The few review outlets that remain, whether print or digital, carry at once too much and too little weight. Reliably best-selling authors and Trump fans and bashers don’t need reviews to promote their books. Most authors realize that reviews don’t necessarily move the needle anymore. Neither, for that matter, does an appearance on Today or other talk TV shows. The publishing establishment, the networked in-crowd of authors, editors, and critics, remains a strong support system, but mostly for itself. Pressed, publishers will admit that back-jacket blurbs, aka literary log-rolling, no longer sell many books. And let’s not forget book stores, an endangered species. On dark days, it can seem like a whole ecosystem is melting away.

I wonder what it all means for the small but once-mighty New York Review of Books.

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I’ve read NYRB sporadically since my teens, when it reliably succored opponents of the Vietnam War, through the years when I’d buy it just for Joan Didion’s essays and David Levine’s wicked pen portraits, into the present in which I subscribe. Though its deep dives into the obscure can make the odd issue unreadable, it still delights often enough. And I’ve often bought books I first heard about in its pages.

A few weeks back, I eagerly dove into “Fashion Forward,” the art critic Jed Perl’s evisceration of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, its newly opened Condé M. Nast Galleries, and its opening show, and found myself nodding in agreement, at least until I hit the passages introduced by Perl’s surprise “at how many serious attempts to understand the relationship between fashion and art” Costume Institute curators “overlooked entirely or dismissed with a passing reference.”

Even before the John Galliano kerfuffle erupted, and a show was approved and only cancelled after politicians and donors revolted, Perl noted his troubling realization, “that there is reason to believe that the fashion industry has bought what amounts to prime real estate at the Met,” then doubled down and offered a big-picture prescription.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a public trust. Its decision making should be subject to the same kind of scrutiny that investigative reporters regularly bring to all kinds of institutions...As The New York Times reported last November when the name of the galleries was announced, ‘Met curators have long privately complained about how the Costume Institute’s starry red carpet on the museum steps eclipses the other exhibitions and scholarship inside.’ Where are the cultural reporters who are willing to dig into these private complaints? What’s been done at the Met probably can’t be undone. But we need to know more about how it happened. There’s too much complacency in the cultural world.

Sadly, while issuing this indictment against New York culture’s gatekeepers, Perl and the New York Review of Books overlooked—and did not even dismiss with a passing reference—a serious excavation of the relationship between money and the monumental museum. Making the oversight more remarkable, that exposé was the target of a sustained suppression campaign carried out by New York’s social-cultural elite, an effort kicked off by none other than Robert Silvers, the late co-founder and long-time editor of the NYRB. The intended victim was my book Rogues’ Gallery: The Secret History of the Money and the Moguls That Made the Metropolitan Museum.

_{Robert Silvers by David Shankbone from Wikimedia Commons}

An admission: Most authors desperately want their books to be seen and taken seriously. So, in spring 2009, when I learned that Silvers’ office had called my publisher’s PR department requesting bound galleys, i.e. an advance copy of the book, which was embargoed to protect its contents from premature exposure, I was thrilled. My work had been seen, and might even be appraised by an august publication I’d admired for years. Then, the PR called back. Silvers’ office had called again to request multiple copies! It took only a moment for my elation to curdle into dread.

I called the publicist. “Did you send them yet?” Oh yes, they’d gone out by rush messenger. “We’ll have a lawyer’s letter within a week,” I predicted, correctly.

Silvers’s companion of many years was Grace, the Countess of Dudley, a shipping heiress, the third wife and widow of the 3rd Earl of Dudley and, before that, ex-wife of Prince Stanislaw Radziwill. The couple were part of the Upper East Side set that still set the agenda for the city’s elite in those days before finance and tech nabobs turned their backs on Park Avenue co-ops and old-school social climbing. Among their closest friends were Museum trustees Henry Kissinger, Jayne Wrightsman and Annette de la Renta, the last two, significant characters in the book.

