August 3, 2009. Heavy rains followed by sun, more rains, more sun following all weekend. New York was beautiful and quiet.
Life As Reality TV. The big news over the web this weekend was: Sarah Palin and her husband were splitting, that they both had “someone else,” etc. A day later Ms. Palin said it wasn’t true. The former governor of Alaska, albeit too briefly, could have a great reality TV show. The possibilities are endless. She could work it all the way to the White House. Or at least some people would think that.
Today is the birthday of -- among many others of course -- Betsy Bloomingdale and Peter O’Toole. Now how do I know such a thing? Because I have an odd sense of recall; that’s how. I often use birthdays as memory markers. I happened to be at a dinner party in Beverly Hills in the early 80s when both Mrs. Bloomingdale and Mr. O’Toole were there and we were talking about birthdays and it came out they shared one. Neither being baby chicks anymore, I’m not sure who is the senior, although it can be safely said that Mrs. B wins the eternal beauty contest.
The Media is the message. Today’s Times has a nostalgic piece by David Carr about this being the 10th anniversary of the launch of Talk magazine, created by Tina Brown, the Superwoman of American media at the time. Carr doesn’t say this, but Talk crashed because it wasn’t very good. It was too clever by half, with a bare midriff of snark, the current kudzu of American media.
The fate of Talk seemed ironic because Tina Brown made Vanity Fair and then The New Yorker the two most interesting and influential reads in the magazine business. She set the tone. For a long while it was overlooked that Ms. Brown had had a brilliant partnership with a man called Si Newhouse.
What is most significant about that failure, however, is that Ms. Brown just got up and went to work on something else, trying to set some new track. Media, like many others things in our world, is going through a sea of change, a shift. It’s impossible to predict its outcome but the internet is already alluding to the changes.
Last week on these pages, we ran Carol Joynt’s [1] affecting account of her professional relationship with Walter Cronkite. Part of the power of that piece was how it provoked memory of a man, a manner and a sensibility about work, life, and people that is in short supply in today’s world. Recently, for example, I heard one of the three top anchors tell some friends, half-jesting, to “just turn it on, you don’t even have to listen” to help with the nightly ratings. It’s all about the ratings, and anchors are now stars, celebrities first and professionals secondly.
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| Peter Cary Peterson at home with Jack. |
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Saturday night I had dinner at Swifty’s with Paige Peterson [2] whose son Peter Cary (or PC) has been a featured player on a new reality TV show called NYC Prep.
I remember when the show was in the talking stages, mother was not in love with the idea of the kid going on TV. It may sound glamorous or financially fabulous, but Paige who started out in adult life as an actress knows things get complicated when the spotlight is on you.
I don’t know Peter Cary, except having met him a number of times at one of his mother’s parties. He seems like a pleasant, possibly shy, well-mannered and polite young man who was known to be a very bright student and who maybe wanted to be an actor (although he was going to college).
Now he’s an item on Page Six and Gawker and the image it’s projecting of the young man is anything but pleasant or shy. His grandfather, Pete Peterson is a billionaire financier, and so it is assumed in the press that the young man is heir to a fortune. This may play on “Reality” TV but not in real life. Paige, who is divorced from Peter Cary’s father, lives comfortably but modestly in an apartment on Central Park West where she brought up her son and her daughter Alexandra. Grandfather and his money has never been a considered influence in their lives.
For the mother, who would have objected to her son going on the show if she had the legal right to stop him, the son’s sudden fame/celebrity/notoriety will be whatever it will be. She’s smart enough to be philosophical about it, knowing that her ability to “protect” the boy will have very little effect on the life of the young man. She’s watching her boy go out into the world on his own for the first while the rest of the world is watching too.
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