But the look on Ms. Westheimer’s face as she looked up—way up—into Mr. O’Neal’s puffy, sleepy eyes was one of sheer joy; a joy that, were this any other place, would have been suspect on a day that reacquainted America with the real costs of war.

But this was not just any place. This was the Vanity Fair Oscar party in chilly Los Angeles, a tent pitched adjacent to the paradigmatic Hollywood insiders restaurant, Morton’s, in which the considerable forces of Condé Nast had been marshaled to provide a coolly coddling environment where none of the plasma screen televisions that punctuated the pastel-Mondrian-esque décor were tuned to the 24-hour news channels, and where hawks and doves, ex-lovers and mortal enemies could co-exist. In a world which creeps evermore toward the acidically divisive black-and-white world espoused by The New York Post and the Fox News Channel, the Vanity Fair party—even in its admittedly pared-down state—seemed, on the surface, a surreal microcosm of ignorant bliss in which the owner of those media outlets, Rupert Murdoch, his heir Lachlan, and their wives could be seen lolling on couches near the rear of the tent while a crowd of what their tabloid would call “peaceniks”—acting couple Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, Oscar winner Adrien Brody, Buddhist Richard Gere and Best Supporting Actor winner Chris Cooper—prowled the party space.

But even though the effervescent laughter and small talk that rose up in the tent suggested that the crowd was grateful for these few hours of escape, the war still managed to infiltrate the party. Like the butterfly that beats its wings in one part of the world and causes a thunderstorm in another, the great fetid beast of death and carnage had dug its talons into the desert of Iraq and set off an earthquake that rattled the cosseted wards of Bel Air, Beverly Hills and Los Feliz during the hallowed festivities of Oscar week.

Step out of LAX after a plane flight from New York and suddenly your tension feels like a suit of medieval armor. The fear of terrorism that permeates our city is as hard to find in Los Angeles as a good newspaper. But a different kind of tension was palpable as the war in Iraq and the 75th Oscars ceremony headed for a collision.

It was the kind of tension that results when an event that is both the most resonant and the most frivolous celebration of American culture takes place, for the first time in almost 30 years, while, thousands of miles away, a city of barely legal men and women were amassing for a prolonged risking of their lives for this country. As Talk to Her director Pedro Almodóvar told the Los Angeles Times, “The Oscars and the war will always be at odds.”

And you could feel that tension ratchet to a formidable level on the evening of March 19, when, shortly after the first anti-aircraft fire was spotted in the green, nightscope-lit sky of Baghdad, NBC’s Tom Brokaw said that what was about to unfold was “probably the most televised event in the history of mankind.” That was a boast that once belonged to the Academy Awards—but no longer.

And, in the days that followed, as the brave journalists in Iraq and Kuwait adjusted their body armor and readied their broadcasts, the reporters who annually embed themselves in the fleshy flanks of Hollywood’s Oscar pageant began to get the calls informing them that because of the situation in Iraq, the press was no longer invited to cover the main events that surrounded the Oscars. Just as the Academy had decided to roll up its red carpet, so did Vanity Fair and the forces at InStyle.

Hollywood has a disregard for the press that’s pretty comical—when you’re not suffering the brunt of it—and suddenly there was a legitimate reason to give us the back of their hand.

At least in one case, the political situation was used as an excuse to disinvite reporters in the same way that Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Larry David used his mother’s death to duck his social responsibilities. On March 20, the day that The New York Times reported that art dealer Larry Gagosian and three business associates—including newsprint mogul and art collector Peter Brant—had been sued by federal prosecutors for allegedly “cheating the government of $26.5 million in unpaid income taxes, interest and penalties on art they bought using a shell corporation,” Mr. Gagosian’s publicist, Nadine Johnson, left a message about an art opening for Ed Ruscha at his Beverly Hills gallery that evening: “It’s just too crazy with the war escalating and the current political climate—we didn’t think it was appropriate,” Ms. Johnson said.

Oddly enough, one of the few companies that didn’t bar the press from their events was also the company that, this year, took a lot of guff from the press: Miramax. On March 22, the company held its annual pre-Oscars cocktail party at the St. Regis Hotel in Century City, where, instead of holding their annual Max Awards skits in which they lampoon the movies they made, Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein, speaking in a quiet voice as if that’s what the times dictated, showed a “Best Of” reel of skits past, which exhumed the ghost of Tina Brown and Talk magazine. At the end of the evening, cabaret singer Michael Feinstein came onstage and tried to encourage the audience to sing along with him to “God Bless America.” There was some eye-rolling, but at least one person joined in with gusto: tycoon Marvin Davis, who was wheeled into the hotel auditorium in a wheelchair and then transferred to the throne-like chair that seems to follow him wherever he goes. Frankly, Mr. Davis did not look like a man who was making a run for Universal. He looked frail and thin and his dark head of hair had gone gray. But he sang along with Mr. Feinstein.

And when it was over and the crowd began filing back out into the party, we asked Mr. Davis if his presence at the party meant that if he acquired Universal he would attempt to hire the Weinstein brothers.

“Who?” Mr. Davis said.

Instead of canceling their parties, Hollywood’s elite just canceled the press. “Nobody wants to go out and be the happy idiot waving in their ruffled dress while there’s bombs dropping over Baghdad and our helicopters are crashing,” said Howard Bragman, a Los Angeles–based public-relations executive—his firm is called 15 Minutes—who has done work for Monica Lewinsky, among other clients, and now teaches his profession at the University of Southern California.

“And it’s taken for granted that the media’s a pain in the ass,” he said, before adding with a little smile: “So when you power guys come from New York it scares us small-town people here.”

Mr. Bragman had one other observation. “If Bill Clinton were President he would have delayed the war until after the Oscars,” he said.

But the luxurious, Hollywood-centric 90’s were long gone, and while a CNN report said that President Bush was urging Americans to take a load off and “embrace” the NCAA basketball tournament, no official voice seemed to be sticking up for the Academy.

By Sunday, March 23, the producers of the Academy had found the appropriate response. The dresses and the jewels were a little more tasteful, but hardly the Amish wear that was predicted to be modeled. And though the red carpet was eliminated, the press was not. Rather, they were pruned back to useful still photographers and a few ABC stand-up reporters interviewing mostly the home team Disney and Miramax stars.

However, if there is one thing that saved the Oscars on March 23 it was Steve Martin and the stage patter that he and the writers put together. “Well I’m glad they cut back on all the glitz,” Mr. Martin said of the vanished red carpet. “That’ll send them a message.”

Although the chill Mr. Martin lost some of that cool when a few jokes into his opening monologue, he realized that the crowd was with him. He had an intimidating—even brutally scary—task on a day when the bloody, gritty reality of the war had first faced American viewers. “I thought I’d rather be Saddam Hussein than Steve Martin,” writer Fran Lebowitz said later. But Mr. Martin’s face seemed to flush with relief and gratitude as he turned the theater into a kinder, gentler and cleaner version of a Friars roast, replete with anachronistic jokes about the shortest guy in the house, still Mickey Rooney (“Stand up, Mickey!”) and the horniest guy in the house, still Jack Nicholson. Mr. Martin’s comeback to Best Documentary winner Michael (Bowling for Columbine) Moore’s “Shame on you, Mr. Bush!” rant was a keeper: “The Teamsters are helping Michael Moore into the trunk of his limo,” Mr. Martin said. And among the memorable unplanned moments was the freaked-out look on Michael Douglas’ face when he saw the mug shot of a strung-out looking Nick Nolte. That’s not funny, Mr. Douglas seemed to be thinking. That’s how I look in the morning.

As went the Oscars, so went the Vanity Fair party. The organizers did away with the red carpet, pared down the guest list, kept the glitz quotient medium cool, and in either a stroke of counterintuitive brilliance or just plain forgetfulness, left a yellow can of Original Scent Lysol in the men’s-room stall. Which may have been the McGuffin indicating that at the last minute, they had decided to let some reporters cover the post-show proceedings.

But first there was dinner. Mr. Murdoch, his pregnant wife Wendi Deng, son Lachlan and his wife Sarah, rocker Elvis Costello and his new musical girlfriend Diana Krall, Mr. O’Neal, Ms. Fawcett, Tonight Show host Jay Leno, writer Gore Vidal, Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman, his date for the evening, Marisa Berenson, and Mr. Gagosian dined on steak and French—not Freedom—fries. Mr. Gagosian’s presence was especially interesting given that, in the days leading up to Oscar week, former New York Post editor Vicky Ward had been calling art-world sources and telling them she was writing a piece on the beleaguered art deal for the magazine.

After the dessert plates were cleared, many of the guests repaired to the couches and ottomans in the tent where D.J. Steve McMahon was laying down a low-key, jazz- and swing-inflected vibe. Among those who stayed in the restaurant proper were producer and The Kid Stays in the Picture documentary subject Robert Evans, who stood talking to agent Jeff Berg as Mr. Evans’ wife attempted to phone director Roman Polanski—who directed Chinatown for Mr. Evans when he ran Paramount in the 1970’s—in Paris, from the reservation phone. Mr. Evans wasn’t able to reach the director, whom he used to refer to affectionately as the “Polack.”

In the tent near the D.J. booth, Fran Lebowitz sat on one of the couches, enjoyed a post-prandial cigarette and gave Mr. Martin’s performance a thumbs-up.

At that moment, recently departed USA Networks chief executive Barry Diller bounded up to Ms. Lebowitz. The media mogul looked like he’d just come from the office after a day of crunching Expedia’s numbers. He was dressed in shirtsleeves and a tie.

“Do you know what this is?” Mr. Diller said triumphantly to Ms. Lebowitz.

The writer squinted at Mr. Diller and said she couldn’t see what he was brandishing.

“This is the order I placed for In-N-Out Burger,” he said, then walked away. Though some frills had been sacrificed in the interest of decorum—press line, live band, Mike Ovitz—the In-N-Out burger counter at the back of the tent, apparently a favorite of the magazine’s editor in chief, Graydon Carter, had been spared.

Ms. Lebowitz said nothing as Mr. Diller high-tailed it back to his burger.

What did she make of Mr. Moore’s speech?

“Michael Moore was right,” she said. “But the amount of self-regard …. ”

Just a few feet away, on the other side of Mr. O’Neal and Ms. Fawcett and her Zang Toi dress with the replica of the American flag sewn into one fold of the train, Mr. Vidal was struggling to his feet using his cane to steady himself. What did he make of the disconnect between the Oscar hoopla and the war in Iraq?

Mr. Vidal gave a perturbed look, but then he said: “Weird similarities.” He fiddled a bit with his cane, then added: “You know the U.S. could lose this war.” He mentioned Korea, Vietnam. “But the boastfulness,” he said, “of the President and the media.” Then he headed for the exit.

Passing Mr. Vidal on the way into the tent were singer Aimee Mann and her husband Michael Penn, brother of Sean. Ms. Mann seemed to hesitate a bit when she spotted Mr. Costello and the pleasingly zaftig Ms. Krall in the slowly growing crowd. Back in the early 90’s, Ms. Mann was known as Mr. Costello’s protégé—they co-wrote “The Other End of the Telescope” and there were always those rumors—and when she spotted the singer, she whispered something to her husband before plunging over to give Mr. Costello a big hug. Introductions were exchanged and then suddenly, Ms. Krall looked a little sullen and Mr. Costello reached out and massaged her back reassuringly.

It was a small gesture, in a night of small gestures. There were few abrupt moves, loud squeals, demonstrations of dirty dancing or excessive public displays of affection, save for Ms. Kidman—a bit too giggly and daft under pressure to be a real movie star—who, upon seeing the determinedly tweedy Royal Tenenbaums director Wes Anderson screamed, “Wes, OH MY GOD!” and dragged the pie-eyed director into a more private corner of the room.

Otherwise, it was wink-wink, nudge-nudge, and lots of discreet magic-finger massages, like the one that Sheryl Crow gave to Mr. Carter, even though Mr. Carter spent a lot of the evening with a petite beauty named Anna Scott, whose father was once in the employ of Queen Elizabeth. (“She’s a friend,” Mr. Carter said the following day.) Later in the night, Mr. Diller and his wife Diane von Furstenberg held hands as they walked through the tent, and in what seems like a case of stepfather worship, Ms. Von Furstenberg’s son Alex appeared at the party with a shaved head.

About the most brazen sexual display all night involved the model Iman and Vanity Fair fashion director Elizabeth Saltzman Walker taking turns licking a lollipop that bore the photographic image of Dennis Quaid, just one of the magazine’s cover guys that had been turned into a celebrity sucker. The second-most brazen involved Heather Graham, who seemed intent on making a connection with U2’s front man Bono, though he had come with his wife, Ali Hewson. At a moment when the Mrs. didn’t seem to be around, we saw Ms. Graham batting her eyes at Bono and overheard her telling him, “me and my friends were saying we’re not going to the bathroom, we’ll miss U2.”

Ms. Graham also seemed to be commiserating with the singer over the band’s loss to Eminem for the Best Song Oscar. “This town loves success,” Bono could be heard saying as he explained that the rapper’s movie, 8 Mile, had not cost that much to produce and had made a lot of money whereas Gangs of New York, for which U2 had written “The Hands That Built America” had cost more and not fared as well.”

As midnight approached, Oscar winners began to tumble in: Ms. Kidman, Adrien Brody, Peter O’Toole and Chicago producer Marty Richards, who still seemed to be a little gaga from the experience. Mr. Richards, who had the Democratic committee’s Robert Zimmerman following him with his Oscar in hand, seemed to be realizing all the people he had forgotten to thank in the heat of his ecstasy. “It’s going to cost me a fortune in Variety ads to make it right,” Mr. Richards said. Vince Vaughn came, and Secretary’s Maggie Gyllenhaal said she found it “interesting” that Chelsea Clinton had told her brother Jake in Interview magazine that Hillary Rodham Clinton had liked her movie. A lot. But then Ms. Gyllenhaal added a bit of a caveat to the Senator’s coolness quotient: “Although Hillary Clinton seems to have taken all sorts of weird uncommitted political strategies lately,” she said. She meant, it seemed, the war.

Nominee Martin Scorsese came and left like a ghost. Jack Nicholson didn’t come nor Warren Beatty, who’s been a regular there for years, and the party seemed a little light on the kind of heavy hitters—like Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts—that have appeared in the past, although Mr. Cruise didn’t seem to be at the Oscars.

Near the airlock where the tent connected to Morton’s, Mr. Cruise’s former Days of Thunder producer Jerry Bruckheimer stood nursing a Heineken. Given that Mr. Bruckheimer is producing Profiles from the Front Line, a Cops-like series following the exploits of our armed forces in Afghanistan, we asked him how he felt about Iraq coverage he had seen on television.

“It’s rough,” Mr. Bruckheimer said. The sad thing is those kids don’t make the policy. They enforce it. And, he said, “I was just saying that this is the first war to be shown in living color.” The producer added that because of the relationships forged with such Bush administration officials as Donald Rumsfeld, “we could have gone right into Iraq with them,” he said, “but we couldn’t get ABC to pay for it.”

It was the most direct conversation about the war overheard all night. And Mr. Carter concurred that once the party started, he didn’t hear much about the war either. “I heard a lot about it at dinner,” he said. “But I think people were relieved not to have to talk about it.”

But there were moments when the tension caused by the situation in Iraq seemed to manifest itself in other ways. As reported in dailies, ICM agent Ed Limato threw a vodka drink on Page Six editor Richard Johnson over items he had written about his former client Jennifer Lopez and a current one, Mel Gibson. Mr. Johnson said Mr. Limato seemed drunk. Mr. Limato denied the war had anything to do with his actions, but said: “I hope he likes vodka.”

And Tim Robbins took Washington Post Reliable Source columnist Lloyd Grove to task. Mr. Robbins declined to comment about it at the party, but, as Mr. Grove wrote, the peacenik’s comments to the reporter were: “If you write about my family again, I will fucking find you and I will fucking hurt you.”

Jennifer Lopez and her fiancé Ben Affleck showed up without any bodyguards in tow. A Vanity Fair source said that there was never a discussion over whether Ms. Lopez, who usually travels with an entourage the size of a football team’s offensive line, would arrive with any more muscle than Mr. Affleck. The couple stayed a long time, too, lounging on couches across the room from Mr. Murdoch and near the back of the tent. One guest said that he heard the couple talking about real estate in Savannah, Ga.

