Kurt Andersen ~ books reviews

THE WASHINGTON POST

June 2, 1999

It Takes One to Know One

In His Novel, Media Insider Kurt Andersen Dissects the Hand That Feeds Him

By Howard Kurtz

KURT ANDERSEN WANTS it clearly understood that he's not George Mactier.

The New Yorker writer has penned a 659-page novel in which the chief protagonist is a self-absorbed, scheming journalistic hack turned yuppie scum who earns $16,575 a week making a mockery of the news business.

"He's 30 percent me, 50 percent me, I don't know," Andersen says in the Brooklyn brownstone where he created Mactier and his ambitious corporate-executive wife, Lizzie Zimbalist.

"He's like a brother. There's obviously genetic material in common. . . . All fictional characters are Frankenstein creations--an arm here, a leg there."

At the same time, says Andersen, 44, the onetime editor of Spy magazine, the Mactier character "is 42 years old and never really took a professional risk in his life. Certainly starting with Spy I took large and unwise risks--I use 'unwise' in self-deprecating irony."

This is the way Andersen talks, not unlike his often obnoxious Manhattan power couple in "Turn of the Century," in great rushes of post-ironic, self-conscious commentary. Just the other day, Andersen told his wife, Anne Kreamer, a television producer and former Nickelodeon executive, that they'd had "a George and Lizzie moment." It seems they bumped into a woman at a dinner party who is now paying them $1,200 a day to use their weekend place in upstate Dutchess County for fashion shoots.

"Turn of the Century" unfolds in the uncharted terrain of 2000--a world not unlike ours, but one in which Andersen can conjure coming attractions of the millennium (a Disney director teaching Washington generals how to direct a war, or "The Supreme Court," a celebrity fake-trial show with Robert Bork as the judge). The novel is generating big-time buzz, in part because Andersen, a former editor of New York magazine and onetime writer and architecture critic for Time, is a creature of the very media subculture he skewers.

But the book also touches a nerve, not just about self-important media types but about hyperactive Wall Street traders, wealthy Seattle geeks, moronic Hollywood producers, sex-obsessed executives and, like connective tissue, old-fashioned greed.

A shrewd cultural critic, Andersen is not without contradictions: A native Nebraskan who does a dead-on depiction of Manhattan. A genuinely funny writer who rarely smiles, even in his book jacket photo. A student of the human condition who was inhumane enough to fire a couple of New York staffers by fax. (Ironically, the novel was born when Andersen himself got the ax at New York three years ago.)

These days, he's working the publicity circuit. While he notes that the New York Post's gossipy Page Six (which makes cameo appearances in the book) once called him "reclusive," a New York Times piece on his book party "depicted me as an on-the-scene, socially-networked-up-the-wazoo Sally Quinn of Manhattan."

The book is peppered with insider references to "blondes on MSNBC," people who are "Nexised," Barry Diller, Al Gore, Charles Manson, Michael Milken, Cristophe, MTV, Slate, "Entertainment Tonight," CNBC, Variety, Newsweek and, in what's sure to draw a chuckle from the cognoscenti, "the final issue of Brill's Content." They are, in Mactier's words, "all members of the international fraternal order of the somewhat famous." Andersen also whacks away at some real-life targets, such as Bill Gates and his evil empire.

"I tried to make it not annoyingly obscure or arcane," Andersen says. "I asked, would my friends in Omaha get this? The twin risks are making it too arcane or dumbing it down to the point where it doesn't really capture these worlds."

He sketches a status-conscious universe of Armani blazers, Cynthia Rowley shirts, Helmut Lang pants, Badgley Mischka dresses, Gucci loafers, whipped mochaccino brulee, sun-dried boysenberries, cilantro ratatouille tartlets, Paul Newman popcorn, Le Gourmet baby carrots, Chinese vitamins, baby Vietnamese eggplant and, naturally, $60,000 Land Cruisers.

