Photo courtesy of Steven Barclay Agency

October 27, 1950– Frances Ann Lebowitz:

“I am so tired of hearing about what the Trump voters want. I don’t care what they want. How’s that? And you know what? We do know what they want. They want a Confederate flag. We all know what this is about. I’m tired of hearing people, particularly men, explain to me what Hillary Clinton did wrong. Donald Trump didn’t win because he did something right; he won because he did something wrong. We always knew you could win that way — appealing to the worst. You’re just not supposed to win the presidency that way.”

She is one of my writing idols. If you don’t know her, you really should. You can start with the terrific HBO documentary film Public Speaking (2010) directed by Martin Scorsese, a 90-minute talkfest with essayist and humorist Lebowitz explaining almost everything.

“All God’s children are not beautiful. Most of God’s children are, in fact, barely presentable.”

This Scorsese flick is a sophisticated affair. It is a series of interviews, seamlessly cut, with Lebowitz at the clubby, iconic Waverly Inn in NYC’s Greenwich Village. The film is the world view of this very witty and very cynical New Yorker. She is not all that happy with most of the changes she’s seen in her adopted city since she arrived 45 years ago.

Conversation provided at Lebowitz’s skill level would have been celebrated in another era. Scorsese provides the proof of this with vintage clips that show figures like James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, and William F. Buckley on talk shows from the 1960s. Lebowitz talks about how she was thrilled and inspired when she was a young person by one of Baldwin’s appearances on the David Susskind Show, pointing out how today’s talk shows are no comparison, with guests that are pre-interviewed and come out to plug their product for five minutes.

“The opposite of talking isn’t listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.”

In Public Speaking, Lebowitz sort of comes out of the closet, to the shock of no one. She seems perplexed that gay people are fighting for MarriageEquality and the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. She says that these issues are the antithesis of freedom and that those are not rights she wants for herself, but she’d vote for them because other gays want them so badly.

Lebowitz is famously paralyzed with what she calls “writer’s blockade” but she has few peers as a public pontificator. Her particular gift for gab has made it possible for her to afford to continue to live in NYC and to hang out with her famous friends.

“Polite conversation is rarely either.”

Born in NJ, her parents owned a furniture store while she was growing up. She was expelled from high school for “non-specific surliness”. Her trademark remains her specialized sneer. Lebowitz decided against college and instead moved to Manhattan. She took jobs driving a taxi and cleaning apartments “with a small specialty in Venetian blinds”.

When she was just 21-years-old she began her column I Cover TheWaterfront for Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine, hired by Warhol himself, before moving over to Mademoisellea few years later.

“Andy Warhol made fame more famous.”

Lebowitz has long promised a novel, Exterior Signs Of Wealth, named for the French conspicuous-consumption tax calculated on the basis of displays of wealth. The novel is supposedly about rich people who want to be artists, and artists who want to be rich people. When asked why the long delay for her first major work of fiction, Lebowitz offers the excuse that she only works on it on the side because “full-time I’m watching daytime television”.

“Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass”

Leibowitz disapproves of pretty much everything except sleep, cigarettes, and fine furniture. Her essays about the difficulty of finding an acceptable apartment to the art of freeloading are classics of social observation. I still re-read her first books Social Studies and Metropolitan Life, both published more than 35 years ago.

Cranky, sardonic, witty and dry; her essays make me think and they make me laugh. She was named one of the most stylish women in Vanity Fair’s International Best-Dressed List, and she is known to wear bespoke suits from Savile Row’s Anderson And Sheppard. On Hillary Rodham Clinton’s sartorial style, Lebowitz states:

“I don’t think she cares. I don’t think she is interested in how her house looks, where her furniture is from, I don’t think she has any visual interests. And there’s nothing wrong in not caring. A man who doesn’t care about what he looks like, he’s applauded. We say, ‘Oh, he’s not superficial!’ I, myself, am deeply superficial.”

Lebowitz had a reoccurring role on the long-running television series Law & Order (1990-2010) as a judge and she has a cameo in Scorsese’s The Wolf Of Wall Street (2013). She had the best ever Proust Questionaire featured on the back page of Vanity Fair.

I am mad jealous by the idea of having a successful Manhattan career made from out of a slim pair of volumes of essays and then chatting away for the next four decades. Progress, her first new book in more than 20 years, is scheduled to be published early next year. We will see about that. I think her quips are on a par with those of Dorothy Parker:

“Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he’s buying.”

“If you are a dog and your owner suggests that you wear a sweater suggest that he wear a tail.”

“If you are of the opinion that the contemplation of suicide is sufficient evidence of a poetic nature, do not forget that actions speak louder than words.”

“In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.”

“Romantic love is mental illness. But it’s a pleasurable one. It’s a drug. It distorts reality, and that’s the point of it. It would be impossible to fall in love with someone that you really saw.”

Lebowitz is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and last year, at the magazine’s third annual New Establishment Summit in San Francisco, Lebowitz weighed in on the election:

“Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich person. They see him. They think, ‘If I were rich, I’d have a fabulous tie like that. Why are my ties not made of 400 acres of polyester?’ All that stuff he shows you in his house- the gold faucets- if you won the lottery, that’s what you’d buy.”

 This year, she has plenty to say about the impact of what happened on that terrible night, November 8, 2016:

“Every time I see the sentence ‘Paul Ryan is the conscience of the Republican Party’,  I think: What is that? Is that like being the quarterback of the New York City Ballet? But yes, that is where your outrage should be.”