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

by The New York Observer

  At 7 p.m., the queue to meet these eligible society bachelorettes and their supporters stretched into the hallway outside the hotel’s main ballroom and down the stairs. The proceeds of the ball, which is expected to net $300,000 after expenses, principally benefit the Soldiers’, Sailors’, Marines’ and Airmen’s Club on Lexington Avenue.

  FEBRUARY 4, 2007 BY JASON HOROWITZ

  BIDEN UNBOUND: LAYS INTO CLINTON, OBAMA, EDWARDS

  SENATOR JOSEPH BIDEN DOESN’T THINK HIGHLY OF THE IRAQ policies of some of the other Democrats who are running for president. To hear him tell it, Hillary Clinton’s position is calibrated, confusing and “a very bad idea.” John Edwards doesn’t know what he’s talking about and is pushing a recipe for Armageddon in the Middle East. Barack Obama is offering charming but insubstantial fluff. And all of them are playing politics.

  “Let me put it this way,” Mr. Biden said. “You didn’t hear any one of them get in this debate at all until they announced for president.” Mr. Biden, who ran an ill-fated campaign for president in 1988, is a man who believes his time has finally come, announcing this week that he was filing papers to make his 2008 presidential bid official.

  Although he admits to a tendency to “bloviate,” he thinks that an aggressive advocate with rough edges might be just what the party needs right now. “Democrats nominated the perfect blow-dried candidates in 2000 and 2004,” he said, “and they couldn’t connect.”

  Though Mr. Biden, 64, has never achieved his national ambitions, he has in recent years emerged as one of the party’s go-to experts on foreign policy. In the past week, he has spearheaded the Democratic pushback against the president’s plan to increase troop levels in Iraq, opposing the move with a nonbinding resolution that his party has rallied around. On a recent weekday afternoon, he was discussing his rivals over a bowl of tomato soup in the corner of a diner in Delaware, about a 15-minute drive from his Senate office. Mr. Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is firmly in the thick of a pack of third-tier candidates. Still, he thinks that at such a precarious point in the nation’s history, voters are seeking someone with his level of experience to take the helm. “Are they going to turn to Hillary Clinton?” Biden asked, lowering his voice to a hush to explain why Mrs. Clinton won’t win the election.

  Illustrated by Drew Friedman

  “Do you want to be in a place where 100 percent of the Democrats know you? They’ve looked at you for the last three years. And four out of 10 is the max you can get?” Mr. Biden is equally skeptical—albeit in a slightly more backhanded way—about Mr. Obama. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.” But he doubts whether American voters are going to elect “a one-term, a guy who has served for four years in the Senate.”

  FEBRUARY 9, 2007 BY REBECCA DANA

  NYTV: Katie Go-Nightly

  KATIE COURIC, THE ANCHOR OF THE CBS EVENING NEWS, WAS IN Georgia on Friday, Jan. 5, in a car parked outside a Nathan’s hot-dog stand.

  She had started this job four months ago, at a salary of $15 million a year, with a contract of four years. The network spent around $10 million advertising Ms. Couric and refused millions more from advertisers in the form of in-house spots.

  Ms. Couric was en route from Fort Stewart—where she had interviewed a raft of servicemen and their families—to Savannah, where she would catch a plane home.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’ve thought about it a lot, and I do think, for security reasons, it’s sometimes hard for journalists to get a broad perspective of what’s going on in Iraq.”

  Ms. Couric is responsible for obtaining and quickly disseminating some such broad perspective to approximately 7.5 million American television viewers every night. She is the first solo female anchor of a national network newscast, and that suits her in that she must be what she mostly already was: starlet, cultural icon, feminist pioneer, media doyenne and, now, theorist of the war.

  Her loaded-up dog arrived at last. “Isn’t television glamorous?” Ms. Couric asked.

  Her lunch called to mind an old joke about what the Dalai Lama said to the hot-dog vendor: “Make me one with everything!” Only in this case, Ms. Couric isn’t looking for spiritual unity. She actually wants everything.

  Illustrated by Drew Friedman

  Illustrated by Drew Friedman

  FEBRUARY 18, 2007 BY JASON HOROWITZ

  It Takes a Chill

  Senator Clinton Comes Up With Press-Control Method: Freeze ’em! Cipriani to Nashua, She Beats the Press; Ann Lewis: ‘Most People Prefer Information Firsthand’

  HILLARY CLINTON DROPPED HER SHOULDERS AND WHIMPERED.

