by Lillian Ross
“The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook” has apparently tapped a deep lode of apprehension in American society; it is now in its sixth printing. “The last time I checked Amazon,” Borgenicht says, “we were ahead of ‘Angela’s Ashes,’ ”—a book that managed to become a nationwide best-seller despite its silence on the subject of how to survive if your parachute fails. (See page 137.)
A curious fact about “The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook” is that it tends to increase rather than to allay a reader’s irrational anxieties. Even to someone who has no contact whatsoever with stampeding bulls, the knowledge that bulls “are not like horses, and will not avoid you if you lie down” is unsettling. And the advice about “how to maneuver on top of a moving train and get inside,” though thoroughly persuasive, raises a disturbing question: how did you get up there in the first place?
2000
THE FAST-FOOD PRESIDENT GOES HAUTE CUISINE — Rebecca Mead
JULIAN NICCOLINI, a managing partner in the Four Seasons restaurant, was taken aback to read in the Times the other day a lengthy account of an elaborate dinner—lobster salad with caviar-cream dressing, a duo of stuffed saddle and roasted rack of lamb with tomato-spinach compote and rosemary-lemon polenta, apple tarte Tatin—prepared for President Clinton by the restaurant Daniel on a recent Thursday evening. Niccolini’s surprise derived from the fact that the very same evening his restaurant had prepared a similarly elaborate dinner—tuna tartare with beluga caviar, roast filet of lamb with truffle sauce and sautéed spring vegetables, a dish of mixed berries—for the President, which had been consumed with gusto. “After the main course, he cleaned his plate with bread,” Niccolini explained, speaking in the Grill Room one afternoon last week.
The President’s appetites, for cream puffs as well as for comestibles, have caused him considerable embarrassment over the years, and even though he was reported to be looking svelte on the evening in question, it appears that his voraciousness remains undiminished. Clinton was at Daniel for less than an hour, and he spent twenty minutes delivering a speech to the dinner guests— sixty-six members of the Democratic National Committee. Nonetheless, according to Anthony Francis, the restaurant’s banquet director, he managed to eat every scrap of his appetizer and his main course. (He ordered his tarte Tatin to go.) The President was then driven thirteen blocks south, to the Four Seasons, where he settled in for a three-hour blowout and gabfest, eventually leaving for Chappaqua—with another doggie bag, containing a slice of Key-lime pie—at twelve-forty-five in the morning.
After a physical last September, when he weighed in at two hundred and fourteen pounds, the President expressed a wish to drop ten pounds, and was reported to be trying to stick to a regimen of low-fat meals and no late-night snacking. Clinton’s staff had presented the Four Seasons kitchen with a list of dietary restrictions. “They told us exactly what he likes, what he doesn’t like,” Niccolini said. “And he is not allowed to have chocolate or cheese.” A Presidential taster was stationed in the kitchen, to insure that the food was prepared in accordance with Clinton’s preferences.
Even so, an approximate nutritional analysis of the President’s two dinners indicates that he had better duck next time he’s in danger of running into the surgeon general, since he is far from meeting the recommended caloric intake for a man of his height and activity level, which would be about twenty-eight hundred calories a day. The meal at Daniel cost him around two thousand calories and included about a hundred and twenty grams of fat, or sixty per cent of calories from fat. (That’s twice as much fat as most nutritionists recommend as a daily percentage.) The meal at the Four Seasons was slightly more spa-like and totalled about twelve hundred calories, with perhaps fifty per cent of those coming from fat. Even if the President had spent the whole day starving himself in preparation—which is as easy to imagine as him endorsing Giuliani for the Senate—he still would have consumed approximately thirty-two hundred calories. That’s nearly ten hours of non-stop golfing right there.
People fearing for the First Waistline might seek comfort in the fact that the President asked for his desserts in a doggie bag, but it appears that they were not destined to make it to Buddy’s bowl. Niccolini said he did not feel snubbed that the President declined the Four Seasons pie (five hundred calories, thirty fat grams) in favor of berries. “The plan was that we were supposed to bring his dessert to the limousine,” Niccolini said. “I guess he wanted to eat it on the way home. It’s almost an hour to Chappaqua. At least it gave him something to do in the car.”
