SALON

New York City

Thursday, Sep 2, 1999 4:00 PM UTC

The clothed city

E.B. White's "classic" book on Gotham is downright phony.

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E. B. White’s “Here is New York” has followed me around now for almost 25 years. I was given a copy of White’s essay on my first trip to New York City, when I was a teenager, and I zoomed through it on the car ride down. It’s not surprising that my 24-hour tour of the usual tourist spots (the United Nations headquarters, the Empire State Building — where I got stuck in an elevator descending from the observation deck, I swear to God) didn’t jibe with anything I read in White’s book. And I’d forgotten about the book until this summer, when I found myself making the move I swore I’d never make: leaving Boston, where I’d lived all my life, to move to New York. Browsing through a bookstore in my new neighborhood, I came across White’s book, which has just been republished in a 50th anniversary edition with an introductory appreciation by Roger Angell.

Some background: White was originally commissioned (by Angell, his stepson) to write the piece for Holiday magazine in the sweltering summer of 1949. By then, White had left New York for his home in Maine. In his foreword to the new edition, Angell notes that while the book now calls up nostalgia for post-war Manhattan, White had put his own nostalgia for the New York of his youth into the essay.

There’s no denying the appeal of “Here is New York.” To most of America, New York City embodies both romantic dream and urban nightmare, the place where we expect to find Fred Astaire taking to the floor in some Art Deco nightclub and a sap-wielding mugger waiting around every corner. White ameliorates those fears and substitutes the more realistic pleasures the city offers. Here is the threatening metropolis broken into small, self-contained neighborhoods; the immense city recast as a way to both lose yourself and find yourself; the embarrassment and out-of-place misery of tourists that results in charming faux pas; the most tender flower of young love blooming at a summer evening band concert. Anyone who wants to see New York but feels timid about actually braving it would read White and feel encouraged. And if you’ve moved to New York and are trying to feel your way into the city, you may take comfort in White’s portrait of it as a place both open to the point of rawness and peculiarly insulated. At times White seems like the wise older uncle giving a blunt but not discouraging pep talk.

It’s also possible, I think, never to have set foot in New York City and still recognize that “Here is New York” is almost completely phony. Certainly it’s possible for outsiders to write intelligently about a place (isn’t that what travel writing is all about?). But even a detached observer must be willing to engage with his subject if his observations are going to have any degree of authenticity. White doesn’t. “Here is New York” is the work of a man who had decided long before he took the assignment that New York no longer held anything for him. That’s discernible less in the sections where White laments the passing of the New York he knew (measuring its loss in newspapers that have folded, cops forsaking their beat for patrol cars, projects replacing slums, cabs replacing hackneys) than in the clichis he reverts to in order to describe what he sees. “A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.” Is there a freshman composition teacher anywhere who wouldn’t have at that trite metaphor like a bull sighting a red flag?

In a dissenting 1947 opinion on White’s much-revered essays, critic Robert Warshow wrote of White and the New Yorker that they “always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it. This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately.”

Thus, White can encounter the residents of the Lower East Side sitting on their stoops on a hot summer night and banish the crowding and poverty by transforming it into “the nightly garden party of the Lower East Side … It is folksy [emphasis added] here with the smell of warm flesh and squashed fruit and fly-bitten filth in the gutter, and cooking.” Visit exotic New York! See the quaint and colorful peasants! “A large, cheerful Negro” panhandler begging coins from a crowd exiting a Broadway show prompts White to observe that “a few minutes of minstrelsy improves the condition of one Negro by about eight dollars. If he does as well as this at every performance, he has a living right there.” (And eventually, no doubt, a summer place in the Hamptons.)

Imagining the budding artists drawn to New York, White sustains a patch of hokum better suited to one of Carol Burnett’s parodies of ’40s movies: “Whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.” Even allowing for a distance of 50 years, did this ever sound like anything more than a load of hooey? Is there anything in White’s thumbnail caricatures of the folksy poor, the cheerful Negro, the disgraced girl or the anguished young writer that he couldn’t have gotten from the bottom half of a double bill or by scanning the paperback rack in his hotel newsstand? He solves the problem Warshow noted, the messiness of actually confronting experience, by substituting clichis out of radio melodrama, B movies and “women’s” fiction.

Throughout the essay, it’s White’s language — once praised by William Shawn as “thoroughly American and utterly beautiful” — that continually gives him away. It doesn’t hit the excruciating depths of Richard Nixon trying to sound like a regular guy by asking David Frost, “How was your weekend? Did you do any fornicating?” But its false bonhomie is that of a man deeply uncomfortable with the quickness and slanginess and good-natured rude energy of American vernacular, a vernacular that reaches its apex in New York City. Warshow quoted White as saying, “Allied soldiers had a hunch that they disliked the idea behind the word ‘Heil.’ They preferred the word ‘Hi’ — it was shorter and cleaner.” Apart from the insulting notion that Allied soldiers were so simple and goodhearted that they fought and died over a syllable, the whole tone of that sentence feels as off as a Mentos ad. Can anyone imagine the man who wrote it saying, “Hi!” like he meant it, as if it came naturally to him?

New York magazine once ran a competition in which readers were invited to submit titles that just didn’t make it. Some of the winners were gems like “The Sun Comes Up Too,” “The Colored Gentleman of the Narcissus” and “Those Karamazov Boys!” Reading “Here is New York,” it struck me that all the entries could have been penned by E.B. White. His phrasing has the feel of someone trying to pass himself off as an average, casual man by trotting out old chestnuts and awkward locutions: “By rights New York should have destroyed itself long ago … It should have been touched in the head by the August heat and gone off its rocker.” On hailing a cab: “You grab a handle and open the door, and find that some citizen is entering from the other side.” Citizen? Not fellow, or guy or even schmo? And White’s pretensions to plain-spokenness just wind up making his grandiloquent moments sound even worse: “In Turtle Bay there is an old willow tree that presides over an interior garden. It is a battered tree, long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it. In a way it symbolizes the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun.” And, Honey, I miss you. And I’m being good.

