Patrick Bateman, your dinner companion.

Some chefs long to cook for royalty; others aspire to Michelin stars. Freelance chef Francis Derby always dreamed of cooking a six-course dinner based on American Psycho.

Last Thursday, Williamsburg’s Nitehawk Cinema granted Mr. Derby his wish. The evening featured six dishes, prepared by Mr. Derby and served at perfectly timed intervals throughout a screening of the 2000 cult classic, matching the meals the characters eat in film.

The Transom settled into our seat around 7:30 p.m., in a theater largely occupied by well-dressed men in their late 20s. Mr. Derby spoke to his hungry audience before the screening—and the food service—began.

“What can I say?” he said. “I can say that the menu is ... the menu. And what I mean is that we can’t really do any substitutions tonight. If you’ve got a nut allergy, I’m sorry. Peanut soup is peanut soup.”

New York may be a city of foodies and fad diets, but everybody accepted Mr. Derby’s caveat without objection. These American Psycho devotees were ready for the full-on, as-advertised experience.

The Transom quickly discovered that, for a movie that’s not about food, the characters do a ton of eating—squid ink ravioli with lemongrass broth, goat cheese profiteroles and arugula Caesar salad. Next came peanut butter soup with smoked duck and mashed squash (a favorite of the crowd). Then there was sea urchin ceviche, followed by a cilantro crawfish gumbo and then a roasted hanger steak with béarnaise and potatoes. Finally, there was a delightful block of chocolate parfait, filled with hazelnuts and cherries.

We found ourselves sipping peanut butter soup while Patrick Bateman viciously murdered a homeless man. The sea urchin ceviche arrived during a prostitute’s murder by chainsaw.

The screening was followed by an ’80s-themed after party in the Nitehawk’s downstairs bar. While DJ Dow Jones spun Genesis tracks and guests sipped Coronas, Mr. Derby and his brother, Daniel—who helped prepare the meal—held court in a corner booth.

Mr. Derby explained to us why a movie about serial killing and Wall Street financiers who eat in fancy restaurants remains relevant in present-day Williamsburg.

“I think it’s definitely relevant, as far as the food scene, because the food scene was a little bit more elite back then,” he said. “[The general public] did not know as much about food. There were not as many foodies—there was no Food Network back then. So it was a very small group of very rich people that got to eat like that. Now everyone eats like that.”

Midway through his explanation, Mr. Derby was cut off by moviegoer Christian Mudgett.

“You combined two of my favorite things: food and that movie,” he said, reaching over the table to shake Mr. Derby’s hand enthusiastically. “So thank you.”

Don't get on Bret Easton Ellis' bad side ...

– Maybe? Hopefully? Last week, the American Psycho author went on Twitter to vent about Lindsay Lohan missing her ADR (basically, redubbing tracks when the audio was unintelligible) for their upcoming film, The Canyons. He threatened to sic Patrick Bateman on her, which could only end one way:


Meanwhile, BEE isn't answering our emails, and Lindsay hasn't been spotted all weekend. (Though that might be more about her dad calling in the LAPD for an intervention at her place in L.A. on Friday.)

– James Franco is "dating" Ashley Benson from Pretty Little Liars. We give it two weeks till he reveals that their relationship was just a performance art piece he was taping for an upcoming MoMA exhibit.

– Can someone explain to us how Ryan Lochte got a little huffy over Seth MacFarlane's impression of him on SNL, but then did a 30 Rock cameo of himself as a "sex idiot"?

– Joaquin Phoenix makes the best analogies ever. When Interview asked him how it feels to be on the awards circuit for his role in The Master, he responded:

It's a carrot, but it's the worst-tasting carrot I've ever tasted in my whole life. I don't want this carrot.

At the landing, visibly breathless and sweaty, their eyes lit up. They had entered the penthouse loft of Edward Scott Brady, the boyishly handsome world traveler, former classical cello virtuoso and “retired entrepreneur,” who was throwing a “Welcome Back Bash” to honor his return from his seventh trip around the globe.

(Jason Seiler)

Demonstrating a generous spirit, he had posted news of the party to Facebook and Guest of a Guest, luring in hundreds of friends and friends-of-friends, the more the merrier, and plying them with premium booze.

The apartment had all the trappings a wayfaring bachelor requires: the cello, a relic from Mr. Brady’s days playing at the Kennedy Center and Avery Fisher Hall; the African ceremonial masks, collected on his jaunts to the subcontinent; the large antique globe; the red-felt billiards table; the framed photos of Mr. Brady from his journeys.

It was, in the estimation of one female guest, “shit-tastic.”

“He’s, like, famous dude,” said Dmitry Astafev, a Russian entrepreneur who learned about the party through his girlfriend, who had been forwarded a Facebook invite and actually didn’t know Mr. Brady, either.

No matter. Sooner or later, it is safe to say, we will all know Mr. Brady.

“My boyfriend met him in the Hamptons,” said a blond-haired woman in her early 20s.

“I met him at Cyril’s,” claimed another woman.

The place was packed with bros in suit-coats and more babes in slinkier-than-thou dresses, in the appraisal of Justin Ross Lee, than one could shake a stick at.

“Unfortunately for these ladies, I’ve already shaken my stick at most of them,” he added with a wink.

Mr. Lee is an entrepreneur and shameless self-promoter, whose reputation, like Mr. Brady’s, preceded him.The day before, he had been the subject of of a comical New York Times Styles Section profile that depicted him, among other things, tussling with a doorman at The Dream Downtown and bragging about his first-class travels to the Middle East and Europe (“Jew Jetting,” as he proudly refers to it on his Facebook page). Mr. Lee hadn’t made Mr. Brady’s acquaintance either—not yet—though their meeting seemed preordained.

“Unlike me, Edward seems to be very well-liked and a lot less controversial, which means he sleeps better at night than I do,” Mr. Lee quipped.

