Disturbing Michiko Kakutani

Hey, it's Jen Hatmaker. Here's what I've learned in midlife. Joy isn't the reward you earn after all the work is done. Joy is the work. That's what this new series on For the Love is all about. The sacred, yes. It's choosing delight, rest, and pleasure on purpose. Because saying yes to yourself, that's the thing that finally lets you fill your table with everybody else. Come find your sacred, yes, with me. Follow and listen to For the Love wherever you get your podcasts. See 13 Originals. Donna has, for the first time, knows in front of Brett chronology wise. In the last episode, she graduated from Bennington. Brett has yet to start his senior year. He better hurry if he wants to catch up. I'm Lily Antelic, and this is once upon a time at Bennington College. Less than zero is released in May of 1985, a few weeks before the end of junior year. Brett. What happened was the book to go off in the summer. Brett also takes off. Paula Powers, class of 86. I went away to Oxford for junior year and during that time, he became famous. My parents started sending me letters like your friend Brett has been written up in time innovators. I'm like, what? What is to some extent Brett's reaction to Simon and Schuster had put out a first printing of about 5,000 copies expecting maybe to sell half that. And I was excited nonetheless because I didn't care what it was going to sell. I was just amazed that the book was published at all. Initially, Simon and Schuster gave us no money to promote the book. So there was at first zero advertising. And yet the media was curious and started writing about the book as well as myself. And soon, for whatever the reasons are, the book connected with a large and very youth audience who saw themselves mirrored in the book's attitude and sensibility. The impersonality and disinterestedness of Brett's word choice. Curious, the media was curious about less than zero, is exactly right. The book is something everybody in the media world is talking about, even if they're not, in the main, saying nice things. In fact, it's causing such a stir that the New York Times is forced to take notice. A month after less than zero's debut, Michiko Kakatani weighs in. Her opening line, this is one of the most disturbing novels I've read in a long time. The review is a pan, a sociological report Kakatani calls the book, but it's one of those pan's that's better than a rave. Brett has succeeded in "disturbing" the New York Times. For a writer who sees himself as a transgressor, a renegade spirit sworn to a renegade pursuit, this is the ringingest of endorsements. And it's treated as such beside an inshuster, at last paying attention. The quote is placed front and center in all the advertisements for which the publishing house is now eagerly shelling out. A few weeks after Kakatani's review, Brett, once again enrolled in the Bennington Summer Writing Workshop, gets word that he's been booked on the Today Show. A limo picks him up on campus and drives him down to New York City. Brett, I had the kind of stamina 21 because I remember I was supposed to be on the Today Show and the night before that, me and a bunch of friends went out and got so wasted. We didn't back to my hotel room till five in the morning and then the wake-up call came at six. Ajay Sagar is one of the friends. Oh my god, I remember that. I don't think I've ever been that hungover in my life. In my life, light in New York City like drinking like crazy and doing drugs or whatever we were doing and I remember waking up by, oh god, what was the hotel? It was called the Omni Berkshire Place Hotel is where they put us up. So I'm like asleep and Brett walks in having done it. Done pretty well too. Here's Brett going toe-to-toe with Brian Gumball on the Wednesday July 10th 1985 edition of the Today Show. The author is 21-year-old Brett Easton Ellis, a junior at Bennington College in Vermont. The novel is titled Less Than Zero, a none-too-pleasant and off-depressing look at the aimless lifestyle of Southern California's teens. A lifestyle dominated by drugs, sex and a decided lack of concern for anyone or anything. Good morning. Congratulations, you've got to hit on your hand. Thank you. Is your book an indictment of your generation in general or the limited few of Southern California? I think it has a more universal theme than just, you know, LA, California lifestyle. I think it's saying, talking about the whole problem right now with this generation's concerns for wealth, status, style, a concern for money. However much you may deny it and you have every single thing that I've read, is anyone really going to believe this as an auto biographical? No. Well, a lot of people would like to for, you know, shock value purposes but it's not like four weeks out of my life or something. No. So we know how the East Coast critics and media respond to Brett and Less Than Zero with fascination and contempt. How though do other writers, in my experience, the best and most perspicacious readers respond to Brett and Less Than Zero? Are they taking him and it seriously? Here is David Lipsky, class of '87, writer and once in future frenemy of Brett. One of the things that you've noticed if you're reading Less Than Zero is, it is an interesting use of the Didian voice. Incidentally, Brett thinks, or it may be fears, that it's an overuse of the Didian voice. This from a conversation I had with Brett about Joan Didian and Less Than Zero. Can you ask Joan for a quote? No, no, no, no, no. I didn't want to read the book because it was such a, you know, I was so immersed in her work and I was trying to write like her. Less Than Zero was completely under the influence of Joan to a degree where I had to fall back on cribbing from her and still there are remnants of things I just stole that are still there that Joan had acknowledged. You know, one of the first things we talked about after she'd read the book. She made a kind of purple or a fly illusion that things that are somewhat reverted but lifted from her work and she liked that. I mean, she was delighted by that. So Joan Didian doesn't think Brett overused her voice and neither does David