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

by The New York Observer

  Cue public outrage, stoked by, among others, Fox’s own Bill O’Reilly, who declared on air: “I’m not going to watch the Simpson show or even look at the book. I’m not even going to look at it. If any company sponsors the TV program, I will not buy anything that company sells ever.”

  When the dust settled, Ms. Regan was out of a job, amid accusations from HarperCollins, which she has denied vehemently, that she had referred to a group of HarperCollins executives and a prominent New York literary agent as “a Jewish cabal.”

  That was that: There was an order sent by Rupert Murdoch to Ms. Friedman, the HarperCollins chief, and Century City was no longer Judith Regan’s second home.

  Illustrated by Robert Grossman

  DECEMBER 24, 2007 BY NINA ROBERTS

  PAD GIRLS! ATTACK OF THE 21ST-CENTURY FALSIES

  TO THE LONG LIST OF THINGS making New York City more homogenous—funky brownstones razed in preparation for high-rise condos, chain-store franchises displacing neighborhood favorites—add women’s breasts.

  Have you noticed? Increasingly, the ladies of this town have been sporting remarkably similar pairs of perfect, pert globes: rounder, higher and larger than ever before. There has been an absence of breast individuality such as lace, seams, overflow, jiggle and, most notably, nipple.

  The flawless orbs that have been parading around the city are achieved by strapping on a “lined,” “T-shirt,” or “contour” bra. These are marketing terms for what is essentially a modern padded bra. This is not the quilted number of years past, but rather a smooth, immaculate device with foam-infused breast cups. Each cup is preformed, creepily having the same shape on or off the body. These lined bras have eased out simple cotton, silk or lace bras, and comprise about 90 to 95 percent of the bras for sale in Victoria’s Secret, the Gap, or any of the mainstream department stores.

  DECEMBER 18, 2007 BY JASON HOROWITZ

  Raucous Caucus

  IOWA HAS EIGHT DEER HUNTING seasons: Shotgun, muzzleloader, early muzzleloader, bow, youth, disabled and special November and January antlerless seasons. I learned this from Mark, the taxi driver who picked me up from the Des Moines airport and drove me to see John Edwards, who was campaigning in Indianola on Thursday afternoon. Mark had just finished pointing out a few deer grazing on the icy fields along the road when I learned something else about Iowa: Kamikaze wild turkeys will spring out of ditches, smash your windshield with the force of a cannonball and almost kill you.

  On the side of the road after the accident, Mark and I dusted off the blue shards of glass that had sprayed onto our clothes and examined the few feathers and innards stuck in the cratered windshield. I asked if the last black wing-beats I saw before the impact didn’t belong to a pheasant. But Mark said it was a turkey, and Mark is from Iowa, so it was a turkey. With that settled, he called me another cab, and we stood outside the car, where everything around us—the farm’s wooden fence, the spindly tree branches and corn stalks shooting though the snow—wore a coating of glistening ice. Then we did what you do in Iowa in late December, three weeks before one of the most anticipated caucuses in decades. We talked politics.

  Mark liked all the Democratic candidates, and he knew without my prompting that Mr. Edwards had an event out in Indianola. He said that, personally, he leaned toward Hillary Clinton because he liked her experience. The cab driver who came to retrieve me, and drive me the rest of the way out to the Edwards event, said, “Mark is a moderate liberal; I’m so far to the right that you can’t see me. I’m almost a fascist.”

  He was serious. He believed that Islamofascist terrorists, as he called them, would destroy America and bring about the end of days if not stopped by the full force of the American military. He wanted Iowa to secede from the union if the next president proved incapable of beating the terrorists back. I asked him which Republican candidate he liked. “None of them,” he said. I said that he sounded like a Rudy Giuliani voter, but he said Mr. Giuliani was too soft on terrorism for his taste, which is something you rarely hear about Rudy Giuliani. Bob also had a problem with the default Republican position on immigration, but not the problem I expected. He called the idea of building a wall to stem illegal immigration between Mexico and the United States ridiculous. “It would divide two Christian countries that needed to unite to fight the Islamofascists,” he explained.