Then Mr. Lee went over to greet Tabber Benedict, a slick-haired attorney whose khaki suit and classic looks gave him the appearance of an attendee at a convention of Patrick Bateman impersonators. If you squinted, he even resembled a clean shaven Clark Gable, or a more avuncular upgrade of reality TV-rake Scott Disick.

Edward Scott Brady (photo courtesy of Patrick McMullan)

As the two stopped to pose for a Guest of a Guest photographer, people in the crowd discussed the size of Mr. Brady’s loft. “This loft is, like, biggest loft in New York City,” said the impressionable Mr. Astafev.

Still, was one loft—whatever its size—big enough for all three men, for their grandiose personalities? The presence of the trio, all in one place, seemed to signal a small if meaningful shift in the city’s cultural history: After a long, dire post-Lehman cold snap, during which ostentatious displays of wealth, social bravado and dandyish fashion gambits were put into deep hibernation, something was stirring. Wall Street was no longer occupied. The impassioned battle cries of the stringy-haired sleeping-bag brigade, fulminating about the ample chasm separating the 99 and 1 percents, had faded. A socially ambitious lad no longer had to hide his Cartier cufflinks or Stubbs & Wootton slippers under a bushel. Suddenly it was okay again to venture into the limelight, okay to aspire to notoriety and social prominence.

Not everyone was ready to put it all out there, of course, but this was the vanguard. Call them the Gatsbabies: three dandyish gentlemen—but straight, mind you, very, very straight—who seemed to come out of nowhere. In this, they were not unlike the former James Gatz himself, on whom they unconsciously styled themselves, the emperor of West Egg, the subject of a million high school book reports and any minute now, a glistening slice of Oscar bait starring Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Baz Luhrmann.

“They’re products of the zeitgeist right now, and that zeitgeist is one of social media and ability to be your own kind of publicist,” said Rachelle Hruska, the founder of Guest of a Guest, which has helped cultivate the personas of both Mr. Lee and Mr. Brady.

“I think never before have people been able to kind of be their own publicist,” she added. “You can just get a Facebook page and just put basically anything you want on it about yourself all day long, and I think that’s what these three people excel at, is using social media to pump up their brand.”
Photographer Patrick McMullan agreed. “They want to be known, they want to be out there, they want to use their profiles to get more work and more girls,” he said, “and more fun.”
Mr. Brady stood amid the throng, holding a magnum of Cristal in each hand, his long hair slicked-back and his dark tailored suit hugging his athletic form. He greeted his female guests with a kiss on the cheek, often pausing to give a Guest of a Guest photographer a cocksure smirk as the ladies struck poses with him.

Like Gatsby, he seemed a little too good to be true. The open bar and free canapes for his hundreds of guests? The National Geographic-quality photographs? The crowd of beautiful and seemingly available women? Surely there was more to this guy than met the eye—or less. We turned to Mr. Benedict and asked if the scene was real or illusion.

“Being in the industry that you’re in, you of all people should understand,” he said. “Perception becomes reality.”

Tabber Benedict (photo courtesy of Patrick McMullan)

A few days after the party, The Observer received a terse text from Mr. Brady asking us to call him. We had been reaching out to those who RSVP’d for his party, asking how they knew him, and word had come back to him that we were snooping around. In a faltering, nervous tone, he said he was caught off guard by it.

We explained to him that this was just simple reporting. We were doing our due diligence.

“I guess I have to get comfortable with what this media thing is,” he said with a sigh.

We found his response curious, given his highly visible activities. We had seen snaps of him surrounded by a gang of Indian women in their native country, shooting the breeze with the Hmong on the China-Vietnam border, posing casually with a cheetah somewhere in the African Sahara. Downtown Magazine dubbed him “The Most Interesting Man in The World.” His life was like a Tina-era issue of Vanity Fair. Why so shy all of the sudden?

The son of Edward Alden Brady, a former ship captain and Chevron salesman, he was raised in the Larchmont section of Westchester. They shared a name—Mr. Brady goes by “Scott” to help differentiate himself—and a talent for the cello. They also shared a wanderlust: the elder Mr. Brady traveled extensively for work (“He’s been around the world on a boat four times,” the son recalled).

Mr. Brady’s talent for the cello landed him at Oberlin College’s Conservatory of Music, where he studied under Norman Fischer, a noted classical music teacher. The brawny Mr. Brady said he also played on the hockey team, eventually bowing out to protect his hands from potential injury.
When Mr. Fischer left Oberlin for a new position at Rice University in Texas, Mr. Brady followed him there and received the Fondren scholarship, earning his degree in in 1995.

At 25, he was awarded the 1998 Panasonic National Young Performers prize. At 27, he became one of the first Americans ever invited to a residency with a Russian orchestra at the Moscow Symphony. There, Mr. Brady endured 15-hour bus rides, eight-hour practices and a measly diet of canned food and scraps while somehow maintaining his sturdy physique (his fellow students, according to a 2000 Times article, nicknamed him Arnold Schwarzenegger).

The next year he returned to New York and started Musika, a private-music tutoring service that targeted wealthy areas in Westchester County and New Jersey. Musika grew from 15 teachers to 800 nationwide, becoming profitable enough for Mr. Brady to retire at the age of 33. He would not comment on Musika’s annual profits. “I can do pretty much whatever I want at this point,” he said. “I can travel, I’m able to lead the life I want to have.”

On Musika’s website, his biography elaborates on his “World Most Interesting Man” pedigree, noting that he is a member of Mensa, “an organization of people with high-level IQs.” (A spokeswoman for Mensa confirmed that an Edward Brady from New York was a member in 2003–2004, but said that his membership had since lapsed).

After his retirement, Mr. Brady set out to travel the world. His travel itinerary reads like a list of locations for a Bond film: playing polo in Abu Dhabi, surfing in Bocas del Toro, Panama; traveling across Madagascar in an ox-led transport.

The photos of his travels are sweeping and sensational in composition and tone, which has led some to believe that he hired a photographer to document his adventures.

