Sitting at Candace Bushnell’s knee and hearing her tell her stories feels like
tugging on a thread that leads all the way back to Arthurian legend. In one
tale, a black knight — of course — will slay the youthful king if he cannot
answer one simple question: what is it that women want? Arthur has a year to
find the answer, and it takes about that long to find a woman wise enough to
tell him. She then gets to marry Sir Gawain. For grappling with the same
tortured question, Bushnell gets an apartment in New York’s hip Greenwich
Village, a few million dollars and a cute former ballet dancer to live
happily ever after with. Who says fairy tales don’t come true?
And 2008 is Bushnell’s fairy-tale year. She’s had a box- office smash with the
Sex and the City film, her new television series, Lipstick Jungle, has been
recommissioned, and this autumn she is publishing her fifth expected-to-be-bestselling
novel, One Fifth Avenue. If she’s not quite queen of the world, she’s
definitely queen of New York.
You would expect her to be, well, a little bit full of herself. If you nail
the zeitgeist four times in a row, you are entitled to feel a tiny bit smug.
Especially as each time you nail it, everyone says: “She’s lost the plot
with this one.” Until, of course, it becomes a TV series or a movie, and we
realise she’s hit the mark again.
When we meet on the set of Lipstick Jungle, just days before production was
shut down by the writers’ strike, she’s garrulous, enthusiastic and happy to
talk for as long as possible, about everything from Hillary Clinton to
childhood bedtime stories. To put this in perspective: on set visits, you
are typically entitled to maybe 20 minutes each with the “talent”, as the
jargon goes. Bushnell is the show’s executive producer and, as we speak, is
putting the finishing touches to One Fifth Avenue. Even I can see she
shouldn’t have time for this. But she does.
She is dressed like a posh school-run mum: tossed blonde hair, dark jeans and
a floaty chiffon shirt in unidentifiable animal print. But it’s her eyes
that hold your attention — the piercing blue is slightly unsettling. If she
were a fictional character, those eyes would bore into your soul. Even in
the real world, they seem to look past your fumbling questions and asinine
pleasantries. Thus, a simple line about the idea for a novel produces a
detailed dissection of her oeuvre.
“I think my work is about saying what we’re not supposed to say,” she says,
leaning forward as she talks, her eyes shining with a greater intensity. “In
Sex and the City, it was the frank discussion of sex. These days, we can all
talk about sex, that’s not upsetting to anybody. I think that now the frank
discussions that make us uncomfortable are women saying, ‘I want to be
president, I want to be CEO, I am ambitious, I want to do this with my
life.’ And that, for women, is the conversation that’s forbidden. That’s
what my work is about. Women aren’t supposed to be that way, yet we are.”
That is certainly the theme of Lipstick Jungle, which debuts in the UK on
Living next month. Based on her novel, it stars Brooke Shields as a
work-and-family-juggling movie executive, Wendy Healy; 24’s Kim Raver as an
ambitious and unfaithful magazine editor, Nico Reilly; and the relative
newcomer Lindsay Price as the single, confused fashion designer, Victory
Ford.
“This is a new paradigm of a woman who’s out there,” Bushnell explains. “It
really comes out of the lives of women I see in NYC, women in their forties
who are successful, at the top of their fields, often the big breadwinners
for their families. They have children and are achievement-oriented, but are
still basically the girl next door. Like my friend Cynthia Rowley, the
designer. She’s married, two children, successful business; she windsurfs
and does everything. But at the same time, she’s got half an hour to meet
for a drink in the Village. In this country, 30% of women make more money
than their husbands. And that is not just women who are CEOs in publishing,
that’s women across the board, women who are managers at Wal-Mart. And money
and power go together. We as women don’t really like to acknowledge that,
but it’s true. So when you have the money, the power paradigm with men
shifts, and that’s what Lipstick Jungle is about.”
Bushnell herself has most of that — although she gave up on the idea of
children a few years ago. She grew up in Connecticut, the eldest of three
girls, to parents who wouldn’t let her watch TV. “My parents believed kids
should make their own entertainment,” she grins approvingly, even as we sit
on the set of her very own TV show. “So we had to write our own stories,
make our own little journals and cartoon books. We wrote music and put on
marionette and puppet shows. My sister and I shared a room, so every night
we would tell stories. We would take turns, telling a long story that would
go on for two months.”
