Sex and the City and Us, page 16
NEIGHBORHOOD NEMESES
Writing a neighborhood into the show could, by season 3 and after, push it over the brink. That meant great things for real estate values, and bad things for New Yorkers who enjoyed being able to get a table without a reservation.
In the third season, for instance, Samantha moves to the Meatpacking District, just south of the gay neighborhood of Chelsea and north of the perpetually cool West Village. Even though Meatpacking had been sashaying toward becoming party central since before Sex and the City premiered, the show would be blamed for “ruining” the historically industrial area.
And if everyone in those Meatpacking clubs was drinking a cosmo, that came as no surprise. No show had more clearly made a drink happen than Sex and the City with its cosmopolitans. The mix of citrus vodka, Cointreau, cranberry juice, and lime juice—or some version of it—first became popular in the gay strongholds of Miami and Provincetown, then took hold in Manhattan in 1987 at the trendy Tribeca haunt the Odeon. The cool kids like Bushnell and her ilk would have known it from there, and it made its first appearance on Sex and the City near the end of the show’s second season in 1999. Fans embraced it: Like cupcakes, drinks offered a simple, affordable way to get a dose of Sex and the City glamour.
This helped boost drinking culture, which had long been an integral part of New York City life, but spread to other places as well. Going out with the girls was now equated with sipping pink cocktails, not drinking herbal tea or sharing lattes at a coffeehouse like the characters did on Friends. Gay writer Ginger Hale wrote on Autostraddle about how her alcoholism began during the show’s heyday: “Even the women on Sex and the City were living the fabulous single life, going out somewhere amazing every night and guzzling Cosmos by the barrel,” she said. “If the straights were doing it, well then, we were not to be outdone because we were not normative; we were rebels! The reality was that I had become another queer substance abuse statistic and there was nothing fabulous about my life. Or at least everything that was fabulous about my life was being drowned in alcohol.”
Sex and the City life came with a price, one way or another.
THE BUS TOUR
Nothing encapsulates the marketing of the Sex and the City lifestyle better than the Sex and the City bus tour.
In June 1999, Georgette Blau was walking uphill on a Manhattan street just after she moved to the city from Connecticut, and she thought about the 1970s sitcom The Jeffersons, in which a couple, George and Louise, were, according to their theme song, “movin’ on up to the East Side, to a deluxe apartment in the sky.” She thought tourists might enjoy visiting the site of the Jeffersons’ upward mobility, as well as a variety of other famous filming locations. So she started a company to conduct bus tours of spots in New York City that had been featured in television shows and movies.
Soon she sold out buses of thirty people or more who wanted to see famous TV sites throughout the city. As Sex and the City rose in popularity, Blau considered a tour dedicated just to the show. She decided to launch one with a target date of September 13, 2001. Blau was in her office putting the final touches on her Sex and the City tour scripts when the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, struck downtown. New York City was in mourning. Blau had spent the four prior months planning the tour, but she knew that now she’d wait longer, as long as it took for life to feel normal again.
The tour finally launched in the middle of season 4, in early 2002, just after the company’s similar tour of sites from The Sopranos in New Jersey. Blau had narrowed ninety-five Sex and the City locations down to a dozen, working on a five-foot-square map. The tour started with the Pleasure Chest, the sex toy shop in the West Village, as an icebreaker. It moved through the major elements of the show: a little eating (cupcakes), a little sex (vibrators), a little drinking (cosmos at a bar), and a little shopping (Bleecker Street).
After more than three seasons, the audience for Sex and the City had grown from 3.8 million viewers for its debut to 6.5 million for its fourth-season premiere. The series’s cultural cachet was ripe for commercial development, and the tour became a symbol of its salability.
But the bus tour’s early days were not without their share of speed bumps.
