One of the sweetest sounds in the world was Corky making the rounds up here on the executive floor, saying in his laid-back voice, "I feel like boffing some bimbos in the Caribbean. Anybody like to come along?"

It's almost like you're right there on the executive floor. Anyhow the writing's not bad as long as you can forget that this story was almost certainly inspired by Tom Wolfe standing in a long line at the airport.
[Pic via]

We talked to Dan Baum on the phone today. He told us the story of the last time he talked to Gawker—in 2007, after the magazine decided not to renew his contract. When we "revealed" that NYer writers are on one-year contract, Pam McCarthy, the New Yorker editor who deals with writers and their contracts, sent Baum some rather passive-aggressive emails, culminating in her allowance that well, if speaking to Gawker helped him sell books, then she could forgive that "there was a bit more there about how we do contracts" than she would like.

Which raises the question: What the fuck does the New Yorker care if the unwashed public knows they give out yearly contracts? A year later Baum took to Twitter and gave out way more details about his own contracts there, down to the dollars-per-word. "We're all reporters" ostensibly dedicated to openness, Baum said. "I just think it's hilarious that this created such a stir...It's a magazine. It is not an organ of state security. It is not a sacred temple."

Of course, the New Yorker has always been insulated and touchy. That was part of its "charm!" Tom Wolfe pointed this out decades ago in a story called "Tiny Mummies!" which made fun of the magazine in its William Shawn days. The opening words:

"Omerta! Sealed Lips! Sealed lips, ladies and gentlemen. We are editing the New Yorker magazine, Harold Ross's New Yorker. We are not running a panopticon. Not exactly!"

Even then, secrecy for absurd reasons was a given. As was an inexplicable fervor amongst the magazine's priesthood!

The New Yorker was in a class by itself. One went to work there and one—how does one explain it?—began to get a kind of...religious feeling about the place. There were already a lot of...traditions.

And those traditions remain! After Wolfe's piece ran he was bombarded with condemnation from a long list of the magazine's most famous writers. Although there was also quite a bit of "Don't dish it out if you can't take it" reaction towards the New Yorker, which enjoyed publishing takedown pieces.

So, some things never change: The New Yorker is insular, easily offended, and America's best magazine, and even though you know all about their contracts now, you still can't get a job there.

Ross wrote a little thing on Leonard Bernstein, the famous composer, and he mentioned the famous Tom Wolfe story about Lenny's fundraiser for the Black Panthers. That story is of course one of the most famous pieces New York ever ran, and it also basically marks the point at which Wolfe became completely insufferable. Anyways Ross points out that Wolfe maybe exaggerated some things, like Bernstein's adoption of "jive talk," and this dismissal of Wolfe's famous story upset him so much he wrote this letter. Let's watch him deftly and inexplicably switch from the first to the third-person:

I know Alex Ross to be a music critic so sublime that he should be spared from irksome toil. A random example: his sensitive reassessment of Leonard Bernstein’s career says that the journalist Tom Wolfe attended the now legendary party for the Black Panthers in Bernstein’s Park Avenue penthouse and wrote an article about it, “Radical Chic,” for New York (A Critic at Large, December 15th).

It goes on from there, with similarly flowery nonsense (the New Yorker presumably, and thankfully, edited out all the ellipses and italics). And then Ross responds, tersely. And then Daily Intel weighs in, which isn't fair, because they totally have a dog in that fight.

That is today's Amusing Letters To the Editor news.

"Mr. Wolfe admitted that he's not truly a fan of Hip Hop, but he finds its universe fascinating.

'I know that it celebrates that same leisure class at the bottom, that’s what the whole thing is about. You know like, 'Kill cops!' and 'What are women good for?' One thing! It’s all part of the pose,' said Mr. Wolfe. 'But I’ve noticed we’ve backed away a little bit in the last several years from killing cops and making girls lean over and all that.'"

Only missionary position for the rappers these days! When you reminisce on how Tommy absolutely nailed the college kid slang in "I Am Charlotte Simmons," (Example: "Yo, Hoyt! 'Sup?...I saw you upstairs there hittin' on that little tigbiddy! Tell the truth! You really, honestly, think she's hot?") you can only hope that his next novel is all about hip hop. [NYO; pic via]

As Wolfe later remembered,

New York lost every high-end retailer on Madison Avenue and beyond. This precipitated a crisis. The board, made up of the big investors, summoned Clay to a meeting... They were hopping mad over this “Viva” business. They could see their investment sinking without a bubble after only four issues. They were ready to can Clay then and there and probably would have, had not the elder statesman and maximum art collector, [Armand ] Erpf, exercised moral suasion.

