She Couldn't Help But Wonder

“I see you’re having the peach cosmo,” Candace Bushnell tells me as she slips into her seat at Caravaggio on New York’s Upper East Side early one Wednesday evening. She’s wearing a lilac Adam Lippes sheath and buttery-beige Jimmy Choo buckle slides, her hair blown out in the soft, subtle layers native to this neighborhood. This white-napkin Italian restaurant is one of her local spots — she lives upstairs with her two standard poodles, Pepper and Prancer — and after she orders a peach cosmo for herself, a suited waiter swiftly pours it tableside.

Bushnell is, of course, the high priestess of the cosmopolitan. Known and worshiped by many as the real-life Carrie Bradshaw, she wrote Sex and the City, the sparklingly witty New York Observer column-turned-1996-book that spawned the HBO phenomenon and mass-launched the pink drink. The franchise also vaulted Bushnell into the canon of New York’s literary It Girls. Even her current residence bears some of that history. “Dorothy Parker used to live in this building,” Bushnell quips, in her slightly raspy voice, before deadpanning, “She probably died there.”

While half-baked trend pieces hail the return of the cosmo almost annually, it never truly goes out of style. The same can be said for Sex and the City. The show has been continuously on TV since its 1998 premiere, whether in censored syndication on E! or streaming on Max, and it remains rich meme fodder. But its arrival on Netflix earlier this year introduced it to another wave of viewers — and summoned a rash of headlines wondering whether stereotypically prudish Gen Z would revolt at the first mention of “funky spunk” or balk at the show’s much-discussed lack of diversity.

Bushnell rolls her eyes at the discourse. “I have people come up to me and say the show changed their life,” she says, or “‘The show saved me when I was depressed.’” If Zoomers are critical of Carrie and company, it hasn’t registered offline. “People don’t understand” — Bushnell speaks in italics — “that watching Sex and the City is a rite of passage for all of these young girls who go to college.”

I do, because I was one of them: In the early aughts, my college roommates and I binged the boxed sets (initially on VHS) and cataloged our favorite quotes via Post-its. (“You can take the Shar Pei out of the penis, but you could never take the dog out of the man.”) The show’s spirited sex positivity validated, even encouraged, our own extracurricular activity and raunchy morning-after conversations, though Bushnell makes it clear now she was never writing it for us. “It was about 30-something women, but whatever,” she says.

“Did I go out with a senator? Yes, I did. Did he pee on me? No.”

At a time when modern dating feels particularly soul-crushing both onand off the apps, Sex and the City has also become a fantasy portal to Bushnell’s bygone New York, when making plans or finding a match of any kind seemed almost frictionless. “In the ’80s and ’90s, nobody was giving up dating for three years, and it probably wouldn’t have been possible, anyway, because you would’ve gone to a bar or the supermarket or gone to see the skaters at Wollman Rink,” she says. “You would’ve struck up a conversation with someone.” People regularly met prospects on the street, she insists. Bushnell herself only stayed in on Tuesday nights. “It was a playground.”

Like 2.5 million others in Sex and the City’s first week on Netflix, Bushnell rewatched the series born of her IP this spring and was reminded of how faithfully early episodes adapted her writing. The pilot begins just like her book, with a journalist named Elizabeth getting ghosted by an investment banker before “ghosting” even entered the vernacular. A self-described “social anthropologist,” Bushnell also originated plots about “modelizers” (Leo DiCaprio types) and the swinging couples sex club Le Trapeze, way before consensual nonmonogamy felt practically ubiquitous. “It really brought me back to those days,” she tells me in a wistful whisper. “It’s strange because it was so much of my life, and of course people always say” — she adopts a girly squawk — “‘Oh, it’s my life.’” She returns her register to normal. “But, no, it’s really my life.”

Bradshaw borrowed from Bushnell more than I ever realized. In the 2000 episode “Politically Erect,” Carrie dates a local politician (noted silver fox John Slattery) with a urine fetish. About a year prior, the tabloids reported on Bushnell jetting to Palm Beach with former New York Republican senator Alfonse “Al” D’Amato, who had just left office and was known, Bushnell exclaims, as “the pothole king” for his attention to local infrastructure. “Did I go out with a senator? Yes, I did,” she says. “Did he pee on me? No.”

