Royal Young. (Photo: Erik Erikson)

On a recent Friday night, the 26-year-old writer Royal Young held a reading of his unpublished memoir Fame Shark at the Lower East Side home of his parents. He had hoped to use the apartment rooftop, but it looked like rain so the event was held indoors. When The Observer arrived, Molly Jong-Fast, whom Mr. Young had enlisted as an opening act, was reading from her novel, The Social Climber’s Handbook, about an Upper East Side mother a little like herself. As we stumbled in, bumping our elbow on a totem pole standing sentry next to the front door, we were hushed by an attentive older woman who turned out to be Mr. Young’s mother.

There was next to no wine left.

There had been a moment of confusion outside, because the name on the apartment’s buzzer did not read “Young.” As it happens, Mr. Young legally changed his name from Hazak Brozgold this summer, though he’d been using the name for years. He wrote about the decision for the website Jewcy, noting that he’d felt branded both by the name Hazak’s Hebrew origins and by its English meaning, strong. “Royal was an even bigger name to fill” than Hazak, he wrote; he’d gotten the name from a 14-year-old girl whom he’d met on MySpace during a lost year after dropping out of college. Despite the age difference, the two had a relationship, but “we never did anything illegal or wrong,” he assured us.

“I was so frustrated with meeting these fuckers at art openings a million times and they’d still get my name wrong,” Mr. Young told The Observer later, elaborating on the name change. “I was like, ‘Fuck them, I’m going to have a name there’s no way in hell they can forget.’” He laughed when we observed that “Royal Young” sounded more claim than name.

Mr. Young is a jaunty if casual dresser—for his reading, he wore a Dior bowling shirt. He is tall and a little pudgy, with sandy hair and a chin dotted with permastubble.

“A big part of my book is seeing my dad as an artist, needing to make money,” Mr. Young told an assembled group as we marveled at the apartment’s customizations—bathroom walls decoupaged with gum wrappers, a bedroom wall dominated by a Mars Attacks!-themed painting, executed by Mr. Young’s brother, the director Fury Young. “I want him to be the next—fucking—Pablo Picasso.” How did he feel about his father’s decision to abandon art for a day job as a social worker? we wondered. “I respect it!” he laughed. “I wouldn’t have been able to do all the drugs I did without it.”

It had not always been so easy: In Fame Shark, Mr. Young wrote that he’d fought with his parents over the name change; the fight was all tied up, he wrote, with his burgeoning alcohol troubles. “By 19, I hid handles of Jim Beam behind my bed pillows,” he elaborated.

Mr. Young’s métier is the confessional memoir: he’s published a number of pieces on various websites and in print outlets, all excerpts from the larger work describing his journey from celebrity obsession to disillusionment. Which isn’t to say he has abandoned the quest for fame entirely. Though he doesn’t operate a blog, his Twitter account is filled with links to his own writing and references to a glamorous life: “Partying in Aziz Ansari’s backyard,” he wrote one evening in June.

Other published excerpts from Fame Shark include a meditation for The Forward on serving as a child extra on the Mel Gibson vehicle Ransom, a piece entitled “My Love Relationship With Celebrities and Fame” for Yahoo’s Shine portal and a New York Press dispatch on a Robert Miller Gallery Christmas party and the snobs and socials in attendance. Of the latter piece, Mr. Young said, “The editor was like, ‘You got us so much hate mail.’ And I was like, ‘I’m so sorry,’ and he was like, ‘No, it’s awesome.’” He said he hopes his writing evokes strong emotions. “My greatest fear is that people read it and they’re like, ‘It was O.K.’”

Mr. Young has saved a piece of hate mail from a writer who called him a “whiny, white piece of shit who thinks he’s so great.”

“I think that’s kind of blind,” Mr. Young said. “If you read about somebody who’s constantly self-medicating, no matter how fancy or upscale or celebrity or socialite the situation may be, you have to realize that there’s a sadness to it. It comes from a need to fill an emptiness that’s internal.”

At the party, Mr. Young read a short piece about a young woman he’d dated in high school; they engaged in a sex act in the very roof garden the guests were standing in, a fact that gave the story a certain frisson. Mr. Young’s mother chuckled knowingly, buzzing another guest in. The relationship as depicted in the story was not smooth; nor, indeed, was the relationship between Mr. Young and his parents. He recalled the time his father had once embarrassed him by showing a painting depicting an outsize, erect penis to Mr. Young’s classmates. At story’s end, Sept. 11, 2001, has come, and Mr. Young sees his father in a new light—as a protector. The crowd clapped, and Mr. Young and his father hugged.

Susan Shapiro, Mr. Young’s onetime writing teacher in a course at the New School, congratulated him on the reading. She had introduced Mr. Young  and Ms. Jong-Fast, her cousin, and arranged for Mr. Young to interview the novelist for a class project—a courtesy Ms. Shapiro frequently extends to her students to give them experience in profile writing. She also teaches the personal essay. “All writers have a hole in their heart, and they’re trying to compensate for the love or attention they need,” said Ms. Shapiro, whose three published memoirs and one how-to book include Five Men Who Broke My Heart.

Mr. Young’s interview with Ms. Jong-Fast ended up on Interview’s website, where he is now a regular contributor. He began by asking the writer, “What drives greed?”

“I thought he asked really good questions,” said Ms. Jong-Fast. “He actually read the book!” The pair remained friends. “I think he’s really talented. He’s like a really lovely person; you want to make sure he doesn’t get injured. He seems—I don’t know that this is true—he seems vulnerable.” How, exactly? “He has enormous eyes, and he’s very soft-spoken.”

Ms. Shapiro asked if Mr. Young had ever heard of Tin House, the literary quarterly. “It’s pretty prestigious!” she said, promising to set up a meeting between Mr. Young and a friend she knew there.

“Love it,” said Mr. Young.

“I went to LaGuardia and I majored in visual art,” Mr. Young told The Observer later, over sandwiches and Presidente beers axt the Rivington Street Dominican joint El Castillo de Jagua. “I think that was something I did to fulfill dreams my dad had of being an artist. My true passion was writing, and Bret Easton Ellis had gone to Bennington, Jonathan Lethem had gone to Bennington.”

A friend of Mr. Young’s in school, Kastoory Kazi, said that Mr. Young had been an outsider at college parties: “Someone in the room, to be snarky and annoying, said ‘What kind of music do you like?’ And he said the Smiths. We bonded over the Smiths all night.” Mr. Young remembers his time at Bennington with little fondness. Had he stayed, “I could easily see myself just being a big, bloated alcoholic in the middle of Vermont. I would have been lost.”

Ms. Kazi graduated from Bennington the spring after meeting Mr. Young, at which point he dropped out and returned to New York. The pair co-founded a magazine called Pomp & Circumstance. Ms. Kazi was the editor-in-chief, and Mr. Young was the personal essay editor.

“She asked me to come on board because she knew I had all this ambition but no real direction,” said Mr. Young.

“He was one of the most hard-working people within that magazine,” Ms. Kazi said. “Because of his fame-sharkness it was something he wanted to dive into. A lot of times, we were able to use the magazine as an excuse to go to great parties in the Hamptons.”

“It was like doing drugs,” Mr. Young said of his aggressive socializing. “You have that moment and you just need more.” He told The Observer about getting into a fight with a Project Runway contestant at a Stella McCartney party (Mr. Young wore fur to the famous vegan’s soirée) and getting shot by Patrick McMullan—albeit as the subject of a stock photo captioned “Atmosphere.”

“They’re just stupid New York stories,” he said. “They’re funny and they’re interesting in a larger context.”

Writing about his life eventually moved Mr. Young beyond his party phase. “I hadn’t really accomplished anything besides getting my dick sucked and hanging out with 14-year-olds at stupid parties and, like, seeing Yoko Ono and Boy George wink at me,” he explained. “I didn’t have anything concrete, and once I took [Ms. Shapiro’s] class and got published—I did. And I felt less of a need to do coke to feel confident or to feel that I was special.”

So what is that larger context? More pertinently, we wondered, what’s that hole in his heart Mr. Young’s seeking to fill? Mr. Young looked down. “I need another beer.”

A minute later, he continued. “I think that a lot of it came from growing up on the Lower East Side and being the only white Jew in my class until I was probably 7 or 8, probably being a minority. And in my home, my parents were loving and supportive, though of course, analyzing everything I did.”

As for how his parents reacted to Mr. Young’s airing of the family’s various dramas in print, Mr. Young told The Observer: “Years of therapy … We’re all very shrinky, and we’re all very much into analysis.” Mr. Young noted that his mother is a neuropsychologist who studies learning disabilities. “I always wanted to have a problem,” he said, somewhat wistfully. Ultimately, he created one, becoming something of an alcoholic after dropping out of college.