Lipsky. It's like, oh, Brett picked up that Didian front style and he took it into place as the Didian wouldn't know about basically where the Didian wouldn't be able to find a parking space for, right, where she wouldn't know the side entrance into. It was just a really cool, unforeseeable use of that voice and it was a way of breaking it to younger readers. So with Less Than Zero, Brett's done eight young adult version of Joan Didian's voice. Well, you could argue that what Joan Didian did was a femme version of Ernest Hemingway's voice and that what Ernest Hemingway did was a commercial version of Gertrude's Signs Voice. The line is easy to follow once you pick it up and illustrious. Brett's less part of a grand old tradition in American letters, originality through copycadding. And while we're on the topic of David Lipsky and Less Than Zero, I want to go back to a story David told about himself in the book in episode eight. It was the spring of 1984. Morgan Andrican had just bought Less Than Zero and Brett asked David to read it. David did then said to Brett that if Brett published it, Brett would be embarrassed. Brett published it and David was the one who was embarrassed. So that story has an epilogue. David, it's a funny story for me to tell friends of mine. You have a nice punch line that you are jogging towards. You put on your ritual practice shoes and you can see the penance flying on the finish line at the end. So, you know, I told him the tenth of fifteen years from now he would be embarrassed and then he published it and I was embarrassed. But the truth is, I'm not sure I was wrong. I thought that he wouldn't be viewed as a writer. You would just be seen as somebody who could bring us villains about how the culture is living wrong, basically, right? He would be like some sort of medical instrument they could say, "Oh, here's your problem." Of course, David nailed it. That's precisely how many critics and arbiters have taste see Brett as a cultural phenomenon rather than a literary one. Cacotone's review and the Brian Gumbel today show Q&A are case in point. Less Than Zero, like, had Brett not publish that. Now, he wouldn't have been famous in the same way or he might have had to wait for him, but he clearly was extremely gifted. He wouldn't have been as effective as your journalist as Joan Didian was. I think Brett might have been more like Joan Didian, had he not publish that book and I think he might have liked that more. We'll never know, an alternate history. Brad Gouge, though, a writer like David Lipsky understands that Brett is primarily a literary phenomenon. He remembers reading Less Than Zero when it came out. The control in Brett's work and screening this is what I respond to. Screening this, I swoon to this term. Screening this, as opposed cinematic or movie-like. I ask Brad to explain it since he made it up. Well, if you look at 19th century novels or something or even poets like Wordsworth, you see kind of a painting, like a painting of nature. Or if you like, I don't know, read novels of all this Huxley or poems at T.S. Eliot, they seem to sometimes update to being like a kind of silent movie or something. And that's work. When you read it, you immediately see it as like a television screen or a movie screen. Everything lit and visualized in that way. So somehow it kind of tricks your imagination, somehow with very subtle cues into like filming his works while you're reading them. So that's it. A lot of those writers who seem like great writers, who one wish to be at the time, you seem a little like Staji and Brett is not. And I think maybe his luck was that the television screen, you know, morphed into iPhone screens and desktop screens. And you know, now we just live live in the screen land. Like you can move from texting to reading a page of Brett Ellis and there's no, there's no distinction. What Brad is saying, I think, is not just that you can see less than zero being adapted into a movie or TV show, but that the book itself is the movie or TV show. Now, movies have dated. With every year that passes, they seem more like a 20th century art form. Television you know soon will be dated. The screen though, the screen hasn't aged a day. It's endlessly, mercilessly contemporary. And somehow, with less than zero, Brett has managed to transform the page into a screen. Less than zero therefore is a new kind of novel, even as it's also an old kind of novel. We've already traced its lineage, that at the same time foreshadows the death of the novel. It's a kiss off to itself. No wonder the literary establishment is bending over backwards to poo poo it. Now, what if LA's young Rich and Jaded, i.e. the people less than zero is about and four. What do they make of it? Brett's friend and former Buckley Cosmate, Ajay Sagole. It was a huge deal. I mean, it was big for everybody my age and they're like, oh, that's us. Like it's not you, but I mean, you know, it was like our, you know, it was the book of the time of like, especially kids in LA. For Ajay, the experience of reading the book is an uncanny one. Brett, I remember him coming back for the first winter break and, you know, we had talked all the time and then first winter break during that whole time, which I think is when lesson zero takes place. And I do remember like reading the book going, this is a conversation we had, you know, I wouldn't say that I'm a character in the book, but I would say that I'm part of some character because of verbatim things that I was saying. Brett pocketed a few of Ajay's lines, a few of Ajay's characteristics when Ajay wasn't looking, but Ajay doesn't mind the theft and neither so far as he remembers does anybody else. Julie as in Julie Foreman, Brett's buckly girlfriend, the base is for lesson zero's Blair. And Dominic Gross, the impetus for lesson zero's Julian certainly isn't bothered. But then it never occurs to Dominic that Julian has anything to do with him. And why would it? Dominic is an addict or a prostitute. In fictionalizing him, Brett's altered him beyond recognition. Here's Dominic. I mean, back then it was the book to read on the beach. I mean, it was nation-wide. So it was a really, really