[Lebowitz] My hatred of money is very profound.
However, my problem in regard to this, not my only problem,
is that I love things.
So I hate money, but I love things, right?
So I hate money, but I love furniture. I hate money, but I love cars.
I hate money, but I love clothes.
So hating money is okay if you also hate things,
because then you're the Dalai Lama, you know?
["Money" playing]
♪ The best things in life are free ♪
♪ But you can give them To the birds and bees ♪
♪ I want money ♪
♪ That's what I want ♪
♪ Your love gives me such a thrill ♪
♪ But your love won't pay my bills ♪
♪ I want money ♪
-[man] Hi, friends. -Hey, what's happening?
We're ready for you to come and take a seat.
[song continues]
♪ That's what I want ♪
[woman] What advice would you give to yourself
as a 20-something coming to New York now?
Bring money.
[laughter]
Bring money. That's what I would tell you.
Advice to someone coming when I came, you don't need that much money.
[song continues]
♪ Money don't get everything, it's true… ♪
[Scorsese] Here we are.
-Okay. -[Griffin] Well…
I don't wanna say anything, but these glasses get more and more mismatched.
But I drink this coffee, and then it goes down and…
[Scorsese] Then we have to redo everything.
[laughs]
It is true that women of my age, when we were children,
were absolutely not raised with the idea that we ever had to think about money.
So, you know, I believe, had I been a boy,
I would not have had this incredible kind of slothful attitude toward money.
Because I wouldn't have been allowed to,
because my father would have been yelling, "Are you crazy? Don't you understand?"
But people very often have said to me,
"Did your parents want you to be a writer?" No.
"Did they try to dissuade you?" No.
"Really? What did they want you to be?" A wife. They wanted me to be a wife.
They assumed I would be a wife. They wanted me to be a wife.
So they never told me anything
or instructed me in anything other than things that would make me be a wife.
And you can see that it didn't work out for them.
But I mean, I think, in a way,
it was not a great thing to be a little girl in the '50s at all,
uh, but the good thing about it
was that they just didn't pay attention to you that much.
I remember very vividly my best friend, uh,
who I am still very close friends with, who lived up the street from me,
I was at her house after school and her father called and said he got a raise
and everyone was very excited, and her mother baked a cake.
I didn't know what a raise was.
So I came home, and I asked my mother, "What is a raise?"
She said, "That's when you make more money each week," or whatever.
And I said, "Well, so-and-so got a raise, and now he makes…"
I remember the amount. $300 a week. It was much more than my father made.
So I realize in retrospect. Um…
I said, "How much does Daddy make?" My mother slapped me in the face.
[Scorsese laughs]
She was so… "Don't you ever talk about money.
It is very rude, and don't you ever ask anyone how much money they make."
And I never talked about money again. So, hence, I have none.
And I was once in my accountant's office,
and, finally, he looked at me and he said, "Let me explain something to you.
You have to talk to me about money. I'm your accountant."
Because I kept saying, "I don't think I should tell you that."
He'd ask me, "How much are you getting for this?"
I said, "I don't think that's something I feel like discussing with you."
"Who are you?" And now, of course, people talk about money nonstop.
-[Scorsese] Yeah. -But also, I still always say, you know,
if I know how much money someone makes for something
or how much their apartment costs, it's because they told me,
which people do all the time. I would never ask anyone that.
You know, but people talk about money all the time now,
as if it was some riveting topic of conversation, which it is not.
[in French] I want to say that I am taxed 74%, yes?
I would like to show you what remains.
-This is illegal, what I’m going to do. -[host] It’s illegal.
If they throw me in jail, I don't care. At least I'll be on a diet.
Here, I’ll show you what I have left.
I’ll stop at 74%.
Quit messing around.
Because this is not for the poor.
This is for the nuclear, and all the…
[host] You realize you're provoking lots of people.
[man] Listen, this is my money. I couldn't care less.
When I first came to New York, my father gave me $200.
Probably the most money I ever had in my life.
I guess I thought, "$200, I guess I'm set for life."
-[Scorsese laughs] -You know, um…
I was a cab driver.
I was a driver, a chauffeur for people.
Um, I was a cleaning lady. I was a peddler.
I sold belts in the street. I would get…
The Village Voice. I would work at least five days a week and sometimes six.
But I never worked on Wednesdays,
because Wednesdays was the day The Village Voice came out.
So I'd go to Sheridan Square and get The Village Voice,
and The Village Voice had… All newspapers did, actually.
