Tama Janowitz

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You can’t be it for very long, and it’s probably not so much fun when you are.

In the 1980s, when New York still had a literary scene that felt central and significant, Tama Janowitz was the It Girl, chronicling and satirizing members of the striving class as they rose and fell in an unforgiving city ever-more consumed with money. Slaves that wanted to be masters, they were hungry, and by the modern vernacular, they were thirsty.

Janowitz’s own ascension to acclaimed author on the talk-show circuit whose work was adapted for the big screen was as unlikely as any, despite her talent. She was blessed. But no matter how public the success, life intervenes, the party ends. For Janowitz, it extends far beyond no longer being able to sell books that get talked about, which only a handful of serious fiction writers can still manage. In her new memoir, Scream, she details dealing with a parent’s dementia and legal battles with a sibling, among other personal calamities. It’s a long way from Letterman appearances–and a lot more interesting, as struggles usually are. 

Two excerpts follow, one from Janowitz’s best-selling bygone era and another from a review of her memoir.


The opening of Dinah Prince’s 1986 New York cover story on Tama Janowitz, written at a time when the city decided that money could buy it happiness but when literature still had a place in the discussion:

On the day before her party at the Milkbar, Tama Janowitz was in a panic. Lisa E. who had organized the affair to celebrate Janowitz’s new book of short stories,Slaves of New York, called to say she had just bought a new dress. It was long and blue and had big sexy cutouts beneath each breast.

“I was like, ‘She’s got a new dress?!‘ Janowitz recalls. “I really wanted one.”

After Janowitz hung up, the 29-year-old author tried to tell herself she would be perfectly presentable. She could wear her black velvet miniskirt and the sequined top an ex-boyfriend had got her from fashion designer Stephen Sprouse in exchange for a painting. 

“It was cute; I mean, it would have been fine,” she says.

Janowitz’s newest beau, a Texas oilman named Brady Oman, was in town for the party. When he heard about Lisa E.’s dress, he took Janowitz shopping in the East Village and SoHo.

“We ran all over looking for dresses,” Janowitz says. “He took me into IF, and, I mean, they were really pretty. But $1,500 for some froufrou thing?”

Two hours before the party, Janowitz called Paige Powell, an advertising associate at Interview.

“Paige, I have nothing to wear!” she said.

Powell met the writer and her new boyfriend at Texarkana with an armload of dresses. In the ladies’ room, Janowitz modeled a scarlet dress with one bare shoulder and a tutu that billowed from her hip.

She walked out in the dress, and it met with the approval of everyone in the restaurant,’ Powell says.

After finishing her steak, Janowitz headed to the party.

“Oh God, I tried to be nervous and thought, Well, I’ll just pretend it’s a party for somebody else,” she says. She descended the red neon-bathed staircase into the Milkbar and instantly became the center of attention. She was photographed by Newsweek, Details, and NY Talk. Patrick McMullan, a downtown paparazzo, posed her beside comedian Howie Mandel.

“I was like, I didn’t know who the person was,” she says. “Some geek who obviously didn’t know who I was and didn’t care to know who I was. But there he was, getting his picture taken with me. I said to him, ‘Howie, I’m waiting for my left breast to fall out of my dress.’ He was totally uninterested.”

Back in her tiny Horatio Street studio apartment by 2 A.M., Janowitz and Oman folded out the couch and went to bed. A few hours later, the shower curtain collapsed in the bathroom. This set off a series of ear-piercing howls from her Yorkshire terriers, Lulu and Beep-beep. Finally, after everyone got back to sleep, the phone rang at 6 A.M.

“Some guy called looking for his boyfriend,” she says, “thinking I had run off with his boyfriend.”

Such is the stuff of Tama Janowitz’s life.•


The opening of the NYT review of Scream, penned by Ada Calhoun:

“Look for the helpers” in times of tragedy, Mister Rogers advised. “If you look for the helpers, you’ll know that there’s hope.” The calamity-prone author Tama Janowitz employs an opposite strategy, focusing on those she believes are out to get her and nurturing a gimlet-eyed loathing for her fellow man. “Try as I might,” she writes, “for me, other human beings are a blend of pit vipers, chimpanzees and ants, a virtually indistinguishable mass . . . sniffing their fingers and raping.”