popular thing. Yeah, so Brett did amazing then. And yet readers want to know who the real characters are. Here's John Cidell, owner of Power Tools, the hottest hippest, baddest nightclub in O.A. in 1985, and only a year older than Brett. Brett, when we met him, we were very impressed. I mean, if someone made a book or a record, that was like very impressionable on us. Like you wrote a book. It's like a real book. Like whoa dude, that's cool. The Wii is John and his friend, a Reformed Wildman who now prefers to remain anonymous. This guy, we call him the ****, the most insane, preppy, drug-doing, maniac. People would see him, like people in the rock scene, and they were like, this guy's like some preppy guy from Beverly Hills. And then if you got in this car, you'd literally like be scared for your **** life. He would do a bunch of heroin. And then he go listen, but I hit this one bump at 110 miles an hour. I can get air in my folks like and rabbit. Here'd be telling you that while he was accelerating on a side street in L.A. In a car that was next to like 70 miles an hour, I'd be like, oh my god, please no. He is accelerating from like 60 to 80 miles an hour and he casually turned to you and go, there's just this one hop sign that you have to run to be able to hit it the right way to get the air. Keep your fingers crossed as you go to like 90 miles an hour onto 110 miles an hour and you just be like, you gotta be fucking kidding me. John, **** in Ajay are all at UCLA together. And it's through Ajay that John and **** meet the real life rip. Rip, the dealer who keeps a 12-year-old girl tied to his bedposts for friends and clients to gang rape in less than zero. Ajay said it up, do you want to meet this guy? He's like the guy, the drug dealer or something from less than zero. Like sure, because **** wanted to meet him. We come over there, maybe you like and see now or something. It wasn't like where we usually go to people's house. You know what I mean? It kind of had a little bit of a weird LA valley and the like Armenian version vibe to it all. And it was like, oh yeah, you're supposed to have all this coke. Yeah, we'll do your coke for you. Even though I wasn't really in the coke **** in this doing everybody's drugs. Then **** like breaks out the heroin this guy, he and you know, he acted like he had done it before he did it. And it's like the coke with a plate. So he fucked up. I'm looking like, oh my god, this is the guy from less than zero. And you would think it was like some badass guy. And it was like some dorky kid and like, you know, with some lightweight and the ****. He was the quintessential of all these kids. He was the legend of all of them. Not the ones that Brett used in reality. Now his Brett characters are great, but we met them and we're like, these people are just like, they're not cool. They're just like, like your friends and you assign them all these like, you know, super dark attributes. The alchemical properties of Brett's imagination. He turns suburban posters into dark princes of the city. Proof as if we needed it, but Western Zero is not simply memoir in disguise, or as Michiko Kakatani suggests sociological report, but imaginative literature. Ready to level up? Chambakasena was your playbook to fun. It's free to play with no purchase necessary. Enjoy hundreds of online social games, like Blackjack slots and solitary, anytime, anywhere, with fresh releases every week, whether you're at home or on the go, let Chambakasena bring the excitement to you. Plus, get free daily login bonuses and a free welcome bonus. Join now for your chance to redeem some serious prizes. Play Chambakasena today. No purchase necessary VGW group voidware prohibited by law 21 plus TNC's apply. The police closed my sister's case in 2019. Last month, her killer commented on my post. On Reddit, true crime doesn't come from journalists. It comes from the victims, the witnesses, and sometimes the suspects themselves. People post the things they'd never say out loud, anonymous, unfiltered, and completely real. In every Tuesday, on Crimes of Reddit, we read them out loud. I'm Sabrina Deanna Roca from Two Girls on Ghost, and I'm Alexis Linkletter from the first degree. Each week, one of us brings the most unhinged, true crime stories the internet has to offer. And the other goes in completely blind. No prep, no spoilers, reacting in real time, same as you, and then we swap. And we pull every thread into the whole twisted picture comes into view. It's stark. It's messy. And the scariest part is that these are real stories, posted by real people. New episodes drop every Tuesday. Listen to and follow Crimes of Reddit, available now wherever you get your podcasts. It's still the summer of '85, and Brett is still at the Bennington Writing Workshop, when he receives a call on the house phone. It's from perhaps the only person on the planet who understands what he's going through. Jay McInerney. Jay had gone through it himself the year before with his debut novel, Bright White's Big City, the pop literary sensation of 1984. Brett. In the summer of '85, Binky had Jay call me to introduce ourselves since we were, I think, getting compared. Binky is a man of Binky Urban, Jay's agent, who also happens to be the agent. She represents everyone from Raymond Carver, to Tony Morrison, to Nora Efron, to Richard Ford, and soon to Brett Easton Ellis, who will leave Joe McGinnis' agent Sterling Lord for her. Jay is older than Brett, but still young, 30. His best friend is Morgan Entrican, the acquiring editor of Lesson Zero. Morgan is also, and I would argue, not incidentally, an inspiration for Bright White's Big City's Tad Alligash, the worst of the many bad influences on the book's Jay-like protagonist, or so the rumor goes. My interview with Jay was conducted at the Gotham Bar and Grill. You'll have to excuse the background chatter, be it clinking of cutlery and wine glasses, or a revel in them, since a swath Manhattan eatery seems like Jay's natural habitat. Jay talks Lesson Zero with me. Morgan very consciously behind the scenes was promoting it as the West Coast version of Bright White's Big City. So Morgan was very