Internet mogul Josh Harris is worth $60 million at the moment. That's Maurice Jr. on his shoulder. (By Mitsu Hayakawa for The Post)

By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 9, 1999; Page C1



NEW YORK – Maurice Jr. is a little hyper; Maurice is a little agitated. He's rustling behind you, the insistent thump-thump-thump of his head against the glass, and you try to forget about him.

But Maurice is hard to ignore. He's a two-foot-long, sandy brown Australian bearded dragon and he's in this big glass tank directly behind your head. His eyes don't blink and he's got this New York edge thing going.

His owner is another piece of work. He's drinking coffee black, vibrating with possibilities in his SoHo loft, talking about programming people's lives and leaving a cultural testament for the age of computer consciousness. A bit chunky, he's wearing loose-fit jeans and phosphorescent green running shoes, chomping a Monte Cristo No. 4 stogie.

He's Josh Harris, the 34-year-old president and founder of Pseudo Programs. Net worth: $60 million.

Harris made millions from his last big Web thing, and he exudes the sweet phat smell of success that has every 18th person in Manhattan conjuring stock-fueled dreams now. And if Pseudo's stock goes public next fall as planned, if Pseudo's Internet TV turns out to be the next hot pick on Wall Street's wheel of fortune ...

Then Harris – known to friends as Lovvy the performance artist – and every nostril-pierced, hip-hop poet, actor, astrologer, cross-dresser and techie in Pseudo's loft building on the corner of Broadway and Houston Street stand to become richer than God.

Then it's time for Lovvy, Part 2. Time for the Web magnate to throw climate-controlled, video-wacked art feasts in that gadzillion-dollar loft of his and become the Lorenzo de' Medici of the downtown art scene. And then ...

"I'm going after Ted and Rupert. I can play this game and they're not laughing. They're just better funded. For now."

New York's got that golden roar. A second Gilded Age has lifted the wealthy and the entrepreneurial, the lucky and the upper middle class of this nation on a tsunami of wealth. "Everyone's Getting Rich!" exclaims Money, the boom-time bible. MIT computer professors defect to Microsoft for rock star money; college kids dream of IPOs; and the stock-fueled rich move light-years ahead of the 55 percent of Americans who own not a piece of stock.

Whose savings is now negative. Whose wages are inching forward at the slowest clip since 1982. Whose net worth isn't.

"I'm going after Ted and Rupert. I can play this game and they're not laughing. They're just better funded. For now."

Whatever.

When the Dow dough kicks, New York City gets real strange.

A "family-style" two-bedroom apartment on a quiet block in Greenwich Village goes for $700,000; a pleasant prewar three-bedroom on the Upper East Side goes for $1.7 million, and you better ante up 100 percent in dollars to prove you're flush. Not to mention the de rigueur social connections; the toniest co-ops, the 50 or so snoot palaces that require a net worth of $50 million for new applicants, demand reference letters from Fortune 500 CEOs and the chairmen of major charities.

"A middle-class apartment in Manhattan?" Barbara S. Fox, a high-end East Side real estate agent, briefly considers the absurdity. "They need to stay in place or move to the suburbs."

The right restaurants charge $25 for soup and $39 for pizza with raw tuna and wasabi. The timepiece of the moment, a stainless-steel SUV of a wristwatch called the Rolex Daytona, fetches $3,000 and there's a six-month waiting list. And Southampton parties with the mock Tuscan villages and Learjets just can't be done for much less than $800,000 a pop.

Swaths of Manhattan are brand-name headaches. West Broadway is Rodeo Drive. Fifty-seventh Street is a HardRockCafe/Sony/BeLikeMike Niketopia. And Times Square, that old dowager of perversion, has become a made-over suburban mom: a Disney walk on the mild side for the preteen set.

Charles Ardai, 28, got mugged in Times Square in the 1980s, a baby-faced romantic lost amid the gap-toothed pimps and whores. Now Ardai, who majored in English poetry, dresses in collarless black shirts and commands a 23rd-floor CEO's office overlooking Times Square; in a few months his Internet company, Juno.com, will go public and he'll likely be worth multiples of millions of dollars.

"The only reminder of the old Times Square are the phone booths." Ardai peers down at a neon whorl of corporate names and recalls a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley: "All that's left are the legs of Ozymandias."

Righto.

But no time for nostalgia. This is Winner Take All. Meaningful is sweet but smart is measured in stock options. Everything reeks of cash: Wall Street gave out $2 billion in bonuses in 1990; 1998 bonuses topped $11.3 billion.

And the real deal isn't the exchange floor. It's down Broad Street at the day-trading sweatshops, the rooms with banks of computers and twentysomethings, old Chinese ladies, Hasidic Jews and T-shirted jocks, elbow-to-elbow in a 150-stock-trades-a-day fever, the low-ceilinged room scented with perspiration and testosterone and anxiety.

