‘A chronicle from a lost civilization’
“No sticks or dips; one bite.”
That has long been the rule in publicity circles when it comes to the Manhattan party circuit, as Ben Widdicombe reveals in his dishy, digressing new memoir “Gatecrasher: How I Helped the Rich Become Famous and Ruin the World.” That is to say: don’t serve anything “a: on a skewer, as the party guest will then have to find some surface on which to set it down, b: that requires being dipped into a sauce, as that will drip, or c: larger than one swallow, as that will leave crumbs.”
Tracking all the dinners he’s cobbled together from trays of apps over the past two decades — during his tenure writing one of the premiere gossip columns at the New York Daily News, but also during stints at Page Six and the New York Times — Widdicombe makes the point that both “anthropologists and journalists know that every culture reveals itself in its trash,” and that “the evolution of the passed appetizer … charts the shifting cultural values of the city as much as any record of election results … or hemlines.”
Consider, the ebb of the ’90s when — in tandem with the dot-com boom and its bust in 2001 — you sometimes got caviar, typically served on a bed of sour cream supported by either a blini or finger-sized new potato. “When the market for tech stocks tanked, however, “passed appetizers disappeared for a while, and in those lean times it became all about Parmesan cheese straws, stacked together like kindling in a beer glass at the bar.”
Cue: the mid-2000s, when the economy started gassing again and “tuna tartare came to represent the hopeful new millennium.” Further good times swam, chugged along by an overzealous Wall Street and the rise of subprime mortgages — and, with them, the arrival of lamb chops at cocktail parties. A turning point. (All of this I remember being mirrored at Toronto shindigs.)
“No doubt the optics were seductive for a certain kind of event planner: confident men eating red meat, right off the bone,” Widdicombe writes, “but lamb chops proved to be the ultimate hubristic hors d’oeuvre. For a start, caterers were often confused about how to heat the lamb — were they supposed to cook it, in those little toaster ovens in the food-prep area, or just keep it warm? … And forget messy cocktail sticks; suddenly there were actual animal bones being left around events, stuffed between the cushions of white party-hire sofas …”
Post-Lehman Brothers brouhaha and the global economy taking a crash, mini-quiches became a thing. For so long, vegetarian options at these dos manifested (if you were lucky) in the form of herbed cream cheese spooned into the curl of an endive leaf, with vegan alternatives only starting to emerge in the Obama years — which, incidentally, is also when mini-hamburgers gained popularity. See: a cocktail party booby-trap. Sliders at fashion parties, in particular, “may look good, and you may be hungry, but there is no coming back from the slovenly spectacle of eating a hamburger of any size. It is etiquette Armageddon … and don’t think you’re not being watched.”
Alas, no such considerations were needed when I found Widdicombe earlier this week. Keeping up appearances on Zoom — where much of social life has shifted these days — is where the boulevardier found himself during a Q&A promoting his book. An online bow for a whole book about IRL parties! An irony not lost on the native Australian.
“I don’t even have to wear pants,” Widdicombe remarked during an email exchange later. A friend of mine and sometime-accomplice — he was starting out in the boldface trade just as I was — he added: “The period of New York decadence I was chronicling certainly felt like Nero’s last dinner party before the fire. Turns out, the flames started at the exact moment the book came out. So it’s ironic this most social of memoirs is being launched with all the intimacy of a prison visit … with palms pressed against the Plexiglas … what was merely nostalgic four months ago now seems like a chronicle from a lost civilization …”
Indeed, his memoir doubles as a proper time capsule of fame-slash-society as well as a love letter to New York — in some ways, picking up in the aughts where Tina Brown left off in “The Vanity Fair Diaries,” spanning the ’80s and early ’90s. It traces Ben’s trajectory, from working at a hot-dog stand when he first arrived in town (Harrison Ford would sometimes come by for a bun) to his slow absorption into the celebrity-sphere (he was the first to break the story about the Kim Kardashian sex tape!)
Rewinding to a time of Razr phones and boot-cut jeans, TomKat and Bush twins — a time when the original World Trade Center towers still stood and JFK Jr. was the prince of Tribeca — it is, for all its boldface, a canny study of how everyone slowly became their own personal brands and how the levers of gossip itself became the news (see: the current occupant of the White House). The crossroads of celebrity and money. The end of shame. The kabuki of sucking-up.
Here: Widdicombe and his partner at the time starting a DIY gossip site called Chic Happens (an heirloom of the early internet because it was pre-Gawker, pre-Perez Hilton). There: Widdicombe encountering Monica Lewinsky, who was the first famous person he small-talked, a moment that he now sums up as a kind of paralysis of dissonance, in that “encountering a celebrity is like watching a film with 3-D glasses. The brain has to merge two stereoscopic images — the person and the persona.”
Liza, Tatum, Tyra, Karl, Harvey, Jared. The tickertape of names, past and present, come in and out. Paris Hilton, the Amelia Earhart of the branded-heiress trend, looms large, with Widdicombe spending an ample part of the book explaining how the Hilton and Trump families interlock (“The Hiltons were the Trumps before the Trumps became the Hiltons,” he posits.)
“In those days,” he writes, “the celebrity hangouts were Bungalow 8, a small club in West Chelsea, and Beatrice Inn in the West Village. Snow drifts of drugs ran through both clubs. Beatrice attracted a younger, hip, downtown set, like Heath Ledger, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, and Chloë Sevigny, whose brother, Paul, was an owner of the club. Bungalow was run by Amy Sacco, the nightlife queen of the moment. She brought in a slightly more conventional Hollywood crowd, like Owen Wilson, Jeremy Piven, and Lindsay Lohan.”
Another point he accentuates is the extent to which the New York fashion scene blew up during the ’90s and early aughts, especially in those Carrie Bradshaw days — and then fell off in the “influencers” era. The centres of gravity shifted. One juicy passage, pivoting around a Marc Jacobs show — one that drew everyone from Sarah Jessica Parker to Donald and Melania — reads super-star-studded. And yet, also like a liturgy, given its date. “To be among that crowd felt like a moment of arrival … there never had been a party like this, and as it turned out, there never would be again. It was the night of September 10, 2001,” writes Widdicombe.
It is a book with no shortage of observations sharp as the spokes on an Alessi Starck juicer. Take: “Nothing annoys a millionaire more than a billionaire.” Or: “When Jude Law decides to be on, it’s like interviewing a tanning bed.” Elaine’s, the now-gone everyone-goes-there eatery, was “the Star Wars cantina of faded literati.”
Nostalgia only gets you so far, though. By the time he reaches the end — the era having moved to a world of TikToks and #MeToo — he looks around a party in the Hamptons and mulls on what has now replaced old New York society.
“The setting would have been familiar to F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Widdicombe writes, “but the characters had been radically updated. Now a Fox News anchor was playing the part of Daisy Buchanan and the twenty-seven-year-old director of product for a dating app was Gatsby.
“I wondered whether these parties, where we stood around drinking George Clooney’s tequila … would exert the same pull on future generations as the grand balls described by Fitzgerald and Capote had on us. They probably would, I thought. After all, people will always be fascinated by money.”