Throw a Drink, Pick Up a 1970s Bestseller

And consider your Cruel Intentions.

First, a bit of housekeeping: There will be no Thursday newsletter this week, thanks to the Thanksgiving holiday (see what I did there?). We’ll be back in business next Tuesday as usual, but this seems like a good time for a heads-up about our holiday publishing schedule. Christmas and New Year’s are both on Wednesday this year — the worst day for any major holiday!! I had a plan for this in my presidential platform! — so our newsletter schedule will be a little funky the last two weeks of the year, because everyone will be passed out under the Chex Mix, including us.

Christmas week will have no newsletter, but you’ll get something that last week of the year — when and what is still TBD. It’ll be a holiday surprise! Consider this a needed rest and respite for everyone before awards season kicks off: We will be hitting the ground running ASAP after the holidays, because the Golden Globes are on January 5. As usual, we will have a live chat during the red carpet and the ceremony for paid subscribers, and full continuing coverage the next day here and on GFY. Also, we just learned The Traitors is back Jan. 9, and with Severance finally returning Jan. 17, paid subscribers may start 2025 with a LOT of Drinks With Broads content. So much drinking with so many broads.

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A Very Special Thanksgiving Edition of New York Times Bestsellers of Yore.

I know, I know!! Usually my looks back at the NYT best-selling novels of years past are focused on that most precious of all genres, the beach book. Together, we’ve thrown some Coppertone into our tote bags and visited the summer books of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, ‘80s, ‘90s, and the first decade of the current century. But this week of all weeks, a young (er, middle-aged; whatever, leave me alone) woman’s fancy turns to the big holiday looming ahead of us on Thursday. Naturally, instead of devoting my brain power to remembering where the hell I stored the folding chairs, or ironing my tablecloth, I started wondering what book everyone was taking in the car or on the plane fifty years ago, to read at Thanksgiving instead of talking to their most annoying aunt, or to wish they were reading while they were instead basting a turkey. Give thanks that we can find out! Put on some bell bottoms and pour your grandma another eggnog, because we’re heading back to the decade of my birth, the 1970s — this time, for best-selling fiction from Thanksgiving week only.

Thanksgiving Week 1970: Of course, it’s freaking Love Story, which kicked off its best-selling dominance on May 10, and which we discussed in the Summer Bestsellers of the 1970s — the coverage of you should probably revisit, because it has everything from backhanded insults to Al Gore (seriously) to National Book Award tizzies. I will say that Love Story does feel autumnal to me, but perhaps that’s just because Ali McGraw wore so many great sweaters in the movie. (PS: I cannot yet get into the non-fiction bestsellers but I do need to tell you that The Sensuous Woman was master of Thanksgiving in 1970 and I can only hope many people traveled with it and read it brazenly on Amtrak.)

Thanksgiving Week 1971: A lot of folks sat in front of the fire and gnawed on a turkey leg while reading The Day of the Jackal, a television adaptation of which literally just came out, like, a month ago! I haven’t read this one, but it sounds like a big-time banger (and of course it is still in print). The author, Frederik Forsyth, also has a fascinating Wikipedia, including a line I misread so dramatically that I briefly thought he was a vampire. He was apparently very much into Brexit (ugh) and also once dated Faye Dunaway (ooh!). What a intriguing mélange of information! A real Waldorf salad of intel.

Thanksgiving Week 1972: Jonathan Livingston Seagull was basically the number one bestseller from July 2 through the end of the year. We talked about this in the previous 1970s coverage as well, but I need to reiterate how extremely dumb this book sounds — I TRULY did not think it was about AN ACTUAL BIRD but it is!! — and I have to think people argued about whether or not it was deeply profound or really stupid while standing on the back porch and taking a smoke break from mashing potatoes. Feelings were likely hurt.

Thanksgiving Week 1973: Thanksgiving, on Nov. 22 this year, landed right in the middle of the two weeks dominated by Graham Greene’s The Honorary Consul. This walk down 1970s bookstore lane really reminds you how much Americans love a book about international intrigue written by people with a history of actual espionage. And trust me, I too am guilty — although I have not read this one. (I think my favorite Greene book is The End of the Affair, even though it is mostly extremely sad and full of religious angst and existential ennui.) Fun fact: Greene had a tendency to anonymously enter Graham Greene parody contests, which he did not always win. That would enrage me. What do you mean I lost? I’M HIM.

Thanksgiving Week 1974: The entire final quarter of 1974 belonged to Centennial, by James Michener. I vaguely think I might have had to read at least part of this in high school? And yet I cannot remember anything about it. Maybe I should pick it up anew? I do love a saga. If nothing else, Centennial is also, like most Michener work, very long, so even if you didn’t like it, at least you could use it to prop the kitchen door open when running the oven all morning started to steam you out.

