Mr. Silverberg was sitting by the pool yesterday afternoon at Hollywood’s legendary Chateau Marmont, preparing for the first night of this year’s Book Expo America, when his partner, the author and former New York Times columnist Bob Morris, cautiously got his attention.

“You will never believe who’s here,” Mr. Morris said.

Mr. Silverberg needed little prompting. Ms. Albert was with a couple of guys, he said later—sleazy-looking, kinda agenty, unclear what the lot of them were talking about. Maybe she was in town shopping a book.

Mr. Silverberg’s friends—Weinstein Books publisher Judy Hottensen and Fresh Air producer Amy Salit—couldn’t believe it when he told them the story last night over drinks in the Marmont garden. “Fraud does not age well,” Mr. Silverberg told them, noting that if he had said anything to Ms. Albert, it would have been something like that.

But Mr. Silverberg did not approach Ms. Albert for a chat. And he wasn’t going to, until shortly after midnight, he received a phone call from Ms. Salit, who had retired minutes earlier to her hotel.

“Laura Albert is here,” Mr. Silverberg told the table after hanging up. “She’s in the lobby.”

This time Mr. Silverberg got excited at the prospect of confrontation. For a second he thought about inviting her to join the table for a drink. But after a bit of giggly, intense chatter—what is she doing at BEA? Is she looking for a book deal?—he paid the bill and coolly led his party inside. “I wish I had my sunglasses,” he said, putting on his normal glasses as though they might do just as well. “I want to see Miss Thing,” he said.

But alas, it was clear as soon as Mr. Silverberg walked into the lobby that Ms. Albert had already disappeared. He looked around a few times and finally decided to call it a night. “She’s not here,” he said.

And with that, he and Mr. Morris went to their room. Big day tomorrow, was the feeling—for the best, perhaps, that this thing had not come to pass.

“It’s the time to do something right here and right now,” said the artist Robert Wilson. He was outside the Guggenheim sharing a cigarette with his friend, Winona Ryder, and talking about cracking the art scene wide open, again.

“His name should become an adjective, you know, like: That’s really Wilson,” said Ms. Ryder. Everyone was at the museum last week to help celebrate Robert Wilson’s 65th birthday, as well as the premiere of the documentary Absolute Wilson, about his life. “You know how people say, ‘That’s really Scorsese-esque’? They should say, ‘That’s Wilson-esque!’”

“He shoots bullet holes of honesty and truth, and that’s rare nowadays,” said Ms. Ryder. Mr. Wilson became famous in the 1970’s as an avant-garde artist in the theater and opera world. His productions are renowned for bringing a new definition of space and time to the stage, as exemplified by the seven-day play he put on in Iran. Ms. Ryder added: “There’s a lot of phonies out there.”

Like JT Leroy? Ms. Ryder had been friends with the fictional author, later revealed to be Laura Albert.

“You know, I knew her per se; I knew what was going on for a long time. But it’s hard in those situations, when someone’s playing a joke and you know what’s going on,” she said. Ms. Ryder was looking very Edward Scissorhands, pale and in a black dress. “It was more amusing to me. But that whole thing was very superficial. I never understood why they wanted to do it that way. It seemed like exhausting, if anything, but that was their way to get more of an audience. In hindsight, I feel bad for the people who felt duped by them. So much is made of like the James Frey thing—it’s sad what you have to do to get book sales.”

Ms. Ryder said that there is still an audience for real avant-garde art in today’s “oppressive” world: “It’s just gotta be good.”

Rufus Wainwright, clad in a snakeskin coat and bandana around his neck, is right there with her. “Sometimes I think that the most open periods in society are the worst, because then there’s a lot of mediocrity,” said the singer. “Whereas now, this kind of treachery that surrounds us—it gives me a challenge, and it makes you have to be that much more brilliant to really make an impact.”

He looked up with a twinkle in his eye. “So I kind of look at low periods as a tremendous opportunity to really smash the ceiling,” he said with a big smile.

Mr. Wilson’s old collaborator, Philip Glass, was on his way out. “There’s maybe less money and less opportunity, but the energy of artists is unstoppable, and it’s still there,” he promised.

—Spencer Morgan

A Doorman Defects?

Gilbert Stafford, the paterfamilias of New York doormen, is contemplating a move. His current roost is Crobar, the cavernous 28th Street nightclub that was a leading light in West Chelsea’s nocturnal rejuvenation. But he’s thinking about Room Service, a club on 21st, between Park and Broadway—that club had its official opening last Thursday.

“Everybody will be wearing the right clothes, the right outfit, the right look,” he said at the Room Service opening. “This is one of those, uh, what do they call it? A star turn.” He swung his tall frame around the dance floor and flung a backward glance over one shoulder.

Manning a portal to clubland, Mr. Stafford has on countless occasions thought, heard or said, “Get a room!” If he winds up at Room Service, he can save his breath. The place has semi-private rooms (which are actually curtained-off cubicles), rentable at varying sums a night, which come stocked with “necessities.”

“I hear they serve food here,” he said. “I hope the food is not an afterthought.” Why? Because people are more pliant sober? “Darling, I’d be out of business if people stayed sober. I don’t give a damn if they stay sober. I might be working here, so at least I want the food to be good, so I’m not embarrassed to invite my friends!”

—Nicholas Boston

Wintour, a Vision

All the ladies put on their best faces and gowns for the Fashion Group International’s 23rd annual Night of Stars party honoring “Visionaries.” But when we asked them to name their personal “visionary,” the gals got all sentimental on us.

“My daughter,” said Anna Wintour, not missing a beat. “She’s beautiful in everything she does.”

The lovely Bee Shaffer was sitting beside her mother. She returned the compliment.

“Oh, of course, my mother is my visionary, because she’s been an amazing mom and has set a great example with her career.”

Actress-model Olivia Wilde is a momma’s girl, too. “Her name is Leslie Cockburn, and she’s an investigative journalist, and she’s very brave and very smart and very beautiful.

Also keeping things in the family was Law & Order: SVU star Mariska Hargitay. “My father is, without a doubt, my visionary. He told me I could be whatever I wanted to be; he encouraged me and supported me. He was a man of his word, and he taught me to be a woman of my word. And he taught me that there are no limits. He’s the reason I have every happiness and success that I have today.”

O.K., anyone else?

“You better not edit out my dad, ’cause I’m a cop. Don’t fuck with me,” said Ms. Hargitay, whose father Mickey was a famous bodybuilder. “But if I had to say someone else, I’d have to say Jesus. He’s the Man. He was a good guy.”

—S.M.

The Evening of Greed

The New York Young Republican Club hosted an 80’s-themed party last week. Leaders described it as an attempt to reinvigorate members, declaring that this is a time when it’s “frustrating” to be a Republican in New York.

The Capitalist Ball was held at downtown’s premiere bridge-and-tunnel hotspot, Culture Club, and offered an opportunity—according to the press release—to “harken back to one of the greatest eras in American culture, otherwise known as the ‘Reagan Years’ or the ‘Decade of Greed’ by those who just didn’t get it.”

By 10 p.m., a group of fewer than 20 people—mostly men in their 30’s—had gathered at the back of the club. Madonna and Duran Duran played to an empty dance floor. Hardly a dent had been made in the cheese platter.

“I would have liked to see 50 people here,” said the club’s executive vice president, Ron Lewenberg. Theirs is the oldest Young Republican club in the country, started in 1911, and boasts an estimated membership of 350. “I can’t say that I’m disappointed, in that I know there are two other events going on.”

Mr. Lewenberg added that Governor George Pataki and the Republican Party in New York State had failed to give young Republicans at the grassroots level a reason to go out and fight for them. “A lot of Republicans are in hiding right now,” he said. “We need to get them to come out of hiding.”

“People go out late on Thursdays,” said longtime member Mark Kronenberg, 38, a math tutor by trade. “Things might still pick up.”

“If we’re young and I were in my 20’s and I came to this party, I’d feel a little bit like, ‘What am I doing here?’” said Mary McNeal, a fortysomething paralegal. “But there’s a lot more people in this club than just these people. I’ve been to events at the Republican Club where they have like Dick Morris speaking, and there are some really hip young people at those events.”

She added, “You just missed a really cute girl, who was very thin with blond hair—she was in her 20’s, maybe.”

William M. Horowitz had a more upbeat take on the party. He was already handing out business cards announcing his candidacy for City Council in the 23rd District in 2009. He was 28 and wore a gray suit and a giddy smile. “I’m loving this—I think it’s great. We Republicans throw the best parties.”

But there’s hardly anyone here?

“Well, you know, it was one of those parties where you had to RSVP, and then if you didn’t RSVP in time, you know there’s only so much you can do.” The Transom hadn’t RSVP’d.

The compact Mr. Horowitz continued, “You know, with the arrogance of the liberal media, they make you think: ‘Oh well, it’s a bad year for Republicans; Republicans are not going to win. You might as well stay home.’ That’s not true.”

Two women seated on a couch brought up the party’s female-under-30 contingent.

Lynn Yan, 25, an investment banker, said that she’d only been to two meetings. She wasn’t surprised that the party was a dud. “Oh my God, New York is so Democratic. And the national mood right now kind of puts a damper on things.”

Ms. Yan’s friend, Loraine Cormican, 28, a writer-comedian, agreed. “Nobody’s here and people are dying in Iraq, so it kind of puts a somber mood on things.”

—S.M.

The Transom Also Hears ….