2000
WHAT’S IN A DOMAIN NAME? — Julian Bames
"WHO steals my purse steals trash,” Iago claims. “But he that filches from me my good name / Robs me of that which not enriches him, / And makes me poor indeed.” I’m not sure it was robbery (the filcher did pay), but it was definitely my name: julianbarnes.com, not to mention julian-barnes.org and julianbarnes.net—all snaffled by a cybersquatter in the last few weeks. And not just me: the fellow has hoovered up the dot-coms of vsnaipaul, fayweldon, jungchang, germainegreer, ianmcewan, martinamis, and louisedebernieres. Some Americans, too: dondelillo, alicewalker, martincruzsmith, davasobel. A hundred and thirty-two by the final count. The fact that many such names should still be available isn’t much of a surprise—the speedy joust of E-commerce is temperamentally far from the slow ragout of bookmaking—but the identity of the squatter was. He turned out to be Dr. Mark Hogarth, a research fellow in the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge. Hogarth is evidently better paid than Iago: at a hundred and five dollars to register each writer, his purse has been trashed to the tune of nearly fourteen thousand dollars.
At first, I was faintly irritated (hey, that’s my name) and faintly flattered. Perhaps the guy was an E-version of Rolland Comstock, a Springfield, Missouri, lawyer who for decades has been collecting and warehousing modern first editions, plus ephemera, arcana, curiosa, and marginalia, on an obsessive, industrial scale. All for passion, not profit: the man even buys up hundreds of remainder copies when it offends him that an admired book should be thus downgraded. Perhaps, I thought, acquiring domain names was like collecting wine labels, a private if peculiar homage to something enjoyed.
And, if I didn’t really believe that, I vaguely imagined that what we loosely call “literary values” still linger on in this new E-territory. For instance, my current Web site (www.jbarnes.com, if you’re interested) is tended by a librarian in Illinois who actually forks out some of his own money to have advertising strips removed from the screen. But the British philosopher is somewhat less noble. He is now holding an on-line auction of all the names he owns; the lucky buyers will then, he judges, set up individual sites to sell each writer’s books on commission. “Robs me of that which not enriches him”—uh-huh. And in the meanwhile Dr. Hogarth invites me to buy back my own name. His fee: three per cent of the cover price of all my books sold, worldwide, in any language, in 1998. Assuming that a writer’s royalty, over a range of contracts, might average out at about nine per cent, he’s asking me for a third of that year’s income, the same amount that I handed over in taxes to the British government, which does at least mend the roads and bomb distant nations on my behalf.
But it wasn’t the grotesque profit expectation that stirred my more atavistic feelings. It was a photograph of Dr. Hogarth in a British newspaper. Not his physiognomy (we know that the reading of mug shots alters entirely with the context) but the background. Behind him were four well-stocked shelves of books: all seemingly in prime condition, ordered, respected, honored. These were the books that helped him work; behind the books, their authors. No doubt there are more things dreamed of in Dr. Hogarth’s philosophy than in mine. And mine, increasingly, boiled down to this: Hey, no, that’s my name. That’s what it says on my spines. Books are but words, yet those are two of the most charged and indicative. They’re also the last ones I insert into my type-script. Text, dedication, title, author: that’s how I do it, ritualistically. Thos
e two words are me. They’re proof that I do such things.
First you lowercase me, then you sell me. “And makes me poor indeed”—on the nose again, Shakespeare. And I don’t think he would have paid up, either.
2000
HOW TO MAKE THE MOST OF SOME SEXY SNAPSHOTS — Mark Singer
IS there in the English language a more cheering, endearing, hope-inducing word, pithy and punchy, a scant five letters, barely two syllables, ten Scrabble points, than “naked”? Which is also to ask, is there—hate to be crude about this, but—a word more purely ripe with commercial possibilities? (“Sex” is by no means such a word; far too complicated. Back to “naked”: Would Norman Mailer be where he is today if he’d called his first novel “The Fully Clothed and the Dead’? Not that Mark Helfrich, a forty-seven-year old professional film editor and amateur photographer who lives in Los Angeles, was thinking merely mercenary thoughts one particular day seven years ago while perusing a box of old black-and-white and color prints—mostly, naked pictures of his ex-girlfriends. Mainly, he was recalling how happy he’d been when he took the photographs and how excellent his subjects looked naked. It occurred to him that a carefully chosen portfolio would make an interesting book, and about a nanosecond later the thought occurred that sales probably wouldn’t suffer if its title was “Naked Pictures of My Ex-Girlfriends.” (As opposed to, say, “My Life in Linoleum” or “Frog Raising for Pleasure and Profit.”)
