Fair and sunny and mild

A scene from Act II of the Metropolitan Opera's performance of Ernani. 3.26.08, 9:40 PM.

Yesterday in New York. Fair and sunny and mild. No real need for an overcoat.

I went down to Michael’s to lunch with Carol Joynt of the Washington Social Diary and her son Spencer who is on school break. Someone suggested that this was the reason the town seemed so much quieter -- and indeed, even Michael's where pandemonium reigns Mondays thru Fridays, seemed a little …. More civilized.


	Anna

There is always someone to “see” at Michael’s and yesterday it was Table 5 where two famous New York faces were tete-a-tete – Anna Wintour (in Prada according to mediabistro.com’s Diane Clehane) with Blaine Trump. These girls would stand out in any crowd – Ms. Trump with the famous American-Beauty-Rose face and Ms. Wintour with the signature bubblin’ Buster Brown coiffure more recognizable – thanks to her signature dark glasses (which she was without yesterday) – than her face.

No Michael’s table looks like a “ladies lunch” because somehow, no matter what, it looks like, or maybe we imagine it to be, serious business. So too, was it at Table 5 when the great editor of Vogue was in intense conversation with the beautiful Ms. Trump.


Blaine

At the table next to them, entertainment lawyer Allan Grubman (also father of Lizzie) was lunching with international literary agent Ed Victor. Is there a show biz autobio with a fat advance in the works? And next to them, Joe Armstrong the media mayor of Michael’s was lunching with Sarah Gray Miller the editor-in-chief of the new O At Home magazine – a home design offshoot of the enormously successful O magazine.

Magazines are glamorous from the outside but hard work and damned gritty and full of personalities that sometimes clash and sometimes sail, all wrapped up in deadlines, deadlines, deadlines. Couple this with egos as big as Everest and temperaments as thorny as a briar patch, and you have the behind-the-scenes.

So, with that in mind, I asked Sarah Gray Miller what it was like to work for Oprah. Bear in mind I already now she’s not going to tell me anything controversial; a job’s a job.


	Oprah

She also only works indirectly for Oprah but in association with Gayle King, Oprah’s very close friend and business alter ego; and O Magazine’s editor-in-chief, Amy Gross. Answer: heaven. The spector, the influence of Oprah permeates the atmosphere. “First of all,” she responded to my question, “I believe in the woman (Oprah).” Furthermore the two aforementioned, King and Gross are also very pleasant and gracious women. Amy Gross, who’s been in magazine publishing all her adult life – having started out as Leo Lerman’s assistant at Mademoiselle – loves being the editor-in-chief of O (died-and-gone-to-heaven time also). She “believes in the woman” too.

I think the “secret” of Oprah’s success – and this probably old news to her fans and disciples – is her executive ability to inspire those who work for her. I have no idea how that works with the person, but it’s more than ideas or a philosophy.

Kitty Kelley is currently in the research stages of a biography of Oprah. Controversy is not a distant cousin of best-selling biographer Kelley, as the world knows. Oprah enjoys a public profile that is about as close to “spiritual” as anyone else in public life today. Her achievements have been multi-faceted. What is she really like? – the question always asked about famous people: probably much like the public image and in other ways, much more challenging than the public image.


Kitty

Public images are tricky costumes. They are all costumes. The most successful ones come from the shrewdest artists. A public image comes naturally out of a persona but the public perception alters that persona even for the person who owns it.

There is a “private” Oprah that is basically unknown to the public and is far more serious than even the public Oprah. How do I know that? A brilliant career – and this certainly is a brilliant career, is the result of a very complex and many-sided individual. It is not accidental anymore than Picasso was accidental. I’d bet money that Kitty Kelley will find that aspect, and that the “revelations” she uncovers will ironically flatter and enhance the image of the woman. That’s just a calculated guess from an outside observer. Because the woman is interesting, always interesting, and always everywoman, everyman.

Which speaking of: several people have asked me what I thought of the TV show “Gossip Girls” which is purportedly about private schoolgirls here in New York.

I’m laughing as I write this because although I hadn’t seen the show, I downloaded an episode from iTunes and watched. As I said, I’m laughing. I don’t know how the show’s narrative has developed but it is an entirely stupid show in realistic terms of the girls who go to these very posh and expensive day schools here in Manhattan.