  Bob dropped me off at the museum in Indianola, which had Edwards lawn signs stuck in the snow around the parking lot and icicles hanging from the rafters. “I better get out of here—enemy territory,” he said, laughing.

  Mr. Edwards spoke at the Warren County Historical Museum, the central exhibit of which was an installation of opposing cubicles showcasing different collectibles—old medicine bottles, retro dresses and “maternal corsets,” a barbershop chair—to evoke an old-fashioned main street.

  Later that weekend, Mrs. Clinton appeared at the Antique Car Museum of Iowa in Coralville, where families piled into a red 1909 Reo, a green 1913 Rambler, a black 1924

  Hupmobile and dozens of other old automobiles, and honked their horns when she was introduced.

  Johnston, Dec. 17

  Hillary Clinton is a human being.

  That may sound like an oddly obvious message for a presidential campaign, but for Mrs. Clinton, who has faced six weeks of bad press coverage and 15 years of cartoonish characterizations from all across the political spectrum, it is an essential point that she is now emphasizing in an attempt to right the direction of her presidential bid with three weeks before the Iowa caucuses.

  “Here in Iowa I want you to have some flavor of who I am, you know, outside of the television cameras when all the lights and cameras disappear,” she said softly, in an unprecedentedly personal speech this morning to announce a new Web site called TheHillaryIKnow.com. “What I do when nobody is listening, taking notes or recording. Because it’s hard in public life to have that kind of sharing experience.”

  Standing in a barn in front of about 150 people and dozens of reporters, Mrs. Clinton was introduced by four of her friends, each of whom swore to her, well, humanity.

  One old friend and former Clinton Justice Department appointee, Bonnie Campbell, called her a “human being who is so empathetic, so compassionate and so supportive of others.”

  The final speaker to introduce the candidate, Betsy Ebeling, became teary at the podium as she discussed her lifelong friendship with Mrs. Clinton. “Friendships are the things that maintain you through good and through bad,” she said. “She is loyal to her friends, she remembers them, she remembers their kids.

  “Do all of you understand that she is a mom, she is a daughter?” she said.

  When Mrs. Clinton took the microphone, she spoke gently and thanked her friends. She picked up on an element from her old stump speech, that many people in America are “invisible,” and said that her life’s work has been “to try and help people who are doing the best they can, but life sometimes has a way of hitting you upside the head.”

  She then ventured into what is for her mostly uncharted territory, talking about her own experiences growing up: how, for example, she wore thick glasses in junior high and high school and how that made it tough for her to meet boys.

  “We’re not all the same in every setting we find ourselves, are we?” she said, arguing that people are composites of the many different faces “that all add up to the people we are.”

  AUGUST 20, 2007 BY FRANCES KIERNAN

  GOODBYE MRS. ASTOR: On Aug. 13, the city lost its most gracious dowager: unfailingly generous, tirelessly sociable, enduringly chic

  “MONEY IS LIKE MANURE, IT SHOULD BE spread around,” Brooke Astor took to saying in later years. In 1986, when she accepted an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for “Distinguished Service to the Arts,” she attributed the remark to Thornton Wilder; in fact she was paraphrasing the words of the turn-of-the-century Yonkers widow Dolly Levi, eponymous heroine of Hello, Dolly.

  For more than four decades Mrs. Astor capt
ured the attention of New Yorkers with words more in keeping with her public demeanor. “Good manners come from a good heart,” she liked to say. She was also the published author of two novels, numerous essays and articles, and two book-length memoirs, as well as a devoted friend and daughter, a self-professed romantic, an accomplished hostess, an intrepid dancer, and a valued guest who thought nothing of attending as many as four parties in one night. But, above all, she was a world-famous philanthropist. For 37 years, as president and guiding spirit of the Vincent Astor Foundation, she devoted the better part of her life to this city—securing funding and also ensuring attention for causes she deemed important. “I never give to anything that I don’t see,” Mrs. Astor liked to say. For her philanthropy was always personal.