Months later, a source close to the board told me what happened next. The ostensibly embargoed galleys went from Silvers to the museum’s head, Philippe de Montebello, Wrightsman and de la Renta, whose personal lawyer at Cravath, Swaine & Moore promptly fired off a lengthy litigation threat. I told that to my pal George Rush, who co-wrote a gossip column for the Daily News. Rush approached Silvers for comment, and got back a proud affirmation. George shared it with me.

“I showed a galley of Rogue’s Gallery [sic] to Annette de la Renta, concerned about the accuracy of some of the statements about her and her late mother, and I gather that, as a result, the author corrected an error in the book and added to it a denial by her of a statement in it,” Silvers e-mailed Rush on May 6, 2009. “We sent the book out for review, but didn’t succeed in getting one.”

I somehow doubt NYRB was unable to find a willing reviewer, but I acknowledge the rest of what Silvers said. He obviously didn’t mention de la Renta’s rather colorful past, all detailed in the book, or her repeated ducking of my pleas for an interview, or that of more than a dozen claims in her legal letter, most were flatly untrue, one was a matter of interpretation, and the correction that was made in later printings concerned a minor detail about an obituary of de la Renta’s mother and predecessor on the museum board, Jane Engelhard. She was a larger-than-life mid-century character whose life should be a movie: Casablanca-as-told-by-Edith-Wharton.

When, in a last-ditch effort to stop the book, Kissinger (long a target of the liberal NYRB, but never mind) called Liz Mohn, the then-head of Germany’s Bertelsmann media group, which owned Random House, to rumble that it shouldn’t publish Rogues’ Gallery, its CEO—quite admirably—went ahead and did. The book is still in print, by the way, and it tickles me to say it’s still banned in the Metropolitan Museum’s store.

I don’t know for certain what inspired de la Renta to declare jihad against Rogues’ Gallery. But months afterwards, I ran into Kenneth Jay Lane, the society jeweler, who was one of the few in their set who was still favorably inclined towards me. I asked him, “What did I do that was so wrong?” He replied, archly, “You wrote a book.”

NYRB’s omissions then and now (a letter to the editor I sent in July has not been published) are, perhaps, understandable. But as American book reviews, book stores and publishing houses slowly wither away, it’s important to remember that those that remain are in a perilous state. So, while my life-long admiration of NYRB has been diminished, I’m not cancelling my subscription.

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Gérald Marie, John Casablancas and Alain Kittler of Elite Models, Ibiza, 1988.

Had the top dog at Elite Models just threatened my life at a Vogue cocktail party celebrating the Paris collections? As Gérald Marie, the model agency’s president, stalked away, I tossed back the rest of my coupe de Champagne. Anna Wintour, the party’s hostess, was in the doorway as I left the grand salon on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Word travels fast in that milieu. “I hear you had a moment,” she said with a delicious grin.

It was March 1992. New York magazine had just published a profile I’d written of model Christy Turlington. It was planned to be a cover story about Naomi Campbell, who’d once rubbed up against me, purring, “Why don’t you write a story about me?” But after I sold my editor on the idea, Naomi ghosted me. She’d been offered the cover of Time, a national magazine which still mattered in 1992. New York was local. Poor Naomi must’ve been disappointed when she only appeared on the cover of Time International. Christy was happy to step in.

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In our interviews, Turlington had been brutally honest about the rise and breakup of the Trinity—the triumvirate of early 1990s supermodels who ruled fashion’s roost. The other two were Campbell and Linda Evangelista, who was married to her agent, Gérald Marie. Faxed copies of my profile were circulating in Paris when the show season started. Veronica Webb, walking for Comme des Garcon, had alerted me by waggling a finger as she passed my front-row seat on the runway. “You’re in big trouble,” she stage-whispered. Backstage afterwards, she told me that Evangelista and the all-powerful photographer-cum-Svengali Steven Meisel were livid and had stopped speaking to Turlington. After another show, when we crossed paths in the Cour Carré of the Louvre, it was Evangelista’s turn to upbraid me. “You’re evil, you’re evil,” she squeaked. “And. You’re. Gonna. Get it.” She wasn’t as scary as her husband.