The story hurtles headlong toward a grand convergence of television, technology and investment banking, a virtual IPO of network nastiness and dot.com duplicity. There are even references to "inexcusably oleaginous" behavior and a certain "postadolescent anarchosyndicalist spirit"; it could not be determined without further linguistic research whether Andersen shares these traits.

The author combines the satiric sensibility of Spy and the Harvard Lampoon (where he was vice president) with the ambition of a man who lasted one day as a Daily News copy aide ("I had too much hubris and self-importance to bring coffee to Jimmy Breslin"). Instead, he learned the TV business by writing for Gene Shalit on "Today."

Andersen pushed the envelope at Spy, where Donald Trump was famously described as a "thick-fingered vulgarian," and at New York. He blames his abrupt firing there on stories that upset the corporate owners, including Henry Kravis, who was named in a "Fat Cat Catalogue" of "rich New Yorkers" as a top fund-raiser for Bob Dole's presidential campaign.

Building a plot around the faux reality theme, the author has Mactier developing a program called "Real News" for the "MBC" network that unabashedly mixes bona fide journalism with infobabes portraying reporters in how-they-got-that-story scripts. In a pivotal scene that suggests Andersen's dim view of the media, Mactier dresses down an old-guard news executive who challenges his fake-news extravaganza:

"Let's say you turn to Bill Rossiter for cross talk after a piece . . . and you feel like laughing--you don't dare smile, right? You fake a very, very sober expression and tone of voice. Right? Or when you have a live back-and-forth with a correspondent in the field. He knows what you're going to ask, and you know all the answers to the questions you're asking--so you have to portray curiosity. Right? That's virtuoso acting. Or when you shoot the subject of a story pretending to talk on the phone or pretending to examine a bullet hole in a door frame."

So, Kurt, what do you really think of the press?

"I'm skeptical, moderately jaundiced, but not deeply cynical," he says. "I mean, corners are cut, deals are made, slippery slopes are slid down and we all know about it. . . . There are a lot of dumb reporters, a lot of sloppy reporters. Not a majority, but too many. That influenced how I depicted the journalistic class."

Lighting a cigarette, he says: "I don't want to sound like a pretentious moralizer and say I wish it was like 1965 when two big papers and three big networks and three big magazines told us what to think." But Andersen laments that journalism is now ruled by "marketplace values."

" 'Greed is good' no longer even needs to be said. It's presumed. Today if you're not making money, you're some kind of sap. I don't think there's any longer any debate about that. I find it strange and somewhat chilling."

As for Lizzie, the foulmouthed executive who runs a small technology company and crosses swords with Microsoft, Andersen's wife played a part. "Some of my friends say, 'Is Lizzie you?' " Kreamer admits. "I am a woman who, because I was raised a Catholic, uses profanity on a regular basis. And I was able to provide some insight into corporate workings in terms of the television world."

Andersen, who smoked throughout the interview, says he gave some of his own traits to Lizzie (who goes through a couple of packs of Marlboros a day). And George and Lizzie both casually fire people. Andersen says he wanted to "convey the excitement and adrenaline and thrill of running a business, and the ghastliness and absurdity and stupidity of it as well."

In Tom Wolfe fashion, Andersen burrowed into his research, hanging out with his friend Jim Cramer, a high-powered Wall Street trader; with his friend Paul Simms, creator of the TV show "News Radio"; and in Seattle with his friend Tom Phillips, who runs deja.com. He also hired a hacker expert to help him write about rebellious techno- nerds. But Andersen says he didn't set out to produce a sprawling "Bonfire of the Vanities" for the '90s; he just kept writing and writing, to the point that his editor had to cut more than 100 pages.

"Turn of the Century" has drawn strong praise, a book that "jacks you into the nerve center of the media society and pins your eyelids open until you go nearly blind," as the New York Times put it. But some reviews serve to trumpet Andersen's insider status.