Janowitz’s 1986 story collection, Slaves of New York, described a culture of material striving. To make rent, its characters embraced prostitution, both professional and circumstantial. Her 2004 essay collection, Area Code 212, and various of her comic novels have satirized New York social climbers’ ruthless pursuit of wealth and nice apartments. This memoir — which spans her childhood (partly spent in 1968 Israel, where her family was booted from a hotel for not paying), her adventuresome youth (she had a fling with a 63-year-old Lawrence Durrell when she was 19), her career struggles and successes, and her more recent life as caretaker to her dying mother — shows that she comes by her obsession with money honestly.

As a quirky lit-world “it girl” (her charming, wacky Letterman appearances hold up), Janowitz enjoyed a glamorous lifestyle. But she always positioned herself as a misfit outsider. Not for nothing did Janowitz appear in her heyday on the cover of New York magazine beside a slab of meat. Here she punctures myths of the erstwhile art-party scene. Studio 54 was indeed hip, she writes, though you had to be careful on the dance floor, lest you slip, or somebody “suddenly shove a popper up your nose.”
 
Now, exiled in upstate New York, coping with her beloved mother’s decline and embroiled in a series of real estate-based dramas, she enjoys little besides horseback riding and mocking the psychotic organization of her local supermarket.•

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Bob Guccione Jr., son of a leathery beaver merchant and a visionary magazine editor like his late father, just did an AMA at Reddit about the 30th anniversary of Spin and life in the post-print digital world. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

Hi Bob, Was it ever weird growing up in your home considering who your father was? I mean did a Penthouse Pet ever come to any of your birthday parties?

Also – I don’t know if you have any pull at Penthouse – but the Penthouse Comix publication was great and included many famous and great creators. Do you think there’d be any chance these stories could be reprinted?

Bob Guccione Jr.:

It wasn’t weird! And yes, Penthouse Pets did come to my birthday parties, but only when I was in my twenties!

The models in Penthouse were always off limits to my brothers and I (and, I assume, although I never thought about it before, my sisters…). That was smart of my father. By the time we’d worked out how to get around that, we were adults and had a better perspective of who these women were, and high respect for them, and our own lives. I was married at 24 to a woman who was a writer and worked in a store in London, England.

I have no pull at Penthouse (I don’t even know if it is still being published). But I agree with you about the comics! Some of them were brilliant, and some of the artists extraordinary.

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Question:

This may be random, but do you have a most memorable Beastie Boys story?

Bob Guccione Jr.

I do! When they were starting out they used to come up to our office and skateboard around the halls. I don’t think we had particularly good halls, I think we were just the only magazine that wouldn’t throw them out. Until we did! I eventually had to told them they couldn’t come around QUITE as much, on the grounds that my staff would all stop working, hang out with them and think they had the best job in the world because, apparently, when Beastie Boys turned up, they didn’t have to work.

I liked them a lot, they were really good people. Very sincere, very gentle and smart. And when I ran into them periodically after they had become huge stars, they always made time to talk.

_________________________

Question:

What was it like meeting Nirvana for the first time?

Bob Guccione Jr.

You know, as an aside, I ALMOST asked the Dalai Lama when I interviewed him what he thought of Nirvana, but I chickened out!

I first met Kurt and Courtney at Nirvana’s manager Danny Goldberg’s house in LA. He was quite, gentle, attentive, incredibly smart and you could feel very special. We hit it off right away and at the end of dinner, as we were all leaving, I told him how much I loved his music, and he said he always enjoyed reading my Topspin columns and had been reading them since he was 16. That was the first time it occurred to me that ARTISTS read me — I don’t know why it never occurred to me before, but it hadn’t.