savvy after I read Lesson Zero, and I listened to Morgan's whole spiel about how he was going to promote it. I realized that what was happening to me was going to happen to him. Within six months of Bright White's being published, my life was insane. My life was turned completely upside down. You were like a kind of a grad student, right? I went from being a grad student to having paparazzi camping on my doorstep. Who I dated was a subject of intense national interest, apparently. Maybe not national, but to the New York Post, it was. And here's Jay on bread. On the one hand, he was clearly a fairly jaded and sophisticated guy, judging from his. But he was kind of, he was a little socially awkward. I mean, he did not have a sort of fluid social persona. I think initially, you know, I felt a little like the older brother because nobody had prepared me for what happened when Bright White's big city was published. So I felt sort of, I don't know, sort of solicitous and vaguely protective of Brett. And I knew that he was going to be swept up into it all as well. Brett referred to the college introductory, but he and Jay have in fact met. In early spring, they, along with novelist Richard Price and Emily Prager, had appeared on a pen panel on the state of American fiction. It was held at NYU and moderated by Brett Simon and Schuster editor Bob A. Tahina, which is why Brett, an unknown at that point, was on such a star-studded panel in the first place. An impromptu dinner followed. Penguin editor Jerry Howard attended. That came along to the lion's head and to say he wasn't a bash. I mean, he just, okay, sure, I'm going out with all these older editors and writers, you know, big deal, right? There is no, let's say G Wiz was the last thing or a golly, you know. It's just a very cool customer. One of Jerry's jobs at Penguin is buying reprint rights for paperbacks. By the time he sat next to Brett at the lion's head, he'd already been honing SNS for a galley of Lesson Zero for months. Or, narrowly, once you ask a subsidiary rights person, can I see that a galley would appear pretty quickly and they'll tell you everything that they can about the book, how much you're spending on advertising, where they're touring, the author, they'll just open up the whole mechanism of the publishing machinery behind it to show you that they are committed to it. And if you spend X thousands of dollars of your company's money to buy the paperback rights, it's going to pay off big time, okay? But nothing like that was forthcoming from SNS and this is kind of like a hound of the Baster Vils sort of thing. And I can't really prove this, but I had the kind of sense that the book was disquieting to Simon and Schuster in some way, that they didn't quite know what they had or what to do with it. In any case, the next day I called up Simon and Schuster and said, "Now look, I've got not the dinner with your author. Will you send me the damn galley?" SNS sends it, Jerry reads it, Jerry buys the paperback rights for Penguin. But back to Breton J's phone call, by the time the connection is broken, they've made one. They agreed to get together in the city, in the fall. And then all of a sudden, it is the fall. Bret's senior year at Bennington has begun. Crazy that Bret has a senior year at Bennington, considering college is meant to launch you professionally and he's already in the stratosphere. September, when he returns to campus, is the month lesson zero first hits the Times for a seller list. The logical move for him would be to drop out, but he doesn't. I wanted to graduate, and so I didn't experience that first year of whatever I might have experienced that might have killed me judging from how I behaved afterwards. My guess is that he sticks with Bennington, less out of a desire for a diploma than for normalcy, which obviously is a pipe dream. Coming back to campus, September was difficult. So I was now a senior. All my friends who have been seniors when I was a junior are gone. I was kind of alone. Very alone. Amy Hurtschivitz graduated, as of Larry David, Joe Eisenstadt, and Dan Ross. Quintana Roodon has transferred to Columbia. Ian Giltler has already been gone for a year. More alienating stone. Bret isn't allowed to participate as a student in certain instances. No one's going to let me in, Wilshon. The two teachers I talked to said, "That's not going to happen." It did not help that it seemed every day there were journalists and photographers coming. I was kind of a problem. I was a problem. Something to kind of have to deal with. So I could feel that. Bret spends much of his time working on his thesis, a collection of short stories, with more a speak-al, a teacher in the Lurich her language division as his advisor. More, I call her mother. I said I'm supervising a thesis with a best-selling writer and she said, "Oh, try to learn as much from him as you can." Bret also started a new novel. I felt myself hanging out with a lot of freshmen and I was writing rules for traction and I realized it didn't really matter if I'm going to class anymore. Adding to Bret's troubles. I also published a damn terrible piece for Rolling Stone about where I saw my generation going in the midst of the Reagan 80s. Terrapids. But it was pretty damn of college life in America. Did not endure me. Born and Out at Bennington College appears in Rolling Stones September 1985 issue. Amusing footnote. In that issue is an advertisement for the Rob Reiner romantic comedy, The Sure Thing, now available on Video Cassette. The Sure Thing itself, slash herself, is played by Nicolette Sheridan, formerly Nicolette Savales, the buckwheat girlfriend of Dominic Gross. The piece is not particularly compelling either as journalism or prose. But it signifies however, is compelling. It's an indirect response to a piece that appeared in the May 1985 issue of Esquire and a direct whammy to the writer of that piece, David Levin. So in the opening episode of this podcast, I said that Bret was the Gen X progenitor, the one who chartered the course for his writer peers. I stand by this statement because spiritually it's dead on. Historically though, well not so much. If you go by