• • •
The Sex and the City bus tour stoked tensions between Magnolia’s estranged founders, and between Magnolia and its neighborhood. The bakery’s two original owners, Appel and Torey, had split up over differences in business approach—Appel wanted to expand, Torey wanted to keep things local—just a year before Sex and the City came calling. Blau’s tour featured Magnolia as a stop, but Torey didn’t want to change the store’s twelve-cupcakes-per-order limit. At first, the tour would send a few employees in to order a dozen cupcakes each in an effort to feed all of the day’s tourgoers. Torey, who liked the shop best when it was a small neighborhood operation, asked the tour to place advance orders or stop coming in altogether. The tour ended up ordering from Appel’s Buttercup instead.
This resulted in the awkward spectacle of tourgoers standing across the street from Magnolia, the vanilla scent of baked goods undoubtedly wafting over, while they chowed down on Buttercup cupcakes. Some of the tour guides, according to a New York magazine report, even explained the discrepancy to tourgoers by implying that Appel and Torey had been onetime lovers who broke up their business after breaking up their relationship. Blau told the publication that wasn’t in the official script, but Torey found out about it when an employee’s wife videotaped her own tour experience. “They completely badmouth us, they get the cupcakes from somewhere else, and then they take all their cupcake boxes from Buttercup and stuff them in our garbage pails,” Torey told New York. “So we have to go out and dump the garbage because they’re overflowing with Buttercup boxes.”
Frustrated by the crowds, Torey put up signs in the shop emphasizing the dozen-cupcake maximum. She cut back her own time in the shop to just a few days a month and retreated upstate to write cookbooks the rest of the time. She had grown up in a Catskills hotel and worked as a jazz singer before she opened Magnolia, so she was used to a slower-paced life. Torey told New York, “A lot of people are very business-oriented. They just want to open more places and make more money, and that’s how they think. That’s just not me.”
Appel, meanwhile, began to pursue her own franchise options.
• • •
Businessman Steve Abrams had a house upstate in Sullivan County, New York, where he was part of a dinner-party circuit that included Torey. Torey’s cooking, her baking especially, impressed Abrams. But he didn’t know that she was Magnolia Bakery. They didn’t talk business.
Then he found out: She was the force behind the cupcake craze, behind that whole Sex and the City thing. He had watched the show, understood its appeal.
Abrams asked her if she would someday consider licensing the Magnolia brand to him for a few stores. He felt the business could grow by marketing to Sex and the City fans throughout the United States and the world. A Magnolia cupcake wasn’t just a cupcake: It was a symbol of an enviable lifestyle, a stand-in for designer clothes and dinners at exclusive restaurants.
It didn’t take long for her to come up with her answer. She asked if he wanted to buy the whole thing: the store on Bleecker and the Magnolia name.
He took the deal, and she was gone, back upstate. Out of the business. She bought a farm and adopted a baby.
Abrams turned her six-hundred-square-foot, $500,000-per-year bakery into a multimillion-dollar business. The cupcake craze would play out worldwide for the next decade-plus because of one scene on Sex and the City.
While cupcakes had long been part of American culture, overseas Sex and the City audiences learned about them from the show. Russians and Koreans had not spent their childhoods eating cupcakes at school birthday parties. But more than a decade after the Sex and the City appearance, the Korean outpost of Magnolia Bakery would still attribute 70 percent of its sales to cupcakes.
The Sex and the City economy chugs on throughout the world and remains vibrant in Manhattan: The bus tours still fill up daily, Magnolia is still known for its appearance on the show, other cupcake businesses proliferate, and on any given day you’re still likely to catch four young women taking a selfie in front of Carrie’s brownstone stoop in the West Village or near the Manolo Blahnik store in Midtown—kept locked and guarded even during business hours.
As Sex and the City reached the heights of its commercial power, the writers decided such superficial victories weren’t enough: They wanted to tell more difficult, more real stories. And they would reach into the darkest, funniest, and most humiliating parts of their own lives to do so.
7
Van Talk, Real Talk
* * *
The more real Sex and the City got with its story lines, the more viewers responded. That reality, it turns out, always started in the van.
