Posted on 10/09/2002 8:50:56 PM PDT by Ranger
WHAT AMERICA NEEDS now is a good sex scandal. The strain of sustained sobriety in the midst of sabre-rattling is wearing everybody down. The money scandals are a poor substitute for the bump and grind of the Clinton years. I had a slew of e-mails from American friends enjoying the Currie Munching escapade more than any other story in months, even though everyone here has forgotten who John Major is, and scarcely knew at the time he was in office anyway.
I go to a fundraising breakfast at the Sheraton Hotel as the guest of the Republican hostess Georgette Mosbacher. The Governor of New York, George Pataki, is the main attraction. Off duty, Pataki, a tall, groomed hunk whose shoulders enter first, has a certain lazy cool. But today he keeps the sex appeal under wraps. Today, it’s all about reassurance. At the Sheraton, I listen with rapidly mounting narcoleptic desperation as the governor projects familial decency to a room full of croissant nibbling power women in Dana Buchman suits.
Never mind, the November election looks like a walk for Pataki anyway. His Democratic opponents keep shooting themselves in the foot. First, young Andrew Cuomo went down because of his boorish tone-deafness to the era of hushed voices. He had hoped to get some Bush-style filial revenge by defeating the man who eight years ago unseated his father, the sainted Mario. But then Andrew made the mistake of sneering that the affable Pataki had been nothing but Rudy Giuliani’s coat-holder in the wake of 9/11. It may have been a perfect example of Michael Kinsley’s Law of Gaffes, which states that a gaffe occurs when a politician inadvertently tells the truth, but it was uncalled for. Exit Andrew.
Now the chosen candidate, Carl McCall, has blown it, too. His handsome black face appeared looking haggard under a headline screaming SORRY on the front page of the New York Post. The tabloid has figuratively busted him, frisked him and booked him. His crime: writing a raft of moderately slimy letters on official stationery improperly soliciting jobs for friends and family, very much like the ones I tend to write myself.
As light relief from the pumped-up tensions of Iraq, this simply won’t do. When I channel-surf between the Peter Sellers clip of Saddam in his pork pie hat waving that rifle and the angryfoetus features of James Carville on CNN’s Crossfire, I long for the irresponsible days of Monica and Bill.
The only people in public life daring to have fun are oldsters with nothing to lose when the world blows up — like Sumner Redstone, the frisky 78-year-old CEO of Viacom who, because he controls 68 per cent of the voting stock in a company that’s prospering, can squire eyepopping new arm candy every night of the week. (Come to think of it, though, he has a new girlfriend who is a 40-year-old third grade teacher in the Bronx, so perhaps he too is now playing it safe.) Or the 66-year-old dynamo Jack Welch, who absconded from home with the sexpot editor of the Harvard Business Review, Suzy Wetlaufer, as soon as he had bowed out of General Electric. At dinner parties Welch tells friends that he married his first wife to please his mother, his second wife to please GE, and he’ll marry his third to please himself. Go, Jack! By this scenario, George Bush Sr is more likely to break out than his son. It is hard to believe that in the mounting tension, a reasonably good-looking frat boy like W is not getting at least the occasional relief massage somewhere, but I think not. Instead we have Al and Tipper Gore’s book on the American family to look forward to next month.
Meanwhile, the canonisation of ex-Mayor Giuliani proceeds apace. The lines snaked for nine blocks outside Barnes and Noble on 5th Avenue when he appeared last week for a signing of his book Leadership. People had waited to see him from as early as two o’clock in the morning, many of them waving Rudy for President banners. He displays none of the Soprano-like arrogance of yore. In the fall of 2000, when I went to city hall with Harvey Weinstein, the chairman of Miramax Films, to help reel in this book for our publishing company Talk Miramax, Rudy was a very different guy. Surrounded by his ever-present consiglieris and flacks, he was most energised talking about his crime-busting days putting away Joe Bonanno. Now, the Rudy of the shark mouth and ambulance-chasing edge, the Rudy of the insult-flying divorce, the uncompromising Rudy I met that day, is gone, and I miss him. He has bagged his comb-over in favour of a tonsorial capitol dome that gives him gravitas. He patiently signs books for hours without any brusque asides to glowering gofers. He appears on Larry King confirming shyly that he and the Woman Who Saved My Life, Judith Nathan, will shortly wed. Even his recent offer to serve personally as Osama bin Laden’s executioner, should they ever catch him, hasn’t reversed his slide into numbing niceness.
This country flatly refuses to acknowledge its need for a sex scandal. Every loin is girded for a big fat war instead. And the anxiety is rising.
There’s a fatalism in the air, even at the gym on 57th Street which used to be a hotbed of displaced executive sexual energy. For the past 15 years I have trudged here dutifully at 5.45 every morning to say hello to my hamstrings. The place used to hum with small-bottomed Puerto Rican trainers doling out punishment to virile investment bankers readying themselves for killer deals and hot dates with models from Elite. Have they gone out of business, or are they still at home with the pillow over their heads? They seem to have disappeared. On the exercise bikes I see only spandexed middle-aged babes with designer eyelifts pedalling for their lives.
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