Jerry Stiller Forgot His Manties!Jerry Stiller said he had a senior moment when he exited the locker room at the Jewish Community Center on Amsterdam sans bathing suit. Peter Brant, who bought out his ex-wife’s half of Interview magazine last week, is pleased to have traded Ingrid Sischy for Glenn O’Brien. On Friday, Lindsay Lohan drank vodka at the Box and at the Beatrice Inn while partying with Stavros Niarchos and Brody Jenner before returning to the Four Seasons Hotel to spend the night with Niarchos. Eli Manning and fiancée Abby McGraw ate dinner at Il Mulino in the Village (he got a standing ovation when he left). At the Plumm, Tracy Morgan ordered two bottles of Champagne, ripped off his shirt and started dancing on the banquette, seemingly lost his credit card, found it in his pocket, and then asked a waitress if he could father her baby. Sacha Baron Cohen and Isla Fisher ate at Café Gray.
cultural capital
Because He’s SchnabulousThe list of reasons why we love Julian Schnabel are many and varied — he is large and hairy, but has a funny Mickey Mouse voice; he constructed a large pink castle in the middle of the city and named it Palazzo Chupi; he can often be found in pajamas and sometimes a skirt; he has more progeny than we can keep track of; he appears to have no filter whatsoever. Perhaps most importantly, he is one of a diminishing number of personalities from an era when New York City, even on its worst days, felt like more than just a collection of Duane Reades and bank branches clustered on a chunk of concrete. And now we add to our list an exchange from the Daily Telegraph’s profile of the Schnab, which we have transcribed below.
Schnabel: I kid around a lot. I have a lot of fun. But most people don’t have a sense of humor.… And then I read in this other thing that I was name-dropping all the time. Well it just so happens that the people I know are famous. You know, they work in the movies with me. They’re my friends. It’s like if I said… What’s your name?
Reporter: (Thinks: My name? We have been talking for the past two hours.) Mick.
Schnabel: Mick what?
Reporter: Mick Brown.
Schnabel: Okay, so I could say I was talking to Mick Brown the other day — I might well say that. (His tone sounds doubtful.) But they might not know who Mick Brown is.
Reporter: (Thinks: Maybe they will after I become famous for murdering a famous artist/director.)
Julian Schnabel, Larging It [Daily Telegraph]
it just happened
Julian Schnabel May Get a Schnoscar! This morning, Intel obsession Julian Schnabel was nominated for Best Director for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. The film, which New York’s David Edelstein called a “masterpiece,” was also nominated for achievements in editing and cinematography, but we know that Schnabel will not be entirely placated by this honor — if you’re near the in the West Village right now, you can probably hear him stalking around the Palazzo Chupi in his purple pajamas, spittle and crumbs flying into his beard as he rages about how he was supposed to get a Best Picture nod but it’s all political and polemical and the Academy is just pissed off because he’s having so much fun — but we’re proud of him, anyway.
Oscar Nominations Announced [CNN]
Related: Can Julian Get a Schnomination? [Vulture]
party lines
Alexandra Kerry Weighs In on Hillary’s TearsAt last night’s opening of Julian Schnabel’s show at the Sperone Westwater Gallery, we ran into Alexandra Kerry (daughter of former presidential candidate John). She was there with BlackBook founder Evan Schindler, who is now running Tar Art Media, a socially conscious arts-media collective. Kerry is working with Schindler on some projects, including a narrative film of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, screenwritten by the author’s son (“We’re doing a reading of it, actually, in February, with Alec Baldwin and Harvey Keitel and Josh Lucas!”). Since Kerry is a woman and political by heritage, we asked her, naturally, about Hillary’s tears. “There has never been a politician who hasn’t stood onstage and been moved at one time or another and affected by something emotionally,” she told us. “I think it is very human and very normal.” How reasonable! But surely it was all a ruse to trick us into voting for her? “The kind of pressure that each candidate is under is not something that I think the average person can understand, so I give her the liberty and the freedom to have her moment,” Kerry said. “And I don’t think that’s something someone would act. I would like to give the benefit of the doubt to anyone who is standing up there and running, particularly in the Democratic party. So I honestly have to say that I don’t think it’s my place to judge what her motivations are. I mean, it may be completely honest.” A-ha! It “may be completely honest.” Girl, you’ve got a future in politics. —Andrew Goldstein
bons mots
Three Interviews With Julian SchnabelIntel crush Julian Schnabel has been making the promotional rounds for the Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and after reading through a few of his interviews, we can report that whether he’s “picking at a crab cake” in Philadelphia, “stretched on the floor in his blue silk pajamas,” or “propped up by cushions like some flannel-shirted artist’s model” in a Toronto hotel, he’s just as Schnabulous as ever. A few of our favorite bits:
• On his preferred interviewing style: “Lie down, like I said. Please, just try it, just try it. OK. I will do the same. Put your head down. Now you can just relax and ask me anything you want, and we will be on the same plane.”
