Jay McInerney: The Consummate New York Writer

Jay McInerney is a New York Times best selling author known for his breakout novel Bright Lights Big City. He also wrote the screenplay for the 1988 film adaption of Bright Lights Big City and co-wrote the screenplay for the 1998 film Gia, starring Angelina Jolie. In addition to his fiction work, McInerney was the wine columnist for House & Garden magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and currently writes the wine column for Town & Country magazine. His essays on wine have been collected in Bacchus & Me (2000) and A Hedonist in the Cellar (2006) and his book of short stories, titled How It Ended, was named one of the 10 best books of the year by The New York Times in 2009. McInernay has also been honored by the New York Public Library as a “Literary Lion” and won the James Beard MFK Fisher Award for Distinguished Writing. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:06Alec Baldwin?

  This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. My guest today is a New York Times bestselling author, screenwriter, and columnist whose breakout novel Bright Lights: Big City inspired a generation of New York writers and New Yorkers themselves. Jay McInerney is a prolific writer with eight novels under his belt. He adapted Bright Lights: Big City into the feature film starring Michael J. Fox in 1988. McInerney has been awarded the Literary Lion by the New York Public Library and the James Beard M.F.K. Fisher Award for Distinguished Writing.

• 1:49Alec Baldwin?

  In addition to his work as a novelist, McInerney has been the wine columnist for House and Garden, The Wall Street Journal, and most recently, Town and Country Magazine. While his novels are synonymous with a glamorous, even decadent, New York, McInerney did not always live in the city. He moved quite frequently during his childhood, and his upbringing plays a part in his writing.

• 2:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. They are shaped by their childhood and also, you know, I think in my case, especially by their early adulthood, you know, I was lucky to have had fairly happy childhood in terms of my relationship with my parents. However, I moved almost every year that I was growing up and that, that was difficult because every year I had to renegotiate social terrain. I had to like get in fights with kids.

• 2:38Alec Baldwin?

  A fresh set of contenders.

• 2:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, a whole fresh set of bullies. And that undoubtedly marked me. It made me kind of socially adept and facile because I had to be. But it also made me somewhat withdrawn because I spent a lot of time, you know, in my room, reading, reading books and writing silly little short stories. In terms of Bright Lights, Big City, the thing that shaped me also was, you know, it's either Hemingway or many people have said it since, including Gordon Lish. But he said that the best thing that can happen to you as a writer is the worst thing that can happen to you that doesn't kill you. And in my case, I lost my dream job at The New Yorker. My fashion model wife dumped me in very short order.

• 3:23Speaker 04

  And then my mother died of cancer, all within the space.

• 3:27Alec Baldwin?

  How old were you when she died?

• 3:28Speaker 04

  A year. I was about 25. And, you know, I mean, those are three really bad things to happen. But I think if those three things hadn't happened, I might have cruised through life fairly easily. I would have become a moderately good writer. But, you know, my first book does have a lot of pain in it because there was a lot of bad things that happened to me in my early twenties. And that all went into the book. And even though I like to think, and people tell me that it's a very funny book in many ways, there's also this underlying current of pain that courses through it, you know?

• 4:04Alec Baldwin?

  I'm gonna read the book again because when I read the book, you're, you're young. I'm young. Now I'm 66. I'm like, I'm afraid to read it again. I'm being laughing and crying at the same time.

• 4:13Speaker 04

  I reread it recently because someone offered me a fair amount of money to use a quote out of it. And I didn't, I didn't recognize the quote. So I reread the book. Well, it turns out they took the quote out of the movie.

• 4:24Alec Baldwin?

  Luckily. But you wrote the screenplay.

• 4:26Speaker 04

  But luckily I wrote the screenplay. So I still got the money. But rereading the book, I was kind of impressed and I was also kind of daunted because I just thought, I could only have written that book then, you know. I think there's a certain music of the spheres that you hear when you're in your twenties too, that you just, that becomes inaudible later. That was a book of my twenties. Bright Lights, Big City was pre-internet, pre-digital, pre, you know, I mean, I sometimes I wonder how we, how we found ourselves back then, you know, or how did we find our friends, you know?

• 4:57Alec Baldwin?

  We met them somewhere.

• 4:58Speaker 04

  You have a rendezvous and you hope that they show up, I guess.

• 5:03Alec Baldwin?

  Well, our network of friends, I think, is much smaller then.

• 5:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:06Alec Baldwin?

  You didn't have, you didn't have the facility to keep up with all those people. You know, I read that book years ago and I was addicted to cocaine. I was a cocaine addict. I got forty years sober coming February. I don't talk about that, that much on the record. And when I read that book, I mean, that pain of lugging myself home at the four o'clock in the morning, trying to sleep, I couldn't.

• 5:25Speaker 04

  When I think of it now, I just absolutely shudder. And it's my friend, friend, friend says, you know, he, he thinks everybody in life gets a bathtub full of cocaine and a swimming pool full of vodka. And after that, you better stop.

• 5:39Alec Baldwin?

  That's your limit. That's pretty funny. Now, but when you, when you write, as other people have observed, now this is not my observation, you wrote it in the second person. People have commented about that a lot. Why? What propelled you?

