Sex and the City and Us: How Four Single Women Changed the Way We Think, Live, and Love - Softcover

Armstrong, Jennifer Keishin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 150116483X ISBN 13: 9781501164835

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2019

Synopsis

The bestselling author of Seinfeldia offers a fascinating retrospective of the iconic and award-winning television series, Sex and the City, in a “bubbly, yet fierce cultural dissection of the groundbreaking show” (Chicago Tribune).

This is the story of how a columnist, two gay men, and a writers’ room full of women used their own poignant, hilarious, and humiliating stories to launch a cultural phenomenon. They endured shock, slut-shaming, and a slew of nasty reviews on their way to eventual—if still often begrudging—respect. The show wasn’t perfect, but it revolutionized television for women.

When Candace Bushnell began writing for the New York Observer, she didn’t think anyone beyond the Upper East Side would care about her adventures among the Hamptons-hopping media elite. But her struggles with singlehood struck a chord. Beverly Hills, 90210 creator Darren Star brought her vision to an even wider audience when he adapted the column for HBO. Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha launched a barrage of trends, forever branded the actresses that took on the roles, redefined women’s relationship to sex and elevated the perception of singlehood.

Featuring exclusive new interviews with the cast and writers, including star Sarah Jessica Parker, creator Darren Star, executive producer Michael Patrick King, and author Candace Bushnell, “Jennifer Keishin Armstrong brings readers inside the writers’ room and into the scribes’ lives...The writing is fizzy and funny, but she still manages an in-depth look at a show that’s been analyzed for decades, giving readers a retrospective as enjoyable as a $20 pink cocktail” (The Washington Post). Sex and the City and Us is both a critical and nostalgic behind-the-scenes look at a television series that changed the way women see themselves.

About this title

About the Author:

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong is the author of Sex and the City and Us, Seinfeldia, and Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted. She writes about pop culture for several publications, including The New York Times Book Review, Fast Company, Vulture, BBC Culture, Entertainment Weekly, and several others. She grew up in Homer Glen, Illinois, and now lives in New York City. Visit her online at JenniferKArmstrong.com.  

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Sex and the City and Us 1

The Real Carrie Bradshaw

Fifteen years in Manhattan, and Candace Bushnell was as broke as ever. She had arrived in New York City from Connecticut in 1978 at age nineteen, but after a decade and a half of trying to make it there, she barely had anything in her bank account to show for it.

She did, however, have several friends. And some of them did have money. One kept two apartments, using one as a home and the other as an office, the latter in a charming art deco building at 240 East 79th Street. When Bushnell needed a place to live, her friend stepped up and offered part of her “office” as living quarters for Bushnell. The friend kept her own office in the bedroom, while Bushnell slept on a fold-out sofa and worked in the other room. Bushnell liked having her friend nearby for moral support as she wrote articles for magazines such as Mademoiselle and Esquire, as well as the “People We’re Talking About” column for Vogue.

Bushnell was still sleeping on the pull-out couch when she started freelance writing for the New York Observer, a publication distinguished by its pinkish paper and upscale readership.

Her boss, editor-in-chief Susan Morrison, who would go on to become articles editor at the New Yorker, called Bushnell the paper’s “secret weapon,” because Bushnell had a special aptitude for getting her subjects to speak candidly.

Morrison left the paper, but Bushnell stayed on as the top job was taken over by Peter Kaplan—a bespectacled journalist who would become the paper’s defining editor. One fall afternoon in 1994, Kaplan said to Bushnell, “So many people are always talking about your stories. Why don’t you write a column?” When Bushnell agreed, he asked, “What do you think it should be about?”

“I think it should be about being a single woman in New York City,” she answered, “and all the crazy things that happen to her.” She could focus on her life and her immediate circle: She was thirty-five and single, a status that was still shocking in certain segments of society, even in New York City in 1994. Several of her friends had also made it past thirty without getting married, and they would make great sources and characters.

Like many in the media, Bushnell lived an in-between-classes life: She scrounged for sustenance, attending book parties for the free food and drinks. But she also ran with the highest of the high class, big-name designers and authors, moguls who hired interior designers for their jets, and Upper East Side moms who pioneered “nanny cams” to spy on their expensive childcare providers. It was the model for the absurd lifestyle that her alter ego, Carrie Bradshaw, would make famous, balancing small paychecks with major access to glamour and wealth. That inside perspective on the high life would become a key part of the column’s appeal.

· · ·

Candace Bushnell knew nothing of private jets and nannies when she first arrived in Manhattan.

In fact, she lived in almost twelve different apartments during her first year in New York City, or at least it felt that way. Candy, as her family called her—honey-blond and Marcia Brady–pretty—had come to Manhattan to make it as an actress after she dropped out of Rice University. Then she found out she was a terrible actress, so she decided to make it as a writer instead.

Thus far, however, she’d only made it as a roommate, and even that wasn’t going well.