“Everyone’s so curious about who’s taking the photographs,” he told us with a laugh. “I have a tripod, I have a Canon 5d Mark II, and there is a device called the Giga T Pro.” The device, he explained, acts as a remote release that can be activated from a quarter of a mile away. He uses it to capture himself in tender, social moments, like speaking with the female members of the Maasai tribe, which he then posts to his Facebook page.

“That’s why I identify with Scott,” said Mr. Lee, while seated in his Murray Heights office. “There’s no accidental postings. He’s methodical and I’m methodical.”

Perhaps, although that’s not the first term one might apply to Mr. Lee, who likes to say there are three things he never pays for: “parking, publicity and pussy.” His borscht-belt schtick and enormous bravado has brought him infamy (if Page Six still counts), sponsorships, and more publicity for Pretentious Pocket, his line of pocket squares, than might seem reasonable.
The day after his Times profile went online, he claimed he did three months worth of business in one day.

Justin Ross Lee (photo courtesy of Patrick McMullan)

“I mean, I had them working through the Sabbath,” Mr. Lee said, nodding toward a quiet and severe-looking intern who was typing on a MacBook air. “I said, ‘No shul without drool.’”
He admitted that he played up his feud with the doorman at The Dream Downtown to provide some material for Bob Morris, the Times reporter who was following him around for the evening.
“I never would have gone to The Dream Downtown,” he said. “I was going there because I had a New York Times reporter behind me. I set him up and he’s stupid enough to walk right into the lion’s den.” [UPDATE: After this story was published, Mr. Lee wrote to say that he "misspoke and was referring to the stupid doorman," not to Mr. Morris. "Bob is a brilliant writer and journalist whom I respect."]

Such behavior is all part of the schtick. So is the peacockish attire—stylish and garish, in equal measure—guaranteed to draw glances. The Gatsbabies are not particularly concerned with how others see them, as long as they’re being seen.

“People look at me and they’re like, ‘That spoiled prick,’” said Mr. Benedict, a 35-year-old attorney who recently launched his own practice, Benedict Advisors LLC. He didn’t seem too concerned about that. Although there is one oft-made comparison he can’t abide.

“Don’t tell him he looks like Scott Disick. He hates that,” said one female friend. We brought up his resemblance to Clark Gable, and the woman paused. “I don’t know what Clark Gable looks like,” she said flatly.

Mr. Benedict says he has earned his pinstripe C. Oliver Custom Suits. At Mr. Brady’s party, he recalled a hardscrabble childhood in upstate New York, working lousy jobs at grocery stores and McDonald’s throughout high school while being raised by a single mom.

“I literally was using foodstamps,” he said. “Justin never did that. He wore nice Brooks Brothers clothes that his parents bought him, you know what I mean?”

He won a scholarship to Colgate while working in the school library, then went to Columbia Law School and put in time at White & Case and The ACE Group before eventually launching his own firm.

Mr. Benedict was at one time engaged to a woman he met through taxi driving matchmaker Ahmed Ibrahim (their pairing was featured in a 2008 Wall Street Journal article). He said he adopted the name “Thomas Pink,” a pseudonym he uses primarily on Facebook, in the interest of personal safety—to protect him from his now ex-fiancée.

“Girls would post on my [Facebook] wall funny things, and she would take it the wrong way,” he recalled.

There was also the enterprising stalker who broke into his Upper East Side apartment as he was attending a charity event. “She called and said, ‘I’m inside your apartment, Tabber. It’s really nice! My friend Tyrone is here, who has brought me some party favors,’” he said.

Nonetheless, he noted that getting his face out there as much as possible—attending the Seeds of Africa charity event, co-hosting the First Annual Post-Walk Celebration to Benefit Breast Cancer Victims—helps to shore up business.

“You don’t meet people in your bathroom, or like on your sofa, watching Game of Thrones,” he said. “I meet people out, and that’s how I meet my clients.”

Mr. Benedict and Mr. Brady (photo courtesy of Patrick McMullan)

We were at 286 Spring Street for the launch party of TheCityStreet.com, an “exclusive” global directory of bankers founded by former investment banker Vana Koutsomitis. Mr. Benedict did not know Ms. Koutsomitis, but as the party lagged, he pulled her aside and offered to call a photographer from Patrick McMullan’s agency. Within 30 minutes, the photographer arrived, Ms. Koutsomitis happily posed with friends and colleagues, and the vibe picked up considerably.

“He sort of looks like Scott Disick,” Ms. Koutsomitis whispered to us.

The night was a success for Mr. Benedict. He had walked in virtually a stranger, and had left with a few business cards of prospective clients. However, as he has learned, the more public the face, the less understanding the girlfriend.

“The last time I checked, I want my lawyer to be as discreet and dorky and smart as possible, not some philandering playboy,” said Elizabeth Stockton Howard, his blue-blooded, Princeton-educated paramour.

When asked what it’s like dating an internet personality, she replied, “It’s awful! I think about breaking up with him everyday because of that!”

Edward Scott Brady does not have a girlfriend to take issue with his activities. But he blanches at the idea that he is aggressively self-promotional.

“I never think I am actively necessarily promoting myself,” he said, sipping from a beer at the rooftop bar at the James Hotel. “I am just doing what I want to do, and traveling, and that is what I am becoming, and what people see me as. Why am I am traveling around the world? Because I want to do it. I’m not thinking about packaging.”

“Edward Scott doesn’t have the same media focus that Justin does, obviously,” said Mr. Benedict. “That’s Justin’s life. I would of course argue that I have a different focus than Justin, too. My focus is on more of the high-end charity events, because that’s what I care about. Justin does a lot more club parties.”

Differences aside, all three of them owe a debt of gratitude to Scott Fitzgerald’s indelible playboy.
“That was one of my nicknames,” Mr. Brady admitted. “‘Gatsby, what are you doing tonight?’ Especially in the Hamptons.”