White’s insulation from everyday life isn’t just the main characteristic of his writing about New York — I’m guessing it’s the reason for this essay’s continued appeal. In his foreword, Angell says “If Andy White could visit New York once again … I think he would want to rush back home to Maine the same afternoon.” Angell goes on to list the usual suspects: crime and violence (without noting that they are at record lows), increased rudeness and diminished sophistication, evidenced by people who dress entirely in black. (And why not? It goes with everything, resists showing dirt and is slimming besides.) But “Here is New York” makes it clear that White had the same impulse to high-tail it Down East even back in the summer of 1949. I question how truthfully anyone can write about New York while disdaining its common energy and dirt (or at least making those qualities the basis for an honest account of revulsion). We should expect more from a writer who has taken it upon himself to engage with the city. White spends paragraphs insulting the commuters who, he says, see only the train station and the block of their office building before retreating to the suburbs. But those are precisely the people that “Here is New York” is written for. It contains about as much authentic experience as a theater weekend.

Luckily, we don’t have to be satisfied with “Here is New York.” The last few years have seen the reprinting of some particularly evocative New York writing that captures the tone of the city between the ’40s and the early ’60s. There is Joseph Mitchell’s “Up in the Old Hotel,” the fruit of a lifetime’s wanderings; the glimpses of the moneyed classes in the novels of W.M. Spackman; the chill creeping through postwar New York in the three novels that make up Isabel Bolton’s “New York Trilogy,” novels that suggest an American Jean Rhys. Recently there was the genuine curiosity and compassion of the vignettes in “Keys to the City,” Joel Kostman’s account of the people he encounters as a New York City locksmith. Best of all, there are Maeve Brennan’s New Yorker Talk of the Town pieces collected in “The Long-Winded Lady” (the name she signed to those pieces).

It may seem odd to make a case for writers being engaged in their subject by pointing to a writer who was so much of a loner. The impression you take from reading Brennan is of someone more comfortable with the temporary, demarcated relations she had with waiters and bartenders and shopkeepers than with the potentially messy interactions between friends and lovers. And yet the rootlessness that seems to be Brennan’s permanent condition, the sidelong judgments that have a way of sticking with you (seeing Park Avenue after reading Brennan’s description of it, I realized she was right: take away the trees and it would be the most anonymous avenue in the city), her constant alertness for whoever ventures into her sphere and her dedication to rendering them as exactly as she can are all the signs of someone willing to encounter New York, even if she rarely ventures outside the role of silent observer. Her book’s best piece, “Faraway Places Near Here,” ends with her encounter with a familiar panhandler whom she approaches to assuage her guilt over lunching in a good restaurant, only to see him riffling through the back seat of a parked car. Where White might have said, “Ten cars like this a day and the fellow would have found a living,” Brennan is afflicted by a mixture of guilt and shame and confusion that “no hail fellow, well met” remark will clear away.

It’s the combination of being willing to be open to the unexpected and resisting the temptation to see the city in CinemaScope that provides the truest New York writing. Being true to the specific oddities or generosities or cruelties she encounters keeps Brennan from falling into the shallow knowingness of White’s attempted overview. Even just a few months in New York is enough time to begin noticing your own oddities. I like the way you can guess at the makeup of a neighborhood by seeing what porn mags are featured on the newsstand (in my neighborhood, it’s “Black Tail”). I like the way that dogs seem to act as the city’s goodwill ambassadors, expressing the enthusiasm and friendliness their owners keep bottled up. I like gawking at the length of subway cars, which makes me feel just as much of a hick as gawking at tall buildings but is a lot less obvious. I hate that there are no baggers in my local supermarket. I’m not yet comfortable with white eggs. I hate watching the cops roust black kids drumming and dancing in Times Square station but not bothering the white classical musician who takes the dancers’ place. I hate Times Square. Nothing depresses me faster or more reliably than seeing the tourists who’ve flocked there and who are trying to convince themselves that they’re having a good time. The most amazing thing about New York City to me is that I’m actually enjoying myself here. That was the most unexpected event of all, but I’m getting used to it.

Charles Taylor is a columnist for the Newark Star-Ledger. More Charles Taylor.

Wednesday, Jun 23, 1999 4:00 PM UTC

A “black mark” for Luchese crime family

Two mob soldiers get plenty o' slammer time for attempting to whack an informant's sister.

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Fittingly, on June 8, Michael (Baldy Mike) Spinelli, a made-in-the-bathroom mobster, was flushed down the drain for a rock-bottom misdeed. And he took one of the noble myths of organized crime into the sewers with him.

Spinelli was sentenced to 235 months for trying to whack Patricia Capozzalo, a mother of three who had the misfortune of being the sister of a mob turncoat. The attempted hit was the low point of the excessive mob violence of the last two decades and belied the supposed axiom that innocent, uninvolved women, children and family members are off-limits to the treachery of revenge, retribution and mayhem that still make organized crime the subject of R-rated movies, TV series, bestsellers and tabloid headlines.

Capozzalo was marked for death by Luchese crime boss Vittorio (Vic) Amuso in an ill-conceived attempt to convince her brother, Peter (Fat Pete) Chiodo, to change his mind about testifying at Amuso’s then-upcoming racketeering and murder trial. Amuso is one of those hot-headed gangsters who don’t always think things through. Capozzalo was shot in the neck and back in front of her home in 1992 after dropping two of her children off at school. Spinelli drove the van that carried the shooter. Had his sister died, it’s hard not to imagine Chiodo being even more eager to testify against his old friends.

Baldy Mike’s participation in the shooting earned him a place in the Luchese family. He was officially inducted at a makeshift ritual in a bathroom at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he was being held on racketeering and murder charges. Spinelli’s inductors had to do without the gun and knife, props in the traditional ceremony, and instead of a picture of a Catholic saint, they set toilet paper afire in his hands as he swore undying allegiance to the family.

Spinelli, 45, isn’t likely to resurface until 2027, if he lives that long. The new sentence was tacked onto the 13 years he still has to serve for other violent crimes. In a prepared statement, Spinelli with a straight face and no sign of remorse said he hoped his sentencing would bring closure to his and Capozzalo’s families. “They’ve both suffered enough,” he said.