In Time, Daniel Okrent begins by saying, "I know Kurt Andersen. Everyone knows Kurt Andersen (especially here at Time)," and that he drew the assignment because he knows the author less well than everyone else. At New York, media columnist Michael Wolff discloses that "I know Kurt, too, and he's blurbed one of my books." In Entertainment Weekly, Benjamin Svetkey notes that "this reviewer worked for Spy as a fact checker during Andersen's tenure and remembers him as {a} likable but distant figure." Only Vanity Fair, run by Andersen's former Spy partner Graydon Carter, limited itself to a brief mention.

With Andersen's media pedigree, it's hard to imagine him living anywhere but Manhattan. But he cherishes this 19th-century, four- story, high-ceilinged brownstone in Brooklyn's Carroll Gardens for being "out of the maelstrom" and an escape for his daughters from the city's "pathological private-school madness. Raising them here will reduce the chances they'll grow up to be insufferable {expletives}."

"Kurt does not need that constant infusion of being with media bigwigs to define himself," says his friend Jim Kelly, Time's deputy managing editor, noting that Andersen steers clear of hobnobbing in the Hamptons. "Kurt is very much a realist, a romantic realist. He has this intense, intense curiosity. He's a jazz pianist in that regard. He goes off on these wonderful riffs all the time."

Andersen's biggest fan says he's not the dark, brooding figure that some imagine. Anne Kreamer says her husband is smart, funny, optimistic and "fearless, in his willingness to actually speak his mind. I would add 'sexy,' but then I would, wouldn't I?"

So just when one might conclude that Andersen is nothing like George or Lizzie, who fly around communicating by cell phone while a Mexican nanny raises their overachieving children, Andersen tells the New York Press: "I withdrew from my familial responsibilities for five months. . . . I saw my kids the way lawyers and investment bankers see their kids." But he obviously feels guilty about it, and that period of book-crashing is now over.

Next stop on this hall-of-mirrors express may be Hollywood. Director Nora Ephron is looking at the book, and there is talk of a feature film or HBO movie--either of which could propel Andersen further into a Mactier-type life.

"There's no question I've gotten more attention than I would have if I were just Kurt Andersen, young first novelist, or insurance man turned novelist," he says. "But there's also been some skepticism, some snarkiness attached to some of the coverage. It sounds disingenuous, but in the end the work stands on its own."

THE NEW YORK TIMES - BUSINESS/FINANCIAL DESK

May 17, 1999

Fact, Fiction and the Media Fishbowl

By ALEX KUCZYNSKI

Kurt Andersen knows everybody.

Mr. Andersen -- a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, a former editor of New York, a founding editor of Spy magazine, a former writer for Time and a member of Manhattan's Harvard mafia -- stood in the center of the front room at Da Silvano on lower Avenue of the Americas a week ago in a shambling blue blazer and greeted the guests filtering in to celebrate his sprawling, multilayered, 659-page behemoth of a premillennial novel, ''Turn of the Century.''

A social satire set in 2000 that skewers cyberspace, television, Wall Street traders, marriage and the media, ''Turn of the Century'' defies tidy plot summary. In short, it traces the lives of George Mactier, the producer of a television program that merges journalism and entertainment (it's called ''NARCS''), and his wife, Lizzie Zimbalist, a computer software guru-on-the-rise and their three Internet-wise children; the story ends when a hacker breaks into the Reuters computer system and broadcasts the false news of Bill Gates's death. Every character is on line, refers frequently -- in a nod to the vogue established by Bret Easton Ellis novels -- to designer labels, and carries a mobile phone -- if not a global-access, $3,000 Iridium phone.

And so it seemed a fitting marriage of fiction and reality that several guests in Da Silvano, their Nokia phones emitting merry digitized melodies, resembled their fictional counterparts in ''Turn of the Century.'' In an upended Mobius strip version of the book, Mr. Andersen's media fishbowl of a novel was being celebrated by, well, the media fishbowl. His book party could have been a scene broadcast on the E!2 network, a cable channel in ''Turn of the Century'' that offers 24-hour coverage of celebrity cocktail parties.