Hovering near them was the hip-hop artist Eve, who sported what looked like a tattoo of a bear paw above each of her breasts. They were real, she said, “and they hurt” when she got them. This being her first Vanity Fair party, Eve said she was “buggin’” because “I’m a fan of the movies and I’m studying acting right now and these actors keep coming up to tell me that they love my stuff.”

Like who?

“Like Ben Affleck,” Eve said.

Did that mean that Ms. Lopez was throwing some shade her way?

“No, I love J. Lo,” Eve said.

But the celebrity who seemed to be spreading the most love was Ms. Hudson, who seems destined to be the future mayor of Hollywood. The star of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days seemed cover all the bases in the tent. Toward the beginning of the night, she could be seen chatting with fashion designer Donna Karan.

“Men, you know,” Ms. Hudson said to the designer.

“Men I don’t know,” replied Ms. Karan.

Mr. Brody arrived with his mother, the photographer Sylvia Plachy. He was besieged the moment he arrived at the party. His speech had struck a nerve, especially the part in which he talked about his friend from Queens, Tommy Zarabinski. Mr. Brody said his buddy was serving in the Army, but he seemed reluctant to offer up more information about his friend. He said he didn’t know if Mr. Zarabinski was seeing action. And when we asked him if anything his friend had said to him had influenced his articulate speech, Mr. Brody gave a sharp look and said, simply, “No.”

And then the crowd swallowed him up.

Harvey Weinstein toured the party in a rumpled tux, but, unlike previous years, where he presided over intimate after-parties in some secret location, he was only good until 2 a.m. “I don’t think anybody was in the mood,” Mr. Weinstein said on March 25. “The show had to go on, and the show did go on,” he said, “and if you saw Entertainment Tonight, you saw that some of our guys in Iraq watched the Oscars and they were why the show was worth doing.”

A year ago, after trying to sell Chocolat at the Oscars, Mr. Weinstein and Miramax officials had vowed to return to making and acquiring the movies that had made their reputation in the first place. And that’s pretty much what they did with Gangs, Chicago, Frida and The Quiet American.

“It feels great,” Mr. Weinstein said of the company’s performance. “He even took some credit for Ms. Kidman’s Oscar given that, he said, Miramax owned half of The Hours.” “And we won the Big One,” he said.

But they also lost a big one, when Mr. Scorsese didn’t get the Best Director Oscar despite a heavy campaign that rankled some Academy members. “Listen, I think that Marty was pleased that Roman won,” Mr. Weinstein said. “But what can I say. Gangs is the quintessential New York movie. We’ll get it more than $80 million. It’s a profitable picture for us.” And that, Mr. Weinstein said, rankled the West Coast establishment. “They don’t want Marty to succeed,” he said, his voice taking on some heat. “I don’t care what kind of campaign is run. When Raging Bull was released, practically nothing was done for his Oscar campaign. And he didn’t win then either.

“It’s more about Marty and his maverick filmmaking style, which, I think, scares the shit out of people,” Mr. Weinstein said. “Maybe I fought too hard, but when I talked to Marty about previous campaigns virtually nothing had been done for him.”

And Mr. Weinstein called the flap over the Robert Wise column endorsing Mr. Scorsese’s nomination as best director of Gangs “bullshit.”

“With Marty it’s always the same thing. Los Angeles versus New York,” Mr. Weinstein said. “And he does not march to that beat.

“They want people to bleed without blood,” Mr. Weinstein said, then added that he had asked a “high-ranking” Academy official why they do this to us, and that the official replied, “Because you can take it.”

But then Miramax’s co-chairman seemed to calm down a bit. He said that Miramax was going to sit down with the Academy and seek the formation of “some oversight committee” that would clarify the rules about Oscar campaigns and put an end to the backbiting.

“Look, I love the Oscars. I love the Academy. I love all of it,” he said, sounding like a man who was looking at a medium-rare T-bone steak with all the trimmings. “The Oscars,” he said, “were good for the movies this year. This year, the Oscars grew up.”

Mr. Weinstein actually looked pensive.

“Yeah,” Mr. Weinstein added. “We did too.”

As the clock passed 2 a.m. the tents began to empty.

Near the airlock, Colin Farrell barreled up to Peter O’Toole and asked if he could be photographed with him. Dark-haired and twitchy, Mr. Farrell put his arm around Mr. O’Toole and said something to him about the Lawrence of Arabia star being “the elder statesman.” Mr. O’Toole listened as he clumsily inserted a cigarette into his posh holder and then put the contraption in his mouth. The cigarette hung at a 45-degree angle from the holder, but Mr. O’Toole made no effort to fix it. Instead, he stroked the back of Mr. Farrell’s neck as the amateur photographer snapped the photo.

And then it was over, Oscar night 2003.

The crowd moved onto the sidewalk. Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones star Natalie Portman stood with a group of friends, talking about school reunions. One of the valets—a strapping, unkempt Jason Schwartzman doppelganger—looked into the crowd of V.I.P.’s and nudged one of his fellow footmen. “She was checking me out,” he said, with a smile.

Hope springs eternal, but somehow, even in this heady setting hope seemed out of reach. It was impossible not to think that halfway around the world, girls and boys their age in fatigues were probably talking about something else.

Over in Century City, at the St. Regis Hotel, the Miramax party, usually an until-dawn affair, was already closing down and Harvey Weinstein, though his team’s Chicago had won the Best Picture, was nowhere to be found. Upstairs in the hotel’s penthouse, trays laden with sausage, eggs and other forms of breakfast went untouched. A few journalists walked forlornly through the empty rooms looking for star power, but there was none. Down in the St. Regis lobby a hotel employee stood cutting open freshly delivered bales of the next day’s New York Times. The headline read: “ALLIES AND IRAQIS BATTLE ON 2 FRONTS; 20 AMERICANS DEAD OR MISSING, 50 HURT.”

“When Penny Marshall comes to my joints, she gets buck wild!” Mr. Combs said with admiration in his polite voice. “Every time she comes to one of my parties, she gets … ” he paused, then continued excitedly, “Penny Marshall stopped the music and sang ‘Happy Birthday.’ She spent the night at the house in the Hamptons the night before. I love her, man. I love her energy. You know, when I’m old, when I’m 60, I’m gonna remember that.”

Lord knows if, three decades from now, anyone else will remember Ms. Marshall’s nasal serenade of Mr. Combs, but for the next few months, they will be talking about the party where it happened.

Get past the confusion at the door and the white noise thrown up by the publicists of the celebrities who didn’t get inside. Indeed, talk to the people who attended the 29th-birthday party of Mr. Combs at Cipriani Wall Street on Nov. 4, and many of them will agree that it marked a moment in New York’s social history.

“The millennium party has started early,” declared funk artist George Clinton as he and his multicolored dreadlocks wove through the Beaux-Arts setting of 55 Wall Street, where Mr. Combs’ monogram, a merger of the letters P and D, seemed to be projected everywhere. Indeed, something more than Mr. Combs’ birthday was being celebrated on this chill November evening: While Truman Capote’s “Black and White Ball” at the Plaza Hotel in 1966 honored the crème de la crème of society, Mr. Combs was celebrating the kind of high-profile commercial success and notoriety that knows no racial or class bounds. On the night of his party, Mr. Combs attracted and presided over a group of local, national and international celebrities such as Donald Trump, Martha Stewart, Ronald Perelman, Sarah Ferguson, Kevin Costner and Ms. Marshall, who either have that kind of success, are trying to regain it, or are yearning for their first taste of it. And for at least this evening, as the television cameras caught them partying with Puffy, they caught a bit of the buzz that Mr. Combs has worked so hard to generate.

Mr. Combs is pushing for that kind of mad mainstream commercial success from a lot of different angles. “I’m in the field of entertainment,” he said. It’s a big field. In addition to performing his own material--his album No Way Out has gone quintuple platinum--Mr. Combs produces such acts as Faith Evans, 112 and Jerome for his Bad Boy Entertainment label; he is producing a film for Miramax; he has a stake in a Chelsea restaurant called Justin’s, a stake in a magazine called Notorious and, most recently, his own fashion label, called Sean John. While many of his non-music endeavors are still in the beginning stages, Mr. Combs, largely through his music work, ranked 15th on Forbes’ Top 40 list of highest-paid entertainers, with estimated 1997 earnings of $53.5 million.

Mr. Combs’ first career in the entertainment field was as a party promoter, and perhaps it was there that he learned that location and crowd mix is crucially important when it comes to flaunting one’s success. In recent years, he has made the St. Barts and Hamptons scenes, where the social wealthy are duly noted by the media. This past summer, for example, Mr. Combs got the press’ attention when he hired an ice-cream truck to provide frozen treats for revelers, who included Mike Tyson, at his Hamptons home. “He had a fabulous little season in the Hamptons,” said David Watkins, president of Icon Lifestyle Marketing, an event-planning company.

For this event, Mr. Combs’ company, Bad Boy Entertainment, hired three firms to throw the affair, which cost in excess of $500,000, according to sources familiar with the party. The first was Mr. Watkins’ company, which oversaw the design and construction of the setting, which included a bottom-lit, translucent, monogrammed dance floor, curvaceous lounge furniture and two Plexiglas go-go dancing booths. In addition to Icon, Bad Boy also hired public-relations consultants Paul Wilmot, a former Condé Nast man who’s tight with the society and fashion crowds, and Peggy Siegal, who handled the show-biz and press invitations.

Mr. Combs, however, insisted that this was not calculated on his part. “I’m very well versed. I take pride in that. I go from the Hamptons to Harlem,” he told The Transom. “That’s how wide my outlook on life is. I like a lot of different experiences. I don’t just pigeonhole myself into one type of experience.”

He added that “my life has been about breaking down barriers. Like, you know, in the Hamptons, I’m just being myself. I don’t act different with Ron Perelman than I act with Russell Simmons. I don’t act different with Busta Rhymes than I act with Donald Trump. I act the same way I act. I’m just Puff.”

When The Transom asked Mr. Combs what he considered to be his ultimate business goal, he replied, “To make history.” Mr. Combs did not necessarily equate making history with making money. Mr. Combs’ vision of making history is “in having people realize and look at people in a different way. The next time a young black kid with his hat turned to the back walks into an office, he may just be looked at in a different way because of Puff Daddy.”

Mr. Combs’ mention of fellow hip-hop impresario Russell Simmons is worth noting. Years before Mr. Combs was lounging in St. Barts and the Hamptons, Mr. Simmons was there. Mr. Simmons was a multimedia million-dollar man before Mr. Combs, and also counts Messrs. Perelman and Trump as friends. Mr. Simmons, who was at the birthday party and is a friend of Puff Daddy, sees his own and Mr. Combs’ goals as the same: “The globalization of hip-hop culture,” he said; when it comes to achieving that goal, however, he conceded Mr. Combs may have an advantage. “He’s a rock star,” said Mr. Simmons. “I’m not a rock star.”

Mr. Simmons means “rock star” in the populist sense, in the way that Donald Trump is a sort of rock star of the real-estate world, a man whose appeal ranges from Eurotrash (the kind of people who buy condos that bear his name) to hip-hop. Mr. Simmons assured The Transom that “Donald’s the shit” (which essentially has the same positive connotations as the hip-hop saying, “My shit is Trump”). Another example would be the manner in which Mr. Perelman has marketed himself as the rock star of the takeover business. Mr. Combs, who met Mr. Perelman in the Hamptons, counts himself as “a follower” of Mr. Perelman’s entrepreneurial ways and calls Mr. Perelman “one of the Great Ones, like the Donald Trumps and the Quincy Joneses,” whom he intends to study. Indeed, after our interview with Mr. Combs, The Transom heard that he is writing a book modeled after Mr. Trump’s The Art of the Deal.

As befits a rock star, the video invitation that went out to prospective partygoers featured a star-studded cast, including actor-rapper Will Smith, comedian Chris Rock, Mr. Perelman and Mariah Carey. Those who RSVP’d for the party’s location, got their tickets and made it through the line, found a three-tiered set with each tier representing a more exclusive area. The dance floor and the space that surrounded it were open to all, but then certain V.I.P.’s could climb a beige stairway (and, as Mr. Watkins told a TV reporter, it was Mr. Combs’ favorite shade of beige) and enter a lounge area. As the party gathered critical mass, that is where Mr. Perelman, Vanity Fair fashion director Elizabeth Saltzman and Ms. Marshall were gathered, along with Kevin Costner, David Lee Roth, Downtown Julie Brown, Robin Leach and Mr. Trump, who said, “I don’t give a shit about Puffy’s success. I just think he’s a good guy.”

The top tier, which could not be accessed from the lounge area, was where the D.J. booth had been set up. It would serve as Mr. Combs’ VVIP area upon his arrival.

Wending their way through the crowd and cigar smoke on the ground floor were Miramax co-chairmen Harvey and Bob Weinstein. Asked if he was “down” with Mr. Combs, Harvey Weinstein humored The Transom by saying, “Yeah, I’m down.” He then defended Mr. Combs against a recent New York Post Page Six item that said Mr. Combs had lost his role in Oliver Stone’s upcoming football film because he threw like a girl. “I played football with him in St. Barts,” said Mr. Weinstein, “and he’s an excellent athlete.”

The crowd featured representatives from fashion (Donna Karan, John Bartlett), Hollywood (Denzel Washington, Francis Ford Coppola), music (Wyclef Jean, Mase), models (Elle MacPherson, Veronica Webb), sports (Derek Jeter of the New York Yankees, Sam Cassell of the New Jersey Nets) and even young society (Serena Boardman). In the crowd, too, was Soul Train host Don Cornelius, who said that Mr. Combs had hit that “Pied Piper stride.” Mr. Cornelius explained that Mr. Combs’ presence at a party “leaves you feeling assured that you’re in the right place.” He added: “Success follows success. More than it breeds it.”

Mr. Combs would not follow anyone that night, and before he made his entrance, the D.J. began urging security to clear the crowd off the dance floor. A narrow gantlet formed, and within minutes Muhammad Ali appeared with an entourage and headed up the stairs. Restaurateur Arrigo Cipriani took the lane soon after, a nervous smile plastered on his face. Then came singer Michael Bolton, followed by Weight Watchers spokesman Sarah Ferguson--two people, if any, who need Mr. Comb’s Pied Piper effect. “Next we’ll see Kenny G,” cracked an art dealer in the crowd.

The D.J.’s voice boomed again; the sound level seemed even higher. “As per Sean Puffy Combs,” the disk spinner explained, everybody needed to leave the dance floor. Reluctantly, they did and waited until the D.J.’s voice boomed again: “Ladies and gentlemen, I want you all to show love to the man … Puff Daddy!”

Mr. Combs, in a beautiful gray three-piece suit that managed to look both tailored and slightly oversize, sauntered into the room and pumped his hands in the air. The crowd flowed behind him, and there in the crush Martha Stewart seemed to appear out of nowhere. “This is so funny!” she said.

Mr. Combs located a microphone. “All the press off the dance floor,” he said. “Leave my people alone.” The music tore into the crowd at ear-bleed levels and they began to move. A spotlight trained on the top-tier balcony bathed Ivana Trump in a white glow, and she began to gyrate to the music. There is a tendency for hip-hop videos to portray the shiny trappings of celebrity and success. Mr. Combs had managed to make his life look like one of those videos.

Although he did not acknowledge this directly, Mr. Combs seemed to be aware that the kind of barrier-toppling mainstream commercial success that he is enjoying right now can be fleeting, as Mr. Costner could have told him.

“I don’t wanna be 40 chasing around young girls and all that,” he said from his yacht phone, in what was apparently not a direct allusion to Messrs. Trump and Perelman. “I am going to have my fun right now.” Indeed, a few times during the conversation, he mused, “I’m just runnin’ through this money like wildfire.” He didn’t sound particularly worried. He said he regretted not being able to speak with his idol, Muhammad Ali, at the party, “But I have a meeting set up with him when I get back.”