I later met the whole band in Seattle and we hung out for a great evening that resulted in my sending Krist Novoselic to Croatia during the war in Yugoslavia, to cover the war for us. When Kurt found out, as Krist was leaving for the airport, he went apeshit and called me up from Brazil, where the band had just finished a tour, and screamed YOU’RE SENDING MY BASS PLAYER TO A FUCKING WAR ZONE! I said yes, we were, but I was sure he’d be alright… He was, and he did one of the best pieces we ever published (and which we’ll republish this year as part of the 30th anniversary).

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Question:

What’s your favorite/the most memorable story SPIN has ever done?

Bob Guccione Jr.

Wow, how long do you have? There are so many I love, so many I’m very proud of and a ton that are memorable.

I think I’m proudest of our coverage of AIDS actually, it changed the world’s perception of how much was actually, really known about the awful disease/collection of diseases. Our reporting cut through the (then) rampant hysteria and forced a lot of crap science and reporting into the light where it could be more soberly evaluated. We ended the death-bringing reliance on AZT for instance. Our reporting, over ten years, was often controversial and very often not generally agreed with, but as I always point out, we never once, in 10 years and 120 columns, had to print a correction. Our facts were airtight. Our opinions and conclusions were often debated and some still are, but we made people think differently, and most of the time NOT politically correctly. I have NO time for political correctness. It’s a cultural fraud. And AIDS science and media coverage was rife with it, which wasn’t doing anyone any good. Sober, real factual reporting did help people and I’ve met many over the years who have said reading SPIN saved their lives. One can barely hope to achieve more in one’s life than that.

I’m also proud of our Live Aid exposes that showed that the funding was going to buy weapons and fund deadly resettlement marches that killed 100,000 people. We reported that Geldof was repeatedly warned by the relief agencies in the field not to deal with the Ethiopian dictator Mengistu, but drunk with his own glory ignored everyone and gave all the money to this murderous thug. Our articles at first had us shunned by the music industry and the world’s media but I challenged hundreds of news organizations to report it for themselves, and when they did, they came to the same conclusion, and basically the resulting press halted the funding of this genocide. I’m very proud of that.

One of my other favorite stories was Tama Janowitz’s fictional accounting of giving Bruce Springsteen’s wife a lobotomy and replacing her, and Bruce doesn’t notice…. Look it up!•

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It kind of appalls me that as a kid I didn’t really recognize how mean David Letterman was at the time. Hilarious and brilliant, sure, but oh so cruel. It just didn’t register with me. Now I cringe. Here he is in 1992 having fun at the expense of novelist Tama Janowitz, who was having her last moment as a very public writer.

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New York City has always been a gold rush but one that usually created something beautiful or exciting in the pursuit. I’m not sure that’s true anymore. When people reflexively refer to it as the “greatest city in the world,” I wince. It’s still interesting, sure, but Manhattan is now primarily the playground of the wealthy and tourists. And the things New York did that made it special, the media and such, have been diminished, dispersed and democratized by technology. You’re still special to me, New York, but we’re growing apart.

Maybe too many of the really creative people I know have dispatched to the West Coast and other points or perhaps these are the dark thoughts one has when hastily crossing the street in Soho on a Tuesday night to avoid a horde of middle-school girls in Daisy Dukes who frantically await a Kardashian poster-signing.

The opening of Dinah Prince’s 1986 New York magazine cover story on Tama Janowitz, written at a time when New York decided that money could buy it happiness but when literature still had a place in the discussion:

“On the day before her party at the Milkbar, Tama Janowitz was in a panic. Lisa E. who had organized the affair to celebrate Janowitz’s new book of short stories, Slaves of New York, called to say she had just bought a new dress. It was long and blue and had big sexy cutouts beneath each breast.

‘I was like, ‘She’s got a new dress?!‘ Janowitz recalls. I really wanted one.’

After Janowitz hung up, the 29-year-old author tried to tell herself she would be perfectly presentable. She could wear her black velvet miniskirt and the sequined top an ex-boyfriend had got her from fashion designer Stephen Sprouse in exchange for a painting. 