dates alone, it's David Levin who comes first. And just who is David Levin? David Lipski explains. Seems like literary generations, they don't turn when the first people show up. It's weird, but then when they start to turn, they begin to turn very quickly. And so there hadn't been a lot of stuff coming from people who were young yet. And so suddenly there was a story by someone named David Levin in the Orchard. I think it would be like 82 or 83. And so it was the first gay story that was ever in the Orchard. Presumably there were characters who'd been gay, but it was the first story where someone was a main character and they were gay and it wasn't like a problem, it was sort of incidental. The short story is called Territory and it was published in the May 31st 1982 issue. When David Levin was 20 years old, a student at Yale. Now, David Lipski is both right and wrong to say that the story's gain is incidental. True, territory is not about the main character coming out as gay, and his gain is not considered shocking or controversial. But territory is about the response of a mother to her son's gain is. Therefore, the story's gain is, I would argue, essential. Essential to the story's appeal as well. That gain is its topic makes it feel "riskly" and dangerous when it's neither. But anything, the older generation, I.e. boomers, I.e. parents, should be reassured by territory. Because although the characters/kids in it are rebelling, insisting on a right not available to their parents, the right to open the engaging gay sex to openly pursue gay love, they're also still worried about what their parents think. The characters/kids in less than zero are the opposite of reassuring, are alarming. The engaging gay sex without identifying as gay, know nothing about love and care even less, and could give a shit what their parents think. And you can't say they're rebelling. Rebelling against what? Who? They don't acknowledge their parents' sources of authority, moral or otherwise, just sources of cash. In short, David Levin is a nice boy, parent-approved, and Breddison Ellis is a bad boy, the one mom and dad forbid you to see. David Lipsky And then David Levin's collection family dancing came out in '84, and Michiko Kakutani, who was a great reader, I thought, she got thrilled about Levin and she said that he had the death and range of Virginia Woolf. Actually, it wasn't Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times, but James R. Zimmerman of the Cleveland plane dealer who compared Levin to Woolf. Still, though, Kakutani felt all over herself praising him. And the final line of her review, quote, "Levitt's stories offer strong glimpses of warmth and affection, something missing in the spiritual wasteland of so much contemporary fiction, but almost be an anticipatory rebuke of Bredd in less than zero." Not that it matters, but I respectfully disagree with David Lipsky's assessment of Kakutani as a reader. What was one set of the Times film critic, Baudel-Crowther, that he was someone who could, quote, "always be counted on to miss the point?" Can, in my opinion, just as easily be said of Kakutani. Of course Kakutani trashes Bredd. But about Bredd's Rolling Stone piece, Levin, with his Esquire piece, had declared himself the voice of his generation, declared it with the title alone, The New Lost Generation. And Bredd, with his Rolling Stone piece, about the changes he's witnessing in the student body at Bennington, an obvious stand-in for his peer group in general, is attempting to talk over that voice. And it's his voice, not Levitt's, that writers his age are tuning into. David Foster Wallace included, "Jerry Howard, who scoops up the paperback rights to less than zero, will, two years later, publish Wallace's first novel, "Broom in the System," represented by none other than Bonnie Nadel, the assistant assignment and schuster, who changed the ending of less than zero, now an agent. Two years after that, Jerry will edit Wallace's collection, "Grow with Curious Hair," the title story of which is written in a parody of the less than zero style. Says the narrator, a young Republican sadist and a Keith Jarrett concert, quote, "Gimlett has observed me masturbating while I watch the English leather cologne commercial, and she agrees that the woman is very alluring, and states that she would like to lick the woman's vagina for her." "Gimlett is a bisexual who is as keen as anything on oral sex. Here is Jerry on "Grow with Curious Hair." "I read it, and I thought, 'Hey,' and I said to David, 'really good parody of less than zero.' He said, 'No, no, no, no, no, I've never read that. I never read less than zero.' I said, 'Okay, if you say so, but it was such an obvious lie.'" A flare-up of the anxiety of influence, I guess. David Lipski wrote the 2010 book, although of course you end up becoming yourself, about a road trip he took with David Foster Wallace in the mid-90s, which became the 2015 Indie, the end of the tour. FYI, this is the reason I have to expect to see Jesse Eisenberg whenever David and I meet up. Jesse, obviously, plays David in the movie. FYI number two, David is also, as we'll learn from that New York magazine piece that went viral in 2019. A fixation of Instagram star Caroline Calloway, a student of his at NYU before she was an Instagram star. And a fixation in part because Jesse Eisenberg was going to play him in the movie. Says Natalie Beach, Caroline Calloway's self-proclaimed ghost writer, in that viral piece. Quote, "David would soon be played by Jesse Eisenberg. Caroline and I were both a little obsessed. More on Caroline Calloway later." Here's David Lipski on David Foster Wallace's reaction to "S and Zero." If you're a young writer anywhere and we're talking about David Wallace here, you're reading that book pretty shortly after it comes out. And you're thinking, wait, something went wrong, that should be me. Your job as a writer is to try to be the one who is packaging stories about your era or a cake on your era. And so Brett is doing that, right? Brett is seeing, as like, this is what the Aides are like. And so you can see why that would be motivating to Wallace. Wallace has a nice