He denied that the dance-floor clearing had been per his instructions. “If that’s what I wanted, I could have gotten it, but on this occasion it wasn’t,” he said. “I’m not saying I’m not capable of something like that, but who are you or anybody else to judge me? I’m not going to be exactly what everybody wants me to be. I just invited people to a party. It’s not to be judged like it was a Broadway play or a theater event. It was just a party, man. Leave the hang-ups at home. If you got in, great, it was great. If you didn’t, I’m very sorry.”

Then he laughed. Success may be fleeting, but he seemed confident there would be another party. “I know the next time, you know to get your ass there early.”

“Johnnie Cochran!” he yelled as he stood at the podium.

The mostly black and tan crowd inside the Harlem headquarters of Mr. Sharpton’s activist group, the National Action Network, roared its approval.

“Johnnie Cochran!” the reverend bellowed again.

The cheers came back stronger this time and were recorded by a half-dozen or so TV news crews covering the Oct. 28 rally for Mr. Louima. After another round, Mr. Sharpton took the cheer to its logical conclusion. “If it don’t fit,” he brayed, then windmilled an extended index finger in Mr. Cochran’s direction. Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. smiled as he mouthed the words, “You must acquit,” along with the rest of the audience, but as the moment ended in another burst of applause and laughter, the defense attorney’s proud face seemed momentarily clouded with frustration.

“I do not want that as my epitaph: If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” Mr. Cochran told The Observer a day later in the office that he keeps at Court TV’s production offices on Third Avenue in midtown. He was smiling, but he was serious.

It was the second time in two days that a prominent black New Yorker had invoked some version of the brilliantly simple rhyming couplet that Mr. Cochran had used on Sept. 28, 1995, in his closing arguments at the criminal trial of O.J. Simpson. The phrase, referring, of course, to the infamous bloody gloves, has shadowed Mr. Cochran even as he has moved beyond the case, beyond Los Angeles. To New York.

Socially and politically, Manhattan’s hierarchy is as complex as one of Mr. Cochran’s Big Bang neckties. But he is already rising to the challenge: He has barely been in the city a year, and he has broken into the city’s media culture via a prime-time show on Court TV; into politics and law, representing Mr. Louima in his $155 million civil claim against the city; into the business world and high society, both black and white; into sports, making a Jerry Maguire lunge for professional black athletes.

“My metabolism and my energy level,” he said, “are probably more geared to New York than they are to L.A.” Already, he has been admitted to practice in the federal courts in Brooklyn and Manhattan; at press time, he was waiting to be admitted to the New York State bar. (An official there said that Mr. Cochran was a shoo-in.) He said that as long as he’s in New York, “I will speak out because I am not bashful on issues that I think are important. And I want to be part of the fabric at this point.”

Mr. Cochran, said Mr. Sharpton, “is smart enough to ingratiate himself with people that have already fit in. So to go to One Hundred Black Men [a group of powerful conservative black Manhattan professionals], to go to my place, it makes the comfort level rise a lot higher, a lot faster, than if he was coming in as an outsider and had the disdain of the local community.”

“I think he’s interested in becoming a person of real importance around town,” said one New York corporate executive, a friend of Mr. Cochran who requested anonymity. “That’s what he was in L.A., and that’s what his mind tells him he ought to be [here].”

‘That’s Veryvery Interesting’

In his austere Court TV office, which is decorated with just a few drawings and photos of himself, Mr. Cochran came off like a neon sign of positivity. Although he dresses impeccably, he wears loud ties the same way that defense attorney Gerry Spence favors fringe and buckskin. The yellow-and-blue number that Mr. Cochran was wearing on the evening of Oct. 29 could best be described as post-Impressionistic.

Looking a good decade younger than his 60 years, he talked in rapid clips, used the words “wonderful” and “impressive” a lot, and had a habit of stringing together two verys as if they were one word, as in: “That’s a veryvery interesting question.” This seemed to be his way of saying that he was veryvery interested in keeping the interview on a breezy plane.

Questions about O.J. Simpson take Mr. Cochran into veryvery land. “I don’t run from my involvement in the Simpson case,” Mr. Cochran said, “but I don’t want to be remembered as [if] that was the only thing I ever did.”

Therein lies one of Mr. Cochran’s talents: answering the question directly and enthusiastically, yet in a manner totally unsatisfying to his interlocutor.

His successful defense of Mr. Simpson made him a national legal superstar and a bona fide celebrity. But his role in the Trial of the Century also served to obscure the achievements for which Mr. Cochran wants to be known: specifically, the reputation that he enjoys and cherishes in Los Angeles as a crusader against police brutality and a defender of minorities’ civil rights.

Mr. Cochran’s decision to begin commuting to New York to do, four times a week, Cochran & Company, a prime-time legal talk show for Court TV, certainly makes sense as the next step in a strategy to move beyond his connection to the Simpson trial. But the attorney was careful to point out that his move to the city “wasn’t anything I sought out.” Rather, he said, he was invited by Steve Brill, the cable network’s founder and one of the media elite’s frat boys. Indeed, Mr. Brill, who calls himself a “total Cochran fan,” told The Observer that he spent “a lot of time” talking Mr. Cochran into the idea of a show. “My wife and I had Johnnie and Dale [Mr. Cochran’s second wife] up to our apartment for cocktails and spent time helping them hook up with real estate brokers and introducing them to some people. It was hard, actually, getting him to think about leaving California,” said Mr. Brill.

By September, Mr. Cochran had a more substantial reason for making the bicoastal commute. On Aug. 9, Mr. Louima was allegedly sodomized with an object resembling a broomstick by someone at the 70th Precinct police station in Brooklyn. By Labor Day, Mr. Cochran had joined the joined the legal team for Mr. Louima, bringing along Simpson trial alumni Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld. Now the East Coast tabloids have their own “Dream Team” to write about. And Mr. Cochran has a potentially important civil rights case--one much more ideologically pure than Mr. Simpson’s.

If Mr. Louima’s civil action against the city ever goes to trial, and if Mr. Cochran ever gets to argue it, it could be a chance for him to shake off the bloody glove imagery and square his civil rights law past with the present. On the other hand, the so-called Dream Team that Mr. Louima has assembled looks like it could, at any moment, be beset with the same personality clashes that plagued the last Dream Team that Mr. Cochran headed.

Those tensions seemed evident when The Observer called attorney Brian Figeroux, who, along with his partners, Carl Thomas and Casilda Roper-Simpson, will carve up with Mr. Cochran’s team and personal injury lawyer Sanford Rubenstein a percentage of any winnings from Mr. Louima’s $155 million civil claim.

Asked how Mr. Cochran had come to the case, Mr. Figeroux said: “I have no correct interpretation or knowledge about how Cochran came on board. There are all sorts of different interpretations out there. You guys [i.e., the media] have to figure out what is the truth.” Mr. Figeroux also said that he had “no comment” regarding relations among the team’s lawyers.

Mr. Louima’s cousin and spokesman, Samuel Nicolas, said that Mr. Cochran “didn’t seek us out,” but that a family friend, a Haitian band leader named King Kino, had put in a call to the attorney.

Then Mr. Nicolas asked a question of his own. “Why is the focus on the attorney and not on the victim?” he said. “Whether it’s Johnny Appleseed, Johnny-Come-Lately or Johnnie Cochran, the focus should be on Abner Louima.”

Networking and Niche-Carving

As he waits to see the direction that Louima case will take, Mr. Cochran has been busy carving himself a niche in New York.

He said that he is contemplating buying an apartment. (He would only that he is currently renting one somewhere on 57th Street.) He is networking with the various factions of the city’s black community. His publicist, Terrie Williams, who has worked for actors Eddie Murphy and Malik Yoba and New York Knick Charlie Ward, is helping to make the right introductions and is setting up what she called “strategic alliances” for the lawyer. “I’m giving him an overview of the key players,” said Ms. Williams.

Elaine Williams, a vice president with Essence magazine, gave Mr. Cochran a booklet of recommendations “from doctors to manicurists to barber shops.” And when public relations executive Caroline Jones threw a party on Oct. 2 for Mr. Cochran’s 60th birthday, she asked the 400 or so party guests to provide him with tips for restaurants. For someone who has long demonstrated an affinity and a talent for working in front of a camera, it is no surprise that many of Mr. Cochran’s New York friends work in the media. Clarence Avant is chairman of Motown Records, Ed Lewis is publisher and chief executive of Essence, Earl Graves, whose Sag Harbor house Mr. Cochran visited this past summer, is president of Black Enterprise magazine, Bill Cosby is … Bill Cosby. The Rev. Dr. Calvin Butts of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church is a Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity brother.

Mr. Sharpton, who met Mr. Cochran through their mutual friend, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, said he recognized Mr. Cochran’s talent for easing into the firmament when the attorney spoke at a rally and book-signing event that Mr. Sharpton put together in Harlem. “Halfway through the speech, he had talked about police brutality and … he never once went to O.J. I said, ‘This guy knows how to talk to an audience,’” said Mr. Sharpton. “He established his activist credentials with probably the most active group in town. So he did not come off as some shallow celebrity that the Big White Media had given us. He became a brother, instantly.”

Mr. Cochran is not averse to rubbing shoulders with the city’s Big White Establishment. He proudly recounted how, shortly after arriving in New York, he was invited to speak to The New York Times’ editorial board. He said that such an invitation was never forthcoming from the Los Angeles Times. And on the social front, Mr. Cochran is part of a tony list--virtually all-white--of celebrities, including Barbara Bush, Donna Hanover, Peter Jennings and George Stephanopoulos, who will be contributing letters to be auctioned off at Christie’s at a benefit for Literacy Partners that will be hosted by Diane Sawyer, Liz Smith and Bette Midler.

“I probably haven’t been here long enough to talk to you about all the various ramifications of power,” Mr. Cochran said, but he added, “I’m intrigued by the Mayor here.”

Mr. Cochran has yet to meet Mr. Giuliani, who will be his figurehead foe should the Louima case go to trial, yet with whom he shares some traits. “Unlike the mayors in Los Angeles, who traditionally have been more laid-back, he’s at everything,” Mr. Cochran said. “‘Peripatetic’ is probably a word you’d use about him. And you know, he’s a powerful Mayor. His presence is something, you know, whether you agree with his politics or not. He’s a real force here in the city.”

Mr. Cochran clearly knows better than to pick a fight with the biggest bully in the sandbox when he’s still getting used to the sand. Yet he seemed to be saying that the Mayor is on his radar screen. Whether or not Mr. Giuliani is scoping out Mr. Cochran is another question. According to a source close to the Police Department: “Cochran doesn’t exist here.”

At the National Action Network rally for Mr. Louima on Oct. 29, Mr. Cochran seemed prepared for a fight. “The city government is veryvery powerful. We trust they’re going to do the right thing,” he said, ending his speech with: “We plan to get justice at all costs.”

Mr. Cochran’s quest for fame and justice seems to be governed by two golden rules, which he recounted during the interview: “To those to whom much is given, much is required,” is one. The other is: “You can do good and you can do well at the same time.”

Mr. Cochran remembered: “Always in L.A., when I’d get $15 million against the L.A.P.D., they’d say, ‘What kind of civil rights lawyer are you?’ I’d say, ‘One who works hard.’”

Between Geronimo Pratt and O.J.

Mr. Cochran’s first taste of affluence came during his high school years. Though he is a native of the Shreveport, La., area, his family moved to California to take advantage of the industrial boom there (his father sold insurance) and eventually settled in Los Angeles. There, Mr. Cochran attended Los Angeles High School, where 3 percent of the student body was black, and many of his classmates lived in exclusive Hancock Park, home to the city’s powerful Van Nuys, Doheny and Chandler families. “I saw no reason why those things shouldn’t be within my reach as well,” he wrote in his autobiography, Journey to Justice.

It was his private practice, not his No. 3 position in the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office, that made him a local hero in Los Angeles’ black community long before the Simpson case. The case of Leonard Deadwyler may not be familiar to many New Yorkers, but it was an important beginning in bringing accountability to a Los Angeles police force that had a long history of brutality against blacks and other minorities. Deadwyler was shot to death in 1966 by police as he tried to drive his pregnant wife to the hospital. Even though the death was ruled accidental, the case made Mr. Cochran’s reputation as a defender of minorities when he represented Mrs. Deadwyler during a coroner’s inquest that was conducted on live television.

Before O.J. Simpson, Mr. Cochran’s most famous client, and the one the attorney is perhaps most proud of representing, was Elmer Geronimo Pratt. “When I promised Geronimo Pratt that I wouldn’t forget, I kept that promise,” said Mr. Cochran.

He was Mr. Pratt’s lawyer in 1972 when the Black Panther was sentenced to life in prison, eight years of it in solitary confinement, for the slaying of a woman in Los Angeles. But this past June, Mr. Cochran won Mr. Pratt’s acquittal after he showed that the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office and the F.B.I. had suppressed crucial evidence about the case from the trial and that the prosecution’s key witness, a former F.B.I. informant and rival of Mr. Pratt, had lied on the stand in the first trial.

In light of those two cases, it’s ironic that Mr. Cochran’s national profile is derived from his involvement in a trial that author Jeffrey Toobin characterized as “an obscene parody of an authentic civil rights struggle” in his book about the Simpson case, The Run of His Life. (Mr. Cochran called Mr. Toobin’s assessment “absolutely preposterous. Jeffrey Toobin wouldn’t know a civil rights case if he saw one.”)

Mr. Toobin’s was not the only book to question Mr. Cochran’s virtue. In Life After Johnnie Cochran, his ex-wife, Barbara Cochran Berry, accused her former husband of philandering and physical abuse. In his account of the marriage in Journey to Justice, Mr. Cochran glossed over the first allegation and denied the second.

The couple’s daughter, Tiffany Cochran, who is a weekend anchor and reporter at WXIA-TV in Atlanta, told The Observer, “The whole trial sent my life into a tailspin.” Although she said she supported both parents, Ms. Cochran added that she felt her mother was “entitled to write what she wanted.” Asked if she thought the allegations were true, she replied: “It’s hard for me to imagine it’s true, but I can’t imagine her lying, either. It’s one of those strange things,” she said. “This trial brought out the worst in everybody.”

Fame, Not Obscurity

The minute he emerged from the Lincoln that had brought him the short distance from his office to a membership meeting of One Hundred Black Men in the Citicorp Building on Oct. 27, Mr. Cochran’s celebrity became apparent.

In the short walk to the building’s entrance, he was swarmed by people, black and white. “Hey, brother. Hey, fellas,” he called to his well-wishers. Then noted, “I can’t walk. I can’t walk down the street. Here and wherever I am now, because of television.” There was no regret in his voice.

Mr. Cochran originally had become a member of the Los Angeles chapter of this organization of successful conservative black professionals, which preaches economic empowerment. But in September, he was inducted into its New York chapter, along with New York City Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew and Board of Education president William Thompson. (Former Mayor David Dinkins is a member, and Philadelphia-based Coca-Cola Bottling Company chairman Bruce Llewellyn is a founder.)

Mr. Cochran had come to fulfill a promise he had made to sign copies of Journey to Justice for his fellow members, which he began doing even as he took the elevator up to the designated floor. He wore a crisp, tailored deep-blue suit accented with a vertically striped blue-and-yellow tie. Vertical stripes also bordered the points of his shirt collar. A blue pocket square with yellow piping and a chunky gold ID bracelet completed the outfit. He moved with an urgency, yet did not seem hurried, even though the starting time for Cochran & Company was less than two hours away.

Though Mr. Cochran tried, there was little time to sign books. When the evening’s program started, he was called upon to give an impromptu speech. “The new civil rights frontier is economic empowerment,” the attorney told the crowd. “We’ve got to own our share of the rock.” Even in extemporaneous mode, Mr. Cochran’s remarks were tailored to the crowd. Neither O.J. Simpson nor Abner Louima were invoked; neither had to be. As Mr. Cochran stood behind the podium with the principals of One Hundred Black Men, Byron Lewis, another guest that evening and the chief executive of Uniworld, an Afrocentric advertising company, referred to Mr. Simpson by saying, “We shan’t mention his name.” Then Mr. Lewis led his own cheer involving Mr. Cochran’s famous phrase. “If the glove doesn’t fit …. ”

“You know what the white people said?” Mr. Lewis continued. “Oh, he’s playing the race card. Of course, what else would he play? What else would he play?”