At 19, she dropped out of Rice University and followed her dreams to New York.
She tried acting, but hated the meat-rack auditions, then sold a children’s
story to Simon & Schuster. “They paid $1,000. I was 19, and that was huge,
so I thought, ah, I’m on my way.” But the book never appeared. “I don’t know
if they discontinued the series, or if I did a really bad job. Either way,
they discontinued me.” She went into journalism, taking any work that came
along. “I even wrote about microwave ovens.”
Meantime, she was going out. A lot. She was a Studio 54 girl, she wrote pieces
on how to disco — but the money wasn’t coming through. In the early 1990s,
aged 33, she found she had made just $8,000 in one year. She had to borrow
money to pay the rent and used a slab of foam for a bed. She thought about
going back to New England. She also thought about suicide. Then The New York
Observer asked her to write a column, which became Sex and the City. Darren
Star, the producer of Beverly Hills 90210, optioned the book, the show was a
smash and suddenly she was famous — although still not rich. The rights went
for $60,000 and she says it’s “highly unlikely” she will ever see another
dime from the show. Hence her producer-deal on Lipstick Jungle. And,
possibly, her obsession with money.
One Fifth Avenue, for instance, is set in the eponymous 27-storey art deco
apartment block in Manhattan, where you can pay about $9m for four bedrooms.
In real life, it is populated by doctors, lawyers, writers and art
collectors, as well as the actor Jessica Lange and playwright Sam Shepard
(whose place cost a mere $3.5m), Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter, and
the film director Brian De Palma. Bushnell adds her own cast: Mindy Gooch,
the matronly board president whose marriage to a weedy writer, James, is
failing; Philip Oakland, a successful screenwriter and twice-divorced
playboy; Schiffer Diamond, a middle-aged actress and Philip’s former
girlfriend; and Paul Rice, a filthy-rich hedge-fund manager.
“It’s about the new replacing the old . . . and the changes we all go through
as we strive for self-realisation,” she explains, hitting psychobabble for
the first time. Naturally, such self-realisation is leavened by shopping for
$2,000 shoes, dining in the finest restaurants and flying off by helicopter
for the weekend.
In Bushnell’s world, labels occupy the same place as Jane Austen’s legacies,
estates and etiquette. They are social markers as well as objects of desire.
Indeed, the two writers’ ambitions are the same — to reflect power through
relationships — although history may not be as kind to Carrie Bradshaw as it
has been to Lizzie Bennet. “I don’t think fashion is part of my work for the
sake of it,” Bushnell insists. “Fashion for many women is a weapon. It’s
comparable to men’s suits. There’s the salesman in the shiny
suit and then, certainly in New York, successful men wear hand-tailored
Italian suits. So, as you get older, your clothes express your status as
opposed to, ‘I found the right handbag, this is my weapon, get back’.”
These days, she insists, her standard outfit is jeans, long-sleeved T-shirt
and turtleneck sweater. Perhaps because she is content. After running
through more than a few toxic bachelors, including a real-life Mr Big, Bob
Guccione Jr, and the British venture capitalist Stephen Morris, she married
Charles Askegaard, a ballet dancer 10 years her junior, in May 2002. The
groom wore Prada, the bride white Ralph Lauren — which she spilt red wine
all over. Now they live in Greenwich Village with a labrador and have a
country house in Kent, Connecticut. Does contentment change the way she
writes? “No, no, God no,” she says hastily. “My voice is my voice, I don’t
have that much control over it. Marriage or not, that’s not going to change.”
So while her characters — and the rest of us, including the generation
of women who worship at her shrine — may still be struggling to make
sense of love, money and control, Bushnell at least has achieved the goal
that King Arthur phrased to save his neck from the black knight’s sword.
“What women want most,” the wise woman told him, “is exactly the same as
men: sovereignty over their own lives.”
Lipstick Jungle is on Living from September; One Fifth Avenue is published
by Little, Brown on September 23