Thanksgiving Week 1975: Oooh, exciting! The nod for this week goes to Agatha Christie’s Curtain. Christie’s books are perfect travel reading, because they’re all so snappy and diverting. I say this with the caveat that I haven’t actually read this one, and also I absolutely thought she was dead by 1975. (This was Christie’s final novel published while she was still alive, however. She died in mid-January of the following year.) PS: The Wiki for this book has a CRAZY SPOILER that I can’t believe I’ve avoided quite literally my entire human life, so Wiki Deep Diver beware.

Thanksgiving Week 1976: AND SHE’S BACK, although now she’s dead. This Thanksgiving, everyone picked up the last Agatha Christie novel ever published — although not the last one written, chronologically speaking — in the form of her posthumously published Sleeping Murder.  Interestingly, the non-fiction bestseller this week was Roots; Wiki notes, “Although Roots was originally described as fiction, it was sold in the non-fiction section of bookstores. Haley spent the last chapter of the book describing his research in archives and libraries to support his family's oral tradition with written records.” Haley apparently referred to it as “faction.”

Thanksgiving Week 1977: This week (and much of the end of this year) belonged to The Silmarillion, J.R.R Tolkien’s posthumous work¹, which was edited and constructed by his son after his death in what sounds like a gigantic undertaking. The 1970s were apparently all about publishing stuff posthumously! I also have not read this — my only Tolkien is The Hobbit; fantasy is just not my personal jam — but it got VERY BAD reviews and it seems that there was a lot of discourse about whether or not Tolkien would have wanted it to be published at all. That’s definitely more fun to argue about over pumpkin pie than, say, gas prices.

Thanksgiving Week 1978: This brought us a list peopled with The Thorn Birds, Scruples, and, for two months in October and November, Herman Wouk’s ​​War and Remembrance, which is — as I noted of its prequel, The Winds of War, in the summer edition — an epic page-turner and tearjerker that I sincerely believe helped me get a good grade in AP American History. Are you craving 2000 pages of People Having Extremely Serious Problems During Wars? Hit the library for these two. (The non-fiction bestseller was Mommie Dearest, so folks had a lot of juicy reading material this particular holiday.)

Thanksgiving Week 1979: The final Thanksgiving of the decade belonged to The Establishment, by Howard Fast, a novel which I learned does not have a Wikipedia page — although Fast’s is fascinating.² Regardless, nothing feels more ‘70s to me than reading a book about the establishment, maaaaaan. (Takes drag on joint.)

— Jessica

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A Pressing and Important Issue to Discuss

Over on Bluesky, I heard tell of a truly heroic and inventive broad and had to share it:

Chee’s follow-up tweet (sorry, I can’t do the other dumb words people are trying to invent for this) shared that this woman “apparently threw Jaegermeister. And crushed the glass underfoot after.” I just LOVE the notion of buying a drink for this express purpose — it’s both deliciously petty forethought and a profound consideration of others, because of course she didn’t want to weaponize someone else’s paid-for booze — and then stomping the glass for good measure. Although I suppose that’s not very nice to the bar? I’ve decided that part is apocryphal, like how all urban legends grow and grow.

Given that Thanksgiving is upon us and it’s often a fraught family holiday even in the BEST of times, this feels like an especially relevant topic to consider. What would I purchase for the express purpose of hurling a drink at someone? It might depend on the someone, or on the slight. Do I want to stain that person? Red wine would do that trick nicely. Do I want to PAIN them in any way, because perhaps something carbonated would prickle their eyes, as would any of the various ghost pepper-infused tequilas you can apparently buy. Do I want it to stink and/or feel like gasoline? Scotch would be effective.

Alexis Carrington Colby Dexter Rowan would prefer to throw a martini, probably dirty, but she wouldn’t hesitate to hurl Champagne either. Elizabeth Wakefield would sort of jerk an open wine cooler in her enemy’s direction — or a Zima with a Jolly Rancher in it — but wouldn’t commit to anything more than what happened to splash out the top. Jessica Wakefield, and Brenda Walsh come to think of it, might throw a tumbler of Fireball. Amanda Woodward would pay someone else to handle it. Dr. Marlena Evans would probably just do a vodka-tonic out of respect for people’s dry-cleaning bills, unless she happened to be possessed by Satan at the time, at which point she might choose something like a Flaming Dr. Pepper for the element of potential skin-melting. Ted Lasso would gently pour water, after giving the person a polite heads-up.

What would be YOUR weaponized liquid of choice? And how wronged would you have to be?

