By Tina Brown

Thursday, October 30, 2003; Page C01

The Yankees' loss to the Marlins on Saturday night felt as if the book had finally been closed on the Giuliani era -- the old my-way-or-the-highway, Scotch-in-a-tumbler ethos of big-time New York, citadel of Jack Welch, Sandy Weill and Dick Grasso.

There was something subversively new wave about the Marlins' baby-faced killer pitcher, Josh Beckett. He had that clueless 23-year-old cool. The Marlins were supposed to wilt under the pressure of the Yankee mystique and the Yankee payroll. Instead, they were too young and oblivious to freak out. They made the star power of the Yankees look, well, old.

I was sitting with a friend in the Steinbrenner family's box surrounded by the sports patriarch's daughter and grandkids, a stunningly normal group of all-American fans. The boys ate huge tubs of butler-served ice cream and waved fishing nets. The girls jumped up and grooved every time the music went hip-hop.

The grown-ups, however, were hushed and subdued as they moved around the box in Florida evening knits for the women and manly sports jackets for the guys. It was a bad night for the family business. Every so often the weighty figure and carved granite visage of Mr. George Steinbrenner himself would descend from his own box above. He wore the flinty expression of owner's heartache.

The Yankees had used up all their heroics in Boston on a real team. Real teams have gruff, bellicose names like Bears or Bulls or Braves (or Cubs). From Steinbrenner's perspective, the heirs of Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio and Mantle simply do not lose the World Series on their home turf to a 10-year-old, MTV-generation franchise named after a fish. I guess he felt the way editors of "real" magazines (i.e., the kind that publish things like articles in between pages of unrelated advertising) felt this week when Lucky, the no-content Conde Nast super-slick super-shopper, was named Advertising Age's magazine of the year.

In New York, we are in turnaround. The old icons are gone or going, and we don't know yet who or what is going to replace them, just as nobody has a clue, after all the acres of ink, about what's really going to go up on the floodlit void shrouded in ghosts where the twin towers stood.

So many Big Apple legends have recently died, or gone AWOL, or are on their way in or out of jail. We mourn the patrician charmer George Plimpton, founder of the Paris Review, and the Ciceronian senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, he of the bow tie, the tweeds and the pointed epigrams. Seinfeld is on his eternal honeymoon hiatus. Calvin Klein sold his company and keeps slinking off to rehab. Martha Stewart is in pretrial limbo. Sotheby's ex-chairman Al Taubman is freshly out of federal striped pajamas. Woody Allen keeps doing unfortunate out-of-character things like breaking a lifetime of ironic distance with a boorish kiss-and-tell book proposal. Al Sharpton has gone national, giving improbable interviews to the New Yorker about his Cabinet-in-waiting. Rapper and phat fashion king P. Diddy is penning essays on the future of the Democratic Party for the new anthology edited by Andrew Cuomo. The only stable New York institution is Liza Minnelli's latest divorce. Donald Trump sees the writing on the wall for vanishing icons. After some quiescent years, he's refurbishing his indelible image with a new reality show on NBC.

The cataclysm of 9/11 made Rudy America's mayor and Gotham America's town. Every woman wanted to date a fireman. But when the dust began to settle, the icons had gone. Anyway, being beloved can dull your edge.

Michael Bloomberg's New York is a pragmatic city of nimble alliances and smoke-free restaurants. Mayor Mike is almost frighteningly sane. He lacks the cartoon qualities that made a Rudy Giuliani or an Ed Koch pop out of a beer mat. He comes up with smart ways to leverage the New York brand, like making Snapple the city's soft drink to help plug the budget deficit. Bloomberg is a manager. That's what we need, but we miss the raw unpredictability of Rudy's road rage.

It's entirely fitting that in the era of legend reduction, the most admired elected official in the state, according to a recent poll, is the slayer of corrupted icons, Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. Wall Street is more afraid of Spitzer than of Osama. He has that hungry Bobby Kennedy look, only without the existential angst.

We do have Hillary, for the moment -- but her seeming attention to every New York detail only reminds us that her sights are elsewhere. We'd love to own Bill, but his need to hurtle round the world piling up speaking fees makes his movements too erratic. When he does show up it's treated, in this Democratic town, like a sighting of Jesus. He suddenly appears -- as he did last week at Vince and Eddie's, a small Italian restaurant on the West Side, for a birthday dinner for the publicist Kathie Berlin and 14 of her friends, and jammed about politics for three straight roller-coaster hours while the help in the kitchen and the people in the bar went nuts with excitement.

Bill Clinton is made for the razzle-dazzle of the city we miss. When he's home in Chappaqua, writing his memoir, the junior senator from New York keeps him on a short leash. At a dinner party in northern Westchester County last summer, Clinton told a guest he would love to run for mayor of New York -- and might consider doing so at some point in the future. Now, though, he "couldn't do that to Hillary."

But the iconic vacuum in the city will last for only a New York minute. The night the Yankees got creamed, George Steinbrenner started growling about "change." "You can count on it!" he vowed. Not much later, the batting coach, Rick Down, was gone, and the boss was on the hunt for the living legends of tomorrow.