At Allison Sarofim’s Halloween bacchanal on Saturday night, where guests were treated to dancing dwarfs and shirtless bartenders, a particularly ghoulish partygoer—who toils in the publishing industry—had a spooky story to share.

“So here’s a little item for you: My friend David Kuhn, who’s standing over there, has been trying to sell Laura Albert’s memoirs to every major publishing house in town, and nobody’s interested. It’s like this weird thing in the media world—people just aren’t interested in the JT LeRoy and the James Frey stories. Literally, nobody wants to touch it,” said the source.

Meanwhile, across the world …. It appeared that newly single Leonardo DiCaprio rallied up his posse for another ride along Sunset Strip on Monday night. The boys, including Mr. DiCaprio and his old (and equally single) pals, actor Lucas Haas and Entourage star Kevin Connolly, trotted into Hyde around midnight. “They came in the back entrance and tried to play it cool, but they were definitely on the prowl,” said the source, who noted that years back, the threesome used to be among L.A.’s most formidable swordsmen. “Leo was checking out every girl who walked by. Kevin was talking to a whole group of girls; he definitely didn’t seem to be mourning his break-up with Nicky. They were all laughing, having a great time. Looks like the spur posse is back!”

—S.M.

“He said, ‘Why don’t you want to work for Essence?’” Ms. Rhone recalled. Essence is not a sibling Gruner + Jahr publication, but was an independently owned production of Essence Communications Partners. It caters to a largely African-American audience and has nothing to do with fitness.

“I didn’t say anything, because I was so taken aback,” Ms. Rhone said. “But then he followed with ‘How about O magazine?’—which I thought was even more interesting, because that’s obviously not a black publication; it just so happens that Oprah is. So I was really kind of confused by the whole thing.”

A spokesperson at Fitness, which is now published by Meredith Corporation, declined to comment and referred calls to a spokesperson for Gruner + Jahr. That spokesperson also declined to comment.

After getting turned down by Fitness and a second magazine, Ms. Rhone eventually landed a job in the comparatively welcoming environment of a major New York–area newspaper. In 2005, after taking a second crack at the magazine industry, she decided to head south for a job at a large Southern newspaper. “It’s a very difficult environment to penetrate,” she said of the magazine scene.

At Condé Nast, the premier magazine empire, the fleet of 29 top editors includes just one person of color.

“The magazine industry is probably the least diverse of any of the media. They’ve taken a real pass,” said Pamela Newkirk, a professor at New York University’s Department of Journalism and author of Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media. “As I say that, I can just hear all the people trying to shake the trees to tell you they have all this diversity—and then start mentioning people in the mailroom. But no, I’ve been in too many of these places, and I know firsthand that they are just not diverse.”

IT IS DIFFICULT TO QUANTIFY JUST HOW NOT-DIVERSE the glossy world is. The Magazine Publishers Association doesn’t track its members’ racial or ethnic makeup, and magazine editors are reluctant to discuss the composition of their staffs.

But The Observer conducted a survey of some leading New York magazines, with the help of magazine staff members who agreed to review their mastheads and provide diversity breakdowns.

The results, magazine by magazine, looked like the far end of assorted paint-color chips: ivory, bone, mist.

The New York Observer is not a magazine, but for fairness’ sake: This newspaper is a very delicate shade of salmon. Out of 40 editors, writers and contributors, there are two people of color.

The magazine survey didn’t include the publishing side of mastheads, but focused exclusively on editorial departments. Masthead structures vary from magazine to magazine, which makes direct comparisons difficult. And mastheads offer only one kind of editorial snapshot—they exclude freelancers, for example.

Still, the results of the survey revealed a world that looks little like the streets of New York, where nearly 65 percent of the population identified itself as nonwhite in the 2000 census.

Of the 203 staffers and contributors listed on the Vanity Fair masthead, six—or less than 3 percent—are people of color.

At Condé Nast Traveler, the swank travel monthly, 11 of the 85 staffers and contributors listed on the masthead are people of color. Of those 11 staffers, three hold editing positions and two are contributing editors, while six hold lower-masthead positions as researchers and assistant editors.

The New Yorker doesn’t publish a masthead, but based on conversations with sources and available published information, the magazine has a pool of some 130 editors, critics, copy editors, fact checkers, editorial assistants and outside contributors—of whom 11 are people of color.

At Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone, four members of the magazine’s 73-person editorial staff are people of color. Six members of New York magazine’s 90-person team of editors, writers, contributors and editorial assistants are not white. (Between 15 and 17 percent of the overall magazine staff are people of color, according to New York spokeswoman Serena Torrey. “We hope we will continue to grow,” she said.) At Forbes, an estimated seven people out of a pool of 116 editors, writers, reporters, editorial assistants, copy editors and bureau correspondents are people of color.

And the non-glossy Nation lists eight people of color among its 99 writers, editors, editorial-board members and Nation Institute fellows.

The Nation’s publisher and editor, Katrina vanden Heuvel, acknowledged that the veteran weekly “need[s] to do a better job in this area.” But, she said, masthead statistics were only part of the magazine’s diversity story.

“We are always out looking for more diversity in terms of our writers, in terms of our editors,” she said, citing efforts to recruit more minority freelance journalists as well as a recently created Nation Institute fellowship for writers of color and a new conversation series between mystery writer Walter Mosely and other minority writers and activists.

Editors for the other magazines declined to comment on staff diversity.

"WHEN WE GO TO SOMETHING LIKE THE ASME [American Society of Magazine Editors] awards at the Waldorf, we’re like, ‘Oh my goodness, this table is the only multicultural table in the whole place!’ said Vibe editor in chief Mimi Valdés. “We totally stand out. Everyone’s like, ‘That’s the Vibe table.’”

But like porn or infidelity or gays in the military, the whiteness of the magazine world is the kind of thing that everyone knows but no one talks about—at least not out loud, not at full volume, unless they happen to be soused or silly at their annual holiday party.

Several industry professionals traced this silence to the fact that magazines are, in the end, just magazines: waxy-paged collections of ads and articles that may provide everything from political analysis to eyebrow-waxing advice, but are hardly essential guardians of the public interest. Rightly or wrongly, they are generally not considered to be as “important” as newspapers.

Yet they make up an industry that generates some $18 billion in ad sales and reaches tens of millions of readers each year. As one African-American entertainment writer said, the people who brush off magazines “don’t really understand the importance of how they help shape public opinion. They don’t understand that for a number of [people] across the country, they’re looking to magazines for cues about everything from beauty to sexuality.”

And other people are looking to magazines for a place to hang a byline and get paid in the process.

Within the notoriously thrifty world of publishing, magazines offer some of the few opportunities for writers to earn a decent wage. While newspapers pay writers in pennies or dimes a word, magazines measure their rates in dollars. For writers of color who have trouble breaking into this world, there is essentially a cap on their earning power, a kind of “glossy ceiling” that doesn’t shatter easily.

Back in the 1990’s, XXL editor in chief Elliott Wilson was looking for a way to break into this world. He “couldn’t get in the door with the ‘white magazines,’” he said. His options were either to give up or start his own small zine; he did the latter and got lucky. “To me, it’s affected my whole path,” he said.

The actress Regina Hall, who has won something of a cult following for her role in the Scary Movie franchise, also contemplated a career in the scribbling trades back in the 1990’s. She attended New York University’s journalism school, but after finishing the 18-month program she came to the stark, if surreal, conclusion that her chances of making it as a black woman in journalism were slim enough that she might as well just shoot the moon—and try making it as a Hollywood actress instead.

“It’s not like journalism felt safe to me,” said the actress during a phone interview from the Vancouver set of Scary Movie IV in November. “It’s really hard for a black actress to make it—but then when I found out what it really entailed to make it in journalism as a black woman, it didn’t feel like one was safe and the other one was a big risk. It was a reality I took into consideration.”

There has been some growth, some small but significant shifts, in the eight or so years since Ms. Hall gave up on journalism. There is now a solid core of writers and editors of color who have managed to shatter the glossy ceiling, many to happy effect—though some also report hitting trouble on the inside. “It’s very ghettoized for black writers,” said Touré, the mono-monikered Rolling Stone contributing editor, who holds the distinction of being the only nonwhite staffer with that title at the magazine. “Everyone knows you can do hip-hop or R&B, but when you want to write about rock ‘n’ roll, people ask, ‘Can you really do that?’”

At the same time, some magazines and media empires have taken the radical step of not only encouraging diversity in theory but also, occasionally, in practice. Time Inc., for instance, has made a formal “business imperative” of diversifying its ranks in recent years, said corporate editor Isolde Motley. “We have a goal, which is to try to have the magazine staff reflect the make-up of the reader population. If you look at demographic curves, it’s the sensible thing to do,” she added, explaining that the company’s diversity initiative includes, among other strategies, hinging the editors’ bonuses on meeting hiring goals.

But perhaps the most significant development has been the rise of “niche” publications like XXL and Vibe, which offer some of the few reliable opportunities for talented writers of color—and which, some say, complicate the picture of an exclusive, bleachy-white industry. “I think, yes, if you view [diversity] just as a numbers game, magazines may be behind some other industries,” said Mark Whitaker, editor of Newsweek, president of the American Society of Magazine Editors, and the first African-American to head a major newsweekly. “But, on the other hand, there is a diversity of magazines …. So it’s just a different kind of diversity exists already.”

BUT WHAT ABOUT EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES that aren’t separated by ethnicity? Despite some heavy pestering, many of the people in a position to provide real answers—white editors who do the recruiting and hiring— declined to talk, including: Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner, Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter, The New Yorker’s David Remnick, GQ’s Jim Nelson, Maxim’s Ed Needham, Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham, Details’ Dan Peres, the corporate chieftains at Condé Nast and others.