''There have been several moments of art imitating life, life imitating art, imitating life,'' Mr. Andersen said the next day over a lunch of fried liver at Orso. The incident with the most intense reverberation between fiction and reality, he said, was when Page Six, The New York Post gossip column, noted that the column was used in the plot of the novel. In the novel, Page Six prints an item about the character George Mactier but misspells his name.

''And in the real-life item, they misspelled his name, too!'' Mr. Andersen said. ''It was pure bliss for me. It pleases me that the fit between the plausible fictional hyperreality and actual reality is confusing.''

Apart from the telescoping interplay between fiction and reality, another sociological theme Mr. Andersen addresses in the novel is the notion that technology has turned adults into perpetual children.

''People talk about the idea of community on the Internet, but that is not what it is all about. It's about instantaneity and getting what you want -- boom, boom, boom,'' he said, politely pounding the table like an anxious child and drawing the concerned eye of a waitress. ''When you want it, now, now, now. The salient thing about children is that they are really impatient about everything. Now as adults we have contrived to create a culture'' -- with cellular phones, real-time E-mail, wireless Internet access -- ''where we always feel we should be able to get something right now. It's a culture of permanent childhood.''

The 150 people gathered for Mr. Andersen's party appeared to bring together everyone -- that is, everyone important -- Mr. Andersen has known since he moved to the East Coast from his native Nebraska in 1973. The gathering on one side of the room showed off Mr. Andersen's Harvard resume: Conan O'Brien; James J. Cramer of TheStreet.com -- fictionalized in the book as Ben Gould, a hysterical, eccentric Wall Street trader -- former Gov. William F. Weld of Massachusetts; Walter Isaacson, Time's managing editor. Closer to the trays of skewered squid canapes stood the media crowd: Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair's editor, with whom Mr. Andersen founded Spy; Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of Miramax Films, whom Mr. Andersen once lambasted in Spy, and Charlie Rose, the PBS talk-show host.

Then there was the third strand of his world: Ann Godoff, the editor in chief of Random House, and Mr. Andersen's public-relations guru, Leslee Dart, a partner in the powerful Hollywood firm PMK. (PMK rarely publicizes projects as trifling as books, but, as Mr. Andersen explained, Ms. Dart is a friend.)

Mr. Andersen knows so many people -- in worlds where marriages, partnerships and college alumni connections bind people together in a close-knit manner that at least appears to encourage favoritism among the members of their intersecting clans -- that when Time magazine published a review of Mr. Andersen's book last Monday, the reviewer included these opening lines: ''I know Kurt Andersen. Everybody knows Kurt Andersen.'' The author, Daniel Okrent, added, ''I just know him less well than everybody else does, so it falls to me to review 'Turn of the Century.' ''

Mr. Cramer -- whose own world paralleled ''Turn of the Century'' as he took TheStreet.com public last week and made over $200 million for himself -- assessed the risks of inhabiting such a cozy universe. ''There is this triple-loaded meaning in the Kurt world,'' he said. ''When you're in that milieu, that Vanity Fair slash Harvard slash Kurt party thing, you seem trapped by others in a world that seems to be of interest to only 14 people.''

Nevertheless, at least a couple of movie studios have expressed interest in ''Turn of the Century.'' Michael Ovitz didn't show up at Mr. Andersen's book party, but he was supposed to. Kathleen Turner showed with the screenwriter Bruce Feirstein.

''She was the one famous person I didn't know,'' Mr. Andersen said. ''She asked me to sign her book. It was one of those surreal moments where I felt like I was in some specific, high-end Disney attraction where you can feel like a celebrity for five minutes, having flashbulbs go off in your face while you sign a book for a famous actress.''

But Mr. Andersen -- as George Mactier would have been -- was pleased by the party's final moments: the last two people at the bar were George Stephanopoulos and Mr. O'Brien.

''And you know it's been a really successful party if the last people to leave are celebrities,'' Mr. Andersen said.