To New York, for a benefit gala at Cipriani 42nd Street for the Norman Mailer Centre and Writers Colony. We are there as a team to present British GQ’s first student writing award to a 65-year-old mother of two: Helen Madden, who presented the children’s TV show Romper Room in the early 1970s and still looks about 40. She wrote the winning story, ‘Rod, Roy and Jerry Lee’, while doing a creative writing MA at Queen’s University in Belfast, and its hearty nature appealed to almost everyone on the panel of judges. Tina Brown, Jann Wenner, and the super-cool Gay Talese were all in evidence, along with Taki, Michael Wolff, the irrepressible Larry Schiller and Mailer’s beautiful widow Norris. When I asked Tom Wolfe how his new novel was coming on, he said, ‘If it’s not finished next year I’m going to be spurting blood instead of ink.’
As part of her prize, Helen spent a month this summer in the Norman Mailer Writers Colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the place that Mailer called home. I spent a night in Mailer’s house, sleeping in his bed and reading a first edition of Tough Guys Don’t Dance, which is set in Provincetown. That night I’d spent an hour upstairs, rooting around his studio, which has been kept exactly as Mailer left it before he died. This room at the top of the stairs is the house’s holy grail, the place where the heavyweight champion of the word wrote his books, where he crafted many of the convoluted, Thesaurus-combed pieces that made him famous, where he spent his days trying to conjure up a book that would generate as much acclaim as The Naked and the Dead or Ancient Evenings. Here you’ll find old manuscripts, the daybed where he would take naps, unopened packs of highlighter pens, his rocking chair, the plastic clothes hangers on which he’d hang his blazers, and a multi-gym he used only once, but which was too heavy to dismantle. The detritus in his studio shows his propensity for exhaustive research, and the room is still littered with books he was using for his uncompleted Third Reich tome. I also found a huge magnifying glass; research papers would be photocopied twice the size so he could read them, while his handwritten pages would be faxed to his secretary in NY to type up. As you walk up the stairs to his studio, the first thing you see is a Bellevue Hospital sign. Mailer was sent there in 1960 after he stabbed his second wife with a penknife, nearly killing her; he wanted to be reminded every day of the awful thing he did.
The new thing in New York is the food mall, and the hottest one is Eataly (see what they did there?), a gigantic celebration of all things Italian promoted by Mario Batali on 23rd Street, near the equally hot Ace Hotel. Here you can buy a hundred different pastas, more varieties of arborio rice than you knew existed, and — if you’ve been doing your homework, or maybe even speak the language — read the Italian newspapers on wall-mounted iPads. Be careful when leaving though, as the partial pedestrianisation of Broadway can lull you into a false sense of security, and if you’re laden with stracciatella di burrata, heirloom cherry tomatoes or maitake mushrooms, you could find your dinner all over the sidewalk.
New Yorkers don’t often take that much notice of British politics. At a lunch for Michael Bloomberg at the Conservative party conference in Blackpool a few years ago, the mayor was asked if Gordon Brown had much of a profile in Manhattan. ‘No,’ he said flatly. ‘The only European leader they’ve heard of is Sarkozy.’ They’ve certainly heard of the new Labour leader, although he has been given a new soubriquet, a contraction of his News International nickname: ‘Red Miliband’ (irony: none).
Quentin Crisp once said that Los Angeles is just New York lying down. Which by the same token must mean that New York is Los Angeles standing up, at least some of the time. Power courses through the city like signals through a fibre-optic cable, power that thinks it’s more important than its West Coast equivalent because it’s so high up in the sky. And with good reason. In New York, there’s no room for amateurs. Whether you’re trying to forge a career, order another drink or cross the street, you better know what you’re doing. Having said that, I’ve never understood why some New Yorkers are so unrelentingly parochial. I’ve been visiting the city since 1984, and one of the first things that struck me was the way in which some city-dwellers are so obsessed with status that it clouds almost every aspect of their lives. There is so much I love about New York, but I’ve always found the status paranoia silly, especially when the latest New-And-Unbelievably-Hot-And-Oh-So-Cool-And-Impossible-To-Get-Into restaurant turns out to be nothing but an expensive version of Café Rouge. I’m sure a lot of New Yorkers would have a much better time if they stopped equating everything to getting into a nightclub. Worried about not getting in? Hey, stay at home. Send out. Chill. Honestly. They’re nearly as bad as Londoners.
Dylan Jones is the editor of GQ.