• On artists David Salle and Robert Longo, who made films that didn’t do as well as Diving Bell and the Butterfly: “Well, they’re not very good painters (either).”
in other news
Rule No. 1: Never Acknowledge What the Schnabel Is WearingSome cowboy from the Houston Chronicle interviewed His Schnabulousness last week. Perhaps his mind was addled after an hour of watching Schnabel’s leg hairs trailing through the azure depths of the hotel pool by which the interview was conducted, or perhaps as a straight-arrow Texan from a town where men don’t wear skirts, no sirree, he just couldn’t help himself, but something caused him to open his mouth and ask a question that no man has ever dared to ask. “I had to ask, politeness be damned,” he wrote. “What are you wearing?”
He looked surprised by the question.
“What? This?” he asked, as if he really thought I might’ve been asking about his sandals.
“This is a shirt I picked up last night at Target,” he said, looking bemused, “and this is a pareo, from Indonesia.”
“Ahh. A pareo. From Indonesia.”
What now? Was I obliged to compliment him on it? What would Miss Manners advise?
It seemed a good time to say goodbye.
Yes, Eric Harrison of the Houston Chronicle. Yes it does.
Earlier: All Things Schnabel
Julian Schnabel on the Diving Bell and the Butterfly [Houston Chronicle]
cultural capital
Julian Schnabel’s Hands Would Like ‘GQ’ to Run a Correction
Julian Schnabel has a bone to pick with Andrew Corsello’s Schnabulous profile of him in GQ this month, one Boston Globe reporter found when he went to interview the director of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Perhaps, you might say, Schnabel took issue with being called a “fat, famous, hairy, rich, name-dropping blowhard”? Not so much. What troubled him was something else.
“Look at these hands,” he urges, laying them flat on the table. In the profile, Andrew Corsello describes Schnabel’s hands as “thick, unpretty, blue-collar” and his fingers as “scratched, filthy with dirt and paint, medium-sized.”
“Do these look blue collar?”
Even after the Globe reporter assures him that Corsello was way off and honestly in the dark someone might mistake his fingers for those of Muffie Potter Aston, Schnabel is still clearly obsessing.
He puts out his hand for a shake, and then holds on. It’s actually not much of a handshake. In his grasp, Schnabel keeps the embrace for a good 10 seconds, making sure he’s able to show the softness of the skin.
“These are delicate hands,” he says.
Big Man on Canvas (screen, too) [Boston Globe]
Earlier:Julian Schnabel is Numero Uno!
cultural capital
Julian Schnabel Is Numero Uno!So this weekend we finally read Andrew Corsello’s profile of Julian Schnabel in the current issue of GQ, in which the two gigantic personalities ride around the Hamptons in La Schnabe’s newly purchased 1975 Eldorado, eating and farting and picking at themselves. Other than not being online, much is wonderful about the piece, but our favorite part is the description of Schnabel’s tubby magnificence, which we’ve faithfully, and perhaps illegally, transcribed for your pleasure:
I only now register the absurdity of what he’s wearing: Slippers, a blue-and-gray checked wraparound skirt that may or may not be a old tablecloth, and a grubby white vest, unbuttoned, that may or may not be Naugahyde and may or may not have been part of a three-piece suit worn by Don Johnson in a Miami Vice episode. His belly, ample, ruddy with sun, parts and displaces the flaps of the vest so that they hang to the sides, putting on glorious display the salt-and-pepper Afghans that are his chest and back hair. Look at him, the bear on the outside and the satyr on the inside. Is this a man capable of making a movie with the word butterfly in the title? The look of a man capable of making a movie as powerful as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly — powerful not only in the sense of exalted emotions, but in the way it takes your assumptions about what movies are for, assumptions so fundamental you aren’t even aware you have them, and turns them inside out? No. This is the look of a man living off the dregs of a modest fortune made in the 1970s publishing a magazine called Heavy Shaggin’
developing
‘Schneighbors’ No More?Friends, we have sad news. Last night at the GQ Man of the Year awards in Los Angeles, a member of Intel’s West Coast bureau — okay, fine, kidding, we don’t have a West Coast bureau; it was a USC journalism student named David Davin — intercepted auteur and art legend Julian Schnabel and asked him, quakingly, about his West Village development, Palazzo Chupi. Occupied by Schnabel, Richard Gere, and Credit Suisse cheese William J.B. Brady, the ginormous pink building is not only a monument to midlife crisis, it’s the set of Intel’s favorite (pretend) reality show, Schneighbors, which is why we were so excited when we heard that Bono had bought one of the two remaining condos. But we couldn’t find any records of the sale, so did he? “No, Bono is not going to be there,” Schnabel said. He was wearing green sneakers, a bathrobe, and yellow-tinted glasses, and as he shuffled away he seemed oblivious to the fact that, 3,000 miles away, our hearts were shattering into a million pieces. But then we looked on the bright side: Could not Bono’s loss be Salman Rushdie’s gain?
