BUH-BYE GEORGE

I remember when George magazine first started. JFK Jr came down to Washington to chat up hopefuls to staff the thing. My old friend Rich Blow was wooed to go work for it. He asked me one afternoon in Dupont Circle what I thought. I asked him what would be on the cover of a glossy magazine published in New York about Washington politics. He had no idea at the time. Neither, it turns out, did John Kennedy. There are only so many times you can get Cindy Crawford to dress up as the nation’s founder. The magazine contained, from time to time, some good reporting. But conceptually, it was nuts. To put it mildly, you can’t convert Washington into Hollywood. D.C.’s stars are, in general, ugly, over-weight, and best seen in private and very dark lighting. Glamorous they are not. Try as he might, John Kasich is no Matt Damon and Barbara Mikulski is no Anne Heche. Trying to publish a Premiere magazine about the beltway was a sublime piece of folly made possible solely by the celebrity chic of JFK Jr. At its best, George was a pioneering way to milk the celebrity culture in a new way: By subscribing, you felt somehow connected to the Sexiest Man Alive. Why he even took his clothes off and wrote an editor’s letter. Unfortunately, the kind of people who want to be connected to the Sexiest Man Alive are not the kind of people likely to be interested in the doings of the House Appropriations Committee. So you ended up with this extremely weird mélange of style and content that couldn’t be rescued even by an untimely dip into the sea near Martha’s Vineyard. Another indication that a new era is coming, methinks. And not a moment too soon.