— Heather

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How Bad Is It: Cruel Intentions 2024

My original headline for this was, “Cruel Intentions? Fool Intentions.” Let us all give thanks that a) I went in a different direction, and b) have never learned not to tell on myself. That one was a real doozy and you deserve to know. Anyway: Amazon’s Cruel Intentions series premiered last week, so I binged a couple over the weekend because I mislaid my Nintendo Switch for a harrowing 24 hours³ and needed to distract myself from thinking about how long it would take to play back through Tears of the Kingdom to get to where I am.

It is an uphill battle to revisit Cruel Intentions, an iconic 1999 movie that starred Sarah Michelle Gellar at her most deliciously spiteful, Reese Witherspoon at her most angelic, and Ryan Phillippe as a smarmy chaotic sleaze (probably also his apex, of his fame at the very least). In keeping with the era’s yen for teen films, Cruel Intentions adapts the French epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses into a takedown of status-hungry, self-involved, hedonistic, bored rich prep schoolers, which was at that point a new spin on material that had already become: a play; the basis of two Roger Vadim films; 1989’s Valmont, with Colin Firth and Annette Bening; and most famously, 1988’s Dangerous Liaisons, starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Glenn Close, John Malkovich, Uma Thurman, and Keanu Reeves.⁴ There are a number of other versions, including Broadway and West End revivals and a 2022 TV series that came and went; the point clearly is, maybe at this point reconsider touching it unless you have a fresh take on it, which this Cruel Intentions does not. It feels less like Cruel Intentions than Gossip Girl, and in a world that has already had Gossip Girl TWICE now and declared itself done with it⁵, I can’t sort out why we’re back here again.

We ARE at least back with the iconic cocaine cross.

The magic of Cruel Intentions the movie is that it keeps things pretty simple. There are no secondary noble causes and there’s very little attempt to add a Poor Me backstory to anybody. You can infer a lot about the motives and messy demons of SMG’s Kathryn, if you want to, but she doesn’t want your pity and so the movie declines to ask for it; she’s chiefly presented as a horrible person who is messing with people simply because she’s privileged and bored and fucks up people’s lives for entertainment — like The Most Dangerous Game, but with social hunting. Sebastian sucks too, but the movie doesn’t add a lot of colors to his life so it’s easier to understand why he’s a shitty Dark Prince and why Reese’s bright, bouncy Annette would compel him in a legitimate way. Still, you end up wanting him to fall for Annette mostly because it would piss off SMG’s Kathryn so much… and yet if the entire thing had gone a different way and Kathryn ended up winning, you’d also be satisfied simply because SMG is so fun to watch. Casting is king and that movie is a great example. I will secretly root for your terrible manipulator if she and her tantrums and her triumphs are compulsively watchable.

This Cruel Intentions is set at a D.C. college, where Caroline Merteuil is the Queen Bee of her sorority and Lucien Belmont is her sex-obsessed step-brother; the Reese Witherspoon role is in the form of Annie, the vice president’s daughter, borrowing spiritually from First Daughter and Chasing Liberty (and in the latter case, namechecking it). Their world is much larger than that of the original, with all activity buzzing around the Greek system, meaning that her primary motivation is keeping her sorority alive — largely to impress her mother, thanks to some grafted-on Mommy Issues that are predictable and dull — by roping in the Veep’s daughter. This might be a noble goal if the show were affectionate, like Greek, but because it fancies itself more of a Gossip Girl vipers’ den, it portrays the whole thing in the absolute worst light possible. For example, our first experience with Lucien is him secretly filming himself having sex with a girl in the bathroom, whom he then abandons so that she won’t be allowed into the fancy sorority shindig they’re attending. We later see them all snickering along with a hazing ritual that ends in a character getting actual brain damage that becomes the butt of several jokes in future episodes. Cece — or Cecile in every other iteration, the only name that stays pretty much the same across all of them — is a pearl-wearing, semi-hapless sorority lapdog for Caroline who you know wishes she’d grown up in the era of Laura Ashley, and her shallow mania is played for yuks: “This is my Silkwood,”⁶ she screams at campus police as she tries to prevent them from going to the basement, and when she fails, she hollers, “Since when is it illegal to have the ugly girls in the basement?” As parody, it’s not even great, but Cecile in the original was at least well-meaning and kind if also (charitably) as dumb as a box of hair. Cece here is a junior-varsity witch desperate for the big time, kind of like Little Jenny Humphrey. A villainous character or three is one thing, but an entire sphere of complete asshats is hard to stomach for very long, much less across eight episodes. By the second, you will find yourself wishing someone would burn it all down, and the affects are so flat all-around that there aren’t many tantrums OR triumphs to enjoy, secretly or otherwise. Every person is smarmy and shitty and worse than the last.