When it came time for Mr. Cochran to return to the studio, a number of members of One Hundred Black Men formed a protective pocket around the attorney and pushed through the surging crowd. Mr. Cochran, looking like a President or a prizefighter, was led to the elevator and then down into the street, where a Department of Corrections supervisor had agreed to give him a lift back to the office. On the drive back, he handed Mr. Cochran a business card, identifying himself as a member of the New York chapter of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, and asked Mr. Cochran if he would speak at an upcoming conference. “I’d be real honored to do it. You just get me some dates,” said Mr. Cochran before he emerged from the car.

As he did, a cabdriver rolled to an abrupt halt in the middle of Third Avenue. The cabby, who was white and had formed his opinion of Mr. Cochran while watching the Trial of the Century on TV, rolled down his window. “Johnnie Cochran!” he yelled, “The best lawyer in the universe.”

Abner Louima’s attorney smiled. “Thank you,” he said, and hustled to make his show.

“I feel O.K.,” the director replied wanly.

For a moment, I wondered how the bearded, fierce-eyed Scorsese of the 70’s--the one whom Los Angeles police once mistook for the Hillside Strangler--would have responded to Mr. Leno’s idiotic questions. But I chose instead to find perspective in the masterfully edited clip from Gangs that Mr. Scorsese had brought along to show.

In the scene, the terrifying Nativist Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis) invites his former assistant, Jenny Everdeane (Cameron Diaz), up on the stage of a social hall so that he can throw some knives at her.

“One more time for the sweet souvenir,” Bill says to Jenny to coax her up.

Of course, what follows is far from sweet: It is terrifying and humiliating and, judging from the look in Jenny’s eyes, a departure from what she expected to happen. But she toughs it out because, really, there is nothing else she can do. Her relationship with Bill is complicated, but she agreed to the terms long ago.

Seen in the context of The Tonight Show, “One more time for the sweet souvenir” sounded like a mantra. Mr. Scorsese wants the sweet souvenir of filmmaking--the Oscar--for a movie that took 23 years to wrestle onto the screen. To better the odds that he will get it, he has allowed himself to become part of a white-knuckle sideshow run by a guy with whom he has an equally complex relationship: Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein. As Mr. Scorsese told Mr. Leno: “We’re the Sunshine Boys.”

It was much more complicated than that. After clashing during the production of Gangs, Mr. Weinstein was now down in the Miramax boiler room doing whatever he does to get Mr. Scorsese an Oscar. “I am gonna go door-to-door for Marty,” Mr. Weinstein told Entertainment Weekly in its March 7 issue. “Marty would like to get one of those golden guys.” In reality, he was trying to work even more ambitious magic by securing the Best Director statuette for Mr. Scorsese and the Best Picture Oscar for Chicago.

Meanwhile, Mr. Scorsese embarked on a Magical Mystery Media Tour that has taken him everywhere but the local Gristede’s to promote his film. On Feb. 13, he headed to Harvard for the Hasty Pudding award, where he was photographed next to undergraduates in gold wigs and massive bras; 10 days later he was in Britain, waiting to receive their Oscar counterpart, the BAFTA award. Roman Polanski won it. There he was shot nuzzling the cheek of Chicago star Catherine Zeta-Jones, looking like one of the Hasty Pudding boys. Three days after that, he headed to the Loews Cineplex Lincoln Square, where the American Museum of the Moving Image presented a discussion called “Martin Scorsese’s New York.”

Then it was on to Los Angeles for a whirlwind weekend. On Feb. 28, Mr. Scorsese got the 2,217th star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, following Eddie Murphy and Andy Devine. The following day, he received the Directors Guild of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award (although Chicago’s Rob Marshall won as best director); then, on Monday, it was The Tonight Show. And on March 8--just 10 days before the Oscar ballots have to be in--Mr. Scorsese will be fêted back on his home turf, when he is presented with the Writers Guild of America East’s Evelyn F. Burkey Award “for one whose contributions have brought honor and dignity to writers everywhere.”

Dignity, always dignity.

Of course, when you’re that visible, some knives are bound to thrown. On Feb. 3, the screenwriter William Goldman drew blood with a column he penned for Variety. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I am sick unto death of feeling guilty about Martin Scorsese,” Mr. Goldman wrote.

“This year, more than ever, it’s like there’s a Byzantine plot to get Scorsese the honor,” he continued. “The Hollywood parties he is attending must make him want to barf, but there he is, glad-handing anyone in the vicinity who is an Academy member …. ”

And then Mr. Goldman wrote that Mr. Scorsese did not deserve the Oscar this year because Gangs of New York “is a mess.”

Well, Mr. Goldman--who has won two Oscars for his screenplays--is the Bill the Butcher of screenwriting. He’s scary smart about movies, and he knows exactly where to stick the shiv for maximum effect. I remember a piece he wrote for Premiere magazine about Saving Private Ryan, right before the 1998 Oscars, that made me look at the revered picture in a much more critical light.

But his take on Mr. Scorsese, while it made some interesting points, didn’t have the same effect on me. It felt more personal than analytical.

I agree with one thing, though: I’ll bet Mr. Scorsese’s not enjoying his pre-Oscar tour. In some of the photos, he looks a bit like Jenny Everdeane during the knife-throwing spectacle. I’ve probably spent a few days with him over the course of four years--all in the context of an interview--and each time I’ve left feeling ashamed of myself. It’s hard to explain, but when you meet a guy who grew up with a fraction of the opportunities you had and yet somehow acquired a knowledge of film, literature and history that dwarfs yours, you can feel like that.

And people who are that smart--no matter how well they suffer fools--tend to die a little bit inside when they have talk-show hosts asking them: “You feel lucky?”

But cringe as I have at these encounters, I don’t feel guilty--or sorry--for Mr. Scorsese. If I may borrow a phrase from Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, Mr. Scorsese’s vanity is stronger than his misery. You don’t make movies the way Mr. Scorsese makes movies without a big, healthy raging bull of an ego.

And he’s operating in 21st-century media hell. Mr. Goldman won his Oscars in 1970, for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and in 1977, for All The President’s Men--long before the media proliferation that brought us CNN, MSNBC, the Fox News Channel, the Drudge Report and dozens more cable channels and Web sites that ooze and blob their programming hours to Oscar white noise. For the producers, it’s imperative to create what one veteran of the Oscar wars called “momentum”: keeping the movie fresh in the minds of Academy voters, known to cast their votes for the last movie they saw.

Mr. Scorsese is hardly alone on this front. On Feb. 27, Chicago’s Mr. Marshall was fêted at the equivalent of a refrigerator opening when his caricature was hung on the wall at Sardi’s. And though Roman Polanski, Oscar-nominated director of The Pianist, can’t campaign in the States because of some outstanding legal troubles, others have helped carry the torch for him. In the last days of February, Samantha Geimer, the victim of the statutory-rape case that caused Mr. Polanski to flee the U.S. in 1977, rose out of the darkness to write a column for the Los Angeles Times and to appear on Larry King Live, suggesting in both venues that Mr. Polanski’s art should be judged separately from his private life.

By the way, there’s another good reason for all of this: It fuels the box office. “If you go to the casino and you don’t put a lot of money down at the table, you don’t get a lot of money back,” one Oscar-tested friend explained. Gangs, which has made over $75 million in the U.S. so far, according to Miramax, received “the gift of 10 nominations.” That is “like getting 10 reasons to see the movie. And if they don’t put their earnings down now, they’re not going to double or triple what they can make back.”

That’s a factor that Mr. Scorsese, at age 60, can’t afford to ignore, given that Hollywood judges his work by its box office. As one senior-level studio executive in Los Angeles told me: “People criticize John Wayne for getting an Academy Award, but John Wayne, I think, contributed to this business in a heavy way. Aside from Marty Scorsese’s enormous talent, I’m not sure what he’s contributed. He’s contributed a lot to himself--he’s an enormously talented guy--but he doesn’t care about making money for anybody.”

That’s the kind of L.A. condescension toward New York that Mr. Weinstein has fought since he brought Pulp Fiction to the Oscars in 1995. And that’s got to be one of the reasons that Mr. Weinstein is throwing his extra-grande ass into getting Mr. Scorsese the Best Director award. Mr. Weinstein is a Gangs fighter himself. If this were the 19th century, he’d probably have a jar of severed ears on his desk--and mine would be among them--but he long ago made the conversion that takes place two hours and seven minutes into the movie, which Mr. Goldman cited as an example of bad storytelling: Leonardo DiCaprio, as Amsterdam, meets with Boss Tweed to turn his gang’s size into political clout by getting an Irishman on the ballot for sheriff.

I liked it. It reminded me of how Mr. Weinstein parlayed his power as the scrappy distributor and producer into an influential position with the Democratic party. Just ask Hillary Clinton.

This is another campaign. As Mr. Cocks said: “What Harvey’s stated ambitions are for Marty, I really don’t know. I know that he’s extremely fond of Marty and extremely respectful of Marty. That doesn’t mean that he’s not a rough and tough character around Marty but those things go side by side in a way that is sometimes very difficult to reconcile.”

By the way, there’s one more reason I don’t feel guilty for Mr. Scorsese. I think he’s made a great movie. I’m going to let him, Mr. Weinstein and the voting members of the Academy worry about the statue. I understand why Mr. Scorsese wants the Oscar. I remember when, on the night of the 1998 awards, Shakespeare in Love writer Tom Stoppard let me hold the statuette he’d won. While he ate scrambled eggs, I got to feel like James Cameron.

But, tell me, do you remember what year Titanic swept the awards? I don’t. But I will never forget Robert De Niro’s bloody fingers in Taxi Driver, his dressing-room speech in Raging Bull, the amazing Copacabana tracking shot in GoodFellas. Those moments have become part of the fabric and mythology of this country.

And Gangs of New York has scenes, moments exhumed and conjured, that are just as memorable--scenes that only Mr. Scorsese could have done. The opening scene, where the Dead Rabbits come up from the bowels of the Old Brewery is “the Irish literally marching out of history,” said Kevin Baker, the author of Paradise Alley, a novel about the Five Points district. “They’re coming up through a thousand years of darkness and oppression and neglect and they come up through these levels and they kick open the door … and there’s America. There’s nothing, no other attempt that I’ve seen on film to get quite so deep into the American historical psyche.”

Gangs is not a perfect movie--Ms. Diaz’s romance with Mr. DiCaprio is flimsy, and the movie doesn’t breathe--but it is hardly a mess. It is, as Mr. Scorsese told me back in November, “an impression of time.”

I like Mr. Cocks’ description even more:

“You can create the mythology of the Eastern just the way that people created the mythology of the old West,” he told me.

So Martin Scorsese and his writers and all his movie-besotted associates got together with Mr. Weinstein, and made an Eastern. First they lived it, then they made it, beautifully and bloodily, right down to its earned last shot. And now, way out west the Nativists are treating the violent, messy paean to New York and its director and producer exactly as a town under assault would react: with a little scorn and some sullen respect. Gangs may get it, and it may not. But Mr. Weinstein and Mr. Scorsese have named the time and the place.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s called gang warfare.

On the outdoor patio of the Washington Hilton stood Presidential accuser Paula Jones, wearing a sparkly black prom dress, working off her nerves with a wad of green gum. Flanking Ms. Jones were the big hair of her adviser, Susan Carpenter-McMillan, her Billy Ray Cyrus–esque husband Steve Jones and some additional security muscle. On one side of the patio, an army of paparazzi stood on the ledge of a three-foot-high stone wall, jostling for a shot of Ms. Jones and her entourage.

As she posed and greeted, she caught sight of Mr. Dunleavy. With his gray S.O.S. pad of hair and leathery mug, the Postman has achieved that look of grizzled agelessness that nature gives to hard-living men who have managed to cheat the odds. Dressed in a vintage tuxedo with a magnificently thin shawl collar, Mr. Dunleavy looked like he would be right at home playing saxophone next to Keith Richards or Charlie Watts.

“You look familiar,” Ms. Jones said flirtatiously to Mr. Dunleavy. But when he introduced himself, Ms. Jones’ eyes registered uncertainty, even fear, and she did not pause to chat. As a crowd surged around her again, the smile returned to Mr. Dunleavy’s face.

“It’s just gorgeous,” he said, his Australian accent lengthening the syllables of the last word. “All these bloody Washington socialites falling all over like it was some Hollywood party.”

For the last several years, the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents’ Association has become an increasingly frenzied affair as celebrities of the moment--last year it was Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche, George Clooney and Fred Goldman--are invited by the glossier magazines in attendance to sex up this annual sweaty-palmed gathering of journalists and policy wonks. For the most part, these celebrities are adornments, irrelevant to, as Bill Clinton noted in his speech that night, “this kabuki dance between the White House and the press.” Ms. Jones has been integral to that dance, however, and her presence at the White House Correspondents’ dinner pushed the event into the overheated realm of the Golden Globes.

There at the Washington Hilton on April 25, the woman Ms. Carpenter-McMillan describes as just a little girl from Arkansas was playing Pia Zadora. To be sure, Ms. Jones is the concoction of a conservative sugar daddy and the press, and she left the distinct impression that she is simply the latest game piece in the cynical chess match between the White House and the media. But everyone in the audience seemed too jazzed with the surreality of this media moment to ponder the fact that they’d created this pawn.

As she worked her way through the crowds, her fame seemed to temporarily confuse the other attendees’ common sense. So when Ms. Jones and her entourage descended upon Sonny Bono’s widow, Mary Bono, Ms. Bono posed cheerily for pictures with her and Ms. Carpenter-McMillan, then got defensive about it later. Ms. Bono carefully explained that Ms. Jones was simply “expressing condolences” regarding the skiing death of Mr. Bono.

“Everybody loved Sonny,” Ms. Bono said. “Even Paula Jones loved Sonny.” And ABC’s Prime Time Live co-anchor Sam Donaldson seemed positively blasé about Ms. Jones’ presence in the room. “If I don’t [get to see her], I’m sure it will be my loss, but I’ll bear up,” said Mr. Donaldson, who nevertheless managed to sniff out Ms. Jones’ table and pose for a picture with her. (Note to Mr. Donaldson: Ms. Jones wants a copy of the photo.)

Ms. Jones also seemed eager to determine if her moment in history was being written down. A source said that as scribe Dominick Dunne, who penned a novel about the O.J. Simpson trial, Another City, Not My Own, was tooling through the area where Ms. Jones’ table was located, he heard someone calling “Domineek Dunne! Domineek Dunne!” Apparently, it was Ms. Jones mispronouncing his name. When Mr. Dunne properly introduced himself, Ms. Jones asked him if it was true, as she had heard, that he was writing a book about her situation. The source said that Ms. Jones seemed taken aback when Mr. Dunne assured her that he was not.

Some of President Clinton’s own operatives were trying to work their voodoo in the crowd as well. Former White House special counsel and current spinmeister Lanny Davis was a guest at a Vanity Fair table that also included tough-guy journalist Robert Sam Anson, the Post’s Page Six editor, Richard Johnson, and The Transom. Mr. Davis dispelled any notion that morale might be down among the Clinton troops, given the White House’s annus horribilis. Mr. Davis, an annoying one-man whoopie machine, cheered and whistled (at a volume that landed him on the C-Span feed) during Mr. Clinton’s speech. Mr. Davis cheered and whistled any time White House press secretary Mike McCurry’s name was mentioned. The Transom even overheard Mr. Davis telling one of his tablemates that he’d never known two people more in love than Mr. and Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Davis’ dizzying spin cycles made The Transom long for a place at the Vanity Fair table that featured the brilliant seating arrangement of pundit John McLaughlin, flanked by Democratic fund-raiser Patricia Duff (formerly Mrs. Ron Perelman) and ex-model Catherine de Castelbajac (best known for her lawsuit against her former paramour, the financier William Koch, which unearthed a cache of Penthouse Forum–like letters written by “your X-rated Protestant,” as she billed herself, to Mr. Koch, whom she tagged “Big Beautiful Billy”).