The women who wrote for Sex and the City lived in Manhattan, mostly downtown, and they needed to get to Silvercup Studios in Queens, to the city’s northeast, for work every day. A ten-seat white van—the generic kind often favored by movie kidnappers—picked them up and drove them to the outer borough as they talked about whatever had happened to them the night before. They called it “van talk.” They would go over their dating and relationship stories, detail by gory detail. By the time they made it to Queens, they knew which parts of their bad dates they wanted to extract for scripts that day.
A young guy in his twenties, an Italian American from Brooklyn named Bones (given name: Michael Buono), served as their driver. He quietly and patiently drove while the writers chattered about everything that had happened to them the night before or, on Monday mornings, over the weekend.
The women lived their lives like lab rats, if lab rats were also the scientists running the experiments. Everything was up for analysis, processing, and distillation into a script.
Each of the writers had her role to play. Cindy Chupack started every relationship as a Charlotte. But she knew she could sometimes become a Miranda with the impediments she placed in her own way. Or become a Carrie by overanalyzing things. Or become a Samantha, when she thought, Fuck it, I don’t need a relationship. But she spent most of her time as a crazy optimist. She always wanted it to work out. She was the one in the van or the writers’ room who said, “Well, maybe this one can end happily ever after. Maybe he is into you.” Like Charlotte, Chupack was the last one to let go of the dream.
Jenny Bicks identified with Miranda. She felt it acutely when Miranda considered an abortion after getting pregnant with Steve’s child. She felt it even more when Miranda’s mother died in the episode “My Motherboard, My Self.” Bicks could imagine, like Miranda, buying an apartment by herself and worrying about being alone for the rest of her life. It was the old worry: Who’s going to find me when I die? The anxiety remains relevant whether it’s Sally Albright, Bridget Jones, or Miranda Hobbes doing the worrying.
Julie Rottenberg, on the other hand, had a boyfriend at the time of the show, with whom her writing partner, Elisa Zuritsky, set her up when she was twenty-five. Rottenberg still felt ambivalent about marriage, however. “I was so fucked up about it,” she says now. Those feelings, too, made their way into scripts.
As the writers’ van talk grew more serious, so did the show they were making. Sex and the City dramatized hard truths along with displaying the latest Jimmy Choos or Dior: People with good intentions cheated. Mothers died; cancer was a bitch. Men were disappointing. Singledom was hard, but so was marriage. Children were even harder. Sexuality was complicated. “People watch the show and think, Yeah, that’s me. That’s my situation,” creator Darren Star said. “I think the show has empowered a lot of people.”
The 2001–02 season marked a turning point for Sex and the City, with the writing reflecting the harsher realities of the writers’ lives while the cast and crew lived with the harsher realities of working on a closely watched show.
THE FEUD
First came reports of “major tension” between Kim Cattrall and Sarah Jessica Parker. In February 2001, New York magazine’s “Intelligencer” gossip column quoted an “insider” who said Cattrall’s scene-stealing as Samantha had upset Parker, claiming the two didn’t want to be in the same room together at a recent party. Both of their publicists denied the rift, though their responses focused mostly on the women’s professional relationship, not their personal feelings for each other. Parker’s spokesperson said, “Sarah’s a businesswoman. She’s a producer of the show—she wouldn’t eat her young. Kim is part of a successful formula—who would screw with that?”
Media around the world couldn’t resist the idea of a Sex and the City feud, and the story quickly spread: The Times of India reported it later that year, but mentioned that Cattrall was “surprised” at the rumors of “jealousy and payment wrangles” because the cast spent most of their spare time on the set singing show tunes together.
The rumors mystified many in the cast. As David Eigenberg says, “All that bullshit about the girls not getting along was such a load of crap. . . . I wasn’t around them all the time, obviously, but the girls all sat together and genuinely liked each other, laughed with each other.”
