Bobby and Jackie: A Love Story is not C. David Heymann's first book about the family and seems like perfect grist for the never ending nostalgia and scandal mill that the Kennedy clan has been running since the '60s. However, according to Andrew Goldman's piece in The Daily Beast it seems unlikely many of the stories in the book actually are actually true.

Heymann says one of the keystone accounts of the Bobby/Jackie love affair comes from now-deceased socialite Mary Harrington who claims she witnessed a steamy scene between the pair at the Kennedy's Palm Beach estate in 1964.

"[T]here," Heymann writes, "sunbathing in the grass next to the house, was Jacqueline Kennedy, wearing a black bikini bottom and no top. A door opened and out walked Bobby Kennedy in a white swimsuit. He approached Jackie and knelt by her side. ‘As they began to kiss,' said Harrington, ‘he placed one hand on her breast and the other inside her bikini bottom.'"

There is no way to check with Harrington about the accuracy of her story short of a Ouija board. Goldman says that it can't be true because the estate was walled at the time.

The only possible place where Harrington could have been staying was at a beach shack on the adjoining property to the south, which sat about 10 feet lower than the Kennedy residence. [Ned Monell, who was the Sotheby's listing agent for the property when the Kennedys sold the place in 1995] says that owing to the heavy vegetation planted around the house, she would have been unable to see anything on the lawn.

And that's just one story that Goldman rips apart. The pair have a history that goes back to 1999 when Goldman wrote a story in the Observer questioning the veracity of a story Heymann told the New York Post about the late John F. Kennedy Jr. In his Daily Beast, article Goldman accuses Heymann of routinely making up claims about the Kennedy clan for his own gain.

Goldman has apparently taken it upon himself to repeatedly swat down Haymann. It's like the journalism equivalent of when the ladies get in each other's faces on Rock of Love, and this is an oh-no-you-didn't of the highest order.

Mike Nelson is the big dude who's the subject of the FindHeMan.com stalker blog. But the joke is it's not that hard to find Mike really cause he spends a lot of time in Madison Square Park, sunning the guns and the lats and the chest and the other important He-Man parts. He lost one eye in a fight with cops and used to be a druggie but cleaned up. Now he doesn't do acid or coke or heroin or rob cemeteries for skulls any more; he just lives with his girl and works out and hangs out and basically goes with the flow:

"I took care of rabbits as a kid," Mr. Nelson recalled. Big smile. "So it taught me how to be a little more affectionate as I got older."

Not surprisingly, this exhibitionist ex-junkie bodybuilder who could go down on women "all day" is one of the least annoying people Spencer Morgan has profiled in the past year.
[NYO]

STANDARD DISCLAIMER: Is this really a trend? Eh, doesn't really matter.

Used to be that just about every guy was circumcised but now it's more like half! Plus other guys are using all types of contraptions to "restore" their foreskins, by yanking skin up over their dicks for extended periods of time. Now that the facts are out of the way, marvel at Spencer Morgan's penis wordplay:

the hooded snake dragon...playing pop goes the weasel...the anteater variety...stare the weasel in the eye...tugger-plugger...precious stones...the turtleneck...a mouthful of limp skin.

But Spencer, where is your trademark "Allow someone to painfully kill themself with quotes" graf, in this case at the expense of a 37 year-old guy who proudly wears a foreskin-extending "device?"

"The main thing that's motivating me is-I'm not married and I'm not in a relationship now-but I think it's really a quality of the sexual experience for my partner, my potential partner. I'm heterosexual, and everything I've read, it's really, really important to the mechanics of sex," he said...

"I'm also very much an amateur psychologist," he continued. "I'm a virgin partly because of the church, but I've also read lots of research that backs up the argument that this sexual experience is such an intimate and intense thing, and at the same time marriage is such a difficult thing to make work-that you need to give yourself every benefit possible."

Oh there it is. This is masterful work, penis-wise. [NYO]

“I think these things are cyclical, and great families survive if they’re intelligent. And again, if they have a lot of members of the family who are actually out there trying to make something of themselves,” he said. “These things are horrible and they destroy wealth and they destroy opportunity for a lot of people, but hopefully great families who have more than one person who have done some great things can continue to preserve capital and build new wealth—so when something like this happens, you’re not destroyed, you’re set back.”

Then Mr. Van Rensselaer and Ms. Menniken hopped in a chauffeured SUV and headed down Park Avenue.