phrase about this. Like a blowtorch under your eyes. Brett, so hot he's on fire. So hot he's setting other people on fire. Okay, so Brett said that fame has isolated him at Bennington, but it's not without its perks. Paula Powers, back now from her junior year abroad. He always had this crew of like young men around him who are sort of like fans, but he kind of liked them, you know? Larry David, no not that Larry David, class of '85 told me this for my Esquire or All History on Bennington. Quote, Brett was very good at getting straight guys to sleep with him. They all wanted to be writers, and he was very charming, so he could convince them to like give it a try. By the way, Brett by senior year is no longer on the fence sexually. There was never much doubt as to which side he was going to land on, but now there's none. Gone are the days when you could catch him in the shower with a girl nicknamed Ilsa, she wolf of the SS. A reference to the 1975 grindhouse classic about a Nazi prison guard whose sexual sadism is equal only by her sexual voraciousness. Dan Roth, class of '85, on the Bennington Ilsa. She looked like she came out of a woman Newton, you know, photo shoot, stunningly beautiful. And rather tall, she had like a page boy blonde haircut, but you could see her dress in leather. And like, you know, hip-hi boots and a riding crop. It was not hard. The charms of adoring and pliable under classmen though have their limits, and Brett finds that he's living his life more and more off campus. It was fall of '85 into '86 that I was, you know, hopping to New York a lot. He and Jay meet up in the city in September. Here's Brett and Jay on Brett's podcast, discussing the occasion. You and I were invited and went to together the 1985 MTV Music Awards. MTV actually reached out and wanted us to come. If you can imagine, if you can imagine two young novelists now being dragged to the staple center for the 2019 MTV Awards and given prominent placement in the auditorium. But I do remember, you had a limo. Yeah. We had dinner at Indoshin after. We went to the awards, then at the Indoshin, and then went to the after party of the industry, in which was the hottest restaurant in New York. And we got one of the two front booths. But this all takes me back to this time. The book party for Brightlight's Big City had sting and boy George in attendance as well as Dan Miller. For some reason John. For the male or reserved too. But I just remember, I had a weird book party at limelight on a weeknight, and John Mac and Roe and various celebrities showed up. And I became kind of like a thing that it was kind of chic in that moment to go to a writer's book party. Literary writers in that period were trailed by Papa Rodsey. They were like gossip columns. They were invited to movie premieres. They walked the red carpet. It just seems like an alternate universe. I mean, there's a little thing in the New York Times today about a book party for Lily Annelieke, which was talking right in Carter through it at the Waverly Inn. And the New York Times was like amazed that this kind of book party even existed anymore. And I know the Waverly Inn and I saw the guesses and everything. And I said, "That is nothing compared to what book parties were like." Did you catch that listeners? That's right. Bret and Jay just made fun of me and my party. And I could pretend to be hurt, but whom am I kidding? I consider it a personal and professional high point getting publicly dist by these two. So the reason I'm playing this exchange for you is to show just how famous Jay and Bret are during this period. Famous in a way that's impossible to imagine serious writers in the present day being famous. Famous in the way that rock stars are famous. Or movie stars are famous. Famous famous. And Bret, young as he is, is ready for fame. Jerry Howard. Bret has a kind of jujitsu approach to. he's never out there. they're trying to impress. He's just laying back and waiting for people to notice his lack of interest in them. And there was a kind of perfection to the way Brett projected his jadedness. He was 22 years old, but he gave off the feeling of having seen it all already and more than once. And I think in some sense he probably had, but on the other hand, I mean, he had a sense of himself as a persona in addition to being a person. As opposed to David Foster Wallace, who I actually think was a work in progress until the last day of his life. Brett was achieved. Brett appears in the British equivalent of the top 20 video countdown on MTV. Sonny Mehta was ahead of Kanopth, but before he was ahead of Kanopth, he had run Piccadour in the UK. And he was publishing less than zero. He got me on top of the pops, 10 minutes on top of the pops to introduce no writer was ever on top of the pops. Brett is named one of the 10 most eligible bachelors by a woman's magazine. Paula Powers. I remember he said, "Yeah, so they asked me, what do you like best about women?" And I said, "They're boyfriends." Not that the magazine prints his real response. He's hired by Tina Brown, then editor of Vanity Fair, to write a hit piece on Brad Pack actor and Breakfast Club star, Judd Nelson. The gun for hire though ends up befriending his target and turning his weapon on his boss. Brett. Concoct an alternative piece about where young Hollywood hangs out, really hangs out, not Spago and the Roxy, but the real hit places in LA. We're with Judd Nelson and Brett Easton Ellis go to because of course being so young and hip and connected, we would know. What I didn't tell Vanity Fair is that the places Judd and I would be extolling would be the most retrograde, least fashionable places in LA. We also threw in a couple of legitimately trendy places of that moment, power tools and dirt box. The piece ran that November. Judd and I were mentioned on the cover where Sylvester Stallone was posing with Brigitte Nielsen. And I remember opening the issue and becoming both delighted and frightened by what we had pulled off, but it wasn't long after that that the magazine found out what we had perpetrated. And from what I heard, had a bit of a fit. Ironically, a few of the places we called cool, ultimately