Not surprisingly, the sentencing judge’s sentiments were similar to the pervasive view of the shooting in many corners of Gang Land.

“This is not just another criminal living and dying by the sword or a gun,” said Brooklyn U.S. District Judge Raymond Dearie. “This is really an unthinkable act of cowardice” that broke one of the “rules that just aren’t broken” and is a “black indelible mark (on the Luchese crime family) that will never be washed away.”

Three days later, on June 11, in a federal courthouse 60 miles away, a Luchese mobster who once did much of the dirty work for a mob-linked carting company got a shorter stretch for the same crime. Jody Calabrese, 37, who pleaded guilty, got 10 years for his role in the attempted hit on Capozzalo, as well as the attempted murder of a salesman for a rival garbage hauler Calabrese shot five times in 1997. He’s due out of prison in 2006.

In a plea bargain, Calabrese admitted his roles in both shootings and in two extortion attempts. Prosecutors expected his sentence to be between 135 and 168 months under federal sentencing guidelines. But Calabrese’s lawyer, Joel Winograd, convinced Hauppauge, N.Y., U.S. District Judge Denis Hurley that because both shooting victims did not suffer permanent injuries and because Calabrese had no prior criminal convictions, the guidelines called for less, somewhere between 108 and 135 months.

Spinelli drove the van that carried gunman Dino Basciano to the Gravesend, Brooklyn, street where Capozzalo was ambushed. Calabrese and another mobster, Gregory Cappello — who died in prison two years ago while serving time for unrelated crimes — were in a “crash car” that tailed the van and was ready to block police or other pursuers.

Spinelli’s brother Robert drove a “switch car” that took the hit team to safety after they ditched the van. He was also convicted and is to be sentenced next month.

Gregory DePalma flourished in those halcyon mobster days before federal racketeering cases.

In 1976, a smiling DePalma stood between Frank Sinatra and Mafia boss Paul Castellano for the now-infamous backstage photo with Carlo Gambino and other mobsters that would later be used to bolster tape-recorded evidence against DePalma and 10 others in a bankruptcy fraud case.

On June 11, hooked to intravenous tubes and breathing through an oxygen mask, the aging Gambino gangster, who unwittingly helped the feds make a racketeering case against John A. “Junior” Gotti, lay helpless in a sparsely furnished hospital room as he was sentenced to six years in prison.

White Plains, N.Y., U.S. District Judge Barrington Parker had traveled to the Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla to put a cap on DePalma’s criminal career.

DePalma, 67, suffers from cancer, diabetes and a host of other ailments. He could have received up to 13 years, but Parker cited DePalma’s failing health in departing from the normal sentencing guidelines.

But a few hours later, back at the White Plains Courthouse, Parker showed no mercy for DePalma’s mobster son Craig DePalma, meting out the harshest sentence he could for the 33-year-old: 87 months.

“You saw what your father’s life was like and you saw what that life brought upon your family, particularly the women, [yet] you cast your lot with Gotti and associates,” said Parker.

The DePalmas implicated themselves and Junior Gotti in numerous crimes in hundreds of conversations tape-recorded from 1995 to 1997. In an ironically memorable one, Junior and Craig made fun of the elder DePalma’s propensity to get caught on tape.

All three pleaded guilty to racketeering charges that included loan sharking and extortion practiced on workers and owners of Scores, a trendy Manhattan strip joint popular with celebrities, sports figures and tourists.

Junior gets his turn before Judge Parker next month. Like Craig DePalma, he faces up to 87 months. Like DePalma, Gotti saw what his father’s life was like and opted to follow in his footsteps, even to the point of getting caught on tape.

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hey, we’ll accept endorsements from anybody

No matter what the feds say about Murray Kufeld, a longtime buddy of Bonanno family consigliere Anthony Spero, Gang Land thinks you gotta like the guy.

Kufeld, who shares Spero’s love of racing pigeons, was called as a witness at Spero’s recent detention hearing in an effort by prosecutor Jim Walden to buttress his assertion that Kufeld carried messages from Spero to underlings at a Bath Beach, Brooklyn, social club a block from Spero’s pigeon coops.

Kufeld denied any improprieties, but admitted under grilling by Walden that he knew many people the prosecutor identified as mobsters, including Bonanno boss Joseph Massino, insisting however that he never knew any of them to commit any crimes.

“Where have you seen Mr. Massino?” demanded Walden.

“In the newspapers and in [Jerry Capeci's] ‘Gang Land,’” said Kufeld.

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Jerry Capeci has been a crime reporter in New York for more than 30 years, during which time he's won numerous awards including a John S. Knight Fellowship from Stanford University. Capeci is the co-author of three books: "Mob Star" (1988), "Murder Machine" (1992) and "Gotti: Rise and Fall" (1996), which was the basis for the HBO movie "Gotti." More Jerry Capeci.

Monday, Jun 14, 1999 4:00 PM UTC

How Sarah got her groove back

In HBO's voyeuristic treat "Sex and the City," Sarah Jessica Parker finally gets a role fit for a comedy goddess.

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Sarah Jessica Parker looks like a walking doodle, a daydreamy collision of curves and straight lines. The wavy mane and wiggly bod don’t quite prepare you for the playful intelligence of her long face, though, or the warmth of her gaze. Parker still bears traces of the roles she played as a kid actress — spunky Little Orphan Annie, awkward Patty Greene, her teenage nerd from the ’80s cult sitcom “Square Pegs” — and you don’t expect to find those particular humanizing qualities in someone who looks so hot in Prada. The element of surprise is Parker’s greatest asset as an actress, but in her biggest films (“L.A. Story,” “The First Wives Club”), she’s been predictably cast as a bimbo with marshmallow for brains.

