The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup (10 page)

THE PLAZA HOTEL’S EDWARDIAN ROOM
is one of those hushed, dim chambers where everything is so padded and plushy that it seems as if the carpets have carpets. Heavy swag curtains fall across the windows. Heavy linens drape the tables. Everywhere there are little candles, large men, fancy-looking women, trim waiters, glinting platters, mother lodes of silver, and an air of genteel excess. Freddy eats here often, but not in the dining room. He eats in the middle of the kitchen, where Kerry Simon, the young chef who runs the place, keeps a table for a few friends. This is some complicated form of inverted reverse snobbery. The Edwardian Room is not a groovy-downtown-hipster kind of place by any stretch of the imagination, but the chef’s table in the kitchen has become a hot ticket these days. When Freddy has dinner here, he is escorted by a delicate, doe-eyed, sweet-natured woman named Paige Powell, who is the advertising director of
Interview
and was formerly a frequent escort of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. These days, Freddy refers to her as “my social coach.” Paige refers to Freddy as “a forward-thinking catalyst who should have broad-reach international exposure.” They are clearly fond of each other. Over the last month or so, Paige got Freddy invitations to a dinner for Giorgio Armani and the one for the people from Ebel watches. “I’d like to see him cross-connect,” she said to me recently. “He should get to know these people, so they can take his great energy and use it somehow. I can almost imagine him as an anchor on an international news program on CNN, or something.”

Our dinner group was to be Paige, Freddy, and Freddy’s friend Great Adventure, whose real name is Roy. Great Adventure—handsome, immaculately tailored, broad shouldered—had just returned from Brazil, where he had been promoting rap concerts. He is Freddy’s current best friend and the man Freddy describes as his fashion coach, for graduating him from his previous B-boy style to his present amalgam of street and chic. Freddy knows exactly what good turn each of his friends and associates has done for him. It is as if he saw his life as a project to which a number of people have generously contributed. Considering that three of his best friends—Warhol, Haring, and Basquiat—are now dead, such accounting seems these days to have particular meaning.

“Yo, Kerry,” Freddy said as we walked into the kitchen. “I know this is
definitely
about to be something beyond food, and totally artistic.”

Paige and Great Adventure joined us, and we sat down at a large, round table set a few feet away from the grill. The kitchen was clattery, warm, buttery smelling, industrial looking. The table was set in pure white, with pale flowers and heavy silverware. Sitting at it, I felt as if I’d been encased in a clean, quiet capsule and dropped into the middle of a stew. Freddy, Paige, and Great Adventure were discussing an upcoming concert in Rio when the first course arrived—a construction of squid and fat pellets of Arborio rice, piled together in a way that called to mind a Japanese pagoda.

Freddy whistled, and said, “This is lovely, lovely, love-
ly.
We are definitely living large tonight! Tell me the name of this dish again. I have to remember to describe it to my mother.”

“Squid-ink risotto,” Kerry said.

“Excellent,” Freddy said. “My mother would bug out if she saw this.”

Great Adventure started to chuckle.

“Yo, man,” Freddy said to him. “Picture a fine squid-ink risotto in Bed-Stuy.”

Three hours later, we were still at the table, having eaten risotto, grilled monkfish, roast lobster with corn sauce, and chocolate cake, and having discussed rap in Brazil, the latest Public Enemy record, Andy Warhol, cooking, Freddy’s popularity in Japan, Freddy’s interest in shooting an episode of
Yo!
in a prison, the president of Fiat, the sisters who own Fendi, the march of the Ringling elephants through Manhattan, Paige’s hometown in Oregon, a pajama party some rappers had had in Los Angeles, the Oscars, the Plaza, Leona Helmsley, Andy Warhol again, the Show World murder, and the various ingredients of the various dishes we’d eaten. It made for peppy conversation. Toward the end of the evening, Freddy’s attention started to drift, as if he’d flipped to the next page in his datebook. He explained after a minute that he was starting to think of everything he had coming up in the next few days. It was, by his count, about a million things.