Yesterday, France’s RTL broadcast an interview with Marie conducted on the island of Ibiza where he’s lived for years, billed as his first since fifteen models asked French courts to investigate him for rape and seven filed civil suits against him alleging sexual assault. These are last-ditch attempts to bring Marie to justice after years of accusations led to cases closed without charges. Following the deaths of Jeffrey Epstein, Jean Luc Brunel, his model-agency partner and rabbateur (French slang term for men who procure models for work and less-savoury activities), and one Daniel Siad, a lesser-known procurer, and the release of the so-called Epstein files, Marie, says RTL, “is now the prime suspect in the French leg of the Epstein affair.”

Claiming that his relationship with his most famous model-accuser, Carré Otis, was consensual and romantic, Marie dismisses her allegations and brushes off a separate charge that he was in league with Epstein. “I have never raped anyone, nor have I ever felt the need to rape anyone,” he tells RTL. “I have always behaved consistently and appropriately with women. I love women. I can’t imagine forcing myself on one.”

I met Marie again, about two years after he threatened me, when Alain Kittler, Elite’s principal financial backer, convinced him to do an interview for a book I was writing on the modeling industry, which was published in 1995 as Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women in America, and Top Model: The Secrets of a Dirty Business in France.

The book tells how Marie entered the modeling business under the assumed name Gérald Marie de Castelbajac. “I was going to work and invent myself another personality,” he told me. By the time he reverted to his original name and moved to a major agency, Paris Planning, his personality was already considered toxic. “Everybody immediately said, ‘If Gérald comes, we’ll leave,’” recalled its owner, who hired him anyway. Marie quickly earned a new nickname, Chevalier de Longue Queue, or Knight of the Long Tail, a reference to his sexual prowess. “He’s a pimp who fucks the girls,” a rival agent explained. He didn’t deny it. “I’m not an angel,” Marie told me, “but I’m very picky about women I date…We are men in the business of women…I think we’re just acting normally.” Normal for the modeling trade, that is.

“His way was, if you want to work, fuck me,” said the late photographer Jacques Silberstein. And Marie was hardly an anomaly in Paris fashion in the 1970s and 1980s. John Casablancas, Elite’s founder, was a role model for all who followed. But he felt Marie took it too far. “I hated his guts,” Casablanca admitted. All these quotes and many more, I should stress, were offered on the record.

As I wrote in Model, “by American legal standards, [Marie] was committing statutory rape on a regular basis.” It’s no wonder horndogs like the current occupant of the White House and his BFF Jeffrey Epstein wanted to follow in the footsteps of Casablancas and Marie. I first heard Epstein’s name in 2011, while writing an update for a new edition of Model and reported that the financier, whom I identified as a sex offender, had bid for Elite’s American operations after a 2004 bankruptcy. “Several people close to the sale,” I wrote, “believe Epstein was either secretly in partnership with Gérald Marie or bidding as a stalking horse on behalf of Elite’s European parent” which Marie still ran. After losing that bid, Epstein switched horses and went into business in Miami with Jean Luc Brunel.

To RTL, Marie seems to confirm all that:

Gérald Marie acknowledges having met Jeffrey Epstein only once, for a meeting before Epstein’s 2006 conviction in New York, but, he says, the American financier’s proposal for a professional collaboration did not materialize. According to him, he never saw him again.

“When we met him, he was a handsome guy, charming, well-mannered, well-educated, there was nothing to complain about,” [Marie] explained on RTL. “We were approached, offered a meeting at his mansion in New York. We went, we talked, we considered the possibility of doing something. We discussed building this new office, and then we realized, along the way, it wasn’t for us, so we didn’t go ahead with it. Simple as that.”