According to Mr. Helfrich, “Naked Pictures of My Ex-Girlfriends” is “not a definitive compendium,” just a photo-memoir of thirty-two women he got to know during a decade of rabbity concupiscence—the book’s subtitle is “Romance in the 70’s”—who, when tracked down twenty or thirty years later, obligingly signed releases that said, in effect, “Sure, go right ahead. It’s only me naked.” Rounding up the releases took seven years, and the book is finally being published next week. The result isn’t a collection of arty nudes, nor does it fit the shrink-wrapped-on-the-newsstand definition of pornography, nor is it stupid, the way the Cosmo-for-guys beer-and-babes-and-accessories magazines are. The accompanying text, in white hand-lettering against a black background, is neither pre-feminist nor post-feminist—just the candid testimony of a guy handy with a Nikon in the twilight of the pre-H.I.V. era, a fellow who without sounding boastful makes clear that he never flagged in his willingness to get laid. (“It was fun. It was like playing a game. It was like living Antonioni’s ‘Blow-Up.’ Sometimes it was foreplay . . .”)
“I think for the people who look at this book the pictures are voyeuristic, because you’re looking at somebody else’s girlfriends,” Mr. Helfrich said the other day during a phone conversation. “By the same token, I feel that other men can recognize one or two of their girlfriends in the stories or shots. I wanted the photographs to look like a boyfriend took them. When editing, I looked for that twinkle in the eye that took me to a certain intimate setting. With apologies to Playboy, I think these really are the girls next door, I’m a fan of Playboy. I’m a lifetime subscriber.”
And, just as orthodox Playboy philosophers have always insisted, it’s the writing, not the pictures, that really counts:
Jill, a long-haired brunette, sitting upright, legs crossed, filing her nails, with a “Do Not Disturb” sign from a Holiday Inn suspended from her left nipple: “About once a month I’d get together with my friend from out of state, Jill. We’d meet at the airport and make a beeline for the nearest bed. Passionately, we’d rip each other’s clothes off and become a couple of hyperactive love-monkeys.”
Cynthia: “Cynthia was claustrophobic with a capital ‘C.’ She wouldn’t even close the shower curtain to take a shower. She was also extremely farsighted. And she was addicted to Tang. Some people wake up and the first word out of their mouth is ‘coffee’—she said ‘Tang.’ ”
Barbara: “Barbara taught me that large tits and large brains don’t always travel in pairs . . . She voted for Nixon in ’72. By then it was all over.”
“Ms. Minter”: “ ‘Ms. Minter’ was the youngest teacher at my high school. . . . She was a great English teacher. We spent many afternoons at her house having naked lunches, then she’d send me home with another great novel. Talk about incentive to read!”
The publisher of “Naked Pictures of My Ex-Girlfriends” is Rat Press, a subsidiary of Rat Entertainment, an eponymous entity founded by Brett Ratner, a young television and film director (“Money Talks,” “Rush Hour”), who says he hopes to adapt the book for TV: “Right now we’re working on the concept. Either a series or a kind of documentary-style show. We have to refine it before we go out to the networks. First of all, the title alone—if there was a show titled ‘Naked Pictures of My Ex-Girlfriends’—would be huge. And there might be more books. Hopefully, we’re gonna go through Mark’s archives and we can do a sequel. Like, you know, naked pictures from the eighties and nineties, which would be awesome.”
Mr. Helfrich, meanwhile, has settled down. He met his wife, Alexandra, four years ago, they’ve been married three years, and they have a two-year-old daughter. Though he’s compiled quite a bit of recent material, he has no plans to publish a family photo album.