He hasn’t told his parents what’s in the book—aside from the excerpts he’s already published or read—but Fame Shark’s real theme, he says, is family. “Every time I read from it, they’re a little shocked … I think when they read the book and realize where I’m coming from, it will be really healing. I mean, that would be my hope … ”

We asked if there was any subject he considered off limits. “I can’t!” he said, laughing. “What’s off limits—and it’s not necessarily even interesting …” He was, for the first time in a conversation during which he’d volunteered that he’d snorted heroin with a model (he didn’t like it) and had oral sex with a male friend for a movie role (he really didn’t like it), lost for words.

“The things that are not off limits,” he continued, “are very provocative … I had an affair with a 14-year-old girl when I was 20. That’s something I’m willing to reveal. The things that I hold onto are not really juicy or scandalous. They’re kind of quiet times.

“I would hope that by talking with me, and meeting me now, people would see that fame is not something I’m still consumed with,” he added. That said, he didn’t especially mind being interviewed. “The fame shark in me is eating it up,” he admitted, “eating it alive.”

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Molly Jong-Fast (Patrick McMullan)

Erica Jong wrote a piece in this Sunday's New York Times about the youth backlash against sex--informed by her daughter! "If their mothers discovered free sex, then they want to rediscover monogamy. My daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, who is in her mid-30s, wrote an essay called 'They Had Sex So I Didn’t Have To,'" the afraid-to-fly elder novelist wrote. She mentioned the essay to us, pre-publication, at a party for Poets & Writers; and certainly, the notion that sex is dead is not one to which we're unsympathetic.

We recently spoke to Molly Jong-Fast, who told us that a parent who writes about sex for a living--leaving aside the notion of parents with a mere healthy interest in sex--can be irksome! "I always find it very annoying to have parents like that. I don’t think you can prevent people from being who they are by bothering them. My parents were always like let’s talk about sex, and I was like 'shut up!'

"I am kind of on the other side of the spectrum that I kind of believe that there's not enough repression. The truth is that I haven’t made up my mind, but it would not be my first choice to have my children turn out like I did," said Ms. Jong-Fast. "I love my parents, it would not have been my first choice. Probably I would have been more comfortable in a family full of doctors where I could live in anonymity."

Ms. Jong-Fast's essay is a part of her mother's collection of essays entitled Sugar in My Bowl: Real Women Write About Real Sex. She is the author of several books.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Ms. Jong-Fast, the only child of Erica Jong, who wrote the sexed-up 1973 feminist gem Fear of Flying, paid $4.95 million last month, city records show, for a four-bedroom co-op overlooking Madison Avenue.

“Part of me feels that what I like about it is everyone here is a banker,” said Ms. Jong-Fast, who’s working on a novel, The Social Climber’s Handbook. “I feel like I don’t have to compete—what I do is so different, it’s not even comparable. I’d feel really bad if everyday I went to a coffee shop in Brooklyn and there were, like, five people on the New York Times best-seller list.”

She and her husband, CUNY professor Matthew Greenfield, a Shakespeare and Spenser expert, bought the apartment, at 49 East 86th Street, from David and Dana Luttway. (Ms. Luttway also has a famous New York mother, Congresswoman Nita Lowey.)

Ms. Jong-Fast grew up at One Gracie Square, with her mother and a boyfriend named Chip. “I don’t know what that co-op board was thinking. … He was a WASP from Darien who became a sort of wild crazy drug-addictive lunatic.” Then they moved to a hot-pink townhouse at 125 East 94th Street, a block from fellow feminist author Anne Roiphe: “A boyfriend of my mother’s said it looked like a bordello. It looked just awful, so hideous.”

Then the family moved to the Imperial House on East 69th Street, where her mother still lives. Later, when Ms. Jong-Fast was in her early 20’s, a grandpa (the other one was famous communist Howard Fast) bought her an apartment in the building. It had belonged to a woman who’d died there after a diabetic coma.

But she got married, moved away to Chelsea, and later came back uptown to a duplex. “I felt like I wanted to be closer to my parents,” she said. When asked about other neuroses, she said—no joke—a fear of flying. “Hilarious for everyone but me,” she deadpanned.

But Ms. Jong-Fast is pregnant with twins, so the stairs at that duplex became tiresome. Now that she’s on Madison Avenue, with a corner master bedroom suite facing toward Central Park, will she be a neighborhood shopper? “I’m just not like that. I mean, I’m happy for those people. Quite frankly, they have to exist. It’s important for the ecosystem; it’s like plankton.”

Can a woman who calls herself and her family “schlumpy … messy and not classy,” be happy in a $5 million East 86th Street co-op? “It works for us because it’s so weird and counterintuitive,” she said.

The four-bedroom apartment came with flat-screen televisions, which the couple are tearing out, along with the wet bar, in order to make space for books. “Swear to God,” she said, “there are no bookshelves.”

“Sholom Aleichem is the oldest possible relative that Grandpa claimed,” said Molly Jong-Fast, the 28-year-old writer. “There’s some story about that, that he was related to Grandpa Howie.” (“Grandpa Howie” would be the novelist-cum-communist Howard Fast, for those who don’t know.)

It was shortly after 11 on a luxe Upper East Side Tuesday, and the young Ms. Jong-Fast was perched in an armchair in her mother’s dining room. That mother is the writer Erica Jong, author most famously of Fear of Flying, the 1973 novel that helped shake a generation of repressed little lassies out of their zipped-up skivvies. Now 64 and happily settled in an art-filled East Side apartment, Ms. Jong appeared as blond and saucy as ever as she plumbed her family’s history, tag-teaming her daughter’s sentences in a game that often felt like a kind of six degrees of Sholom Aleichem.

Name a Jewish literary or artistic figure and they would find a connection; even choose a businessman and, most likely, they would trace a link. For instance: the novelist Jonathan Fast? That one was easy. He is the young Ms. Jong-Fast’s father, her mother Erica’s former husband and the son of the aforementioned patriarch, Grandpa Howie.

How about the gossip queen, and second Ron Perelman wife, Claudia Cohen? She is the younger Mr. Fast’s first cousin via his mother Bette’s line—a line that began with Isaac Cohen, the founder of Hudson County News Company (and a man whom Ms. Jong described as “one of these tough little Jews”).

Or what about—for a real challenge—the French Impressionist Camille Pissarro? Pissarro was born in St. Thomas in 1830, the son of a Dominican mother and Sephardic Jewish father, and spent most of his life in France. But trace down a few generations and a good 100 years, and it turns out that Ms. Jong’s niece, the artist Annabel Daou, happens to be married to the Impressionist’s great-grandson, MoMA curator Joachim Pissarro. The separation is exactly six degrees.

A family stacked with so many movers and machers offers plenty of perks to its lucky members: rich family lore, enviable connections, entrée to editors, to say nothing of grist for the next big novel. In a way, it’s like living in a modern-day shtetl, an upscale one, where everyone just happens to live on the Upper East Side, or maybe Upper West, where the floors are covered with fine Persian rugs instead of dirt, but also where the sprawling, honking insanity of New York seems suddenly to contract to a few narrow streets, a handful of industries which are at once cozy, familiar and approachable.

“It’s like mishpucha,” said Susan Shapiro, author and young cousin of Howard and Bette Fast, recalling how, when she arrived in New York in 1981, Howard Fast took it upon himself to introduce her to the various literary luminaries at one of their famous parties.

“He would say, ‘This is Suzy Shapiro, she’s a new brilliant writer in town, you better be nice to her, she’s mishpucha,’” said Ms. Shapiro, whose upcoming book, Only as Good as Your Word: Writing Lessons from My Favorite Literary Gurus, includes a chapter dedicated to her favorite cousins. “And what was interesting was that, when Molly was 14 or 15 and she was hanging out with my New York Times editors and everything, I heard myself say, ‘Molly Jong-Fast, brilliant young writer, you’d better be nice to her, she’s mishpucha.’”

“A family like ours is like a relic,” Ms. Jong-Fast said as she nibbled on a chocolate rugelach.

But if the shtetl model has its advantages, it also has its complications, intrigues and odd love triangles—or perhaps even rectangles, like the one that saw Ms. Jong’s fourth and current husband, the divorce lawyer Kenneth Burrows, briefly dating her former husband’s older sister, Rachel Fast. It was a long time ago—when Mr. Burrows and Ms. Fast were barely adults—but it apparently caused serious consternation in the Fast household, because Mr. Burrows’ uncle, the famed playwright Abe Burrows (think Guys and Dolls), had been a “turncoat” who talked to “the Committee”—that would be the House Un-American Activities Committee—while Howard Fast had refused and been blacklisted.

“It’s pretty incestuous,” Ms. Jong said with a throaty giggle.

Incestuous and, for all its free-to-be-you-and-me bohemianism, perhaps a little demanding, too. After all, the Jong-Fasts are the product of at least four self-made immigrant storylines, and a family doesn’t produce more than three generations of writers and artists without a serious myth system pushing them forward.

Peter Daou, the club-scene musician turned political blogger, who also happens to be Ms. Jong’s nephew via her older sister (and co-author of the album Zipless, inspired by his aunt’s poetry), was inclined to put a benign spin on it: “There was always a sense of ‘Make something happen, but do whatever you feel passionate about,’” he said of his parents’ child-rearing philosophy. “So it’s a combination of wanting to be overachievers and having the freedom to do whatever you want.”