Oh, that story, sniffed a publicist for one high-profile glossy when asked whether the editor in chief would comment on the magazine’s diversity policies. Hasn’t that story already been done, like, a ton of times?

“There is definitely no sense of shame about not having a diverse staff the way there was 10 years ago,” said an Asian-American editor at a popular glossy magazine.

One of the few white editors who agreed to speak on the record was Kurt Andersen, who created Spy magazine in the 1980’s and headed up New York in the mid-1990’s. When asked how he thought his magazines had done at diversity, he sighed and acknowledged, “We failed. We hired very few black people or Hispanic people during the two and a half years I was editor of New York magazine.”

Mr. Andersen’s tone was perplexed, and genuinely disappointed, as he said this, as if he still couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong. He called the industry’s persistent lack of diversity “appalling” and added: “We tried to do our best to recruit affirmatively and stuff. And it’s just for all the reasons I’m sure everybody will tell you who is in a position of hiring [people of color] as editors: It’s not easy to remedy, even when there’s the will.”

Mr. Andersen was echoing a common refrain among some editors. “The applicants of color who walk through our doors are not as numerous as we wish they were, and there are lots of magazines fighting to hire these qualified candidates,” said a spokesperson for one top editor.

But many writers of color balk at this explanation. Perhaps, they said, a number of would-be minority journalists do opt out of magazines, either because they don’t see many models of advancement or because they could earn a far more respectable—or simply livable—salary beginning in any other professional field. (The class/race coupling can’t be ignored, and the entry-level salaries of journalism have a way of whittling out everyone but the elite.) But qualified applicants can be found by those who look.

“I just don’t believe there’s a concerted effort being made,” said one African-American entertainment writer. “I could come up with 10 people right now off the top of my head who would give their right arm to write for GQ, Esquire, Vogue or New York magazine. But they can’t get in—they don’t know how to get in—so they just end up writing for these urban magazines.”

This was the essential issue for many of the people of color interviewed for this article, the stubborn root of the problem: The industry is deeply, almost primally exclusive, defined by a cozy clubbiness that is woefully hard to penetrate.

The New York publishing scene is an insular place, run, in many cases, on old tribal principles of friendship, family and college connections. It is hardly unique in this respect, but magazines’ tight margins, small staff and overall insidery competitiveness may make these tendencies more intense. People hire who they know—and perhaps people that mimic their advertisers’ preferred demographics.

“I think, in people’s minds, it’s not like, ‘Let’s not hire any black people.’ It’s just like, ‘I don’t really know any black people to hire, and I don’t really want to do the work to find out who they are,’” said Scott Poulson-Bryant, a founding editor of Vibe and author of the racy new book Hung: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America. “People aren’t really that active about finding new blood, so to speak.”

Betty Cortina, who spent years working at Time and Hearst publications before becoming the editorial director of Latina, simmered it down to a matter of editorial will.

“These are some of the most strategic and innovative companies in the world, and we can figure out how to do just about anything: how to create another magazine in a market that’s already completely fragmented, how to get magazines to newsstands across the globe, how to bring innovative, creative packages to advertisers who have already seen it all,” she said. “But we can’t figure this out? Come on.”

● ● ● ● ●

Sometimes, in the great dance of Condé Nast office space, moving up means moving down. This coming spring, boy-shopper Cargo is scheduled to leave its 15th-floor perch in the 4 Times Square mothership to take over a more spacious eighth-floor location vacated by its older sister, Lucky.

And Lucky has already moved to still-more-roomy digs on the sixth floor, to accommodate its own continued growth.

Both moves are part of a multi-stage real-estate shuffle following last year’s full absorption by Condé of its sibling Fairchild division. The change expanded Condé Nast’s official roster of titles far beyond what could fit in the status-symbol headquarters at 4 Times Square—and it made Fairchild’s building, at 750 Third Avenue, fully available as a Condé Nast annex.

So it was that in October the company announced that House & Garden and Golf Digest would be moving out of the main building and over to Third Avenue.

There are no current plans, said company spokeswoman Maurie Perl, for any former Fairchild magazines to make the reverse trip.

But with new space opened by the exile of those two titles, 2006 is shaping up as a nomadic year inside the Condé Nast building.

“It’s a moving chessboard,” Ms. Perl said. “This is a continuing work in progress and a fluid process.”

Cargo currently occupies the south side of the 15th floor, a floor it shares with the business staffs of Bon Appétit and Architectural Digest. According to a Cargo source, the staff has outgrown those quarters, and racks of clothes now clutter the hallways.

Only select Cargo staffers have private offices, with the rest in cubicles. Editor in chief Ariel Foxman has an office with a private bathroom, according to a source familiar with the magazine, but executive editor Lisa Arbetter and articles director Tim Moss have tiny offices, and Mr. Moss’ has no windows.

“It’s been tight for a long time,” Ms. Perl said of Cargo’s 15th-floor home. “ … Our intention is to give them the space that’s needed for everyone to do their best work.” Cargo’s business staff is expected to remain on 15.

In other directory revisions, the newborn Men’s Vogue, which is currently spread across several floors, is slated to move to a seventh-floor space once Golf Digest moves out of it. The upcoming, still-unnamed business magazine headed by Joanne Lipman is working out of the 18th floor, with its permanent space yet to be finalized.

And the company’s Internet wing, CondéNet, is preparing to move out of the 17th floor and into newly leased space at 1166 Sixth Avenue. There, plans call for it to occupy the 14th and 15th floors, as well as half of the 16th.

TPG Architecture, a New York–based architecture firm, is outfitting the new space for CondéNet. Previous TPG projects have included the Today show’s set, MSNBC’s studios and flagship stores for Hugo Boss and Donna Karan.

Because the move-in deadline is tight, according to a spokesperson for TPG, Condé Nast has agreed to retain the existing furniture at the site. But TPG is installing a new concrete-and-glass staircase to connect the floors, and new lighting and furniture will be installed in the reception area.

However, while Condé Nast employees have the Frank Gehry–designed cafeteria, staffers at CondéNet will have to make due with only a kitchen.

—Gabriel Sherman

On his desk, in a city that collects talismans of access, New York Times Washington reporter David E. Rosenbaum kept only one signed photograph: a framed picture of investigative-reporting legend I.F. Stone.

Rosenbaum, who died on Jan. 8 at age 63 from injuries suffered in an apparent mugging two days before, was remembered by colleagues as a reporter’s reporter, eschewing insidery chumminess in favor of the craft of sharing information with Times readers.

“He hated events like the White House Correspondents Dinner, or other things where the press hung out with politicians,” said former Times Washington editor Adam Clymer.

“He never tired of finding out stuff,” said Times reporter Robin Toner, whom Rosenbaum mentored and recently collaborated with covering President Bush’s efforts to overhaul Social Security. “He had a strong sense of the role of a newspaper reporter in a democracy.”

Rosenbaum had taken a buyout and officially retired in December, after 37 years with The Times. But he remained on contract with the paper. The day he was attacked, he had come into the bureau to do research to update the paper’s advance obituary of Gerald Ford.

Rosenbaum spent nearly his entire Times career as a reporter, save for a brief stint in New York as special-projects editor under Abe Rosenthal during the early 1980’s.

“He didn’t want to climb the ladder of being an editor,” said Times diplomatic correspondent Steven Weisman, who arrived at the paper in 1968 alongside Rosenbaum.

“He just didn’t like it,” reporter Linda Greenhouse recalled of Mr. Rosenbaum’s brief turn as an editor at West 43rd Street.

A memorial service is scheduled for Jan. 13 at 10:30 a.m., at the Dirksen Senate Office Building, according to bureau chief Phil Taubman.

Rosenbaum first arrived at The Times on the Washington bureau night desk in 1968, after stints at the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly. His career was marked by a talent for sifting through and explicating arcane matters of economics; in 1990, he shared a Polk Award for his coverage of the first President Bush’s tax increase.

“He brought to every complex story a substance and depth and an understanding of policy,” Mr. Weisman said. “That was his great skill.”

“When I came to work at The Times, David welcomed me warmly,” Mr. Taubman said. “I remember that right from the get-go, he was exceedingly generous with source names and numbers. That was David’s manner: He was one of the friendliest and most welcoming people at the newspaper.”

In 2002, Rosenbaum was one of the first Washington journalists to write about the growing influence of now-disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Most recently, Rosenbaum expressed dismay over the Plamegate scandal.

“He thought promises of confidentiality were given much too casually,” Mr. Clymer said. “He said you needed to protect the City Hall janitor who exposes corruption, but not political gossips.”

—G.S.

When The New York Times reported on Jan. 9 that there is no such person as author JT Leroy, and that the writer’s public appearances have been made by a woman named Savannah Knoop, Stephen Beachy was delighted.

“I e-mailed [reporter] Warren [St. John] on Sunday night thanking him for doing the article and telling him I thought it was great,” said Mr. Beachy, who wrote about the mystery of JT Leroy’s identity for New York magazine back in October.

The next day, however, another e-mail began circulating: New York spokeswoman Serena Torrey mass-mailed media reporters a message with the heading “JT Leroy is a Fake, NY Mag reported in October and NY Times Agrees Today.”

“Today,” Ms. Torrey wrote, “three months after New York’s investigation made news, the New York Times, which had recently profiled and hired ‘Leroy’ as a legitimate writer, ‘reported’ that Leroy, who’d recently written for the Times, was indeed Laura Albert.”

