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Zoë Heller and James Wolcott

the breakfast table
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from: James Wolcott

The Sopranos, Andrew Cuomo, and the Nixon Watergate Tapes

Posted Thursday, Aug. 9, 2001, at 12:01 PM ET

Dear Zoë,

A couple of words were dropped from my previous post that made it seem Camille Paglia and I hadn't chatted before. It was supposed to read that we hadn't chatted in ages. (I did write about her for Vanity Fair: the piece where she was photographed with strapping, black-leather bodyguards.) My own take on The Sopranos is that the first season was sensational--almost as good as Michael Mann's Crime Story and the peak period of Buffy the Vampire Slayer featuring Eliza Dushku's Faith--but that the show has become a buffoonish, self-referential, sadistic exercise, the actors apart from James Gandolfini and Edie Falco increasingly mannered and stereotyped. I find the series nearly unwatchable, and I think its audience has become a mass cult of self-congratulation.

One of the stand-out moments of The Sopranos panel was Andrew Cuomo's welcoming remarks over lunch. Tall, handsome, virile, articulate, charismatic, he's an amazing power-pack of political sex appeal. He has his father's cadences and empathetic grace notes without his father's Jesuitical nitpicking. Conservatives recognize how formidable Cuomo is--that's why they've been pre-emptively striking at him, presenting him as a grubby liberal snorting like a bull with ambition. But Andrew Cuomo is clearly someone who can take anything thrown at him and has none of his father's soul-searching doubts and hesitations. He has the self-command of a future president.

Buried in the Daily News today was an Associated Press item about how audio experts are going to get a crack at finding out whether it's possible to recover what was said in the famous 18-minute gap on the Nixon Watergate tapes--the section Rose Mary Woods claimed to have accidentally erased. I can remember when that tape gap was a national obsession. I came to New York in 1972 and was working at the Village Voice when Watergate broke, and one of my tasks was wading through the slush pile to see if any unsolicited manuscripts had the tiniest speck of promise. At least 80 percent of the submissions were about Watergate, and at least 90 percent of those were fantasies/speculations/ruminations on what was on that missing audio. Many of them were obscene: Terry Southern/Paul Krassner riffs in which Nixon and his secretary, or sometimes Nixon and Bebe Robozo, were doing the dirty until they realized, oops, the tape recorder was running. Going through those scores of manuscripts taught this journalistic novice two things: Originality really is in short supply, and the notion that there's all this undiscovered, unjustly neglected talent out there is a myth. It takes a professional writer to churn out printable junk.

Word is that Bush is going to make his stem-cell announcement tonight at 9. Isn't it unusual to address domestic policy issues in prime time? Usually the only time the president takes to the airwaves then is to let us know which country we've just bombed. And I question the wisdom of giving this stem-cell decision so much dramatic build-up. Unless Bush wows us with Solomon-like wisdom, he's going to disappoint some interest group and disappoint them all the more because he created such false suspense.

Another letdown edition of the New York Post. The cover is a ghostly, shrouded shot of Mariah Carey sipping through a straw, her features barely discernible through the blurry foliage. She was photographed, according to the Post, "in the lush garden of her mom's suburban home, where the singer is recovering from a nervous breakdown." Presumably the Post, by invading her privacy with no journalistic justification, is hoping to drive her into a deeper one.

Jim

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516171819
from: James Wolcott

The Sopranos, Andrew Cuomo, and the Nixon Watergate Tapes

Posted Thursday, Aug. 9, 2001, at 12:01 PM ET
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Zoë Heller is a columnist for the London Daily Telegraph and author of the novel Everything You Know. James Wolcott is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and author of the novel The Catsitters.
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