On March 31, The Observer met Ms. Wohl outside her favorite bead store, Beads of Paradise on 17th Street, and persuaded the waifish heiress to partake in an interview and a whiskey at the Old Town Bar.
Before agreeing to answer questions, Ms. Wohl had one of her own: “Why me?”
It’s a fair question.
“I think that people should pay more attention to the people that are actually making a difference and the people that are actually working their asses off,” Ms. Wohl said. “And the people that are actually working really hard to save the environment. People don’t pay attention because they’re not fashion designers or because they’re not pretty—or because they’re not something. Those people are there; it’s just that our society chooses to escape into the fantasy world of something that isn’t real.
“I’m not saying that I wish girls wearing gowns would care more about a cause,” Ms. Wohl went on. “But Paris Hilton, or someone like that, if she believed in something, she could make a difference. She’s fabulous, she’s great—she’s great? You know, I don’t know. Whatever.”
MAY 7, 2007 BY NICOLE BRYDSON
KATE MOSS GOES MASS!
Illustrated by Drew Friedman and Victor Juhasz
IN 1996, THE ACTRESS SHARON Stone made the minimalist statement of the decade when she eschewed her favorite designer, Vera Wang, and wore a Gap turtleneck with a ball skirt to the Oscars; now, the Gap sells a cut of jeans called “Williamsburg,” and Ms. Wang, the empress of bridal wear for the Park Avenue set, has produced her own cheap line, Very Vera, for Kohl’s, as if she were Jaclyn Smith or something.
As for Ms. Stone, no one would be surprised if she dipped a toe into the clothing biz. After all, every other celebrity on earth has.
On May 8, Barneys—Barneys!—will begin selling cheapo clothes that the only temporarily disgraced model Kate Moss designed for the British chain Topshop, a favorite of Gwyneth Paltrow. And M by Madonna is but the latest offering from Ms. Moss’ erstwhile employer H&M, one of whose stores is on the site of the old (sniff!) Daffy’s on Fifth Avenue.
Gone is the late-1990’s frisson of sifting through bins of last season’s discount designer rejects; with the sudden ubiquity of fast-food fashion, one can have a reasonable facsimile of the latest thing, right now, with minimal effort.
And the ladies are lovin’ it. “I want this!” said Jenya Walters, 17, a high-school student who was shopping at Target.
MAY 28, 2007 BY GEORGE GURLEY
RED EYE FOR THE STRAIGHT GUY
“I’VE GOT TITS. I’VE GOT FUCKING TITS.”
Greg Gutfeld, host of Fox News’ bawdy, blogger-friendly 2 a.m. chatfest Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld, was smoking outside the Landmark Tavern in Hell’s Kitchen on a recent Sunday night and talking about the changes wrought on his physique since his TV show debuted in February.
“I’ve completely stopped exercising,” he continued. “I have not thought about going to a gym. My diet has gone to hell; I smoke more. I don’t think my drinking has gotten worse; it’s just more intense. I need it—and I’ve never needed it. The one thing I hate about it is, the people around you, who you love, you end up being kind of mean to them. Because you feel they don’t understand. And it’s a very wrong kind of thing.”
If Red Eye isn’t quite Fox’s answer to The Daily Show, the show’s giddy roster of New York–area media stars and camera-craving bloggers, who are probably unknown and unattractive to the vast majority of Fox viewers, is evidence that Fox wishes to make itself a respectable place to do business for the next-generation New York media elite.
So far, about 300,000 viewers are tuning in to the show, which is taped at 8:40 p.m. and airs at 2 a.m.
Illustrated by Drew Friedman and Victor Juhasz
JUNE 12, 2007 BY PETER W. KAPLAN
TONY’S BLACKOUT
‘Sopranos’ Auteur David Chase Left a Majestic Wrap-Up, But His Onion-Ring Existentialism Causes a Panic—Where’s Dr. Melfi? It’s a Media Anxiety Attack!
WHAT ROUGH BEAST IS DAVID CHASE RIDING?