True, Cattrall and Parker didn’t grab drinks together after their nine- to eighteen-hour workdays. But if they couldn’t be in the same room, they wouldn’t have continued to appear in so many scenes together, Parker says. TV shows with warring costars knew how to separate them. One sign was a sudden shift to lots of phone-conversation scenes instead of in-person ones. Cattrall told the Guardian there was one explanation for the persistent speculation about their relationship: “The Sopranos never had any questions asked about whether or not they like each other, because they’re not all women.” Parker echoes that sentiment: “Nobody ever said to Jimmy Gandolfini, ‘Why aren’t you hanging out with Nancy Marchand on the weekends?’ ”
Parker describes her relationship with Cattrall, and her other costars, as a connection different from any other, one without a proper label. They were not sisters, nor best friends. Parker understood it sounded bad, especially when speaking of a relationship between women, to admit, “We’re not best friends.” They were colleagues of a type few people get to experience. They relied upon each other for years and lived through a unique trajectory only those four people could understand. That didn’t require that they always greet each other in the morning with hugs and spend their downtime together. Were they sometimes annoyed by each other? As Parker says, “Abso-freakin’-lutely.” But, Parker adds, “that is a testament to the depth of that relationship, because you don’t get annoyed by somebody when you’re being polite”—that is, when you don’t share an intimate connection.
The specter of the feud harried all four Sex and the City stars. Interviewers inevitably asked about it. Sometimes they even grilled Parker on specifics: Did she get Cattrall a Christmas present? If not, why not? It upset Davis, who was protective of her costars. Nixon, having known Parker since they were both ten years old, served as a reliable sounding board for Parker and tried to avoid answering media questions about it herself.
The rumors rattled Parker. She resented the implication that she was difficult or mean. The idea was, as she says, “anathema” to everything she had cultivated in her professional life. She tried so hard to treat everyone on set kindly, no matter how tired she was. “In my entire life, I would never, ever throw a temper tantrum,” she says. “I’ve never had the courage. I would be ashamed.” Her publicist talked her down with each new feud report: “You have to let it go.”
SEX GETS REAL
The show’s tone turned heavy on-screen as well in the fourth season, which started to air in June 2001: Carrie turns thirty-five and reunites with Aidan, whom she’d crushed by having an affair with Mr. Big. Miranda struggles with the prospect of motherhood and fights off feelings for her child’s father, Steve. Samantha meets the first man we’ve ever suspected could be her match: hotel magnate Richard Wright.
Charlotte is divorcing Trey, her seemingly perfect man, though she has an even more immediate problem. One of the show’s writers, whose name we needn’t know, pitched the idea of giving Charlotte a “depressed vagina,” vulvodynia, as a result of her marital struggle. The writer had once received this diagnosis herself.
When the episode aired, the story line evoked strong reactions. Some viewers wrote in to praise Sex and the City for bringing the problem out in the open. Others wrote in to complain that it didn’t belong on a comedy show, as it was no laughing matter. Several media accounts took the show to task for underplaying vulvodynia, which Charlotte’s doctor describes as merely uncomfortable. The Chicago Tribune published this account: “The pain can get so bad, you can’t sleep, you can’t walk, you can’t sit, you can’t do anything,” said Lauren Kunis, a New Yorker who was diagnosed with it in 1999. “When you’re dealing with that pain 24/7, you just want to be dead.”
By the fourth season, the writers had become comfortable enough with each other, and the show, to share almost anything. When they’d first started, they’d come from shows that had nothing to do with their own lives: sitcoms about families, teen dramas. They had approached Sex and the City gingerly at first. Sure, they could use their own experiences as single women in their thirties, but would anyone else care?
With the show now at peak popularity, not just in America but around the world, the answer was a definitive yes. Millions of women related to what the writers had given them so far; now the writers were ready to get even more real. Consider the litany of humiliations, trials, and tragedies that Miranda alone experiences in season 4: a boyfriend who takes loud shits with the bathroom door open, a boyfriend who requests rim jobs, a neck spasm that requires Aidan to rescue her while she’s naked in the bathtub, her mother’s death, Steve’s cancer, and her own accidental pregnancy while the infertile Charlotte pines for a baby. To think even half of this came from real life is sobering.