“I’ve got that movie I’m going to be in, and I have to work on the screenplay of this movie I’ll be directing, and there’s always
Yo!,
and I got to get this video going,” he said when we had finally left the Edwardian Room and were standing outside the revolving doors. It was now dark. A group of women swaddled in mink stoles brushed past us, murmuring as they headed into the hotel. A horse carriage and a cab were double-parked at the bottom of the steps going down to the street. Freddy posed at the top and lit a cigarette. He was wearing his sunglasses and a big tan hat. Backlit by the Plaza chandeliers, he formed an imposing silhouette. “This black pop-life shit can get hectic sometimes,” he said after a moment. “It’s cool most of the time, but it can be hectic. Every now and again, to be honest with you, I’m, like,
damn.
”

I WANT THIS APARTMENT

J
ILL MEILUS IS A NEW YORK CITY REAL ESTATE
broker. Like Superman, she can see through walls. Walking down a Manhattan street with her is a paranormal experience. “Nice building,” you might remark as you pass a handsome but unrevealing prewar facade, to which she might respond that the J-line apartment on the third floor has a new kitchen, that the guy in 8-A is being transferred to Florida and will entertain any offers of more than two hundred thousand dollars, that the super is a chain-smoker, that there is a one-bedroom for sale because the owners are having money troubles or are having twins or made a new fortune or are splitting up. New York is the big show-off of American cities, yet its residential life is almost invisible to the ordinary passerby. Even so, you cannot hide from a real estate broker. The other day, Jill took one of her customers to view a SoHo loft—a nice, $650,000 sort of place, with a lot of windows and chintz upholstery and silver gizmos artfully scattered around. Jill’s customer, a television actress, whom I will call Vivian, liked the loft, so she paced off the dimensions and counted the closets, and eventually came upon a locked door beside the kitchen. She told Jill that she wanted to see what was behind it; after all, the price of the loft could be calculated per square inch, let alone square foot, and behind the door were a few of those high-priced inches. Jill considered the request and then sighed. “Vivian, I wish I could show it to you, but I can’t,” she said. “The owners of the loft are sadomasochists, and that is their dungeon.” “Oh,” Vivian said. She looked disappointed. After a moment, Jill brightened. “I know that it’d be a great space for a second bathroom,” she added, “and the owners do promise to remove the dungeon fixtures as a condition of sale.”

The total value of all privately owned apartments in Manhattan is estimated to be $102.7 billion, and about 7 percent of those apartments turn over every year. In 1998, for instance, the combined sales of all cooperative and condominium units came to $7.9 billion. Many of those units are one-bedroom starter apartments, but some are larger, and a few are a lot larger. Last year, the company that Jill works for, the Corcoran Group, sold a pretty big place on Central Park West to Ian Schrager for $9 million, and recently another brokerage had almost closed a deal for a $22 million apartment that occupies the top three floors of the Pierre Hotel, and is being purchased by a Wall Street analyst with a rather pessimistic view of the stock market. The Corcoran Group handles 20 percent of the sales of New York residential real estate. There are about four hundred Corcoran Group brokers, making it the second-largest brokerage in the city—smaller than Douglas Elliman and bigger than the three other major brokerages, Brown Harris Stevens, Halstead Property, and Bellmarc Realty. These are good days to be a real estate broker in New York. Because prices are so high and the volume of sales is so large, brokers in New York are making more than their counterparts in other big, expensive cities, like Houston and Los Angeles. The top broker in New York earned close to $2 million last year, and a typical broker is making sixty thousand and has no trouble finding people who want to sell and people who want to buy.

When I first met Jill, she had just got a new exclusive, a

PREWAR 2BR FOR $279K. GV/PRIME
Charming home just steps off Fifth Avenue on best blk. View of brownstones and lots of sun! Seller relocating!

It was actually a cheery but bantam two-bedroom co-op on West Eleventh Street, in Greenwich Village, which another Corcoran broker had sold to a young investment banker two years ago for $160,000. The banker was getting married and moving to Texas. As the apartment’s exclusive agent, Jill was handling all the advertising and marketing. Although any broker from any company could show the apartment to customers, Jill had to be present at all showings, and she would split the commission with the eventual buyer’s broker. In effect, she was the seller’s representative. She would keep the entire commission if she happened to sell one of her exclusives to one of her own customers, because then she would be representing both the seller and the buyer. Everywhere else in the country, brokers typically share listings and can show a house at any time, by themselves, because keys are usually left in a lockbox outside the house which any broker can gain access to. The New York City system is very New York–like: complicated, arcane, and logistically nightmarish. Not only do brokers have to be available to show their exclusives to other brokers and their customers but they also have to be able to take customers to see apartments on the market which other brokers are handling, and this means they have to arrange with those other brokers to see their exclusives. At the moment, Jill had two apartments that were her exclusives, and about a dozen customers who were actively looking to buy, with price limits ranging from around $160,000 to just under $2 million.

