From column to cultural staple
‘Sex and the City’ began with a newspaper and a hopeful young author
Before six seasons of premium cable television, before endless reruns on basic cable, 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 Nov. 28, 1994. The column’s author and central character, Candace Bushnell, was then a 35-year-old 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 closetful 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 socialized 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.
Throughout the 1980s, Bushnell, a native of Connecticut who attended Rice University and New York University, had written articles for women’s magazines. She also networked, dated and dreamed of publishing a book.
The Observer was then a small but influential weekly broadsheet, published on salmonpink paper by Arthur Carter, an investment banker, and edited for 15 years by the late, great Peter Kaplan.
When Bushnell began writing for the paper in the early ‘90s, and soon after got her own column, it was a “huge deal,” she said — 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 front-page news.
“When I got the column, I felt, ‘I know what to do with this’ If I’d have gotten the column when I was 28, I just wouldn’t have known what to do with it,” Bushnell said.
“I changed people’s names. I love those characters. Like the two 25-year-old girls? The one I call Cici, I won’t say who she is today, but she’s very successful. Every time I see her, we’re laughing our heads off about those stories.”
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 gas station that appeared frequently in her column.
“It would be pretty usual to have six to10 invitations a night. Of course, they’d come in the mail. Because people still sent invitations by mail, not email. And people made schedules. You’d make a schedule of the parties you were going to and in what order.”
One night in 1995, Bushnell, Morgan Entrekin, CEO and publisher of Grove Atlantic and Judy Hottensen, associate publisher of Grove Atlantic, among others, wound up at the Bowery Bar, where talk turned to her column. It was a life-changing evening.
“Ron is the publisher of Vogue magazine for a reason. The man knows how to make a deal,” Bushnell said. “I don’t know what he said, but the next thing I know, Judy is saying, ‘Yes, Morgan, we should do this as a book,’ and Morgan’s like, ‘OK, I’ll offer you $20,000.’ And Mr. Big, Ron Galotti, said, ‘Oh, come on. Make it 25.’ ”
Darren Star, creator and executive producer of Sex and the City (the show), looking for another New York-based project after the cancellation of Central Park West, optioned Bushnell’s column. The show made many people famous and wealthy, including Bushnell. But what seems now like a sure thing was then only a vague idea. “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?’ “Bushnell said. “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.”