Manhattan Passions: True Tales of Power, Wealth, and Excess

Ron Rosenbaum is a topflight New York journalist. This book consists in 1980's interviews with rich, big- shot makkhers and dealers in the big town: Felix and Elizabeth Rohatyn the investment banker who reportedly saved New York, and his socialite wife: Eileen Ford of the topflight Model Agency, her husband and their star of that moment, the Kenyan Khalifa, the McCarthy lieutenant and legal advisor to the rich, Roy Cohn, Californian Adman Jay Chiat, the second generation of the Forbes empire, Malcolm ( who gives Rosenbaum the boot for a question on the Sandanistas) two TV Producer Tycoons, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer: the man who added 'automation' to the world's vocabulary John Diebold, who Rosenbaum finds a first- rate cliche - maker, Ms. Cosmo , Helen Gurley Brown and her friend, the gossip columnist, Liz Smith, the Mafia lawyer James LaRossa, the journalist behind the TV program, the 'Rich and the Famous', Robin Leach, the Donald Trump, Mayor Ed Koch, CBS News President Van Gordon Sauter, NY Times Restaurant Critic Bryan Miller, Gov. Mario Cuomo. A topflight list who Rosenbaum chats with over extravagant lunches he enjoys describing, and I suppose, eating. I found the book interesting because it gives insight into the way the kind of people who make it in the bigtime think and operate. All the energy, all the cleverness, all the personal hokum and idioscyncracy are essential to the picture. But the picture on the whole and Rosenbaum in his tone implies this is not a very inspiring one. There is something a bit tawdry about it all, the sordidness of life at the top. In fact the passage of the book I enjoyed the most was Rosenbaum's literary excursus on the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald, in which Rosenbaum describes and praises those tales of failed writers written at the end of Fitzgerald's career,'The Pat Hobby Stories' A light enjoyable read .