Mr. McLaughlin seemed to devote most of his attention to Ms. de Castelbajac, although he had some competition in Henry Kissinger, who sat on her other side. (Thank God something interested Mr. Kissinger. He seemed to be fighting off sleep during Mr. Clinton’s speech.) Actor Ron Silver, who had come with Ms. de Castelbajac, was also at the table.

Up on the dais, Mrs. Clinton was looking a little dazed, perhaps from those five hours of questioning by Kenneth Starr earlier that day. And the backdrop of red curtains made Mr. Clinton’s face look unnaturally flushed, as if he were trying to contain some staggering anger. But as he delivered his prepared remarks, Mr. Clinton showed that, even with Ms. Jones in the room, he was a master of this media game. “Yes, this Washington is a special place, and Hillary and I will never forget our visit here,” Mr. Clinton said, as a punch line to his jokes about the Clintons’ numerous trips abroad during their scandal-plagued year. But in this humor there was truth, truth that the Clintons, even after having been re-elected, are still treated very much like outsiders.

Though Mr. Clinton joked that he had not read or watched the news since “the Pope went to Cuba,” he came loaded with plenty of barbs about the media, which, he noted, was “confident in its judgment and bold in its predictions.” At one point, Mr. Clinton held up what he said was an advance copy of Steve Brill’s new magazine, Content (which, he said, contained an article titled “Buddy Got What He Deserved” by New York Times editorial page columnist Maureen Dowd). First, he pronounced the word “content,” with emphasis on the second syllable of the word, and said, “Why would anyone want to call a magazine about the news media that?” Then, “corrected” by Mr. McCurry, Mr. Clinton pronounced the title as it was meant to be and repeated his question.

Mr. Clinton concluded by telling Helen Thomas, the dowager of White House correspondents who had been honored earlier in the evening, that she could ask him “anything.” (Her seniority, by the rules of the Washington press corps, allows her to throw out the first question at press conferences.) But, added Mr. Clinton, “in an even older tradition, I don’t have to answer.” With that, Mr. Davis and much of the crowd gave the President a standing ovation.

Mr. Clinton’s final words seemed to have become the mantra of the celebrity contingent that attended Vanity Fair’s post-dinner party at the Russian Federation building. A tense moment ensued shortly after Warren Beatty and his wife, Annette Bening, arrived at the party and immediately headed upstairs to the bathrooms. As the minutes ticked by and the couple did not descend the staircase, some began to speculate: Could Warren and Annette have somehow escaped via the second floor? (This would have been the second time that Mr. Beatty had gone AWOL with Vanity Fair, having blown off the magazine’s Oscar party.) Disaster was averted, however, when the couple eventually re-emerged and stayed until after 2 a.m., charming the pants off nearly everyone in the room.

The Transom’s face time with Mr. Beatty was minimal; too bad we can’t say the same for our encounter with the Earl Spencer. As we tried to ask Princess Diana’s brother if he’d thought the press had changed much since the damning speech he’d made at her funeral, he grabbed the hand in which we held our notebook and said something about being able to “smell” one (a notebook, not a journalist) a mile away. When we explained that we were not trying to hide the tablet from him, Mr. Spencer, who had come to the party with 20/20 co-anchor Barbara Walters (and had sat at the ABC News table), politely answered our question with the Clintonesque line: “I haven’t read the papers since my sister died.” He must have been watching TV.

G. Gordon Liddy was in a more talkative mood. Mr. Liddy, who once offered to take a bullet if it would save the honor of the Nixon administration, defended the appearance of Ms. Jones (who had sat next to him at the Washington Times’ Insight table). Mr. Liddy called her “vivacious,” and said that Ms. Jones had told him that she had wished she was seated closer to Mr. Clinton on the dais “so that she could stare him down the way that she did as she sat across the table from him at [Mr. Clinton’s] deposition.” Mr. Liddy said that Ms. Jones’ appearance was “not a political thing” but rather, as he said her husband had told him, a matter of “her reputation.”

Ms. Jones seemed to be forgotten, though, as Saturday turned into Sunday and the crowd loosened up. A few couples were dancing, and Lucianne Goldberg was shuttling drinks and a tray of hors d’oeuvres to friends who had not been allowed past the gate. Matt Drudge was inside. And down on the lawn, Ms. Dowd sat with a group that included Mike Ovitz’s former spokeswoman Anna Perez (now a Harvard fellow), Washington Post columnist Lally Weymouth, actor Michael Douglas and Vanity Fair contributor Maureen Orth.

Also hanging around was comedian Ray Romano, who had entertained the crowd following Mr. Clinton’s speech. Mr. Romano’s act is largely about his children, and before he went on, there was much talk that he had been picked because of his nonpolitical humor. Mr. Romano still killed, but one of the best moments of his routine was not a particularly funny one. Mr. Romano talked about how he had once caught his 5-year-old daughter daydreaming with a smile on her face and asked what she had been thinking about. “Candy,” came her reply. “When was the last time you daydreamed about candy?” Mr. Romano asked the audience.

Mr. Clinton didn’t crack a smile. For him and a lot of people in that room, it had been a long time.

On Saturday, Sept. 29, Freddie Roman, the dean of New York’s Friars Club, stood before audience members in the Grand Ballroom of the New York Hilton and asked them to familiarize themselves with the fire exits.

Then, because he’d said that “these are very different times for us all,” he attempted to answer a question that people had been asking him. Mr. Roman’s Vulcanesque eyes and brows scanned the audience before him. The question sounded a little like something that would be asked at Passover. “Why have a night like this in times like these?”

Mr. Roman was referring to the Friars Roast, the club’s yearly ritual of profane humor and insult that was about to get underway with Playboy founder Hugh Hefner in the hot seat.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attack on New York, the Friars organization and Comedy Central, the cable network that, for the last three years, has taped and televised an expurgated version of the roast (this one will debut on Nov. 4), had, after some debate, decided to go ahead with the event. “It’s time we get back to normal, like Mayor Giuliani and President Bush have asked,” Mr. Roman said. “And for the Friars, this is normal. Telling dirty jokes, making fun of people. That’s what we do, and we’re proud to do it for you,” he said. “So you can get some laughter back in your life and into your hearts.”

While the crowd waited for the cameras to start rolling, Mr. Roman eased into the task at hand.

“A couple married 48 years. Wife takes sick and passes away. Funeral at the Riverside, 78th and Broadway,” Mr. Roman said. “After the service, the pallbearers pick up the coffin. As they’re leaving the building, the coffin hits the wall.” From inside the coffin, he said, the woman’s voice could be heard.

“They open the coffin--it’s a miracle,” he said. “She stays married for another two years. Gets sick, passes away again. After the service, the pallbearers lift the coffin. As they start to leave, the husband yells, ‘Watch out for the wall!’”

The laughter sounded grateful. Mr. Roman got the high sign to introduce Mr. Hefner. A small group of Playmates led the flesh magnate--who looked frighteningly robust and wrinkle-free for a man in his 70’s--to the big red swivel chair on the stage.

Behind Mr. Hefner, stretching out like the wings of a B-52 bomber, was the event’s dais, a roster that only the Friars could put together: actors Danny Aiello, Keith David, Vincent Pastore and The Sopranos’ Joe Pantoliano in a newsboy’s cap; MTV personality Carson Daly, looking lost; mentalist the Amazing Kreskin, artist LeRoy Neiman, developer Donald Trump; actress Diane Farr and Dr. Joyce Brothers; comedian Dick Capri, former kidnap victim Patricia Hearst, onetime Playboy pictorial subject Kylie Bax and makeup-less Kiss member Ace Frehley.

Friar Club’s Abbot Alan King’s eyes shone in the spotlight.

“The Friars have an age-old motto,” Mr. King said. “‘We only roast the ones we love.’ Tonight, we give lie to that bullshit.”

His gaze shifted to Mr. Hefner, in mid-chuckle. “Not only don’t I love him, I never met this putz before in my life: Hugh Hefner, who likes to be called Hef--but in Hebrew, spelled backwards, it’s Feh!”

Our “leaders kept telling us,” Mr. King said, “we must get on with our lives, and laughter is a very important part of our lives. And who better to laugh at than our guest of honor,” a man “who made jacking off a national pastime.” A guy who “has smelt more beaver than a furrier. A man who makes Donald Trump look like Elie Wiesel. A man who thinks the early-bird special is eating pussy before 6 o’clock.”

Mr. King stared down the crowd. “Who better?” he said.

Yes, who better to ease this crowd back to its favorite blood sport than Mr. Hefner, a man whose soul had escaped his body decades ago via his vas deferens? The Friars weren’t roasting a man, they were roasting an abstraction: a square-jawed, silk-robed symbol of American priapism, who, at 75, wanted us to believe that he was bedding down nightly with more than a half-dozen human equivalents of Jessica Rabbit.

For a city that had crossed its pain threshold weeks ago, Mr. Hefner was a fortunate choice. It’s hard to eviscerate a man whose only innards are a hyperdeveloped reproductive system, and who, up there onstage, looked as burnished and ageless as a publicity still, emitting his affectless, Teflon chuckle.

The table of Mr. Hefner’s alleged paramours and Playboy Playmates seemed to have been placed strategically in front of the podium as a symbol of what was at stake should any joker go too far. At the Comedy Central after-party at Beacon restaurant, comedian Jeffrey Ross agreed that some comedians had pulled their punch lines when it came to Mr. Hefner. “I’ll tell you why,” said Mr. Ross, who was wearing a bow tie that Buddy Hackett had given to him. “Because they’re afraid they won’t get invited to the mansion. They were all backstage going, ‘I know it’s funny, but do you think this will piss him off?’”

The roastmaster of the evening was Jimmy Kimmel, co-star of Comedy Central’s The Man Show. “I could go on and on,” said Mr. Kimmel, “but what could you say about Hef that hasn’t already been mumbled incoherently by a thousand young women with his cock in their mouths? I’ve read just about every issue of Playboy since I was 15 years old,” Mr. Kimmel continued. “Not once did I ever see a Playmate say one of her turn-ons was fucking a 75-year-old man.”

Rob Schneider, whom Mr. Kimmel said “is so short he doesn’t even have to bend over to kiss Adam Sandler’s ass,” was the first roaster on the podium. Mr. Schneider told the crowd, “We’re here tonight to honor a man who personifies why these terrorists hate us. If it were up to them, women couldn’t read, couldn’t work, get fake tits, go to school, pose nude to help their career. Hugh Hefner believes that women should be able to do all those things--except read.”

Mr. Schneider was the first comic of the night to approach the topic that was foremost in everyone’s thoughts. The laughter seemed hesitant and restrained.

Jeffrey Ross went up to the podium. “Hasn’t there been enough bombing in this city?” he said into the microphone.

“Ooooooooooooh!” the crowd erupted.

Mr. Ross was up next. The Buddy Hackett bow tie seemed to be working. “My good friend Abe Vigoda’s here,” Mr. Ross said. “Last week, Abe tried to enlist in Old Navy.” Mr. Ross looked over at Mr. Vigoda. “Abe, enough getting old. Just fuckin’ die already, all right?”

Eventually, Mr. Ross got around to Mr. Hefner.

“Hef has fondled more playmates than Michael Jackson,” Mr. Ross said, which got him a big laugh. “Personally, I think it’s awesome, awesome that you sleep with seven women,” he told Mr. Hefner, “because eight would be ostentatious.” And then the comic explained the real reason that so many women were required: “You know, one to put it in, and the other six to move you around.”

Sarah Silverman, in a stylish black number, replaced Mr. Ross at the podium. “Jimmy Kimmel, everyone,” she said to the crowd after Mr. Kimmel introduced her. “He’s fat and has no charisma. Watch your back, Danny Aiello!”

The crowd loved that one, and Ms. Silverman, who was the only woman to roast Mr. Hefner, proceeded to lay waste to a few more of the men on the dais. She told Mr. King that a nursing home in Florida had just called. “The last person who thinks you’re funny just died.” And gazing at the gray-bearded face of Dick Gregory, she said: “Is he the guy from the rice or the cookies?

“Well, let’s talk about the whores--the Bunnies,” she continued.

“I think they should be role models in society--if only for the fact that they wax their assholes.” Later, The Transom asked Playmate Michelle Winchester what her fellow Playmates had thought of that particular joke. She replied with a smile: “Actually, that’s true!”

Ice-T made his second speaking appearance at a Friars Roast. “I just wanna rob all you white motherfuckers. And for some reason I don’t, and it fascinates you,” he told the crowd, which gave him a healthy laugh just in case he was serious. But there seemed to be some confusion in the crowd over whether his line that Mr. Hefner’s “dick is busier than an orthodontist in fucking Japan right now” was actually funny.

The civil-rights activist and nutritionist Dick Gregory told a couple of jokes. “Black folks,” he said, “know this is a great nation” because of the success of Michael Jackson. “Where else can a poor black boy be born in utter poverty in Gary, Ind., and end up being a rich white man?” Mr. Gregory said.

But Mr. Gregory had come to praise Mr. Hefner, not roast him. He cited Mr. Hefner’s courage for hiring black entertainers to work the Playboy Club when no one else would. And then he delivered an inspirational speech about New York and the United States.

“Fear and God do not occupy the same space,” Mr. Gregory told the crowd. “If you stop and think about what makes America great, it’s not soldiers--it’s the firemen that left home this morning and intended to come back tonight and ran into a building when everybody else was running out.”

The crowd gave Mr. Gregory a standing ovation, but the quick-thinking Mr. Kimmel steered the event back to its profane moorings. “So anyway,” he said, “I was reading your magazine the other day,” and he described what he was doing while he was reading. The crowd exploded with laughter. “Someone forgot to tell Dick this was a roast,” Mr. Kimmel said, adding: “Boy, does that make me feel like a piece of shit.”

Gilbert Gottfried was the last man up to the podium. In his $11 gray shawl-collar tuxedo jacket with tails, black bow tie and Caesar haircut, Mr. Gottfried looked like he had just come from band practice.

Mr. Gottfried grasped the podium with both hands and, squinting out at the audience, he began the screeching parrot-like delivery that is his trademark.

“Ice-T did my whole act,” he said. “So I’ll do it anyway: I’m going to follow you white motherfuckers home and rape you fucking white bitches.” Mr. Gottfried paused while the crowd convulsed. “You see, it’s such a strong bit it still works,” he said.

“Dick Gregory did the rest of my act,” he continued. “I want to say--a lot of you young people don’t know, but years ago, Jews were not allowed in comedy!”

Then Mr. Gottfried started in on Mr. Hefner. “Hugh Hefner doesn’t need Viagra. He needs cement! He needs to take ice-cream sticks and tape it around his dick and use it as a splint!” Mr. Gottfried screamed. “But in all fairness to Hefner, he really had to fight for free speech, so we could say things we couldn’t say before. Like: ‘Die, you senile old bastard! Die!’”

Mr. Gottfried was killing. It was time to push the envelope.

“Tonight I’ll be using my Muslim name, Hasn’t Been Laid,” he said. This got a big laugh. Then Mr. Gottfried began a routine that had worked extremely well for him at the Richard Belzer roast.

“A woman is on her deathbed,” Mr. Gottfried said. “The husband is sitting at the corner of the bed. Her hair’s all dried out. Her skin’s all white. All of a sudden, she goes, ‘Please, honey …. ’” Mr. Gottfried described the woman’s verboten sexual request.

The comedian paused. Some of the audience members were looking around.

“This is a clean one,” he said. The husband complies and, Mr. Gottfried said, “the color returns to her skin; her hair looks healthy. She jumps up in bed. She’s sexier and healthier than she ever was before. She looks down. Her husband’s sitting at the corner of the bed, crying. She goes, ‘What’s the matter?’”

Mr. Gottfried waited a millisecond. “He goes, ‘I could have saved my father!’”

The laughter came in gasps. There were gurgling sounds in the air and people hung doubled over, sucking air through hoarse throats.

The man in the gray tuxedo jacket looked out over the crowd. “I have a flight to California. I can’t get a direct flight,” Mr. Gottfried said. “They said they have to stop at the Empire State Building first.”

There was a silence. Then hissing and hooting flooded forward.

“Too soon,” a man could be heard saying in the back of the ballroom.