“We tickle people’s curiosity,” Mr. Lee said. He’s found that, as it was for Gatsby, a certain air of mystery can be useful. “The first question I get is ‘What do you really do?’” he said. “And that’s how I know I’ve garnished their attention, and that’s how I know it’s a three-pointer.”
drosen@observer.com

Patrick Bateman, 20 years ago.

So-called "American psycho" Patrick Bateman, who graduated from Harvard in 1984, would be 50 this year, if he were a person living in the real world; the novel commemorating his romp through New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s turns 20 this year. Anniversaries! So meaningful as a way to measure time, and the aspirations of the writer.

What would Mr. Bateman have been like? Still great-looking: that’s a given. We know that the attention Mr. Bateman paid his appearance, with a punishing morning regime (and, let’s be honest, he’d have gotten a bit of subtle Botox by now), was second only to the attention he paid to his complicated murder schemes.

He’d have kept his bare arms—only when running in the Park, but at all other times shod, still, despite changing trends, in Valentino—buff from the gym. He’d have stayed in his favorite city, New York, spending cocooned years enjoying what he called “all the toys”: the plane, the security detail, the murder dungeon. It’s a bit easy a joke to say he’d have worked at Goldman Sachs. He’d have worked at Goldman Sachs. He would use LinkedIn for business and Craigslist for, er, pleasure, but would find Facebook déclassé.

In an age of sensationalism fatigue, I miss the boost to a young, ambitious writer’s career that Mr. Bateman was able to provide solely by going on a gruesome killing spree in the guise of an alter persona.

Would he have married? It’s impossible to know. He was, after all, a fictional character, and that limits the selection of potential brides. Perhaps he’d have ended up with his contemporary, that ethereal blonde from The Secret History—after, that is, ill-fated liaisons with a Swedish girl detective, and a hip assistant in the New York rock world, and—just perhaps—the title character of a Tina Brown biography.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

It makes sense, then, that the Great White Way would come calling. The New York Post has the goods on the American Psycho musical, which will combine the source material's black and bloody satire with Broadway-styled numbers. The music is being penned by Duncan Sheik, the signer-songwriter behind the well-received Spring Awakening, and playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa is handling the book. 

"There are murders, and they are on stage in full view of the audience," Aguirre-Sacasa told the Post. "An ax and a chef's knife will be used. I think there's going to be a lot of blood."

"Obviously, it's not for the people who want to see 'Elf,'" Sheik added.

With the soundtrack still in development, let's ask Patrick Bateman which songs should be included. According to the film, Huey Lewis and the News "really came into their own, commercially and artistically," with their album Sports, in 1983. "Hip to be Square," on that album, is the band's "undisputed masterpiece." As for Whitney Houston, "'The Greatest Love of All' is one of the best, most powerful songs ever written about self-preservation and dignity." And Genesis' "Invisible Touch," off their album Duke, is "an epic meditation on intangibility."

And, of course, there's plenty more advice where that came from. We're so excited we're breaking out our Oliver Peoples glasses and making reservations at Dorsia!

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

Yes, it’s a scary thought, but that’s exactly what Mr. Ellis has attempted in Lunar Park, a bizarre fictional confession that skids briefly across the slick surface of the young “Bret Easton Ellis” and his quintessentially mid-80’s Brat Pack misbehavior (the phrase “vast apathy” occurs three times in the first dozen pages) before plunging into the goo of a lonely man’s uncharted midlife inscape. Appropriately, Mr. Ellis plays it as a horror story, complete with haunted house, demons, ghosts and “paranormal investigators.”

Bret’s adventures in introspection begin with a retreat to “Midland County”—to the suburbs, that is—a last-chance effort to escape the hideous torture of literary celebrity and a train-wreck heroin habit: “My wistful attitude about fame and drugs—the delight I took in feeling sorry for myself—had turned into a hard sadness, and the future no longer looked even remotely plausible.” So he “got clean” in May, and by July he’d moved in with and married Jayne Dennis, “a well-known actress” and mother of two children, one of whom—here’s a shocker—is Bret’s biological son, tardy fruit of an affair that blossomed briefly in the reckless 80’s.

Bret’s boy, Robby, is a surly 11-year-old (he’s also “passive and enervated,” thanks, perhaps, to his meds—“vast apathy” for a new millennium). Robby loathes his father, just as Bret loathed his own father, who died shortly before Robby was born. The Midland County “McMansion” that Bret and Jayne call home is on Elsinore Lane (think Hamlet); it’s Halloween. Anyone want to bet on the imminent apparition of the father’s ghost?

Papa Spook isn’t the only supernatural force on the block. There’s also Bret’s creative talent, which is so potent that Patrick Bateman, the yuppie serial killer from American Psycho, has materialized—in the suburbs!—and picked up, in “real life,” where he left off in the pages of that novel: killing methodically, maximizing the gore. A little monster Bret invented as a boy starts wreaking havoc, too; it has taken up residence in a bird doll that Bret bought for Jayne’s 6-year-old daughter. And all the while, boys about Robby’s age are vanishing without a trace ….

It’s tough coping with the paranormal when you’re falling off all sides of the wagon at once: Bret is drinking again; Bret is snorting coke (“Jay McInerney,” a.k.a. “Jayster,” appears on cue to sample “the Devil’s Dandruff” at a crowded Halloween party); Bret is inching his way toward an affair with a girl who’s writing her thesis on his “work” (when the student mentions his wife, he replies: “My wife? Hey, I’ve only been married three months. Give me a break. We’re still testing the waters—”).

Lurid confessions, Oedipal complications and supernatural incidents set in “the tiredness and the cliché of suburbia” and wrapped in a meta-fiction designed (designated?) to provoke contemplation of the writer’s fearsome imaginative power and its mysterious, possibly sinister origins—I guess Lunar Park must be the product of some heavy-duty brainstorming. It’s still dead on the page.

Affectless prose, like salt flats minus the tang, is an Ellis specialty; he does deadpan with the best. Less Than Zero (1985), big, horrifying chunks of American Psycho (a book good enough to deserve the extreme animosity it aroused), the first 150 pages of Glamorama (1999)—like it or not, these are examples of tightly controlled, rigorously understated writing. Lunar Park is a different kind of flat: exhausted and empty.

