Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Alamy, Getty Images
Three tiny titans — rich man, poor man, Canadian — came to New York. Barry Diller, of Beverly Hills, arrived here in 1966 in his mid-20s, finding the city so “overstimulating and disorienting” that he had “severe stomach cramps” each night. Keith McNally arrived a decade later, in 1975, at the time of his arrival also about 25 and late of bumming around the world. To him, the city “seemed more like the films than the films themselves.” New York “in the summer of 1978 was a festering pot of arson, stabbings, prostitution, and graffiti,” says Graydon Carter about his arrival; he dallied in Canada until his later 20s and did himself the favor of transgressing the border to secure a job first before his arrival. He loved it here: “I can’t recall when I had ever been so happy.”
For thousands of us over the last decades, they were our bosses. Now, they all have memoirs that reveal much. Why do these older men who have often loomed so large in the worlds of media, dining, and entertainment suddenly want to show us their tender bits? Maybe they felt we’ve all been too incurious. As bosses, we knew them better from “Page Six” than reality, and we were too young to know that, just like us, they arrived as young, silly, and unsure people themselves, entering industries that were previously dominated by eccentric, unhinged, even venal characters. These three, though, in their own telling, were relatively well adjusted. Can you believe it? Here they are to confess their pile of phobias: just the usual, like heights, planes, exposure, heartache, the agony of being back-stabbed, contemplation of the self. (Collectively they have also slept with more men than you might have suspected.)
They move fast. Carter, seven years after his arrival, is already looking for backing from billionaires to launch Spy. “I often wonder where I found the confidence at twenty-nine to open a 130-seat restaurant in Manhattan after arriving in America only five years earlier,” McNally writes. His wondrous nightclub Nell’s, Carter’s Spy, and Diller’s Fox all arrive in 1986. Nell’s “turned away five hundred people” on opening night; Susan Sontag mingled with Andy Warhol.
Do you ever feel like a fraud? One important thing to know about bosses is that they often know nothing and may continue knowing nothing for quite some time. New York City needs you not for what you know but for what you are. Diller spent three years down in the agency mail room reading the history of agenting and found that his lifelong method was to study absolutely everything until he could take it apart and put it back together all new. Diller’s other method, and he knows how terrible a process it was for some, was driving everyone crazy and thrashing at an idea until it was as good as possible. This may or may not make him the rare good boss, depending on your disposition, but it definitely makes him the rare boss with appropriate amounts of self-insight.
Carter, whether new to New York or new to Condé Nast, was terrified of being asked anything, because he knew nothing, and his talent was surrounding himself with the hilarious, daring, and super-competent. He is haplessly appointed the editor of Vanity Fair and simply never gets fired. (A talent itself.) McNally, though, is more a creature of need; something between a hobbit and a dragon, he can’t stop re-creating a lair that manifests as a restaurant that then manifests as a business. This is a strange habit, but, lucky for us, it does result in a suite of businesses that define a city (and can take in $80 million a year, pandemics and cultural love of meat depending).
This is the tiny bosstown nestled inside New York City where they all live. Barry Diller is fired by Nora Ephron back at the school paper in Beverly Hills; she is the same reader who tells Carter she rushes to buy Spy on the newsstands. Aimée Bell, who worked for Carter for decades — he is her son’s godfather — edited McNally’s memoir. Andrew Sullivan, who acerbically wrote for Spy as a child, is the one who told a future internet mogul Diller about AOL. Carter, who is friends with Keith McNally’s tempestuous brother Brian, of Indochine fame, goes to a Yankees game in Lorne Michaels’s car with McNally. Brian met his wife through an introduction from Anna Wintour, who eats at Balthazar five nights in its first week and whom Carter spends 25 years trying to figure out and never quite does. (She suddenly bursts into focus toward the end of his book. “Anna Wintour tends to greet me either like her long-lost friend or like the car attendants,” he writes. She is the biggest boss of them all.) Carter is watching what Diller makes and taking a little credit for it too: “It’s rare for me to watch an episode of The Simpsons and not see a name in the credits that had once been on the Spy masthead,” he writes. Yes, sure, but the Harvard-to-comedy pipeline can only extrude so many white men.
Brian McNally opened 150 Wooster in 1986; Diller was there, David Geffen was there, Warhol was there. Diane von Furstenberg, Carter’s Connecticut neighbor and Diller’s future wife, was there, and through her he became friends with Diller, who he concedes made him nervous at first. It ends well: Diller does a little investing in Carter’s current publication, Air Mail.
In fact, it is possible to build a megamemoir of New York City if you simply chopped and dealt these three memoirs into one. Jay McInerney shows up at the Odeon in 1984 and asks if he can use its exterior image for the cover of his book, the year Barry Diller, then 42, is leaving Paramount, planning to go to 20th Century Fox (he is more likely to eat at Mr Chow). Richard Gere not only has a nasty fight with Brian McNally at Karl Lagerfeld’s (who among us?); he gets the blame for busting up Diller’s relationship with Diane von Furstenberg even though Diller helped put him in his star-making role in American Gigolo.
They live and work in an even skinnier Manhattan that only stretches from the Dakota to the Carlyle to Tribeca. When it’s not Balthazar, it’s just Elaine’s, the Russian Tea Room, and so on. And it’s a town, you have already suspected, that is run on instinct. Carter rejects the Condé consultants with data and “resumed trusting our instincts.” Diller: “I do not believe that using instinct rather than deep, hard numerical or fact-based data to help with decision-making is the lazier process.” The word instinct — “which I prize almost above all else” — appears on more than 20 pages in his memoir; the word success appears on 74 pages in his book, and something like 50 in McNally’s.
Around them, empires and their technologies rise and fall. Carter started at Life, already a zombie mag, and saw the picture book decline when advertising went to the big-three networks, even as Diller saw the splintering of their dominant TV landscape. Business models, as they always have been, are tried on and discarded: What if there could be a newspaper that comes out on Tuesdays and Thursdays, for the shopping ads and the entertainment ads? What if there could be a fourth TV network — or a channel that showed you things to buy? Here we are, in the sweaty lap of what they made for us.
As each man arrives nearer the present — it’s our time, sweet babe — he becomes less thorough, more telegraphic, maybe less sure. They want to end their stories but they haven’t seen the end yet. Diller is rich beyond comprehension, and he knows exactly what to do with it; McNally is still mildly disabled from the stroke that has tortured him for years, but, through great labor, his speech is recovered enough for him to get off good jokes. Maybe they know there is no real satisfying endgame to being on top, as Showgirls taught us long ago.
As you digest all three — particularly McNally’s, shot through with the pain and fear of being alive, and Diller’s surprisingly vivid and instructive text — you can try on some personal boss-types and boss-methods. Shop for tactics. Take two for yourself; they clearly work. And believe it: Every day you are being more timid and reasonable and far less bold than any of these three would ever be.
When the lobster pot is getting hot for those of you surviving on your paychecks, these memoirs reveal that’s when the big boss is renegotiating his contracts, gathering investors, retreating to his country houses. The silent fourth memoir here is the unwritten book that tells the story of the rest of you who labored meanwhile, and what publisher would buy that?