He seems to have understood the mood of his nation better than anyone since Mario Puzo and Francis Coppola forecast the fate of the American empire in The Godfather.
And he has world leaders mouthing his dialogue, day and night. Here is Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the prime minister of Iraq, in The New York Times yesterday: “There are two mentalities in this region,” he said. “Conspiracy and mistrust.”
Baghdada-bing.
The rest of the world was muttering about Tony Soprano’s final blackout, but Mr. Maliki proved once more that David Chase has been battling for something worth fighting for. What do I mean, battled?
Try David Chase himself, as interviewed cathartically and perceptively by the hardest-working man in Sopranos land, Alan Sepinwall, the TV critic for Tony Soprano’s end-of-the-driveway hometown paper, The Star-Ledger: “No one was trying to be audacious, honest to God,” Mr. Chase said. “We did what we thought we had to do.”
He had completed his story, but he was giving us a gift in the last scene: He was telling us more. What happened in the four last minutes was plenty of information, and not of the conspiracy-theory type: We got to see the world as Tony does, suffused with anxiety and some amusement and apprehension. It took David Chase eight years to get Tony in and out of therapy, and he was improved about as much as a patient can be improved, maybe 2 to 5 percent.
“It felt like ginger ale in my skull,” he told Dr. Melfi in the first episode. The Sopranos ended up as it began—not with a bang, but an anxiety attack.
Only this time it was ours. This time we blacked out.
“I was shocked by the ending,” said Peter Bogdanovich, the movie director and film historian who played Dr. Elliot Kupferberg, Tony’s therapist’s therapist. Mr. Bogdanovich said he had shot another scene that didn’t make the final episode, in which he was comforting an exhausted, bereaved Dr. Melfi.
“It ends at that moment because that’s his life,” said Mr. Bogdanovich. “He’s anxious about getting blown away, the F.B.I. is going to indict him, Syl is going to die, everything is insecure and tense. It kept going, and the insert shots kept making you feel it was the last thing he was going to do. Endings, endings, endings. The little things in life are the last thing you are going to do. In fact, that’s his life.
“He didn’t give you what you expected—instead of a Hollywood ending,” Mr. Bogdanovich said, and so the viewer was left with “any number of imaginings, so you ask, ‘What the fuck happened?’”
“David has been consistent by doing everything with a vengeance he was not allowed to do on network television, so he gave you a very ambiguous ending,” he continued. “Which is not what the American audience is used to.”
The entire business history of American television has been a conspiracy toward two ends:
(a) the resolved ending, generally happy;
(b) destroying ambiguity.
Life and art weren’t supposed to jibe when it came to commercial entertainment. It’s not that David Chase was the first guy to come up with ambiguity and moral relativism on TV, but he may have done it with the most vengeance of any television writer since Rod Serling.
You may have noticed that the guys in the safe house where Tony was hiding were watching an episode of The Twilight Zone. It’s a 1963 episode called “The Bard,” and it was written by Rod Serling, the patron saint of television auteurs. In it, a failed playwright summons William Shakespeare from the dead to write his TV pilot for him. Shakespeare, needless to say, sells it, then is compromised and crushed. On Mr. Chase’s soundtrack, you could hear the agent lecture the writer: “The television industry today…is preoccupied with talent, looking for quality…the television writer is a major commodity.” Television writer…commodity. It is the voice of the network slaughterer.
Now the tabloid writers are mad at him. They wanted the show to splatter. As John Candy and Joe Flaherty used to say on SCTV, they wanted it to blow up real good. Mr. Chase
inspired the ire of Yahoo nation by bagging and dumping what he wanted to avoid: The dark bedtime-story end of The Sopranos was in great demand, and he provided it—splattt!—under the wheels of Phil Leotardo’s Ford Expedition.
But he also provided the first really grown-up summation in the history of American television: The subjective shot of Tony experiencing the American influx of diners at Holsten’s restaurant was news, as was his inglorious humanity. The final shot of Tony before the black, if freeze-framed, is a human image more photojournalistic than dramatic. If you have that particular device, take a look at Tony, the woolly mammoth in freeze-frame before the Ice Age, another human in anxious abatement in the Age of Ambiguity.