But Jonathan Fast, who grew up under the shadow of a man who wrote more than 80 books, many of which were adapted for television and film, recalled something more direct—a mantra, even—woven into the red diapers: The only way you can make a living is as a writer.

“It was just what [my father] said, and then my mother used to agree with him,” said Mr. Fast, 58. “It’s insane—I still believe that.”

His onetime wife, Ms. Jong, recalls growing up with a similar notion in her family, where it seemed that everyone—save, perhaps, her importer-exporter father—was walking around with a smock, paintbrush and deep artistic thoughts.

“I guess I always had the feeling that, ‘How could you make a living if you weren’t an artist?’” Ms. Jong recalled.

To which her daughter responded: “Little did we know that they were like the five people who could do that!”

With two books already under her belt, Ms. Jong-Fast would seem to be the next in line to inherit the familial writing mantel. But if you ask her, she’s not always sure she wants it. She has settled down now, had a child, joined two temples—a far cry from her mother’s early husband-swapping, city-hopping ways.

“I think, had I been a little bit more away from my particular peccadilloes, I think I would have been a doctor,” the daughter said. “I really wanted to be a scientist or a doctor.”

There was a flicker of confusion on her mother’s face. And then, with a phrase repeated by generations of Jewish mothers, famous or otherwise, she said: “You know, Molly, it’s not too late to be a doctor if you want to be a doctor.”

On the first page of Sex Doctors, she reveals that her mother's side of the family suffers from irritable-bowel syndrome and Crohn's disease. In Chapter 2, she calls her grandfather a liar and claims that Norman Rockwell wanted to have anal sex with him. Near the end, in a chapter titled "What's in Joan Collins's Box?", Ms. Jong-Fast answers that question: a wig.

That didn't sit too well with the award-winning actress and best-selling author, whose lawyer fired off a letter to Random House. The publishing house was quick to make changes and tone things down.

Ms. Jong-Fast, who refers to the affair as "Baldgate," says it all started when she was 13. During a dinner with her mother and Ms. Collins, the latter kept talking about Valentino's yacht, and Ms. Jong-Fast kept mentioning how much she'd like to check it out-to which Ms. Collins replied, "Oh, no, not as you are now, why you're too fat to go on Valentino's yacht."

In late March, the two women found themselves locked in a staring contest at a Glamour magazine party. "She looked really pissed," Ms. Jong-Fast recalled.

"I was holding Mom's hand. She started coming towards me, and I said, 'Mom, we have to get out of here-Joan Collins is going to kick my ass.' So we left. It was so scary. She's big, she's tall, she could take me."

As of April 11, Ms. Jong-Fast had received mostly favorable notices in the press for the Sex Doctors in the Basement, with the notable exception of one reviewer who noted that Ms. Jong-Fast's "sense of entitlement trips her up" and another who lamented the lack of restraint in her memoir, which "suffers from such breathtakingly unamusing, self-important irony that this reviewer found it nearly unreadable."

Neither review bothered Ms. Jong-Fast in the slightest. For one thing, they appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Chicago Tribune.

"They were really mean, but so hilarious," she said. "People from the Midwest don't really get New York. With a book like this, you should be like, 'She's not even famous-who cares?' That's the way you should go. But it was like, 'Why doesn't she come to more profound realizations about her life?' And that is why it's funny. They're reading it like it should be Angela's Ashes or like Wasted."

One reviewer even wrote to Ms. Jong-Fast, calling her "immensely talented" but wishing she'd eased up on the "cheap humor" and focused more on what it feels to be the child of someone famous. "I was like, ''Cause it doesn't feel like anything,'" she said, adding that her book was meant to be an amusing response to all the earnest, humorless and "fake literary bullshit" memoirs out there.

Although it took Ms. Jong-Fast five years to write The Sex Doctors-in that time, she's gotten married, had a baby (Max), earned an M.F.A. from Bennington, and contributed to The New York Times, Cosmopolitan, Modern Bride and others-it sometimes reads like she dashed the whole thing off in a month, via e-mail, or casually dictated it all into a tape recorder. As she chatted and riffed away, it was as though she was testing out new material.

"I have a giant head," she said, finishing her small green salad with extra carrot-juice dressing on the side. "I feel like that's one of the other things I have going for me. I have an enormous head. A lot of people who are successful have enormous heads-they look like bobbers, you know, with big heads in the cars? Napoleon had a big head. Robert De Niro has an enormous head. Eve Ensler has a giant head."

Reluctantly, Ms. Jong-Fast confessed that she's not the Vagina Monologues playwright's biggest fan.

"I can't stand it when people use other people's hardships as a way to self-promote," she said. "She's like, 'Women in Samoa are being raped and murdered every day-buy my book.' Or 'I'm really here to talk about women's rights-buy my book.' Or 'I'm going to be on HBO talking about women's rights-buy my book.' For God's sake, shilling is one thing, but shilling on the backs of poor, homeless Samoans without genitals is a whole other thing."

Ms. Jong-Fast backpedaled a little.

"Maybe I'm just a tiny bit jealous that she's a big star and I have a 27-pound cat," she said. "Or maybe my jealousy stems from the fact that Samoans without genitals tend to shun me. Perhaps I'm just running with the wrong group. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I need some traumatized Samoan friends ASAP, but you just never meet Samoans in the Scoop store."

Is she uncomfortable with her level of fame?

"It's hard for me to be this famous," she said. "It's called not famous. I'm less famous than Jazzy Adams [the deceased dog that belonged to New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams]. I'm less famous than Jazzy, but I think I'm more famous than the new Adams dog, because we don't know what his name is. I'm less famous than the Gastineau girls but maybe more famous than their doorman. Compared to me, the Gottis are huge stars."

Does she have a stalker?

"If only! If I had a stalker, I'd be talking to Entertainment Tonight, not you. I might hire a stalker …. No, there are stops between where I am and Stalker Fame. No, the saddest thing is people who aren't that famous but they have stalkers, like abused women. That's sad. I had a fan, but I wrote him back and then he went away. But I do get fan letters, which is totally weird. And hate mail. No, I don't get hate mail-yet. I get lawsuits. No, it's pretty hard for me to walk down the street; my privacy is a big issue. It's hard to keep a private life and be a public person, you know?"

She finished her spicy tuna roll and confessed to a horrible fear of flying. She's tried everything (Fly Without Fear at LaGuardia, the "Mad Russian" hypnotist, virtual-reality therapy), but she still has nightmares.

"Mom and I did Oprah in Chicago two years ago-couldn't get home," she said.

"Couldn't get on the plane, so we took the train. I hate flying. I once took so many beta blockers that I fainted at J.F.K. and had to be taken in an ambulance to the local hospital. Let me tell you that [Kings County Hospital] is not a nice hospital. Literally, I've got all my fancy luggage and there's a woman next to me saying, 'My skin is crawling-I'm coming down from the crack!' She's screaming, and I'm on the bed next to her."

She said her mother has absolutely no fear of flying.

"The big lie of my life is that she wrote Fear of Flying," Ms. Jong-Fast said. "And I really could write Fear of Flying."

-George Gurley

Faux Real!

What is it with these Law and Order actors? Everywhere The Transom goes, it seems, we run into at least one of them, shilling for some children's charity, raising money to help rape victims, all gussied up in an outfit from some fashion designer at some cocktail party at some socialite-filled boutique on Madison Avenue. Don't these people know that they're not actually lawyers, detectives or public defenders charged with representing the poor and besotted? Don't we?

A case in point: Safe Horizon.

Last week, we found ourselves eating canapés in the corner of the Calvin Klein boutique talking to Stephanie March, who was wearing a $1,300 mauve Calvin Klein dress and an ample assortment of her own chunky jewelry. From 2000 to 2003, the blonde and glowing Ms. March played Assistant District Attorney Alexandra (Alex) Cabot on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. She's on the board of Safe Horizon, a major New York charity with strong ties to the fashion industry that helps victims of crime and abuse. "Charities often operate in the court system," she said, "so it's natural for them to come to us."

How's that?

In a telephone interview earlier this year, Katherine Oliver, the commissioner of the Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting, tried to explain. " Law and Order is the quintessential reality-television show," she said. The intermingling of television show and city life is so complete, she added, that it's no wonder people can't quite tell the difference. People rush up to Sam Waterston and beg for legal advice. The Mayor has made two cameos on the show, conducting two mock press conferences in the real City Hall. When his office wanted to advertise the 311 information hotline, Law and Order writers happily worked it into the plot. Poised to become the longest-running television drama, Law and Order and its four franchises are all shot around New York City as often as on a soundstage. "A lot of New York City residents are pleased when Law and Order is shooting on their block," said Ms. Oliver. "People like to see their city glamorized on TV." Talk about suspension of disbelief.