And while Carrie hooked up with a sensitive-souled male model in the first season, Bushnell shares, “I had sex with the real Calvin Klein underwear model,” Michael Bergin. I blurt out that Bergin also dated Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy before she married John F. Kennedy, Jr. “I didn’t really date him,” Bushnell replies wryly. “We were friends — friends with benefits.”

Bushnell did, in fact, date the real-life Mr. Big, an alias for former Condé Nast exec Ron Galotti, who she has said broke up with her on the same day she received a box of advance copies of Sex and the City. And she’s still friends with the real-life inspiration for “international party girl” Amalita Amalfi, a former Vogue editor who served as a gateway for Bushnell’s, and thus Carrie’s, obsession with Manolo Blahniks. “I’m actually seeing her tonight,” Bushnell tells me, after we order twin bowls of linguine with clams.

Bushnell only worked in the HBO writers’ room for the first two seasons, but the parallels continued. Like Carrie in the glittery Los Angeles episodes, Bushnell had a run-in with Matthew McConaughey in LA — not at a smarmy general meeting but a party at Chateau Marmont. In 2002, Bushnell married Charles Askegard, a principal dancer for the New York City Ballet, and soon after, the show cast ballet icon Mikhail Baryshnikov as Carrie’s lover. (Bushnell and Askegard divorced in 2012.)

“Your apartment is just a place to sleep and get dressed and shower and maybe have sex. And then you go out into the night.”

Bushnell makes a game of the overlap in her one-woman show “True Tales of Sex, Success and Sex and the City,” which has toured the United States and United Kingdom and is bound for Australia in December. Bushnell initially sold the rights to her column for a reported $100,000 and still gets a sliver when new incarnations (such as movies or And Just Like That…) are hatched. Yet she says she’s made most of her money from writing bestsellers like 4 Blondes (for which she received a $1 million contract), Lipstick Jungle, and The Carrie Diaries (the latter two were also adapted for television).

Today’s New York hinges too much on tech and hedge-fund riches for Bushnell’s taste — even this restaurant, she notes, is “ridiculously expensive.” “When you went to a club, it wasn’t about bottle service,” she says of the city in the ’90s. There was a premium on artistry and interesting people over wealth. (Case in point: She often ran into future president Donald Trump, who was “out every single night” with second wife Marla Maples, and Bushnell notes, “He wasn’t taken seriously.”) “Instagram has changed all that. Everyone’s like, ‘It’s fake.’ It’s like, ‘No, I know those people, and they really are on that f*cking yacht!’” Still, she is only so willing to walk, Jimmy Choo-clad, down memory lane. “On the other hand, who cares what it was like 25 years ago?”

She doesn’t pay much attention to her It Girl descendants, but the idea of Julia Fox as a Versace darling battling a mouse problem in her modest apartment, as Fox once revealed on TikTok, comes as no surprise to her. Bushnell came up in “a time when everybody kind of had that small one-bedroom,” she says, before clarifying, “if you were lucky.” In New York, it doesn’t matter — or it shouldn’t, anyway. “Your apartment is just a place to sleep and get dressed and shower and maybe have sex. And then you go out into the night.”

After dinner, Bushnell did end up going out with “Amalita,” she tells me on the phone the next day, “and she introduced me to a Broadway producer who’s won a Tony award. We’re going to go to a show sometime.” Bushnell sounds simultaneously amused and a smidge hopeful. A peach cosmo and a promising man on a Wednesday night? “There you go,” Bushnell says. “It’s New York.”

Top image credit: Dior dress c/o Albright Fashion Library, stylist’s own gloves

Photographs by Sofia Alvarez

Styling by Stephanie Sanchez

Hair: Christiaan van Bremen

Makeup: Jewels Grogan

Photo Director: Alex Pollack

Editor in Chief: Lauren McCarthy

SVP Fashion: Tiffany Reid

SVP Creative: Karen Hibbert