In another era, Parker would have been a Hollywood comedy goddess, like Claudette Colbert, Barbara Stanwyck or Carole Lombard, playing characters who were smart, wily, ambitious, sexual beings. But where Hollywood has failed Parker, TV has come to the rescue. In HBO’s super-glossy adult comedy “Sex and the City,” which has just begun its second season, Parker is at her gawky, sexy, sly best as a 30-ish sex columnist observing the mating rituals of New York singles. Based on Candace Bushnell’s droll New York Observer columns, “Sex and the City,” like its screwball comedy forerunners of the 1930s and ’40s, appreciates the humor in the complicated socioeconomic dance of marriage-seeking. Parker’s Carrie and her three best friends work the problem of finding a mate as if they’re plotting a complicated bank heist — which, many unhappily single people in major metropolitan cities will probably tell you, is easier to accomplish than finding a non-psychotic person to date.

OK, I admit it — at first I was put off by “Sex” for reasons succinctly articulated this season by Carrie’s friend, feminist lawyer Miranda (Cynthia Nixon): “How does it happen that four such smart women have nothing to talk about but boyfriends?” But gradually, the show won me over. Producer Darren Star (“Melrose Place”) and regular writer Michael Patrick King juice up Bushnell’s pseudo-anthropological premise with dazzling guilty-pleasure voyeurism.

“I love a big dick. I love it inside of me. I love looking at it. I love everything about it,” exclaims Carrie’s 40-ish, well-worn, publicist pal Samantha (Kim Cattrall). But to appreciate the comic force of that speech, you have to realize that the sexually voracious, not-to-be-denied Sam is out of her mind with frustration because the otherwise perfect guy she’s dating is, as she somberly puts it, roughly the size of a gherkin. Let’s face it, you’re not going to hear dialogue like that on “Providence.” “Sex” is horny and witty, goofy and wise. Imagine Edith Wharton and Jacqueline Susann meeting for drinks at Moomba and you have some idea of its smart girl allure. “Sex” is literary sociology with a graduate degree in smut, and, boy, is it fun.

“Sex” revolves around the romantic misadventures of Carrie, Miranda, Sam and their refined, relatively naive art-dealer friend, Charlotte (Kristin Davis). The show’s structure is pretty straightforward — narrator Carrie taps away at her Powerbook, composing columns about such puzzlers as, “Are there certain things one should never say in an intimate relationship?” and “Are relationships the religion of the ’90s?” These dilemmas are then depicted in story lines involving the quartet and its acquaintances. Throughout the ensuing chaos, the girls still have many opportunities to gather ’round the bar or the coffee shop booth and debate Topic No. 1, the difficulty of finding marriageable men in New York who aren’t asses. Watching “Sex” is like eavesdropping on a conversation in the ladies’ room, and not a unisex bathroom, either — “Sex” knows the value of boundaries. Which is why “Sex” may be horny, but it’s never crude.

What sets “Sex” apart from the similarly relationship-obsessed “Ally McBeal” is that Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte are true-blue friends — they’re supportive, not envious of one another’s career or romantic successes. The second season opener of “Sex” had a denouement that sweetly illustrated the nurturing quality of female friendship at its best. Carrie has broken up with the commitment-phobic man of her dreams, known only as Mr. Big (played by Chris Noth with a degree of rogueish charm that, I believe, is illegal in several states). She runs into Big unexpectedly while she’s out on a rebound date, and it throws her off balance. She eventually sends her date home, goes to a pay phone and makes a call: “It’s me. I know things are weird between us right now but I really need to talk. Can you meet me at our place?” Carrie goes to the coffee shop and, after an anxious moment, spots — no, not Mr. Big. Miranda. Despite her earlier high-minded outburst about her friends’ conversational preoccupation with men, Miranda has answered Carrie’s call, because that’s what girlfriends are for.

I would be remiss if I didn’t at least acknowledge that “Sex” doesn’t exactly portray men in a heroic light. The show is a parade of “toxic bachelors,” “serial modelizers” and assorted other small-membered, ball-scratching, bad-breath-spewing, selfish, conceited, unfaithful, untruthful males who fail to measure up as husband material.

However, I know that some guys feel left out, bullied and dissed by girl-talk shows like “Sex and the City.” So I must inform those guys that there are two new cable shows, FX’s “The X Show” and Comedy Central’s “The Man Show,” that are allegedly designed to ease the pain of the average maligned, unappreciated, badgered, Dockered, “Titanic”-ed male. The nightly “X Show,” which features four hosts, advice segments and interviews with Playboy Playmates and sports stars, is basically a male version of “The View,” except without the sage presence of a Barbara Walters as elder statesperson. Hugh Downs, call your agent. As for “The Man Show,” fellas, listen to me: Nothing the women on “Sex and the City” say about your gender could possibly be more humiliating than what “The Man Show” says about your gender.

Hosted by Adam “Loveline” Carolla and Jimmy “Win Ben Stein’s Money” Kimmel, “The Man Show” (which premieres Wednesday) is a snarky schmuckfest dedicated to (as the hosts declare in the opener) “building a dam to hold back the tidal wave of feminism that is flooding the country. A dam to stop the river of estrogen that’s drowning us in political correctness. A dam to urinate off of when we’re really drunk!” (Hey, didn’t Comedy Central already build that dam and call it “Politically Incorrect”?) This weekly “joyous celebration of chauvinism” promises a testosterone-friendly lineup of things guys supposedly like to watch on TV, which in the first show includes women in bikinis, women jumping on a trampoline, explosions, supermodels and “one of the purest forms of entertainment” — monkeys, wearing costumes, doing people things.

Coincidentally (or not!), TNT has just launched a weekly sitcom called “The Chimp Channel,” starring actual primates doing spoofs of TV shows like “Treewatch” and “NYPD Zoo.” I don’t know where those guys on “The Man Show” get the idea that watching monkeys is strictly a male thing — I enjoy a good performing monkey act as much as the next person (Oh, that Marcel from “Friends” was pure gold!), but I am disappointed to report that “The Chimp Channel” just doesn’t cut it. The dialogue is unimaginative and sophomoric and the parodies aren’t so much funny as they are creepy. Putting a chimp in a blond wig and a “Baywatch” swimsuit with big fake Pamela Anderson boobs sure seems like animal abuse to me. Oh, jeez — I hope I didn’t just give “The Man Show” any ideas.

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Joyce Millman is a writer living in the Bay Area. More Joyce Millman.