Though she's no longer on the show, Ms. March professed difficulty differentiating between her fictional and actual roles in life. "I was hoping Law and Order would get me out of jury duty," said the newly married actress (who told The Transom that she and her hubby drank 84 margaritas over the course of their eight-day honeymoon in Cabo San Lucas). "But sure enough, I ended up on the jury." It was a civil case, an argument between two Russian jewelers. "Working at Law and Order completely renewed my respect for juries," she added. (Implicit plug: Watch the newest franchise, Law and Order: Trial by Jury!)

Scott Millstein, the chief operating officer of Safe Horizon, told us that unlike many other starlets, the Law and Order ladies actually mean business when they lend their support. "My impression is that they immerse themselves in these characters," he said. "The more you immerse yourself in these issues in order to get into character, the more you identify with them. It's a genuine support-it's not a bullshit kind of, celebrity kind of thing."

Last year, for example, the ubiquitous Mariska Hargitay, TV queen of the charity circuit, did a public-service announcement for the Safe Horizon hotline. After it aired, calls to the hotline increased 150 percent, Mr. Millstein said.

There is nary a benefit invitation that doesn't loudly advertise Ms. Hargitay's name. And she's almost always there, smiling broadly, explaining her responsibility to the city, to the children, to the poor.

At the Safe Horizon party, we asked Ms. Hargitay what she's doing with the rest of her time.

"Workin', workin', workin'," she told us. "You know: bustin' perps left and right."

-Rebecca Dana

Property Porn

"Real-estate lust has been around for a long time," said journalist Michael Gross. "But why the literature of real-estate lust?"

As the real-estate bubble expands, it's no surprise that publishers are churning out books in which New Yorkers' lives are entwined with their lairs. At Makor on April 6, four authors discussed various social worlds-a tony Park Avenue apartment building, the cultural melting pot in Morningside Heights and life in a midtown luxury hotel. Once the roughly 30-person audience was loosened up with free wine, a more provocative question was raised: Is Manhattan real estate the new pornography?

"I have always referred to magazines like Architectural Digest as 'shelter porn,'" said Mr. Gross. If that's the case, then his upcoming book must qualify as the Lolita of the genre. Mr. Gross' 740 Park delves into the rarified world of one of the city's most exclusive co-ops, where billionaires like Ronald Lauder, Steve Schwarzman and David Koch rest their heads.

The voyeuristic impulse to glimpse the extravagant lives of New York's filthy rich has been with us for decades-but now there are more ways than ever to scratch that itch. The money that celebrities and socialites shell out to put a roof over their heads (reported for years in these pages) is now the subject of countless books, added column space in the papers and numerous blogs tapping into the growing public obsession. But citing the tech-boom crash as a reference point, doomsayers also see this moment-when sales records are being shattered and $1 million doesn't buy what it used to-as a decadent, if not dangerous, era.

"There is something sexy about it," said novelist Valerie Ann Leff, "and something so over the top that it's exciting." Although she now resides down South, Ms. Leff used her Fifth Avenue upbringing as fodder for her fictionalized world. She read from her novel Better Homes and Husbands, along with two other fiction writers, Karen Siplin ( Such a Girl) and Cheryl Mendelson ( Morningside Heights).

During the Q. and A. that followed, a recent Minneapolis transplant expressed shock at the cultural significance implicit in an apartment's proximity to the subway. Other topics included Europeans buying up property while the dollar is in a slump, and which celebrities have felt the wrath of the dreaded co-op board.

However, one disgruntled Upper West Side woman found no discreet charm in the babble of the bourgeoisie.

"When you talk about New York, I don't know which country you're talking about," she exclaimed, briefly disrupting the brick-and-mortar love fest.

She'd neglected to read Makor's event description offering an inside peek into "the closed doors of New York's stylish apartment buildings," perhaps assuming it was a Learning Annex seminar on thrifty apartment-hunting. Sure, New York has historically welcomed the tired, the poor and the huddled masses, and real-estate advice is Topic A at dinner parties from Bridgehampton to Bushwick, but we reserve most of our longing for the opulent structures built for the city's grandest and greediest.

"New York is like a layer cake," said Mr. Gross. "It's not one society; it's 15 societies all layered on top of each other."

Mr. Gross, who admitted that the combined wealth of everyone in the room couldn't buy a single apartment at 740 Park, emphasized that using even a single building as the main character can give insight into New York's complicated cultural history.

"It's not a book about any particular Mrs. Gottrocks or Thurston Howell III," Mr. Gross told The Transom. "It's a book in which the building has a personality, exerts its own power."

-Michael Calderone

Jazzy is dead; long live Jazzy Jr. As Off the Record's Sridhar Pappu reported last month, New York Post columnist Cindy Adams' beloved Yorkshire terrier, Jazzy, died this past summer. But his memory persists, both in a new Saks Fifth Avenue boutique and in the name of Ms. Adams' replacement dog, Jazzy Jr.

"He meant everything to me. So that's why I am continuing his name-in his memory," Ms. Adams told The Transom.

On Nov. 9, from 1 to 5 p.m., Saks Fifth Avenue will celebrate the opening of its eight-floor Jazzy Couture boutique with "Jazzy on Fifth," a street fair for pet owners and their pets. According to the press release announcing the shindig, it "will mark the first time a city block was closed for a dog-related event"-including the lane of traffic on Fifth Avenue closest to the department store. And if you wonder how Ms. Adams pulled off such a feat, you've never seen Mayor Bloomberg cowering in her presence.

But that's beside the point. Open to the public, the street fair will feature hot dogs, cotton candy and artists sketching portraits of people with their pets. On sale will be select items from the Jazzy Couture line of upscale pet apparel, carrier bags, ceramics and accessories. Among the items that will be featured in the Jazzy boutique (though not necessarily at the street fair) are doggie sparkle tees with removable marabou collars, a leather doggie trench coat and a leopard faux-fur jacket. (A part of the proceeds will benefit the ASPCA.)

The center of attention at the street fair will no doubt be Ms. Adams and Jazzy Jr., the Yorkshire who replaced the original. Although the press release makes no mention of the fate of Jazzy, Ms. Adams told The Transom that Jazzy, who would have been four in September, "was with his trainer in the country" near Albany "when he suddenly started to lose everything. He was throwing up, bleeding, everything." He died on Aug. 17. Ms. Adams declined to name the trainer because "I don't want to put this heavily on her"-but, she said, she did have an autopsy performed, and the results showed that Jazzy "had E. coli in his system." However, Ms. Adams added, the medical examiner's reports offered no answer as to how or where Jazzy might have ingested the bacteria. "It's something that does not give me any closure," she said.

Ms. Adams said that not only was she devastated-"I was sucking my thumb for two months"-but so was Juicy, the Yorkshire terrier pup she had obtained as a playmate for the original Jazzy. "After I lost Jazzy, Juicy was upset," Ms. Adams said. "She went under." Ms. Adams didn't explain what this meant, but she did say that "I had to get another puppy to annoy Juicy," who is now 14 months old.

Enter Jazzy Jr., who, according to Ms. Adams, comes from the same bloodline as Jazzy and Juicy.

When The Transom asked Ms. Adams if the procurement of Jazzy Jr. had anything to do with the business venture behind Saks' Jazzy Couture line, she replied: "No, no. The logo is there-Jazzy Couture. It's like Lassie: There were 400 different Lassies. We have Dior, and Dior is gone a long time," Ms. Adams continued. "This is doggie Dior: He's going to have a couture line. And then there's going to be Jazzy Cruise. I mean, have a little respect here."

The original Jazzy entered Ms. Adams' life unannounced, as a bereavement present from New Millennium Press co-president Michael Viner following the death of her husband, comedian Joey Adams. The Evian-lapping Yorkshire later became the subject of Ms. Adams' 2003 book, The Gift of Jazzy.

Ms. Adams said she has recovered enough from her loss to write about Jazzy, Juicy and Jazzy Jr. in a Post column that will probably appear on Friday, Nov. 7. She also said that she wouldn't be seeking any kind of legal redress over Jazzy's untimely death-an interesting decision for someone who announced at her husband's memorial service that she would "never forget" those who had not done right by her Joey.

As the gossip columnist explained, however, proving any kind of negligence regarding Jazzy's demise would be near-impossible. For another: "What you can get back only is the price of your dog. I don't want that. I want my dog," Ms. Adams said. "So there's no litigation. There's just my tears."

-Frank DiGiacomo

De Niro Shuts Hudson

Robert De Niro has closed the olive curtains for good on Hudson Lounge, his Tribeca bar at 116 Hudson Street. "All I can say is that we are no longer open for business," said one of the lounge's operators, Ken Jowdy. The nightspot, which opened in the summer of 2001, closed sometime during the last week in October, not long after press reports that Mr. De Niro had been diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Although it's unclear what will become of the space, Mr. De Niro-who recently tried to purchase a townhouse on the Upper East Side-doesn't seem to have abandoned Tribeca. He owns the two buildings next-door, 112 and 114 Hudson Street, and is involved in opening a luxury hotel around the corner. Representatives for Mr. De Niro declined to comment on the closing.

