Men of Manhattan

It was the summer of 1984. A few nuns were strolling the streets of La Romana, a resort town in the Dominican Republic, when they heard a baby’s screams coming from a dumpster. The news soon reached the bronzed ears of the city’s most renowned resident, Oscar de la Renta, who at the time was mourning the death of his first wife.

On a recent Thursday afternoon, Moises Oscar de la Renta, now 24, picked me up in a Lincoln Town Car he had hired to run some last-minute errands in preparation for a camping trip he was taking that weekend with two attractive young women.  read more »

John Follini is a 58-year-old contractor from East Patchogue, L.I. He’s spent his life building barns, mending roofs and fences, installing light fixtures—doing the general upkeep required in sprawling homes along Long Island’s North Fork, in towns such as Bellport, Mastic-Shirley and Brookhaven. His forearms are invariably sheathed in a moist film of dirt; he has a gray mustache, a great muscular back. Like most accomplished Long Island contractors, he is a crack shot with a bow and arrow.

His father, who was also in the construction business, taught him to hunt when he was five. Grandpa Follini got in the way of a shotgun while serving as a guide on a bird hunt in East Hampton; he showed young John the pellets in his knuckles.  read more »

My editors told me I was crazy. Nuts. As in meshugge. After writing a column two weeks ago about the actor Steve Guttenberg’s move to New York and his hopes for finding true love—a column which they’d O.K.’d under protest—I went back to them last week and announced that it was absolutely essential that I go back to the Goot, as Mr. Guttenberg sometimes calls himself, for more. The original column, I pointed out, had received more than 170 comments on our Web site; Drudge had linked to it; some TV suits had contacted Mr. Guttenberg about a reality show. Clearly, there was an untapped wellspring of American passion for this wonderful actor; in the decades since he first sprang into the national consciousness in the Police Academy movies, he’d remained a lightning rod.  read more »

“It’s kind of a different way of life, because you can really just live your life one loop at a time,” said Gunner of his life caddying at a very exclusive private Hamptons golf club which is often bathed in a nice ocean breeze. He’s 25; back home in Glasgow, he’s studying to be a dentist. “You always know you’re going back out the next day. So it’s quite a surreal environment. ”

“It’s just something you do between sessions,” said Coco, Gunner’s 22-year-old friend from Glasgow. By “between sessions” he means between bouts of drinking.

While the work itself—digging around for balls in the fescue, lugging two sets of golf bags, praying for the moment when you put that flag in the 18th hole—might at times feel like grunt work, the way of life in the shack—two long pine planks that run along either side of a covered tent, tucked away behind a well-groomed hedge—is rarely dull.  read more »

About two years ago, Steve Guttenberg walked into the showbiz haunt Crustacean on Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

“I walked in and the maitre d’ made a big deal for me,” said Mr. Guttenberg. The Goot—as he’s known to his friends—appreciated the show. To hear him tell it, eating in public in Los Angeles is a dangerous business for an actor whose last box office hit was Three Men and a Baby in 1987.

“All of a sudden, the maitre d’ says, ‘Get out of the way!’” said Mr. Guttenberg. “And they literally threw me to the side and Tom Cruise came in.  read more »

Captain Stefan Barr said the scallops at the Gramercy Tavern could use a little more salt. He’s been back only a few months from his second tour in Iraq. For 10 years, he was one of the few, the proud, or, as he puts it, “the best”—a Marine. Now he lives in Soho.

Yes, there are soldiers walking among us, dining right next to you, tucking into those same $20 scallops. Some of them probably look just like you or me. Mr. Barr does not. He is 6 foot 5. He has a chest like a well-fed pterodactyl, with long, sinewy arms and giant hands that could easily reach across the table and pop my head off like a cork.  read more »

The Bear Stearns man, the lifer, the one they would have put on the cover of their recruiting pamphlet if they had one—Bear Stearns wants you!—he’s a self-made man. Daddy didn’t put him through Harvard Business School, and if he did, you better keep that to yourself.

Ace Greenberg—the man who put Bear on the map and defined the archetype, Missouri-educated on a football scholarship, started as a clerk, kept his nose to the grindstone, became the CEO—Ace isn’t interested in your business degree. “I want them to have a PSD degree,” he said. “A poor, smart, and deep desire to be rich degree.  read more »

The block of West 11th Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues is lined with brownstones and London plane and Chinese scholar trees as tall as the brownstones they shade. Their leafy branches overlap, creating a cozy green roof over the block, as well as a considerable mess to clean up—one of the trees has a pair of birdhouses attached to its trunk.

Henry Codin has been sweeping the block for over a decade. To some he is known as the Mayor of 11th Street. The city is filled with these neighborhood characters, like the Godmother of East 10th Street, or the homeless twins of East 12th Street between Third and Fourth avenues—they are identical, but one is far grumpier.  read more »

“I’ve been too high lately to be terrified of anything,” Liam McMullan said as he loped down Broadway on a recent afternoon to audition for a remake of the movie Fame. Twenty years old, he wore jeans, a purple T-shirt, beat-up Chuck Taylors and a Batman fanny pack containing a jar of marijuana, a bottle of Excedrin for the migraines he been getting lately, and a cell phone and iPod.

When he was 2 years old, Liam was featured in a VH1 special on children with wild parents—his are nightlife society photographer Patrick McMullan and the artist Laurie Ogle. His godparents are Village Voice gossip columnist Michael Musto and Mudd Club DJ Anita Sarko. His parents brought Liam to Warhol’s Factory when he has 3 weeks old. They never married.  read more »

Rip Torn, paragon of masculinity among actors and for the public who have seen him in Men in Black, Larry Sanders and recently as Don Geiss in 30 Rock, was telling a story. He was standing on the southeast corner of 23rd Street and Ninth Avenue, wearing black cowboy boots, black Wrangler work pants held up by suspenders, a blue striped shirt, sherbet orange vest and a dusty black fedora.

“I’ve seen people die, but never go from alive to dead that quickly,” he said.

It had happened on this same corner; Rip Torn was hiding behind a lamppost with Norman Mailer, who would one day try to bite off his ear. But that was later. The soon-to-be-dead guy in the story Mr. Torn was telling was someone unfortunate enough to be flushed out from a hiding place under a car by four armed men in dark suits.  read more »