It so happens I live between two of the most prominent (read: expensive, exclusive) girls’ schools in town – Chapin and Brearley. So I see these girls all the time – early morning when the blocks are jammed with arriving limousines, taxis, parents on foot, school buses – and weekly mid-afternoon when school’s out and many of the same cast of characters are back in the streets. Their presence during those two parts of the day seriously ties up traffic on what is otherwise an almost sparsely traveled thoroughfare.

Both schools run up to grade 12. Up until recently anyway, the schools required “uniforms.” Chapin’s is/was green. Sometimes I’d see the “older” girls walking away from school, just far enough away to watch them light up and smoke, all in their white blouses and pleated green skirts. Seeing a fifteen year old gangly kid acting out “sophistication” with a cigarette is funny to this old man. Very serious of course; and a riot too.

Both Mia Farrow and Caroline Kennedy have or have had children at Brearley. I know this because I’ve seen the mothers in the street in the mornings walking their daughters to school. What was noteworthy about their presence was their appearance: both women who in their “on” hours are really great looking, bright and beautiful; in the morning before school look like….what do you look like when you’ve just got out of bed, haven’t had time to shower and get your act together? Another cup of coffee?

I mention these “images” (that word again) because this TV show “Gossip Girls” is supposedly about girls who go to these schools. In the show, the “kids” are socializing at Upper East Side cocktail parties with their “fashionable” and “sophisticated” (and “rich”) parents. I don’t think so. You don’t find those kids at parents’ cocktail parties in New York except on the rarest occasions. And when you do, the “kids” look like fish out of water. And about as energetic. Because they’re kids and these “grownups” have little more than perfunctory interest in them while entertaining their friends.

“Gossip Girls” presents the picture as if the grown-ups and the kids are all part of one social set. There is one scene where the father who is evidently an investment banker insists that his son keep his girlfriend (they’re teenagers) until he completes some kind of business deal that involves the girl’s mother. Really.

The script has these “kids” acting like grown-ups (if grownups acted like Joan Crawford in “Craig’s Wife,” or Bette Davis in “All About Eve.”

Really; it’s a riot with very little to do with reality. Teen-agers always imagine that they are “sophisticated.” “I’m not young enough to know everything,” Oscar Wilde once remarked. These “Gossip Girl” teen-agers know everything and their teenage romances are like “An Affair To Remember.”

The rich kids of Manhattan are more sophisticated than kids out in Kansas or even Massachusetts. New York kids (all boroughs) are more sophisticated because the city is an education in life that you can’t avoid once you’re out on the streets, no matter who you are. The rich kids in Manhattan also have natural access to all kinds of people of power because of their parents. They are often exposed to very dynamic people. Think of it: being a kid and having Kennedy or Farrow as one of the mothers in your life.

The "gang" from Gossip Girls.

Rich kids in Manhattan can also be commensurately spoiled because of the enormous wealth that exists in some families. I once overheard a girl having dinner with friends at Swifty's telling them how her family had three private jets – one for the husband, one for the wife and one for the “kids” when they needed it. This was being explained the way you might tell somebody you’ve got three Tvs – one in the bedroom, one in the kitchen and one in the living room.

Rich kids in Manhattan are also spoiled. They often have more people to pick up after them. They often don’t learn basic lessons in childhood because they are used to being waited on. What appears to be a privilege eventually becomes a serious liability. I do not mean to say that all rich kids are slobs because it depends entirely on the sensibility of the parents.

“Gossip Girls.” is basically about teen-agers playing “dress up.” Older children acting out life as if they were independent adults. The “adults”in the show, however, take the opposite tack: they act like teenagers. And even look almost like teen-agers. In the opening episode of Gossip Girls” there’s a father-son relationship where the father (a rocker) looks so young, at first I thought he was the older brother. Then, as the story developed he really wasn’t much older acting than …. An older brother.

“Gossip Girls” is a soap opera about made-up lives. The funniest are the “boys” who look like boys and are playing the classic parts of the swain, the predator, the salt of the earth; and the girls are playing the parts right out of Clare Boothe Luce’s "The Women." Except they’re not grown-up. But then neither is the script. It is about New York life about as much as The Bevery Hillbillies is about Beverly Hills.

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