In one apartment, on East 49th Street, which was something of a red-light district at the time, she lived with three other girls. All three wanted to be on Broadway, and, even worse, one of them was. All they did was sing when they were home; when they weren’t home, they waitressed. Worse still, the women who lived above them on the third and fourth floors were hookers with a steady string of patrons clomping through.

Bushnell did her best to ignore the chaos and focus on her career. At a club one evening, she met the owner of a small publication called Night, where she landed her first entry-level gig. The magazine had just launched in 1978 to chronicle legendary nightclubs like Studio 54 and Danceteria. Other assistant-type work followed for Bushnell at Ladies’ Home Journal (where the mix of stories in a given month might include career advice from Barbara Walters, an exposé on sexually abusive doctors, and “low-cal party” ideas) and Good Housekeeping (which favored more traditional topics such as a “Calorie Watchers Cookbook,” White House table settings, and “How Charlie’s Angels Stay So Slim”). Finally, Bushnell landed on staff as a writer at Self in an era when cover stories included “Are You Lying to Yourself about Sex?” and “12 Savvy Ways to Make More Money.” This was at least a little closer to her speed.

Throughout the ’80s, when Bushnell was in her twenties, she found ways to write about the subjects that interested her most: sex, relationships, society, clubbing, singlehood, careers, and New York City. At that point she still thought she’d like to get married and have kids. But her work reflected the times and spoke to the millions of young women who poured into big cities to seek career success and independence instead of matrimony and family life. To pursue her own big-city dreams, Bushnell braved New York at its lowest point, when the AIDS crisis ravaged lives, graffiti covered buildings and subway cars inside and out, beefy vigilantes called the Guardian Angels roamed the streets to discourage criminals, and Times Square was populated with prostitutes and peep shows.

· · ·

It was the Observer column that would ultimately catapult her to the next level of her career. Bushnell and Kaplan got down to practicalities. She’d be paid $1,000 per column, which was $250 more than other columnists at the paper were paid. This, plus her Vogue checks and perks like flights to Los Angeles for assignments, added up to a decent New York lifestyle for the time, particularly given her frugal living quarters. Bushnell and Kaplan discussed the title of her new column and settled on “Sex and the City.” A perfect newspaper column title: “pithy,” as she’d later describe it. The column was headed by an illustration of a shoe, based on a strappy pair of Calvin Klein sandals Bushnell had purchased for herself on sale.

As Bushnell later wrote, she “practically skipped up Park Avenue with joy” leaving the office after Kaplan offered her the column.

But first things first: What to write about for her “Sex and the City” debut? Well, there was that sex club everyone was talking about.

· · ·

One late night in 1994, Bushnell left a dinner party at the new Bowery Bar to head uptown to a sex club on 27th Street. She didn’t know what would happen, but hoped it would be enough to fill her new column. As it turned out, Le Trapeze was, like most sexual escapades, neither as good nor as bad as imagined. It cost eighty-five dollars to enter, cash, no receipt. (Her expense reports were about to get interesting.) The presence of a hot-and-cold buffet took her aback. “You must have your lower torso covered to eat,” said a sign above. Bushnell spied “a few blobby couples” having sex on a large air mattress in the center of the room. And, as Bushnell wrote, “many men . . . appeared to be having trouble keeping up their end of the bargain.” A woman sat next to a Jacuzzi in a robe, smoking.

This experience became Bushnell’s first “Sex and the City” column, published on November 28, 1994, with the headline “Swingin’ Sex? I Don’t Think So.” Despite the come-on of the column’s name, it contained a traditional and wholesome bottom line: “I had learned that when it comes to sex, there’s no place like home.” Over the next two years, Bushnell would chronicle the gulf between fantasy and reality, between what the hippest of the hip of New York City thought they should be doing and what they truly wanted in their souls. If they could find their souls.

As Bushnell wrote in that first piece: “Sex in New York is about as much like sex in America as other things in New York are. It can be annoying; it can be unsatisfying; most important, sex in New York is only rarely about sex. Most of the time it’s about spectacle, Todd Oldham dresses, Knicks tickets, the Knick [sic] themselves, or the pure terror of Not Being Alone in New York.”

Over the next two years, Bushnell would sit at her desk in her friend’s apartment on the tenth floor of the 79th Street building, writing her column. She smoked and looked out on an air shaft from the dark three-bedroom apartment as she pondered the lives and loves of those she knew and tapped away on her Dell laptop keyboard. The words she wrote would turn her from a midlevel writer into a New York celebrity.

Her column gained such notoriety, in fact, that it affected her love life. High-powered men she met told her, “I thought about dating you, but now I won’t because I don’t want to end up in your column.” She would think, You aren’t interesting enough to write about anyway. Her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Vogue publisher Ron Galotti—a tanned man with slicked-back hair and a penchant for gray suits with pocket squares—did make the column regularly, referred to as “Mr. Big.” When she’d finish writing a column and show it to him, he would read her copy and issue his version of a compliment: “Cute, baby, cute.”