Had The Times ripped off New York’s scoop? When Mr. Beachy saw the scare-quote-laced salvo, “I was surprised,” he said. “Whatever the press release said, those are not my issues. I thought I was given a perfect amount of credit. [The Times] even linked to my story on the Web site. I don’t have any issues with the Times piece.”

In his October piece, Mr. Beachy laid out a strong circumstantial case that Leroy didn’t exist and that his literary output was the work of a woman named Laura Albert. But the piece stopped short of delivering a conclusive kill shot, and Mr. Beachy was stumped by the question of who portrayed Leroy in his public appearances.

“I’m thrilled the Times piece came out and they found the last piece of the puzzle,” Mr. Beachy said. “It’s been weighing on my mind all these months—who the actor is.”

Mr. Beachy said that he and Mr. St. John—who had written a profile taking JT Leroy at face value in 2004—had assisted each other in their respective quests.

Ms. Torrey, via e-mail, said that Mr. Beachy’s revelation “was the significant breakthrough in the unmasking–JT Leroy story, and the Times account wouldn’t have been possible without it …. [W]e were just protecting our reporter’s scoop.”

At The Times, meanwhile, Mr. St. John’s investigation spared the paper the trouble of writing an editor’s note about the paper’s original Leroy profile—and a travel article that had run in the paper’s T magazine under Leroy’s byline.

“We think the story Monday stands as a major correction,” Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis wrote in an e-mail. “We have arranged to have notes attached in our electronic archives to Warren St. John’s profile of the fictional person, published a year ago, and to the ‘T’ piece bylined by the fictional person. Both will refer readers to the piece published Monday.”

—G.S.

Correction: Last week’s Off the Record incorrectly described The New York Times as having announced 690 layoffs at the newspaper in 2005. The New York Times Company had announced roughly 700 layoffs companywide, including staff cuts at The Boston Globe, regional newspapers and broadcast properties, and among the corporate staff, as well as at The Times. Off the Record regrets the error.

"It certainly isn't Freudian," replied agent Richard Liebner.

Actually, the term "Serlingesque"-as in Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling-came to mind. Gathered in the back room of Elaine's on Sept. 3 was a collection of local on-air talent that, seen in a single setting, boggled the mind. These were men-and with one exception, they were all men-meant to be viewed at a safe distance through the cool medium of television. But for one night they broke through the fourth wall and gathered in a single, sweaty space, reminiscent of one of Mr. Serling's ambulatory nightmares, mixed with a little of Paddy Chayefsky's The Bachelor Party .

Which it was: John Roland, master of the Dry Look, Channel 5 anchor, veteran of the airwaves since 1969-when John Kluge, not Rupert Murdoch, owned the station-with a long, legendary history as a man about town and Westhampton, was about to get hitched for the third time, to the financial planner Joanna O'Rourke. (The wedding took place on Sept. 6 in Westhampton.) "She was marvelous to me when I was very, very sick," the apple-cheeked, 61-year-old Mr. Roland told The Transom, referring to his bout with diverticulitis last year. "This one's going to work."

Near the makeshift bar was veteran Channel 11 reporter Marvin Scott, decked out in a retro flecked tweed jacket that looked straight off the set of L.A. Confidential, posing for a photo with doe-eyed Channel 2 anchor Ernie Anastos, Channel 4's mustachioed medical reporter Dr. Max Gomez, and slightly spastic Channel 2 sports reporter Warner Wolf. National talk-show host Maury Povich, his hair perfectly tousled, caught up on gossip with bantam-like former Channel 5 news director Ian Rae. Elsewhere in the crowd were Channel 5's sunny-faced weatherman Nick Gregory , beefy reporter Bob O'Brien and snowy-haired Good Day New York anchor Jim Ryan, New York Post reporter Steve Dunleavy-who looks as if he's slowly turning into a lead statue-and, for a little while, Fox 5 news anchor Rosanna Scotto, who came in a flowing beard and man's suit, compared facial hair with attorney Barry Slotnick and grabbed her crotch at least once before she left.

Ms. Scotto came in drag because the evening's proceedings were meant to be a Friars' Roast-style bachelor party for her Fox 5 news colleague, whose friends weren't about to let him forget his past. "Does the bride-to-be know that the cumulative marriage time preceding her is 52 months?" Mr. Liebner-who represents a lot of the men in the room, including Mr. Roland-said aloud to no one in particular shortly before the festivities started. About the same time, Mr. Povich made an early exit, leaving the $125 that each of the guests were supposed to pay for the evening. When Mr. Scott said something about giving Mr. Povich his money back, Mr. Liebner said: "He's a millionaire. Give it to U.J.A."

Even though agents are some of the funniest people on earth-and not necessarily intentionally-for some reason Mr. Liebner was not designated as one of the Roland roasters, but he should have been: He seemed to have the Friars spirit in his blood. "Say 'pussy'!" the agent's nasal voice boomed at one point in a game attempt to stir up the boys.

Frankly that's why The Transom had come to cover the festivities. We've long suspected that Mr. Ryan, Mr. Wolf and Dr. Gomez could work blue with the best of them, and we were hoping to hit paydirt. We wanted to hear Mr. Wolf say "pussy" instead of "Let's go to the videotape!", or to witness Mr. Anastos sneer "cocksucker!" instead of "Goodnight, Dana."

But perhaps mindful of their public images, the on-air guys left most of the cussing to the behind-the-scenes guys like Mr. Rae, who is both Australian and a former news director, which makes him prone to foul language. Suffolk County Surrogate Court Judge John Czygier, who M.C.'d the evening, told the crowd that the party's organizers had decided to go with a sit-down meal in honor of Mr. Rae because "Ian's from Australia" and "usually by this time of night he's at the sterno in the chafing dishes."

"You sonuvabitch, I'll get you," shouted Mr. Rae, whose arm was in a cast.

Turning his attention to Mr. Roland, who was decked out in a black-and-white hound's-tooth patterned jacket, black shirt and black pants, the judge recalled the time that Mr. Roland came to tell him that he was going to marry Ms. O'Rourke. "And knowing John and knowing the way he lived, I was just so pleased that he would come to me and ask," Judge Czygier said.

His reply?

"I said, 'John, are you fucking out of your mind? I mean, you bring a different girl out every weekend and bang her like a dinner gong on the Ponderosa!'"

"Oh my God!" brayed Mr. Rae.

Judge Czygier continued, saying that he told Mr. Roland that "if you're leaving the world of bachelordom, you can't just leave and forget your past. You have to leave a legacy, because we all know John. We've all seen him around town.

"And John said, 'You know what? I'm going to give you something and you can pass it on.'"

"Gonorrhea!" said Mr. Liebner.

Later, Ralph Nathan, one of Mr. Roland's oldest friends, read from a long, long list of Mr. Roland's old girlfriends, including "Linda the liquor lady," whoever that was.

"I think I'm coming," Mr. Roland said about three-quarters through the list.

"Me, too," said Marvin Scott, who was sitting at the same table.

But Mr. Roland visibly shuddered when Mr. Nathan included, at the end of list, "your abbreviated affair with Billie Boggs."

In 1988, Mr. Roland was suspended from Channel 5 after a testy interview with Joyce Brown-a homeless woman who took her alias from another Channel 5 on-air personality, Bill Boggs-in which Mr. Roland accused her of defecating on the sidewalk near the station's studios. He eventually apologized.

Mr. Scott was up next, and he had clearly prepared a lot of material. "We did try to find a stripper tonight, but we couldn't find someone you haven't already dated," Mr. Scott told Mr. Roland.

"Stop using Alan King's stuff!" someone yelled.

Like we said, Mr. Scott had prepared a lot of material. "I got two more pages," he said when the crowd began to chant for Mr. Rae. "I paid 125 bucks for this, would you get on with it?" Mr. Ryan yelled.

Mr. Scott reeled off a top-ten list of the things you shouldn't say on your wedding night. Number seven was "I think biting is romantic, don't you?"

"Marv Albert said that," Mr. Roland rebutted.

There was applause and groans, and, finally, Mr. Rae made like the news director that he once was: "All right, mate, yer out," he said.

"Fuck you all, " Mr. Scott told his colleagues.

Mr. Rae, whose right arm was in a sling-a fracture incurred during a game of golf, according to his tablemates-had been waiting all evening to tell the room the "real" reason for his injury.

"Roland lent me a Viagra pill and nobody showed up," he said as paced back and forth in front of the room, holding a glass of red wine in his left hand.

Mr. Ryan followed and recalled the time in 1983 when Mr. Roland disarmed and shot one of the three gunmen who tried to rob the Racing Club, a hangout for Channel 5 and Murdoch lifers on East 67th Street.

"How fucking drunk were you?" Mr. Ryan wanted to know.

Replied Mr. Roland: "I'm an anchor man-what can I tell you?"

Michiko Masher Scores!

Rule No. 1 for writers: Don't try to hit on New York Times reviewers. Or maybe you should. Take a lesson from Leslie Epstein, author of nine books of fiction, including King of the Jews and Pandaemonium . "When I heard last night that Michiko Kakutani was going to review San Remo Drive , I didn't know what to think," said Mr. Epstein from his home in Boston. Given his last interaction with The Times ' chief book critic, he had reason to sweat.