The first chapter (the cleverly fictionalized Brat Pack chronicles, condensed to 25 pages) zips along nicely, but already at the Halloween party, the slowdown—the sagging—is worrisomely apparent. Halfway through the novel, I gave up hoping that I’d come across a single stinging turn of phrase or any scene sharp enough to make me tense. Nothing frightening, nothing funny, just a sad, lazy wallow somewhere in between.

Here’s a typical passage. Bret, who’s been drinking, has been told by a man named Kimball that Patrick Bateman is back—either that, or an ersatz Bateman is treating himself to a little copycat carnage:

“I had gotten up, and my knees were shaking …. The room was now filled with despair, torrents of it. I knew even then, half-drunk on vodka, sobering up at a rapid pace, that Kimball would not be able to help anyone and that more crime scenes would be darkened with blood. Fear kept bolting me upright. I suddenly realized that I was straining not to defecate. I had to grip the desk for support. Kimball stood uneasily beside me. I was of no use at that point.”

It’s not easy to see how the author of those desperately lame sentences could have created a plausible character, let alone one who could come back to life, 15 years post-publication, and darken a crime scene with blood.

So when Bret insists that the appallingly convincing American Psycho was not actually his fault, I’m almost ready to believe him. “Something else wrote that book,” he tells himself. Sure, he started it (“I had planned to base Patrick Bateman on my father”), but “someone—something—else took over …. I would often black out for hours at a time only to realize that another ten pages had been scrawled out.” This “haunting” went on, he confides, “during the three years it took to complete the novel.”

A pity that Mr. Ellis wasn’t similarly haunted when he wrote Lunar Park.

Adam Begley is the books editor of The Observer.

Chloë Sevigny's brother has been busy this fall, spinning at nightclubs, fashion events and parties to promote things like Sephora cosmetics and Bombay gin. Mr. Sevigny is so ubiquitous it makes one wonder if he could be the next Mark Ronson, the city's current hottest D.J., a 27-year-old who spins everywhere from downtown clubs to a recent disco-filled night at the Whitney Museum.

Mr. Sevigny says he is uneasy about his budding status. Like many on-the-make young Manhattanites, Mr. Sevigny yearns for a taste of fame. But what happens if fame plays a trick on you-if you get to be a boldface name, but not because of your deepest talents or identity or ambition? What happens if your 15 minutes come because you can spin records and have a famous sister? Do you keep quiet and milk the fame, or do you walk away?

What's a guy to do?

"I never really wanted to be a D.J.," Mr. Sevigny said. "Eight months ago, I would never have thought it. It was really weird. I'm still adjusting to it. Imagine if you were a D.J. in two months-you're as far away from it right now as I was."

He was fidgeting and smoking in a booth at Time Cafe on Lafayette Street. Tall and lanky, he was wearing a tweed jacket, a blue Oxford button-down and khakis. He has his sister's blue eyes, but without her hauntingly knowing air.

Up until this past spring, Mr. Sevigny was working for Dana Giachetto, the flamboyant money manager whose firm, the Cassandra Group, catered to A-list movie stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon. But as everyone knows by now, in March the Cassandra Group was immolated in a blaze of client defections, bad press and a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation. Mr. Giachetto was caught trying to leave the country and jailed. Mr. Sevigny was very much out of a job.

While figuring out what to do next, he D.J.'d at the birthday party of a friend who had noticed that Mr. Sevigny had a lot of cool records in his apartment. Next he was asked to D.J. at Serena, a lounge under the Chelsea Hotel, then at a boutique party for an English fashion house. "It ended up being a great party where a lot of people danced, had a great time," he said. "Hence, recommendations." By August, his phone was ringing a lot.

He pushed away his half-eaten cheeseburger. "It's the funniest thing," he said. "I'm sitting here doing an interview. You know, six months ago I was behind a desk. A real, regular life. It's a New York story, that's for sure. Would not happen anywhere else. It's so much tied into the whole Hollywood thing. Besides my sister, there was the whole Dana thing. You could think of it as a negative thing. Everything all at once produced more. My sister gets nominated for an Oscar, Dana gets busted and then all of a sudden I'm a D.J. It makes it all the more interesting."

The year 2000 has been good to Mr. Sevigny. He's got a nice apartment with a big kitchen and high ceilings in the East Village. He owns stocks and has been watching crude oil closely. He's not a millionaire: He rides the subway, but takes out a minimum of $200 from A.T.M.'s. He sleeps late and dates a tall, blond, cream-skinned woman named Bay Garnett, whose father, Andy Garnett, was described by The New York Times as "a member of the English aristocracy." Manhattan File magazine recently named Mr. Sevigny among the 100 most-wanted bachelors in Manhattan.

Rather than the usual techno and hip-hop fare, Mr. Sevigny likes to play songs by the Sex Pistols and New York Dolls, as well as hard-rock hits from the 70's and 80's. "People are trying to make it uncool to like rock 'n' roll," he said. "Like you're not hip if you're not into techno."

Besides not being a technical virtuoso-he was once witnessed having trouble with the audio knobs at Spa-Mr. Sevigny has an unapologetically amateurish style: He's an anti-D.J. D.J. He might play four Ramones songs in a row, or play 45 seconds of a crowd cheering at a Guns N' Roses concert, or just stop a song in the middle and flip over the record. Mr. Sevigny's fee is somewhere more than $5,000 a night, he said.

"I say every day, 'Oh my God, I would never have been able to have done this,'" Mr. Sevigny said. "It's similar to that of a member of a band or a successful artist. Thank God I make enough money to really enjoy my off time. I work two days a week! Now it's turned into snowboarding season, and hopefully I'll get a lot of that in. Maybe I'll get some film festival jobs. That's the great thing as a D.J., it's kind of like a rock band to some extent. If you can hook up with a gig at Sundance, you're flown there and you go and hang. Mark Ronson is, like, flown around on Tommy Hilfiger's private jet."

