Boston Celtics star Paul Pierce refused to use his credit card at Tenjune and left to go find a club where he could use cash.
Porn star Jenna Jameson has lost a lot of weight and has started acting unprofessionally since her divorce. Real-estate developer Harry Macklowe gets preferential treatment at all Icon parking garages in Manhattan. Ben Widdicombe got an earful from Pauly Shore. The Russian Tea Room uses out-of-context quotes to give the impression that it has been well reviewed.
Tom Wolfe will give a speech in Miami about art and architecture. A number of J. Jennifer Lopez arrived three hours late to her album-release party. Padma Lakshmi and Salman Rushdie may be breaking up. James Gandolfini picked up a girl Tony Soprano—style. And Christopher is apparently the odds-on favorite to get whacked in the final season. Julianna Marguiles bought condoms with some guy at Duane Reade. Lindsay Lohan was allowed to use an apartment in the Atelier on West 45th Street because developers wanted to give the building some star power.
But Dan published it, and it was great. That was exactly the kind of writing that drew me into magazines in the first place—into reading them and later into working for them. Dan would go with a story if he felt the truth in it. I wrote a short essay on the virtues of letting yourself go. Then Dan went to the fashion shows at Milan and hung out with a bunch of fashion-world sparrows with inch waists.
And I can say from the inside that we very definitely were not; I think we were interested by the intersection and the overlap between straight culture and gay culture. Details , at least as it was redefined under Dan [Peres] in , came at a time when the definition of masculinity was changing. It was dynamic, and archetypes were breaking down, and I think fusty ideas of what made a man a man were beginning to crumble—and rightly so.
Of the stranger things that I actually expensed: a used pair of panties; opium, which I smoked in Richmond with a bunch of yuppie opium smokers; and a hand job. Guy B would then have to chug the Smirnoff Ice on bended knee. I mistakenly thought this would make a brilliant Details story and brought it up in an ideas meeting. It did not get approved, but later that day entertainment director David Walters snuck out, got a Smirnoff, and iced me. I chugged my Smirnoff on bended knee in the middle of the office.
It was great. The thing that really made Details what it was was the point of view—both the voice and the aesthetic. It was knowing…and pushed things, always. There was a TV portfolio we did in that included Martha Stewart and ALF styled the same way —sweater slung over shoulders, cocktail in hand—and it all went down without Martha knowing what was happening.
That feels classic Details irreverence to me. I think the readers very much got this: The magazine did its first focus groups when I was there, and one of the projects involved readers sorting through images and pulling out ones that, to them, felt very Details. At the time the editorial muscle there was astounding; many are now prominent editors or writers elsewhere in no particular order: Michael Hainey, Danielle Mattoon, Mark Healy, Ariel Foxman, among others.
The second tour was during the golden era of the metrosexual covers: Downey Jr, Damon, Josh Hartnett [! The lesson in both cases is that the magazine, like so many other platforms, failed to stay ahead of the consumer behavior it promised to cover.
But for a sweet moment there, for both tours, it really mattered. It was addictive, demanding, exhausting, degrading, stimulating, and incredibly satisfying. We put as much time and attention into a story about the Iraq War as we did a story about man boobs. I learned most of what I know about being a magazine editor from the great ones there.
Dan was only 28 or something when he was named editor-in-chief. We were all kids. It felt like we were getting away with something. Remember: We were a small, scrappy staff. But we worked for Fairchild. Our cafeteria at 7 West 34th Street was two guys with a hot plate. Everyone says their first office is like a family. But in this case, it really was true. And I wanted to make Dan proud.
I remember interviewing this big Hollywood producer one night by phone. It was going to be one of my first real bylines in Details. And it would have been, had the producer not hung up on me after eight minutes because he thought I was disrespecting his work. Dan was cool about that. He was pretty cool about everything, really. Instead we all went out and got drunk—like a family. I think Dan was secretly proud of that.
What more could you ask for from a first boss? We knew what was coming, but we were still a little shocked when it happened. Which I think is how we all feel today. Sometimes, with these matters, the evidence is clearer in retrospect. Ian Daly, now a close friend of mine, went on to become instrumental in the rollout of Apple Music. Andrew Essex, a powerhouse in marketing and media. Mickey Rapkin went off and wrote Pitch Perfect.
Erica Cerulo launched Of A Kind. Grady Laird turned into a cold-brew-coffee tycoon. I mean, my two main editors at Details were Pete Wells and Jessica Lustig, and I am quite certain that it would be impossible to find two sharper, more literate, more gracious, more word-sensitive editors in all of New York media. So there you go. So who deserves credit for all of this? Dan Peres. As I pointed out on my Facebook page, here are just some of the people and ideas that Dan got me to write about: A violinist going home to Siberia.
A pack of rogue bodysurfers in Southern California. Keanu Reeves searching for a sandwich.
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