New York's old-money culture still dominates, oh yeah. The old real estate families are drowning in boom-time cash, and they control political giving and entry to the big charity boards, along with the bankers and old-money WASPs. The prewar obelisks along Park and Fifth avenues are reserves of old money.

But Wall Street and real estate aren't the hottest things anymore. That 1980s narrative, the Developer as Icon, is done.

Bobby De Niro and his string of restaurants and Harvey Weinstein and Miramax and the wizards of Silicon Alley are the new templars of dollar hip. Stockbrokers run up real estate prices on Fifth Avenue; Dustin Hoffman, Bruce Willis, Tommy Mottola, Carly Simon and Madonna do the same on Central Park West. Willem Dafoe does performance art reading T.S. Eliot in a Pseudo studio underwritten by investment bankers whose clerks day-trade stocks on their portable computers.

"No one wants to work their way up through an investment bank anymore," says Craig M. Hatkoff, a venture capitalist. "The time frame for success is no longer 18 years; it's 18 months.

"This is a gold rush."

Still ...

The question lingers like a toothache in conversations with the newly rich, and the envious many who yearn to join them: How long will it last?

It accounts for the restlessness edging to hysteria in New York, the sense that too many suburban geniuses are getting too rich chasing too much easy money. The New York Times recently listed 11 Internet companies about to go public; just two turned a profit last year.

"They don't see it as an indulgence. They see it as a necessity," says status-symbol cosmetic surgeon Darrick Antell. (By Mitsu Hayakawa for The Post)

Someday this Bull stops running, the Bear snarls, and New York's cool and chancy shadows close on El Dorado.

"We went through a freakout last fall when the market dropped," Hatkoff recalls, "but the Wizard of Oz, Mr. Greenspan, blinked three times and it was over."

He laughs at himself, at his class in this city at this time.

"Let's be honest. This has delusion written all over it."

So the Gilded Age Redux anthropological tour begins Uptown and moves down ...

One Word: Plastics

Cosmetic central. A $1 million lair with seamless gleaming tiles and special ventilation. Where Darrick Antell, MD, DDS, PC, FACS, does the nip and tuck and lipo-suck on the bizarrely wealthy.

"They don't see it as an indulgence. They see it as a necessity," explains the doctor, freshly returned from Antigua. "Extra skin makes them feel dirty."

Sometimes, though, his clientele wants a bit more skin. Bonus breasts. More than a few Manhattan stockbrokers are dipping into their ever-growing bonuses and bringing the wife into the shop for an augmentation. Antell's big-bosom business is up 200 percent in the past year. The growth in men's eye-bag and neck-wattle liposuctions keeps pace.

Because Antell's patients are the types "whose names are on buildings," most choose a discreet post-op side door to a limousine and thence to the Surrey, the Mark, or the Carlyle. Hotels that know everything and reveal nothing. Where patients have private nurses and eat five-star meals with ice packs on their whatevers.

Then they return to Fifth Avenue, London, Dubai.

Antell never advertises; status is his salesman. "People of a certain socioeconomic background want the same vacations, the same schools, the same clubs," he says. "So when they're lying on the beach in the Caribbean, they might want to say, 'Oh yes, I had my liposuction by Dr. Antell.' "

His prices? $15,000 for a face lift, $8,000 for an eyelid tuck, $8,000 for a breast job. Does he take insurance?

A faint chuckle tickles that buttery voice.

"Chanel perfume and Armani suits aren't covered by insurance. Just think of us as giving you a luxury suit."

Things

The serious ones, the invariably thin women draped in the $150,000 diamond and platinum snowflake necklaces, the $6,020 Chanel wool knit suits and the $980 Lodia shoes, never carry shopping bags.

"Fifteen of our women drop $25,000 to $35,000 per week and we deliver it to their apartments," says a sales gallant at Cerruti, the latest ultra-chic Italian boutique to drop gilded anchor on Madison Avenue. "If you carry a shopping bag, you're not real."

Boys aren't that different. Even the older guys with the little potbellies order 15 Cerrutis and 10 Armanis and mix-and-match. "Five years ago they thought about it," says the salesman. "Today it's point and buy."

Wealthy Manhattan men adore fat metal watches the size of free weights that bristle with gadgets and keep time in three zones. It complements the upscale auto look, uptown or down.

Idling at the curb on Madison Avenue is a tan 42-year-old guy with a cell phone surgically attached, driving a sow of a sport utility vehicle. It's got 10-way power adjustable-leather-heated-memory front seats and bars that curl around the headlights like butch battering rams.

What are you scared of?

The pudgy dude in the charcoal Armani suit sits at the wheel of his Lincoln Expedition. His wife's inside Emporio Armani. He seems a bit startled.

You live in the wealthiest Zip code in the galaxy, the reporter says by way of explanation. But you drive a Sherman tank. Is something making you nervous?

Eyes narrow. He dials 911 as the tinted window slides up.