Tuesday, Jun 1, 1999 4:00 PM UTC

Will the real Eloise please stand up?

Now that "Eloise" is back in print, her fans can once again reclaim her as their own.

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I am Eloise. I am (almost twenty-) six. One of my friends agrees with me: after discovering our mutual love of all things Eloise, he has since refused to address me by any other name. Once, he even asked for Eloise when he called me at my mother’s house. My mother, who introduced me to Eloise herself, simply handed me the phone.

I am not the only one who thinks she is Eloise. I have rivals. Apparently, Marie Brenner of Vanity Fair also believes herself to be Eloise; in her introduction to “The Absolutely Essential Eloise” she writes, “Eloise was not allowed to belong to anyone else. I truly believed that I owned her.”

Exclusive ownership of Eloise was presumably the motivation behind the theft of the Eloise portrait that hung in the Plaza Hotel in the mid-’50s. Kay Thompson blamed it on rowdy debutantes. I blame it on rowdy debutantes who believed themselves to be Eloise. The most likely candidate for the beguiling Eloise is Thompson’s goddaughter, with whom she lived on and off until the end of her life. If nothing else, both Liza — whose mother Judy Garland died of a drug overdose — and Eloise shared a fabulous surrogate mother who was much more attentive than their own.

In fact, the similarity which Liza shares with Eloise is also the one she shares with her godmother. Eloise — with her stick-straight, ashy blond hair, pot belly and circus-mime face — is “not yet pretty though she’s already a person.” Neither Liza Minnelli nor Kay Thompson were ever considered ravishing beauties. An early profile of Thompson in Radio Guide declared, rather nastily, “Ugly Ducklings Can have Beaux Too.” As an actress during Hollywood’s musical golden age, Thompson was never cast as the drop-dead leading lady. Her most famous film role was in the 1957 “Funny Face” in which she played fashion editor Maggie Prescott — a spoof of Diana Vreeland — another ugly duckling who proved that fabulousness was more important than one’s face.

Kay Thompson did not intend to share Eloise with anyone. “Eloise is me,” she said, “All me!” She once called up Schuyler Hooke, manager of Books of Wonder in New York City, to voice dissatisfaction with a 40th anniversary window display because it did not feature Thompson’s name in its trademark marquee fashion.

“What is the title of that book in the window?” she asked.

Hooke replied, “‘Eloise.’”

“That is incorrect,” screamed Thompson. “The title of the book is ‘Kay Thompson’s Eloise’!”

We Eloise impersonators are the reason that three of the four Eloise books were out of print for more than three decades. At first bewitched by our attention, Thompson courted us with myriad Eloisiana, which we fed on voraciously. In the 1950s, the list of items for purchase (licensed by Thompson’s company Eloise Ltd.) included an Eloise record, a life-size doll, clothing, Eloise French postcards, wigs, luggage and toys. You could even buy Eloise’s emergency kit: a hatbox containing bubble gum, crayons, turtle food, sunglasses, soap, notepads and “Please Don’t Disturb” signs from the Plaza. In the 1970s, visitors to the Plaza could find an Eloise ice cream parlor off Palm Court, and Room 934 was displayed as “Eloise’s room.” In return for allowing Eloise to be adopted by the Plaza, Thompson was amply compensated: She lived rent-free at the luxurious hotel for nearly 20 years.

But then Kay Thompson got sick of us. Our initial admiration — a mass consumption of all things Eloise — was viewed as imitation and she did not consider it a form of flattery. Adults and children flooded the Plaza, all insisting that they were Eloise. In 1962, Kay Thompson told Steve Silverman, “The book was out one day when Elsa Maxwell left a note that said, ‘Dear Kay Thompson. How did you know that I lived at the Plaza?’ And that is exactly what has taken place. The idea of these people playing child!”

Of course, the idea that “precocious grown-ups” (for whom the title page of every edition of Eloise insists the book was written) would want to play child was precisely the idea that inspired Thompson to commit her alter-ego to print.

I think she became jealous.

So does Hilary Knight, Thompson’s illustrator and collaborator. His pink-splashed black and white drawings of the child Maurice Sendak called, “that brazen loose-limbed delicious little girl monster” provide the punch line to Thompson’s allusive, scatting prose. Knight’s contribution to a 1996 profile of Thompson in Vanity Fair is an illustration that shows Thompson kicking the chair out from under Eloise to scrawl “I am Eloise” in lipstick on the vanity mirror in the Plaza’s powder room.

Knight’s illustration may seem a little tawdry. But then again, Knight himself got into something of a tangle with Ms. Thompson over the ownership of Eloise. Their professional relationship effectively ended when Thompson pulled from publication a nearly completed manuscript of yet another sequel; this one was entitled “Eloise Takes a Bawth.” In later years, Thompson refused to return Knight’s phone calls. Kay Thompson’s sense of possession was so strong that she became unwilling to share Eloise, even with the person who literally animated the child in her head.

Here’s the thing of it: None of us are Eloise. Not even Thompson, who, when she was 6, was the daughter of a St. Louis jeweler, not a mysteriously absent New York debutante with seemingly endless credit. There was no British Nanny, no turtle wearing sneakers, no dog who looked like a cat and certainly no world-class hotel as a playground.

We’re not Eloise, but we wish we were. We want to be her because she speaks to a most irresistible impulse: to be a child who can play with adult toys (room service, ballrooms, hotels in Paris and New York) without having to pay for them. Children love Eloise because she has more stuff than they do and no parents to tell her what to do. Adults love Eloise because she has more stuff than they do and no adults to tell her what to do. Wouldn’t you love to be able to order a strawberry leaf and one clam in season for dinner or go to lunch in the Palm Court with toe-shoes on your ears?