• 5:50Speaker 04

  Well, what propelled me was the birth of the thing, really is. So one night, I was, you recognize this type of night. It was like three thirty in the morning and I was, God, I think I was in a, I was in a club that no longer exists, obviously, but maybe it might have been the world. And I'd gone with a friend and he disappeared with a girl. And my girl had rejected me. And so I'm, I'm standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom and the coke is just running out. And I remember saying into the mirror, uh, you're not the kind of guy who'd be at a place like this at this time of the morning, but here you are. And I was certainly.

• 6:27Alec Baldwin?

  And you weren't, and you weren't that kind of guy?

• 6:28Speaker 04

  I was.

• 6:30Alec Baldwin?

  That's what you told yourself.

• 6:31Speaker 04

  No, but I told myself, I was a good Catholic boy. I didn't, what was I doing, snorting coke at three thirty in the morning? So I, I finally made it home that night. I had to walk up to East Fifth Street because I'd run out of money. And I wrote that very sentence down on a scrap of paper and I stuck in the desk drawer and forgot about it. And about six months later, I had submitted a short story to George Plimpton at the Paris Review. And he actually called me on the phone and I'm not gonna try and imitate him. You probably could, but he had this very fluty.

• 7:01Alec Baldwin?

  Yes.

• 7:02Speaker 04

  Patricia voice.

• 7:03Alec Baldwin?

  Yes.

• 7:03Speaker 04

  He said he liked the story, but did I have anything else? So I go through my desk and I'm like going crazy and, and everything I read that I had written in the last year seemed like really imitative and derivative. Like here was my Ambiti story, here was my Robert Stone story, here was my Raymond Carver story. And then it came on this piece of paper. You're not the kind of guy who'd be at a place like this at this time of the morning. And I thought, wow, I can, I said, you know, that's how we talk to ourselves. We talk to ourselves in the second person. We don't say, I idiot, we say, you idiot, you know? So that night I sat down, I wrote, I wrote the first chapter of Bright Lights, Big City, basically. And the next morning I called up George, a Paris Review office and I said, I got one, I got one.

• 7:47Speaker 04

  And I, I sent it to them and they promptly published it. And I subsequently thought, you know, the story's not done. And also it created a nice stir. I mean, back when literary buzz was something other than on Instagram.

• 8:02Alec Baldwin?

  It was real.

• 8:03Speaker 04

  And, and yeah. And so I thought, you know, I should just keep going with the story because I said to myself, this guy is in obvious pain. What's wrong with him? Something bad's happened to him, but it doesn't come into the, particularly into the story. And so, so I started writing a novel, which I finished in, I finished the first draft in six weeks. And my.

• 8:22Alec Baldwin?

  Who was your editor?

• 8:23Speaker 04

  My editor was Gary Fisketjohn of Random House. And about halfway through my writing process, I told him I was writing a novel and he said, well, I hope to God it isn't in the second person. And that almost stopped me cold. So then I went back and I tried writing in the first and the third, and something just drained out of the story. It wasn't as funny, it wasn't as self-conscious. And so I stuck with it. And there were one or two reviewers who thought I was crazy, but there were quite a few others that liked it and it subsequently sold hundreds of thousands of copies. So I guess readers weren't put off by it. But the guy is, for a good part of the book, the guy is high. He's like, you know, so he's self-conscious. He's in a slightly altered state and.

• 9:04Alec Baldwin?

  But he's in pain in my mind. Well, at least this is what I get from other things you've written and my sense of comments you've made in interviews. What I see about you is that the guy that has his pain, but is always trying to overcome it. There's an emotional sturdiness to you as a person. And in the books, there seems to be, they don't stop fighting. They try not to give up and succumb. It's not Bukowski.

• 9:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, I went through some crises this past year and my, my wife said to me fairly recently, she said, I can't believe how upbeat and optimistic you are about all this. And I said, but what would be the point of letting it defeat you and being downbeat?

• 9:41Alec Baldwin?

  You're talking about the health issues.

• 9:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. It's like, you know, I, I like to think I have a positive attitude even when it seems ridiculous, but you just lose that additional peace of mind that you might preserve.

• 9:55Alec Baldwin?

  You're writing and you're submitting and it's journalism or whatever, you and essays and things. The guy that you're editor, how do you end up with him? You were with him before Bright Lights. How do you get him?

• 10:06Speaker 04

  I, I met him at Williams College when, when we were both there and we initially were pursuing the same woman who was a Wellesley transfer student and, and we, we had a big feud about that and he, you know, and the first time I ever really met him, he threw a cigarette into my beer pitcher.

• 10:23Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah, I'm sorry about that.

• 10:25Speaker 04

  And, and so I-

• 10:25Alec Baldwin?

  And it was love.