-Alexandra Wolfe

It's a Ghoul Thing

At the Oct. 31 Halloween Party at the Four Seasons, the most unexpected costume belonged to Martha Stewart: She came as Martha Stewart. Wearing a long black dress and a scraggly black wig, the crafty broad cunningly sported a paper-cutout mask of her face. In fact, she had two such masks-one on a stick and one with an elastic band-and the real chills came when she held up both. It was as if, like The Matrix's Agent Smith, Ms. Stewart had replicated herself in triplicate.

"I addressed her as Martha because she was dressed as Martha, and then from behind the mask she said, 'Bonsoir, mon ami,' and I realized it really was her! Ingenious!" said restaurant owner Alex Von Bidder, who was in negotiations with union representatives for his staff up until five minutes before the party began. Indeed, he was fielding money-related questions from his staff throughout the evening; their contract was to expire at midnight, and there'd been talk of an impending strike.

But most guests were too busy comparing costumes to notice the management's strife.

Partygoers included fashion designer Patricia Field, who was dressed as a large red-haired clown with pointy shoulder pads; Page Six's Richard Johnson, wearing a polyester gangster-style pinstriped suit; and Kim Cattrall, who was dressed as something that involved pink hot pants and driving gloves. When Ms. Stewart, there with her publicist Susan Magrino, was introduced to The Transom, she wanted to know if we were a waiter. When she learned that we were something less helpful-the spooky media-she suddenly grew mute. We asked if she'd made the mask herself and a pantomime ensued, with a lot of nodding and pointing and a two-fingered motion that we think was supposed to represent scissors.

Then she held the mask so that we could see the top of it. It read: "Happy Halloween From Forbes.com."

The mask, it turns out, was one of five downloadable ones that Forbes posted on its Web site last year. The others were of former WorldCom chief executive Bernard Ebbers, former Enron chief executive Ken Lay, the frighteningly freckly former Tyco chief executive L. Dennis Kozlowski and former ImClone Systems chief executive Sam Waksal, whose biotech company is currently at the center of the investigation into Ms. Stewart's alleged insider trading.

"This Halloween, Dracula and Frankenstein's monster seem positively cuddly," the site proclaimed. "To inspire some real fear, try dressing up as one of these current and former chief executives …. Now that's scary."

-Anna Jane Grossman

Quentin, Crisp?

Kill Bill director Quentin Tarantino sounds a little nostalgic for the wild 1980's. At least that's the impression The Transom got on Oct. 30, while watching Mr. Tarantino frighten the usual crowd of beer-bellied sports fans or theater-going cheapskates in the dark and musty back room of McHale's Pub on Eighth Avenue. Dressed in a red sports jersey, Mr. Tarantino was seated at a corner booth with two stringy-haired brunettes who were a shade below middle age. From 6:30 to 8 p.m. he held court, looking at the bar's extensive-American, Italian and Mexican!-menu, flailing his arms wildly throughout dinner, reminiscing loudly about drugs in the 80's and not letting his two companions get a word in edgewise. "Those were the days, man!" he belted with an ear-to-ear smile and a grand, open-armed gesture. "All the coke people did back then, and heroin-that was the height of it!"

-A.W.

Slip-Slidin' Away

At playwright Jonathan Marc Sherman's 35th birthday on Oct. 10 at the Slipper Room, actor Ethan Hawke wanted no room to slip. Mr. Hawke, who starred in Mr. Sherman's 1993 Off Broadway play Sophistry and also co-founded the now-defunct theater company Malaparte with him, recently split with his wife, Uma Thurman, after reportedly cheating on her with a 22-year-old Canadian model while filming north of the border.

Nervous about being associated with any more lithe young things so soon after the break-up, Mr. Hawke ducked out of all photos at the party-even ones being taken by Mr. Sherman's friends. One partygoer who was in a crowd that included Edward Norton and Sam Rockwell reported that Mr. Hawke could be heard saying: "Oh, man, I can't get my picture taken with girls! I'll get in trouble with the press!"

-A.J.G.

Fear of Fattening

"I'm huge!" author Molly Jong-Fast told The Transom on the evening of Nov. 1, as she plopped down in a plush chair at the New York Palace. Ms. Jong-Fast, the 25-year-old daughter of Fear of Flying author Erica Jong, had just exchanged vows with Matthew Greenfield, 39, an assistant professor of English at the College of Staten Island, and she did indeed look rather large and a little uncomfortable in her white lace strapless gown. But there was a good reason: The bride is expecting her first child-a boy who will be named either Max or Elijah-on Jan. 15, which may have had something to do with her vehement refusal to be lifted in a chair during the traditional horrah dance, and with her decision to go barefoot during the wedding ceremony. But she slipped on green Puma athletic shoes during the reception. "My foot is now a size 12," she said, pausing for effect. "These are all I can fit into! These, and Ferragamo's. Uck!" Ms. Jong-Fast put her finger in her mouth and mimed gagging.

The wedding, which was planned by Claudia Hanlin of the Wedding Library, featured D.J.s playing klezmer music, black and white M&M's (Matt and Molly, get it?) at each table and a Ron Ben-Israel–designed wedding cake created in the shape of a stack of great books, including As You Like It and The Odyssey. Another unintentional part of the cake's appearance were a number of tiny indentations that resulted from numerous wedding guests poking their fingers into the eight-tiered wonder to determine whether it was really made of just frosting and cake (it was).

Ms. Jong-Fast, a freelance writer whose novel Normal Girl (Villard, 2000) is currently being adapted for film by Bret Easton Ellis, is the only child of Ms. Jong. Her father, divorced from Ms. Jong since 1983, is science-fiction novelist Jonathan Fast and the son of the late, renowned author Howard Fast, writer of Spartacus. As might be expected, a bevy of writer types were among the wedding's 330 guests, including Naomi Wolf, Daphne Merkin, Anne Roiphe and Joan Collins, who looked like her taut author photo come to life. Singer Judy Collins, a family friend, wore what appeared to be pink silk Chinese pajamas and serenaded the couple during the ceremony.

Talking to The Transom via cell phone two days after the event, Ms. Jong-Fast discussed the evening. She and Mr. Greenfield had taken an early honeymoon-with their parents-over the summer, and she was spending her first weekday as a wife doing grand-jury duty downtown.

"Someone asked Joan Collins if she was Judy Collins' sister!" she said. "She didn't think that was funny."

She then mentioned another wedding guest, doe-eyed actress Sophie Dahl. Ms. Dahl and Ms. Jong-Fast attended Trevor Day School together-the same Upper West Side school whose principal was arrested last week after being charged with pedophilia.

"I was just so shocked," Ms. Jong-Fast said, "by how bad he looked in his mug shot! I mean, in comparison, Lizzie Grubman looked gorgeous!"

Ms. Jong-Fast is currently at work on a memoir called Sex Doctors in the Basement, which is more or less about growing up as the daughter of the woman who invented the term "zipless fuck." If Ma Jong had had her way, her strawberry-blond daughter would have done the vow-exchanging between contractions.

"She thought it was so adorable that I got pregnant-she was two and a half months pregnant when she married my dad," Ms. Jong-Fast said. "But she wanted me to be even more pregnant at the time of the wedding. She thought it would've been even cuter."

-A.J.G.

Pretty in Pink Onesies

Molly Ringwald, the Titian-tressed 35-year-old actress best known for being a Titian-tressed 16-year-old actress, is now a mom. On Oct. 22, Ms. Ringwald gave birth to a girl, according to her agent, who reports that both mother and baby are healthy and resting at home. Although the baby's hair color was not disclosed, her name is Mathilda Ereni Ringwald Gianopoulos, which is about one syllable for every year since Mama Ringwald has had a hit film. Last year she starred with Christopher Lloyd in The Big Time, a TNT made-for-TV movie, and in Broadway's Cabaret.

The baby's father is Panagiotis (Panio) Gianopoulos, a swarthy, handsome editor at Bloomsbury U.S.A., where he edits J.T. LeRoy, among others. Mr. Gianopoulos is also an aspiring novelist and has written both fiction and nonfiction about sex for Nerve.com. Earlier this year, his nonfiction work earned him a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. In the late 90's, he was an editorial assistant at Talk. "He was extremely outgoing and smart, very outgoing and popular," said his former boss there, Jonathan Burnham, now president of Talk Miramax Books.

The star of many of the 1980's iconic John Hughes films, including Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club, Ms. Ringwald spent most of the 90's living in France and was married from 1999 to 2002 to French novelist Valery Lameignere.

Ms. Ringwald and Mr. Gianopoulos declined to comment, but earlier this year Ms. Ringwald announced to the press that she and Mr. Gianopoulos have dated since 2001 and have no immediate plans to marry.

"I think I'll go the Susan Sarandon– Tim Robbins route," she said.

-A.J.G.

