Lipstick Jungle and Cashmere Mafia

By RABBI ELLIOT B. GERTEL

The producers and writers of NBC’s Lipstick Jungle and ABC’s Cashmere Mafia must have had awkward moments when they realized they had spawned the same show. Happily, both series were cancelled. They did little to enhance broadcasting standards.

Both were about high-powered women in the business world and their up-and-coming or down-and-falling friends. Both series were set in New York. And both series had a ruthless Jewish character as a foil and other Jewish characters – for “spice”?

In Lipstick Jungle there was a nasty book publisher named Janice Lasher (Lorraine Bracco) who was out to destroy the reputation of perky, tall film executive Wendy, played by Brooke Shields. Lasher (affectionately named after series writer, Amanda Lasher?) was peddling a book by a former nanny who distorted some of Wendy’s husband’s comments made while the stay-at-home dad was upset about his wife’s missing a child’s milestone. Lasher makes it clear that she will show Wendy no mercy. The writer who makes this Jewish woman so merciless is John Levenstein.

In a selfish moment of self-doubt, Wendy brings her 12-year-old daughter to an awards luncheon to show that she is in fact a devoted mother. She is also dealing with a zealous stage mother who wants her daughter to change her children’s films image by pursuing roles in films that require nudity and maybe even breast implants. The two daughters are seated together at the luncheon. When the stage mother suggests to Wendy’s daughter that she is there to showcase her mom’s devotion, the latter bolts from the room as her mother, Wendy, starts to speak.
Lasher takes cruel advantage of the situation by taunting Wendy, “Having a bad day, Mommy? Nice try dragging your kid in here, trying to use her for damage control.” Devastated by the unfair press and by her daughter’s protest, Wendy is willing to do anything to placate Lasher. But the latter continues to taunt and to threaten. Finally, in desperation, Wendy writes “Bitch” in lipstick on the back of Janet’s fur coat.

When Wendy’s friend, Nico (Kim Raver), editor-in-chief of a fashion magazine, intervenes, Lasher tries to fluster her with references to her humble Greek beginnings in Flushing, Queens, and then declares her intention to get even with Wendy for “going on record” with remarks about Lasher’s publishing trash. Yet Nico neutralizes Janice by hiring away her assistant and threatening to publish the assistant’s tell-all stories about Janice’s own eccentricities and indiscretions. “Don’t look so shocked, Janice,” Nico concludes. “That’s what friends do for each other. You’d know if you had any.”

Nico has, by the way, been having an affair with a male model and photographer’s assistant who is several years her junior. Nico feels guilty but comes to suspect during her own affair that her older, professor husband is sleeping with a young woman, one of his students, who hangs around a bit too much and sends him too many notes. After all, Nico recalls, she married him after having an affair with him when she herself was his student. Yet Nico is riddled by guilt when her husband Charles suffers a heart attack while she is in her lover’s arms and cannot be found until the next morning. When she does see him in the hospital, we learn from writers Lisa Alden and Dan Bucatinsky that his name is Charles Stern and that he uses terms like “shmuck.” It seems that the plan was to portray him as Jewish.

Cashmere Mafia provides similar main characters in similar situations. The series offers even more references to Jews. At the start of the very first episode writer/creator Kevin Wade credits a family with a Jewish-sounding name (Greenwald) with stealing the nanny of the children of a high-powered corporate woman, Zoe Burden (Frances O’Connor). We learn pretty soon that the founder of a cosmetics company, Lily Parrish, was born Yetta Goldman, of humble Jewish beginnings in the Bronx.

At one point, the series appears to come to the defense of old-world family traditions. Mia Mason (Lucy Liu) loses her boyfriend when she is promoted over his head at the publishing firm where she is becoming a major player. Her parents fix her up with a brilliant and handsome Chinese American doctor. They want her to remain within her own culture; her mother is not pleased that her husband is seeing a Jewish dentist on Riverside Drive.

Kevin Wade, Mike Chessler, Chris Alberghin and other writers tease us with the possibility that old-world matchmaking may well win out. But of course such endorsement is not forthcoming. The writers are more interested in inserting other “Jewish” references, such as the unfaithful husband of a hotel COO complaining that he has to drive his shiny new car to the Hamptons because an investment advisor named Charles Nadler will not drive into the city.

While withholding support for endogamous marriage for the preservation of Asian culture, the writing staff applauds an experimental lesbian relationship for Caitlin Dowd (Bonnie Somerville) who works in a cosmetics firm, and even has a Roman Catholic priest, her brother, telling her to seek the right person instead of the right man. When a friend tells her that “Being gay agrees with you,” she responds: “I know. It’s almost been a month.”

Writers Lizzy Weiss, Tze Chun and Mike Weiss decided to introduce a Jewish corporate raider. So they concocted Len Dinerstein and got Peter Rieger (of Crossing Delancey fame) to play the part. Juliet Draper, the chief operating officer of a chain of hotels, is expected to deal with this monster. She is warned, “If guys like that smell fear, they pounce.” As if to take some of the brashness and ruthlessness out of the Dinerstein character, the writers inform us that he was kidnapped for three days while on a U.N. fact-finding mission. He is also allowed to explain, “Billionaire is not a character profile. It’s just a word that goes next to my name these days.”

Dinerstein pursues Juliet from the start, inviting her out to dinner and suggesting that all the money he put into her company, even if only to pillage the stock, will be “money well spent” if it leads to a romantic relationship. Mia tells Juliet and us: “You know he keeps a kosher kitchen. You really should read up on those Jewish traditions. Just don’t order the shrimp.” Juliet is teased that she could end up “the fourth Mrs. Len Dinerstein.”

To these writers at least, a kosher-keeping company-destroyer seeking to make Gentile women kosher keeping is no contradiction in terms, or maybe the contradictions are expected to be “inside” jokes. Also, writers Weiss, Chun and Weiss “balance” the Dinerstein character with the owner of the cosmetics firm at which Caitlin works, Lily Parrish nee Yetta Goldman. When Lily’s protégé Zack Posen (a Jewish ingrate?) leaves her on her own before a major Fashion Week promotion, Lily denounces “that ungrateful little miskeit. I was supporting that pisher when he was nothing.” Before being given the assignment to keep the company in the limelight, Caitlin responds: “Blond, Irish, brother who’s a priest. The only Yiddish I know is shmear and shiksa.”

It’s too bad that the Jewish writers involved with these two series knew as much Yiddish as they did and felt a need to trot out Jewish characters. They certainly had nothing to say about Jewish life, and came up with nasty caricatures of at least one Jewish man and one Jewish woman.

Updated 6/12/08