Later New York owners could not be talked down from this sort of intervention. The present one at least gets credit for voluntarily sharing (as indicated by a sidebar credit) its library trove with the rest of the world. (The Warhol article, "La Dolce Viva," is here.)

Their hedge funds have blown up here and there, but unlike the investment banks, they are still very much in business. They have hurriedly pulled themselves into defensive positions inside their shells, like turtles. Their Armageddon, if any, will not come for two more days, which is to say, Tuesday, Sept. 30.

Most hedge funds open up a crack on Sept. 30, Dec. 31, March 31 and June 30 to give investors the chance to “redeem” their investments, meaning take their money out. These moments are called gates, like a series of gates in a prison. The gate is the limit, the fixed percentage of your money, that the fund will allow you to take out at one time. Even with these strict caps on withdrawals, some funds may end up nothing but shells.

But hedge funders are still superior, Wolfe added, because only they practice the magic of "saving," leaving them with a "nut" that will be just fine when their funds collapse, because they don't lead ostentatious lives of excess like investment bankers. Ha!

In any case, thanks for the warning, Tom. For a minute there we were all worried the torrent of horrific bad news might slow down this week!

First of all, Charlotte Simmons is supposed among other things to be an indictment of college promiscuity, something Tina Brown had no trouble with as an ambitious young undergraduate at Oxford University with boyfriends such as Martin Amis. (I'd been looking for an excuse to rehash Brown's active college sex life.)

Second, it is a profoundly conservative book—George Bush's favorite—by an author who has mocked Tina Brown for her salon liberalism. Tom Wolfe tells of a dinner party at which the guests engaged in ritualistic disdain for George Bush, only to be punctured by one of those workers they professed to care about so much, a waiter who planned to vote for the despised Republican. Wolfe told the Guardian: "Tina and her circle in the media do not have a clue about the rest of the United States."

Above all, how on earth can Brown spare the time? In her career choices Tina Brown has of late become as promiscuous as the college students ridiculed in Charlotte Simmons. She pops up in the restroom to which reporters covering Hillary Clinton's campaign had been exiled, working on a book on the candidate which now seems redundant; she's still pitching her book on Lady Diana to middle-aged women in cities such as Pittsburgh and Naples, FL; originally British, Tina Brown is one of the candidates to take over the BBC's famed Letter from America radio broadcast; as the supposed founder of the forthcoming Daily Beast web site, she's been establishing her internet bona fides talking to the dreary Online News Association.

That wouldn't matter except that she's been presenting herself as an internet convert, full of passion for a new medium “vibrant with life instead of constantly obsessed with fears of its own extinction.” She's a founder of a website which is supposed to launch in weeks. One would have thought Barry Diller would be expecting the degree of maniacal commitment that Brown once brought to magazines and that internet entrepreneurs are expected to bring to their ventures.

The whole thing, starting with the subprime, is the fault of the computer. I was just talking to a banker the other day, and not that long ago, 20 years ago, an investment banking house, let’s say, Lehman Brothers, when it got a package of mortgages, they would go through every mortgage, every single one, and they’d throw out the ones that just seemed absurd, they just wouldn’t accept them. Things used to arrive on paper. Today things arrive on a screen, and a screen is back lit, and one of the biggest pains in the neck is trying to read something dully written and complicated on a computer screen. It will drive you nuts—I mean, try it sometime.

It's actually true that the financial crisis was caused in part by certain Collateralized Debt Obligations and other complex, devil's brew financial vehicles whose risk could only be assessed — or claimed to be assessed, really — using computer models and whose contents were poorly understood if examined in the first place. But the proper response to an investment you don't understand is to refrain from buying it, not to blame the tool that made it possible.

After all, as Wolfe should know, investment banks only started caring about boring old home mortgages when computer technology made it possible to quickly bundle and sell them on the global market. And good luck running a hedge fund without heavy use of computers and the internet.

Furthermore — wait, why are we seriously arguing finance with a novelist? Isn't there something else we can talk about, Tom?