All-American Trannie

On Oct. 30, Montblanc North America's dapper chief executive, Jan-Patrick Schmitz, stood on the promenade of Rockefeller Center, at the unveiling of the public art exhibit commemorating the opening of the company's flagship store on Madison Avenue and 57th Street. "Montblanc pens have been used for decades to sign contracts, make laws, hire people, fire people," he said in his refined European accent, before popping the cork on a bottle of Krug champagne. "They're used by world-renowned writers, famous politicians …. "

At the opening that day, however, there were no heads of state extolling the virtues of Montblanc penmanship, no Richard Holbrookes or Norman Mailers signing autographs with snow-capped pens. Instead, crawling on all fours in front of the row of six larger-than-life shopping-bag displays was transsexual Amanda Lepore, the "muse" for David LaChapelle, one of the exhibit's artists.

Mr. LaChapelle's shopping bag, All American, was one of six 10-foot-tall, 882-pound bags that Montblanc had commissioned for its Rockefeller Center exhibit, The Art of Shopping in New York. On the front of the bag was Ms. Lepore's face, made to resemble Marilyn Monroe's in Andy Warhol's famous silkscreen. On the other side was an enormous cheeseburger crushing her, leaving only her flailing legs peeking out from underneath. "My dream was always to work for Andy Warhol," Mr. LaChapelle said, standing near the platform where his bag was displayed. "This bag is a tribute to him." Ms. Lepore, in a snug black mini-dress, climbed down from the side of the bag, where she'd been posing for photographers. "Amanda has always wanted to be Marilyn Monroe," Mr. LaChapelle continued. "She's the Marilyn Monroe of transsexuals. She never wanted to be a woman in the traditional sense."

As the artist stared admiringly at Ms. Lepore, she covered her exploding bosom with her black stole and tossed her platinum blond curls out of her face. "I was more into the idea of a woman, the drawing of a woman," Ms. Lepore said through lips as big as bananas. Then, in a voice even deeper than Mr. LaChapelle's, she added: "I'm the ultimate fantasy of a girl."

Ms. Lepore pranced past the isolated clump of Montblanc execs, who looked like they had just walked out of Sulka to the other side of the promenade. Mr. LaChapelle considered the picture of the cheeseburger flattening his companion. "It's actually anti-food," he said.

Anti-food? The Transom asked him.

"I'm a vegetarian, and the idea is that we spend so much time shopping and consuming that it's a never-ending cycle." Asked what the meaning was, he said: "It could mean different things for different people. You can have it your way." For example? "Well, if you like the idea of a giant hamburger crushing you, then it can be a good thing for you. But I don't want to define it. That's too literal."

-A.W.

Fudge Does Film!

The turtle-swallowing 5-year-old on whom author Judy Blume based her character Fudge Hatcher has grown up. Lawrence Blume, Ms. Blume's son, now in his late 30's, has gone from digging up worms to an even grittier enterprise: directing his first feature film, Martin and Orloff, a comedy about a marketing man recovering from a suicide attempt, whose shrink leads him into a series of misadventures.

The low-budget movie, which will premiere at the Sunshine Theater on Houston Street on Nov. 7, stars Upright Citizens Brigade members Matt Walsh and Ian Roberts, who co-wrote the script. And the two told The Transom that Mr. Blume's pedigree had something to do with his hiring. "Ian's a big fan of Judy Blume novels," said Mr. Walsh. "He has written The Annotated Fudge, Fudge Cliff's Notes," and "has those Web sites where you ask questions and Fudge provides the answer."

Well, not really, but then Mr. Roberts said something we did believe: "I've read all her adult-erotica books. They make great Sunday-afternoon reading."

Mr. Blume characterized his mother's influence a little differently. "She was very helpful for me, to see somebody who could be an artist on her own terms and succeed," he said. "You see a lot of artists' kids being artists-part of it is, you see that you can make a living out of it."

And though Martin and Orloff is his first directing gig, Mr. Blume is no stranger to the movie business. He first made a living editing films and writing scripts, and he directed the film adaptation of his mother's novel, Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great. He also co-owned Post Works, a post-production house. "I don't think I've accomplished anything particularly incredible," he said of his directing job on Martin and Orloff. "So I just treat it as blue-collar work." Blue-collar work that may soon involve co-producing (with Mariah Carey) a film adaptation of Wifey, his mother's novel about a bored suburban housewife in the late 60's who lets her freak flag fly.

And Mr. Blume did a little of that in Martin and Orloff. "I like being a little risky, a little bit politically incorrect," he said. "It's like the killing of little girls on a bridge." He was referring to a scene in which three Girl Scouts dressed in a spareribs costume may or may not fall off a bridge into a vat of barbecue sauce. "People think, 'You can't kill little girls!'" he said. "There's something kind of risk-taking in that scene."

Mr. Blume's expectations for Martin and Orloff are decidedly more modest. He said he hopes the movie will draw viewers by word of mouth and will ultimately expand to more theaters throughout the city. In the meantime, he said, "I'm just a single guy looking for a job."

-A.W.

The Transom Also Hears ….

That lobbyist Sid Davidoff placed a winning $2,100 bid on a 166-gram white Tuscan truffle at an international auction for the fragrant fungus on Nov. 1. The New York portion of the auction took place beneath distractingly hot klieg lights at Le Cirque, where those in attendance included author Jay McInerney, Martha Stewart, gourmand financier Roger Yassin, Joan Collins, Four Seasons co-owner Julian Niccolini, Gourmet publicist Karen Danick and Moët and Chandon's international on-trade manager, Charles de Pontevés. When restaurateur Drew Nieporent learned that Mr. Davidoff doesn't cook, he offered to have his chefs at Tribeca Grill cook up a dinner for eight using the truffle.

Mr. Davidoff's truffle ended up being a trifle, however, compared to the pungent load-weighing close to a pound-that brought $35,000 from a trio of Left Coast bidders: Michael McCarty of Michael's, Barbara Lazaroff of Spago and Piero Selvaggio of Valentino. According to a spokesman for the auction, the sum tied the world's record for the most expensive truffle purchase.

-F.D.

· Actor Steve Schirripa, who plays Bobby (Bacala) Baccalieri on HBO's The Sopranos, gave The Transom a brief lesson in how to spot a goomba on Oct. 30. Mr. Schirripa, who has just published A Goomba's Book of Love, the follow-up to his 2002 A Goomba's Guide to Life, joined Knicks Keith Van Horn and Antonio McDyess at Madison Square Garden for the Read to Achieve organization's Halloween party, and-out of the earshot of the 50 third-graders who also attended-he told us, "One thing you will never hear a goomba say: 'Two tickets to The Vagina Monologues, please.'"

-John Gallagher

Met: June 6, 2002

Engaged: Feb. 16, 2003

Projected Wedding Date: January 2004

Molly Jong-Fast, 24, the daughter of the woman who coined the term "zipless fuck" and a candidate for an M.F.A. in creative writing from Bennington College, is engaged to Matt Greenfield, 39, a professor of Shakespearean studies and 17th-century English literature at CUNY Staten Island. They met on the self-consciously bawdy Web site Nerve.com.

"My whole family were weird bohemians who all got married with, like, cigar bands-and I didn't want to be the first in my family to be totally J.A.P.-py and horrible," said Ms. Jong-Fast, draped over her fiancé's leg in her candle-lined East 60's one-bedroom. "Matt's strong and protecting, but in a feminist-pleasing way. It's cool for me to have this relationship where he can look at what I write and I can read what he writes. It's equal." However, the age difference is occasionally an issue. "Sometimes, I get all scared that he's going to die before me," she said. "But then I realized I could take his cryogenically frozen head all around Europe with me in a special hat box when I'm, like, 70."

She went on several dozen Nerve dates before happening on Mr. Greenfield's profile-routedthrough Salon.com-which contained a description of an M.L.A. essay he was workingonabout "wound narratives" in the works of Christopher Marlowe. "Like, 'Ow, my aorta is dissecting!'" said Ms. Jong-Fast, whose own profile was rife with spelling mistakes (she's dyslexic).

On date No. 1, the dark-haired, soft-featured Mr. Greenfield showed up in Ms. Jong-Fast's lobby with a lily. "He was really sweaty," she said. "But I thought, 'This is the man I'm going to marry! I hope he's nice!'"

They lunched at an Italian café and meandered through the dregs of the Puerto Rican Day Parade. "He was so smart, I was afraid to talk," said Ms. Jong-Fast, who's tall with a strawberry-blond mane and a smile that resembles a frown. "I was really intimidated." Mr. Greenfield found her warm, effusive … open. "There was a kind of emotional nakedness with her that was the opposite of what I'd been experiencing in New York," he said. Indeed, Ms. Jong-Fast is the author of Normal Girl , a semi-autobiographical novel published two years ago (the film version, written by Bret Easton Ellis, begins shooting soon), and the forthcoming memoir Sex Doctors in the Basement . Mr. Greenfield cracked Normal Girl after their first date and likens her work to that of Tom Wolfe. (He'd read Fear of Flying , her Second Wave feminist mother Erica Jong's chef d'oeuvre , when he was a teenager at Andover. He's also a longtime fan of the science-fiction novels written by her father, Jonathan Fast, and her grandfather Howard Fast, the once-blacklisted author of Spartacus .) "Molly's just so much more alive than most people," he said. "'Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety'-that's Antony and Cleopatra ."

