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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 âofficeâ 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 âPeople Weâre Talking Aboutâ 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 paperâs âsecret weapon,â 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 Kaplanâa bespectacled journalist who would become the paperâs defining editor. One fall afternoon in 1994, Kaplan said to Bushnell, âSo many people are always talking about your stories. Why donât you write a column?â When Bushnell agreed, he asked, âWhat do you think it should be about?â
âI think it should be about being a single woman in New York City,â she answered, âand all the crazy things that happen to her.â 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 ânanny camsâ 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 columnâs appeal.
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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 herâhoney-blond and Marcia Bradyâprettyâhad 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, sheâd only made it as a roommate, and even that wasnât 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 werenât 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 Ladiesâ Home Journal (where the mix of stories in a given month might include career advice from Barbara Walters, an exposĂŠ on sexually abusive doctors, and âlow-cal partyâ ideas) and Good Housekeeping (which favored more traditional topics such as a âCalorie Watchers Cookbook,â White House table settings, and âHow Charlieâs Angels Stay So Slimâ). Finally, Bushnell landed on staff as a writer at Self in an era when cover stories included âAre You Lying to Yourself about Sex?â and â12 Savvy Ways to Make More Money.â This was at least a little closer to her speed.
Throughout the â80s, 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 sheâd 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.
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It was the Observer column that would ultimately catapult her to the next level of her career. Bushnell and Kaplan got down to practicalities. Sheâd 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 âSex and the City.â A perfect newspaper column title: âpithy,â as sheâd 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 âpractically skipped up Park Avenue with joyâ leaving the office after Kaplan offered her the column.
But first things first: What to write about for her âSex and the Cityâ debut? Well, there was that sex club everyone was talking about.
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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 didnât 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. âYou must have your lower torso covered to eat,â said a sign above. Bushnell spied âa few blobby couplesâ having sex on a large air mattress in the center of the room. And, as Bushnell wrote, âmany men . . . appeared to be having trouble keeping up their end of the bargain.â A woman sat next to a Jacuzzi in a robe, smoking.
This experience became Bushnellâs first âSex and the Cityâ column, published on November 28, 1994, with the headline âSwinginâ Sex? I Donât Think So.â Despite the come-on of the columnâs name, it contained a traditional and wholesome bottom line: âI had learned that when it comes to sex, thereâs no place like home.â 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: âSex 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 itâs about spectacle, Todd Oldham dresses, Knicks tickets, the Knick [sic] themselves, or the pure terror of Not Being Alone in New York.â
Over the next two years, Bushnell would sit at her desk in her friendâs 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, âI thought about dating you, but now I wonât because I donât want to end up in your column.â She would think, You arenât interesting enough to write about anyway. Her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Vogue publisher Ron Galottiâa tanned man with slicked-back hair and a penchant for gray suits with pocket squaresâdid make the column regularly, referred to as âMr. Big.â When sheâd finish writing a column and show it to him, he would read her copy and issue his version of a compliment: âCute, baby, cute.â
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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 Americaâmuch less the worldâembraced. She only hoped to hook the select, in-the-know audience the Observer was known for, the upper echelons of high society. Bushnellâs âSex and the Cityâ column emphasizes opportunistic women on the hunt for financial salvation in Manhattanâs high-rolling men; her âCarrie Bradshawââa pseudonym for Bushnell herselfâis 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 Yorkâs party culture of the coke-fueled â80s, cracked that Bushnell âwas doing advanced postgraduate work in the subject of going out on the town.â
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 âtight 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.â 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, âlike in Edith Whartonâs time,â Bushnell says. âThere were hierarchies. Society was important, the idea of wanting to be in society.â Women still often felt as if they had to please men, like Wharton wrote in The House of Mirth of her character Lily Bart: âShe had been bored all the afternoon by Percy Gryceâthe mere thought seemed to waken an echo of his droning voiceâbut 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.â
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 cityâs 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: âShopgirls 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,â 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.
âSEXâ BEYOND THE UPPER EAST SIDE
Before long, people began to buy the Observer just to read Bushnellâs column, people outside the Observerâs standard readership. Readers loved to guess the real identities of Bushnellâs pseudonymed characters. It was said that the writer âRiver Wildeâ was probably Bret Easton Ellis, the American Psycho author. âGregory Roqueâ 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. Bigâs paramour, Carrie Bradshaw, as her âfriend.â Eventually, detailed depictions of Carrieâs lifeâher thoughts, her word-for-word conversations, her sexual escapadesâovertake the column. That, plus their shared initials, made it hard to imagine Carrie wasnât Candace. In fact, Bushnell later revealed sheâd created Carrie so her parents wouldnât knowâat least for sureâthat they were reading about their daughterâs 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 Bushnellâs dissections of city types such as âpsycho moms,â âbicycle boys,â âinternational crazy girls,â âmodelizers,â and âtoxic bachelors,â and they devoured the knowing insider commentary:
âIt all started the way it always does: innocently enough.â
âOn 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.â
âThe pilgrimage to the newly suburbanized friend is one that most Manhattan women have made, and few truly enjoyed.â
âOn a recent afternoon, four women met at an Upper East Side restaurant to discuss what itâs like to be an extremely beautiful young woman in New York City.â
âThere are worse things than being thirty-five, single, and female in New York. Like: Being twenty-five, single, and female in New York.â
Bushnellâs column contained seedlings of the fantasy life that would bloom in Sex and the City the television show. But âSex and the City,â as a column, was a bait and switch. The clothes command high prices and the parties attract big names; however, despite the columnâs name, there isnât much sexy sex and thereâs almost no romance. One character sums it up: âI have no sex and no romance. Who needs it? No fear of disease, psychopaths, or stalkers. Why not just be with your friends?â Bushnell puts it this way: âRelationships in New York are about detachment.â The writer herself had soured on marriage, telling the New York Times it was an institution that favored men. Sheâd onc...