Did I mention to you I’m pimping out my cars?

Much better!

[Observer]

Man. It's like, you score an interview with a heavyweight like Wolfe, and then screw it up by subjecting him to embarrassing questions like these:

Are you afraid of death?

HI ,since i was very young,i have dreams,visions,premonitions and receve messeges ,FROM JESUS,ST MARY,ANGELS.HE ANSWERED TO MY prayer ,to write this book, …Gods Blessing Through Dreams,Visions,& Premonitions. my web http://www.godisblessingmylife. .tk. true story

MMy mother read an article several years ago which mentioned a favorite childhood book which had Bear in the title. Could you possibly email me the title?

Many thanks,
Sharon

Did you ever use LSD or marijuana while traveling with the Merry Pranksters?

Sigh.

• Charlie Sheen is sorry to black people for calling his ex-wife Denise Richards a "f—king n——r." He's especially sorry to "Tony Todd, an African-American, who was my best man at my first two weddings." Ha! Richards, with whom Sheen has been bitterly feuding, doesn't get an apology, and can presumably just "f—king" deal. [Us]
• Yesterday, everyone was worried fashiongay Andre Leon Talley would ruin Michelle Obama by putting her in a bolero jacket or some other atrocious thing. He hasn't done that yet. Instead, the Vogue editor-at-large introduced the would-be first lady at a fashion-industry fundraiser while he was wearing "a kind of turban that recalled the much-discussed costume [Barack Obama] once wore in Somalia." No one should have a problem with Obama hanging out with what looks like a gay muslim, even an elitist gay fashion muslim in New York, so obviously no one, anywhere, will. [R&M]
• Not only did Anne Hathaway break up with her scuzzy Italian boyfriend, she also moved out. Yay! But what's this business about dinner at Cipriani? [P6]
• Relentlessly cranky novelist Tom Wolfe demanded to know why a developer insinuated he was anti-Semitic. OK, this time he might have a legitimate reason to be cranky. [P6]
• Broadway and former TV star Mario Lopez is being named People's "Hottest Bachelor," but he's still totally getting evicted from his Broadway theater to make way for Katie Holmes. The guy's biceps can't catch a break.
• Supposedly Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt just bought a $10,000 stash of guns, including "two Benelli semiautomatic M4 tactical shotguns, two Wilson close quarter combat .45-caliber pistols and one Scout semiautomatic rifle." Suddenly, I'm kind of interested in seeing them in front of some reality television cameras again. Near other reality television stars. While drunk and angry. [The Superficial]
• So sad: Freeloading music critics get free drinks, but no free food, at a listening party. They stormed out in a huff, logically. [P6]
• The mother of 50 Cent's 11-year-old son claims the rapper burned down her Long Island mansion. He claims she totally monitors his cell-phone conversations with the son. Call it a draw? [R&M]

People who have spoken with Mr. Cayne say that he, like everyone at Bear, was stunned by the firm’s precipitous collapse and the rock-bottom price of its sale. In the past weeks, together with his wife, Patricia Cayne, who is a student of Jewish religious traditions, Mr. Cayne has spent considerable time searching for comparable events in religious history to see what lessons can be learned from the collapse of his firm, said a person who has spoken to him recently...

While Mr. Cayne has not publicly said why he sold his shares, people who know him say that it suggests a need to separate himself, emotionally as well as financially, from the firm that for so long had been part of every fiber of his being and that now had become a source of pain and disappointment.

Here's a taste of Wolfe's Croker, from A Man In Full, after his corporate meltdown and religious conversion:

"...You think if only you can acquire enough worldly goods, enough recognition, enough eminence, you will be free, there'll be nothing more to worry about, and instead you become a bigger and bigger slave to how you think others are judging you. 'You have priceless silver and goblets of gold,' said the philosopher, 'but your reason is of common clay.' As of this morning, I am as rich as the richest of you, for I am hereby handing over anything I own, the Croker Global Corporation, every last branch of it..."

"I don't know what you're like," Croker was saying, "but if you're like most uv'us here is Atlanta, you're driving yourself crazy over possessions. Just think about that for a second..."

"I can tell you that the only real possession you'll ever have is your character, that and your 'scheme of life,' you might say. The Manager has given every person a spark from His own divinity, and no one can take that away from you, not even the Manager himself, and from that spark comes your character. Everything else is temporary and worthless in the long run..."