• 10:26Speaker 04

  I went over to try to fight him and we were pulled off each other. And then somehow, the next thing I knew, we were friends and we took a class on James Joyce's Ulysses together and that was sort of a bonding experience. And then I remember that I gave him, that one of the first hardcover books I ever bought was Raymond Carver's Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? And I, and when I saw I was finished with it, I thought it was extraordinary and I lent it to him. And it was kind of wonderful because he ended up being Raymond Carver's editor down the road. But in the meantime, we became best friends. We, when we graduated, we drove across the country together in a beat up Volkswagen

• 11:07Speaker 04

  and spent about three months on the road until we couldn't find work. Eventually parted, but he remained my best friend and then he went to work for Random House. So he was the logical person to go to when I had a book to publish.

• 11:21Alec Baldwin?

  He was your editor throughout?

• 11:22Speaker 04

  Right. If they all own my books so far, yeah. Yeah. And it was- It's an interesting relationship because on the one hand, it's great to have your best friend editing your work. And on the other hand, it makes for some tense kind of sibling rivalry, you know?

• 11:36Alec Baldwin?

  Was he honest with you, officer?

• 11:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, very honest. But I mean, to the point that he would sometimes write in the margins like, duh, exclamation mark. And then, you know, just a little discouraging. I mean, but usually when I'd finished a book, he would come to wherever I was living and just camp out for about a week. And we would just go over pretty much line by line. And sometimes we'd fight terribly about about stuff. I mean, he wasn't sure about the second person at first. And I'm really glad I held my ground on that. And I have to say, his name is Gary Fiskichan, by the way, but I have to say that the thing I give him credit for is that he always said, in the end, it's your name on the book. So apparently, I had the veto power, although it was hard sometimes not to feel like I was the naughty student and he was the teacher.

• 12:20Alec Baldwin?

  I was contacted by Library of America to go to the synagogue on Fifth Avenue in Warrnambool. I had a presentation, myself and two other people, John Rothman and one other to read from Roth's bibliography. So we go there and I get an email from Philip Roth. It says, thank you so much. I'm really very pleased that you're doing this. So we go and do it. And it was pretty well. I mean, it's great stuff to read. And I'm a pretty good reader in public that way, if I find where the accents are. And he writes me again. He says, I heard it went great. Thank you so much again. And so I stop and I go, let me ask you a question. What do you think about me writing? I'm writing a memoir and I want to write it in the third person. So I can protect some people as I did in my divorce book.

• 13:00Speaker 04

  Right.

• 13:00Alec Baldwin?

  Roth writes me back and he goes, first of all, and there's like capitalizations for instance, first of all, there is no such thing as a memoir in the third person. So you must put yourself out there. You spare no one, particularly yourself. And he goes on and on and on.

• 13:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, he didn't.

• 13:18Alec Baldwin?

  He didn't. He didn't do it. But I have written books, I swear to God, this is funny, not that I dwelled on the Saturday point, I was even aware until now that I've written books where I would write sentences in the second person. I did that for runs. And I got attacked by the editors for that.

• 13:33Speaker 04

  It's an easy thing to fall into because it's a mode that we often use internally, you know?

• 13:40Alec Baldwin?

  In conversation?

• 13:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, and in conversation. And sometimes, I've seen it where other people will slide into the second person when they're when they're writing. I got some grief for it at the time, not from regular readers, you know, from critics who wondered if it was a legitimate. Mode.

• 13:56Alec Baldwin?

  Well, I'm being glib here somewhat when I say that your life obviously changes after that book.

• 14:01Speaker 04

  My life changed almost overnight. I mean, nothing happened overnight back then because, you know, when you publish a book, I mean, even word of mouth takes time to spread. And it was a while before much was written about Bret Lutz's Big City. And very quickly, it sold out its first printing and it took about six, seven weeks to reprint it. And we were afraid it might die then because, you know, that's a long time.

• 14:25Alec Baldwin?

  That people step in.

• 14:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. But it did. And, you know, and the second printing sold out very quickly and the third. And suddenly, you know, by three or four months after it was published, I was, I was getting kind of New York famous, you know? And I remember, I mean, one of the first indications I, I had of this was, I was trying to get in. Remember the Palladium opened a long time ago?

• 14:49Alec Baldwin?

  Which is now a dormitory.

• 14:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. So a bunch of us went to try and get in. It was a huge line. And I just said, oh, the hell with this. My friend, Morgan Endrick, said, no, wait a minute. And he manages to get up to the bouncer and he says, that's Jay McInerney over there. And the bouncer immediately says, oh, well, why didn't you say so? Come on in.

• 15:08Alec Baldwin?

  I just wait, Mr. McInerney.

• 15:10Speaker 04

  That was the first time I thought, wow, maybe my life is changing, you know? And, um, girls and...

• 15:17Alec Baldwin?

  All of it.

• 15:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, all of it.

• 15:19Alec Baldwin?

  It's a banquet.

• 15:20Speaker 04

  And it was, um, yeah, I mean, and for a relatively shy person who was just out of graduate school, it was kind of wild.

• 15:26Alec Baldwin?

  How old when the book came out?

• 15:27Speaker 04

  Twenty-seven. I'd been to graduate school. I'd spent two years in Japan teaching English.

• 15:33Alec Baldwin?

  What did teaching English in Japan do to feed your career as a writer? If anything?