Following the 1999 release of his last novel, Ice Fire Water , Mr. Epstein took out a series of classified ads decrying Ms. Kakutani's silence. "DEAR SWEET MISS MICHIKO K.-Call your Leib Goldkorn," begged one, which ran in one of those little spaces at the bottom of The Times ' front page in October 1999. Leib Goldkorn, the recurring 94-year-old protagonist of several of Mr. Epstein's books, just so happened to have a crush on the reclusive book critic. "Why?" you might ask. Because, in the novel, she just adored the elderly Goldkorn's latest book-and even fictional authors can't resist the adoration of finicky critics. "I thought it was cute and was hoping she would find it cute, too," said Mr. Epstein of his ploy-or, should we say, Mr. Goldkorn's ploy-to woo Ms. Kakutani through the pages of her own paper. "But she didn't."

Ms. Kakutani was not interested in Mr. Epstein's aged character at all. Instead, after half a dozen of the ads ran-costing Mr. Epstein a cool six grand, the better part of his $10,000 advance-she demanded that the paper's advertising department pull his upcoming November ad, which read, "YOO-HOO! MY CUTE KAKUTANI!-Leib Goldkorn is calling," along with the six remaining ads to follow.

"I never heard from her and was going send her a note, but I thought it would come across as slavish," said Mr. Epstein, who bowed out without a fight when the advertising department let him know that the object of his affections likened him to a stalker.

When San Remo Drive , a novel based on his own Hollywood childhood-he's the son of Casablanca co-writer Philip Epstein-was published in April of this year with no review from The Times , Mr. Epstein began to sweat. "I lost hope and thought they'd never review me. I thought I'd just foolishly burned my bridges," said Mr. Epstein. This time he waited sheepishly, understanding Ms. Kakutani's silence. "I think she felt her privacy was invaded and was plenty pissed."

Then, on Monday night, he received an e-mail from his publicist: Ms. Kakutani was reviewing his latest. And, to his even greater surprise, he woke up yesterday morning to a glowing review. Ms. Kakutani called the novel "a keenly observed portrait of Los Angeles" and compared him to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Joan Didion. If the Times reviewer did hold a grudge against Mr. Epstein, she hid it well.

"She believes in art," said Mr. Epstein. "If there's a subtext that she's forgiven me, I'm pleased."

Through a spokeswoman, Catherine Mathis, Ms. Kakutani said that she "has no memory of these ads, and they had no relationship with the review."

"She set everything that's between us aside and wrote a generous review," said Mr. Epstein. "Maybe I can blow her a kiss through this column."

-Ronda Kaysen

Glengarry Glen Rastafarian?

Actor Alec Baldwin may have been used to adoring teenage girls and Hunt for Red October fans, but he wasn't prepared for a scruffy, bearded man on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 77th Street who offered him marijuana. It was still light out at 6:45 p.m. on Sept. 8, when Mr. Baldwin rolled up in a town car to CNBC chief executive Pamela Thomas-Graham's party for Tina Brown and David Faber's television shows in the Georgian Suite of 1A East 77th Street. As he walked toward the entrance while talking on his cell phone, a tall black man wearing a bushy beard, scruffy jeans and a ripped gray T-shirt approached him and offered what looked like a joint to the State and Main star. Mr. Baldwin waved his hands and motioned the man away and, once inside, seemed to have shrugged off the incident as he mingled with writer George Plimpton, media mogul Barry Diller, former diplomat Henry Kissinger and literary agent Lynn Nesbit. "That was weird," said Mr. Baldwin of the incident. And when The Transom asked the actor if the man smelled like he'd been smoking something, Mr. Baldwin said: "I hope that guy was on something, otherwise he was a severely deranged person."

-Alexandra Wolfe

F**k, Gone Amuck

In a July Salon.com article, artist Ken Courtney-creator of an exclusive line of one-of-a-kind T-shirts that say "I fucked ______" (fill in the blank with Anna Wintour or Gisele or the name of whatever over-hyped celebrity you please)-defined his "art" (i.e., his shirts) as a reflection of what he describes as our society's tendency to "name-fuck."

"[N]ame-fucking [is] using this commodity of the celebrity name to buy coolness, or insider status, or whatever," he said. Included in the article was a list of people whose names were, he felt, potentially fuckable.

Among those names were actress Chloë Sevigny, bizarro artist Matthew Barney and writer J.T. LeRoy.

Mr. LeRoy is the 23-year-old two-time novelist who has attracted attention in recent years because of his roster of celebrity "friends" (Winona, Madonna, Tatum, etc.) and his raw accounts of growing up in and out of foster homes and truck stops. A former heroin-addicted, transvestite child-prostitute, Mr. LeRoy has indeed been fucked by a lot of people.

So it's to be expected that the reclusive Wunderkind might've been offended when someone forwarded him a copy of the Salon article in which he was mentioned. But, in fact, Mr. LeRoy saw the irony and quickly called Mr. Courtney to see if he could get one of the T-shirts for Asia Argento, who is directing and starring in a movie version of Mr. LeRoy's book The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things .

"I was honored that he included my name in the same sentence as all these other people," said Mr. LeRoy, speaking from his San Francisco home. The rarely photographed writer has an extremely childlike, effeminate voice and a West Virginian drawl. "I like the lack of sacredness. I mean, the worst thing you can say to someone is 'fuck you,' right? And I don't wanna be anyone's sacred pedestal toy." Mr. Courtney had not yet created an "I fucked J.T. LeRoy" shirt, but at the young writer's request he made one-with white felt letters on a vintage blue sports jersey-and then photographed it and put it on the home page of his Web site, justanotherrichkid.com.

Then last week, the shirt came to the attention of Mr. LeRoy's fans, roughly 300 of whom correspond with each other and with Mr. LeRoy, through a Yahoo list serve called Terminator (named after the auteur's "street" moniker). Many of the list's "Termies" (as they call themselves) are transgendered or homosexual or the victims of child abuse. They were not amused by the garment.

"They've formed a real community, and a lot of people in that community are wounded people who find comfort and safeness through the list," said Nancy Murdock, a 45-year-old Boston-area grammar-school teacher who moonlights as Mr. LeRoy's assistant. "I think that when they saw the shirts, a lot of them felt like, 'Who is this person trying to make money off J.T., and bringing up the past in such an in-your-face kind of way?' They just wanted to protect him. He brings out a maternal instinct in people."

Deeply peeved and unaware that Mr. LeRoy had sanctioned the shirt, the list serve's owner, Kai Fisher, a 22-year-old Mount Vernon, Wash., bookstore clerk, pounced. "We've had our fair share of stalkers on the list because of, shall we say, our 'colored sexual orientation,' if we can call it that. So I've always helped J.T. track down these people. Like we've had mail bombs to members and J.T.'s account has been hacked," said Mr. Fisher, who has run the list for three years. "When I saw these shirts, it just didn't seem right and I just flipped."

He considered hacking into Mr. Courtney's site and taking down the photo. But before doing anything so rash, he got Mr. Courtney's e-mail off his site and wrote an angry note, saying that he "was a longtime friend" of the writer and had a "big problem" with the shirts.

"I wrote him back and said, 'Hey, if you're J.T.'s 'longtime friend,' why didn't you check with him first before e-mailing me?'" Mr. Courtney, 31, told The Transom. "And then I'm sitting here later that day and my cell phone rings and there's this deep, stalker-like voice on the other end, saying like, 'So what are you going to do about those shirts?' I felt like I was in a fucking Tarantino movie!"

Mr. Courtney returned fire. "So I was like, 'Yo!' I just totally ripped him apart, and told him he was out of line and not to ever fucking call me again and to go talk to J.T."

Mr. Fisher did check with Mr. LeRoy, then bowed out of the melee. "I kind of felt like a fool," he said.

But by that point, the list-serve campaign against Mr. Courtney had taken on a life of its own.

Mr. Fisher tried to assuage the group with repeated postings telling them that Mr. LeRoy was behind the shirts, but many Termies seemed to insist on being outraged.

"It is tacky!" wrote one. "Them designers are just a bunch a cowboys without the lasso," wrote another. A few list-members tried to organize an "e-mail bomb"-that is, getting everyone on the list to bombard Mr. Courtney's e-mail address with a dozen bogus orders. Even after Mr. Fisher's repeated explanations that Mr. LeRoy was a friend of Mr. Courtney's, the fans begged to have their grievances heard. "This is funny. Sort of like, if a tree falls in the woods, does J.T. approve?" wrote one. "[W]e're all supposed to say what we think and feel-even if it isn't what the Cherub-in-Charge thinks or feels. J.T.'s got enough sycophantic fawns about. I think he probably appreciates hearing unvarnished responses."

Discouraged, Mr. Fisher suggested he resign as a list-owner.

But Mr. LeRoy effusively thanked Mr. Fisher for "looking out" for him and eventually tamed the Termies with a posting: "I used ta be a prostitute. The shirts make a joke outta that. Ya know, it's like those Chinese finger puzzles where you put a finger into each side of a woven tube and, when you try to pull your fingers out, they just get more stuck. You gotta move your fingers deeper into the tube to get unstuck. So, that's what I'm doing, pushing my fingers in, gettin unstuck and wearing these cool shirts while I do it."

The Termies backed off, and apologies were exchanged between Mr. Courtney and Mr. Fisher. Mr. Courtney offered to send a T-shirt to the devoted list-serve owner, but Mr. Fisher declined. "I couldn't wear it here. I'd get attacked," he said. "I live in a rural county."