because of the piece became cool. So Brett punk's Tina Brown, then the most powerful editor in America. And he's not just the writer of that piece. He's a subject too. The beautiful black and white Brad Branson photos that accompany his words feature him as much as they do Nelson. That November, Brett also appears in another publication, the student newspaper of Brown University, or David Lipsky is now a junior. A reporter for the Brown Herald calls Brett for a comment when the New Yorker accepts a short story of David's. And oh boy, does he give her one? Quote, David's work is perfect for the New Yorker because he specializes in very safe New Yorker sorts of stories. They're extremely conservative, middle class, Connecticut, angst. David Lipsky. You know, you really do hope for positive coverage from your campus newspaper. There's like, what the fuck? Why would he be doing that basically? Well, I took away from that as he would still matter. Brett has become such a creature of the media that that's where his friends go looking when they want to find him. Larry David said this to me, quote, "It wasn't easy to stay in contact back then. Brett didn't have a phone in his dorm room. We'd write letters back and forth every once in a while, and that was it. But he'd visit New York and he was having parties at Lionlight and being written up. So I'd be keeping up with him by reading about him in newspapers and magazines. With all the time he's spending in New York, Brett needs a home away from home, a dorm away from college. Amy Horskivitz, Class of '85, told me this, quote, "Brett would get a room at the car aisle. We'd drink, do a shit ton of drugs, go to clubs. We were wild and out of control. The car aisle, as in the car aisle hotel, Ian Getler, Class of '84, on the car aisle. The car aisle was where Mick Jagger and David Bowie had apartments in the '70s. So it had this iconic history. But I honestly think that Brett was just there because it was really nice, and he knew it because he'd been there with his dad." Brett's dad, Bob Ellis, is living in LA and not with Brett's mom. Still though, Bob Ellis is a dominating presence in Brett's life. Again, Amy Horskivitz, quote, "we'd see his dad in the city. He'd rent a limo and want to get drunk and high. Go out." Brett. "My father and I, I can't, I had friends, I think Ian Getler came out with a couple of times. I think my father went into the finals of drugs and Ian couldn't and we were driving around in a winnancy. My father often traveled around New York in a winnancy." Ian Getler, on the dynamic between Brett and Bob. Bob was an interesting character. He was looking to party in New York and he was a little bit over the top. He was a little bit conspicuous consumption and like Brett, he could consume alcohol at a whole other level than most people. So there, you know, there was an element of danger in Bob Ellis. You know, once he had drunk to a certain level, he suddenly is this guy who has 50 or 60 pounds on you and a glint in his eye. And I guess Brett is not male in the same way. It's hard to say what was going on between the two of them. Brett sort of had the tired demeanor of the way a young person might act with a parent that they're just kind of exhausted by. But I never saw direct conflict between them. It sounds as if Brett's acquiescent, but I don't think he is. I think he's playing acquiescent with Bob Ellis the same way a possum plays dead with a fox. It's a survival technique. It's also an act of aggression. And Brett in his sleighway is aggressive. Mehing the Carlisle his clubhouse. He's horning in on the old man's territory while looking like he's doing nothing at all. Ian. Once when Brett's dad came to town and we went to have dinner in the hotel, they were like good evening, Mr. Ellis, but they were talking to Brett not to his father. So the tide had really turned as far as who their valued customer was. An edible battle between a father and son over the esteem of the concierge. So Brett's moving up in the world, but he's also breaking down as Jerry Howard sees when he arranges a lunch for Brett to meet the people at Penguin who will be marketing Weston Zero, the paperback. Brett came to the restaurant and you know he's very polite and he's taking us in as much as we're taking him in. But what I really remember was that in very, very short order he downed three great fruit and jins. And then he got up to go to the bathroom doing who does water there. And then he came back and the disturbing part was was that there was no difference whatsoever in his affect. Anxiety becomes a problem. Brett. I was perfectly fine with wine until Weston Zero, just this notion of I was an own person now and I felt everyone was watching me. Pinnock becomes a worse problem. Paula Powers. He was having increasing panic attacks like more and more intense. It was really doing a number on him. And then finally when night he called his mother and said I can't handle this anymore. I need you. And she said I'm getting on a plane immediately. And she was there the next day she took the red eye. And she really helped him you know. It's Sophia with Enough, Franklin with the Y, and if you're looking for some bubble gum dumb dumb podcast, then you are in the wrong place, baby. Whether I'm reminiscing on the trials and tribulations of working in the corporate world to recapping today's latest reality TV show, you're going to want to pull up a chair and stick around. It's a good time and always 100% unfiltered. Follow and listen to Sophia with an F wherever you got your podcasts. And then almost before it's begun, senior year is over. It's June time to graduate. Brett though, nearly doesn't. I fail a couple of stuff I think. I fail my tail of Gen G course. You know, and there was a lot of talk that should break right away. The tail of Gen G course is taught by Claude Fredericks. The The literature and classics professor, who serves as the basis for Julian Moro and Donna's The Secret History. It's the only course of quads that Brett ever takes, and as you just heard, he doesn't actually take it, flunk it, and deliberately. "Quad," you know, "I—quad was just—again, my tolerance