  She was reacting, with comic theatricality, after a guest at a fund-raiser on Friday night asked her about the perception in the media that she was cold and calculating.

  “I am aware of the story line, and I very much am conscious of how I have to work to make it clear to people who I really am,” said Mrs. Clinton as she walked around a “Hillary for President” stage in the midtown Cipriani ballroom. “That doesn’t mean everybody is going to like me or vote for me, but at least it gives me a better chance to stand on my own bearings.”

  She was speaking at an event packed with ticket-holding supporters and almost entirely free of reporters.

  Mrs. Clinton, the front-runner in the race to win the Democratic presidential nomination, controls her statements and image more than perhaps any candidate that has come before her.

  Her disciplined and highly touted communications operation keeps the media at arm’s length, reflecting the wariness of a woman who has been the subject of more press scrutiny than just about any other elected official in the world. At the same time, her press people have arguably emerged as the most aggressive of any on the Democratic side, criticizing opponents John Edwards and, this week, Barack Obama for their perceived mischaracterizations of her complicated position on Iraq.

  Now, as reporters observe and deconstruct Mrs. Clinton’s every gesture and syllable from the wings, she simply isn’t playing along.

  FEBRUARY 18, 2007 BY GEORGE GURLEY

  BUNGALOWING IRAQ

  IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT LAST Saturday, and Bungalow 8 was filling up. I wanted to ask the famously exclusive nightclub’s regular patrons their thoughts about Iraq.

  John Flanagan, a 40-year-old nightlife impresario, was sitting with a large group drinking $350 bottles of vodka.

  “I’m upset for the American lives that are lost, and the Iraqi lives,” he said. “It makes me feel confused about the direction we’ve taken and whether it was for the right cause.”

  He referred to the war as an “unpleasantry of life.”

  “I’d rather not be talking about this,” he added. “I’d rather talk about helping out Darfur, helping victims of Katrina.”

  By the bar stood Laura Choi, a 25-year-old wearing a black-and-white-striped Marni dress. She said she did not support the war. “Living in Europe, I feel like I always have to defend myself, and people are always attacking me,” she said. “I mean, I’m in Paris, I’ll sit down for dinner with a bunch of French people, and they’ll just attack Bush. I’m not a Bush supporter, and yet I feel, as an American, I have to defend my country.”

  Interior designer Brinton Brewster, 38, was also very upset.

  “We were brought into the war under false pretenses, the public was lied to, and we’re creating another generation of terrorists,” he said.

  “Unfortunately, the ‘fabulous people’ get a bad rap,” he continued. “Just because we live life in a certain way, they think we don’t have compassion for other people. It’s just not the truth. But you know, what really upsets me, honestly, is the propensity of the media to focus on Lindsay Lohan going in and out of rehab. I don’t care about celebrities and what they’re doing. I’ve met them all.”

  Emily, a history major at Princeton University, took a seat. “I am upset by the I
raq war, but I don’t focus on it, because it’s a negative energy,” she said. “I think we are overanalyzing the situation. I mean, here we are at Bungalow 8!”

  Illustrated by Robert Grossman and Victor Juhasz

  FEBRUARY 25, 2007 BY MARK LOTTO

  I Am George Jetson

  MEET GEORGE JETSON; JANE, HIS WIFE.

  Their deluxe apartment in the sky, you must admit, boasts quite the view. Rockets whiz past condos the shape of flying saucers. Stars flutter and flicker, and below the clouds are frozen like rivers.

  Tonight’s another of George and Jane’s keycard parties. Pretty swingin’. Plenty of futurific fun to be had, here in the 21st century.

  Or not. The actual 21st century, our 21st century, has been—not to put too fine a point on it—a real clusterfuck. Like kids outgrowing Santa Claus, we’ve spent the past seven miserable years learning to stop dreaming about the World of Tomorrow.

  Why would we? In the continued absence of solar-paneled jetpacks, plutonium-powered time machines or even fully electric (forget flying) cars, most of us still arrive at our still-earthbound offices via that great marvel of 1904, the subway. Which rarely gets faster, cleaner, cheaper or more frequent, but instead everyday further erodes, like the ruins at Troy. The news isn’t any better above ground: just look at the hole still sitting at ground zero—and the monolithic monstrosity we’d like to fill it with—for definitive proof that the cultural capital of the world hasn’t managed to keep its imagination running, that we’ve sputtered to a stop.

