Fran Lebowitz, friend to the flawed and famous, brings her NY wit to Australia

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Fran Lebowitz, friend to the flawed and famous, brings her NY wit to Australia

The modern-day Dorothy Parker is shocked by the US sex scandal - but not for the reasons you might think.

By Andrew Purcell
Updated

Fran Lebowitz is dreading her trip to Australia. On stage at Melbourne's Athenaeum Theatre and the Sydney Opera House she'll be in her element, fielding questions without notes: the problem is getting there.

"It's a thousand-hour flight," she says. "I've been invited numerous times, and I've always said 'I smoke. I can't go that long without smoking. It's out of the question. They will take me off the plane in handcuffs."'

‘‘For a woman my age, the idea that this is happening is astonishing,'' says Fran Lebowitz of the sex scandal engulfing Hollywood.

‘‘For a woman my age, the idea that this is happening is astonishing,'' says Fran Lebowitz of the sex scandal engulfing Hollywood.Credit: Brigitte Lacombe

Maintaining a two-pack-a-day habit in New York requires dedication, as smoking is banned in parks, on beaches, in pedestrian plazas and near hospitals, in addition to every indoor public space. Inevitably, it involves a lot of skulking in doorways. As Lebowitz does not own a mobile phone, she skulks with her head up and her eyes open, observing the city through trails of Marlboro Light smoke.

Before the interview, she stole a last gasp on North End Avenue, under the towering glass blocks of Battery Park City, a vertical suburb on the edge of downtown Manhattan that, naturally, she hates. "I find it very depressing," she says. "They're all finance people, probably, because that's New York now."

Fran Lebowitz in 2013.

Fran Lebowitz in 2013. Credit: JULIE GLASSBERG

Her chosen meeting place, next door to a restaurant she'll dine in when we're done, is the lobby bar of the Conrad Hotel. Tonight's rate is $459 for a suite.

Lebowitz arrived in New York in 1968 as a high school kick-out (expelled for "non-specific surliness") and met a circle of fabulously erudite and discerning friends almost the instant she stepped off the bus. A childhood in Morristown, New Jersey, where her parents owned a furniture shop, had shown her the life she didn't want, and she grabbed the one she did with both hands.

She never had money, and lived in squalor, but that was fine. She drove a taxi, cleaned apartments, and sold belts on street corners and advertising in magazines. Mostly, she read books, talked about art and life and politics, and stayed up all night, sober, having given up all drugs but cigarettes at 19. By 21, she had a column in Andy Warhol's Interview magazine.

Her first book, Metropolitan Life, was published in 1978, to great acclaim, including a New York Times review that cemented her reputation as a modern-day Dorothy Parker. "To a base of Huck Finn, add some Lenny Bruce and Oscar Wilde and Alexis de Tocqueville, a dash of cab driver, an assortment of puns, minced jargon, and top it off with smarty-pants. Serve without whine," wrote critic John Leonard. "This is the New York style, and I for one am glad that it survives and prospers because otherwise we might as well grow moss in unsurprising Omaha."

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A big smoker, Fran Lebowitz fears the "1000-hour flight" to Australia.

A big smoker, Fran Lebowitz fears the "1000-hour flight" to Australia.Credit: Brigitte Lacombe

A second slim volume, Social Studies, was published three years later, but since the early 1980s, Lebowitz has primarily dispensed her wit in person, bon mot by bon mot, often in the company of more famous friends and always with fine comic timing. "Here's the thing," she begins, sucking on an anecdote or epigram, then serving it with relish.

At 67, she is in demand at universities and festivals and, increasingly, wakes and funerals. "No one dies in New York without my speaking," she recently told the New York Times. "That's how I know I'm immortal. Who would speak at all those services without me?"

Young people often tell her they wish they'd lived in Manhattan in the 1970s, when Warhol held court in the back room of Max's Kansas City and punk and new wave exploded downtown just as hip-hop took off in the Bronx. She's thought about whether her 20s were so great simply because she was carefree, or because the city itself was better, and concluded it must have been, because she certainly didn't pine for the 1930s.