"But you say, 'I'd rather die than sit down beside the road with a Dixie cup, begging.' Do you realize what you're really saying? You're saying, 'It ain't what I'm gonna eat or where I'm gonna stay I'm worrying about, it's saving face, it's what everybody in Buckhead's gon' think about me..."

Times: Down $900 Million or More, the Chairman of Bear Sells

Thursday, July 26, 2007. 7:45 pm. I'm on the Hampton Jitney, Montauk Highway, Route 27, we pull into the forlorn Southampton Jitney HQ/Health Spa parking lot. I'm drowsy from a full afternoon on Main Beach, when I notice famed New Journalism author & bon vivant TOM WOLFE walking slowly to his car in the parking lot just beneath my bus window.

Wolfe's owl-like visage is unmistakable, but I'm very put off by the rag tag outfit he's wearing this mid-summer evening. Normally of course one imagines Wolfe dressed to the nines in his signature ice cream white suit, custom dress shirt, silk tie and jazz-age spat shoes.

Shockingly, Wolfe is wearing faded, worn navy sweatpants, ill-fitting and slovenly, as one might wear for a touch football game on the Great Lawn. He has on a royal blue shirt rolled up at the sleeves. The cut and hue of the shirt actually has a sloppy cowboy denim shirt quality to it. Wolfe has balloon-like white sneakers on his feet, most like the casual Reebok white aerobic shoes that my father sported in South Beach a couple of years before his death. Wolfe's famous parted grey hair is all askew, splayed across his forehead and touching his eye and nose like some gator-trailed, drunken Brooklyn hipster at Studio B's closing time.

Wolfe walks the few steps to his car [perhaps he was dropping off a friend for the ride back to Manhattan; I caught the bus in Amagansett at 6:50 but it took us an hour to reach South]. His choice of automobile was the only aspect of the experience that seemed suited to the great author. Wolfe's car was a Cadillac, in the pristine ice cream white that one sees in his custom three-piece suits. It's a Caddy of fairly recent vintage, big and boxey and somewhat inflated like his white Reebok sneakers. It has a similar design quality to the Escalade, but it's a luxury 4 door Cadillac, big and puffy, not like the classic long, sleek Lincoln Towncar that I prefer; more like a sawed-off shoebox Rolls Royce design, but still impeccable in the whiteness of the paint and the opulence of the high suspension.

The other Wolfe-ian aspect were his rims: Wolfe had installed full white-walled wafer-like ice cream white metal disc rims inside his fat tires, with a showy Cadillac logo in the center. Very Palm Beach or Beverly Hills, I thought to myself. He inched out of his parking space, so, so slowly, a foot at a time, haltingly, perhaps wisely avoiding a collision with the huge lurking Jitney Prevost bus that has taken more than a few lives in past summers on Montauk Highway.

I suppose in the city Wolfe takes pride in his immaculate three piece suits and manicured Southern Gentleman profile. But like certain East Enders, he dresses way down in the country—yet making sure his choice of car bespeaks a man of over-arching, even intimidating, refinement, accomplishment, taste and means.

The Earl Grey -
11937 / 10021

Inside the restaurant, Tom Wolfe had his photo taken with Julia Allison. (That bears repeating: Tom Wolfe had his photo taken with Julia Allison.) Kurt Andersen made a little chit-chat before begging off to the Larry King appreciation party in the next room. (They had better snacks, by far. Also CNN partygoers received a Coach-imitation leather tote with a CNN tag, and a DVD of King's reputedly best work. You could sneak in through the kitchen.) The two parties side-by-side may have been a slight disaster on the part of Steven Rubenstein and his PR folks, but it came off fine, actually. (It was a question of wattage; did we see Hillary Clinton presswoman Jennifer Hanley outside, meaning that Hillary Clinton was inside the CNN party?)

Uniformed waiters were aggressive with the hors d'oeuvres, most of which featured caviar in some form, but the knot of yarmulked men gathered by the bar ignored them. (The duck, the shrimp, the crabcakes!) Also not eating, or drinking, was Jared's rehabilitated felon father, Charles Kushner, who mostly spoke in low tones to men at the end of the bar. Ever-gracious Jared entertained a seemingly endless stream of well-wishers and posed for photographs. The real estate broker-developer Michael Shvo said he'd call him about having lunch. Jared recently purchased the most expensive office building in America.

