For nearly 60 years Fran Lebowitz has been the unvarnished voice of New York’s collective gut. Now 74, she began broadcasting her brilliantly blunt—and often hilarious—social commentary about the city and the world around it in the 1970s via her work as a magazine columnist, author, and actor. Since the 1990s, though, the sage observer, who will hold forth at Peekskill’s Paramount Hudson Valley Theater on May 9, has been offering her wry, instinctual musings mainly via public speaking engagements. “It’s what I wanted my entire life,” she told The L Magazine in 2011. “People asking me my opinion, and people not allowed to interrupt.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly the outspoken Lebowitz has long had opinions on another prominent erstwhile Manhattanite, one whose rise intersects with her initial print coverage of city society: Donald Trump. “In New York he was always a joke,” she says by phone when asked about the current White House occupant. “Most people in New York never considered him a New Yorker, and most real estate developers looked down on him. I mean, can you imagine the level of moral squalor you have to have for a New York real estate developer to look down on you? This man managed to go broke owning casinos. People walk into a casino, throw their money away, and walk out. How do you go broke owning a casino? He didn’t get [to the presidency] by being any kind of genius. He got there because he’s the luckiest man in the world. Without question. And not because of hard work, either. I have a friend with a little boy, a four-year-old. Whenever that little boy puts away one of his toys, he’s already worked harder than Donald Trump ever did.”
Lebowitz, however, has seen her share of work. Upon moving to New York from her New Jersey birthplace in 1969, she initially supported herself as a house cleaner, chauffeur, college term paper writer, print ad seller, and even a pornography scribe. Gravitating to the art scene, she befriended Andy Warhol and his circle and was hired by Warhol for his Interview magazine, penning the columns “The Best of the Worst,” which reviewed bad movies, and “I Cover the Waterfront,” which focused on the broader New York arts landscape; a stretch at Mademoiselle followed. A fixture at hotspots like Max’s Kansas City and Studio 54, Lebowitz was running buddies with figures like Robert Mapplethorpe, Jerome Robbins, David Wojnarowicz, and the New York Dolls, “the only rock ’n’ roll band I ever really cared about.”
Lebowitz’s first book, the comedic essay collection Metropolitan Life, was published in 1978. In its wake came 1981’s Social Studies and 1994’s The Fran Lebowitz Reader (a reprint of the first two books) and the children’s title Mr. Chas and Lisa Sue Meet the Pandas. The author’s whiplash wit made her a hit guest on TV talk shows, and from 2001 to 2007 she starred as Judge Janice Goldberg on “Law & Order.” In 2010 she became the subject of Public Speaking, an HBO documentary directed by her longtime friend Martin Scorsese, in whose 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street she also appears. In 2021 she again collaborated with Scorsese, this time for “Pretend It’s a City,” an acclaimed Netflix series centering on their conversations about New York life.
“I would never move out of New York,” says the defiantly analog orator—she’s never owned a computer or a cell phone—who briefly lived in Poughkeepsie as a teenager. “People move out because it’s so expensive to live here. New York could be in flames and it would still be an incredibly expensive place to live. If you think having a backyard is a good substitute for living in New York, then that’s great. It never appealed to me. But because of that I have to be constantly working to stay here.”
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This article appears in April 2025.