Also his model girlfriend dislikes the word "moist." [NYO; Pic via NY Social Diary]

Stefan Fitzgerald is a bike delivery guy for a large weed operation who was only too happy to bitch to the Observer about his boss:

At some point in the day—it’s a 12-hour shift—he meets up with The Man, who takes the cash and refills his supply. The cell phone works as a pager, basically: When there’s an order from a customer, dispatch calls you; you call back from a pay phone, dispatch tells you where to go.

“That way it’s untraceable. Supposedly,” he said. Mr. Fitzgerald was comfortable telling me about his work because it’s been his experience that the cops don’t really care about small-time pot dealers.

“Frankly, the guys I work for I think are a little paranoid,” he said of the elaborate phone system. “But I guess it goes with the territory.”

Stefan: you're fired. And under arrest. [NYO; pic via The Onion]

Yesterday afternoon California-based Dwell [magazine] filed suit against Moinian in US District Court, alleging that Moinian's [new financial district development, named Dwell95]—which was designed by Philippe Starck and officially launched on Monday—violates a trademark held by the magazine since 1999. The mag argues that not only did Moinian rip off the name, his company also "depicted this trademark using a font and style that are nearly indistinguishable from the font and style used by Dwell."

Cityfile thinks the Observer profile of the son might have been a plant, designed to generate some good PR just as his dad was getting sued. But that may be a stretch— Observer rich kid profiles are never really "good" PR.

[NYO, Cityfile]

The related question, of course, is whether or not anyone would be so interested in Carr's story (the book comes out next week) if he weren't now a celebrated columnist for the NYT... Sedaris, Burroughs, Eggers — most successful memoirists today start out as relative unknowns. It's the confessional that announces them to the world, which either expects them to keep on confessing (and is willing to overlook embellishment) or pays them the compliment of taking whatever other work they might do seriously for at least five minutes. Apart from being a minor celebrity already, Carr's original contribution to the modern autobiography is to lay bare the unreliable workings of memory. He wants to be a free-basing Nabokov.

A small snatch of his story was excerpted two weekends ago in the Times Magazine, no doubt to reinforce its before-and-after appeal: I went from sharing needles to sharing cabs with MoDo! In the hands of a worse writer, this exercise would have been a disaster. I read the piece start to finish and came away wanting more. But Carr does seem to periodically renew his license for twee, as in this graph:

If I said I was a fat thug who beat up women and sold bad coke, would you like my story? What if instead I wrote that I was a recovered addict who obtained sole custody of my twin girls, got us off welfare and raised them by myself, even though I had a little touch of cancer? Now we’re talking. Both are equally true, but as a member of a self-interpreting species, one that fights to keep disharmony at a remove, I’m inclined to mention my tenderhearted attentions as a single parent before I get around to the fact that I hit their mother when we were together. We tell ourselves that we lie to protect others, but the self usually comes out looking damn good in the process.

Get on with it already. Either stick to the smart meditations on cognitive recall, or tell your dark tale the way you and everyone else remember it and let the reader judge for himself your former cretinism. Don't do one as a way of doing the other.

UPDATE: Gawker alum Joshua David Stein reviews NOTG favorably in the Observer.

[Observer]

While the rabble may have padded about in cut-off rags in days past, respectable members of society are only now dipping a toe into the short-waters:

A growing number of style-conscious men are becoming more comfortable with the idea of showing some leg during the hot summer months. No longer does it seem remarkable to see men—straight men—dressed in slim-fitting shorts that hang well above the knee, from conservatively dressed 9-to-5 Manhattan types, to Williamsburg hipsters who wear their cutoffs so high, it evokes the lyrics to the 1993 R&B hit “Dazzey Duks” (or The Dukes of Hazzard, depending on one’s age).

Moneyed gentlemen including Ed Westwick, Devendra Banhart, Sean Avery, and even Graydon Carter have donned short-pants at one time or another, the intrepid news-paper reports. The news-man queries several of his close personal friends to determine how this trend is going over within the media:

Michael B. Dougherty, a research editor at Gotham magazine, [says] that there’s “something really defeatist” about shorts, kind of like wearing sweatpants when you get to the point of not caring how you look[.]

But the practice is deemed more acceptable within the devil-may-care confines of Green-Point:

And if you ask John McSwain, who works as an assistant editor for Vice magazine’s online television network, VBS.tv, he’ll tell you that four to seven inches above the knee (or perhaps even higher!) is about right.