‘It was cute; I mean, it would have been fine,’ she says.

Janowitz’s newest beau, a Texas oilman named Brady Oman, was in town for the party. When he heard about Lisa E.’s dress, he took Janowitz shopping in the East Village and SoHo.

‘We ran all over looking for dresses,’ Janowitz says. ‘He took me into IF, and, I mean, they were really pretty. But $1,500 for some froufrou thing?’

Two hours before the party, Janowitz called Paige Powell, an advertising associate at Interview.

‘Paige, I have nothing to wear!’ she said.

Powell met the writer and her new boyfriend at Texarkana with an armload of dresses. In the ladies’ room, Janowitz modeled a scarlet dress with one bare shoulder and a tutu that billowed from her hip.

She walked out in the dress, and it met with the approval of everyone in the restaurant,’ Powell says.

After finishing her steak, Janowitz headed to the party.

‘Oh God, I tried to be nervous and thought, Well, I’ll just pretend it’s a party for somebody else,’ she says. She descended the red neon-bathed staircase into the Milkbar and instantly became the center of attention. She was photographed by Newsweek, Details, and NY Talk. Patrick McMullan, a downtown paparazzo, posed her beside comedian Howie Mandel.

‘I was like, I didn’t know who the person was,’ she says. ‘Some geek who obviously didn’t know who I was and didn’t care to know who I was. But there he was, getting his picture taken with me. I said to him, ‘Howie, I’m waiting for my left breast to fall out of my dress.’ He was totally uninterested.’

Back in her tiny Horatio Street studio apartment by 2 A.M., Janowitz and Oman folded out the couch and went to bed. A few hours later, the shower curtain collapsed in the bathroom. This set off a series of ear-piercing howls from her Yorkshire terriers, Lulu and Beep-beep. Finally, after everyone got back to sleep, the phone rang at 6 A.M.

‘Some guy called looking for his boyfriend,’ she says, ‘thinking I had run off with his boyfriend.’

Such is the stuff of Tama Janowitz’s life.”

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Spy magazine existed during the ’80s mostly to ensure that Tama Janowitz didn’t get away with too much. You see, Tama Janowitz wrote novels that were more successful than their merit suggested they should be, so she needed to be put in her place. Thankfully, a bunch of jackasses with fancy educations who wished they were writing crappy books that sold a lot of copies were there to ridicule her. Take that, Tama Janowitz!

Seriously, Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter chose just the right moment to publish Spy. New York was in the midst of a decade of greed that rivaled the Roaring Twenties for excess but with none of the earlier era’s panache. The publication was there to take the piss out of the whole stupid thing–the Milkens, the Helmsleys, the Trumps. (I will always feel indebted to Spy for dubbing Donald Trump a “short-fingered vulgarian.”) I can’t say I ever read the magazine much at the time, but the only things that came out of that decade that ended up influencing comedy more were Letterman and the Simpsons.

I got my grimy, grubby fingers on a copy of the October 1989 issue that is built around the “Spy 100,” the snarky mag’s annual takedown of insider traders, political advisors and all manner of irksome cretins that made NYC break out in hives. It features a fairly famous cover that shows President Bush (the sleepy one, not his son who gave the entire planet a vigorous rogering from behind) with words carved into his hair, as was the idiotic custom of some kids of the time. (The idea was later borrowed for this Newsweek cover.) The list skewers the expected (political hit-man Lee Atwater was number one), the unexpected (people excessively grieving the late Lucille Ball) and, yes, Tama Janowitz. An excerpt from the passage about hotelier horror Leona Helmsley:

“Caught billing more than $4 million in personal expenses to the real estate empire she gold-dug out of her now-enfeebled husband. Convicted of tax evasion (conspiracy and mail fraud; acquitted on charges of extortion of kickbacks from cowering business vendors). Continued running self-reverential ads. Anticipating the horror stories about her routine terorization of employees, Leona’s lawyer admitted in opening remarks–boasted even–that she was a ‘tough bitch.’ Trump called her a ‘disgrace to humanity in general.'”

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