· · ·

Bushnell never envisioned a mass audience for her work in the Observer. She never would have believed, at the time, that it would turn into a TV hit that all of America—much less the world—embraced. She only hoped to hook the select, in-the-know audience the Observer was known for, the upper echelons of high society. Bushnell’s “Sex and the City” column emphasizes opportunistic women on the hunt for financial salvation in Manhattan’s high-rolling men; her “Carrie Bradshaw”—a pseudonym for Bushnell herself—is unhinged and depressed; her friends have given up on the idea of love and connection. The result resembles a female version of Bright Lights, Big City and, in fact, the author of that book was her friend and frequent party mate Jay McInerney, whose wavy crest of dark hair, thick eyebrows, and natty style made him look more like a matinee idol than a novelist. Even McInerney, the chronicler of New York’s party culture of the coke-fueled ’80s, cracked that Bushnell “was doing advanced postgraduate work in the subject of going out on the town.”

She went out nearly every night, interviewed people at her central downtown hangout, Bowery Bar, and found stories all across town. New York was, Bushnell says, a “tight place then. It was the day when restaurants were theater. Nobody cared about the food. You just saw who was coming in, who talked to who.” If you wanted to know what was going on somewhere, you had to go there.

New York dating rituals still hearkened back to another era, “like in Edith Wharton’s time,” Bushnell says. “There were hierarchies. Society was important, the idea of wanting to be in society.” Women still often felt as if they had to please men, like Wharton wrote in The House of Mirth of her character Lily Bart: “She had been bored all the afternoon by Percy Gryce—the mere thought seemed to waken an echo of his droning voice—but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptabilities.”

With the column, Bushnell had made herself into a professional dater. She got her material from dating, and she could use her profession to meet potential dates. This linked her to the city’s earliest recognized wave of professional, single women: the shopgirls of the early 1900s. They made their living as retail clerks, but more important they were single girls whose jobs gave them access to wealthy men: “Shopgirls knew that dressing and speaking the right ways would help them get a job, and that the right job could help them get a man,” Moira Weigel wrote in her history of courtship, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating.

Bushnell and her friends had become the modern version of Edith Wharton heroines and those shopgirls, stuck between dependence on men and modern dating practices that lacked manners and rules. She envisioned herself writing for this select subculture, whispering their secrets to others like them, and perhaps even to the men who pursued them.
“SEX” BEYOND THE UPPER EAST SIDE

Before long, people began to buy the Observer just to read Bushnell’s column, people outside the Observer’s standard readership. Readers loved to guess the real identities of Bushnell’s pseudonymed characters. It was said that the writer “River Wilde” was probably Bret Easton Ellis, the American Psycho author. “Gregory Roque” was most likely Oliver Stone, the Natural Born Killers filmmaker. A Bushnell pseudonym became a status symbol of the time.

Soon everyone in town knew that Mr. Big was Galotti, the magazine publisher who drove a Ferrari and had dated supermodel Janice Dickinson. In the column, Bushnell, as a first-person narrator, introduces Mr. Big’s paramour, Carrie Bradshaw, as her “friend.” Eventually, detailed depictions of Carrie’s life—her thoughts, her word-for-word conversations, her sexual escapades—overtake the column. That, plus their shared initials, made it hard to imagine Carrie wasn’t Candace. In fact, Bushnell later revealed she’d created Carrie so her parents wouldn’t know—at least for sure—that they were reading about their daughter’s own sex life.

Readers took in every word. They read it on the subway and on the way out to the Hamptons. They delighted in Bushnell’s dissections of city types such as “psycho moms,” “bicycle boys,” “international crazy girls,” “modelizers,” and “toxic bachelors,” and they devoured the knowing insider commentary:

“It all started the way it always does: innocently enough.”

“On a recent afternoon, seven women gathered in Manhattan over wine, cheese, and cigarettes, to animatedly discuss the one thing they had in common: a man.”

“The pilgrimage to the newly suburbanized friend is one that most Manhattan women have made, and few truly enjoyed.”

“On a recent afternoon, four women met at an Upper East Side restaurant to discuss what it’s like to be an extremely beautiful young woman in New York City.”

“There are worse things than being thirty-five, single, and female in New York. Like: Being twenty-five, single, and female in New York.”

Bushnell’s column contained seedlings of the fantasy life that would bloom in Sex and the City the television show. But “Sex and the City,” as a column, was a bait and switch. The clothes command high prices and the parties attract big names; however, despite the column’s name, there isn’t much sexy sex and there’s almost no romance. One character sums it up: “I have no sex and no romance. Who needs it? No fear of disease, psychopaths, or stalkers. Why not just be with your friends?” Bushnell puts it this way: “Relationships in New York are about detachment.” The writer herself had soured on marriage, telling the New York Times it was an institution that favored men. She’d once been engaged, about four years before the launch of her column, and the experience had made her feel as if she were, she said, “drowning.”<...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 150116483X
• ISBN 13: 9781501164835
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256