‘There’s a Carrie in every town and there’s a Samantha in every town -– and I’ve met them all’
Twenty years after Sex and the City first aired, the team who created it recall how a humble newspaper column led to a cultural phenomenon, writes Steven Kurutz
Before six seasons of premium cable television, before endless reruns, before a hit movie and a sequel, before Manolo Blahnik became a household name, before the fan bus tours to Carrie’s stoop, the rise and fall of Bleecker Street, and Cynthia Nixon’s surprise campaign for governor, before all of that, there was a newspaper column.
Sex and the City first appeared in the New York Observer on 28 November, 1994. The column’s author and central character, Candace Bushnell, was then a 35-yearold freelance writer with talent and charm and just as much anxiety over whether it was ever going to happen for her.
“It” was a lot of things: a successful career as a writer, love, marriage, a wardrobe full of Chanel or even money to pay the rent. One year, Bushnell said, she earned $14,000 and was thrown out of her sublet. But she also summered in the Hamptons, dated the publisher of Vogue (the real Mr Big) and socialised with famous writers and rich people.
Things did work out. In 1996, the columns were collected in a book of the same name. Two years later came the HBO series starring Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw, a cultural juggernaut that eclipsed both the book and the column.
On the 20th anniversary of the TV show’s debut, we caught up with Bushnell and friends and colleagues from those years to tell the back story of how Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte came to be. And to revisit New York in the mid-1990s, when few had mobile phones, downtown could still be dangerous, and the print medium was king.
Morgan Entrekin, CEO and publisher of Grove Atlantic
I first met Candace through some friends. It was up on this very strange, wonderful place, Fishers Island, in the late ‘80s. She was a houseguest there with a boyfriend, Jeff Carpenter, an artist. As soon as I met her she said, “I’m a writer.”
Peter Stevenson, former editor of the New York Observer
We had several mutual friends. We dated for a while. It was lovely and I couldn’t keep up with her. At the time I met her, she was living in a studio or one-bedroom on the East Side. She was staying at a friend’s house. The friend, Anne something, had a magazine called Scene.
John Homans, former Observer editor
Candace was always like a character in fiction. She was wisecracking. She was brassy, funny, always smiling. If you called her home number, she’d say, “Hello, Scene.” There was no gap between her professional and personal life.
Bushnell: I didn’t have a place to live. Anne and I made a deal. I had to answer the phone and pretend to be her secretary and I could live there. I slept on a foldout couch. I had no money. I probably made $2,000 a month. When you want to do something, who cares?
Stevenson: Whenever she was paid for a piece, she would be more likely to buy a pair of $800 shoes than go out and stock up the fridge. I remember one of her staples was sardines and crackers.
Bushnell: Anne and I really worked. It was the only thing that saved us, otherwise we would have gone crazy. But then at the end of the day, inevitably three or four girlfriends would end up coming over. We’d meet up, have some laughs, and then maybe we’d go out. It was a lot of talking, spilling of our lives: “Hey, this is what happened to me.” We were the Sex and the City women. We were in our mid-30s. We were supposed to be married. Married or CEOS. And somehow, we just hadn’t gotten there.
When Bushnell began writing for the Observer in the early ‘90s, and soon after got her own column, it was a “huge deal,” she says – not monetarily, but a high-profile opportunity to cover wealth and power in New York for a publication that was literary and irreverent. The editors ran Sex and the City on the cover, treating dating, gender roles and social change as frontpage news.
Bushnell: There was constant angst. “What’s going to happen to me? What’s going to happen to all of us whose lives aren’t
“That’s the thing about Sex and the City. It’s written by somebody who is desperate for a roof over their head”
following the script?” I can’t say it was bleak because, listen, we had a lot of girlfriends who were having a great time. But this wasn’t a group of women that people were saying, “You’re fabulous. You go, girls.” Instead, we were really considered pariahs.
Judy Hottensen, associate publisher, Grove Atlantic
Professional women not marrying at the very earliest age, holding out and having careers, getting married and getting divorced – there was a lot of that going on. For women in New York, it was a turning point. That was the column’s gravitational pull, and why people related to it.
Bushnell: There were quite a few women who thought they were Samantha. A lot of that is due to the TV show. There’s a Carrie in every town and there’s a Samantha in every town -– and I’ve met them all.
Like many young, ambitious New Yorkers in the era before social media, Bushnell viewed going out as part of her job. On any night of the week, she might attend a book party, a fashion event or go to the Bowery Bar, a downtown watering hole in a converted petrol station that appeared frequently in her column.
Darren Star, creator and executive producer of Sex and the City (the show)
I came to New York to do this CBS series, Central Park West, which was ultimately not successful. It was an exciting time to be in New York. The city was coming to life again. I met Candace when she interviewed me for Vogue. I remember Candace and Ron going to dinner at Le Cirque, and Ron was wearing a tuxedo. Old New York still felt like it was there.
One night in 1995, Bushnell, Entrekin and Hottensen, among others, ended up at the Bowery Bar, where talk turned to her column. It was a lifechanging evening.
Entrekin: We were sitting at a table and I said, “Candace, those columns are very clever. Are you going to write enough of them to make a book?” She said, “If you give me a contract, I will.”
Bushnell: It’s about relationships and power and status and pecking order – which is something that everybody in New York understands because you live it every day. Everybody lives these little indignities. Somebody at the very top of the heap talks to you, you’re like a little bird: “I’m going to take this crumb back to my nest, and I’m going to survive on this crumb for the next three days.”
Star: When we did the pilot, Candace took me on a trip to the Four Seasons Nevis. I remember her saying, “They’re going to teach this show at universities.” I was, like, “What are you talking about? I hope this show gets on the air.” She was very gungho from the beginning. I was thinking, “Am I going to work again? Are people going to misinterpret this and think it’s pornographic?”
Bushnell: That’s all I wanted to do, write books. When I moved to New York, I thought that I was just going to start writing novels and they would be published. And I was 35 and I was really facing, “Am I ever going to write a book?” I put everything in my life on the line so that I can publish a book and somehow make it. You know, that’s the thing about Sex and the City. It’s written by somebody who is desperate for a roof over their head, really.
© NYT 2018