GRAZIA INTERVIEW
Fran Lebowitz is as renowned for her signature style as for her acerbic wit. Here, she shares her take on everything from ageing to Trump
EARLY LAST MONTH, a mild to mediumstrength earthquake rattled New York City. Fran Lebowitz – raconteur, ultimate New Yorker, menswear style icon – was at home in her Chelsea apartment. ‘I didn’t know anything about it until people started calling me,’ she says. ‘But every person I know said the same thing : “We thought it was construction noise.” That’s how noisy it is in New York – that what in any other place would have been recognised as an earthquake, here, people thought, “It’s a renovation.” The number one thing that people complain about here is the noise.’
Plenty of New Yorkers enjoy complaining. Few relish it as much as Lebowitz, who has elevated her critiques of modern life into a career and art form. ‘To me,’ she says, ‘complaining is just a sign that you’re awake.’ Lebowitz is the genuine article : a New York icon since the 1970s, when she moved to the city to make it as a writer. She drove a taxi and wrote porn until Andy Warhol hired her to work at Interview magazine, then published two books of essays about urban life. These days, most people know her for her decades-long writer’s block or from Pretend It’s A City, the Netflix documentary series directed by close friend Martin (‘Marty’) Scorsese. She says 20-somethings approach her in the street and tell her they wish they’d been in New York in the ’70s because it looked more fun. She finds this ‘astonishing’ but understandable. ‘New York in the ’70s has achieved some sort of permanent glamour, like Paris in the ’20s.’
Lebowitz is 73 and, yes, she does have a favourite era. ‘ What everybody thinks was the best time in the city very frequently seems to coincide with when they were in their twenties. I was in my twenties in the ’70s so, to me, that was when it was the most fun. It’s definitely more fun to be in your twenties in the ’70s than in your seventies in the ’20s, which I am now.’
Of course she has thoughts on ageing. Disdainful ones – particularly toward the term itself. ‘Ever yone calls it ageing. I just call it being old,’ she says. ‘No one likes getting old.’ She thinks she looked her best in her thirties. The first birthday she struggled with was her 40th. ‘I ruined a really great party that somebody threw for me by just sulking. No idea why.’ But she enjoyed her fifties ‘very much’. ‘The fifties are good for women. You already know pretty much ever ything you’re going to know. You still look all right and you still feel mostly fine.’ She turned 70 in October 2021, during lockdown. She received so many bouquets that ‘my apartment smelled like [Upper East Side funeral chapel] Frank E Ca
