Fran Lebowitz: 'I am really not a contrarian'
Almost from the moment she set foot in New York more than 50 years ago, Fran Lebowitz has been part of the city’s social firmament. Like it, she has moved inexorably upmarket since she first made her name as a humorist in the 70s with a column in Andy Warhol’s Interviewmagazine. Back then, she hung out with the likes of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and the New York Dolls as well as jazz legends such as Charles Mingus and Duke Ellington. These days, she rubs shoulders with fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg and former Vanity Faireditor Graydon Carter, while the late Nobel laureate Toni Morrison was a close friend and confidante.
One person who has remained a constant in her life, though, is the film director Martin Scorsese, who, like her, came of age in a time when the city was tougher, scuzzier and seedier. Until the pandemic put paid to her socialising, Lebowitz would spend every New Year’s Eve with Scorsese and a select few others, watching a classic Hollywood film in his private screening room.
“When we met, there was an instant rapport, which, I think, is really the nature of true friendship,” she tells me, sounding almost wistful. “The kind of connection we have is really as rare as true love and romance. It’s not the same, but there is something chemical about it. It’s something that just happened – there is not really an explanation for it.”
That chemistry underpinsPretend It’s a City, the hit Netflix series that, with the help of Scorsese’s deft direction and understated onscreen presence, has brought Lebowitz to the attention of a whole new audience and become an antidote for many to the constraints of our fearful, fretful times. In Scorsese, who also directed Public Speaking, a 2010 documentary about her, she has found her perfect foil: someone in thrall to her wit, in tune with her temperament and willing to give her all the space her voluble presence demands.
Filmed in 2019, before the pandemic rendered Manhattan a kind of ghost town, Pretend It’s a City gives Lebowitz free rein to hold forth on whatever she likes, which is mainly herself, and the myriad things that annoy her. They include tourists, bureaucrats, the smoking ban, the cult of wellness, mobile phones, the death of good manners, the self-obsessed and the young. “Even when I was young,” she quips, “I didn’t hang around with people my age. By the time I was in my early 30s, I had numerous friends who’d died of old age.”
Given the times we are living in, Lebowitz’s comedy of complaint should come across as insufferably petty, but instead viewers have found it diverting and her, in her relentlessly cranky way, charming. She has arrived in all her mouthy, pushy, opinionated way at exactly the right time: a forcefield of comic self-certainty in a world of anxious uncertainty. Much of this is down to her wit, which, to put it mildly, tends towards the acerbic, but also undercuts her grumpiness and castiron certitude. When I suggest that she has elevated contrarianism to the level of high art, though, she disagrees.
“First of all, I am really not a contrarian,” she says, sounding almost offended. “It is not my goal, desire or impulse to say or believe something in order to be contrary to what other people say or believe. It turns out, of course, that many of the things I say and believe are contrary to what other people think, but I do not say them for that reason. That is 100% true.”
How, then, would she describe herself? “I know this is not a view that is very widely shared, but I think of myself as a person who is very reasonable. In fact, I consider myself to be the very essence of reason and logic.”
Lebowitz is speaking to me over the phone from New York, where she famously lives a digitally disconnected life in an apartment that also houses around 10,000 books. She may be the only person in Manhattan who has chosen not to own either a laptop or a mobile phone, which means Twitter is missing out on her epigrammatic wit and she may not even be fully aware, or even care that much, that her sartorial style has lit up social media. Her defiantly masculine look – slightly outsize men’s jackets and shirts worn with turned-up Levis and embossed cowboy boots – has led one style blogger to dub her “the Angry Alternative Style Icon We Could All Learn From” and place her top of their list of “most stylish badasses of this century”.
Just how badass you can be while having your cashmere coats and jackets made bespoke by Anderson & Sheppard in Savile Row, whose only previous female client was Marlene Dietrich, is debatable. And, as some critics have pointed out, it’s a bit rich riffing on New York being a prohibitively expensive place to live, having, according to a 2017 report in Variety, “splashed out $3.1m for a one-bedroom and two-bathroom condo at the Chelsea Mercantile, a full-service, celeb-approved building on a busy corner in New York City’s Chelsea neighbourhood”.
To a degree, though, Lebowitz has always lived above her means, moving to her own apartment in midtown Manhattan not long after she first arrived there in 1969. “As soon as I could, I got my own place in the West Village,” she tells me. “It was a horrible apartment, but it wasn’t on the Lower East Side, where many of my friends lived, and which was a lot cheaper, but also a lot scarier. It was so dangerous that I would not go there to visit them, even in daylight.”
InPretend It’s a City, the defining image of her recurs in all seven episodes: a lone figure in a broad-shouldered overcoat pounding the streets of pre-pandemic Manhattan in the manner of a Mafia hitman en route to an assignment. This may be Scorsese’s little in-joke, but it is nevertheless apposite given that Lebowitz is a woman on a mission to target the many absurdities and annoyances of New York life. Her certitude is fuelled by an anger that may be exaggerated for comic effect, but it is nevertheless real and deeply felt. What irks her most is the absence of good manners – “I know you are not even meant to say that word any more” – in public life.
“When I was young,” she says, employing one of her favourite refrains, “there was a very strict idea of the boundary between the public and the private life. So, things that you might do in the privacy of your bedroom, you wouldn’t do on 12th St. That seems to have disappeared entirely and it is not just the young; it’s true even of people my age, who were brought up in a certain way and then forgot about it. It is surprising to me just how unconscious people are of themselves in public, considering how much more acceptable it has become to think about yourself all the time. This has been going on for some time, of course, but I haven’t really gotten used to it. And, yes, it angers me.”
In Pretend It’s a City, her ire is directed at the wilfully inept – city officials who spent $40m installing “lawn chairs” in Times Square – and the wilfully naive, including a young woman