But that's where all the help wanted ads were.
And I would always think…
Because I always hated whatever job I had.
So I'd think, "Next week, I'm gonna get a better job that I don't hate as much."
At some point, I realized, "Fran, you just don't like to work."
You know? It's not just…
This is a bad job, yes, anyone would think this is a bad job,
but, I mean, frankly, I don't really like to work and so…
I really like to lie on the sofa and read, which is not a profession.
No one pays you for it. Because if they did, this would be my house. So…
[Scorsese laughs]
But I also very much avoided the job all of my friends had,
which was waiting tables.
So all of the girls I knew who had to work… I knew some girls who didn't.
They waited tables and…
Like 100%, I would say, did.
And my friends would say to me, "Why are you cleaning apartments instead of…
Come work where I'm working. You make more money, you know.
It's less, you know, arduous physically, for sure."
Um, and, you know, I would say… Let me put it to you this way.
The people who hired waitresses were men. Okay? The managers were men.
You could not get a shift as a waitress in a restaurant
without sleeping with a manager, okay?
That's what all this stuff is about. It's not about romance.
It's not about dating.
It's not about, you know, flirting or not flirting.
It's about, for instance, for Fran, as a young girl, it's just about working.
Okay? And that's how you got a job as a waitress.
There was a restaurant that people wanted to work in where the manager was gay.
The guy was gay. The guy's gay! Everyone went to, like…
-[Scorsese laughs] -[coughs]
Of course, he only hired waiters, and they also had to sleep with him.
So… You know?
New York, everyone has this idea that New York used to be cheap, you know?
It was always more expensive than any place else, you know.
So if I tell someone,
"This was my apartment on West Fourth Street in 1970.
It was $121.78 a month,"
people go, "Ah! That's unbelievable!"
It was expensive!
In other words, most of my friends lived in the East Village.
They would say, "You are crazy to spend all this money on one room.
If you lived in my neighborhood on Avenue C,
you could have four rooms for this."
I would always say, "Yeah, but I don't get raped."
-[laughter] -Okay?
Which I always felt was worth the extra money.
-It's worth it. It's worth it. -You know?
I'm not a spendthrift, but there's certain things you pay for.
And so it was overpriced. It was a horrible apartment.
It was overpriced, but it was much safer.
The first big check I ever got, I didn't have a bank account.
I got this huge check, like $100,000. I didn't know what to do with it.
I literally… Here's what I did with checks.
I would get the check, which would be more along the lines of $100,
and then I would go across the street to the delicatessen,
and I would say to the guy,
"Could you take a roast beef sandwich out of this and cash the check?"
And they would.
So I had this vision of myself walking in to the delicatessen,
asking them to take a roast beef sandwich out of this.
I actually, I would have to say, was frightened of this check.
And I didn't have any sense of how much money this was,
except it seemed to me like an insane amount of money.
So I think that when I first made money, I was quite frightened by it.
I mean quite frightened by it.
I mean, it seemed like an amazing thing to me, but it also…
There's never been a time in my life that I can think of
when I was thrilled by money.
It was not… I didn't think… [gasps]
I never thought that. Money never does that for me.
One of the things it takes to make a lot of money is loving money.
You know, really loving it. Really caring about it.
I always say the same thing. There's two kinds of people in the world.
The kind of people who think there's such a thing as enough money
and the kind of people who have money.
And it's as simple as that.
So, yes, for me, there is enough money.
I've definitely had periods where there was enough money.
And my idea of enough money was I could pay for everything that I had.
[Scorsese] Mh-hmm.
I was trying to get a mortgage once,
and I was talking to the person at Merrill Lynch, the broker,
who was looking at my stuff while I was on the phone,
and she said, "May I ask you a question?" I said, "May you ask me a question?
You're looking at my tax returns for the last five minutes.
It's like you're in my sock drawer. You know?
You know more about me than I do.
Yes, you may ask me a question."
She said, "Why is your income so erratic?"
And I said, "Well, I'm a writer." She said, "A writer?" [scoffs]
[Scorsese] Oh, God.
That's why writers never get a mortgage.
[dramatic music playing]
There are apartments that cost $20 million in New York, or a lot more.
That wasn't always true.
Because when you think about it, how could an apartment cost $20 million?
What does that even mean?
What does it mean, an apartment costs $20 million?
It's a ridiculous amount of money!
These amounts of money are stupid and people get used to them.
I thought, after a year of looking at apartments,
during which the prices were going up by the hour… Okay?
First of all, the prices were stupid.