“Alexandra had never posed nude for anybody before she met me,” he said. “Early on, I asked her to let me photograph her, and she said O.K., but she demanded to keep the film until we were married. So she had rolls and rolls of film, and as a wedding gift she had them developed, put them in a box, and gave me a box of naked photographs of my wife. Which I thought was a great gift— even better than scores of naked pictures of my ex-girlfriends.”
2000
THE GUY WHO MAKES THE PRESIDENT FUNNY — Jeffrey Toobin
IT is not, perhaps, the most important event in Bill Clinton’s farewell tour of Washington, but April 29th marks the President’s final speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and thus the last time he must deliver laughs on command. As a consequence, the occasion is a turning point for a thirty-six-year-old New Yorker named Mark Katz, who has served as Clinton’s chief jokewriter for both tumultuous terms. “It’s been a remarkable window on this Administration,” Katz said the other day over lunch. “I can tell you the joke answer to every crisis that’s come up—the haircut, gays in the military, everything. I’ve sat in front of a word processor and tried to handle them all.”
Katz is on the short side, built close to the ground, and he is easily amused. (What, you expected Gary Cooper?) Like most humorists, he began his career by getting thrown out of class in the seventh grade, in his case in Rockland County, a place Katz remembers as “a hotbed of social rest.” After college, he volunteered in the Dukakis campaign and soon found himself a sort of comedy czar for that doomed undertaking. “Yes, I’m the man who made Mike Dukakis so funny,” he said. “When people say that campaign was a joke, I can’t help but feel a little proud.”
Katz puttered around in advertising for a few years, until, in 1993, friends from the Dukakis campaign hooked him up with Clinton for the annual round of after-dinner speeches—at the Gridiron, Radio and TV, and White House Correspondents’ Dinners—where the President was expected to entertain ball-rooms full of grumpy reporters in evening dress. Katz has come to see the speeches as a kind of unofficial history of the Clinton years. “He says stuff in these speeches that he never would have said anywhere else,” Katz suggests. For example, the President never admitted that he used the Lincoln Bedroom to raise campaign funds, but at the 1996 Correspondents’ Dinner he said, “The bad news is, our only child is going off to college. The good news is, it opens up another bedroom.” Last year, Clinton winked at his well-known distaste for the correspondents themselves, noting that if he had lost the impeachment vote in the Senate he would not be appearing before them. “I demand a recount,” he intoned. There are, however, no Clinton jokes about skirt-chasing.
Katz has turned his post as shtickmaster general of the United States into a one-man humor-consulting operation that he calls the Sound Bite Institute. In a
ddition to various corporate jobs, Katz has consulted with Hillary Clinton and has advised Al Gore on a number of recent speeches. (Gore turned down one of his more edgy offerings: “You know, the Washington Post just reported that I got C’s and D’s in my sophomore year, but they failed to report that that was also the year I invented the bong.”)
Katz’s fondest memory of his White House years concerns a speech that Clinton did not give. “I was all set to do the rehearsal for his White House Correspondents’ speech in 1995,” Katz recalled, “and at the last minute they decided that it was too close to the Oklahoma City bombing for him to do something funny. I was despondent. Then, a couple of minutes later, I got a call that the President wanted to see me. I ran back to the Oval Office, and he said, ‘Let’s just read it through for laughs.’ And that’s what he did, and it was probably my funniest speech ever. So I’ve been pitied at the highest levels. He felt my pain.”
2000
NAKED AND TRUTHFUL IN THE BRONX — Lillian Ross
THE makers of the movie “Finding Forrester”—Opus No. 65 for Sean Connery, who is co-starring with a sixteen-year-old newcomer named Rob Brown—were messing with the South Bronx the other night. They were filming scenes that featured Brown, a local six-foot-tall basketball-playing eleventh grader, interacting with Connery and assorted neighborhood folks, including the rapper Busta Rhymes. A few years before Brown was cast in the film, he was relocated from an inner-city public school and placed, on scholarship, in a prestigious private school. Last February, when he was cast in “Finding Forrester,” he had no manager, no agent, and had never before acted in anything. “There’s an inner peace about him—he’s a most unflappable fellow,” one of “Finding Forrester”’s several producers said. “And we’re doing everything not to shake his confidence, everything to keep him concentrated.”