“It is the most subversive television series ever because it makes you like the monster,” said Mr. Bogdanovich, who was still mulling the last scene. “You don’t know what you’re waiting for. It’s the perfect use of suspense. You are trapped, not wanting anything to happen, but wanting something to happen. It’s very vicious. You’re left with any number of imaginings. What the fuck happened? Which shows you’re bloodthirsty also.”
We saw the two things that were preoccupying Tony: the one unambivalent relationship of his life, the adoring Meadow, his only true believer—she decided to become a lawyer when she saw her daddy taken away in cuffs!—and the assassins around him.
The Chase Gang gave us all the information we needed in the hour: indictments, threats, business, A.J., Carmela, Janice, it was all wrapped up. I was always certain that someone was going to clue Carmela in on the murder of Ade, but it didn’t happen. When Carmela entered Holsten’s, she entered in long shot, and her friendly, reassuring smile to Tony was casual and loving, but quick. A.J. entered with what looked like a potential assassin, his effective twin. But it was Meadow who received the Hitchcockian treatment of threat: Would she be able to park? Was she about to be locked in by assassins? Would she make it across Broad Street, on which she seemed to be in as much jeopardy as was Janet Leigh in Psycho?
Illustrated by Philip Burke
* * *
Tony and the Boss: Sopranos auteur David Chase’s subversive finale made panicked millions shriek, lunge for remote control.
* * *
“Anybody who wants to watch it,” Mr. Chase told Mr. Sepinwall in The Star-Ledger, “it’s all there.”
The Sopranos could have made it in the Clinton years, but it could only have become the deeply troubling comedy it was in the Bush era. Not because of the White House so much, but because of the viewer’s complicity in the dirty brew of power that flowed from this White House. Not because of the war, but because of the public sense of responsibility for this war.
“Oh,” says Carmela when she’s trying to talk A.J. out of joining the army, “you want to get your legs blown off?”
“Always with the dramatics,” he says.
But not really.
Earlier, at Bobby Bacala’s funeral, A.J., who truly did seem to relax and inhabit his own body once more after his yellow S.U.V. exploded, had a peroration for the commercial landscape the show inhabited: “America,” he said, “is still where people come to make it. It’s a beautiful idea. And then what do they get? Bling and come-ons for shit they don’t need and can’t afford?” Paulie mocked him and descended into a Norm Crosby routine.
But David Chase fought for and won a strange moment of pure insight into the American process. It was romantic, bleary, filthy, piercing. It was as much a comedy of American sobering up after 9/11 as Dallas was a comedy of America getting drunk on the Reagan years. But Mr. Chase fought a battle and won: He created a last shot on television that was one of the best close-ups in movie history, the snapshot of Tony taking in American ambiguity: the Boy Scouts, the killers, the gangstas and the one person toward whom he had little ambiguity. Like the final image of Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows, he captured all the intimate uncertainty of his age, in a room that could have been heaven or hell, but with good onion rings.
It was, so far, the best last episode in TV history—better than The Mary Tyler Moore Show or All in the Family or Seinfeld, despite all the screaming about it from plotmongers who wouldn’t have been happy with anything short of the conflagration from the end of Scarface or Tony whacking Dr. Elliot Kupferberg before he entered witness protection. Paradox, moral relativism, internality. All the stuff that network television has battled and ejected in the past 60 years—except in a very few instances—is the essence that David Chase brought to his 86 hours. David Chase’s enduring triumph in American television is that he embraced ambiguity and looked for poetry in the Bush administration.
Paulie Walnuts thought he had seen the Virgin Mary, and Tony mocked him; but in fact, Tony had seen the other side of mortality as well, and almost was cajoled by Cousin Tony—a spectral Steve Buscemi—into entering that big, well-lit house in his coma dream, after Junior shot him. But he didn’t, he re-entered the living and went on. That was, he knew somewhere, his task, and it’s why the cozy, dark ordinariness of Holsten’s restaurant in Bloomfield, N.J., was a terrifying but immensely moving way station.
