In conversation
As she brings her live show to the UK, Sex And The City author Candace Bushnell tells Polly Dunbar about female ambition, dating dilemmas and her new project
‘I a terrible cold, but we’ll be okay,’ says Candace Bushnell huskily over Zoom as she pops the first of several cough sweets into her mouth. Behind her, Pepper, one of her two poodles, settles down on a ‘ I have ‘ I have daybed for a nap. Lesser women might have cancelled our interview to do the same, but it takes more than a cold to stop the force of nature who created Sex And The City.
Sniffles aside, the entire scene is exactly what you might expect from Candace, whose groundbreaking mid-1990s newspaper columns about her wild dating exploits in Manhattan inspired the TV show that epitomised glamour for millions of women around the world. Pops of bright pink decor surround her in the stylish office of her New York home in Sag Harbor, where she’s talking to me wearing a black poloneck and subtle makeup, her blonde hair falling in immaculately blow-dried waves. Even Pepper’s fur is groomed to perfection. You can almost hear Samantha Jones drawling, ‘Faaabulous.’
At 65, the writer is celebrating her illustrious career with a one-woman show, True Tales Of Sex, Success And Sex And The City, which she’s bringing to cities across the UK following a smash-hit run in the US. It promises to be as funny, frank and inspiring as her, brimming with anecdotes from her life, which may or may not echo those from SATC (spoiler: most of what happened to Carrie Bradshaw also happened to Candace).
‘It’s really the origin story of Sex And The City,’ she says. ‘How I wrote it, why I invented Carrie Bradshaw, and what happened afterwards.’
REWRITING THE RULES
Candace was in her mid-30s when she landed the column in the New York Observer that sparked a global phenomenon. Born in Connecticut, the daughter of a rocket scientist and a travel agent, she dropped out of university at 19 and escaped to Manhattan, where she was a regular at the legendary Studio 54 nightclub. ‘It was like being an anthropologist, observing people,’ she says.
Desperate to make her mark, she scraped a living writing articles for magazines and dated the publisher of Vogue, the New York playboy Ron Galotti, who was the inspiration for the character Mr Big.
To avoid scandalising her parents with her column’s racy exploration of modern sex, she created an alter-ego, Carrie Bradshaw, to deliver her whip-smart one-liners. Her love of Cosmopolitan cocktails and Manolo Blahnik shoes (‘I still go to Manolo, buy three pairs and feel bad,’ admits Candace) made them bywords for chic, while her observations about ‘modelisers’ (men who only date models) and ‘toxic bachelors’ (men who can’t commit) gave us a new dating language. But the column, a