Then you would go Monday to look at an apartment.
You would go to look at the same apartment Wednesday.
It was $50,000 more.
I would say, "I looked at this apartment on Monday. Why is it $50,000 more?"
"The market's going up. Better buy it now."
"I don't really like it." "Doesn't mean you shouldn't buy it."
You know, within a few apartments,
the real estate agent will say, "Why do you need such a big apartment?"
They will say, "Do you entertain a lot?"
This is the first idea. "So you must give a lot of parties?"
I would say, "No. No one gives fewer parties than me. No one.
Really. The Ayatollah Khomeini gave more parties than I do.
So, no, I don't entertain. Not only not a lot. At all."
So, "What do you need all this room for?" "Well, I have 10,000 books."
After a certain number of apartments,
when I keep saying,
"This is too expensive, this is too expensive,"
they say, "You can't afford an apartment big enough for your books,"
which I already knew.
I knew before I called them. They didn't know.
It took them a while to know it, but I already knew that.
And so after, I believe, looking at 100 apartments,
I looked at about 100 apartments,
I guess I just felt like I'd put in enough suffering,
"Give me an apartment."
I bought an apartment
approximately three times the price I could pay for an apartment.
I would like to win the lottery.
In fact, at this point, I actually need to win the lottery.
So, I mean, it's gone past the point of just desire,
and we're now at absolute need.
Do you go to those places and get those forms or whatever?
Um, I play the lottery every week,
and one time, several years ago, I won $1,200 in the lottery.
-Wow. -Right?
If you win more than $600, you have to go to the lotto office,
which, at the time that I won,
is right in the neighborhood of that other big casino, the New York Stock Exchange.
-[laughter] -[laughs] Oh, yes.
So I get to this lotto office,
and I'm standing in line, and there's other lotto winners.
And the guy in front of me goes to the desk and gives in his ticket,
and the woman behind the desk says to him,
"All right, sir, we're gonna send you your check in about two weeks."
And the guy goes, "No, no, I want it now."
She said, "No, we're gonna send it to you in about two weeks."
He said, "No, I don't want you to send it. I want you to give it to me now."
She said, "That's not how we do it, and you'll get the check in about two weeks."
And he said, "You don't understand. I need this money now."
And she said, "You don't understand. You're not getting it now. Next."
And he said, "You don't understand. I was counting on this money to pay my rent.
What am I supposed to do now?
She said, "Why don't you do whatever else you were gonna do
on the off chance you didn't win the lottery."
[laughter]
-So now I'm this guy. -Yeah. Yeah.
So I need to win the lottery.
If I was asking myself, "What can you pay for an apartment?"
I would have told you a third of what I paid for this apartment.
People kept saying, "When are the prices gonna go down?"
And I kept saying, "Just wait. Wait till I close on this apartment."
[Scorsese laughs]
Okay? And then I closed on the apartment, and the prices started going down.
I am the harbinger of bad real estate decisions.
[laughter]
I am Buy High, Sell Low Lebowitz.
So, I mean, there is…
I'm the only person I know, truthfully, who's lived in New York as long as I have
who has never made a correct real estate decision.
Never. Not one time.
And the only thing that calms me down at all about it is to remind myself
that I did not come to New York at 18 to go into the real estate business.
I think I've proven that I'm not going into it.
So some young guy said to me last year, "I don't understand.
Everyone your age already found their apartment years ago. They paid--"
I said, "Yeah, everyone but me."
[Scorsese] You were on 57th Street a long time.
A long time. See, that apartment…
I owned that apartment for a long time, and that was…
-I lived there for-- -The one on--
The Osborne. I lived there for 26 years.
When I was young, I mean like 21, I went to a party in that building.
And I'd never been in the building. I'd never heard of it.
I couldn't get over the apartment.
And still, by the way, the apartment that I went to the party in
was one of two or three apartments in the building like that.
My apartment wasn't like that. And it was just…
I mean, it was spectacular.
It's a beautiful 19th century building. The oldest apartment building in New York.
And I thought, "I would like to live in a place like this."
It was a nightmare living there. There would be one problem after another.
The building was falling apart because it was so old.
There was always construction. There was one huge problem after another.
I never left there,
because I knew I would never have such a beautiful apartment again.
And finally, one day, I actually said to myself,
"Fran, you are like one of these women who's married to a guy who beats her up
and her friends keep saying, 'You have to leave him. He beats you up,'
and she says, 'But he's so handsome.'
They say, 'But he beats you up,' and she says, 'But he's so handsome.'"