  REMEMBERING MRS. ASTOR

  BARBARA WALTERS TELEVISION HOST

  One sometimes hears, “Who will be the next Brooke Astor?” But there will never be another Brooke Astor. She was unique—charming, wise, funny, elegant and, most important, generous. Even her very long life was unique. To have her for a friend was a privilege.

  ROBERT SILVERS EDITOR, THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  She was in no way remote from the world. She knew very much what was happening. And this was, after all, indicated by this fact that she had taken an interest in this paper which had been put on the newsstands once…. She took the initiative, she wanted to see it, she wanted to be part of it, she wanted to invest…. At a later point, one of her businesspeople said, you know, you’ve been going on for years and the paper is doing well, and she wants to make her shares available to you at low cost…and she just gave it back to us, really.

  KENNETH JAY LANE JEWELRY DESIGNER TO THE SOCIALITES AND FRIEND OF MRS. ASTOR’S FOR 40 YEARS

  One thing she always used to say all the time, even in her old age, was, “Kenneth, do I flirt too much?” And I’d say, “No, Brooke you flirt just enough. You better not stop.”

  NOVEMBER 19, 2007 BY PHILIP WEISS

  OH NORMAN, MY NORMAN: His New York Jewish Public Self Was American Triumph

  NORMAN MAILER’S JEWISHNESS WAS A DOORWAY TO the world. He gave his talents to mankind and felt no special obligation to the people from whom he came. He wasn’t a self-denier, he knew the marvels of being Jewish—“My Jewishness was a great asset in my work, because it gave me a certain sensitivity to the world. It is not easy to be a Jew without thinking about the world a great deal of the time, given the classic situation of Jews in history,” he said in an interview I did for The Observer.

  But Jewish history is filled with assimilation, especially by literary stars from Spinoza to Heine to Nathanael West. Assimilation is older than any other Jewish social dream, older than Zionism, communism, or, today, neoconservatism. Mailer said once that being a bookish Brooklyn kid felt like a limitation to him, and certainly he rebelled against it. Mailer wanted—like the Zionists—to be a man of action, and for a while, the writing was dwarfed by the extravagant life: the marriages, offspring and fights (on the Town Hall stage with feminists, and on the Hamptons turf with Rip Torn).

  There was a lot that was Jewishy about the book that made him a celebrity: The Naked and the Dead, published in 1948. Mailer did not experience much combat in the South Pacific; but in one World War II reminiscence, I read that Mailer the young reporter used to pop into other guys’ tents and ask questions, listen to the stories. In the novel, Mailer’s ego is parceled out, like cabalist shards of the godhead. Goldstein the Jew from Brooklyn is a smaller character than the book’s hero, Lieutenant Hearn, a gentile who went to Harvard.

  Charles McGrath wrote in The Times that Mailer never wrote the great American novel, and this must be conceded, though he died trying. He told Charlie Rose earlier this year that he waited three years to write the sequel to The Castle in the Forest. But “I know enough about being 84 to know that if you’re a ping-pong ball you can roll off the table at any second.”

  From the time he was in South Pacific tents, the journalism and novels bled into and out of one another, but my generation was more turned on by the journalism. When Mailer was tied down by fact and his own experience, it made the work more alive. We were electrified by the journalist insisting on his own experience in The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago—trying to breathe the hot air in Miami and saying it was like making love to a 300-pound woman who decided to get on top.

  “There are two kinds of ways for novelists who have some talent to go,” he said in my interview with him for The Observer. “One is to use their experience as their private gold mine, and they search more and more deeply into that gold mine. That is one way to be a serious novelist. Another way was to use your personal experience as a springboard to go quite a distance into the outside world. That was my preference…. But I have never wanted to write about the near things. My personal experiences are crystals to beam my imagination into far off places.”

  I wish he had tried to integrate those experiences more, the personal life of being a rabbi’s grandson, then an American celebrity with all the women and children. He emulated Tolstoy, but Tolstoy seems to have injected more of himself and his life into his novels. He said he never went to Israel because he knew he’d have to write a book about it. So he turned away from vital material. Mailer wanted to wrestle more with history than with himself.