Jill is chestnut haired, self-effacing, midsize, and fortyish. She specializes in downtown real estate and has a lot of artists and writers and architects as customers, which means she goes to work wearing big, hairy sweaters and stretch pants rather than an uptown broker’s wardrobe of smart black trouser suits and moderate-height heels. She grew up in a suburb of New York and has lived in the city since she began college. She now lives in an insanely huge loft, for which she pays an insanely low rent—so low that she begged me not to print it, knowing how such a thing would make her the object of pure, embittered resentment. Not that having a great place to live wouldn’t stir up envy anywhere in the world; it’s just that in New York the span between crummy places and fantastic ones is wide. So is the span between the apartment that is an incredible bargain and the one that is wildly overpriced. Only in New York are you likely to find so many identical apartments with so many unidentical price tags. The fact of Jill’s living circumstances came to light when I asked her whether selling real estate was like working in a chocolate factory—that is, whether you were tempted to consume the best merchandise yourself. “Most brokers have some kind of good deal,” she said sheepishly. “I mean, we get to see everything and we usually end up with something kind of strange and great.” Even so, there have to be times when brokers must feel unrequited. One afternoon, I went with Iva Spitzer, a broker with Douglas Elliman, to see a prewar apartment on West Fifty-seventh Street that she was handling. It was quite nice: about fifty-five hundred square feet; eleven rooms or so; a terrace running around the entire apartment; north, south, east, and west views, including a dead-on view of Carnegie Hall; triple-height ceilings; a majestic living room, with cove lighting and a sky scene painted on the domed ceiling; a shuttered napping room; black walnut flooring; a master bathroom bigger than an average bedroom, with the original sunken marble bath and a huge stall shower with sixteen brass shower spigots mounted on the walls and a dinner-plate-size brass showerhead with a few hundred pinpoint spray holes; and a yawningly large professional-quality kitchen with Sub-Zero everything and a stainless-steel fendered range. I could easily imagine living there, until Iva mentioned that it was a rental that happened to be priced at thirty-five thousand dollars a month. I asked if it frustrated her to handle such a place. “No, it’s an incredible place, but I don’t really see myself here,” she said, sounding philosophical. “I see someone like Sean Penn here. Or Puff Daddy.”

Real estate can be an aggravating profession. “It’s a sort of manic-depressive business,” Jill likes to say. “It’s always either totally crazy or dead. Things fall through all the time. If you get devastated by stuff like that, you can’t go on.” Up until twenty years ago, residential real estate in New York City was usually handled by “social brokers”—older women who sold apartments now and then to their friends over afternoon tea or at the hairdresser’s. In those years, very little property in Manhattan was actually bought or sold. What few hundred listings existed were handwritten on index cards, collated on knitting needles, and filed in leather binders. The cooperative and condominium conversions that began in the 1970s turned thousands of rental apartments into real estate that could be bought and sold. Suddenly, there was a lot more money to be made, and real estate brokerages began attracting actresses and artists and teachers, people who liked the independence and mobility of the job and were used to a certain amount of unpredictability and rejection, and usually came to real estate after another career. Jill was a chef at a couple of popular New York restaurants before she got her broker’s license, eleven years ago. She worked from home for a while after she had a baby, and had returned to her office, in the Flatiron district, a year before we met. Iva Spitzer had also been a chef—at a restaurant in Boston—before going into real estate. Barbara Corcoran, the owner and founder of the Corcoran Group, had held twenty-six short-term jobs before she started her business; her favorite was waitressing at a diner in New Jersey. She liked it because it was a people job.

