After a few rings, I was sent to a recorded message from Lebowitz saying that I should leave my name and number and she’d call back soon.
I was prepared for this to happen. Her team made sure that I was. Just a few days earlier, they had reached out to say that Lebowitz screens all calls on her landline and sends them to her answering machine. When I got to that point, I was instructed to introduce myself, explain that I was calling on behalf of the Dallas Observer and be prepared to filibuster until Lebowitz picked up.
Lucky for me, Lebowitz answered quickly as soon as she heard that I was the writer from Dallas who would be next in a decades-long lineage of interviewers to profile her.
After kindly greeting me, she told me that she’d been thinking about Dallas in anticipation of my call. Her last time on tour in the city was in 2017, honoring a rescheduled date at the Charles and Dee Wyly Theatre after it flooded during a fire systems check months earlier.
On Thursday, Nov. 14, she makes her return to North Texas at the Eisemann Center in Richardson. The event will be in conversation with Dallas marketer Catherine Cueller, with an audience Q&A and book signing to follow for her latest, The Fran Lebowitz Reader.
The prospect of having a conversation with Lebowitz is about as intimidating as it gets. The 74-year-old has forged a career of more than 50 years through biting cultural criticism intercut with razor-sharp observational humor. But with such a prolific career, there’s something of a Fran Lebowitz conversational blueprint laid out after hours of recorded interviews, including two Martin Scorsese-directed documentaries and countless appearances on late-night television.
In nearly all of her appearances, Lebowitz’s charm comes in a sort of verbal anthology. She shifts from monologue to monologue, including topics like the tendency toward cigarette smoking by artists or the unpredictable distribution of talent in people.
Scorsese's first film with Lebowitz, 2010’s Public Speaking, opens with her recalling a story of a blind art collector damaging a rare Picasso painting in his gallery.
“There is no more suitable and potent image for our time than the image of the blind art collector,” she said. “I think that sums it up. If you were gonna write a history of the era, you should call it ‘The Blind Art Collector and Other Stories.’”
Lebowitz spoke again about the sale of Picasso paintings in 2021’s Pretend It’s a City, where her musings were once again Scorsese’s muse. In Episode 4 of the six-part Netflix original series, she shared her chagrin with a 2015 auction of Picasso’s "Les Femmes" at Christie’s auction house in New York. Scorsese showed some footage of the painting being brought out before an army of bidders; it sold for $160 million as a chorus of cheers erupted in the room.
“We live in a world where they applaud the price, not the Picasso,” she said.
In the thick of Lebowitz’s verbal anthologies, the appreciation and intentions behind owning art, specifically an original Picasso, tend to reemerge. So for our short chat on the phone, I knew what I had to ask.
“Rich people are so much richer than they used to be,” she says, noting that the trend she’d pointed out was only getting worse. “There’s always rich people, but they weren’t this rich. The amount of private wealth that is in the hands of relatively few people is a very bad thing for democracy. And they buy art.”
When Public Speaking was released, the record price for a work of art was Jackson Pollock’s "No. 5, 1948," which sold for an estimated $140 million in 2006. Today, the record has more than tripled. In 2017, Saudi Arabian royal Badr bin Abdullah Al Saud paid $450.3 million for Leonardo da Vinci’s "Salvator Mundi," an oil portrait of Jesus Christ with a title that translates to “Savior of the World.”
“I think it’s bad for artists, especially young artists, because they have grown up in an environment where they think in these terms,” Lebowitz says. “If you tell your parents you wanted to be an artist or a writer, when I was that age they were upset because they thought you’re going to starve to death. Now their parents think, ‘How can we turn this kid into an artist so we can get rich?'”
Whatever Lebowitz told her parents when she was young, it paid off. Born to Harold and Ruth Lebowitz in Morristown, New Jersey, in 1950, she had a gift of gab that was recognized at an early age when she won the “wit award” in junior high. Just a few years later, Lebowitz says she was expelled from the private all-girls high school she attended for being a bad influence on her peers. She left formal education behind altogether and moved to New York, where she worked as a cab driver.
Her first experience in the editorial world was not as a writer but in advertising sales for Changes, a small cultural magazine in New York. But her wit couldn’t be confined to the ad pages, and soon Lebowitz started to contribute writing to the magazine. Just a few years later, Andy Warhol hired her as a columnist for Interview magazine. In 1978, she published her first book, Metropolitan Life, a series of short, humorous essays. She followed it up with another collection of essays, Social Studies, in 1981. Later that year, she graced the cover of the September issue of Interview as its primary subject.
Since Lebowitz began taking dates as a speaker while promoting those two books, she’s maintained a semi-regular touring schedule across the globe.
“Writing is very hard. Talking is very easy. That’s why I like to talk,” she says.
Lebowitz is perhaps the last true humorist, a bygone breed of writer who could make a living from sheer force of personality. Her reputation required readers and editors to accept a certain level of authority from her on general cultural news, while presenting it in a niche lens of cynical humor whether in writing or speech. It’s a formula that’s impossible to quantify, but one that Lebowitz continued to solve throughout the ‘80s.
“Everyone has opinions, but not everyone is good at writing,” Lebowitz says. “Now everyone writes this stuff.”
Anti-Social Studies
With the advent of social media and ease of internet access, more people than ever have a platform. In return, Lebowitz has almost consciously shrunk her platform, famously resisting technological developments and stating that she’s never owned a mobile phone or a laptop.“I know that it’s very democratizing,” she says of new media. “But in a certain way, it’s too democratizing. I know I’m going to be killed for saying that, but really I feel that there is too much democracy in the culture, not enough in the society. I would rather fewer people publishing their writing and more people participating in politics.”
My call with Lebowitz took place prior to the 2024 election, and she mentioned having accidentally booked a speaking date in London on Election Night.
“A friend of mine said to me, ‘If it goes bad, you could just stay there,’” she says. “That would be very good if I could find someone who would pay for me to live in this hotel, which there is no such person.”
It wasn’t the first time Lebowitz was in London for a momentous Trump-related event.
“I was in London when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade,” Lebowitz says. “I did like six nights in London, and night after night, ‘Why'd you overturn Roe v. Wade?’ Every single audience I have is very focused on American politics.”
Lebowitz says people in foreign countries often speak to her about American politics as though she were the one who makes the decisions. Based on everything else she’s said, that seems like an interaction she would actually welcome.
Lebowitz’s gripes about the state of the country, the democratization of media or the intentions behind billionaire art collections could all be boiled down to the same principle: the application of ego. After she was expelled from high school and cut her teeth in the pre-Murdoch days of mainstream media, each moment of her career hinged on an intense understanding of the culture around her.
“I think it would be better if people would have more ego involvement with their knowledge,” Lebowitz says. “People are not embarrassed by not knowing things, and that didn’t used to be the case.”
Lebowitz’s latest run of touring dates brings her to nearly 50 years of public speaking. If a lifetime spent sharing her opinions managed to move the cultural pendulum, even slightly, it would be a befitting legacy to leave behind.
“All of these places I go to, they’ve all changed,” Lebowitz says. “It’s different people, except for me. Everyone else died.”
Fran Lebowitz appears Thursday, Nov. 14, at Charles W. Eisemann Center, 2351 Performance Drive, Richardson. Tickets start at $35. Books will be available for purchase in the lobby courtesy of Interabang Books.