"You really didn't need that much money, and I think that is a tremendous thing for a city," she says. "I wrote a lot, but mostly we hung around. I think that's very important to a city: idleness. It's impossible to be idle here now, unless you're a zillionaire. It's a terrible thing for the culture. The amount of time kids have to work these days is detrimental to the arts.

Also, the orgies in New York were unimaginable in the '70s. It was before AIDS …

Fran Lebowitz

"Also, the orgies in New York were unimaginable in the '70s. It was before AIDS … For people who were straight there was the pill. We thought there was no such thing as too much sex. We thought that it was good for you, like orange juice."

Although Lebowitz has a "preference for women and girls," she has never come out. She talks about gay rights as an insider, albeit one who thinks marriage equality is an odd goal for a liberation movement and once remarked that she's never been in a relationship longer than six months because she doesn't want to trade boredom for contempt.

Lately, she has watched in fascination as a parade of male colleagues have been exposed as chauvinists and sexual abusers. "I know, personally, almost every one of these men," she says, including Harvey Weinstein, news presenters Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose, Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic and comedian Louis CK.

"For a woman my age, the idea that this is happening is astonishing. No one ever thought that this would happen," she says. That men would be exposed? "Or if they were exposed, that anyone would care. So it's shocking, in a way: we could never imagine such a thing would happen."

In February, Variety reported that she had bought a one-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment in Chelsea for $US3.1 million ($4.1 million). A question about moving house is an opportunity to tell her New York real estate story, lamenting her bad timing and bad judgment in property deals over the years.

But hang on, haven't you just bought a $3 million flat? "My whole life, I lived in apartments I could afford. Naturally, the apartment I can't afford is much nicer," she says. "Here's what I was thinking: 'Fran, you're 66 years old. You smoke two packs of cigarettes a day and Donald Trump is the president. What are the chances that you'll live long enough to have to pay for this apartment? Almost zero'."

This, in turn, becomes an anecdote about her terror of nuclear annihilation as a child, and how she stashed a can of tuna, a jar of water and a stack of Nancy Drew books (but no can opener) in the crawl space under her family home. She still has her copies of those teenage detective novels among the 11,000 books at her flat, arranged by category, then alphabetically by author, in hardwood cases with glass doors.

Lebowitz is at her most entertaining like this, roaming from one non-sequitur to the next. In Martin Scorsese's 2010 documentary about her, Public Speaking, he basically sets the camera up and sets her off, and trusts that her wit and charisma will carry the film.

She has no idea what she'll talk about in Australia, which is the way she likes it, although for the last year, nine out of 10 questions from the audience have been about Trump. "It's so grotesque. It's like a science fiction movie. Especially for New Yorkers," she says. "Here, he's so hated, and has always been hated: he was hated when he was a regular huckster."

This hatred blinded her to the possibility that he might win the presidential election. Now that he has, she worries the damage cannot be undone. "Even if tomorrow morning, every Republican in Congress and in the Oval Office evaporated and were replaced by left-wing geniuses, he's already destroyed aspects of democracy that I don't believe are reparable."

Lebowitz has been joking about her "writer's blockade" since the late '80s. Exterior Signs of Wealth, a novel, was first promised to her publisher in 1981. Progress, an essay collection, was trailed in the late '90s, and an excerpt was printed in Vanity Fair in 2004. It's listed in the Kindle store as having been published in 2009, but does not, in fact, exist in any form but a hundred or so handwritten pages in a drawer.

"Clearly, there's something wrong with me. What it is, I do not know," she offers. Is this a pose by now, I wonder? The role of the fabulous cultural critic, too busy socialising to jot down her aphorisms, has been kind to her, after all. "I would like to write another book, genuinely. It's probably the thing I'm most foolishly optimistic about," she insists. For now, if you'd like to hear her hold forth you'll have to buy a ticket, or sit next to her on a long plane trip.

Fran Lebowitz is at Melbourne's Athenaeum Theatre on March 2 and the Sydney Opera House in two events for All About Women on March 4. Extra tickets for the Wheeler Centre event in Melbourne are on sale today (December 16) for $35, or $25 concession. Sydney tickets from $29. wheelercentre.com, sydneyoperahouse.com

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