  Americans have always assumed that one day we’d awaken in our utopian future, like tourists at Disney World wandering happily from Frontierland into Tomorrowland. But we took the future for granted, as if it were a wife. And maybe it escaped this neglectful marriage, changed its name and skipped town.

  MARCH 11, 2004 BY ANNA SCHNEIDER-MAYERSON

  IT’S OBAMALOT! HARVARD LAW MAFIA LED BY LARRY TRIBE RESURRECTS OBAMA TIES

  LAURENCE TRIBE, THE CELEBRATED liberal constitutional scholar, was looking at a black plastic “Countdown Clock” that sits on a desk at his home in Cambridge, Mass. “Time until Bush goes,” reads the legend accompanying the digital read-out.

  Mr. Tribe’s former research assistant, Barack Obama, is now the leading contender against Senator Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, and Mr. Tribe is working furiously on behalf of his favorite alumnus.

  On March 20, Mr. Tribe will finally get to co-host a party for more than 150 guests, at the Cambridge home of his law-school colleague David Wilkins, that was originally scheduled for this past weekend.

  Several of Mr. Obama’s former professors are expected to welcome their prodigal son back to Cambridge for the event, an intimate, $2,300-a-head affair.

  Several Harvard Law School faculty members who got to know Mr. Obama before he graduated in 1991 have spent the last 20 years eagerly watching his star rise. The presidential campaign has become a culmination of the old New England bastion’s affection for a favorite son.

  And at this early date in the campaign, their favors are about more than Mr. Obama’s image, as they and their cohort scramble to meet the maximum donations to his war chest before a March 31 deadline, when all agree that the viability of his candidacy will really be determined.

  Illustrated by Robert Grossman and Victor Juhasz

  Illustrated by Drew Friedman

  MARCH 18, 2007 BY SPENCER MORGAN

  This Is Cafe Society?

  AT AROUND 11:30 LAST SATURDAY NIGHT, TWO MEN OF EQUALLY modest stature—one in a gray suit, the other in jeans and a worn jacket—were enjoying a cigarette on the corner of Bank Street and Waverly Place.

  The better-dressed man was the actor Sean Penn. His companion, Pearl Jam lead singer Eddie Vedder.

  Then a third, taller man approached.

  “Hey, fellas, can we get a group shot?” asked one of the paparazzi. He spoke in a foreign accent.

  “O.K., just one and then you’ll leave, right?” said the actor Tim Robbins. “I feel like I’m at a premiere,” Mr. Robbins added. “We’re out on the streets.”

  Mr. Robbins and his famous friends were on the street in front of the Waverly Inn, a West Village pub recently reborn as the city’s latest clubhouse to the rich and famous under the direction of its host-with-the-mostest, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter.

  In many respects, dining at the Waverly is very much like being at a premiere. Adjacent to Messrs. Penn, Robbins and Vedder’s table was Mr. Penn’s 21 Grams co-star, Naomi Watts, dining with a gaggle of girlfriends.

  Toward the back of the restaurant, in the big booths adjacent to the bathrooms sat the likes of rock star Lenny Kravitz, rap mogul Russell Simmons and celebrity photographer Sante D’Orazio.

  And shadowing them all was the Edward Sorel mural, commissioned by Mr. Carter and featuring caricatures of Anaïs Nin, e.e. cummings, Jackson Pollock, Bob Dylan, William S. Burroughs, Eugene O’Neill and others. Mr. Sorel said he charged Mr. Carter the “very cheap” price of $50,000 for the mural. “The only change Graydon made was that he had me take him out of it,” he said. “I had drawn him as a bird with a martini.”

  Mr. Sorel added, “Sometimes, when I go there, I am the only person I don’t know.”

  MARCH 18, 2007 BY NICOLE BRYDSON

  THE SMUG TUG

  MEN OF NEW YORK! WHY ARE you no longer throwing your scarves carelessly, rakishly over your shoulders, ends trailing in the wind?

  Why are you now pausing to double those scarves, holding the looped end at one side of your necks, then drawing the ends primly through so that they form a little bundled knot in front?

  From the warmth of our cubicle we did a little research and found out that the loopy new trend has a name: the Hoxton knot, after the hipster district in London. It’s also known by the even poofier, vaguely scrotal-sounding moniker, the Snug Tug.