for a certain kind of teacher, the affectation of quad-fredericks was, you know, the bowtie and the suits, and I just—I mean, I had my own affectations, I'm sure, but quad-freder is just an uninteresting. But the administration decides to look the other way, and Brett is there on graduation day, listening to Donna deliver the commencement speech, and watching Jonathan, the perennial sophomore on leave, watching his girlfriend Susan Coleman, collector diploma. That's freshman year roommate, the one he couldn't abide, and who couldn't abide him, Miles Bellamy, has failed to graduate. Miles is, however, attending the ceremony. Brett crosses the Berlin Wall of broken glass, now metaphorical, to ask Miles for a favor. Miles." "It was something Brett and I haven't gotten, but we both had fathers who were drunk, so they'll mind stop drinking. Basically, Brett's father was so drunk and he asked me so that he could sort of focus on graduating, to keep an eye on his father, take care of him." Bob Ellis sleeps it off in Vapa, the visual and performing arts building, Mrs. Most of the ceremony, but he comes to and time to make a pass at Amy Herskowitz and attend the reception, which is where he has this encounter with Paula Powers. "At graduation, Brett was standing with his dad and I was like eating Swedish meatballs off of plate, and I had blue fingernails. I came up and said, 'Hi,' and his father grabbed my hand and he said, 'Oh, look at your blue fingernails. They're delicious. I want to stir my drink with them and he dumped my hand in his drink and swirled around the ice cubes with my fingers.' I thought it was funny, and I looked at Brett and he looked disgusted and he looked away. It was the first time that I really got, 'Oh, he actually really doesn't like his dad, because he would complain about his dad, but I kind of figured, 'Well, everybody thinks they're dads of drugs, you know, when you're a teenager.' But he really did not like his dad's behavior again. So, that's graduation. Graduation, though, isn't the thing. The graduation party is the thing. Brett's father throws him one at, 'Where else?' The Carlisle. Dan Ross. The invitation, which I still have, was embossed and very tasteful and sort of, 'Holygo, lightly,' kind of way. It's kind of the thing that you would have imagined Audrey Hepburn opening with glove hands, you know. An elegant invitation for an elegant party, though Jay McInerney and attendee, describes it in terms that are other than. 'It's a big rat fuck.' Big rat fuck. Kesca say big rat fuck, Jay. 'It was crazy. Somehow it became a real big deal. People were crashing in.' And journalists are covering it. Jerry Howard shows up with one. 'I was there with Bruce Weber, who was profiling Brett for the New York Times magazine.' Jerry remembers noticing that the line to the bathroom is prohibitively long. He also remembers meeting Brett's dad. 'Who looked rather unnervingly like Richard Nixon?' But he missed Andy Warhol. From the Andy Warhol Diaries, edited by Pat Hackett. Monday, June 16, 1986, quote, 'Keep hearing had a limo and I decided to go with him to the car while for a party for the Ellis kid who wrote less than zero. And as we were going in, a bald girl with a fashionable ugly dress was going in.' 'I'm interrupting. A bald girl in a fashionable ugly dress? Clearly Jonathan Leatham's ex-girlfriend, Maddie Horseman, the one he shaved his head with on Common's lawn in the summer of '84. Back to Andy.' 'I wonder if regular non-fashion clothes are out forever? If these kids will ever dress normally, like, you know, filled on to you again.' It was such a cute party. Brett on Warhol and that cute party. 'Worth all came to my party and he came with Keith Aaron. Wanted to take me in another two of those nice looking guys who were straight out for the night.' Brett, not without regret, declines. In New Yorker of a certain vintage, one said to me, quote, 'In New York in the 80s, if you were at the right party, the party you were supposed to be at, then Andy Warhol was there.' And that Andy, who will be dead within the year, comes to Brett's graduation party, strikes me as significant. His presence serving as a kind of benediction of the occasion, yes, but also a bread. Lisa Fater, class of '85. 'Oh yeah, I'm some of the famous graduation party. I rode up in the elevator with Andy Warhol. That was the hike of, it was just Bennington and New York coming together at the Carlyle. It was perfect. It was the 80s in New York, celebrities, fame, decadence, cocaine. I mean, it was fun.' Brett will start his next novel, 'The Final Instauman in What He Thinks Abaz, the less than zero trilogy, American Psycho, a few months later in the fall of '86.' It should be noted that he opens it on April 1, 1987, the day of Andy's Memorial service, the rare event that stops the city cold, more than 3,000 people crowding into St. Patrick's Cathedral to pay their respects. Next time, on 'Once Upon a Time at Bennington College,' J. is always so surprised that I never talked to him about my gain as even though I had boyfriends and I certainly wasn't pretending to be straight. And so when Jim came into the picture and it became apparent that we were going to be living together, J. noticed and it was kind of like, 'Why didn't you ever tell me? It's sort of like, why would I?' It was not something that I identified with or defined myself by. I know J. had brought this up a lot and so, 'Where's my, why do you work closer friend?' or something and it was like, 'Why are you talking about?' This has been a presentation and production of C-13 Originals, a cadence 13 studio. 'Once Upon a Time at Bennington College' is executive produced by me and Chris Corcoran, created and written by me, directed by Zach Leavitt, edited by Perry Crowell, script edited by Bruce Handy, production support and additional editing by Ian Mont, mixed and mastered by Bill Scholz, production coordination by Terence Malangone, studio coordination by Sean Cherry, artwork and design by Kurt Courtney, marketing by Brian Swarth, Josephina Francis, Roy Recurren and Melissa Wester. The original music is by Joel Goodman. Caden's 13 is an Odyssey Company. [end]