So how were things at the paper? "We're having a lot of fun," Jared said. Was he dating Ivanka Trump? "We're just friends. But thanks for asking." So that partnership was all business too.

Ms. Trump was in a very nice short black dress, looking tall and blonde; she talked for what seemed like eons with Jared's assistant Kimberly. Steven Rubenstein, who represents the Observer and the Kushner family, made sure everyone was having a good time and that the photographers were getting all the right people; he talked with did not talk with New York Times reporter Allen Salkin, who wrote such nice things about Jared in the Sunday Styles section.

Cindy Adams talked to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, notebook in hand, hair at attention. Salon editor Joan Walsh, in a pantsuit, stayed close to Salon writer and former NYO staffer Rebecca Traister. Harry Evans was there with his wife, former lots-of-places editor Tina Brown, who spent a lot of time deep in very close conversation with W/WWD boy Jacob Bernstein.

"I love this tabloid!" Mr. Evans said, Britishly. "I seized it with great joy before a long bus ride, and I loved every word!" He is somewhat reminiscent of a brilliant leprechaun. "Joe Conason on politics! John Heilpern! The Obama piece! I thought it was terrific! The tabloid format is far better." Mr. Evans said that the bus had taken him to Southampton.

Ms. Brown has recently finished her book about Princess Diana. "It's like a plum pudding—there are great nuggets everywhere!" she said. "It's as much about celebrity culture as it is about Diana herself." And how did Ms. Brown feel about the Stephen Frears film The Queen? "I loved The Queen," Ms. Brown said. "It was very accurate! Except for the portrayal of Robin Janvrin, the Queen's private secretary. He looks like Kenneth Branagh in real life."

Ms. Brown said that the book had taken her a year and a half; for it, she conducted 250 interviews. "I feel like a giant whale has been lifted from my head."

Maer Roshan, who worked for Ms. Brown at her short-lived magazine Talk, was there with a bundle of his Radar-ites, including his lieutenant Chris Tennant, who was holding court with several ladies in a booth. He was wearing jeans that appeared to have been painted on. That tall woman with the jet-black hair, talking with the older man? So tall! Atoosa Rubenstein! Lots of flashbulbs.

Observer reporters seemed vaguely uncomfortable at such an extravagant gathering ("It's the Observer with money," more than one was overheard whispering), and they swiped multiple Bellinis as they came around on silver trays. Transom reporter Spencer Morgan however did not look uncomfortable.

Jessica Joffe wore eyeglasses. Slate editor Jacob Weisberg and Domino editor Deborah Needleman arrived with New York's Ariel Levy. Jacob is going on a three-month book leave soon. Andrew Balazs, Columbia J-school graduate, was there solo. Lloyd Grove was not in attendance, but Ben Widdicombe, Hud Morgan, and Daily News gossip boy Patrick Huguenin were.

We were promised there'd be no speeches but there was a microphone and so Jared took it and said that 20 years ago, when the New York Observer was founded, he was starting a venture called... kindergarten. His voice still has a little hint of his Livingston, New Jersey upbringing. The new website, he said, was to launch on Monday, but as a preview, they had a page up on the screen. (The Four Seasons, it turns out, does not have Internet access.) Jared said he was very fortunate to work with Peter Kaplan, the editor of the newspaper, a sentiment that was greeted with cheers from the crowd. "We get to go to the 21st century with a new newspaper," said Kaplan. He then referred to the paper's former owner and publisher, Arthur Carter, as "my buddy and weekly tormenter."

Of the paper, he said: "The paper is younger, thinner, and better looking, like Jared."

We talked to Peter Kaplan in person. "For anyone under 30, the New York Times is a queen-sized sheet!" he said. "Going smaller was the best thing we could have done. We're still smart. We still have an edge." He said something about possibly becoming the smartest tabloid in America. "It was time to make a change. I love it. It's great!"

Jacob Bernstein left in Peggy Siegal's car. The New Yorker's Nick Paumgarten may have left with William Berlind for stiffer drinks. Patrick McMullan's photographers would prove unable to identify Alex Kuczynski. Ivanka Trump left alone, and on foot, heading east on 52nd Street. —Doree