“Life gets boring when you're middle-aged,” says a character in Candace
Bushnell's new novel One Fifth Avenue. “You can't keep doing the same thing.
You look like an asshole.” The speaker is a reformed “toxic bachelor”, a
womaniser who has abruptly reinvented himself, aged 50-plus, into a
late-breeding devoted dad. But it could equally be the mantra of the author
herself.
Bushnell, the archetypal all-night New York party girl, dated well into her
forties, charting her romantic yet often lonely journey in Sex and the City.
But now, just four months from her 50th birthday, she is every bit the smug
married, dopily in love and newly domesticated. On her skinny arms are
lesions, which she struggles not to scratch, from wrenching up poison ivy at
her second home in Connecticut. This summer she had the house repainted, and
has plans for a pool.
“It is kind of exciting,” she says. “If I was 25 or even 35 I wouldn't be a
bit interested. But, wow, for the first time I have some control over where
I live and what it looks like, which I think is one of the rewards of
working hard. As my mother always said to me, ‘You didn't marry money:
everything you got, you got for yourself'.”
Sex and the City dragged Bushnell out of penury at the age of 33, but it
didn't make her fortune: she sold the rights long ago for $60,000. But a TV
series of her novel Lipstick Jungle begins its second season in America,
with Bushnell securing a lucrative executive producer credit. And One Fifth
Avenue, her latest book, which chronicles the interlocking lives of
residents in the eponymous apartment building, exudes commercial promise.
We meet in One Fifth itself, or rather at Otto, the Mario Batali restaurant on
the ground floor. I see instantly why Bushnell, when she first moved to
Manhattan at the age of 19, was entranced by this building. Walking north
through the concrete grunge and low-rise chaos of Greenwich Village, it
looms, a 27-storey Art Deco monolith the point where hip and struggling
downtown youth meets uptown success and grandeur. Outside its oak-panelled
lobby, where liveried doormen hover, you feel you have left minor
tributaries to join the money river that streams through the city. Jessica
Lange and Sam Shepard, Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter and the film
director Brian de Palma live here: a four-bed apartment goes for $9 million.
Bushnell herself lives a block away in a two-bed pad in a smaller building.
A few misconceptions about Candace Bushnell: that she is flip, wisecracking,
trivial, a high-maintenance materialist princess. Actually she is rather
intense and serious, vulnerable, and, most surprisingly, an ass-kicking
feminist. Perhaps the TV version of Sex and the City, with its glitzy
surfaces, distracted us, along with Bushnell's own kittenish beauty and
man-pleasing glamour. Today she does not disappoint in white Gucci jacket
and honey-coloured Chloe flares over a tiny vest, beneath which she is
bra-less and boyish. On her feet are vertiginous leopardskin Jimmy Choos in
which - endearingly - she struggles to walk. Why there isn't a spare gram on
her tiny frame is explained when we eat: she nibbles through an undressed
salad and just half of her small rocket pizza, and I dispatch 90 per cent of
our “shared” dessert.
Her new book is about power, money and envy, refracted through the prism of
New York real estate. “In London you have blocks of very similar houses. But
here, where you live says something about you. Whether you live in a prewar
apartment, as opposed to one of the brick buildings from the 1960s, as
opposed to a town house, which is very glamorous and expensive.” But the
book's undercurrent is mid-life: its disappointments, compromises and
surprising outcrops of joy. Moreover, Bushnell seems to be simultaneously
looking ahead to the kind of old person she might become - in Enid, the wise
and wily columnist - and looking behind to the young women in her wake, in
the form of Lola, a workshy, crassly consumerist and entitled
twentysomething. Lola comes to Manhattan because she's seen every episode of
Sex and the City “at least a hundred times”, and demands that her
credit-crunched parents put her up in the West Village because “that's where
Carrie Bradshaw lived”. Is Bushnell culpable in creating a monstrous
generation? “In your twenties you want easy answers,” she says. “The real
reasons someone became successful - they worked really hard, paid their
dues, put in the hours, struggled, put themselves out there, took chances -
are all things no one wants to hear. Young people want to hear you were in
the right place at the right time, sold your soul to the Devil, or cheated.
Short cuts.”
The truth, she says, is that one's twenties can be awful: “No one really
listens to you, or takes you seriously.” But aren't a woman's thirties, the
Carrie Bradshaw years, the toughest: that desperate imperative to marry and
have a baby or it might never happen? “That's just bullshit!” Bushnell says
with such venom that I fear she might walk out, but instead attacks her
salad with angry stabs. “I hate it! I hate this defeatist attitude that
everyone tries to lay on women.” But aren't we limited by our biology?