"I think this whole thing is an interesting issue because it has very little to do with me," Mr. LeRoy told The Transom. "I mean, I run into this a lot, where people say to me, like, 'Oh, I want to hug you.' I think there's this way that some people fetishize me-they read the book and forget that I'm no longer the same person as the person I describe in the book. I've had almost 10 years of therapy, you know?"

He and Mr. Courtney are currently collaborating on a design for a special edition of an "I fucked J.T. LeRoy" T-shirt that they are hoping to sell at a reading of Mr. LeRoy's to be held at the Coral Room on Sept. 13.

"I guess some people feel their role is to protect other people, and I guess if you're on the street and you're dealing with drugs and sex, that's one thing," said Mr. Courtney, whose line of shirts are available for around $80 at boutiques in Paris and Brooklyn. "If you're a hustler in the Tenderloin in San Francisco or on the streets of New York maybe. But these are fucking T-shirts."

-Anna Jane Grossman

"The first time I met J.T. was during my first heartbreak," she said of the author J.T. LeRoy, whose work had just been read by a group of performers including musicians Debbie Harry and Shirley Manson, and actors Rosario Dawson and Tatum O'Neal.

"It had been my first love," she went on, namelessly invoking the image of former fiancé Johnny Depp, with whom she broke up in 1993. She said that she and her ex had had opera tickets, and as part of her recovery process, she had decided to use them by herself.

"I saw this boy leaning up against the opera house, listening to them tune up," she said. "I said to him, 'Do you want to go in with me?' And that's how I met J.T."

A soft, Appalachian-accented voice yelled from backstage something that sounded like "I love you, Winona!" But some cocked their heads. Ms. Ryder's tale of her invitation to a 13-year-old who by his own account would have been a heroin-addicted transvestite prostitute at the time, seemed unlikely.

That a piece of the canon surrounding the world of Mr. LeRoy raised suspicion was not surprising. For five years, the 23-year-old author of Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things has cultivated a mystique of half-truths and clever apocrypha about his own life that seems to chafe at investigation. It recalls the life-as-a-work-of-art trappings of Andy Warhol and his Factory.

Mr. LeRoy's story, which he chronicled in his autobiographical debut, is of following his mother, Sarah, into a life of prostitution, becoming a preteen "lot lizard" who assumed his mother's identity while turning tricks for truckers.

Since Sarah 's publication, Mr. LeRoy has remained tucked away in San Francisco, allowing himself to be photographed only in wigs, sunglasses and-for Vanity Fair -a dress.

An unlikely item on the New York Post 's Page Six on Dec. 3, 2002, quoted both Mr. LeRoy and Italian actress Asia Argento, who is adapting his second book into a film, as saying that they were having a child together. A week later, Mr. LeRoy told Village Voice columnist Michael Musto that Zwan singer Billy Corgan, Third Eye Blind's Stephan Jenkins and actress Tatum O'Neal would be the baby's godparents.

When Ms. Argento appeared at the Thursday-night reading, she was very obviously not pregnant, but in an April 21 item about the event, the Daily News ' Rush and Molloy referred to Mr. LeRoy as "the gay transvestite father of Asia Argento's child."

When asked by The Transom about Ms. Argento's pregnancy, Mr. LeRoy snorted. "She is, but it's a metaphor," he said by phone several days after the reading. As if the misunderstanding were the most natural thing in the world, Mr. LeRoy explained that the two had grown close while working on the Heart script, and that when they finished, Ms. Argento had told him, "It's kind of like you knocked me up!"

Less metaphorical, Mr. LeRoy said, is his home life with Astor, a man, and Speedy, a woman, and their child, Thor; the three of them are raising the child.

"Getting pregnant [with Thor] really concretized us," he said. "At that point, we figured either we're going to be brought up on charges or we're going to make this work."

Though it has been reported that Speedy is his girlfriend, and that Astor is his boyfriend, Mr. LeRoy told The Transom that he and Astor had never been together. He said that Astor and Speedy are a couple.

"Billy [Corgan] and Speedy are really connected," he added. "But it's easy for us to go out and play around because we love each other so much."

Rumors persist that Mr. LeRoy is the fictional creation of his mentor, novelist Dennis Cooper. Mr. LeRoy said that he has also heard that he is the collaborative invention of novelist Mary Gaitskill and director Gus Van Sant.

"We started a lot of rumors, me and Dennis," Mr. LeRoy said, gleefully adding, "Actually, I'm Flannery O'Connor. She's recovered!"

About Ms. Ryder's improbable opera story, Mr. LeRoy said vaguely, "Yeah, that was a long time ago."

But he could elaborate: "Well, I was afraid. I didn't usually do these things for free. And she was babbling some shit about Timothy Leary, and I was thinking, 'Great, now I have to go fuck Timothy Leary.'"

Mr. LeRoy said that at the time, he had no idea who Winona Ryder or Timothy Leary was. Later, when The Transom again brought up the story, Mr. LeRoy seemed to break cover.

"Well," he said, "Winona can get away with that because she's an actress."

At the reading's intermission, fans stood in the lobby of the Public, talking breathlessly about Mr. LeRoy's rare appearance onstage, with Ms. Argento by his side. Raccoon-penis bones signed by Mr. LeRoy were going for 15 bucks a pop. There was the sensation that someone might soon pass out Kool-Aid and distribute identical muu-muus. Or that the whole thing was a hoax-the kind of thing cooked up by the kids at McSweeney's , with whom Mr. LeRoy just published an individually bound story, "Harold's End."

Mr. LeRoy's work-the thing that has ostensibly drawn the wide-eyed masses with their penis-bone necklaces-is very good. His horrific sexual confessionals feel somehow fresh, clean. It's as though he has surgically removed bits of his painful past, described them in honest, eloquent detail, and in doing so, healed them.

"He's like a Christ figure to some of these people," said Patti Sullivan, who wrote a screenplay version of Sarah for Mr. Van Sant.

On Easter morning, Mr. LeRoy spoke to The Transom by phone from Pittsburgh, where he had done another reading at the Andy Warhol Museum. His voice was a hesitant whisper, nearly inaudible during the first moments of conversation. But within 10 minutes, he was chugging away loudly, holding forth on Ms. Sullivan's comments about his Christ-like stature.

"I feel more Jewish now anyway," he said, adding: "Madonna sent me a whole box of Kabbalah books."

The next day, he had given the matter more thought.

"When people think about Jesus, they think about the crucifixion and the rising," he said. "But if you think about who he was, he was a guy who hung out with a bunch of freaky people, a bunch of outcasts. He was probably a little psychotic himself, but he hung out with street people and prostitutes. I'd like to think I'm a little healthier than Jesus, because I've had more therapy than he did. And I'm not into pain like he was."

In the span of several hours, Mr. LeRoy seamlessly moved from Madonna and Jesus to other high-wattage names. He mentioned an argument he'd had with musician Liz Phair about the dental-health benefits of dark chocolate. He told of a Calvin Klein party last year where he'd said he had met one woman "who was real." After chatting with her about her charity work, he felt comfortable enough to slip under her legs to get to the men's room.

"It turns out she was Bianca Jagger," he said.

He was appealingly childlike when he described meeting Mr. Corgan ("It's nice when they turn out not to be buttheads"), but considerably more adult recounting the way Bono helped to set his band with Speedy and Astor, Thistle, in motion: "[So] we were working with U2's management, but they were so slammed that they gave us their lawyers, and I just didn't feel that they were steering us in a direction we wanted to go."

At the reading, when Secretary director Steven Shainberg announced that Mr. LeRoy had called to ask him to make Sarah into a movie, there was a ripple in the crowd. For several years, Mr. Van Sant has owned the rights to the book.

Mr. LeRoy later explained that he had had artistic differences with Mr. Van Sant and that the option was expiring.

"I know how things can look from the outside," said Mr. LeRoy, reflecting on the business of being J.T. LeRoy, and the celebrities that populate his life and his conversation.

"But all these people, the ones that are kind of close to me, these are not cult people. Billy Corgan-you wouldn't think of him as somebody who was going to join or buy something to be part of a clique."

He explained that he saw Mr. Warhol's Factory as a model: a group of talented outcasts who huddled together for warmth, simultaneously manipulating and rebelling against the traditional systems.

"Andy fucked with the art world, and I think the literary world needs to be fucked with," said Mr. LeRoy.

The idea that to take these stories at face value is to be fucked with-like the White Stripes claiming to be brother and sister when they are ex-spouses-is hard to resist: Ms. Phair, who made an album called White Chocolate Space Egg , chiding him over dark chocolate; Mr. LeRoy, an admirer of Mr. Warhol, crawling under Factory doyenne Bianca Jagger.

Asked about the improbability of these tiny details, Mr. LeRoy said that he hadn't even considered the title of Ms. Phair's album.

"That just seemed like a good story," he said. He paused, then continued: "Maybe it's like Jackson Pollock-they found a lot of his spatterings mirrored patterns found in nature. Is it because it's an accident, or a universal unconsciousness?"

"It's about family and connectedness …. I feel like I'm weaving a web that feels strong, a web that will support me, like a family. A web I can lean back into," he said.

When asked about the real Sarah, his mother, Mr. LeRoy grew silent.

"She is gone-not on this earth," said Mr. LeRoy, breathing heavily into the phone. He added that he still sees her, "depending on what kind of drugs" he's on, and that she is "enraged" by the terms of his literary success.

Mr. LeRoy said that he received $24,000 advances for both Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things . He is not allowed to comment on how much he got for the film rights, but said: "We still drive a car from the early 90's."

Then Mr. LeRoy conferred with Astor about a piece of clothing.