Mr. McSwain, 27, of Greenpoint, is a shorts enthusiast who loves all styles, from Fred Perry tennis shorts to those little cutoff jeans that, when worn by women, are sometimes referred to as “boom-booms.” (Mr. McSwain alternately calls them his “redneck cutoffs.”)

"Shorts" fit for public prancing may be purchased at Barney's for $160, the story notes. But those with proletarian urges can find versions fit for slumming at the "American Apparel" millinery:

Mathew Swenson, a spokesman for the company, said the male audience for short shorts, once exclusively the attire of trend-setting hipsters, has widened to include more mainstream types of guys who’d previously limited themselves to the baggier cargos and board shorts dominating the market—these days considered, perhaps, a bit dorky. “Now you prove your masculinity by wearing short shorts or pink underwear,” he said.

What a gay time we'll have in our "shorts!"

[NYO]

"I recently got back in touch with another friend—we'll call her Catherine—I hadn't seen since college, except a couple years ago when we ran into each other in the West Village, right after she'd moved back to New York from Los Angeles. Anyway, we've been hanging out. She's single. The other day she was telling me that most of her friends from college (except for me and a couple others) are married, and most of the married friends have at least one kid. Catherine was in a sorority, and I'm convinced that there's a correlation between sorority membership and getting married by 27 and having the first kid by 29. My younger sister, who is 24 and was in a sorority, seems like she will bear this theory out, though she got offended when I proposed it. Then I found out she had shown our mom engagement rings on the Tiffany's Web site, just in case her boyfriend should turn to my mom for advice.

...A friend of mine—we'll call her Natalie—is moving in with her boyfriend in brownstone Brooklyn, even though everything's so fucking expensive these days that you might as well just move back to Manhattan. She met this guy at work; at the time, she was involved in a torturous long-term relationship with another guy, one of those relationships people get into in their early 20s and then wake up one day and, hell, they're 28 or 29 and nothing has changed, he's still the same guy they were vaguely annoyed with all those years ago, except now they live together and he does things like punch walls when he's upset."

"It's embarrassing if you're a particular kind of person—a Manhattan media person, like somebody who considers himself to be thoughtful or have a generally elevated level of media consumption," said one such Manhattan media person who wished to keep his name out of this article. "You don't want to be aligned with moms. Because literally, this is the meat and potatoes of their Internet consumption."

(GUESSES?)

Some enjoy the cheap gags at LOLcats. But others, like [VH1 writer] Mr. Gottlieb (who says he likes LOLcats), see these images as mocking animals, and also people, via the animals. "Sometimes it seems like it's a proxy for making fun of retarded people," he says.

And Cuteoverload overlord Meg Frost admits the truth:

But for anyone still uncomfortable admitting their admiration for her work, Ms. Frost wants you to know one thing: "There's no shame in kittens. It's better than porn for sure."

"Oh, well, I guess I should say that for myself," she added. "Some 45-year-old guy might not agree."

[Seamy underbelly of the cute world explored by the Observer's Matt Haber]

J.K.: Do you have any interest in real estate?

L.G.: Only in the pornographic sense that everybody else does.

J.K.: Real estate is like porn for rich people.

L.G.: So what possessed you to go buy a dinosaur? This is, like, so old-media. Isn't it a bit yesterday?

J.K.: Well, I would say two things. People are hysterical about the death of newspapers and I would say they're not dying, they're just kind of reinventing themselves. What the ultimate body count is in reinvention is still to be determined, but the difference between a weekly and a daily is that my product is a country home, whereas a daily is your primary residence.

L.G.: Now when people come to you, as I'm sure they do, and they just read something snarky about themselves in the Observer, and you have a business or social relationship with them, and they say "Jesus Christ, Jared, look at what your paper did to me"—what do you do in those situations?

J.K.: Well, I think people for the most part are very respectful and they know that I'm a publisher who has strong belief in editorial independence. And I'm very fortunate to surround myself with great people, and I believe that you hire good chefs and you let them shop for the groceries and cook.

He's so rich!

[Portfolio]

Like all of the Observer's Williamsburg coverage, this piece causes the reader an even greater level of apoplexy by using a breezy, ironic tone, rather than just putting its head down and pounding out a list of bars, parks, and restaurants where the postgrads who populate the terrifying neighborhood can go to meet one another and, 47 minutes later, have coke-fuelled sex in an Enid's (there's one!) bathroom.