Related: Look Who’s Schneighbors!
multiple choice
Look Who’s Schneighbors!Let the speculation cease! The Wall Street Journal today reports that Richard Gere has in fact purchased a condo in Julian Schnabel’s building — 18,500 square feet of space with double-height ceilings, six-foot tall fireplaces, and earthenware or marble bathtub. And the other day, The Villager reported that Bono bought a penthouse in the big pink building. If this is true, the Palazzo has just usurped the Dakota as the residence for aging baby-boomers in the entertainment industry. In fact, we suggest that the people at VH1 begin crafting a proposal for a reality show posthaste. Just think: long, drunken dinner parties with the Dalai Lama, visits from Trudi and Sting. Bono will get pissed when Julian borrows his leather pants and returns them all stretched out, and every day they’ll do yoga around the communal pool —with a hot young instructor that Richard and Bono fight over. Wow. We can already see Julian, shirtless, in downward dog. But hold on: There are two other apartments left in the Palazzo!
gossipmonger
Richard Gere’s Sell-Buy ConundrumRichard Gere may buy the penthouse in Julian Schnabel’s West Village building, if he can sell his Sullivan Street townhouse for $12 million first. Henry Kissinger, Michael Eisner, and Barry Diller were among the power players who ate at Michael’s for lunch yesterday. Some designers are refusing to use the Earth Pledge’s ecofriendly “Sea Leather” because it’s actually made out of dead fish skin. Ivana Trump’s new engagement ring, from daughter Ivanka’s jewelry line, costs $250,000. Anderson Cooper told Conan that he has a “fatty deposit” under his eye that is visible in high definition. NBC refused to run a Larry Craig–inspired political commercial, though CNN picked it up. (Perhaps it had something to do with Matt Lauer’s interview with the disgraced senator?)
intel
Schnabel Playing Coy With West Village Condo TowerDespite charging what some brokers say is an astronomical $4,000-plus per square foot only the likes of the Plaza can top that artist Julian Schnabel’s not making it easy to buy an apartment in his shocking-pink West Village condo tower. Madonna’s penthouse walk-through notwithstanding, a source says marketing has been nonexistent and that there’s neither sales office nor sales agent for the project. To see the units, brokers have to make arrangements with a “construction manager,” and there are no brochures or Website to check out floor plans. (Don’t even ask about concierge service and other pedestrian amenities.) Still, the spaces are apparently very much worth the trouble stunning and “baronial” and oh-so-grand. At the prices he’s asking, they better be. A representative at the project would not comment. S. Jhoanna Robledo
Related: Music at Big Pink? [NYM]
party lines
What Was Marty Scorsese Like in High School?
Last week the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts held its annual youngARTS gala at the Ziegfeld, and it drew a top-tier crew of New York celebrities — Martin Scorsese, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Julian Schnabel, Jane Fonda, Frank Gehry, and Edward Albee among them — to watch a variety show performed by 37 creative high schoolers from around the country and then present them with cash awards. “I like working with kids,” Schnabel told the crowd. “They aren’t fucked up yet.” We asked the celebs — who earlier in the weekend had worked with the aspiring artists as mentors — what they were like in high school.