The adults in Eloise’s world have a considerably more complicated time of it, although Thompson is careful not to overdo her character assassinations. To begin with, there’s Mother. She shows up mostly by cablegram. (The one depicted through Nanny’s glasses upon arrival in Paris reads: “Koki [her mother's lawyer's chauffeur] at your disposal. Let Eloise do anything within reason.”) She has charge accounts at Bergdorfs and Neiman-Marcus. She wears a size 3 1/2 shoe. She’s 30. No one mentions Daddy. By my accounting, this makes her a debutante who had a “little accident” at age 24. There is also ample evidence that Mother is something of a kept woman. Eloise’s coy asides tell us that “my mother knows the owner.” The same relationship applies to her lawyer (with whom she goes to Virginia), her stockbroker and the owners of Maxims and Christian Dior. The people Mother knows make sure that every expense incurred by la petite fille and Nanny are immediately taken care of. One suspects quite a few people who know Mother know her in the Biblical sense.

Nanny, the only physical adult mainstay in Eloise’s life, has a weakness for boxing, horse races, Pilsener beers and Johnny Walker straight. By all indications, the only way to deal with a child who steals the air conditioning control switch from the Plaza (and takes it to Paris with her) and spritzes pigeons with seltzer water is through a drunken stupor. Says the observant Eloise of Nanny’s drinking,

You cawn’t, cawn’t get a good cup of tea

they simply do not boil the water

so you have to have champagne with a peach in it instead.

Although Nanny may be rather foggy in the morning, she still manages to take awfully good care of Eloise. When Eloise wakes Nanny in the middle of the night by shining a flashlight in her face, Nanny puts witch hazel on Eloise’s toenails. (Apparently, this is absolutely the only way to comfort certain little girls.)

All this adult content in a story about a child is enough to make certain readers view Eloise with disdain. One person who does not believe herself to be Eloise is Anna Quindlen. In fact, she describes Eloise as “pathetic.” In her introduction to a special edition of Ludwig Bemelmans’ “Madeline,” Quindlen writes, “When I think of Eloise grown up, I think of her with a drinking problem, knocking about from avocation to avocation, unhappily married or unhappily divorced, childless.”

In contrast, Quindlen sees the grown-up Madeline as “the French Minister of Culture or the owner of a stupendous couture house, sending her children off to Miss Clavel’s to be educated.” I see the adult Eloise scrawling obscenities in lipstick Chez Madeline and perhaps swatting madame with a feather boa.

Quindlen is right: Eloise is not Madeline. Both are versions of ’50s upper-middle-class girlhood and we adore them for their naughtiness. But Eloise — who writes on walls, slonks down hallways in her skates while dragging a stick along the walls and pours water (champagne in the Paris version) down the mail chute — would never consent to being one of 12 girls in two straight lines.

I have more hope for the grown-up Eloise. When I think of Eloise as an adult, I think of her as a writer. She has an eye for social manners and mores that would make Jane Austen quiver. When Madeline and her cohorts smile at the good (a person in regal garb feeding a horse), frown at the bad (a jewel thief) and sometimes are very sad (when they see a disabled soldier), it gives me the distinct impression that they will grow up to be women who attend charity balls in couture gowns, nibbling caviar in the name of the poor.

Eloise is not a saint — she is more interesting. Her musings on the adults around her are perfect thumbnail sketches with a shrewd eye for class, character and general human foible. Consider her take on Lily, the night maid: “She married the conductor of the subway and cut her hair but I think she’s sorry.” Of the Palm Court maitre d’ she says: “Thomas has a son in the Marines who got married on a shoestring / Thomas has a Corvette.” Or this description from “Eloise in Paris,” of Mrs. Fifield, the nouveau-riche Texan on Parisian holiday who “smokes 3 packs a day” and “laughs rawther loud:

she was absolutely breathing

and had spent all of her Travelers Checks at Pierre Balmain…

She speaks no French

so you can imagine.”

When my daughter was 6, I took her to New York for the first time. She wore a pleated skirt and puffed sleeves. I covered my college-student clothes in an enormous fake-fur coat worthy of any 1950s society matron (but purchased in a thrift store in Brooklyn for $7). For three hours, we wreaked quiet havoc on the Plaza. We called on the house phones, she scrawled her name in crimson lipstick on the powder room mirror, we called my mother. In the Plaza gift shop, we asked for anything Eloise. But this was not the 1950s nor was it 1999; there was nothing Eloise to be found. Finally, I put a child-size Plaza Hotel bathrobe on my credit card.

Now that Kay Thompson is no longer around to censor Eloise, we will all be able to own her, and she won’t just be living at the Plaza either. Simon and Schuster will reissue the three Eloise books and a feature film is in negotiation. There will be an exclusive Eloise lipstick and Eloise, like Barbie, will have a proprietary Christmas line of dolls, furniture and plush toys through FAO Schwarz. The Plaza will hold a “Black and Pink Ball” in honor of Eloise and, once again, the Plaza gift shop will sell Eloise dolls, books, and videos. They will even sell Eloise bathrobes. I’ll be damned if I won’t buy one of each and every item.

While I am as happy as anyone that Eloise in all her glory is once again alive and well and living in New York, Paris and Moscow, I am nostalgic for the time when it seemed Eloise could belong only to me.

If you happen to spot a 26-year-old city child skibbling down the hallway at the Plaza in an Eloise bathrobe wearing Eloise lipstick, you will know that it’s me, Eloise.

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Amy Benfer is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y. More Amy Benfer.

Tuesday, Mar 30, 1999 8:00 PM UTC

I can't get arrested in this town!

When Celebrity Arrest Syndrome goes international.

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“An ongoing New York protest against the police shooting of an unarmed street vendor got a dose of Hollywood support this week. Activist Susan Sarandon and 218 others were arrested Thursday …” — “Names & Faces,” Washington Post, March 27

Ronnie, hi, it’s — sorry honey, can you hold?

[Eight-minute pause.]

Hi, Ronnie, you’re a sweetheart, that was my homeopath, he’s impossible to actually get on the phone. So I called because the talk we had last week? About this is a transitional point in my career and we need to raise my profile and get me into quality projects? Well, I’m doing Pilates with the cable news on — it helps me clear my mind and get centered — and guess who I see? Susan Sarandon, on the television, prime time, getting arrested. Looking absolutely fucking drop-dead gorgeous, I could rip her throat out. Have you heard about this Amadou Diablo man in New York? Well, apparently the thing with this Diablo –

[Three-syllable pause.]