And yet I think we’re supposed to care about them, because who ELSE is there to care about? Claire Forlani, wooden as a tree in a cameo as Caroline’s mom who grabs Lucien’s inner thigh while telling him she’s always considered him her son, too? Nope. Sean Patrick Thomas, a.k.a. Cecile’s cello teacher/crush in the 1999 movie who plays Cece’s professor — and probable future lover — here? Ew⁷. Caroline, who is so unbothered by the worst of Greek system shittiness? Pass. Sarah Catherine Hook looks like Reese and has SMG’s three names, but plays Caroline with a sneering monotone that gets old fast. Beatrice, the girl from the aforementioned sex video, should be sympathetic and the show certainly makes you agree with her anti-Greek protests, but then they swerve and present her and her friends as pretentious and obsessive, and make her say things like, “College is camp times a million.” Savannah Lee Smith’s Annie is the lens through which we see and hear all this, and while she is the least shitty of everyone, even she seems to think Beatrice kind of sucks — and being drawn to Lucien at all is disqualifying. Based on his character yes, but also on his sweaters and his whole… everything. Zac Burgess is woefully miscast. Admittedly I was never one to crush on Ryan Phillippe, either, but he’s effective in that part and you could understand why he was able to psychosexually manipulate people. I cannot say this same for this person:

He looks like if Joseph Gordon Levitt from 2002 were cast in a parody of an ‘80s movie. He is anti-arousing. There IS an element of his character’s sexual success being with people who recognize it as social climbing rather than lust-driven, but he generally is treated as someone with lethal charm and a reputation for being a real ladykiller, and while the actor does his best, I just do not get that energy from a man who styles and carries himself as if he just starred in a mediocre community theater production of Grease and is pretty sure someone’s uncle is going to tell a friend who’s an agent all about it. I cannot sign off on him commanding entire social strata, much less banging his way through Washington.

I don’t necessarily hate that baggy cardigan for ME, but he looks a little ridiculous in it, and it’s keeping me from taking him seriously. You’re a rich brat in 2024! Why are you trying to channel the popular kids from Pretty in Pink? You can dress so much better than this! You could be sharp! Sigh.

So how bad was the new Cruel Intentions? VERY BAD. Not nearly fun enough, not fresh enough, not anything other than an echo of better things that will make you want to seek out those originals. Which, do. I personally have not seen Dangerous Liaisons since I learned that Michelle Pfeiffer and John Malkovich had an affair during filming while they were both married (her to Peter Horton, him to Glenne Headly, which, my dude, do not cross Janet the Jackal) and need to revisit it with that fresh knowledge. I never finished Gossip Girl 2.0 because it was so appalling, and while I’m not sure I want to watch all of the original, the early episodes — the ones that gleefully bragged on billboards about how trashy parents thought it was — might be amusing. Sometimes⁸ the original flavor really is the best, and Cruel Intentions 2024 has a lot of superior ancestors.

— Heather

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Last Call

— Ana de Armas appears to be dating the stepson of Cuba’s current president. (Who is often referred to as a dictator, to be clear.) This dude is also allegedly an “advisor” to the administration. De Armas is Cuban, and her brother was once allegedly investigated by Cuban authorities for anti-government sentiment, so I’m honestly not sure what to make of this. She is generally the person I think of when ruminating on whose career got most torpedoed by Covid — I know she was Oscar-nominated for Blonde, but her Knives Out-generated momentum as a celebrity just ran into a wall and it’s hard to recapture that. Regardless, I did not anticipate this development. — J

— This is easily my favorite headline of the last month: Luann de Lesseps recalls ‘making out heavily’ with ‘tipsy’ Hugh Grant at a Hamptons restaurant. INJECT THIS INTO MY VEINS, this entire story is a chaotic hoot and I believe every single word. (For his part, Hugh Grant basically confirmed it, as far as I’m concerned.) — J

— Finally! We would be remiss if we didn’t remind you that, technically speaking, The Royal We is a Thanksgiving book.

1. Why do people love a dead author at Thanksgiving?? -H

2. And it’s a sequel to Fast’s earlier novel, The Immigrants.

3. On our fifth search of the den couch, we found it, wedged between pieces in a way so improbable that we almost didn’t see it that time either. Everyone in my house is relieved I am no longer asking them if they are gaslighting me and/or have hidden it out of spite. Something they might NOW wish to do. — H

4. This is where I burst in like the Kool-Aid man to note that I LOVE THIS VERSION SO MUCH, it might be my favorite movie of all time? I have never taken off my makeup without thinking of Glenn Close doing it in this movie.- J

5. The reboot was SO GHASTLY that I almost wish I’d recapped it. Ultimately it would have been a lot of effort for only like three other people to be wailing about it with me. —H

6. Speaking as one of the two people who was asked to remove all Kevin Costner jokes from their debut YA novel, would this character EVER know that reference? -J

7. He seems to be the only O.G. cast member who didn’t pass on this one; SMG was attached for a while but wisely bailed.

8. Except in the case of potato chips obviously.