The subject of marriage came up even before they went to bed together. "If you're in my position, you can't rebel with casual sex," Ms. Jong-Fast said. "You sort of have to go the other way."

Mr. Greenfield knelt down in front of the Asia Society on Park Avenue on a snowy, snowy night-"It's, like, us and 100 doormen," Ms. Jong-Fast said-and is currently sizing his great-grandmother's platinum ring, which has a round diamond. "We were like, 'No diamonds! Little children on the Ivory Coast lose their hands for diamonds!'" Ms. Jong-Fast said. "But then all of a sudden, Grandma Rose's ring came into the picture, and we were like, 'What little children?'"

The wedding will be a literati-sprinkled event at a yet-to-be-determined location in Manhattan. The bride hopes that the teenage designer Jessie Della Femina, a family friend, will design a gown-possibly in shearling.

She is also happily engaged in that nouveau-feminist task: registering for gifts. "I really want the china called Woodland Stream that has pheasants on it and is really WASP-y and funny," Ms. Jong-Fast said poutingly, "but Matt says you can't register for ironic china patterns."

"The pleasure of irony is short," Mr. Greenfield said. "The pleasure of china is long."

Monique Brown and Jaime McKenzie

Met: July 4, 1997

Engaged: Dec. 22, 2002

Projected Wedding Date: July 5, 2003

Monique Brown was an editor at Black Enterprise magazine when Jaime McKenzie, an analyst at Lehman Brothers, took her to that masterpiece of progressive African-American thought: Chris Rock's Pootie Tang. "I thought that taking a senior Black Enterprise executive to see such a ghetto movie was a hilarious thing to do!" Mr. McKenzie said.

Ms. Brown is now editor in chief at The Network Journal , a business publication for black professionals, and author of It's a Sistah Thing: A Guide to Understanding and Dealing with Fibroids for Black Women . She spent much of her 20's suffering from these benign but debilitating chronic uterine tumors. "I could barely walk, because they were so large and heavy and caused such a pain in my abdomen," she said. She eventually submitted to two major surgeries that left a constellation of scars on her midriff ("I think imperfections are sexy!" said Mr. McKenzie, who likes to caress them) and her ability to have children an open question. "If we have to, we'll adopt," Ms. Brown said. "He wants five-he has 11 siblings-but I keep telling him he's marrying an old woman!" (They're both 33.)

It was love at third sight. They met briefly through a mutual friend at a music festival in New Orleans and he took a picture of her, but it got shoved in a box back home in New York. Their second encounter was at a real-estate seminar at the Hilton in midtown, but neither could place the other. Then one day the stocky, goateed Mr. McKenzie was switching planes in Atlanta, heading home from yet another New Orleans music festival. "Suddenly I hear someone behind me yelling, 'Excuse me! Excuse me!'" he said. "So I was trying to get out of the way, and then she was behind me all out of breath saying, 'Don't I know you?'"

And so he came to call her his "Sexy Mama," while she dubbed him "Pumpkin Pie," after his favorite dessert. Last spring, they set up what they call a "W account" (for "wedding"), and then after several months he formally proposed on one knee in her living room-but without a ring.

Three weeks later, Ms. Brown-tall and sleek with a bright smile-was onstage at the eighth-anniversary event for Professional Women of Color, an organization she founded and heads, when Mr. McKenzie suddenly bounded up and presented her with a diamond, just under two carats, in a platinum band embedded with six channel-set stones. The 200 attendees erupted in cheers. Among them was Nicole Brown, a D.J. at KISS FM, who spent the next morning on air dedicating love songs to the couple, who plan to live in Brooklyn.

Their wedding reception will be at Antun's, the fabled Queens catering hall. Ms. Brown will wear a Demetrios gown with a dramatic fishtail bottom. "She's very straightforward and aggressive," Mr. McKenzie said. "She's never content; she's always looking for the next possible avenue to uplift people. She sets a standard for integrity and dedication for black women."

He added that his fiancée would like to be a contestant on Fear Factor.

Jim Schoenbeck and Dana Wood

Met: Feb. 17, 2002

Engaged: Dec. 31, 2002

Projected Wedding Date: Apr. 5, 2003

Dana Wood, 40, is an assistant vice president of strategic development for L'Oreal's "luxury products" (a.k.a. the ones we can't afford-Armani, Kiehl's, etc.) and rarely ventures outdoors without a generous slathering of moisturizer, self-tanner and foundation. But despite the careful grooming, this pretty, diminutive blonde was having trouble finding a mate. So she squirted a puff of powerful pheremones onto Match.com, writing that she liked golf. "I do!" she said. "I love the little outfits!"

Her third online suitor was Jim Schoenbeck, a former Air Force captain and vice president at Merrill Lynch who had just ended a five-year marriage to a designer for Calvin Klein. "My first wife just decided I wasn't right for her, and that was a difficult thing for me," said Mr. Schoenbeck, a dark-haired, blue-eyed 43. "So I think I was pretty cynical about marriage in general."

The brooding veteran waited for Ms. Wood at Village, a townhouse restaurant in … the Village. "When I walked in, I thought he was so cute that I was flushing," she said. "My cheeks turned pink-a smoky rose." But the glow faded quickly. "He was a little dodgy in the first encounter," she said. "He said a few sarcastic things that hurt my feelings. Like when I described what I did for a living, he said, ' You're involved in mergers and acquisitions?'"

"She just didn't strike me as that sort of person," Mr. Schoenbeck said. "I mean, she didn't have a Wall Street profile-she was a beauty editor [at W ] for eight years!"

"And then he said, 'You don't really play golf, do you?'" Ms. Wood said.

But on their second date, they went to a driving range in Westchester, and by the end of the day-well, she might as well have been Cameron Diaz in There's Something About Mary . Last fall, he indulged her obsession with large cats by taking her to Las Vegas to see Siegfried and Roy. "That's when I knew Jim was my extremely special guy," Ms. Wood said.

This feeling was confirmed on New Year's Eve, when he scored a table at Bouley and then had the waiters bring out a caramel mousse tart with "Will you marry me?" written in chocolate on the plate. "I was hyperventilating," said Ms. Wood, who will soon move into Mr. Schoenbeck's Battery Park two-bedroom with her 20-pound Maine coon, Flynn. "I had an out-of-body experience." And this was even before she saw the ring-a 2.5-carat round solitaire diamond in a chunky, "industrial" platinum setting.

The wedding will be at 91, an event space in the West Village near the site of their inauspicious first date, with a shabby-chic Renaissance theme: think draped brocade, muted colors, distressed woods. The makeup will be L'Oreal, naturellement , and the bride won't be the only one glowing-Mr. Schoenbeck is now a devotee of Acqua di Gio pour Homme and Kiehl's Crème de Corps. "His skin is just so soft," Ms. Wood cooed. All we can say is that this guy must be really confident in his masculinity-Siegfried and Roy? Kiehl's?

"I think he has lousy manners," said Holly Solomon, the 65-year-old art dealer who, decades ago, was one of the first to open a gallery in SoHo. "He's just one of the kids who's hustling, like every other kid who's hustling. He behaved very badly with my staff. Quite badly. He was rude, crude, demanding. He's a cheap little bully. And what the hell is this show? What the hell is this thing? And then he uses a lot of names that don't even know him? I went to see Julian Schnabel, and he said, 'Who the hell is he?' I mean, no one ever heard of this guy before."

Ms. Solomon sighed. The art world, she reflected, isn't what it used to be. "You know, he doesn't come from a good family," she whispered.

Meaning …?

"He's a nobody."

Mike Weiss might be a nobody, but he's not going to let that stop him. Just a few months ago, he was working as a waiter and making his own works of art. Now he has quit waiting tables, quit trying to be an artist himself, and, at 29, he has decided to make the leap. He's becoming a curator simply by acting like one. He's got a new company, partners, 2,800 square feet of raw SoHo office space and all kinds of notions about the Internet and the mingling of the generations and the need to discard the old ways of promoting and selling art.

So he has put together this exhibition, called A Room With a View . ("I like clichés," he said.) It is scheduled to include 120 new works by 120 artists, among them some of the big names–Julian Schnabel, Ross Bleckner, Donald Baechler, Kenny Scharf, George Condo, Amy Sillman–as well as dozens of young artists who have yet to break out.

Following Mr. Weiss' instructions, all the artists participating in the show have produced works measuring 11 inches by 11 inches. Miniature works of art may be esthetically pleasing, but if you were, say, an up-and-coming curator who wants to make a lot of connections, you might especially prize them because they give you a way to cram dozens of artists into a tiny room. The show's exhibition space, if you can call it that, is a 200-square-foot section of a friend's apartment on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Prince Street. If everything goes according to plan, it will be up and running May 9.