Generally speaking, Gérald Marie is careful to distance himself from Jean-Luc Brunel and…he refuses to take the blame alone, he says, all because he is still alive.

There’s lots more about Marie in Model, and it doesn’t paint him as charming or well-mannered, or appropriate with women, but in parting, I offer just one witness:

Christine Bolster, Marie’s live-in lover in the mid-1980s, recalled those years for me. She started modeling at age 14, and when she got to Paris soon afterwards, Marie agreed to represent her. “I knew what I was getting myself into,” she told me. “I had my reasons, y’know? … I walked into it because he was an agent, because he could get me what I wanted.” But then, after becoming first his secret lover (he lived with another model and their child), and then his live-in, working every day “until I was almost dead,” constantly sniffing cocaine at home, in Marie’s office, in nightclubs, “on the table at La Coupole,” and rarely having sex with him anymore, she felt, “he really became sinister.” So, she began working more often in America until, on a surprise trip back to Paris, she found snapshots of Marie with Evangelista. “Finally, I had proof. And ten minutes after I found them, Linda walked in, with a key….”

That was the moment her illusions ended. “I sort of died….I lost all desire to create…I sobbed and I wept…I was depressed. I was broke…I trusted him, you know?….I suffered a lot…Modeling was my life for six and a half years…I loved every second of it it. I have to thank Gérald for that, but that’s why I dislike him so much, because he took that away from me.”

It’s complicated, isn’t it? But it’s also simple. “They can go before any court, say what they want, nothing will happen,” Gérald Marie predicts to RTL. Leonardo da Vinci once said, “Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.” Jeffrey Epstein may have outdone his role model, but Marie has outlived his pupil and believes he’ll also out-run the law. For now, at least, we can say this: Paris is no longer his town.

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—Maximilien Robespierre at the trial of Louis XVI, December 3, 1792

Image generated with OpenAI’s ChatGPT image generation tool, 2026

Scion-in-law Jared Kushner and his Middle Eastern partners surely thought they were too rich to fail when they set out to develop an exclusive $1.5 billion five-star Adriatic resort by privatizing a former Soviet military island and undeveloped wetlands where thousands of flamingos nest on the Albanian coastline.

But in the spring, their takeover provoked that nation’s Flamingo Revolution, a popular anti-government uprising. This summer that protest triggered a corruption investigation. And now, it’s alleged that deeds for some of the land were forgeries. Kushner & Co. have learned that local populations can say mjaft, Albanian for enough, no more. Their misadventure is evidence that a you-can-be-too-rich fever is becoming a social contagion, with the heat on the Haves spiking as fast as sales of GLP-1s.

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On the East End of Long Island, where tempers can run as hot as the city its privileged weekenders leave behind, there have been more reasons than ever to be irate this summer. In bucolic Water Mill, the biggest irritant used to be the single traffic light in the center of the tiny business district. It could cause traffic to back up for miles. Now, new fear has been added to that perpetual frustration, because two properties there—combined, they hold most of the hamlet’s retail stores--were acquired in May for a reported $39 million by The Runyon Group, a California real estate investment, development and advisory company. A thoroughly modern enterprise, Runyon sees itself as a lifestyle center curator rather than anything so humdrum as a commercial property manager.

Meanwhile, ten miles north, just across Sag Harbor Bay, the citizens of the independent town of Shelter Island, an 8,000-acre paradise accessible only by ferry from one of Long Island’s two forks, are suspicious of the intentions of two recently-arrived billionaires.

