Fiction Is Funnier Than Truth of ‘Sex’

Here’s proof that “Sex and the City” author Candace Bushnell and her TV counterpart, Carrie Bradshaw, really are two different people. It’s midafternoon on a lovely late-summer day, and at the super-chic Federalist bar, Bushnell declines to order a Cosmopolitan.

“That’s a little too strong for me at this time of day,” Bushnell says of the martini, lighting her first Merit and calling instead for a Bloody Mary. She takes her first sip of the afternoon. “You know, this won’t make me talk more.”

No, Bushnell hardly needs any coaxing from the fiery tomato concoction to spill the secrets. Her “Sex and the City” column in the New York Observer revealed one of the last, great pieces of classified information: that women talk sex with the same bawdy delight as men.

Bushnell’s column--which became a book in 1996 and then the popular HBO series starring Sarah Jessica Parker as Bradshaw--chronicled the horror and the humor, mores and mysteries and the inanities and insanities of contemporary dating life with gleeful sociological precision. The pieces gave the impression that Bushnell had to be one of those lifelong, cynical urbanites, or that she was detailing the exact romantic misadventures of herself and her friends.

It turns out that neither is the case. Bushnell, 41, still giggles at the confession that so much of “Sex and the City” is fiction, even if it first appeared in a newspaper. And our wittiest chronicler of glittering in-crowd sex lives spent her first 18 years in Glastonbury, Conn.

Not that Bushnell doesn’t know the ins and outs of her subject better than anyone. Her own love life has been so fascinatingly checkered that she’s caused a run on boldface type among the New York gossip columns. Previously seen on Bushnell’s arm: Spin/Gear publisher Bob Guccione Jr., former U.S. Sen. Alfonse D’Amato, Talk magazine co-founder Ron Galotti (her notorious Mr. Big) and Michael Bergin, a male model-actor who once squired Carolyn Bessette before she added the Kennedy name.

Her current beau is Stephen Morris, a mid-30s multimillionaire British venture capitalist. He’s the former boyfriend of Bushnell’s former best friend, writer Kate Boehner, who was also Bushnell’s roommate since the late 1980s.

Was. This is how the New York Post merrily boldfaced the item: “When Kate went to his apartment to move her stuff out, Candace’s stuff was already hanging in the closet.” Oops.

In Early Days, ‘It Wasn’t All Glamour’

But let’s back the story up.

It all started the way it always does: innocently enough.

Bushnell was in her third semester at Rice University in Texas. She finished all the writing courses the school offered and left for New York with plans to write and act. There were dozens of roommates and nights spent squatting in filthy fleabag hotels. And there were the nights of glamour and grandeur at Studio 54, of punk-rock insider-dom at the Mudd Club. Bushnell fell in love, with a pair of leather pants.

It was New York in the late 1970s: before AIDS and Giuliani, during the cappuccinos-at-Fiorucci’s and the electric-blue spike-heeled boots and early cocaine highs, after the last days of disco. It was not Glastonbury, or, as one of her friends dubbed it, “Glastonboring.” Oh, and maybe it wasn’t even all that innocent.

“It wasn’t all glamour, but that was the thing that made it so glamorous,” Bushnell says, wearing a tied-at-the-front Versace dress that, dangling over the bar stool, reveals thighs as perfectly tanned as her calves.

“The thing that’s maybe a bit odd is, coming from that kind of suburban background, it’s hard to get away from suburban thinking,” she says. “A lot of people are creative because something really horrible happened to them when they were a kid, or because one of their parents was an artist or did something creative. It makes more sense. You see where it comes from.

“Glastonbury is great, but there was a feeling of great security. And everybody dressed alike. Everybody wore Lacoste alligator shirts and topsiders and started playing tennis when they were 4. Which isn’t to say I didn’t totally enjoy growing up there. But I knew that the first part of my life and the second part were going to be different. Still, it’s hard when you come from the suburbs because you have to get over that suburban thing.”

And how did Bushnell do that?

“I went to Studio 54 a lot.”

If Bushnell’s nights glittered, her days were positively frumpy. She wrote first for Ladies Home Journal and then Good Housekeeping. But then she broke into a club-crawlers magazine called Night, which gave Bushnell her first real piece, called “How to Act in a Disco.” (The last line: “If someone dies, ignore them.”) She was well on her way.

“I was always basically writing the same stuff that I write now, about people in New York City, different characters.”

And by characters, Bushnell says, she means fiction--even though some people have a hard time separating the character and her life. Maybe that’s because her observations are so keen, so in-the-moment, that it’s hard to believe they could be anything but reported stories from dating’s front lines.

Bushnell, though, seems to fear something else: that contemporary love lives and lies are contemptuously dismissed, that a blond writing about sex could only know of what she writes firsthand.

“Quite a few stories in ‘Sex and the City’ are complete fiction. That tipped me off that I can do this. Like when the girls go to Connecticut for the baby shower? None of it ever happened. But everybody thought it was real. So much of it is fiction. I tell people this, but they never believe me.”

And now the gossips are vetting her new book, “Four Blondes,” for parallels to her own social life. Might Bushnell be the New Yorker who meets a Brit while researching a story in London? Might Bessette be the woman in the fairy-tale-gone-wrong “Platinum,” already optioned to Universal as a feature film? Bushnell sips her drink and sighs.

New ‘Four Blondes’ Also Is Fiction

“ ‘Four Blondes’ is completely fiction,” she says. “Sometimes I think people don’t understand the concept of fiction. The reason it bothers me is I’ve only ever thought of myself as a fiction writer. Now when I do write fiction, people don’t believe it! People say, ‘You write about people’s sex lives and what really happens to them.’ I don’t! I never have!

“There isn’t even that much sex in ‘Sex and the City.’ It was never meant to be a sex column. It was never meant to be about the nitty-gritty of sex. It was always meant to be about sex and society and where those two things intersect. War, family and society--those are the big three topics. All of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books are about society. Edith Wharton is about society.”

Which is why Bushnell gets especially bothered by one word that keeps showing up in reviews: “Superficial.”

“I’m always perplexed when people say that,” she says. “By superficial, people usually mean anybody richer, better-looking or more successful than they are. [I write about] the stuff of everyday life that we all have to deal with. The fact of the matter is, we all do live in a culture where looks and money matter. Finally I got fed up. I said, ‘I don’t do noble! I do shallow and superficial!’ ”

Ultimately, Bushnell sees herself as a chronicler of human nature: the beauty, the reality, the horror and the humor. That’s why the TV show resonates, she suggests. What has she learned over the years? “At the beginning of a relationship, certain things happen, like if somebody doesn’t do what they say they’re going to, you’ve got to cut it. It only gets worse. It doesn’t tend to get better.”