"There's a lot more money on Wall Street than this, man!" he said. Still, he added, "at the top end of D.J.-ing, some of these guys are making millions. In Europe, D.J.'s are huge. Most people say that America's really lagging behind. I'm sure there would be tons of D.J.'s laughing at my rates. Like, 'That's nothing! Are you kidding me?' Because they're making hundreds of thousands a night for some parties, for spinning records."

He knows that his last name has worked in his favor. On a recent night, on his way to spin at Spa, he remarked, "The Sevigny name might conjure up my sister, who could possibly stop by. And you'd be surprised what they pay some actresses to show up at parties."

"I don't know if he'd be doing it if there wasn't a draw on the last name," said Jake Spitz, a publicist for Spa.

Later that night, at 3 a.m., Mr. Sevigny was in the D.J. booth at Spa with his headphones on, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. His sister was there, looking frazzled, overwhelmed and spectacular.

About 75 people were cutting the rug to AC/DC's "Back in Black." Josie Novack, a personal trainer in a miniskirt, was by the dance floor and not dancing.

"This music sucks," she said. "It's too aggressive, too antagonistic. It's too much of the same stuff. People forget about the feeling . It's way detached. Negative, pumping, angry energy-not sensual. It's working if you want people to leave ."

A D.J. and musician named Lex Marsh, who was standing by a sullen-looking Parker Posey, the actress, was also left cold. "It's obvious," he said of the music. "Old rock hits. Crowd pleasing. No feeling to it. The thing is to set a mood, and this guy has no idea how to get a mood. He's here because of his sister. I like his sister, she's cool, but I can't think why else he's here, except he has that name."

But Mr. Sevigny has his fans. On another night, he was spinning at Eugene on West 22nd Street. Sophie Dahl, a model and Roald Dahl's granddaughter, was there. The actress Liv Tyler was dancing with a girlfriend. Mr. Sevigny was playing a Blondie song. Nigel Mogg, a rock musician with a rooster haircut, said, "He's doing a great job. If your personal taste can translate to a lot of other people's taste, you're doing a good job. Some people try to be too hip and they play stuff that you don't know. I hate techno, man. The thing about techno is, do people actually go home and listen to that in their house? It takes balls to play AC/DC and Blondie and New Order and the Cure."

Another fan is Moby, the techno star, who also grew up in Darien.

"I love the way paul sevigny dj's," Moby said via e-mail. "It's funny cos i've known paul and chloe since forever. i remember little chloe as a 12 year old ingenue."

Mr. Sevigny said that Moby's approval meant something to him. "That was exciting for me because here's a guy with a No. 1 album," he said. "It was one of the first things that legitimized me to myself. Because all the time people come up and tell you you suck."

World's Coolest Sis

Paul Sevigny was born in Philadelphia and raised in Darien, Conn. His mother was a Grace Kelly–like beauty and his father, who died in 1995, was an artist. Young Paul was big into skateboarding and had a nine-foot ramp in his backyard. "Sev" headed into Manhattan on Sundays for punk-rock matinee shows at CBGB's. His little sister Chloë idolized him. "She would do a lot of the same things I would do or whatever," he said. At 17, Mr. Sevigny went to boarding school, then to college in South Carolina, where he majored in art. "I basically went to the school to sail; they have a great sailing team," he said.

In 1994, The New Yorker published an article by Jay McInerney which declared that Chloë Sevigny, then 19, was "the coolest girl in the world." Miss Sevigny was doing things like interning at Sassy magazine, babysitting for the rock band Sonic Youth and befriending a Beastie Boy. Soon she met filmmaker Harmony Korine in Washington Square Park and was cast in the controversial Larry Clark movie Kids , for which Mr. Korine wrote the screenplay. While racking up more movies, she also mastered that rare art of embodying cool while mocking the idea of cool at the same time.

I asked Mr. Sevigny about his sister's fame. "There's a downside for her," he said. "She still hasn't made that much money, so as far as that's concerned, it's not like she's set up for the rest of her life. You'd imagine for somebody on the cover of every magazine in the country it would be, but it's not the way it is with Chloë. There's a tremendous amount of pressure on a girl her age; we're talking about a lot of money, you know, some decisions-she turned down over $3 million worth of shit last year."

Does he advise his sister?

"Yes, she'll usually run everything by me, or the majority, if it's a big thing," he said. "I guess a brother and a sister always do. We're close, and since our father died, that makes it even closer."

While his sister was picking up heat in Hollywood, Mr. Sevigny was doing Wall Street: runner, clerk, trader at "a small boutique." Last year he began dating Emma Forrest, a 23-year-old British journalist who wrote a novel called Namedropper . "I don't really speak to him anymore," Ms. Forrest said. "There's no animosity, but I keep hearing about him and reading about him being this super-hip cool guy. And what I liked so much about him was, we were just complete dorks. He was the only person I ever met who was a bigger dork than I. We would just sit around and talk in baby voices and pretend to be Furbies, the child toy, the little furry ball that talks. We'd pretend to be Pikachu from Pokémon. And he was really great to me. I met him like a week after I moved to New York from England, and he was really my mom for a year."

But there were problems. "I'm not a very stable person and neither is he, and two crazy people don't make a sane one," Ms. Forrest said, laughing. "He'd be saying what an incredible human being George Bush Sr. was, and I'd just burst into tears. And I'd be in floods of tears as he'd go on to say that George W. should be President by virtue of being George Bush's son."

Another recurring issue was apparently Bret Easton Ellis' 1991 novel American Psycho, whose protagonist, Patrick Bateman, is a well-dressed serial killer. "It's his favorite book," Ms. Forrest said. "He would say, 'I am Patrick Bateman.' I would say, 'You mean you want to torture and murder women?' and he would say, 'No, I don't mean that.' I would say, 'Which part of Patrick Bateman do you relate to?' He never managed to explain that one. I remember I said, 'You know it's a satire,' and he snorted and said, 'You just don't understand it.' He just worships that book."