• 15:37Speaker 04

  Just gave me time to write because I only had to teach about 10 hours a week. I mean, I, I was kind of fascinated by Japanese culture and so on, but there came a point where I realized that staying there was, was not going to... Engaged me in my own culture, it was gonna, if anything, divorce me from my own culture. And so, so at that point, I moved back to New York with my girlfriend, who was a fashion model. And for me, everything was about New York was just so new and amazing. And it was almost like I was a foreigner coming to discover this new country. And I just found New York extraordinary. And I just thought, I could write about this. I could write about New York. And not many people, you know, since, I don't know, since

• 16:17Speaker 04

  Salinger, not that many people had. I remember Tom Wolfe coming up to me in 1986, and he said, that was brilliant that you wrote about New York. He said, I'm gonna do the same thing. And then, of course, he wrote Bum Bar the Vanities, which turned out to be a pretty good book.

• 16:31Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah.

• 16:32Speaker 04

  And then, there was a whole slew of New York novels. But I remember Jason Epstein, who was the vice president at Random House, who was kind enough to take my book on. He took me out to lunch, and he said, first of all, nobody your age reads, and this is 1983. And then he said, and secondly, nobody cares about New York. So, he was very, he said, you wrote-

• 16:53Alec Baldwin?

  You were coming out of the 70s, which is ugly New York.

• 16:55Speaker 04

  He said, he wrote a really good book, but he said, I just want to tamp down your expectations. And, you know, allegedly, nobody wants to read about New York. But three years later, every other book was set in New York City.

• 17:11Alec Baldwin?

  Author and columnist Jay McInerney. If you enjoy conversations about the New York literary scene, check out my episode with Tina Brown.

• 17:21Speaker 05

  A great editor isn't an autocrat. I mean, you have to have a vision, in the same way the director has to have a vision of a movie. And you have to have a worldview, too. I mean, I knew what I wanted to do with Vanity Fair. I wanted to combine the elegance and glamour of the magazine, of the famous magazine of the 20s and 30s, with some of that narrative gristle of journalism that had then become the sort of defining feature of the great magazines of then the 70s and 80s, like Rolling Stone, like New York Magazine. So I wanted to modernize that formula, if you like.

• 17:54Alec Baldwin?

  To hear more of my conversation with Tina Brown, go to here'sthething.org. After the break, Jay McInerney talks about his involvement in the film adaptation of Brightlight's Big City, and helping Michael J. Fox prepare for the role.

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• 20:10Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing. The 1988 film adaptation of Bright Lights: Big City, starring Michael J. Fox, premiered to mixed reviews. I was curious about Jay McInerney's work on the film and how he felt about the portrayal of the main character, Jamie Conway, who is based on Jay himself.

• 20:31Speaker 04

  Michael and I got along tremendously well. In fact, we used to stay out till 3:00. I don't know how he made it to the set every morning because we used to stay out till 3:00 in the morning, doing, snorting coke and doing all the stuff that you do in the book.

• 20:43Alec Baldwin?

  He's a method actor.

• 20:44Speaker 04

  I first learned, when I was hanging out with Michael, first of all, the power of a persona. And his persona was Alex Keaton. And his millions of fans wanted him to be Alex Keaton and they didn't want to see him with a coke straw up his nose. And my smaller legion of fans had no interest in seeing Alex Keaton playing me.

• 21:06Alec Baldwin?

  That's over a mirror.

• 21:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, no interest. And so that, there was a disconnect right there.

• 21:12Alec Baldwin?

  From the beginning.

• 21:13Speaker 04

  From the start. And then also, I think, you know, I mean, Sidney Pollack was the producer and he once said to me, he said, "Why do all these people want to get into all these nightclubs?" And I just thought, "Oh, man, we don't really understand what's going on here, do we?" And, you know, the director, James Bridges, he was, you know, he was aging out at that point, this kind of material.

• 21:34Alec Baldwin?

  Urban Cowboys is a completely different kind of movie.

• 21:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. So I mean, look, I wrote the screenplay, but honestly, they shouldn't have let me write the screenplay because I didn't know that much about movies at the time. Screenplays are very different than, as you know, than novels. You know, it's like, writing a novel is like hosting a party. Writing a screenplay is like catering the party, you know? And you have to have a different language and you have to realize that movies are made out of images, you know? They're not made out of words.

• 22:01Alec Baldwin?

  I think Mamet taught me this, or I observed this about Mamet, and he confirmed with me in whatever language, because I'd done a few Mamet films. I did Glengarry, obviously, I did State of Maine.

• 22:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, remember that one?

• 22:11Alec Baldwin?

  And when I was around him, and you could talk to him, he's so intimidating, he's this amazing talent, and, you know, universally admired in the, in the, in the acting world, you know, in the acting world. And so, I mean, I really believe that Ollie Ono is probably one of the five best plays I've ever read in my life, for an actor.

• 22:27Speaker 04

  Well, Glengarry, Glen Ross is not so shabby either.

• 22:30Alec Baldwin?

