cloud, carrying Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp away into infinity.
Print could aim to be stolid and enduring, piling up in libraries or, at worst, on microfiche. TV made its getaway. If you weren’t right there and watching with everyone else when something happened, you didn’t see it. Reruns or syndication could give you another chance, but you still had to catch the moment.
The VCR only stalled it a little. Your friend’s mother could watch her stories on Saturday, after working the day shift all week. If somebody had had a tape running, you might get to rewatch a Tyson fight or when that dude broke Geraldo’s nose with the chair, until somebody forgot which tape it was or recorded over it.
After that, people would do what they did with everything on TV: talk about it for a while, then mostly forget about it. TV moved on, in its infinitely renewable present. The main points—Kojak: bald guy—went into the collective consciousness; the rest faded into the dimness of individual semiconsciousness.
Suddenly, via YouTube links, those lost moments click back into view, as if a telegram from your great-grandfather were showing up in your e-mail. When the Pixies popped up on my laptop, playing on Dennis Mil
ler, I was transported: I was standing in front of my dorm-room television, 14 years in the past, in the peach-tinged glare of an early-generation halogen torchiere. The Pixies more or less invented what would be called alternative rock, but broke up before it finished becoming a viable commercial category; they were not a band you heard much on the radio, let alone saw on a talk show.
I felt a gleeful kick as Black Francis scurried up to the mike and announced they were covering a “Reid Brothers song”—a secret handshake to us viewers who not only knew the Jesus and Mary Chain, but knew the Jesus and Mary Chain’s names. The band tore through “Head On,” just like they’d torn through it in 1992.
But then Mr. Miller—the sly rebel comedian, the Saturday Night Live legend, who knew enough to book the Pixies on his own show—came over to greet them. And he was…a tool. He was smarmy; he was stilted; his floppy West Coast suit was ridiculous. He wasn’t funny.
He wasn’t funny? I was sure Dennis Miller was funny in 1992. I remembered it. He came on funny in the 80’s, with force. We all watched “Weekend Update” and recited back the best parts between bells on 10th-grade Mondays. Then when we were in college, the talk show was funny too, even if it did bomb. He only descended into unfunniness over the next decade, taking the wrong projects, hardening into a cranky, right-wing bore. But I knew he was funny before that, just like people knew Brando wasn’t a fat blob in A Streetcar Named Desire.
Nope. He was lousy. YouTube had him dead to rights. There was another clip of him, from earlier, sitting down with David Letterman at the height of his SNL fame. Mr. Letterman? Funny. Mr. Miller? Lousy, lousy, lousy. Everything that would make him a washout on Monday Night Football was already on display: the obviously canned pop-culture references; the clumsy timing; the attempt to mask his stiffness and incompetence with smugness. What had the 20-year-old me been thinking? How could I have been so wrong?
The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots Page 60