(Coincidentally, sister Chloë played Bateman's secretary and near-victim in this year's movie version of the book.)

Things didn't work out with Ms. Forrest. But then Mr. Sevigny landed his dream job-with the luckless Mr. Giachetto.

"People had been telling me about Dana for like two years," Mr. Sevigny said. "'Oh, Dana , Dana, Dana, you gotta meet Dana, Dana's making me tons of money.' I didn't really pay much attention. Then, all of a sudden, Chase gives him $100 million. I was like, 'Maybe I should meet Dana.'"

He was there for two months. "Imagine that," he said. "I was there when the shit hit the fan."

On a recent Saturday night, Mr. Sevigny sat down for pasta at an East Village restaurant before a night of doing laundry. He was wearing a snug white turtleneck sweater, tightish blue jeans and white tennis shoes by Marc Jacobs. He had just returned from a D.J. job at a Boston department store. In exchange for three hours of playing records, Surface magazine paid his fee and put him and three friends up at a four-star hotel.

"It's starting to become too much like a real job, which isn't really what it should be," he said. "It's working out so well that it'd be nice to keep doing it for a while, but you also realize how fragile the whole thing could be. And if I continue to become more and more of a D.J.-I certainly don't want to be a D.J. a couple of years from now. I don't know if I prefer to be a D.J. a year from now."

In fact, a few days after being interviewed, Mr. Sevigny said he was getting out of the D.J. business altogether. "It's just not the right thing for me," he said. He added that he plans to spin records just one night a week, and that he would soon start work at Cheap Date magazine, which he called an "anti-fashion fashion magazine." Cheap Date is edited by his girlfriend, Ms. Garnett, and written largely by sons and daughters of the wealthy. Contributors include Harmony Korine, who wrote the screenplay for Kids, the film that helped make Chloë Sevigny famous.

Leonardo DiCaprio could have been bringing more than his flawless skin to this scene. Like Patrick Bateman, the idea of Leonardo DiCaprio is also an abstraction, a grand illusion born with his role in 1996's Romeo and Juliet and monstrously amplified by the success of Titanic , a film that has grossed more than $500 million in North America alone and remains among the top-10 box office earners six months after its release.

Mr. DiCaprio's friends insist that the actor's Titanic -inflated image has little to do with the actual him. "Leo lives his life. He does not live the perception of his life," said one.

Still, Mr. DiCaprio, who cares enough about the public's perception of him to employ two public relations firms–Ken Sunshine Consultants Inc. in New York and BWR in Los Angeles–is responsible for the care and maintenance of his image. And in May, while the actor was dating models and hanging out in Manhattan nightclubs and at the Mercer hotel, his handlers momentarily lost control of that image in the gale-force conditions of the Cannes Film Festival media frenzy.

It was there that news broke that Mr. DiCaprio was attached to star in American Psycho , based on a press release issued by one of the film's producers, Lions Gate, that included a statement from Mr. DiCaprio's manager, Rick Yorn, that said: "Leo is extremely excited about this script and has decided to make it a priority." Two weeks later, Mr. Yorn and Mr. DiCaprio's publicists, Ken Sunshine and Cindy Guagenti, resembled a Cirque du Soleil contortionist act as they writhed and backflipped bicoastally, announcing that their client had not signed to play to play Patrick Bateman.

What had prompted the about-face? One, a spate of bad press that suggested Mr. DiCaprio's attachment had resulted in the ejection of Ms. Harron as the director and actor Christian Bale as Bateman. Two, that the $21 million that Lions Gate had offered him for a role in what was originally meant to be a $6 million film made a mockery of independent filmmaking. And three–most important to the keepers (and benefactees) of Leonardo's image–that his portrayal of a yuppie monster who likes to torture and kill women would frighten off the massive fan base of teenage girls whose repeated viewing of Titanic has kept the movie alive at the box office.

Mr. DiCaprio's handlers quickly moved to dispel those notions and let it be known that their client was not only not committed to the film, but that he was unaware of Ms. Harron's and Mr. Bale's displacement. In that brief moment when the actor's camp did not have control of the situation, Mr. DiCaprio, who had turned himself into a formidable leading man via his performances in Romeo and Juliet and Titanic , suddenly looked his age. Which is all of 23.

Two weeks later, the gates are back down at the DiCaprio compound. Mr. Yorn did not return phone calls and Mr. Sunshine (who said that his client was unavailable for comment) was laying the groundwork for whatever script Mr. DiCaprio chose next. "Judge him on his body of work, not on one movie," he said. Mr. Sunshine's self-described role as "media consultant" for Mr. DiCaprio, which he has held for about two months, comes by way of Cuba and his friendship with Dana Giacchetto and Jeffrey Sachs, partners in the Cassandra Group, an investment company that helps grow the millions made by Mr. DiCaprio and other high-income earners. Apparently, Mr. DiCaprio was in the Cassandra Group's offices when he spied a picture of Messrs. Sunshine and Sachs standing with Cuba's jefe , Fidel Castro. The actor let it be known that he was interested in visiting the island. Two months later, Mr. Sunshine and friends had arranged for Mr. DiCaprio, along with a group that included his father George DiCaprio and singer Alanis Morrisette, to take part in a "cultural exchange." Mr. Sunshine bonded with Papa DiCaprio and came on board.

Mr. DiCaprio is said to be considering American Psycho along with a number of other films, including an adaptation of John Irving's The Cider House Rules . The Transom also hears that the young actor recently met with Gummo director Harmony Korine and his producer, Cary Woods, about their next untitled project. (Neither Mr. Korine nor Mr. Woods could be reached for comment.)