When the booing started, Mr. Gottfried responded: “Awwwwwww, what the fuck do you care?” Silence fell once more.

Mr. Gottfried had his answer. Up on the podium, he began making strange movements with his arms, as if he was working some sort of invisible machine that could take him back in time to the moment right before he had pushed too far. Seconds passed.

“O.K.,” he continued. His voice was not so loud.

“A talent agent is sitting in his office. A family walks in. A man, woman, two kids, their little dog, and the talent agent goes, ‘What kind of an act do you do?’”

At the father’s signal, Mr. Gottfried said, the family disrobes en masse. “The father starts fucking his wife,” he said. “The wife starts jerking off the son. The son starts going down on the sister. The sister starts fingering the dog’s asshole.” Mr. Gottfried’s voice was growing stronger. “Then the son starts blowing his father.”

The Hilton’s ballroom filled with the sounds of sudden exhalations. The comedians on the dais were bug-eyed with laughter and recognition. Some of the men had dropped to all fours. Mr. Gottfried was beaming.

“Want me to start at the beginning?” he asked.

He kept going, turning the joke into an extended bacchanal of bodily fluids, excrement, bestiality and sexual deviance. Mr. Gottfried plumbed the darkest crevices he could find. He riffed and riffed until people in the audience were coughing and sputtering and sucking in great big gulps of air.

Tears ran throughout the Hilton ballroom, as if Mr. Gottfried had performed a collective tracheotomy on the audience, delivering oxygen and laughter past the grief and ash that had blocked their passageways.

Then he brought it home.

“The talent agent says, ‘Well, that’s an interesting act. What do you call yourselves?’“

Mr. Gottfried threw up his hands. “And they go, ‘The Aristocrats!’”

There was a sound in the room that went beyond laughter.

Mr. Gottfried had gone to “The Aristocrats,” the comedy equivalent of the B-flat below high C that Leontyne Price had sung at Carnegie Hall on Sunday. “The Aristocrats” is one of the definitive inside jokes among comedians. It is so definitive that comic Paul Provenza and performance artist Penn Jillette are making a digital documentary about the joke. “Every comic makes it their own,” Mr. Provenza said. “The set-up is the same and the punch line is the same,” but the comic puts his or her “own stamp” on the material in between.

Mr. Gottfried had used it to save himself, but also to lift the crowd to another place.

A few minutes later, Alan King paid him a high compliment.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I’m just still a little touched by that asshole Gottfried.”

On Saturday, Sept. 29, Freddie Roman, the dean of New York’s Friars Club, stood before audience members in the Grand Ballroom of the New York Hilton and asked them to familiarize themselves with the fire exits.

Then, because he’d said that “these are very different times for us all,” he attempted to answer a question that people had been asking him. Mr. Roman’s Vulcanesque eyes and brows scanned the audience before him. The question sounded a little like something that would be asked at Passover. “Why have a night like this in times like these?”

Mr. Roman was referring to the Friars Roast, the club’s yearly ritual of profane humor and insult that was about to get underway with Playboy founder Hugh Hefner in the hot seat.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attack on New York, the Friars organization and Comedy Central, the cable network that, for the last three years, has taped and televised an expurgated version of the roast (this one will debut on Nov. 4), had, after some debate, decided to go ahead with the event. “It’s time we get back to normal, like Mayor Giuliani and President Bush have asked,” Mr. Roman said. “And for the Friars, this is normal. Telling dirty jokes, making fun of people. That’s what we do, and we’re proud to do it for you,” he said. “So you can get some laughter back in your life and into your hearts.”

While the crowd waited for the cameras to start rolling, Mr. Roman eased into the task at hand.

“A couple married 48 years. Wife takes sick and passes away. Funeral at the Riverside, 78th and Broadway,” Mr. Roman said. “After the service, the pallbearers pick up the coffin. As they’re leaving the building, the coffin hits the wall.” From inside the coffin, he said, the woman’s voice could be heard.

“They open the coffin--it’s a miracle,” he said. “She stays married for another two years. Gets sick, passes away again. After the service, the pallbearers lift the coffin. As they start to leave, the husband yells, ‘Watch out for the wall!’”

The laughter sounded grateful. Mr. Roman got the high sign to introduce Mr. Hefner. A small group of Playmates led the flesh magnate--who looked frighteningly robust and wrinkle-free for a man in his 70’s--to the big red swivel chair on the stage.

Behind Mr. Hefner, stretching out like the wings of a B-52 bomber, was the event’s dais, a roster that only the Friars could put together: actors Danny Aiello, Keith David, Vincent Pastore and The Sopranos’ Joe Pantoliano in a newsboy’s cap; MTV personality Carson Daly, looking lost; mentalist the Amazing Kreskin, artist LeRoy Neiman, developer Donald Trump; actress Diane Farr and Dr. Joyce Brothers; comedian Dick Capri, former kidnap victim Patricia Hearst, onetime Playboy pictorial subject Kylie Bax and makeup-less Kiss member Ace Frehley.

Friar Club’s Abbot Alan King’s eyes shone in the spotlight.

“The Friars have an age-old motto,” Mr. King said. “‘We only roast the ones we love.’ Tonight, we give lie to that bullshit.”

His gaze shifted to Mr. Hefner, in mid-chuckle. “Not only don’t I love him, I never met this putz before in my life: Hugh Hefner, who likes to be called Hef--but in Hebrew, spelled backwards, it’s Feh!”

Our “leaders kept telling us,” Mr. King said, “we must get on with our lives, and laughter is a very important part of our lives. And who better to laugh at than our guest of honor,” a man “who made jacking off a national pastime.” A guy who “has smelt more beaver than a furrier. A man who makes Donald Trump look like Elie Wiesel. A man who thinks the early-bird special is eating pussy before 6 o’clock.”

Mr. King stared down the crowd. “Who better?” he said.

Yes, who better to ease this crowd back to its favorite blood sport than Mr. Hefner, a man whose soul had escaped his body decades ago via his vas deferens? The Friars weren’t roasting a man, they were roasting an abstraction: a square-jawed, silk-robed symbol of American priapism, who, at 75, wanted us to believe that he was bedding down nightly with more than a half-dozen human equivalents of Jessica Rabbit.

For a city that had crossed its pain threshold weeks ago, Mr. Hefner was a fortunate choice. It’s hard to eviscerate a man whose only innards are a hyperdeveloped reproductive system, and who, up there onstage, looked as burnished and ageless as a publicity still, emitting his affectless, Teflon chuckle.

The table of Mr. Hefner’s alleged paramours and Playboy Playmates seemed to have been placed strategically in front of the podium as a symbol of what was at stake should any joker go too far. At the Comedy Central after-party at Beacon restaurant, comedian Jeffrey Ross agreed that some comedians had pulled their punch lines when it came to Mr. Hefner. “I’ll tell you why,” said Mr. Ross, who was wearing a bow tie that Buddy Hackett had given to him. “Because they’re afraid they won’t get invited to the mansion. They were all backstage going, ‘I know it’s funny, but do you think this will piss him off?’”

The roastmaster of the evening was Jimmy Kimmel, co-star of Comedy Central’s The Man Show. “I could go on and on,” said Mr. Kimmel, “but what could you say about Hef that hasn’t already been mumbled incoherently by a thousand young women with his cock in their mouths? I’ve read just about every issue of Playboy since I was 15 years old,” Mr. Kimmel continued. “Not once did I ever see a Playmate say one of her turn-ons was fucking a 75-year-old man.”

Rob Schneider, whom Mr. Kimmel said “is so short he doesn’t even have to bend over to kiss Adam Sandler’s ass,” was the first roaster on the podium. Mr. Schneider told the crowd, “We’re here tonight to honor a man who personifies why these terrorists hate us. If it were up to them, women couldn’t read, couldn’t work, get fake tits, go to school, pose nude to help their career. Hugh Hefner believes that women should be able to do all those things--except read.”

Mr. Schneider was the first comic of the night to approach the topic that was foremost in everyone’s thoughts. The laughter seemed hesitant and restrained. Jeffrey Ross went up to the podium. “Hasn’t there been enough bombing in this city?” he said into the microphone. “Ooooooooooooh!” the crowd erupted.

Mr. Ross was up next. The Buddy Hackett bow tie seemed to be working. “My good friend Abe Vigoda’s here,” Mr. Ross said. “Last week, Abe tried to enlist in Old Navy.” Mr. Ross looked over at Mr. Vigoda. “Abe, enough getting old. Just fuckin’ die already, all right?”

Eventually, Mr. Ross got around to Mr. Hefner.

“Hef has fondled more playmates than Michael Jackson,” Mr. Ross said, which got him a big laugh. “Personally, I think it’s awesome, awesome that you sleep with seven women,” he told Mr. Hefner, “because eight would be ostentatious.” And then the comic explained the real reason that so many women were required: “You know, one to put it in, and the other six to move you around.”

Sarah Silverman, in a stylish black number, replaced Mr. Ross at the podium. “Jimmy Kimmel, everyone,” she said to the crowd after Mr. Kimmel introduced her. “He’s fat and has no charisma. Watch your back, Danny Aiello!”

The crowd loved that one, and Ms. Silverman, who was the only woman to roast Mr. Hefner, proceeded to lay waste to a few more of the men on the dais. She told Mr. King that a nursing home in Florida had just called. “The last person who thinks you’re funny just died.” And gazing at the gray-bearded face of Dick Gregory, she said: “Is he the guy from the rice or the cookies?

“Well, let’s talk about the whores--the Bunnies,” she continued.

“I think they should be role models in society--if only for the fact that they wax their assholes.” Later, The Transom asked Playmate Michelle Winchester what her fellow Playmates had thought of that particular joke. She replied with a smile: “Actually, that’s true!”

Ice-T made his second speaking appearance at a Friars Roast. “I just wanna rob all you white motherfuckers. And for some reason I don’t, and it fascinates you,” he told the crowd, which gave him a healthy laugh just in case he was serious. But there seemed to be some confusion in the crowd over whether his line that Mr. Hefner’s “dick is busier than an orthodontist in fucking Japan right now” was actually funny.

The civil-rights activist and nutritionist Dick Gregory told a couple of jokes. “Black folks,” he said, “know this is a great nation” because of the success of Michael Jackson. “Where else can a poor black boy be born in utter poverty in Gary, Ind., and end up being a rich white man?” Mr. Gregory said.

But Mr. Gregory had come to praise Mr. Hefner, not roast him. He cited Mr. Hefner’s courage for hiring black entertainers to work the Playboy Club when no one else would. And then he delivered an inspirational speech about New York and the United States.

“Fear and God do not occupy the same space,” Mr. Gregory told the crowd. “If you stop and think about what makes America great, it’s not soldiers--it’s the firemen that left home this morning and intended to come back tonight and ran into a building when everybody else was running out.”

The crowd gave Mr. Gregory a standing ovation, but the quick-thinking Mr. Kimmel steered the event back to its profane moorings. “So anyway,” he said, “I was reading your magazine the other day,” and he described what he was doing while he was reading. The crowd exploded with laughter. “Someone forgot to tell Dick this was a roast,” Mr. Kimmel said, adding: “Boy, does that make me feel like a piece of shit.”

Gilbert Gottfried was the last man up to the podium. In his $11 gray shawl-collar tuxedo jacket with tails, black bow tie and Caesar haircut, Mr. Gottfried looked like he had just come from band practice.

Mr. Gottfried grasped the podium with both hands and, squinting out at the audience, he began the screeching parrot-like delivery that is his trademark.

“Ice-T did my whole act,” he said. “So I’ll do it anyway: I’m going to follow you white motherfuckers home and rape you fucking white bitches.” Mr. Gottfried paused while the crowd convulsed. “You see, it’s such a strong bit it still works,” he said.

“Dick Gregory did the rest of my act,” he continued. “I want to say--a lot of you young people don’t know, but years ago, Jews were not allowed in comedy!”

Then Mr. Gottfried started in on Mr. Hefner. “Hugh Hefner doesn’t need Viagra. He needs cement! He needs to take ice-cream sticks and tape it around his dick and use it as a splint!” Mr. Gottfried screamed. “But in all fairness to Hefner, he really had to fight for free speech, so we could say things we couldn’t say before. Like: ‘Die, you senile old bastard! Die!’”

Mr. Gottfried was killing. It was time to push the envelope.

“Tonight I’ll be using my Muslim name, Hasn’t Been Laid,” he said. This got a big laugh. Then Mr. Gottfried began a routine that had worked extremely well for him at the Richard Belzer roast.

“A woman is on her deathbed,” Mr. Gottfried said. “The husband is sitting at the corner of the bed. Her hair’s all dried out. Her skin’s all white. All of a sudden, she goes, ‘Please, honey …. ’” Mr. Gottfried described the woman’s verboten sexual request.

The comedian paused. Some of the audience members were looking around.

“This is a clean one,” he said. The husband complies and, Mr. Gottfried said, “the color returns to her skin; her hair looks healthy. She jumps up in bed. She’s sexier and healthier than she ever was before. She looks down. Her husband’s sitting at the corner of the bed, crying. She goes, ‘What’s the matter?’”

Mr. Gottfried waited a millisecond. “He goes, ‘I could have saved my father!’”

The laughter came in gasps. There were gurgling sounds in the air and people hung doubled over, sucking air through hoarse throats.

The man in the gray tuxedo jacket looked out over the crowd. “I have a flight to California. I can’t get a direct flight,” Mr. Gottfried said. “They said they have to stop at the Empire State Building first.”

There was a silence. Then hissing and hooting flooded forward.

“Too soon,” a man could be heard saying in the back of the ballroom.

When the booing started, Mr. Gottfried responded: “Awwwwwww, what the fuck do you care?” Silence fell once more.

Mr. Gottfried had his answer. Up on the podium, he began making strange movements with his arms, as if he was working some sort of invisible machine that could take him back in time to the moment right before he had pushed too far. Seconds passed.

“O.K.,” he continued. His voice was not so loud.

“A talent agent is sitting in his office. A family walks in. A man, woman, two kids, their little dog, and the talent agent goes, ‘What kind of an act do you do?’”

At the father’s signal, Mr. Gottfried said, the family disrobes en masse. “The father starts fucking his wife,” he said. “The wife starts jerking off the son. The son starts going down on the sister. The sister starts fingering the dog’s asshole.” Mr. Gottfried’s voice was growing stronger. “Then the son starts blowing his father.”

The Hilton’s ballroom filled with the sounds of sudden exhalations. The comedians on the dais were bug-eyed with laughter and recognition. Some of the men had dropped to all fours. Mr. Gottfried was beaming.

“Want me to start at the beginning?” he asked.

He kept going, turning the joke into an extended bacchanal of bodily fluids, excrement, bestiality and sexual deviance. Mr. Gottfried plumbed the darkest crevices he could find. He riffed and riffed until people in the audience were coughing and sputtering and sucking in great big gulps of air.

Tears ran throughout the Hilton ballroom, as if Mr. Gottfried had performed a collective tracheotomy on the audience, delivering oxygen and laughter past the grief and ash that had blocked their passageways.

Then he brought it home.

“The talent agent says, ‘Well, that’s an interesting act. What do you call yourselves?’“

Mr. Gottfried threw up his hands. “And they go, ‘The Aristocrats!’”

There was a sound in the room that went beyond laughter.

Mr. Gottfried had gone to “The Aristocrats,” the comedy equivalent of the B-flat below high C that Leontyne Price had sung at Carnegie Hall on Sunday. “The Aristocrats” is one of the definitive inside jokes among comedians. It is so definitive that comic Paul Provenza and performance artist Penn Jillette are making a digital documentary about the joke. “Every comic makes it their own,” Mr. Provenza said. “The set-up is the same and the punch line is the same,” but the comic puts his or her “own stamp” on the material in between.

Mr. Gottfried had used it to save himself, but also to lift the crowd to another place.

A few minutes later, Alan King paid him a high compliment.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I’m just still a little touched by that asshole Gottfried.”