"Is that Costume Nationale?" he asked. Remembering the reporter on the phone, he laughed and said, "When I used to be worrying about what kind of bed I was going to sleep in, Mary Karr told me, 'Wait till you can't live without Prada.' And it's happened."

-Rebecca Traister

Harem Zarem

"Everybody thinks I'm retired. I'm not retired. I'm working all the time. I'm younger than I've ever been," said Bobby Zarem, the 66-year-old legendary New York flack turned muse, seated in the MGM screening room on Monday night.

A small crowd was awaiting the New York premiere of People I Know , the new Dan Algrant flick based loosely on Mr. Zarem's life.

The wild-haired Mr. Zarem slung one arm over the empty seat beside him.

"I was just down in Savannah working on the new David Gordon Green picture," he said. "Do you know him? His first picture, George Washington , got great reviews in The Times . Did you see it? It's a shame-it went straight to video."

Mr. Zarem then turned to look at the smartly clad man sitting alone, one seat to his right.

"Are you going to sit there?" asked Mr. Zarem, glaring at him. "Because if you are, you're breaking up two pairs. Did you mean to do that? Did you mean to break up two twos?"

"Uhh, no," the man sulked, and slid into the aisle seat.

The interruption did not distract Mr. Zarem from his pitch.

"But this new one, it's got bigger names; the boy from Billy Elliot 's in it," he said as he shook his head. "I'm not working on it, but I sent them to Savannah to shoot it. I said, 'You've got to shoot this in Savannah.'"

Originally scheduled for release in the fall of 2001, People I Know was held for eight months. "It was a victim of 9/11," said Miramax head Harvey Weinstein.

But Mr. Zarem thinks differently.

"The most powerful people in New York-not me, but the politicians and Senators-were portrayed in such an ugly way that Harvey didn't think that it was right for the rest of the country to see New Yorkers portrayed that way," said Mr. Zarem, his Southern drawl booming above the noise of the crowd. I don't think it should've been held, but it's fine now. I don't know if there were other reasons; I was just taking Harvey at his word."

At the after-party at Osteria del Circo on West 55th Street, The Transom caught up with the director, Mr. Algrant, whose credits include Sex and the City and who, with thick-framed glasses and a square face, looks the part of a Williamsburg theater buff.

Teaming up with writer Jon Robin Baitz ( The West Wing ), Mr. Algrant set to work on the story of Eli Wurman. Played by Al Pacino, Wurman is a washed-up publicist whom the film follows through 24 hours on the job as he haphazardly witnesses the murder of a has-been model and TV personality, Jilli Hopper (Téa Leoni).

"The character is based on me," said Mr. Zarem, "but I've never been involved with a murder."

After promising Jennifer Holiner, the bubbly brunette publicist for Mr. Pacino, not to talk about anything but the film, the actor took a few minutes out to talk to The Transom.

"Everybody who's in this business knows about Bobby Zarem; he's got that Southern charm," said Mr. Pacino, his hair rumpled and disheveled. Seated in the back of the restaurant, Mr. Pacino leaned over the table.

"With all due respect to Bobby," he said, "it's not an autobiographical thing-it's loosely based on where he comes from.

"There's something about our culture now. We've changed," Mr. Pacino continued, reflecting on his character in the movie. "Eli, in the old days, would've met with more cooperation. He's not heard as much now. His rap isn't as effective as it used to be. But he still can turn a phrase and attract people."

"The public's taste level has dropped considerably," said Mr. Zarem. "I built toward the long run, and the stars had their eye on the long run. The kids today make so much so soon, they don't have to think about the long run. I built up the people so if they got caught with a hooker, the public would say, 'That's boy's play.' They wouldn't care. I love the kids today-don't get me wrong-but I'd rather be their friend than work for them."

"I don't think publicists have changed at all. It's the same job," said Mr. Pacino. When asked what the world would be like without publicists, he turned on the charm as Ms. Holiner tapped his shoulder.

"We'd be talking for four days, not 10 minutes," he said.

-Ronda Kaysen

Mistah Dillon, He Dead

In his film-directing debut, Matt Dillon, 39, set out to eradicate his frat-boy image by writing, directing and starring in City of Ghosts , about a con man who travels through Cambodia in search of his boss. "There were certain perceptions that people had of me, you know. 'He's dumb,' or 'He's just got a pretty face,' or 'He's a thug,' or 'He can only do one thing,'" Mr. Dillon has said before. "I'm not so concerned with that now. Longevity's what it's about."

At the movie's premiere at the Chelsea West Cinema on April 21, the house was packed with an unlikely group for a Hollywood event: members of the U.N. and Refugees International. Aside from Mr. Dillon himself, former ambassador to the U.N. Richard Holbrooke drew the most attention when he walked into the theater, and even Kevin Bacon-one of the few token Hollywood heartthrobs in the audience-was left sitting between two excited Refugees International staffers.

Mr. Dillon's opening speech paid homage to the organization, especially a now-deceased volunteer named Yvette who inspired him. "I like to think she's here tonight with us," he said somberly.

He was in lighter spirits later on, at the crowded after-party at Man Ray. Even though the restaurant was filled with younger faces-Fisher Stevens, Mark Feuerstein and Federico Castelluccio-Mr. Dillon, dressed in a dignified black suit, was still ringing in his new image. While the scenes of bloody Cambodian prostitutes in City of Ghosts made a striking contrast to the image of Cameron Diaz's semen-enhanced hairdo, Mr. Dillon isn't expecting his audience to change. "I don't really think so much about the audience when I'm making the film," he said. "I think of the audience as observers of the film, but I don't think of them as-I don't know. That's a marketing question, it seems like."

Now, Mr. Dillon is "more interested in storytelling." The only changes that concern him with his new venture are changes in the actual production. "It changes all the time," he said of his movie, which took half a decade to conceive, create and produce. "You're working on things, and it goes through different incarnations; it just changes as it goes along. I think that's really a valuable part of making the movie-changes. When you see things that need changes to be made, then you do it."

As a writer, director and actor, Mr. Dillon "had a real hand in it," and a plan. "My game plan was to be really prepared as a director in pre-production, so when I was stepping on the set, I could be more focused as an actor," he said. "If I hadn't written it, it might have been more difficult. I think the thing that was really important was the preparation, so that made it easier."

Now, after all his preparation-and with only days to go before the release of his movie, on April 25-he referred to his past roles as "other things … jobs that I was taking as an actor." Before Mr. Dillon was swallowed up by a mob of adoring actresses and ambassadors, he mused on his nascent directorial experiences-which include having directed an episode of the HBO series Oz . "People say it's like wearing two hats," he said, "but I think it was like wearing one big hat."

-Alexandra Wolfe

Courtney Love grinned and tugged on her chewed-up bangs as she lurched down the red carpet that led into Hugo Boss' Fifth Avenue flagship store on June 18. A pair of nervous German reporters, a man and a woman, called out to her from behind the roped-off press area, and Ms. Love–gangly and graceful in a sheer Richard Tyler haute-couture gown with black-lace overlay–leaned in uncomfortably close. She patted the woman reporter's hands and gave her a heavy-lidded leer. "Don't be nervous," she ordered. "Just start asking me stuff."

A little bit later, Ms. Love was scheduled to sing a set of 20's and 30's torch songs at the Russian Tea Room as part of a benefit for the New Group theater company, but the Germans weren't curious about that. They wanted to know more about her dress. Then, unsolicited, Ms. Love pulled her unruly shoulder-length hair back to reveal an enormous multi-layered necklace studded with cameo images. "I have to show you this, because it's the best, best, best piece of jewelry I own," she told the Germans, as the journalists flanking them on the rope line crowded in to get a piece of the action. "It's Bulgari, it's from 1860 …." Ms. Love trailed off for a moment and then impatiently tapped the hands and arms of a number of the reporters who were, at that point, obediently recording her every word.

"You see, you don't even know what it is, you're just shallowly writing this down. Now look!" Ms. Love instructed, her badly gnawed, red-painted nails glittering in the flashbulb light. She held her hair back with one hand and waved her other hand over the necklace, as if she was displaying prizes on The Price is Right .

"These are all the emperors of Rome. There's Claudius and Tiberius and Aurelius," she said. "It was made by some psycho French woman, and it's my favorite piece of jewelry I have ever had in my whole life."

Ms. Love was working up a head of steam. "These guys were bloodless, gutless murderers," she said, perhaps forgetting Marcus Aurelius' reputation as a gentle philosopher and writer and Claudius' democratic ways (even though he whacked one of his wives). "They ran a country where everything was painted white. It was a white, racist, fucked-up country and they killed Jesus."

Just as Ms. Love was getting to the point of her history lesson–possibly about the fashion potential of Pontius Pilate–she was summoned by a publicist, who pointed her toward an overwhelmed-looking Winona Ryder, gesturing wanly at the rock diva from the middle of the red carpet. Ms. Ryder was scheduled to M.C. the Tea Room event, but she seemed freaked by the responsibility. The waif-like actress was a mass of nervous ticks, girly grins and saucer-eyed shyness and looked like a one-woman revival of the decade whence she sprang. She was decked out in a "Borderline"-era black clip-on hair bow and a strapless black prom-dress number, which she kept earnestly tugging over her cleavage.

Without another word to the press, Ms. Love turned, efficiently collected Ms. Ryder, and strode out of the Hugo Boss store and into the car that would take her to the Tea Room.