  Well, no, but he won the Pulitzer Prize for that. My scene wasn't even in there. So when he puts my scene in there, I called him, and I go, "Why are you taking your Pulitzer Prize-winning book and changing it for the movie business?" He goes, "'Cause I never believed these guys had a criminal nature. I need someone to come in and turn the screws tighter, so they commit a crime."

• 22:46Speaker 04

  Ah, yeah.

• 22:47Alec Baldwin?

  And he said, "I wrote this person that you're gonna play to come in and, and to push them toward the criminality."

• 22:53Speaker 04

  Huh.

• 22:54Alec Baldwin?

  Now, he writes, "Bob enters. Bob, you're probably wondering why I called you. Well, here today..." That, no, his whole idea was, "What's the point in a screenplay of any stage directions? I'm gonna describe the room, because in the book, that's the only chance you're gonna get to see the room, if I tell you what's in the room."

• 23:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:09Alec Baldwin?

  If I accent something, if I accent their behavior, his handshaking, he's scratching his crotch, whatever you write, I'm responsible for that. And then a screenplay or a teleplay, it's, a director's gonna come in and just do whatever they wanna do. And Mamet's so spare in that way, so spare.

• 23:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:26Alec Baldwin?

  When I saw that movie, I thought, thought that those people lost that idea. Like, there wasn't enough of the book, and the, and the kind of, I don't wanna say grit, but just the, the sense of the book in the movie.

• 23:36Speaker 04

  Well, you know, I think back to The Graduate, because The Graduate actually was a very successful novel until my-

• 23:43Alec Baldwin?

  Assault.

• 23:44Speaker 04

  Mike Nichols got a hold of it.

• 23:45Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 23:46Speaker 04

  And Mike Nichols so, kinda reinvented the book, you know, and he had this great underwater scenes, you know, in the swimming pool, and, you know, the scene in the closet, I mean, but, but he found a visual language to interpret what was largely a novel of dialogue. And people don't even remember that there was a book called The Graduate Now. So, I mean, it's not the worst thing in the world for me that Bright Lights, the book, is better than Bright Lights, the movie. But, you know, I wonder if we'd had a Robert Town as a screenwriter and if we'd had Tom Cruise as...

• 24:19Alec Baldwin?

  You and somebody, you were the co-writer.

• 24:20Speaker 04

  Tom Cruise, for a year, was supposed to be the star. Tom Cruise came and spent three, four days and nights with me, following me around, so that he could model the character on me. It was very weird. He kept calling me sir, which was very peculiar. I mean, I was like a year older than he was. But he finally, you know, it got delayed and he finally left to do Top Gun, which I think was a good career choice.

• 24:45Alec Baldwin?

  Tom's gotta do what Tom's gotta do.

• 24:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, so strange. He was such a polite, respectful kid.

• 24:51Alec Baldwin?

  He's a great guy, actually.

• 24:52Speaker 04

  As I say, only a year younger than me. But, you know, Michael, there was a mismatch there in the casting, I think. And, uh, not that Michael isn't a great actor, because he was... But taking on an iconic TV role and embodying it, it's really hard than to, you know...

• 25:11Alec Baldwin?

  The producers have no one to blame but themselves.

• 25:13Speaker 04

  To get the audience's minds somewhere else.

• 25:15Alec Baldwin?

  You should have known what he was. Anyway, after you launched the book, comes the imitators and/or people say were, uh, kind of, I don't want to say imitating or piggybacking, but Bret Easton Ellis comes and does his book, which he said, he put a character in there based on you in Less Than Zero? Was that true?

• 25:31Speaker 04

  In one of his later books called Lunar Park, there's a character named Jay McInerney.

• 25:35Alec Baldwin?

  No.

• 25:36Speaker 04

  Like, who gets drunk and falls in the pool.

• 25:38Alec Baldwin?

  Okay, well...

• 25:39Speaker 04

  Who snorts coke off a Porsche, you know?

• 25:41Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah, okay.

• 25:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I never did those two things.

• 25:45Alec Baldwin?

  No, no, I don't, I doubt it.

• 25:48Speaker 04

  But Bret's book was very different than mine.

• 25:50Alec Baldwin?

  How so?

• 25:50Speaker 04

  It was very dark and it was very, sort of, it was almost nihilistic. And his prose was really stripped down and bare. His big influence was Joan Didion. And, um, when I first... Read his novel before it came out. Morgan Ettrick and his editor were saying to me, oh, I'm going to promote this as the West Coast, right, Lights, Big City. And so at first I was inclined to not like the guy at all. But then we did a seminar together and I read the book and I thought, you know, he's really talented and we're doing two completely different things. Although it was very easy for the press to lump us together because young people, drugs, you know, that kind of nightclubs, that kind of thing. But I befriended Brett in part because I wanted to warn him what was likely to come his way.

• 26:33Speaker 04

  In other words, that his life was going to be turned completely upside down. I mean, it happens to actors a lot, but it doesn't usually happen to writers. And it did happen to me and it did happen to him in a way that it hadn't since, you know, Mailer and Capote and Vidal, that generation. And I'm still good friends with Brett. And, you know, in some ways, I, you know, we have an experience in common that not many people have.

• 26:56Alec Baldwin?