You see, Ronnie, this is exactly what I was talking about. The second-guessing and the corrections and the nit-picking. Do I have to remind you who could have jumped over to Ovitz when he came sniffing around? Fine, so this Di-OWL-o apparently had his rights violated by the New York police, really badly violated — yes, well, I’d call that “violated,” wouldn’t you?

[Brief, apologetic pause.]

My point is, they wrote Sarandon up like she’s Mother fucking Teresa. Blah blah blah chestnut-haired Oscar winner and activist. Blah blah blah commitment to social justice. Blah blah blah Tibet blah blah blah longtime actor-director companion. I don’t know what page it’s on. Laine found it on the Netscape and gave me the gist — you know what my homeopath said about having newsprint in the house.

My point is, we both know there’s room in this town for like three successful older actresses. After 40 I don’t care how much Stairmaster you do, how much surgery you have: You need stature. You need — Laine, what’s that word? — you need GRAVitas.

My point is, this Diablo thing is getting huge. Sarandon’s there this week, next week you bet it’ll be Alec Baldwin. After which Streisand, Tom and Nicole, pretty soon everybody’s jumping in and it’s over. We’ve got a narrow window. We need to get me arrested, Ronnie, and we need to get me arrested fast.

[Medium-length pause.]

[Long, icy responding pause.]

[Longer pause, with ample time for fumbling clarification.]

Oh and the Lifetime Original Movie was a good idea? “Torn Apart: A Surrogate Mother’s Story” with Gabrielle Carteris? Listen, Ronnie, I am not ready to disappear for 40 years until they flash me for five seconds in the Academy Awards death reel. I want my fucking halo now. I want to be the Stepmom. I want to be Sister Whatshername with Sean Penn. You want to continue representing me, you call Ed Sharpton’s agent, you call whoever you have to and you get my highly toned ass thrown in jail.

Ronnie, honey, it’s me. No, I’m at the Mercer — the planter of wheat grass in the room at W New York was like half-dead, I couldn’t deal with it. So are we all set with Sharpton’s people?

[Pause.]

They said what? I have to what?

[Pause.]

That isn’t going to work. Because it’s not, that’s why. Because I’m not standing on the asphalt in New York City in March, with the bird shit and rain and exhaust fumes and my multiple chemical sensitivity and God forbid I even breathed that to my homeopath, that’s why. Can’t the police just send somebody? Yes, yes, Ossie Davis, yes, Ruby Dee, I’m sorry but what else are they going to do all day? They make, what, one movie a decade?

[Pause.]

No, I can’t just issue a statement! Ronnie, a man basically died or whatever here. This is not just about getting me on television. This is about sending a message, which requires that I get on television, which if you think anyone’s sending cameras for a fucking press release you are seriously in the wrong line of work.

[Pause.]

Well, that’s your job. It’s national news, right? Aren’t they protesting in Los Angeles too?

[Really extremely brief pause.]

My God, what’s wrong with this country? Doesn’t anybody care about anything anymore?

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -
-

No, Ronnie, everything is not OK. It took the Mobile Arrest Unit hours to show up, if I don’t have a chronic-fatigue relapse it’ll be a miracle, and the coverage! Don’t I pay you to manage this? “Tinseltown Gadfly and Elderly Rev in Paddy Wagon Fracas”? Civil-rights legend, my ass — the man’s a bigger camera hog than Jenny McCarthy. Anyway, that’s not why I’m calling. The Diablo thing was all wrong for me. I need something of my own, and I think I’ve found it. Did you know we’re bombing a tiny country? Well, Laine’s still working on that, but I’m pretty sure it’s near Albania –

[Brief, witty remark.]

Yes, with Bobby De Niro and Anne Heche, I was thinking exactly the same thing! And Ronnie, this is going to be way bigger than Diablo. They’re protesting at the American embassies all over the world, and, well — I know you like me to consult you in advance, but I had Laine set up a meeting with one of their people.

[Brief, flustered protest.]

That’s exactly what I thought, but this gentleman gave me some of the most fascinating literature, and Ronnie, the stories are all lies. The spite! The conspiracy! Apparently entire villages of people have staged their own mass murders just to smear the Serbians. And of course the media — well, it’s just like what they did to that poor fat man in Atlanta. Ronnie, mistreatment by the press? Who better than me to understand! This could be like George Clooney after Princess Diana –

[Brief, cautious venture.]

People are different these days, Ronnie. Sure, they ripped Vanessa Redgrave over that Palestinian business, but look, she just won the Globe for “Gods and Monsters.”

[Brief, tactful remark.]

Whatever, well, nobody else knows that either, but they gave her the Globe anyway, that’s exactly my point. And, better, this is Europe, which can only help my international box office, I mean I’m sorry but I bet they don’t have three cineplexes in Tibet. Now. Does America have an embassy in Los Angeles?

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -
-

[Extended, shrill tone.]

Pick up, Ronnie. Ronnie, pick up. Fuck. Sorry about the connection, but apparently this country’s out of my cell area — it’s, like, out of all the cell areas. So since you obviously had issues with this project I had Laine go ahead and do the legwork, and, well, all the best demonstrations are in Eastern Europe. We’re in — Laine, honey, where are we? — I think it has some of those little dots in the name, you can have your assistant look it up. Meantime, look for me on CNN. I have to go, the organizers are passing out cocktails. I wish you could see — they have some type of little towel stuck in them. This is the most fascinating culture!

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -
-

Well, Mr. Skeptic, eat your words. It was amazing: the stone-throwing, the police dogs — it was just like “Born on the Fourth of July.” No, not a scratch! Laine had a bit of an allergic reaction to the gas at the embassy while he was securing my oxygen mask, but fortunately he had his epinephrine. Afterward? Well, I guess you could call it a “jail,” the literal translation is “dungeon,” but — no! Of course not! They sent me on to the Hilton. Evidently “Lethal Menace” just made their theaters, and, well, not to brag, but I’m something of an icon here. It’s not the St. Regis, but this isn’t a vacation, right?

[Hopeful interjection.]