Investor George Soros and members of his family have become the second largest private landholders on the island, scooping up 120 acres since 2013. And The Chequit, an historic inn, was bought by Stefan Soloviev, the son and heir of Sheldon Solow, a remarkably litigious, now deceased, Manhattan real estate mogul. Soloviev owns more than 400,000 acres of American farmland, including 1,000-plus acres on the North Fork. He hopes to subdivide 372 acres of his North Fork land into 47 residential lots, leaving a smaller parcel undeveloped. He briefly seemed a boon to Shelter Island when he bought The Chequit in 2020 for a reported $3 million+ and restored it and its restaurant, cafe and tavern. But last fall, another nearby business he owns, the equally venerable Shelter Island Pharmacy, stopped filling prescriptions, forcing customers to get their drugs from the mainland.

Together, Soros and Soloviev have inspired fears that billionaires might be “ruining the island,” as the New York Post had it in a recent outrage-bait headline. In its story, the Post quoted a local, still seething over George’s son Alex Soros’ wedding to former Hilary Clinton aide Huma Abedin last year. The East End equivalent of the Lauren Sanchez-Jeff Bezos-nuptials takeover of Venice thirteen days earlier, it “crippled the island” with its “absurd security and disruption.”

That confluence of weddings was early evidence of a phenomenon newer and more noteworthy, if less pervasive, than performative Everyone Hates Elon oligarch-bashing. It’s also the engine that powers the conflict underlying my new book, Treasured Island: The Story of St. Barth…and its Barbarians, Billionaires and Beauties. As plutocrats summer, so do they winter, and so, a multi-national luxury-industrial complex has arisen to develop infrastructure and service their every desire.

But over-tourism leaves a bad aftertaste. That was made abundantly clear by the residents of Palma de Mallorca, capital of the Balaeric islands, when tens of thousands heeded the call of a group called Menys Turisme, Més Vida (Less Tourism, More Life) last month and demonstrated against the goose that lays these poisonous eggs.

Over-dependence on the uppermost class of tourists may be less common but it is equally objectionable. It’s why many react with horror at the thought that a quaint, old-fashioned Water Mill strip mall with a deli, a manicurist, and a printer serving the quotidian demands of the citizenry may soon become a boutique-brand-heavy luxury-retail village offering the wealthy the same products and restaurants that populate opulent resorts from Croatia to St.-Tropez. Though it’s been in and out for decades, that French former fishing village was deemed the latest victim of “overtourism, influencer culture and luxury brands chasing viral visibility” by the Post last month. Closer to home, pharmacies jettison prescriptions to sell tubes of La Roche-Posay. Whole neighborhoods are swallowed up by plutocrats’ compounds surrounded by security fences. And McMansions pop up on what was once North Fork farmland like white truffles under the snuffling snouts of Lagotto Romagnols on the Po River delta.

On St. Barth, invasive investors and businesses based in Miami, the south of France and Switzerland--collectively called The Groups--effectively privatized once-empty beaches, turning them into raucous day-clubs for rosé-swilling, table-dancing swells; replaced locally-owned restaurants serving indigenous French and Creole food with overpriced outposts for trendy pan-Asian and Middle Eastern cuisine; stuffed once-quaint hotel rooms with electronic gadgets and hotel-branded merch, and turned modest, beachy boutiques into polished marble and glass vitrines, trading intimacy for scale, handcraft for high-tech, warmth for wow! And the locals are saying mjaft!

An anti-development poster protested a St. Barth beachfront building site.

As Jared Kushner has learned, this backlash was inevitable. The little people, priced out of their own communities, unable to find affordable housing, stuck in traffic, and jarred by construction noise, are pushing back and finding strength in numbers. This summer on social media, local St. Barth protesters could be found celebrating a small but significant legal win over The Groups, the suspension of a building permit for a multi-millionaire-owned restaurant on Lorient, until now, an under-developed beach. “We must remain vigilant,” one of the angry neighbors behind the action declared . “The fight must continue on all fronts.” From St. Barth to St.-Tropez and the Hamptons to Albania.