Mr. DiCaprio's interest in American Psycho (and that he may be talking to Mr. Korine) suggests that he is interested in taking a role that's far, far removed from Titanic 's Jack Dawson. Mr. Ellis, who said he does not know Mr. DiCaprio, nevertheless said that his "grapevine" tells him that "that's definitely one of the reasons" that the actor is interested in the project. "I don't think he's ever cared what people thought about his role choices. I don't think he's someone who's really grooming himself for a certain leading-man stardom."

It is not a question of his acting talent, which is considerable, but rather some of Mr. DiCaprio's eclectic project choices, such as his portrayal of Arthur Rimbaud in Eclipse .

"Will teenage girls be traumatized by this movie? It's the unspoken question," said Mr. Ellis. "I don't think so."

Americans, however, are still queasy about seeing their big screen-idol men as psycho killers (neither Mr. Caine nor Mr. Hopkins was overwhelmed with romantic lead roles when they took their chances with those two films). While Mr. DiCaprio had not ruled out American Psycho as his next film at press time, industry oddsmakers predicted that Mr. DiCaprio would not make the film.

While it does contain some scenes that mix sex and violence–including one where Bateman bloodies himself as he performs oral sex on a woman–the script to American Psycho , a copy of which the Transom obtained, is hardly the torturefest that Mr. Ellis' book was. (One of Bateman's sexual conquests does get it with a chain saw, however, after seeing a couple of skinned women in the bachelor's closet.)

Instead, Ms. Harron and her writing partner have streamlined the movie as a social satire of Manhattan in the killer 80's, one that pays particular attention to the sadomasochistic rituals of dining at restaurants-of-the-moment that serve vertical food. Designer labels (Valentino, Giorgio Armani) and odd food combinations ("swordfish meatloaf with onion marmalade," "goat cheese profiteroles") abound, as does Bateman's love of bad music: Phil Collins-era Genesis, Huey Lewis and the News, Kenny G. And, in one scene, Bateman is driven to rage when his brand-new business cards turn out to be chopped liver compared to those of his yuppie colleagues. (Guess who his next victim is?)

While much of the violence is implied, Bateman's character does get to spout some misogynistic dialogue. "You are a fucking ugly bitch; I want to stab to death and then play around with your blood," he says to one bartender who has angered him. To his pals, he quotes the serial killer Ed Gein (whom one friend mistakenly thinks is the maître d' at Canal Bar): "When I see a pretty girl walking down the street, I think two things. One part of me wants to take her out and talk to her and be real nice and sweet and treat her right," he says. "The other part wonders what her head would look like on a stick."

Then there is a scene in which Bateman masturbates while making crank calls. Getting one woman on the phone, he shouts. "I'm a corporate raider. I orchestrate hostile takeovers. What do you think of that? (makes disgusting sucking noises and grunts) Huh, bitch?"

That Mr. DiCaprio was drawn to Ms. Harron's and Ms. Turner's script is interesting on two accounts. For one, the dialogue, while presented in the framework of a satire, sounds awfully similar to the largely improvised dialogue that Mr. DiCaprio spouts in Don's Plum , an experimental picture that he made with some friends about three years before Titanic . (Sample: "Get out of here, you slut bitch!", "I'll fucking throw a bottle at your face, you goddamn whore!") The film, which The Transom has seen, is damn near unreleasable, and a $10 million lawsuit filed in Los Angeles charges that Mr. DiCaprio and another actor are trying to block distribution of the film. Replied Mr. Sunshine: "Of all the preposterous things that I encounter vis-à-vis Mr. DiCaprio, this ranks right at the top of the list.

Bret Easton Ellis could certainly impart to Mr. DiCaprio what the consequences could be if the actor decides to take the American Psycho role. Simon & Schuster, the original publisher of the novel, dropped the book when it and its author were assailed by Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women and other feminist groups. "It was not fun," said Mr. Ellis, who for several years suffered a subsequent dent in his literary career.

That Mr. DiCaprio would even consider American Psycho , while Titanic is still playing in theaters, is "a really great subplot in this narrative," said Mr. Ellis. "They expect him to be doing Titanic II .… Of all that people that might want to commit to something like [ American Psycho ], it's him."

A decision to play Patrick Bateman could certainly be spun as a brave choice on Mr. DiCaprio's part. But that will be harder in the wake of all the waffling that followed Lion's Gate's announcement. There is a saying that he who hesitates is lost. Regardless of who was making the decisions in Mr. DiCaprio's camp, in that moment of hesitation, the actor's heretofore seamless image of quiet confidence veered into self-consciousness.

And this is not the first time Mr. DiCaprio has hesitated. At one point he was slated to play Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights , but dropped out about two months before filming began and the role went to his Basketball Diaries co-star Mark Wahlberg. Most recently, when he dragged his feet about taking the lead role in the film adaptation of All the Pretty Horses , directed by Billy Bob Thornton, Matt Damon's agents grabbed the role for their client.

In the wake of the brouhaha over whether Mr. DiCaprio was committed to American Psycho , it is interesting to note that none of the producers involved with the project–producers hoping to still seal a deal with Mr. DiCaprio–would discuss for the record what happened. It is a measure of Mr. DiCaprio's considerable power in the business. If only that power could have been wielded better in advance. Mr. Yorn is respected as a savvy operator in his industry, and some observers said this could have happened to anyone. Others wondered if he is being stretched thin by his star client. "You can't talk to anyone else at that agency [Industry Entertainment] about Leo," said one source close to the negotiations for American Psycho . "If you've got one guy dealing with this onslaught, I feel sorry for him. I think Rick is just scrambling. He's overwhelmed by some of the most amazing offers in the history of the film business."

Mr. Sunshine said of Mr. Yorn, "I couldn't have hoped for the quarterback of our team to be functioning any better."

Another independent film player casts his sympathy vote for Mr. DiCaprio. "There's no level of paranoia that could protect him from the insanity that exists out there."

Then again, Mr. DiCaprio can take comfort in what one industry observer who has followed the actor's career calls the rule of threes. "After you have one big success, you're allowed to do three of anything," said the source. "Three bad films. Three money-losers." Added this person: "He could do two American Psycho s and still have a buffer."