EARLY ONE TUESDAY MORNING
last month, I went with Jill to the West Eleventh Street two-bedroom. It was the first day she was showing the apartment. She had advertised it in the
Times
over the weekend and had also posted a description of it on the Corcoran Group Web site, and already she had gotten a dozen queries. The apartment house was an elegant eight-story brick box built at the turn of the century, with a curlicued banister running up the stairs and tiny Juliet balconies on each landing, but the interior had been gutted and rebuilt in the early eighties, and the apartments were now stripped down and undetailed, with chalky white drywall walls and hollow-core doors. The seven hundred square feet of the apartment were diced up into a galley kitchen, one full bath, a rectangular living room, one average-size bedroom, and one dwarfish one. Most normal people living in normal cities would probably consider it far too small to live in for the price, but by New York standards it was a sunny, snug, well-located apartment, which would probably sell quickly. In New York, “quickly” means “quickly” and sometimes even “viciously.” When the market in New York is heated up, war breaks out. Real estate gets most people agitated, but in New York it seems to provoke a special fervor. Brokers start accepting only sealed bids, and bids offering more than the asking price are taken for granted. So is offering all cash, proposing to forgo the mortgage-contingency clause in the contract, begging to sign a contract on the spot, and tendering press releases and family portraits to plead one’s case. One of Jill’s colleagues had a customer who bartered for an apartment with rare French movie posters, which he guaranteed would appreciate in value.

The owner of the apartment had already gone to work when we arrived, but she had obviously tidied up before she left. A few fresh magazines were fanned out on her coffee table like a deck of cards, and all the wastebaskets were empty. Her cat was on the sofa, chewing on a piece of wire and daydreaming. It was a chilly but brilliant day and the apartment was filled with light. Right after we settled in, a broker named Jackie called from the lobby, and a moment later she stepped through the door with her customer, a pale young man with a shaved head. The customer surveyed the little living room and then walked to the window and gazed out onto the street.

“Boy, it’s really sunny,” Jackie said.

“All day,” Jill said.

“Such a pretty block,” Jackie added.

“Quintessential Village,” Jill said. She turned to the young man and told him, “By the way, none of the walls in here are structural, so you can move them all around if you want to.”

The customer wandered out of the living room, into the bigger bedroom, and then into the bathroom. “I’m not in a rush to buy,” he called over his shoulder. “I’ve only been looking for about a year.” Jackie shot Jill a look.

After a minute, the customer said, “You know, I just realized that I forgot my glasses, so I’m going to have to come back and look another time.” He wandered out the front door. Jackie trailed behind, mouthing “I’ll call you” to Jill.

“She’ll never call,” Jill said, closing the door behind them.

A few minutes later, another broker—Bill from Douglas Elliman-appeared at the door, accompanied by another pale young man. This one was carrying a briefcase, which he dropped in the kitchen doorway. When he was out of earshot, his broker whispered to Jill, “Look! That’s good! When people put their bags down, it means they plan to stay for a while.”

The young man came back into earshot. “Wow, there’s a lot of light in here,” he said.

“None of the walls are structural, so you can move anything,” Jill said. “I mean, if you want to.”

“The light is really beautiful,” the customer said.

“It’s a historic block,” his broker added.

“It’s beautiful light,” the customer said, “and I like the exposed brick.” He took another turn around the living room and said, “I love this building! This feels so good!”

“You could take down the wall between the bedrooms,” Jill said. “Or between the kitchen and the little bedroom.”

The customer wasn’t listening. “That’s my deal, see. I need light. And this has light. It’s awesome. Beautiful. I really like it.”

A broker named Edna arrived, leading her customer, a poker-faced young woman who said she worked as a recipe tester for a gourmet magazine. Edna dawdled by the door while the woman scanned the apartment. Then they huddled in the living room and waited for the young man and the Douglas Elliman broker to leave. Once they had gone, Jill turned to Edna and her customer. “So?” she said.

“I love it,” the young woman said. “I want it.”

Jill raised her eyebrows.

“I really, really love it,” the young woman went on. “By the way, are dogs okay?”

Jill lowered her eyebrows. “No dogs,” she said. “Sorry.”

Edna clutched at her throat and gasped. “Oh God. No dogs? No dogs? You have
got
to be kidding. Well, there goes my deal. She wants to buy the apartment right now. However, she has a dog.”