See Annie Quick at Sin-é on April 7, 10 p.m. Another California transplant who calls New York home, the tattooed, blue-nailed Ms. Quick shows real promise on her sophomore solo album, Bigger: Ten Songs About Georgette (Paste). A bracing, welcome antidote to all the female singer/songwriters pouring out their vulnerabilities behind an acoustic guitar, Ms. Quick prefers a steely rock sound and acidic lyrics that she sings in a voice reminiscent of early Sinead O'Connor. On record, Ms. Quick has yet to define herself in the way that Ms. O'Connor or P.J. Harvey have, and she probably could have sold herself better by moving "Thrill," "Just for You" and "Fed Ex" to the front of the album. But listen to her sing "If I could FedEx my anger to you, you would sign for your demise" and you'll will want to see what she does with that anger live .

Sin-é is located at 150 Attorney Street at Stanton. Phone: 212-388-0077 .

Plan to see the Mark Pender Band at the Cutting Room on April 16, 11 p.m. If you've ever watched Late Night with Conan O'Brien , Mark (the Love Man) Pender is the natty, bespectacled bald guy in the Max Weinberg 7 whose freak flag is eternally unfurled, whether he's getting down with his trumpet or acoustic guitar. Turns out Mr. Pender has his own band, which plays the kind of jammy jazz and funk-think Earth, Wind and Fire meets the Average White Band-that sounds great live. The band will be playing cuts from their self-released, self-titled CD and DVD, which is available at markpenderband.com. Request "Hypnotize," the slow jam that got Mr. Pender his "Love Man" handle from former E Street Band member Steven Van Zandt.

The Cutting Room is at 19 West 24th Street. Phone: 212-691-1900.

Revisit the Nashville rhythm-and-blues scene via Night Train to Nashville: Music City Rhythm and Blues 1945-1970 (Lost Highway). Released in conjunction with the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum's exhibit of the same name, this two-CD set, produced by Daniel Cooper and Michael Gray, makes the case that Memphis wasn't the only R&B hotbed in Tennessee. Though the inclusion of California-born Etta James' live performance of Ray Charles' "What'd I Say" at a Nashville nightclub may make you wonder what kind of methodology went into this compilation, there's a lot to love, including "Just Walkin' in the Rain," a spare, solemn guitar-and-vocal number by the Prisonaires, a group of Tennessee State Penitentiary inmates, led by tenor Johnny Bragg, who were driven under guard from the Nashville prison to Sun Records in Memphis to record the song. Other highlights: Little Richard inspiration Esquerita singing "Rockin' the Joint" like he means it; Audrey Bryant's rockabilly "Let's Trade a Little"; Joe Simon's "The Chokin' Kind," which Joss Stone recently covered; Roscoe Shelton's balls-out "Say You Really Care"; Bobby Hebb's breezy "Sunny"; and Joe Tex's magnificent sax-and-sex-flavored "I Want To (Do Everything for You). According to the liner notes, Mr. Tex, whose stage surname was inspired by his Texas roots, claimed his secret to crossover success was that he always used "half soul musicians, half country musicians" in the studio. But that could also describe the secret formula of Nashville R&B: Not quite as greasy as the Memphis sound or as polished as Motown, it's the cool precision of Nashville's Music Row mixed with the sweat-slick passion of Jefferson Street. The best songs on Night Train are freighted with it-soul engines running on their own track.

So it was shocking to read the news reports earlier this month that Mr. Cruise had decided to end his 14-year relationship with his publicist, Pat Kingsley, a partner in PMK/HBH-arguably the most powerful celebrity public-relations firm in the country-and hand the P.R. reins to his sister, Lee Anne DeVette, who had been flacking for her sibling's production company with Paula Wagner, Cruise/Wagner, on the Paramount lot.

To say Ms. Kingsley was Mr. Cruise's publicist is an understatement. In truth, she was the co-architect and engineer of the bulletproof body armor that Mr. Cruise wore to do battle with the media. The first layer of protection came via PMK's tony stable of clients, which since its merger with the Huvane Baum Halls Agency (HBH) includes Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Aniston, Tom Hanks, Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, Robert Redford, Woody Allen, Matt Damon, Cameron Crowe, Aaron Sorkin and Kirsten Dunst. A publication or media outlet that offended Mr. Cruise risked losing access to the rest of PMK's clientele.

Next came the contracts. According to a 1994 article in The New Yorker , at the press junket for the 1992 film Far and Away , for instance, reporters who wanted to interview Mr. Cruise had to sign a contract which essentially acknowledged that PMK controlled the photographs and utterances of Mr. Cruise that resulted from the promotional event-a safeguard against freelancers who resell their stories to the tabloid press overseas.

And finally, as a last line of defense, there was Ms. Kingsley, a charming septuagenarian Doberman with a Southern twang who once represented Doris Day. "Pat's fallen on swords for that man," said Howard Bragman, a Los Angeles–based publicist whose firm, Bragman Nyman Cafarelli, was purchased three years ago by the publicly traded giant Interpublic Group of Companies that also owns PMK/HBH and Rogers and Cowan, not to mention the McCann-Erickson World Group and Deutsch. (Mr. Bragman has since left to form his own boutique, Fifteen Minutes.)

More than effective, Mr. Cruise's media Gundam suit helped change the way the celebrity press does business. The depth and insight of Gay Talese's great Esquire piece, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold , " was replaced by the superficial pap of [fill in magazine title here]'s "Tom Cruise Has Control Issues."

So when Mr. Cruise threw off all the padding and protection that Ms. Kingsley and the support team at Interpublic-owned PMK/HBH had provided for him and went "internal," as Ms. Kingsley put it in one of her comments to the press, he looked, for the first time in a long time, like a vulnerable man.

But that's not necessarily a bad thing when you're Tom Cruise.

As one top-tier publicist (who doesn't work at PMK) explained to The Transom, one problem with Mr. Cruise's public persona is, "He's so predictable in what he says. There's no excitement value. He's a really nice person-you can't take that away from him-but there's no spontaneity to him." Citing the dullness of Mr. Cruise's late 2003 Dateline interview with Ms. Couric, in which the actor called his rebound girlfriend Penélope Cruz a "good girl," the publicist said: "I don't think you'd TiVo him."

The problem with such a tamped-down approach to publicity is that it doesn't wear well with repeated exposure, especially in a world where the vast number of media and press outlets vying for coverage has already devalued celebrity. "There's barely anybody who's a guaranteed sell anymore," said an editor at a major magazine that frequently features celebrities on its cover. "It used to be Tom Cruise would sell, Julia Roberts would sell. Those used to be sure bets-but now, I don't know. There's too much competition between television and magazines."

One industry source familiar with Mr. Cruise's career said that the actor has "done a lot more press in the last five years" in an effort to push his films past "the $100 million" mark. But in doing so, said the source, Mr. Cruise has "exposed" himself as "robotic."

But for now, the question of whether Mr. Cruise has decided to revamp his image-or even his reasons for leaving Ms. Kingsley-remain unexplained. "The two biggest mysteries in Hollywood are, why did Tom Cruise divorce Nicole, and why did he leave Pat Kingsley?" said the top-tier celebrity publicist. Likely they will remain mysteries: Ms. Kingsley declined to comment, and calls to Ms. DeVette went unreturned.

But for those who remember that whenever Mr. Cruise attended a public or media event, Ms. Kingsley was always a few steps behind, the signs of trouble were evident late last year when the publicist didn't accompany Mr. Cruise on the international press tour for The Last Samurai .

Of course, the most persistent speculation tends to fall into three different categories. One, Mr. Cruise wasn't happy with the publicity and Oscar campaign for his role in The Last Samurai , a movie that, despite the perception that it was not a hit, has earned more than $448 million in box offices worldwide, according to the March 22-28 issue of the weekly Variety . Certainly it had to be galling for Mr. Cruise to see his peers Sean Penn and Johnny Depp up for Best Actor Oscars in a year when he'd been passed over.

The second, of course, is the tense situation that ensued following Mr. Cruise and Ms. Kidman's divorce, when the two actors were both represented by PMK and Mr. Cruise watched his ex-wife's star ascend (though she, too, was denied an Oscar nomination this year) while his faltered.

And, finally, Mr. Cruise's embrace of the religion of Scientology is said to have played a role in the split. "They've taken a greater control, and obviously he's allowing it," said the industry source, who noted that, in recent months, a Scientology representative sat in on Mr. Cruise's interviews and afterward gave him feedback. Like her brother, Ms. DeVette is a Scientologist, and in Entertainment Weekly she called the allegation a "bigoted rumor."

Indeed, the timing of Mr. Cruise's split from PMK/HBH has sparked some speculation that Mr. Cruise's decision may have been prompted by Mel Gibson's decision to ignore the media's white noise over his religious beliefs and release The Passion of the Christ . "Mel just did his thing for his religion. Maybe Tom was inspired by that," said Mr. Bragman. "Maybe next we can expect Madonna, Roseanne and Sandra Bernhard to produce Kabbalah: The Movie ." Though Mr. Cruise's decision to defect from PMK/HBH shouldn't affect the firm financially, it does have symbolic heft in the Hollywood P.R. community. Though Ms. Kingsley denied it vigorously, speculation has already begun that she will follow her PMK partner Lois Smith into retirement within the next year or two, leaving only Leslee Dart, who is based in New York, the remaining partner of the original PMK firm. (Ms. Dart could not be reached for comment.)

The odds are also being calculated on how long Ms. DeVette will last in her role as Mr. Cruise's personal publicist. Of course, if she's in any way assisted by the Church of Scientology, which has proven that it can be as persuasive-and, when that fails, as litigious-as any public-relations firm, then Ms. DeVette may long outlast the naysayers.

And according to the celebrity publicist, representing an actor with Mr. Cruise's stature "is not the hardest thing in the world. It's literally getting faxes on your desk all day and saying no all day. And when the movie comes out, you sit around and decide what magazines you are going to do. Tom's not stupid. He has Paula Wagner, and [Lee Anne] has the studio publicists helping him."

But as Mr. Cruise approaches his 42nd birthday, he has got to understand that he's fighting a difficult battle. His stardom may survive, and he seems to have joined in a productive partnership with his Minority Report director, Steven Spielberg (they are planning a remake of The War of the Worlds ). But the persona he molded in Risky Business and developed through rabbit-toothed superstardom in Top Gun , Rain Man , Jerry Maguire and even Vanilla Sky hasn't really advanced, as the persona of his early mentor, Paul Newman, did. Middle-aged Cruise is an amorphous movie star, unidentifiable except for sinews, good teeth and sweat. Jerry Maguire defined him last because the scrawny, desperate, sexy ambition of the Cameron Crowe character seemed to match Mr. Cruise exactly and speak for a generation struggling to find a white-collar hero.

But Mr. Cruise hasn't redefined himself lately. This may seem beside the point for a man who can make $448 million in a Civil War uniform in Japan, but if you look at ongoing entities like Clint Eastwood and Jack Nicholson, focused definition of a movie star's persona is very much to the point of his vitality as an institution.

Mr. Cruise is fighting exactly this battle. Tom Cruise, the movie star, can only be perpetuated by great movie choices and brilliant, focused public presentation. His circumstances are mitigated somewhat by his boyish looks, intense competitiveness and his success as a producer, but Hollywood is a youth game, and already there are a couple of generations bumping up against him from underneath. As they grow older and their time grows shorter, they will not be so deferential-and neither, for that matter, will the press, which in a Bonnie Fuller world is less concerned with access and more concerned with paparazzi photos. Tom Cruise will have to re-emerge once more, inhabiting a persona that makes sense for 2004 and 2006 and 2008. He is, as Mr. Spielberg would probably be quick to point out, a participant in a Philip K. Dick version of show business, in which the future devours the protagonist unless the hero stays ahead of his pursuers. And his pursuers are time, and us. Both are gaining. And that's why, said the industry source, "I don't think any publicist needs him as much as he needs another publicist."

Let's Holla for Kaballah

At 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 3, socialite Sale Johnson and director Marty Bregman walked into Larry and Denise Wohl's Park Avenue parlor for their first Kabbalah party. Ms. Wohl and her friend Ann Barish had invited 50 or so friends over for some sushi, sashimi, satays, Sancerre and spirituality, the latter courtesy of two rabbis from the East 48th Street Kabbalah Centre. After picking up their gratis Power of Kabbalah books, cover-blurbed by Kabbalah Mama Madonna, Ms. Johnson and Mr. Bregman took their seats near nightclub impresario Chris Barish, Rick and Kathy Hilton, dermatologist Joel Kassimir and money manager Ken Starr for Rabbi Eliyahu's introductory speech.

Rabbi Eliyahu, who had been in the other room in deep conversation with fashionista Bettina Zilkha, joined the other rabbi in the middle of the living room, and the two of them began to discourse on the virtues of their faith. The rabbis spoke about how Kabbalah teaches its followers to live a life without stress, and to tap into that "99 percent"-i.e., one's spiritual, mystical side. They asked the guests-standing or sitting, filling up the living room, dining room and front hall of the apartment-what they wanted improved in their lives, but made a point never to emphasize religion. "We never got the feeling this was related to Judaism," said Ms. Johnson.

Some in the audience had been to Kabbalah parties before; Mick Jones' wife Ann had been having them in her home for months. Others listened to the rabbis' spiel with skepticism. When it came time for the question-and-answer session, "Marty Bregman was the most vocal," Ms. Johnson recalled later. "He's a really good friend of mine; he's one of the wisest men I know. He asked the black-and-white questions. I don't think the answers convinced him. He was definitely a nonbeliever, and I think he left still a nonbeliever. I was moving more along with his thinking," Ms. Johnson added. "If his wife were there, Cornelia, she's the type who would be into it-she's more ethereal."

Ms. Johnson said that the guests were most interested in "the red string"-the red band that's been gracing the wrists of celebrities in Us Weekly , from Madonna, who turned the faith into a fad 10 years ago, to newbies Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. "When it's all over, everyone's going up-at least a good percentage of them would go up individually and talk to the two teachers, who would either put a red string on them, or they would socialize or leave," said Ms. Johnson. "It's this red string that's been blessed by the Temple of Rebecca. It helps soak up and remove the negative energy from your body. It eventually wears out and falls off; then you put a new one on. It supposedly is draining your body of negative energy." She said that she had been wondering about the string too, and went up to Rabbi Eliyahu with Mr. Barish's girlfriend, Michelle Manning, and asked, "If you don't have this hour to come to the center for teachings on a regular basis, can you still wear the red string?"

Ms. Johnson went on: "He said yes, but could I just come for one session? I said, 'I'll try, but I really can't. It's two hours out of my day-20 minutes there, 20 minutes back.' He said, 'I'll come to you.' I said, 'I don't have an hour for you.' He said, 'What about 20 minutes?' I said, 'No.' 'Ten minutes?' he said. I said, 'O.K.' He puts the red string on me, ties four knots on one side, four on the other, closes his eyes and is blessing the knots. They've been calling me for my 10 minutes."

Ann Jones said she invites her friends over to her house for Kabbalah parties every few months. "I've had people here from Muslim princesses to musicians, to somebody who works in a store, somebody serving me," said Ms. Jones. "My boundaries are good energy." She said that Kathy Hilton's first brush with Kabbalah was at her house. "When she left, the next day her daughter"-that would be Paris-"arrived home from Australia and went to the Kabbalah Center in L.A. for the first time."

When Ms. Jones invites the Kabbalah Centre's rabbis over for her cocktail parties, she said, her only stipulation is that they don't talk about religion. "I don't proselytize," she said, "and when I do these rabbi meetings, we don't discuss religion-we discuss spirituality ." Sometimes she invites five people over, sometimes 15. "I've had parties where I've introduced Deepak Chopra to the Kabbalah rabbi," said Ms. Jones. "There was a little bit of dancing around, checking each other out. But I've had Hollywood here, rock 'n' roll, civilians, Deepak-everyone."

Sally Hershberger stylist Steven Dillon discovered Kabbalah at a party like Ms. Jones'. "The rabbis operate with somebody privately who can't really make it to the center," he said. "That's sort of how they got me in there." He's also hosted a benefit for the Kabbalah Centre's Spirituality for Kids initiative at the Sally Hershberger salon. "We're all just looking for the light here," he said of himself and his co-workers. "Thanks to the celebrity people, [Kabbalah] really has changed things for the masses. The world is so celebrity-obsessed that I think the more celebrities do it, the better it'll be."