  Mailer was more American than Jewish. He was granted a passport out of his Harvard/Brooklyn petri dish by two great democratic experiences, Army service in World War II and the celebrity that followed from that. He made his own choices in Jewish and American history, and he didn’t look back.

  * * *

  GEORGE GURLEY INTERVIEWS JARED KUSHNER

  Illustrated by Barry Blitt

  Can you tell the story of how you bought the paper?

  Well, I heard the paper was for sale and I’d obviously heard of the paper, mostly when I picked it up when I was going up to college on the LaGuardia-Boston shuttle. They always had great caricatures in front, and I remember seeing an article about the “power seders” in New York; the paper was different, exciting and interesting. So I heard it was for sale, and it seemed like a very cheap price for a New York paper, based on what I had read in the press. I called up Arthur Carter, whom I’d met a few times through my father, and said, “I’m reading in the papers that you’re selling The Observer.” And he said, “It’s not really for sale; I’m not sure what I want to do.” So I kept calling, saying, “Arthur I want to meet with you, I want to make you an offer.” He’d say, “I’ll call you if I’m interested.” I think at the time he had a deal to sell it to Robert De Niro and his people.

  Then out of the blue, I got a call one day and Arthur said, “I can sell you the paper, but you have to do all of your diligence over the weekend.” I said, “No problem.” That Saturday night my girlfriend and I were at the movies and I got an email on my BlackBerry with the contract attached. I left in the middle of the movie, went into the city, read the contract, did all the diligence the next morning. We worked through Sunday and by Monday morning, we had a contract that was close to executable form.

  I met with Arthur that Tuesday, sat with him and [his daughter] Mary Dixie, and I’d brought Clive Cummis, one of my father’s lawyers, who is well respected and wears a bow tie and has gray hair, a real gentleman—I figured he’d give me some sense of credibility with Arthur. We sat down, and I put down on the table a check with the full purchase price and a signed contract, and I said, “Listen, I’m ready to go.” And we spoke for an hour and I said, “I really do want to buy this paper, I’ve got all these plans.” I had put together a full PowerPoint presentation about how I can improve circulation, I can improve ad sales, I can make this thing great, I can make it hip, I can do this—I didn’t know what I was talking about, I’d never done any of these things before.

  I left and thought, you know, it was a good meeting, and I went back to my summer internship at a start-up private-equity fund, and I got a call in the afternoon and it�
�s Arthur, and he says, “Jared, I’m going to sell you the paper.” And I said, “Well, O.K.!” I’d been pursuing him for six months and I thought I had a one-in-a-million chance of doing it, so I was shocked. I thought, “Well, now I actually have to do all these things that I said I knew how to do!” It was like I was airdropped behind enemy lines without knowing that many people in New York. I was excited, enthused, scared.

  That night I went to the lawyer’s office and we finished up the documents, down on Wall Street, and I walked out at 5:30 in the morning and was walking through the streets of New York, which were very dormant and quiet and it was just starting to get light outside, because it was the summertime, and I remember looking up at all these buildings and saying, “Wow, I just did something that really is significant in this city.” That day I called my boss at the private-equity firm and said, “I’ve got to quit; I just bought a newspaper.” He was very supportive and told me no one had ever quit on him before for that reason. He remains a friend.

  I was totally unprepared for what happened next, and was overwhelmed by the media interest. I didn’t know how much the media cared about media. I didn’t know what Gawker was, and all of a sudden they start writing about you.

  The most important thing that happened in that regard was that the reporter who called first was [The New York Times’] David Carr, who’s a phenomenal journalist. And I was very lucky to be working with [public relations executive] Howard Rubenstein, and Howard said, “I think you should do the first interview with him since he called first.” So I sat down with David on a Sunday, and for me it was weird because there’s a photographer taking pictures of me and I’m thinking, “What the hell is going on?” The article came out well, and I think it made a difference because David took me seriously. He could very easily have said this is a kid, he’s 25 years old, what the hell does he know? But instead, he really listened to what I was saying and, by David Carr taking you seriously, I think it set the tone for a lot of the press that was to come. So I always appreciate that he took me seriously, and I was serious about it, so I think he got it right.