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On the deck of the Albatross, Ocean Beach, Fire Island NY, summer 1978. Photo: Ellen Levine

Four years out of Vassar, in Spring 1978, after taking a year off for bad behavior of many sorts, I needed rent money and a break and a want ad in the Village Voice led to a job as the #2 editor on the Fire Island News, a seasonal weekly newspaper for the barrier beach communities off the southern coast of Long Island. I don’t recall much about the interview process aside from learning that various previous editors had gone on to glorious careers in journalism and publishing, which sounded promising. Within weeks, I’d moved into a skanky little apartment attached to the paper’s bungalow office in the middle of downtown Ocean Beach. The biggest downsides to a paid summer in the sun? The drunken jerks in wife-beaters dancing out of nearby bars singing “Macho Man” right out my window at 3 AM, and the realization that Josh, my boss, roommate and the #1 editor, who’d formerly run the Columbia Spectator, was a junkie.

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At first, Josh, now dead, of course, got high only on our days off back in the city, but by July he was using all the time, which presumably influenced his decision to surprise our elderly, blue-haired publisher, Bee, by secretly filling most of an issue with a long short story by a friend of his. It was memorable only for its description of penises pumping like oil derricks.

The morning it was published, after finding an outraged note on his desk, Josh ran to Bee’s house and was never seen again. Soon, Bee appeared at our office, sweetly told me she’d fired him when he burst into her house in a frothing rage “while I was powdering my feet.” Bee patted my cheek, and said, “You’re the editor now.”

The name of the blog I wrote sporadically for the last twenty+ years was inspired by Josh. He’d told me that the Spec had a physical complaint log, the Gripe Book, where the disaffected could register objections to its coverage. Years later, I launched a blog called Gripe Box in a box on my website, then, after someone tried to trademark it and agreed to pay me for the name, I redesigned it as a legal pad and used Gripepad to voice my differences with the cosmos.

Speaking of which, I sublet my loft that summer to a friend’s gangsta-wannabe little brother, on condition I could stay on my off-nights in the city. One time, I arrived to find multiple kilos of carefully-wrapped hashish bricks on my living room floor. I smoked some and it was beat and he was using my land line while trying to sell it, so that night, when he didn’t appear, I slept with his girlfriend. (Remember, it was the Seventies.) He never filed a gripe so I don’t know if he ever found out, but she and I are still Facebook friends. Nothing to gripe about there.

I still have differences with the cosmos, and with institutions, people and processes closer to home, but for Substack, I wanted a name that reflected my abiding interest ever since—which will be my subject here, at least when I’m not griping about something. Without knowing it, two years before my Fire Island summer, I’d found the work I’d do for the rest of my career, covering what Lord Byron called the polished hoard in Don Juan, his unfinished mock-epic poem about an aristocratic libertine. I’d realized there were telling stories behind the stories about the privileged rock stars I’d been extolling since 1972, when I first worked for magazines that existed primarily to sell records and concert tickets.

In the muckraker-era, the humorist Finley Peter Dunne created a bartender character, Mr. Dooley, who was a one-man GripePad himself. He famously observed that the best journalism comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. I long ago chose to concentrate on doing the latter. So, this newsletter is called The Haves in honor of the all-too-comfortable who have alternately fascinated and appalled me for decades.

The progression of my subjects seems natural in retrospect. I wrote about rock stars for ten years. They often dated fashion models, and those stunning six-footers became my next subjects, which led to ten years covering fashion. At the New York Times and New York magazine, I shared the front rows of fashion shows in New York, Paris, Milan and London with the rich, the titled and the entitled, and they have been my subjects ever since. But the path was slippery, I often lacked directions, and sometimes the Haves turned the tables and took pot shots at me. I’ll tell you about all of that—and many of them.