On a recent morning, Mr. Weiss was walking down Broadway in SoHo, dressed in a shiny gray Dolce & Gabbana suit, cream-colored shirt and Prada shoes, with no tie. He was out picking up the last of the little paintings. It was 10 days before the opening and he had 110 of the 120. He was comparing himself to boxing impresario Don King. "I'm the Don King of the art world. I can't get enough of Don King. People look at him and they say, 'What the hell can this guy do?' They see his hair, he's not 6 feet tall, good-looking, blue-eyed. They underestimate him, and they underestimate me."

Mr. Weiss isn't 6 feet tall, either. More like 5 feet 6. Raised in Roslyn, L.I., son of a women's undergarment merchant and "a Jewish housewife who carries around a Shih Tzu," he left Long Island for the Rhode Island School of Design. He hated it. With his Billy Joel tapes and his red Lincoln Mercury XR4TI, he didn't fit in with the glamorous misfits who made up the student body. He dropped out after a year and a half, returned to Long Island, attended Long Island University, then moved to the big city and got a master's at the School of Visual Arts (title of his thesis: "I Want to Be Different Like Everyone Else"). As an artist, his big thing was manufacturing letters–light boxes about 18 inches tall–and using them to spell out his name. He also made awnings that said "Mike Weiss." He did all right, considering. He got his name out there. He made connections.

"I had a studio appointment once with Mary Boone, " he said, referring to the gallery owner. "She was six hours late. I didn't have a phone. I understand, of course, she's very busy. But I had to stay there all day, without a phone, waiting. Basically, I want to get to the position where I don't have to treat artists the way I was treated in the past."

To get to where he is now, Mr. Weiss had to make, as one artist's representative put it, "a pest of himself." He has had to badger the establishment. He sent begging faxes to Julian Schnabel, who finally caved, with one condition: that his piece be the highest-priced in the show.

"He said, 'What's the most expensive piece in the show?' I said, '$10,000, Ross Bleckner.' He said, 'Mine's $14,000.'"

They haggled over the consignment fee. Mr. Weiss has been insisting on a 50-50 split with everyone in the show. But Mr. Schnabel wanted $10,000 out of the $14,000. Mr. Weiss said, Fine, take all $14,000.

"I wanted him to know that in the end it's not about money, it's about the show," he said. "Anyway, when I sell the piece, he'll probably just give me the $4,000." (Mr. Schnabel didn't return a call for comment.)

'I Was Extremely Insulted'

Mr. Weiss wanted to get off the street to explain his side of the Holly Solomon story. Stepping into the SoHo Dean & Deluca, he described the time he went into the grande dame 's gallery with his girlfriend, Molly Jong-Fast, the 20-year-old daughter of Erica Jong. Apparently, Ms. Solomon implied that Mr. Weiss might not be in Ms. Jong-Fast's social league: "We walked in, and Molly introduces me to Holly, and Holly says to me, 'Aren't you glad you're with Molly Jong-Fast?' I'm, like, the curator who's putting her artist into one of the biggest shows in New York, and she says, aren't you glad to be with Molly Jong-Fast?… I was extremely insulted. It was embarrassing to me."

Later, through his girlfriend, Mr. Weiss heard that Ms. Solomon was wondering aloud whether his family background was up to snuff. "Like coming from a good family means anything in the art world!" Mr. Weiss said. "Like it shows that I could do something. It's ridiculous, this snobbery in the art world."

But he had to cool down. It was time to go to Ms. Solomon's Houston Street gallery to pick up a painting for the Room With a View show. He left Dean & Deluca, whipped out his cell phone and dialed Ms. Jong-Fast. "Hey, gorgeous," he said. He asked her if she remembered the names of the people who worked for Ms. Solomon–but she couldn't help him out.

He trekked over to Houston Street, went inside the gallery. Ms. Solomon herself was not there. The guy minding the store–whose name Mr. Weiss ultimately had to cop to not remembering–said she had been hit by a bicycle messenger and had spent the previous night in the emergency room.

"Maybe I should send her some flowers," Mr. Weiss said, as the man packed an 11-by-11-inch painting in bubble wrap.

Outside, Mr. Weiss slipped the picture in his Patagonia messenger bag, and pulled out a sheet of paper with his schedule on it. Every morning, Kent Helms, his partner in their new company, Mahk Ltd., prints up an itinerary, then presents it to Mr. Weiss over breakfast at the New Era Cafe. Mr. Helms, it seems, is the muscle behind Mr. Weiss' big talk. While Mr. Helms–who works as a consultant to the National Tobacco Company–puts together a business plan and raises capital, the tenacious Mr. Weiss charges all over town.

At the heart of the day's schedule was lunch at Aqua Grill on Spring Street with Ms. Jong-Fast, who had driven down from her parents' country home in Connecticut, where she's putting the finishing touches on a novel, titled Girl , to be published by Villard Books. He arrived at the restaurant first and went to a table. Fifteen minutes later, Ms. Jong-Fast made her entrance. She had red hair and pale eyebrows, and she wore black.

They ordered–soft-shell crab sandwich for him, lobster for her. Over the meal, he told his war stories–haggling with Julian Schnabel, talking tough to Cecily Brown. Twice, Ms. Jong-Fast kicked him under the table, trying to keep him from saying something imprudent.

"Everyone thinks I'm burning bridges," he said. "No one's burning bridges … I just want people to know that I'm there."

The Ralph Kramden Idea

Fulton Street, 2 P.M. He approached the studio of Jacqueline Humphries, an abstract painter with a serious reputation who, for whatever reason, had agreed to do an 11-by-11 painting for Mr. Weiss. Ms. Humphries answered the door to her spacious loft in torn, paint-splattered black jeans and a white thermal top. The radio was on. Mr. Weiss went in and gave her work the once-over. "Is anything in here finished?" he asked. She didn't really give him an answer. She just watched him look at her work. She seemed partly bemused, partly annoyed. Mr. Weiss then explained to her that he was putting together another exhibition, called Road Show , based on the idea of the road. He wanted Ms. Humphries to be part of it. He thought her paintings were suggestive of cars rushing by on the highway. He added that he had secured the cover for a future issue of NYArts magazine. He wanted her to be part of that, too. "I had this idea to dress up in a 50's bus driver's uniform, like Ralph Kramden, with the hat and everything … I'll be driving the bus–not a real bus, obviously, a virtual bus–and the artists in the show will be in rows of four riding behind me on benches."

Ms. Humphries narrowed her eyes. "Did you go to art school?" she said wearily. "You sound like you went to art school."

He launched into a spiel about what a privilege it is for the younger artists–he corrected himself and said "less established" artists–to be in a show with established painters such as herself. Ms. Humphries looked at him with glassy eyes. "I don't know exactly what you're proposing," she said finally.

In the cab on the way to his next appointment, Mr. Weiss went over his performance with Ms. Humphries: "She doesn't know who I am. I mean, I just walked right in and offered her a spot in a show. It's like Don King. Nobody knows what the fuck he says when he talks. But it works."

Over to Broome Street, to the loft of George Condo, a 1980's fixture and Allen Ginsberg pal who's the subject of a documentary called Condo Painting , set to show at the next Cannes Film Festival. Mr. Condo greeted Mr. Weiss at the door with an impish grin, exposing red-wine-stained teeth. An open bottle and half-filled glass was on the table. The artist led the budding impresario into his vast work space and pointed to a little painting on the floor.

Mr. Weiss took a look and laughed immediately, then turned to embrace Mr. Condo. The painting was indeed a funny piece of work–a toothy, cartoonish face, with a red clown's nose. It wasn't dry yet, so Mr. Condo cast about for a box to put it in, while Mr. Weiss launched into his rap about the Road Show and the Ralph Kramden idea. Mr. Condo nodded and smiled.

Afterward, on quiet Broome Street, Mr. Weiss was charged. "George Condo just stepped up!" he said.

It was time to stop by his own apartment to drop off the art. His place was a tiny studio on Sullivan Street, with a mattress on the floor. Small drawings and paintings occupied the walls–"thank-you things," he called them.

Mr. Weiss went over to the answering machine and pressed play. "Hi, it's Cecily," a voice said. It was Cecily Brown, a hotshot British painter now represented by Larry Gagosian. She explained that she would not be able to deliver a painting for the show. "I hope I didn't screw anything up," she said. "I'm sure I didn't, because you have another 300 people, anyway."

"That's so insulting!" Mr. Weiss said.

The message was many days old, but it still bugged him. He listened to it one more time, then declared that in his art show, in place of the painting Ms. Brown had promised, he would hang the answering machine on the wall above her name and encourage people to listen to the big-time artist making her flimsy excuse.

"She let me down," Mr. Weiss said. "What she's doing is not only making me lose credibility, but it'll look bad for her …"

Epilogue

A few days later, there was another message on his answering machine–this one from Will Cotton, a friend of Ms. Brown's who also has a piece in the show. Ms. Brown would get a painting to him after all, in time for the opening on May 9. "But he told me not to leave her any more messages," said Mr. Weiss.