  For that period, for sure. Author and columnist Jay McInerney. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeart Radio app, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Jay McInerney details the story behind his screenplay for the 1998 film Gia, which launched the career of one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, Angelina Jolie.

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• 29:08Speaker 07

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• 29:29Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing. Ten years after the release of the film Bright Lights: Big City, Jay McInerney penned the screenplay for Gia, which launched the career of Angelina Jolie in 1998. Despite having two of his scripts made into movies with big stars, McInerney chose not to continue with a career in screenwriting. I wanted to know if he was ever tempted at the time to move to Hollywood and pursue writing for film full-time.

• 30:00Speaker 04

  So I did some spec screenplays and I got my price up pretty high and it was a nice way to make money. The only full-length screenplay I wrote that really got produced was Gia, which was... I remember. It's HBO's first movie because HBO, remember, was just a recycling bin, basically. Yes. They took like Red October and then they just put it on TV. And that was, that was what they did. But then they came to me and they said, hey, we've got this idea to make original movies. And how'd you like to do the first one about Gia Caracci? And I just said, oh, this is perfect, like drugs, eighties models, nightclub, let's call Jay McInerney. I mean, what else would you do, right? And so I said to them, look, I could write a good screenplay, I think.

• 30:44Speaker 04

  But I said, it's all gonna depend on the casting. I said, you have to find a woman who is utterly charismatic because Gia never said anything memorable in her entire life. I mean, this, there's not a single line that anybody can remember that she said. But, you know, luckily, they cast it perfectly. I mean, Angelina Jolie was extraordinary and she-

• 31:05Alec Baldwin?

  That was her big break.

• 31:06Speaker 04

  She, that was her big break, she made the movie and-

• 31:09Alec Baldwin?

  You made the career of one of the biggest movie stars in history. Well, in that way that you've known, I mean, as whether as friends or partners, if you will, you've known a lot of famous women. I used to know, fleetingly, Marla Hanson. Right, I think it was after she was attacked. I knew her after she was attacked.

• 31:26Speaker 04

  I, she, I, we went out together for four years.

• 31:30Alec Baldwin?

  What a story.

• 31:31Speaker 04

  Marla Hanson was a small town girl, Texas, came to the city, got some modeling jobs and she got in a, rented an apartment. The landlord was very invasive and she kept turning down his advances and he fired, finally hired two men to slash her face. You know, I mean, so I talk about symbolism, you know?

• 31:49Alec Baldwin?

  Like a du ma.

• 31:50Speaker 04

  A model whose face is slashed and I met her after the attack as well. Keith McNally used to have these dinners at Donnell's and he said, you know, why don't you come tonight? I think you'd really like this girl that's there. I was kind of fascinated to meet Marla Hanson because she was all-

• 32:06Alec Baldwin?

  All over the paper.

• 32:07Speaker 04

  She'd normally cover the Post like seven times by then and, and everybody liked Marla because she said, you know, I'm undeterred and I'm gonna keep modeling and I love New York and so I found her, well, first of all, I found her really good looking. And secondly, I-

• 32:22Alec Baldwin?

  Beautiful girl.

• 32:23Speaker 04

  Found her face, even afterwards, she was, she was very beautiful. So we started dating after that and, and then unfortunately then I became more of a tabloid fixture because I was- Dating a tabloid fixture. We went about four weeks dodging the paparazzi. And then finally, this, you know, one of them said to me, look, Jay, just give me a picture. I'll split the $5,000 with you, whatever it was then.

• 32:48Alec Baldwin?

  I'll never forget, I was dating a woman, this is many, many years ago, many years ago. I was dating a woman who was a very famous movie actress. And we're there and she was divorcing her husband. And she said, I don't want to hurt my husband's feelings. I really like him and we're friends and we're going to get divorced. So when we leave this hotel, I'm going to go before you or you go before me. I want us walking out the hotel.

• 33:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's what we used to do.

• 33:08Alec Baldwin?

  It was the first time I was ever introduced to that. Like this kid from Massa Peak, well, I'm sitting there going, you want me to what? You want me to go out ahead of you because, oh, I get it, I get it, I get it. And I never knew that. I had to sneak around because of who you are and our cameras and stuff.

• 33:22Speaker 04

  That's what we used to do.

• 33:23Alec Baldwin?

  And we did that. I went out the back door and she went out the front door and got her picture taken, whatever. And, you know, my education from back then about how you try to manage your personal life in public like that is really tough. The ones I see that are the most successful movie stars, you don't know anything about them, you really don't.

• 33:42Speaker 04

  The most, I agree, but you know.

• 33:43Alec Baldwin?

  You know a little bit about them. By the way, we went to Barnes and Noble on 17th Street at Union Square, where you know the area.

• 33:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:50Alec Baldwin?

  Whatever mac and cheese they have is in soft cover. Is there any place I can get hardcover books of the books? Oh, I want Bright Lights, Big City.

• 33:57Speaker 04

  Well, the problem is the only, Bright Lights was published in trade paperback. And I was upset about that, but my editor said, look, this is the, this is the way to reach people your own age, he said, because hardcover books are expensive, which is true. I didn't buy many when I was back.