“Men's sperm deteriorates after 27, but I don't hear anyone running around
telling men they shouldn't reproduce after 27 the way we tell women.” I
mutter about fortysomething women filling IVF clinics. “You know what, it's
possible they couldn't conceive at 32. You just don't know. You can always
adopt kids. Women are always trying to squeeze the outline of their lives
into what society says is going to make them happy.” It goes to the core of
Bushnell's being not to settle for second-best. Her philosophy is that women
should keep faith in true love, however long and lonely the search. In her
thirties she likened marriage to drowning, but at 43, at a $3,000-a-plate
charity dinner for the New City York Ballet, she was introduced to Charles
Askegard, a 6ft 4in principal dancer ten years her junior. Maybe she was
just ready. Maybe - as a real Ms Big, compared with her fictional Mr Big -
she knew that no man could pull her under. But, Bushnell says, Askegard was
quite simply The One. In five weeks they were discussing marriage. In eight
she was on a Nantucket beach, roses in her hair, watched only by closest
family, having just the kind of low-key wedding that Carrie Bradshaw finally
enjoys. “I waited for the right person. And I would urge other women to do
the same. Which is why I hate this ‘time's running out!' Well, if you're
married to the wrong person and get divorced, that's not so great either.
Maybe having the courage to be on your own is more important.”
Six years on, Bushnell is still crazy about her husband. “We have a banter.
This morning I got up and I said something and he made this comment and I
said, ‘OK, so we're going to start laughing at 8.15 in the morning now.' My
English friends would say a relationship is about being cosy and that really
makes sense to me.” The couple cook, walk their Ibizan hound Tuco, spend
weekends in the country. Little wonder One Fifth Avenue is played out in
private interiors, not Bushnell's usual fictional mileu of clubs and
parties.
She doesn't regret not having children, never felt the desire, but says it can
be hard to be childless in this babycentric age. How is she facing 50? “Oh I
love it!” she says, but without conviction. “You're not going to walk into a
party and have a lot of men want to take you home.” Does that bother her?
“Not me, I'm married, I don't care, I'm happy.”
Bushnell contemplates her fading beauty like a superhero losing his special
power. Her looks were her entrée to New York highlife. Too short to model,
with no acting talent, she began chronicling the Studio 54 set in a New York
Observer column that became Sex and the City. Later her beauty was her
supreme marketing tool: she posed discretely naked for New York magazine.
She took it for granted, never had to try hard - she loathes salons - so was
bitterly stung a few years back when a journalist wrote with glee how rough
she looked: her mother was dying, she wasn't sleeping or eating well.
Consequently, Bushnell admits, she had a pedicure yesterday for fear I might
remark on her unbuffed toes. “I'm just trying to work with what I've got,”
she shrugs. So she has Botox - “It works!” and indeed her brow is smooth and
immobile - but can't face surgery, the months of recuperation, that it
leaves you looking not younger, just odd. “Somewhere in your forties, guess
what, everyone starts to look the same! Middle-aged. Now when I look in the
mirror I see the old lady underneath. And that's OK.”
Echoing the Betty Friedan school of American feminism, she believes work is
women's great liberator: those who live on their looks always end up
confused that life didn't fully deliver. And One Fifth Avenue has several
trophy wives who lose themselves when they give up careers.
Bushnell also highlights the plight of the alpha female. In One Fifth Avenue,
Mindy Gooch is a corporate executive who, when her promotional progress
stalls, redirects her thrust into busy-bodying and pushy parenthood. Other
residents see her as a bitch: to Bushnell she is Everywoman. “Competition!
Women! Oh my God, women aren't supposed to compete! That's bad! When we
should acknowledge that women, like men, do compete and healthy competition
is positive and does quite a bit for one's self-esteem.”
Perhaps that was the problem with Hillary's presidential bid, I say. Naked
ambition is still repellent in women. “I was liking Hillary,” Bushnell says.
“I thought she tried really, really hard. I doubt now we'll ever see a
female President in my lifetime. One always hopes that sexism is on the
wane, but I think that is a mirage. There are so many ways now that people
put women down: their looks, a terrible ageism. An accomplished woman isn't
respected, she's still a source of negativity and fear.” And it puzzles her
that women are still each other's harshest critics. “One has consciously to
make an effort not to do it,” she says. Yet as I walk ahead of her out of
Otto on to Fifth Avenue, I feel Bushnell's huge turquoise eyes lasering into
my back, critically appraising my clothes, shoes and body more keenly than
any man.
She's overdressed, but as long as she doesn't have a chip on her shoulder it's good for all.
Beliving in the rights of women is not what the majority would consider feminisim to be - that's reserved for the anti-male complainers who have an unhealthy lack of self-esteem
PK, Lodon,
Just typical. She partied into her mid 40s and then decided it was time to get married. And she goes for some beefcake (he is a dancer after all) for a husband. Turn it around. A 43 year old party animal guy decides to settle down and marries a stripper in her 30s. Most women would be appalled.
Octavian, London,
I really enjoyed this article, very intelligently written & observant. Thanks to Janice Turner.
Ella, St Albans,
A self made women now that is really somthing to aspire to, age is cool if you love your self because the greatest love of all comes from inside your self, once you have worked that out your free.
Mary, Stockport, Cheshire