Orson Welles once said that “Every story essentially has an unhappy ending. If you want a happy ending it all depends on where you stop telling it.” David Chase’s triumph was that he had the balls to stop telling it right h
JUNE 25, 2007 BY AZI PAYBARAH AND ANDREW MANGINO
Shelly’s Gridlock
ALBANY—EARLIER THIS MONTH, Michael Bloomberg and Eliot Spitzer emerged from the governor’s midtown office with great fanfare and announced that they were ready, in principle, to support City Hall’s sweeping plan to reduce traffic and air pollution in New York, which includes a proposal to charge cars for entering midtown Manhattan.
Not that it mattered.
The real show took place in Albany this week, where a stoop-shouldered, graying cipher of a man shuffled down the hallway in the State Capitol behind the Assembly Chamber, and slowly mumbled to a handful of reporters in a gravely voice, “We’re going to conference it,” and “We’re going to talk about it.”
Thus spoke Sheldon Silver, the 63-year-old Democratic State Assembly speaker who led his party during the dark years under Republican Governor George Pataki and who has stubbornly refused to fade away now that, technically, there’s another Democrat in Albany that outranks him.
JULY 16, 2007 BY HILLARY FREY
GRILLING GORDON
RECENTLY ON FOX’S REALITY COOKING CONTEST HELL’S KITCHEN, Gordon Ramsay, the multiple Michelin Star–winning Scottish chef, screamed at Melissa, a struggling contestant: “Listen, listen…If you just shut the fuck up for 30 seconds you might learn something!”
A few days later, on a broadcast of his BBC America show, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, in which the chef helps faltering U.K. restaurants get back on their feet, he counseled a distressed chef, a “big friendly giant” named Stuart White: “You deserve to make [the restaurant] yours. Stick to what you know, you can do properly, and stand firm.”
Who exactly is Gordon Ramsay? Is he the obnoxious, permanently exasperated Simon Cowell caricature on yet another American reality series—a series which happens to be winning its Monday night time slot among the 18-to-49 demographic? Or is he a nurturing, wickedly talented food expert who wants to save wayward restaurants? Is he an ambitious 40-year-old chef de cuisine who wants more than anything to woo and conquer New York City—or just a greedy blond bastard?
Illustrated by Robert Grossman
JULY 16, 2007 BY LIZZY RATNER
THE NEW VICTORIANS
ON A BALMY MORNING IN JUNE, Rebecca Miller, a petite 26-year-old actress and Brown University graduate, was perched on a wooden bench in the East Village, just a block from the apartment she shares with her fiancé and two cats. By the looks of her outfit, she was firmly grounded in the 21st century, just another hip lass with loose curls, a scoop-necked top and denim skirt with naughty front slits.
Then she opened her mouth, and it was as if one had been transporte
d back—oh, 150 years or so. “We had been talking about getting married since we got together,” Ms.—or perhaps we should write Miss—Miller said.
There was a time, not too long ago, when the young and the aimless hightailed it to New York City in pursuit of an altogether different urban experience than the domestic bliss enjoyed by Miss Miller and many of her bosom companions. High on a cocktail of recklessness and abandon, they came here to find their id, lose their superego, shake up the world, or simply shake their thang. Then they promptly chronicled these exploits in confessional sex columns.
But recent years have seen a breed of ambitious, twenty-something nesters settling in the city, embracing the comforts of hearth and home with all the fervor of characters in Middlemarch. This prudish pack—call them the New Victorians—appears to have little interest in the prolonged puberty of earlier generations. While their forbears flitted away their 20’s in a haze of booze, Bolivian marching powder, and bed-hopping, New Vics throw dinner parties, tend to pedigreed pets, practice earnest monogamy, and affect an air of complacent careerism.
As one soon-to-be-married, female 26-year-old online editor who lives in Williamsburg put it: “It’s no longer cool to be a slacker and be living in your basement.”
The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots Page 64