• 34:12Alec Baldwin?

  I try to only buy hardcover now.

• 34:13Speaker 04

  But, yeah, me, oh, me too. So there's, there's really no American hardcover by Let's Wake City. All the other books are in, are in hardcover.

• 34:21Alec Baldwin?

  Oh, yeah, because I want to get, I want to get.

• 34:22Speaker 04

  But the problem is the publishers, they only do one run of hardcover and then it all goes into paperback.

• 34:27Alec Baldwin?

  So what are you working on now?

• 34:29Speaker 04

  I just sold a book to Knopf, my longtime publisher, and it's called See You on the Other Side. I started writing it during the pandemic and it's, and it starts in the pandemic. But where the title came from was, was that I was walking past a coffee shop at that time. And it was right after everything had been closed and someone had slapped a sign on the window that said, "See you on the other side," meaning like, what, week, two weeks, we'll be out of this mess, except it was more like a year and a half. And then one of the main characters in the book dies at the end of the book. And I suddenly, when I was rereading the book, I was searching for a title and I saw this, that I had written

• 35:14Speaker 04

  this down about this sign. I thought, God, that's a good title for the book. The bad news is that it's the fourth novel in a series of novels about these characters.

• 35:23Alec Baldwin?

  Brightness Falls is part of that.

• 35:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, Corinne and Russell Calloway, who, when we first meet them, are this, you know, really glamorous New York couple. Not wealthy, but, you know, she's a stockbroker and he's an assistant editor, book editor, and he remains an editor throughout the series. But Brightness Falls was going to be a one-off. And then the crisis in that book was the stock market crash. And Russell had actually tried to perform a leveraged buyout on his publishing house. That was, that was the kind of thing that happened in the eighties. And then nine eleven came along and I just, for the life of me, I couldn't think, how am I going to, you know, take this into account as a writer? And then I finally thought, wait a minute, what if I just take this set of characters and just have them react to this

• 36:07Speaker 04

  event? And I really kind of liked the characters and, you know, they're also going through marital crises and so on. And before I knew it, you know, I'd written a third one, which was set around the time of the crash of the 2008 and Obama's election, you know, very big deal. So this seems to be partly a way, for me, of following a relatively happily married couple, which, you know, as someone who's been married four times, it's like, it's like something that I'm fascinated.

• 36:35Alec Baldwin?

  Something to be wished.

• 36:36Speaker 04

  I'm fascinated by it, but also registering the kind of crises that New York City has gone through in my lifetime. So this is the very last one, for sure, but it's now a tetralogy.

• 36:45Alec Baldwin?

  Well, it's reminding me somewhat, I mean, you're very distinctive writers, but it's reminding me somewhat of Richard Nelson's Apple family stories, those four plays he did, where they're all seated around talking about AIDS. And we cut to nine eleven. I mean, he's got these four tableaus and they're just talking about what's going on and their relationships. And the wife goes on, gets divorced, becomes a lesbian, then her lesbian girlfriend comes into chapter four and blah, blah, blah. I mean, Richard Nelson, who I worship, I worship him. But where did you meet Ann?

• 37:15Speaker 04

  Ann Hurst is my wife. I met her in nineteen eighty six at a nightclub called MK. So she was with a friend of hers. I was sitting with Bredy Stenellis, Tammy Janowicz and myself, of all things. I mean, we, we didn't hang out that much with Tammy, but that night we were. And, and this friend of hers said, you're gonna meet these guys. They're, they're like the coolest guys in all of New York. And so Ann came over and introduced herself and, you know, I, I knew, I knew her last name, you know, she's the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst.

• 37:45Alec Baldwin?

  Yes.

• 37:45Speaker 04

  Oh, and Marla Hanson was at the table as well. So, so I couldn't like flirt openly.

• 37:50Alec Baldwin?

  My former girlfriend, my future wife.

• 37:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:52Alec Baldwin?

  My imitators.

• 37:53Speaker 04

  But, but we definitely hit it off and there was a little electricity there. And so we, we just kind of stayed in touch. And when, when I broke up with Marla finally, a couple of years later, I called her up and I said, you know, it's, I broke up with Marla, it's really sad. No, but I was thinking like, yeah, not so sad. And, and she said, oh shit. And I said, what? She said, I just got engaged. And it was like.

• 38:12Alec Baldwin?

  We have a problem.

• 38:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, we have a problem. And it just kind of, we, we just kept missing the boat. Including on September tenth, two thousand and one, we had a date. For the first time in many years, we were both free. So we have a date, we go to, we go to a restaurant. And so then I, you know, I, I invite her back to my apartment since we were downtown. And she says, tell you what, she said, let's not rush things, but let's do this again tomorrow. And she said, you might have a, you know.

• 38:43Alec Baldwin?

  Give me a date to think of.

• 38:44Speaker 04

  Maybe we'll have a different result. And I said, sure, sure, sure. So, so off she went uptown. I, I went downtown. And the next morning was September eleventh. And she was trying to get to Long Island where her kids were. Phones weren't working. And yeah, so it was another four or five years before we got together. But now we've been married seventeen years and a long time, a long time.