And so finally I realized this was me with my apartment!
That I kept saying, "Yes, he beats me up, but he's so handsome!"
I finally thought, "You know what? He beats you up. Leave."
So I've come to understand that my greed for apartments
and furniture and things like that is so intense
that, even though I feel very, very worried about having done this,
I feel less worried than I do happy to be having this swell apartment.
[all laugh]
So this has made me feel the most American that I've ever felt in my life.
I feel I've joined my fellow Americans
in being in psychotic debt for no reason at all.
In other words, I can't say,
"What can I do? My daughter was very sick." Okay?
Everyone is sympathetic to that. But who's sympathetic to this?
"Why shouldn't I have a 20 million square foot apartment? You know?
I'm tired of not having this!" Because that's really what it is.
[Griffin] It looks like you're in another world.
[Lebowitz] I am. [chuckles]
[Griffin] What makes a model citizen of New York?
You have to oppose things
that are promoted by many of the people who run New York,
because you have to understand why they're promoting them.
They're promoting them so that--
They always say it's so money comes into the city.
Money comes into the city to whom? To whom does it come in the city?
It doesn't come to me. It doesn't come to you.
Because we don't own any of these things.
There was a period, I think in the '80s,
where they were trying to tear down Lever House
and I was in a restaurant with Jerry Robbins,
and a man came to our table and asked us to sign a petition.
"Would you sign this petition to keep them from tearing down Lever House?"
So I signed it. Jerry signed it. The man left.
Jerry looked at me and goes, "You know, I'm pretty sure I signed a petition
to keep them from putting up Lever House."
[Scorsese laughs]
To me, that is the story of New York.
[upbeat music playing]
I'm pretty sure that when they put up Lever House on Park Avenue after the war,
there were a lot of houses on Park Avenue still, and so they took the houses down.
[music continues]
[tempo increases]
[Lebowitz] The great thing about Grand Central Station,
the reason it's so beautiful, is because one person built it.
And that person, luckily, was someone who knew how to build a building.
Because, I mean, a building that size now would never be built by a single person.
There will not be a single sensibility.
It was his money, and he just poured the money into it.
What's amazing about the Chrysler Building is the detail and how beautiful it is.
At the moment, apparently, it's for sale, I believe.
Not that I'm about to buy it.
To me, it's the perfect size for a house for one.
The skyscraper was invented here.
The world was completely awestruck by our skyscrapers.
Empire State Building.
Everyone loved the Empire State Building.
But also some people envied the Empire State Building.
Um, and so in certain parts of the world,
like, for instance, the Gulf States,
they built these horrible, tall buildings in the middle of deserts,
and then we copied them!
So now 57th Street looks…
I mean, it doesn't look like the Gulf States,
but, you know, those buildings.
Now, I don't really believe that there's any profound aesthetic reason
why a very tall building cannot also be beautiful.
New York in general was never a particularly beautiful city.
It was never Paris, you know. It was never Florence.
But, um, it is now a city that…
At least it was original, in other words.
Now, 57th Street looks like one of these Gulf States,
except it's a real place.
It's 57th Street.
It reminds me, in a way, of Ralph Lauren's clothes.
When Ralph Lauren started,
what he really did was he copied Brooks Brothers clothes.
People who bought Brooks Brothers clothes were a certain kind of person.
They were basically WASPs.
And Fran, but basically WASPs.
When Ralph Lauren started making his clothes,
he copied these clothes, but he made them a little different.
Like, Brooks Brothers shirts,
before they ruined the shirt department, which was many years ago,
a Brooks Brothers shirt really didn't fit anyone.
It's not that they just didn't fit me. They fit no one.
Because those people didn't want their clothes to fit.
Clothes that fit, they were for other people.
There was something a little, mm…
ambitious about clothes that fit.
Ralph Lauren, not actually being one of those people,
didn't realize that clothes aren't supposed to fit,
by which I mean they were more like clothes that not-WASPs wore.
To me, the amazing thing was that, after a while,
the WASPs who always wore Brooks Brothers clothes
started buying Ralph Lauren's clothes.
The actual people that he was copying
started buying them, despite knowing they weren't the real clothes.
I don't know why they did this.
I wasn't one of those WASPs or one of these WASPs.
But, to me, I found this astonishing.
To me, this is exactly the same thing
as the skyscrapers that were copied by Dubai,
and now we copied them back.
I was born in 1950. At the end of 1950, so I'm younger than you think.