In a career that careened from high to low and back again, I tried to cover low life rockers living high with a serious but cheeky broadsheet sensibility. Turnabout is fair play, so I also found tasty tabloid-style treats in tales of the high and flighty, the rarified, scary ruling class and those who serve them. This Substack will reveal the back-stories of some of those stories, and tell some new ones, too. I aim to keep leaping tall fortunes and taking deep dives into glittery gutters, but also to tell you how I’ve done my job and why I think it’s important: The Haves, the wealthy, the powerful and the famous shape our world.

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I grew up in a journalist’s household. Throughout my childhood, my father, Milton Gross (that’s him with me, above, in 1959), was the lead sports columnist for the New York Post.

We didn’t have a lot but his position conferred a certain privilege. So, I often joke that I grew up in legendary venues (all now demolished, some reborn): Madison Square Garden, Yankee Stadium, the Polo Grounds, and later, Shea Stadium, where I drank my first alcohol at age 12 at the April 1964 party celebrating its opening night (the Mets played the Pittsburgh Pirates). I chugged a glass of what looked like water, only later woozily understanding it was the jockey Willie Shoemaker’s vodka.

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In my childhood, New York had nine daily newspapers, and my father brought them all home, the afternoon papers at 5, the morning papers at 11 at night. My mother was a charter subscriber to New York magazine and my childhood ambition, later achieved, was to work there.

My first byline was in my high school newspaper. I covered a 1968 Richard Nixon for President campaign rally featuring the welterweight boxer Rocky Graziano. At 16, my attention turned from sports and politics to rock music and I started going to Madison Square Garden on my own. My first concert was there. The Doors headlined. Regular trips to the Fillmore East followed, and the next year, I wrote and mimeographed several issues of an underground newspaper, Styx and Stones, that I used to cadge my first press passes--to the Woodstock Festival.

Record reviews in the Vassar Miscellany News led to my first professional byline: a review in Crawdaddy of a forgettable album by The Doors after the death by misadventure of Jim Morrison—and I’ve been slinging syllables for money ever since. I spent the rest of the 1970s writing articles and paperback books about the rock scene, in between steadier-paying jobs writing advertising copy, and editing a rock magazine and a weekly newspaper. In the early 1980s, I co-authored three paperback mystery novels about a fashion model-turned-sleuth under a pseudonym. Catherine Oxenberg, a daughter of Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, posed for the first cover:

Those books led the way to a new beat, international fashion, and a job as a columnist for my local community newspaper, The New York Times, from 1985 to 1988, as the city evolved into the world’s financial center, and then, on and off until 2000, for New York magazine, where my specialty also evolved, finally setttling on the ways of wealth, privilege and power.

In my mind, my subjects were the human equivalent of the expensive, mechanically marvelous, statusy watches called Grand Complications, fetish items, striking on the surface, vastly complex inside. I saw my job as turning them over, opening them up, taking them apart and explaining how they worked. I wrote about designers and dealmakers, socialites and hustlers, retailers and photographers, media machers and politicos, a princess here, a chef there. Some of them got richer than New York’s traditional Old Money Upper Class.

I rarely wrote about celebrities. And I tried my best to avoid PR people. Despite that, some became good friends. But that’s a story for another day.

Since 1995, I’ve had jobs at Esquire, GQ, George, Talk and Avenue magazines and briefly wrote a gossip column for New York’s Daily News, but my primary gig has been writing books—ten in that time, three of them New York Times bestsellers—about the powerful with a sideline in stories about where they go when they travel. I like to travel, too, so I saw that as a reward for years of magazine work.

It all added up to…something, but in the last few years, the media whirl has been powered by subtraction: fewer newspapers and magazines, fewer pages to fill, fewer jobs for journalists, fewer book stores and book reviews. There’s less distribution, less advertising, less money, less structural support, less leeway, less research runway, and less courage among editors competing for clicks and advertisers’ favors rather than a place setting the agenda for a cacophonous yet coherent cultural conversation.

And then came Substack, which I’ve watched and read and finally saw was a forum to do exactly what I want, supported by you, readers who are also interested in my subjects: Them.

Welcome to The Haves.

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