  Whatever it’s called, we don’t like it. The old way of tying a scarf suggested that a fellow had somewhere to go, and more important things to think about than meticulously showcasing his knitted goods. Whereas the Snug Tug, well…it’s more like the Smug Tug: self-satisfied, static. Luckily, spring is nigh.

  MARCH 25, 2007 BY MICHAEL CALDERONE

  PORTFOLIO STAFF GETS A GAG ORDER ON QUIET LAUNCH

  As Magazine Prepares a ‘Quasi-Beta’ Issue, Tom Wolfe Steps Up

  WHAT GOES INTO PORTFOLIO’S new business journalism? Mr. New Journalism himself, for starters: “I’d been poking around on the subject of hedge funds,” Tom Wolfe said, “so I agreed to do 2,500 words.”

  The hyped-yet-secretive new Condé Nast business magazine is sending its first batch of pages to the printer this week, in order to get the 300-plus-page debut issue onto newsstands by April 24. Editor Joanne Lipman, who came to the startup from The Wall Street Journal in a roar of publicity, has put a gag order into effect—ordering the people assembling Portfolio on the 17th floor of 4 Times Square not to breathe a word about it in the hallways.

  Mr. Wolfe reported from Greenwich and New York for his piece, which will run outside that crowded feature well—even though he filed long.

  Mr. Wolfe said he was recruited by Portfolio staff writer Alexandra Wolfe. Ms. Wolfe has a front-of-the-book piece in the launch. “It’s kind of like a father-daughter field entry,” Mr. Wolfe said. “It’s like when you have two horses in the same stable.”

  Tricky Dick and…Hic! Was George W. tippling again?

  Illustrated by Philip Burke

  Illustrated by Victor Juhasz

  APRIL 8, 2007 BY MICHAEL CALDERONE

  The Times Machine

  “SOME DAY WE’LL ALL BE READING our papers electronically,” said Arthur Gelb, who started his career at The New York Times in 1944 and served as the paper’s managing editor from 1986 to 1990. “That’s just the way. Am I happy about it? No, because I lived my life with the wonderful past of the printed newspaper.”

  Mr. Gelb, who chronicled his life at The Times in the book City Room, offered
his reflection on the future of newsprint in the context of what might otherwise appear to be an unrelated topic: The Times’ move this year from its century-old headquarters at 229 West 43rd Street to the gleaming new 52-story tower on Seventh and Eighth avenues, between 40th and 41st streets.

  But nobody at The Times seems to be able to talk about the new building without talking about the future of the newspaper—or rather, the future of the news organization. Amid harangues from rogue shareholders that the newspaper isn’t making enough money, and amid dire predictions for the future of the “dead-tree” media industry, publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. is moving his company into a building that will demand the kinds of changes he has been trumpeting for more than a decade.

  The old building at 229 West 43rd Street—the noisy, hulking bricks-and-mortar newspaper factory chronicled by Mr. Gelb—is still essentially an industrial building; the new one is an airy, transparent embodiment of Mr. Sulzberger’s post-newspaper newspapering plans for The Times.

  Cascading style sheets replace plates; pixels stand in for ink, the virtual for the physical.

  The move to the new building will force a change in the newspaper’s basic DNA. The product of The New York Times is no longer a newspaper but the news itself, in whatever form it takes.

  APRIL 15, 2007 BY SPENCER MORGAN

  ARDEN OF EDEN

  HERE’S A NEAT TRICK TO TRY next time you’re at a swanky downtown fund-raiser gala: Ask Arden Wohl—the 24-year-old aspiring filmmaker, philanthropist and accomplished (whether she likes it or not) socialite—what she thinks about, say, New York’s current obsession with “It” girls.

  Then see how quickly your head starts to spin.

  “I just feel like, with anything, things go in and out of interest, and in and out of fashion. The age of technology, people are drawn now to the Internet, so they gain access to things. People are obsessed with things that are not important—money, and imaginary lives that people don’t really live. And I think that 10 years ago it was magazines, it was these imaginary lives, what people would look at, and it was models. It would be supermodels, and it was a great, trendy thing, and now there’s like five supermodels that die a year, and they’re all faceless, skinny girls who are like 15 who were probably sex-trafficked and abused, and they probably come here and are stuffed with drugs and put on the runway and, like, are anorexic and they’re all underage, and they’re faceless. And now people are like, ‘The new trend now is socialites,’ and people like to blog, and people like the Internet, to talk about who they know, people that they’ve met.”