• 39:07Alec Baldwin?

  But whenever I've met her, fleetingly, I don't know her that well, but whenever I've met her, what a lovely woman she is. So you're adding the tetralogy, you're putting the new edition?

• 39:17Speaker 04

  That's the latest, and that'll come out, I guess, next year. And, yeah, I'm just editing it at the moment with my new editor, his name is Errol McDonald. And, yeah, I mean, I'm glad to be back in the game again. I also wrote a memoir during the pandemic. I showed it to my agent, who feels like it's about 17 lawsuits waiting to happen. So we've got to figure that part out. Yeah. I mean, I, I mean, the funny thing is, my-

• 39:41Alec Baldwin?

  I'll give you some tips on a whole lot of-

• 39:42Speaker 04

  My stories about Mick Jagger and Carrie Fisher are no problem, because they're famous. But it's, it's like the wives and girlfriends and all, and, and brothers and, you know-

• 39:51Alec Baldwin?

  I can't wait to read it now. Mick Jagger, Carrie Fisher.

• 39:53Speaker 04

  Those guys are, those guys might sue me. Those girls might sue me. So I-

• 39:59Alec Baldwin?

  Is it gonna come out at all, or no?

• 40:01Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, well, as soon as I publish this novel, then I'll, I'll figure out the-

• 40:05Alec Baldwin?

  You'll dig in and figure it out.

• 40:06Speaker 04

  I'll figure out the memoir, but-

• 40:07Alec Baldwin?

  You move the furniture around?

• 40:08Speaker 04

  I mean, the, the people who have read it tell me it's really fun.

• 40:11Alec Baldwin?

  A memoir from you I'm dying to read. Last thing I'll say is, in your books, the word "bright" appears three times.

• 40:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:19Alec Baldwin?

  And you seem to me like a very buoyant person. We didn't even get into the fact that you were the wine columnist for the Wall Street Journal.

• 40:25Speaker 04

  Who knows?

• 40:26Alec Baldwin?

  How did that happen? I mean, other than you being a fan of wine and drinking wine?

• 40:28Speaker 04

  Well, I started with, you know, I just, I love, I mean, my friends know that it's a hobby of mine, I love wine, and so my friend Dominique Browning took over House and Garden magazine, and she wanted to have a wine column, but she thought wine writing was boring. So she, she called me up, and, and I said, "Look, I don't know enough, I don't know enough to write a column." And she said, "No, but that's just the way," she said, "You're, you're a good writer and you've got enthusiasm." She said, "Just write like you're one chapter ahead of the textbook, of the class in the textbook, and write like a novelist, write about the characters who make wine." And so, so, so I did this for a few years, and House and Garden eventually folded, and then the Wall Street Journal called me up and said, "Hey, you want to be our wine critic?" And I thought, "Wow, Wall Street Journal, me, the Wall Street Journal?" I don't know, it's-

• 41:11Alec Baldwin?

  They're right.

• 41:12Speaker 04

  But, you know, their-

• 41:13Alec Baldwin?

  We all drink wine.

• 41:14Speaker 04

  Their cultural coverage is, is quite good, and, yeah, so I did that-

• 41:17Alec Baldwin?

  I like a lot of things about the Journal.

• 41:18Speaker 04

  I, I did that for four years. I like a lot of things about the Journal, too. Not, not so much their editorial page, but-

• 41:25Alec Baldwin?

  Well, as I said to some friends of mine, I would come across movies that I didn't feel somewhat needed to be remade, or maybe they need to be remade. Here's an opportunity to take a story and tell the modern angle on that story. Looking for Mr. Goodbar was one I wanted to remake, just to direct or produce.

• 41:42Speaker 04

  I remember that, yeah.

• 41:43Alec Baldwin?

  The way you could say about female sexuality, and how women are played with and exploited now or not, or how they do the exploiting. Whatever the female psychology is about sex, and do Mr. Goodbar again and contemporize it. And the other movie that's burning to be remade is Bright Lights: Big City.

• 41:57Speaker 04

  Well, it's supposedly in the works, but you know how these things work.

• 42:01Alec Baldwin?

  Yes.

• 42:02Speaker 04

  You know, they're like-

• 42:03Alec Baldwin?

  They'll be remade when we're dead.

• 42:04Speaker 04

  There are fifty people who have to all agree at the same time, you know? But I have a conversation every month or two with-

• 42:10Alec Baldwin?

  It's gotta happen.

• 42:11Speaker 04

  With the guys.

• 42:12Alec Baldwin?

  It's ready.

• 42:13Speaker 04

  I'm-

• 42:14Alec Baldwin?

  You gotta like that movie.

• 42:15Speaker 04

  I'm ready to.

• 42:16Alec Baldwin?

  We're finally gonna play the lead role who is as seeking as you are. Seeking. You are seeking many things.

• 42:21Speaker 04

  Oh, I'll take that. I like that.

• 42:27Alec Baldwin?

  My thanks to novelist, columnist, and screenwriter Jay McInerney. This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. We're produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach McNeese, and Victoria DeMartin. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is Danielle Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's The Thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.

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