No, not quite yet, that’s what I’m calling about. I need you to make a teensy call to the State Department. One of the gendarmes is complaining of a stiletto-heel puncture — of course it’s mistaken identity! You think they don’t have Manolo here?

[Brief reassurance.]

Great. Now I want a press conference as soon as my plane gets in. Laine’s faxing you a fact sheet on Mr. Milosevic for handouts, and he’s checking if we can borrow a couple of Serbian children — but just in case, put in a call to Tad at ICM. See if we can get a piece in Us — no, somewhere serious — let’s try George. And … and … excuse me …

[Hushed, concerned inquiry.]

No, Ronnie, I’m sorry, it’s just the opposite. I’ve never felt better. Things are about to turn around for me. Can you feel it? I just — I feel my work right now is coming from a very real place. Oh, Ronnie. It means nothing to have a gift unless you use it for something important. Isn’t that why we were put on this earth? Isn’t that what this business is all about?

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James Poniewozik is the editor of Salon Media. For more columns by Poniewozik, visit his column archive. More James Poniewozik.

Friday, Sep 11, 1998 7:00 PM UTC

Good will bluffing

Good will bluffing: "Rounders" deals some fine actors a bad hand. Reviewed by Stephanie Zacharek.

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According to director John Dahl’s “Rounders,” professional poker players are very, very interesting people — for about five minutes. That’s about how long it takes for us to grasp that the key to what they do, as baby-faced card whiz Mike McDermott, played by Matt Damon, reveals, is “play the man, not the cards.” It’s a strange way to make a living, reading the eye flickers and nose-scratching of a bunch of guys (and in this movie, most of them are guys, many suitably fat and greasy-looking) hunched around tables in shabby, dimly lit rooms. And neither Dahl nor most of his actors ever quite convince us that there’s a good reason to sit in front of a movie screen watching them for more than two hours. There just never seems to be enough to look at in “Rounders,” other than a bit of cool, sublimated anguish or ecstasy as they win or lose it all. There’s lots of steam rising from the mean nighttime streets of New York City, but after a while even that comes to have a blank, facile look to it. After the whole thing’s over, you look back and you realize you’ve just watched a poker-faced movie.

The central conflict in “Rounders” is an ancient one, picked up off the scrap heap of movie clichis and dusted off hastily. One of the central features of that conflict is the good-hearted woman who gets to say something like “Don’t throw your life away, Johnny, on that (card game/race track/moonshine/what-have-you)!” and “Rounders” has its version in the pretty but excessively pouty Gretchen Mol. Mol plays Jo, Mike’s live-in girlfriend. The two of them are in law school together, where Mike is trying to build a respectable life for himself, intermittently basking in words of wisdom from his professor and mentor, Martin Landau. But Mike, unable to stay away from cards, loses every penny he’s got to the Russian-mob-connected Teddy KGB, one of the city’s toughest players (John Malkovich, chewing the scenery as if he hadn’t eaten for a week), a foreboding critter with a cute little quirk: He fills his poker-chip tray with Oreos, and at particularly tense moments, he’ll hold one up to his ear, listening for the soft whoosh as he unscrews it. (Now that’s character development.) After Mike loses it all to Teddy, Jo pleads with him to quit gambling, and he does — until his longtime buddy and poker partner, Worm (Edward Norton), gets sprung from prison, where he’s been doing time for distributing fake credit cards. Worm, deeply in debt from his pre-prison days, coaxes Mike back into action, and before long the two find themselves sharing a soak in that proverbial hot water.

What you end up with is a bunch of perfectly capable actors hanging around waiting for a decent hand. As the movie’s star, Damon has embarrassingly little to do. Mostly, he walks around looking slightly crestfallen, like he’s just realized he’s left his lost innocence in his other pants. Landau delivers his stock wise-old-timer routine, regaling Damon with cautionary, pointless tales about how he gave up rabbinical studies for law school. “We can’t run away from who we are. Our destiny chooses us,” he says pensively, unaware that somewhere, Yoda must be getting ready to slap him with a massive suit for copyright infringement.

There are flickers of promise in “Rounders.” John Turturro, as the deliciously named Joey Knish, is a kindhearted gambler who supports his family by playing cards and who cuts Mike a break when he desperately needs it. In his two-tone velour zip shirts, with his perpetually befuddled but sweet smile, Turturro has a shy, wise-guy charm. And when we first see Norton, his blaring orange prison jumpsuit is like a beacon of hope. The movie seems to jump to life when he’s on-screen. His role is an obvious lift from the charismatic screw-up played by De Niro in “Mean Streets,” but Norton has enough skill to make the character his own, even down to the way he lets his clothes hang on his lanky frame. Dressed in thrift-store shirts and vintage leather jackets whose sleeves are too short, his ambling swagger suggests both effortless cool and perpetually youthful awkwardness. Hanging out at a nudie bar, he gazes up at a dancer, transfixed — the look on his face is both cherubic and intense, like a kid spooning Cheerios into his mouth while keeping his eyes fixed on Saturday cartoons.

But Dahl — the director of “The Last Seduction” and “Red Rock West” — doesn’t seem to know how to draw the rest of the ensemble around Norton. The characters come off like wayward satellites, circling and bumping into one another randomly. “Rounders” does deal one small, unintentional pleasure — the mysteries of the Pyramids will probably have been revealed by the time anyone figures out exactly where Malkovich got his inscrutable Russian accent. “Count-eet!” he barks as he passes a tray of poker chips to Damon early in the movie, and I couldn’t wait for him to show up and open his mouth again. When I heard lines like “You haefhv my muneey?” and “Meestair son-of-a-beetch!” I wasn’t disappointed. Malkovich is occasionally a fine actor — his glittering malevolence cast a grave though ultimately heartbreaking chill over “Dangerous Liaisons” — but he’s played the beady-eyed bad dude too many times. What he does here isn’t a performance, but a stunt. It’s got to be a tough life, smearing bad accents all over your dialogue like margarine on a soda cracker. And you thought playing poker was a lousy way to make a living.

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Stephanie Zacharek is a senior writer for Salon Arts & Entertainment. More Stephanie Zacharek.

Page 41 of 42 in New York City

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