Um, but I always felt that was lucky. Especially for a writer.
There were very bad things about the '50s.
There were horrible things about the '50s and the '60s.
But it gave me a view of the entire last half of the 20th century, you know,
which I always find to be a very lucky thing,
even from just the point of the pleasure of observation.
I mean my own pleasure in observing.
I mean, there's certain things that I never expected to improve.
That never would have occurred to me. Okay?
Starting in the '70s, people started talking about gay rights.
It seemed ridiculous to me.
Ridiculous. Young people now often thank me.
"I know you were such an activist for gay rights."
I was not an activist for gay rights. I always tell them that.
I say, "No, I wasn't." First of all, I've never been an activist.
Second of all… Not what you really call an activist.
I'm not that self-sacrificing, let me assure you.
But I also never thought it would work.
It's like the Me Too movement.
I would never imagine this in a million years.
Never in a million years.
Being a woman was the same from Eve until, like, eight months ago.
Okay? So, you know, it was the same.
You could talk to anyone, any woman, you know, who's not…
I mean, I suppose even if you're 18, it's changed, you know?
Because it's changed from when you were 12!
People go, "Don't you think there's gonna be backlash on this?"
What do you mean, "going to be"?
Yeah, of course there's a backlash. Yeah, there's definitely a backlash.
"Don't you think maybe this woman is lying?"
And my feeling basically about this is I believe every single woman.
Prove to me she's lying.
I'm sure some people are lying. I'm positive, of course.
But you have to prove that to me, because I was a young woman. Okay?
Anyone who was a girl, who was a young woman, knows what this is about.
It's like what I said before.
You couldn't get a shift as a waitress in a restaurant.
That's what it's about. Okay?
So, you know, I believe these women.
A lot of these guys who got caught, especially at the beginning,
I knew every single one of them!
Personally, I knew them.
I knew a million stories about all these guys,
but not the stories that they got caught with.
Like, there are men accused of violence and rape.
I never heard those stories.
Those are not the kind of stories you hear, as much as, like…
Because even stupid guys don't brag about that kind of stuff,
because even somewhere they know this is a crime. Okay?
There is a difference between a crime and the movie business.
Okay? You could say, "Well, this is the movie business.
This has always been the movie business!"
And my feeling about this always was, "You don't have to be a movie star."
If you want to be a movie star or be a waitress at that restaurant,
that's what you gotta do.
Luckily, I don't want to be a movie star, so, you know, um…
So I believe their stories about those guys
and about the women who wanted to be a movie star so much they did it.
That's not the same thing as rape. It's wrong. It's bad. Okay?
So if that's the movie business, that's one thing,
but if you make beds in a hotel
at $6 an hour,
and the person in charge of your…
not only your life, but the fact that you're probably undocumented.
That person is, like, the janitor on that floor.
That's what the problem is.
Not who's a movie star or not a movie star,
who's a model, who's not a model.
I mean, yes, those things are wrong. Absolutely, they're wrong.
I think, if we hadn't started with that, no one would pay attention.
People pay attention because those people are movie stars.
No one's gonna pay attention to the person who makes beds in hotels.
Of course, there's millions and millions of women in that position,
and, basically, they're hostages, you know?
Um, no, you don't have to be a movie star, but you have to earn a living, you know?
So that is what it's really about.
[Lebowitz] Truthfully, during this entire very dangerous period in the '70s,
nothing really ever happened to me.
You know, once, I got robbed in the street.
You know, I was on Beekman Place.
You know, like, where…
And I tried to talk the guy out of it.
Which now I would think, "That is crazy."
And I had a lot of cash on me. I never did.
Because I borrowed it from a girl who lived on Beekman Place.
I had to pay my rent.
So I never had cash on me. I don't have any now.
Um, and I went to her apartment, she gave it to me so I could pay my rent.
And I go out and this kid stopped me in the street and goes, "Give me your money."
I said, "I don't really have any money." "Give me your money!" So…
I could tell that he was a junkie and so I said,
"Look, I have a lot of money." I thought, "Why am I telling him this?"
"I have a lot of money, but I need the money."
And I'm sure he's thinking…
Like, somehow I imagined that he chose me because he chose Beekman Place
and he thought I lived on Beekman Place.
And I said, "Well…
Could you just take enough to fix with and let me have the rest, because I need…"
And he took the knife out.
And I gave him the money.
You tried to reason with him.
I was trying to retain as much money as possible
since it was not even my money.
He took a knife out, I stopped arguing. That's the only thing that happened to me.