That said, if you want to go read the entire tortured Williamsburg-as-college metaphor (your apartment search is like "room draw!"), be our guest. Call us enablers, if you will. But remember this, twenty-something Observer staff writers: at least 25% of the Gawker editorial staff lives right next door in Greenpoint. We go to some of these places that your story proposes to morph even further into postcollegiate hellholes. It's only a matter of time before we catch you walking down the street one night.

So say hello, why don't you?

[Observer]

Nicole Brydson from the Observer used to live in Greenpoint, and now when she goes back, she's not even the only one! Or as she wryly puts it, "I've recently found myself traveling north to Williamsburg and Greenpoint for a night out more often and apparently, I'm not alone!"

Trendwatch! SEA Thai restaurant is so bridge-and-tunnel! Greenpoint has clubs and a bowling alley! And Nicole tells us that, at long last, "with its mix of hipster residue and tragically suburban folk, Bedford Avenue finally completed its transformation into the new Avenue A." Tragic. Let's hope word of this doesn't get out to the hip young hipster crowd attending their musical shows around the neighborhood. It would make them so mad!

Having gotten fed up with all the stumblebums and glitterati roaming the streets of Greenpoint, she says she's now "totally content to return to my quiet, peaceful neighborhood" of Prospect Heights. That's cool but, is your old apartment available? I really want to get in on this Greenpoint thing before it gets spoiled!

Diller recently spun off his conglomerate into five new companies, due mostly to a complicated and lengthy fight with a "reclusive billionaire" major investor. This also helped fight claims that IAC was "a random hodgepodge" of disparate companies, except that the groups that remain under the IAC umbrella are a random hodgepodge of internet companies, "united under the loose banner of 'helping consumers.'" Like, uh, Zwinky, which helps consumers make Zwinkys. And CollegeHumor, which helps consumers find IAC-owned websites where they can buy funny t-shirts.

And speaking of CollegeHumor! Connected Ventures, the booze-soaked internet frat party that generates lots of great traffic from coveted demographics, will not be moving into the IAC GehryDome. Because although CollegeHumor EIC Ricky Van Veen promises that Diller gets them, he is aware that they might be a distracting presence among the grown-ups.

"Barry okayed us not going into the new building because he understood it wouldn't mesh. There was a Heely craze at the time—literally half the office had Heelys," said Mr. Van Veen, referring to the sneakers with built-in wheels that seemingly every child in the world was wearing at one time. "Talking to Barry, I think he realized he didn't want Heelys scraping up those brand-new floors."

It's Diller Time! [Observer]

"Jared was certainly not anywhere near the top of his class," said his own high-school college counselor, Margo Krebs. "It was an unusual choice for Harvard to make."

Not that unusual — Jared's unseemly father, Charles, made a $2.5 million pledge to the school just before those acceptance letters went out (going the distance, the Kushes indirectly fellated Harvard alum Ted Kennedy as well). As for Jared's enrollment in NYU Law School in 2003: though he graduated from Harvard with honors, dad had already secured a smooth path by giving NYU $3 million in 2001. And, just to be sure, the elder Kushner started renting part of the Puck Building to the university at a discount.

But doesn't it always work this way? Our family donated extensively to the crafts room at the local community college.

Getting Ahead the Old-School Way [Gatecrasher]

The book (or proposal) is tentatively titled The Future Is Next Year: On the Cusp of New China, and Scocca aims "to be in Beijing for the critical year of 2007, seeing and writing about what happens as China closes in on hosting and competing in the 2008 Olympics—and closes in on its future." This means, obviously, that Scocca's moving, leaving wee Manhattan for the pulsating streets of Beijing, though he'll still continue to write and edit for the Observer. How they negotiate the 12-hour time difference remains to be seen.

And the real story: Scocca's wife works in Beijing as the deputy director of the Clinton Foundation's HIV/AIDS initiative in China. So really, this is all a complex and profitable way for Scocca to get back his sex life.

So: what if that terrible first inning had never happened? The arithmetically glib answer would be: a rousing 8 - 6 victory for the Salmon. Yet that doesn't get at the deeper issues—the possible acts of heroism that went undone, the mysterious feedback between success and confidence, confidence and success. In pursuit of those deeper—and, did we mention, space-filling?—truths, we convened a panel of participants to explore the question of what might have been.

The Observer's write-up really is worth a read; if the New York team weren't too busy bathing themselves in celebratory barrels of Domaines Ott, they might even enjoy the Look Book.

Observer Softball Report: What If 9-0 Never Happened?