Though the press was barred from witnessing Ms. Love's performance, someone who attended told The Transom that the original grungette "totally rocked the house," albeit sans the Richard Tyler dress and the necklace of thieving, murdering Romans. Congratulating the crowd for being fashionista-free, Ms. Love did her set–which included "I Can't Give You Anything but Love," "California Here I Come" and "I Am Lucky"–in a red slip, red dress, black bikini underwear and torn black fishnets.

At one point, Ms. Love, apparently fed up with the stodgy crowd, urged Ms. Ryder to join her onstage, proclaiming: "We're the two most fucked-up Jewish intellectual cunts on the planet." According to the concert-goer, she also bragged that back home in Oregon, Ms. Love's dad had sold Ms. Ryder's dad $200 worth of "oregano." Ms. Love also coaxed Ms. Ryder to join her on "Long Black Veil" by pleading, "Be a good girl, let it out!"

Ms. Love spent a lot of time standing on tables and shedding clothes one piece at a time, until night's end found her in the stockings, underwear and bra with her slip half off–fiddling with her clothes while Rome burned.

–Rebecca Traister

Amazon.scam?

Amazon.com chairman Jeff Bezos wrote his first customer book review for the site on June 10, and wouldn't you know it, people found his critical skills, like, so-oo-o helpful.

As the media recently reported, Mr. Bezos gave a top rating of five stars to Wall Street Journal reporter G. Bruce Knecht's The Proving Ground –the true story of a, uh, perfect storm that sank several boats near Australia in 1998. ("Intense and disciplined," Mr. Bezos wrote.) As the press also reported, Mr. Knecht has a long and friendly relationship with Mr. Bezos.

Four other customers also gave Mr. Knecht's book a perfect rating, and all of them, it seems, were dead-on with their critical acclaim. Amazon.com allows visitors to its site to essentially review the reviewers by noting how helpful they found the customer critiques to be. And guess what? Amazon readers felt unanimously that all five reviews on the site were helpful.

And Mr. Bezos, it turns out, is a Michiko Kakutani in the rough: 18 out of 18 visitors to this particular section of the Web site took the time to note that they found the Amazon chief's 80-word review helpful.

To achieve that degree of unanimity on Amazon is a real rarity, and Mr. Bezos' infallibility seems to be particularly iron-clad. Indeed, when The Transom–using a form of quality control practiced by Tammany Hall–cast five votes indicating that Mr. Bezos' review was "not helpful," not a single one registered. (The site is updated every 24 hours, and the votes were cast in plenty of time to be counted.) Likewise, three reviews giving The Proving Ground a devastating one-star rating–also courtesy of The Transom! – failed to register on the site.

An Amazon.com spokesman did not return phone calls seeking an explanation for this phenomenon, which was not helpful.

–Ian Blecher

Angels and Insects at CFDA

"We're all still here," the jewelry designer Robert Lee Morris said to fashion publicist Judith Agisim during the "V.I.P." cocktail reception that preceded the Council of Fashion Designers of America's American Fashion Awards on June 14. Mr. Morris was just making small talk, but his comment resonated: For the 20th anniversary of the ceremony, much had been made of the infusion of "new" nominees, such as Bruce's Daphne Gutierrez and Nicole Noselli for the Perry Ellis Award for Womenswear, but what was more remarkable was the preponderance of fashion veterans on display.

The oft-heard cliché is that succeeding in fashion demands constant reinvention, but it also requires supernatural resilience. And a few laps around the V.I.P. tent and Avery Fisher Hall on June 14 would have convinced even the most skeptical scientist that should nuclear holocaust level this city, the cockroaches would be sharing the scorched earth with the fashion crowd.

In just 10 years, the fashionistas' universe had changed drastically, contracting and, like the new Presidential administration, becoming ever more corporate and conservative. It was hard not to feel a little unnerved when, during the ceremony, LVMH-Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton chief executive Bernard Arnault was given a special award (in absentia) for "his Globalization of the Business of Fashion with Style" and LVMH's myriad corporate logos–Guerlain, Fendi, Celine, Givenchy, Pommery, Mercier, etc.–were projected onto the stage like some Hubble Telescope shot of a strange new galaxy.

But the veterans in the V.I.P. tent had not only already adapted to these changes, like species of insects and reptiles that learn to blend into their surroundings, they had incorporated them into their personal style. Having lost nearly 60 pounds, Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld embodied corporate sleekness in his dark denim jeans and tuxedo jacket. "It's a fashion thing," Mr. Lagerfeld said of his transformation, although he also likened his weight loss to the story of "Phoenix," who "burned his nest."

Other refinements were more subtle. As OutKast's "So Fresh, and So Clean" played on the sound system, Vogue editor Anna Wintour stood smiling regally in the center of the tent, without her trademark sunglasses. She was flanked by her editor-at-large André Leon Talley, who had traded in his Napoleon capes and military wear for a classic tuxedo. Diane Von Furstenberg came married.

Meanwhile, preppy, pomaded bag designer Andy Spade seemed to be illustrating his evolutionary skills via juxtaposition: He arrived at the shindig trailing–by a good 20 feet–his wild-haired actor brother, David Spade. Later, David, who seemed to be preoccupied with his BlackBerry communicator all evening, could be heard telling one male fan: "Hanging out with David Spade might not be such a good idea."

Comedienne Sandra Bernhard, who M.C.'d the awards ceremony, took the stage in a glittering web-like Bob Mackie dress that bared a lot of skin, including her paunch. Ms. Bernhard spoke of going to Lotus with Laura Bush and Lynn Cheney. "They were doing blow," she said. Ms. Bernhard had some fun with the pansexuality of her audience. After declaring that Mr. Lagerfeld "looked so hot," Ms. Bernhard announced that she was going to "turn" the pony-tailed designer "straight." And riffing on the number of fashion people who have the hots for designer Tom Ford, Ms. Bernhard announced: "All the men line up on the right. All the women, go home."

As for Mr. Ford, there was some grumbling in the room after he nabbed the Womenswear Designer of the Year award for a single season of work on the Yves Saint Laurent line. Although Mr. Ford is American, he presides over European labels.

Then again, we're talking fashion, not logic. And Mr. Ford does have that glossy, bullet-proof quality, although not quite as impervious as Calvin Klein, who endured both a tofu pie thrown (at Mr. Lagerfeld) by an anti-fur demonstrator and, at 58 years old, the CFDA's Lifetime Achievement award. Interview editor Ingrid Sischy, who presented it to him, retitled the honorarium the "Halfway-Through-Your-Lifetime Achievement Award.'' Given the youth movement at the CFDA, Ms. Sischy could well be right.

–Frank DiGiacomo

Mystery Writer

It was muggy with writers on Wednesday, June 13, at Patti Sullivan's Boerum Hill bash for J.T. LeRoy's new book, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things . There were writers from Vanity Fair and Paper in the living room slurping runny brie and cold San Pellegrino. There was Ms. Sullivan herself, a screenwriter who had just finished adapting Mr. LeRoy's first book, Sarah, in collaboration with Good Will Hunting director Gus Van Sant. She was hiding in the air-conditioned study with Daniel Wolfe, author of Men Like Us: The GMHC Complete Guide to Gay Men's Sexual, Physical, and Emotional Well-Being .

The only writer missing was the enigmatic, 21-year-old Mr. LeRoy himself, who chooses not to leave his San Francisco home and prefers not to have his face photographed. "It's a party where no one knows each other, but everyone knows Jeremy [LeRoy]," Ms. Sullivan explained.

Despite his absence, Mr. LeRoy was keeping tabs on his flock of fans from across the country.

"I just spoke to him two minutes ago," confirmed Danny Pintauro, the former child-star of Who's The Boss? , who knew Mr. LeRoy through Mr. Van Sant. Mr. Pintauro patted his pocketed cell phone in a confident nod to his connection to Mr. LeRoy. Sure enough, back in the air-conditioned haven of her study, Ms. Sullivan was chatting by phone with Mr. LeRoy, letting him know that Bad Behavior author Mary Gaitskill had just arrived. The famously shy Ms. Gaitskill, sheathed in a tight red dress, grabbed the portable phone enthusiastically from Ms. Sullivan and gossiped with Mr. LeRoy in a corner until the batteries wore down.

A big bus pulled up outside the apartment, ready to transport the crowd to the Williamsburg bar where Mr. Pintauro and Ms. Gaitskill would be reading passages from The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things to a crowd of about 300.

Ms. Sullivan was back on the phone with Mr. LeRoy. "Jeremy, you're micromanaging your own party from the other coast!" she chided cheerfully, as she pulled up an image of him on her computer desk-top. "That's Jeremy," she mouthed, and Mr. Wolfe and two of Ms. Sullivan's neighbors crowded round the monitor with curiosity. The stark black-and-white photo showed Mr. LeRoy standing in a courtyard, bare legs and arms extended, cutting a dramatic figure with his longish hair falling down his back and his visage hidden as he looked heavenward. "It's a pretty picture," said Mr. Wolfe. "But I wouldn't mind actually seeing what his face looks like."

–R.T.

The Transom Also Hears….

Near the end of U2's June 17 show at Madison Square Garden, the band's lead singer, Bono, gave thanks to "The Almighty," but he also smartly expressed his gratitude to the thousands of mere mortals who had spent as much as $130 a ticket to insure that he and his bandmates could continue living rock-star lives. "Thanks for spending your hard-earned on a rock show," Bono told the crowd, which included Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner; his significant other, designer Matt Nye; MTV Networks chairman Tom Freston; hairdresser Frédéric Fekkai; and restaurateur Steve Hanson. "And thanks for giving us a great life."

– F.D.