Ms. Johnson, a self-proclaimed "nonbeliever," said that Kabbalah's effects have surprised even her. "This is very weird, coming from me," said Ms. Johnson. "But when I have things that really upset me, I have very low blood pressure-I get a spike in my blood pressure that you feel." After the Kabbalah party, she noticed a change: "I went home and there were at least four major things that happened: The dog ate his leather leash and had to be rushed to the vet, someone left a message and said I'd been offered a price on a house in Palm Beach I'd been interested in, and then two other things. But instead of getting that tightening-in-your-chest feeling, I got the opposite. I got this puff of expansion," she said.

Ms. Johnson's stressful life continued apace, yet the calmness remained. "The only thing in my life that was different was a silly piece of string on my wrist," she marveled. "I can't claim that that was what it was, but I can't claim that it was anything else."

Ms. Barish, too, said that Kabbalah has relaxed her. From her motorboat in Miami, she said, "I've just played 18 holes of golf and I'm still calm!" She said Kabbalah has made her more patient. "It's really improved my golf game!"

-Alexandra Wolfe

"I want to have it so tight that it works in front of every audience: rich, poor, a strip club and the Senate. Literally like that," he said. "If only smart people like your shit, it ain't that smart." He let out a laugh, a heh-heh-heh that was a cross between Eddie Murphy and Phyllis Diller. Heh-heh-heh .

"The greatest artists of our time were pop. Beethoven was pop !" Mr. Rock said, putting an emphasis on that last word as if he were participating in a poetry slam. "Beethoven was the fucking Justin Timberlake of his time. You know what I mean? Louis Armstrong, that shit was pop ! It wasn't like just some cool-shit jazz people that listened to it. That shit was pop . Picasso was pop. Motherfuckers are eating burgers and going, 'that Picasso shit is good.'

"So, that's what you strive for," he said.

If you were one of the more than 30,000 people who had the good fortune to see Mr. Rock during his six nights in the city-five at the Theater at Madison Square Garden, one at the Apollo Theater on Feb. 3-then you know that he, too, is pop, no small feat in the dying, fractionalized art of stand-up comedy. And not just pop, but maybe in the big Pantheon of American comedy.

For proof, all you needed to do was turn around in your seat on Feb. 2 and watch a melting pot of an audience-white, black, brown, Long Island mook, Manhattan snob and outer-borough homeboy-clutching their sides and letting out great big purgative howls of laughter as Mr. Rock's nimble reindeer body leaped around the stage as he sweated, spritzing strangely reassuring controversy, clutching a cordless mike. He was the opposite of some of the old comedians who had reassuring surfaces and unsettling innards; Chris Rock blasted the air with street talk, orifice-probing language and invasive sounds, but seemed full of inner decency and secure values.

"Krispy Kremes," he said gleefully, should have a new slogan: "So good, you'll suck a dick."

There were hints of the Pantheon in the montage of comedian's photos that opened Mr. Rock's show: Bill Cosby, Flip Wilson, Redd Foxx and Buckwheat were interspersed with Bob Newhart, Lenny Bruce, Alan King, Woody Allen and Joan Rivers. They were white and black, Jews and gentiles, comedians who worked blue and comedians who worked black and blue and comedians who worked black and clean, but all at one point or another had gone pop. Chris Rock was playing Live at the Pantheon, but he was pop.

But most of all, the proof of his popness was in the comedy. Mr. Rock's show was a clear-eyed deconstruction of American life right now-domestic life to foreign policy to celebrity culture-through the eyes of a bucking, braying, restless husband and new father. (Mr. Rock and his wife, Malaak, are the parents of a 2-year-old girl, Lola.)

Though he states that "the whole world's gone crazy" and deflates the phony patriots who crush the complications of American life, "I'm a person," says Mr. Rock. "I've got some shit I'm conservative about, I got some shit I'm liberal about. Crime, I'm conservative. Prostitution, I'm liberal." Mr. Rock still concludes in his show that we live in "the best country in the world."

On Feb. 2, Mr. Rock began his set with some observations about Janet Jackson's breast-baring performance during the Super Bowl half time. "Ain't that some sad shit?" he said. "Do you remember when she was so fine just a glance would do it? Now she got to whip out her 40-year-old titty on TV." The crowd wheezed with laughter as Mr. Rock declared that this juggernaut of declining values had to be stopped "because someone gonna pull out a dick next. That's right, when a nigga whips out a dick the game's over," he said. "Super Bowl's over. Nelly whipped out his dick. That's enough. That's enough. Go to commercial."

A lot of Mr. Rock's show is dedicated to the U.S. as he knows it in 2004. Saying that he loves rap but has grown tired of defending it, Mr. Rock said that "even the United States government hates rap. You know why I say that? Because they won't arrest anybody that kills rappers." After contending that more people saw Tupac Shakur's killing-which took place on the Las Vegas Strip after a Mike Tyson fight-"than the last episode of Seinfeld ," he said: "You mean to tell me they can find Saddam Hussein in a fucking hole, but you can't tell me who shot Tupac?"

As for Governor Schwarzenegger, "What kind of retarded shit is that?" Mr. Rock wanted to know, "Arnold Schwarzenegger can't even play a smart guy in a movie."

Meanwhile, Mr. Rock said he wanted to "smack the shit" out of Michael Jackson, Janet's brother.

"What the fuck is with that family, man?" he demanded. "Janet's whipping out her titty. This clown's charged with child molestation. Again! You thought it was Groundhog's Day when you heard that shit, right?" he said, on Groundhog Day. Mr. Rock then went on a riff about Mr. Jackson's appearance on 60 Minute s. "Ed Bradley tried his best to make Michael look like a mammal. He just tried to make him seem like he drank water like everybody, and he couldn't do it." Mr. Jackson, he continued, had shown up in court "looking like Captain Crunch."

"It might be a nice, celebrity-packed jail this year," Mr. Rock said, invoking the names of Kobe Bryant, Mr. Jackson and Jayson Williams." This provoked an "oooooh" from the audience. "Oh, come on," Mr. Rock replied. "It's gonna be star-studded. 'Jailhouse Rock' is gonna have a helluva beat."

But then Mr. Rock changed the beat in an interesting direction. "All this celebrity news is just some bullshit to get your mind off the war," he said. "I think Bush sent that girl to Kobe's room. To get your mind off the war. He sent the girl to Kobe's room. He took the little boy to Michael Jackson's house. Bush killed Laci Peterson. Bush was fucking Paris Hilton. All of this shit is to get your mind off the war."

The crowd erupted.

Mr. Rock continued. "Bush lied to me, man. He said we got to move on Iraq because they're the most dangerous regime on earth. If they're so dangerous, how come it only took two weeks to take over the whole fucking country? You couldn't take over the Bronx in two weeks. You'd need a month to get the Grand Concourse, man."

"They're looking for weapons of mass destruction. They can't even find a whiffle-ball bat!" he said. And later: "I didn't go to no fancy school or no shit, but weren't we after bin Laden. What the fuck happened?

"When I heard we were after Hussein, I was like, really?!" Mr. Rock said. "That's so 80's. The whole war feels like a bad VH1 special. Hussein is back. And Bush is back. And Cheney is back. And Paula Abdul is back. Shit, before you know it, it'll be Hammer time again."

"The whole country's got a weird mentality. A really pumped-up gang mentality. Everyone wants to be in a gang," Mr. Rock said. But the beauty of his comedy and the reason he is pop is that though a tough moral streak runs through his comedy, Mr. Rock remains steadfastly nonpartisan.

"Republicans are fucking idiots and Democrats are fucking idiots and conservatives are fucking idiots and liberals are fucking idiots. Pretty much anyone that makes up their mind before they hear the issues is a fool, O.K.?" he said onstage at Madison Square Garden to healthy applause. "Everybody wants to be in a gang. Why don't they just fucking make up their own mind."

Backstage, he was just as steadfast. Asked if he was following the Democratic primaries, Mr. Rock said, "Nah. It's like college basketball. I wait for the Final Four." He laughed and went into announcer mode. "Well, the Final Four! North Carolina's back. Syracuse." Said Mr. Rock: "It's always like the same cats."

When I said he had talked a lot about President Bush, Mr. Rock stopped me. "I'm talking about the President. In my last special, I talked about Clinton. I haven't picked a side. I'm still where I've always been. It's my job to talk about the President, no matter who he is," he said. And a little later, worried that he'd be perceived as being co-opted, he said what generations of comics have said, "You want me to take a political stance. That's career suicide."

"I'm 38," he said. "My whole life, no matter who's been president, Harlem's been Harlem. Fucking Bed-Stuy"-that would be the Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn where Mr. Rock grew up-"is still Bed-Stuy."

Well, did Mr. Rock think that Republicans or Democrats were better at creating the kind of distractions to which he was referring earlier? "People like distraction," he said with a smile that suggested he was not going to be fooled into committing career suicide. "Nobody likes to sit down and write a novel. You can't wait for something to distract you." He laughed. "Nobody wants to do work. Hard work ahead of you? Look, a bunny rabbit!

"I'm just saying the world's addicted to distraction," Mr. Rock said. "It's the oldest drug in the book, distraction. We know what has to be done. We know how to do it. But it never gets done because we're addicted to distraction."

But Mr. Rock has clearly not given up on good old American democracy. During his show, he says something that seems shocking at first-then he explains himself. "I love to see the flag burn, because it lets me know I'm in the right spot," he says. "People only hate the winners. People the hate the Yankees. People the hate the Cowboys. People hate the Lakers."

In other words, Mr. Rock like, like the other big comedians in the Pantheon-Redd Foxx, Bill Cosby, Lenny Bruce and Will Rogers-likes being in the free speech vortex of the world. "Come to my show, laugh," he said. "I kind of write a show the way I write it because I don't really take any laughs for granted. My whole philosophy is even if you don't think it's funny, hopefully you think it's interesting.

"It's jokes, man," he said after the show. "It's jokes.

"Look at Bill Cosby. Look at Dick Gregory. As far as who's the bigger activist, who's got more stuff done." Mr. Rock cupped his hands around his mouth and whispered, " Bill Cosby ." Then he said, "That's how you do it. Do I want to march down 125th Street or do I want to put myself in a position to give Tuskegee [University] $40 million? That's where it's at. That's the real gangster shit. That's the real activism."

About half of Mr Rock's show is built upon a different kind activism, the kind he said that resulted when he became a father.

"After the 9/11, I gave up the 'Keeping It Real' part of my life. The whole artist lives in Brooklyn thing," he said backstage. "It was weird. I just realized that I was in a stalling pattern in my life. I was in Los Angeles when it happened. My wife was in New York."

That day, Mr. Rock said he thought, "Maybe I should have a kid. I should move."

Though Mr. Rock said he keeps an office and a home here in Manhattan and one in Brooklyn, he calls Alpine, N.J.-just down the block from Eddie Murphy, another photo in the opening montage-home. "I lived in a house I bought," Mr. Rock said. "Now we live in our house. It's our house. And it's the baby's house. There's something liberating about that."

Mr. Rock talks in the act about the perils of raising a daughter. "I realized that I'm the man in her life. And her relationship with men is going to be based on my relationship with her. If I fuck up, you know"-the crowd applauded here-"every guy in here knows some girl with daddy problems."

Mr. Rock said that he had come to realize "that my only job in life is to keep her off the pole." By this he meant the pole that strippers use in their dance routines. "If your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up," he said. Not that he had anything against strippers. "But I do have a problem with the stripper myth," Mr. Rock said. "The stripper myth is, 'I'm stripping to pay my tuition. No you're not! If there's all these strippers in college, then how come I never got a smart lap dance. I've never had a girl sit on my lap and say, 'If I was you, I'd diversify my portfolio. Ever since the end of the Cold War, I found NATO obsolete.'"

Backstage, Mr. Rock said that the birth of his daughter had indeed changed his way of thinking. "I don't know, it's made me look at the universe, I guess," he said. "I have so much in common with so many people now - with most of the world - where I didn't before. I can literally have a conversation with any parent in the world." He let out a signature chuckle. "It's a beautiful thing. You sit here in your little celebrity body and you can't relate to a lot of people and then you have this kid, and it's like, please. I can talk to anybody. It's great."

Given some of the subject matter of his show, was Mr. Rock worried about his child's future? "No, no," he said and then riffed on the one area where he does take a side: "The future of black people is always better, let's just say," he said. "The future is bad for white people. It's never going to get better than having a whole race of people that fucking did whatever you said. It's only downhill from there. I mean it in a practical sense. Do you know how much easier your life would be today if you had-look at the slaves-an unpaid assistant? How much easier would your life be. And we're not even talking to assist. Slaves actually did the work. I have an assistant. She doesn't write jokes. Slaves actually did the work." He loosed another guttural chuckle. "So, it's always going to be downhill if you're white."

Fatherhood, Mr. Rock said, has paid other dividends. "The kid got me more into my marriage, I guess," he said. "I thought I was married before, but I was kind of show business married-like hey, whatever happens, happens. Now I'm like in it. There's an acceptance of marriage. I know people that get married and somewhere in the marriage, they get committed. So I'm like really committed to my marriage now."

In his show, Mr. Rock offers less sentimental perspective of marriage and fatherhood. "Men! You marry, have kids. You live to be about 38," he said on stage. "Don't get me wrong, guys. You'll breathe another 40 years, but the living is over. You're a fucking dead man...Your life's fucking over. Ain't no new shit happening to you. You want to see new, look at your kids." People in the crowd were gurgling. "You don't think you're dead, look at your parents. Mom, alive. Dad, dead.

"Whatever job a man got at 35 and he's married with kids, he gonna have that job for the rest of his fucking life! Don't try to tell your wife you're going to find your spirit." Mr. Rock imitated the man: "'Honey, I'm not happy. I'm not fulfilled. I need to find my spirit.'" Then the woman: "'You better take your ass back to work. And find some overtime.'"

The Black Ambition tour ends in March, though HBO will record a Washington, D.C. performance to be telecast on the network sometime in the spring. In the meantime, Mr. Rock said that he has no movie roles lined up. "I mean I've read stuff, but everything sucks," he said. "That's the best thing about touring: You make enough money to turn down bad movies."

Mr. Rock said he'll continue to do stand-up "as long as I can do it strong." though he recognizes that the art-form is dying.

"It's going to be like jazz man," he said. "It's going to die in our lifetime." There were only a few people, among whom he counted himself and Jerry Seinfeld ("He's the funniest he's ever been in his career" ) who could both love performing and could fill venues with 1,000 or more seats. "You're going to see people covering jokes. It's like jazz and reggae," he said. "It's dead."

The culprit, he said is television. "In the old days, you really had to wait ten years to get a shot on The Tonight Show or whatever. That's the only place they're doing comedy. And now there's 300 channels. And there's probably about four just comedy channels." Not only that, but he added: "Everybody thinks they need a comedian now. So the NFL's got a comedian on. I've been offered sportscasting gigs. Everybody on the news: OK we need a funny weatherman. So, nobody develops.

"The hard part is not really coming up here," he said. "It's leaving your nice house, your wife, your baby, food, you got your perfect couch, your cable. You got to leave your house at night 10 o'clock, something like that, to go to a smoky club and hang out with comedians that just started. You literally got to go back to high school." It was like, he said, Mr. Schwarzenegger having to go back and win the Mr. Olympia title every time he wanted a new acting role.

But, he said, "I actually like smoky clubs" and "seeing how my act stacks up against the kids. I want to be better than the kids." It was odd hearing Mr. Rock say this. In person, he still looks boyish, trim and taut-skinned. But he's gone through the same transition Eddie Murphy did, from Puck-like stand-up to man. "A lot of guys aren't better than the kids," he continued. "They've become like banquet comedians. They do charity events. Their stuff only works in front of audiences of industry people or people that paid to see you."

But Chris Rock was no banquet comedian. He was a man who had disciplined his distractions; a comedian who'd gone pop. "Right now," he said, "I could walk into any club in the country and I don't care who's headlining and I'm gonna kill."

Chris Rock was backstage at Madison Square Garden. He was sweaty, skinny and happy. Heh-heh-heh .