Fork in hand, Bret Easton Ellis pokes at a bowl of bloody raw meat. It looks gory enough to be a gag-meal by his monstrous anti-hero Patrick Bateman. The title character of Ellis’ novel “American Psycho” — which has been turned into a decadent, high-energy, sexy-yet-blood-spattered musical now on Broadway, of all things — would love to surprise his creator with a bowl of flesh swimming in truffle vinaigrette and served with a linen napkin.
Of course, it’s only a $38 entree of steak tartare. Tucked into a corner table at Midtown’s venerable ‘21’ Club, Ellis, 52, says that a serving of raw filet mignon is precisely what Bateman would order here.
“He’d go for whatever is the restaurant’s classic,” says the author, not needing to be reminded that, in the book, Bateman steals a disinfectant cake from a urinal at ‘21’ Club, covers it in chocolate and feeds it to his girlfriend who believes she’s biting into a confection from Godiva. Despite it all, says Ellis, with a bit of an eye roll, “I have a soft spot for Patrick.”
Bateman and “American Psycho” have been good to Ellis. The book, which was written to satirize consumer-obsessed yuppies on Wall Street and is often singled out for its scenes of unbridled violence, celebrated its 25th anniversary in March. It has sold more than a million copies in the US and led to a well-received movie that launched Christian Bale to stardom. The Broadway adaptation, which captures the novel’s black humor, shrewdly shows how relevant much of “American Psycho” remains — especially Bateman’s obsession with designer labels, social one-upmanship, metrosexuality, hot restaurants and Donald Trump.
“I think Trump would be a father figure for him [Bateman.] He would see a kindred spirit in the Donald Trump of today.”
- Bret Easton Ellis
“ ‘The Art of the Deal’ was a big thing among young Wall Street guys [in the late 1980s],” says Ellis of Trump’s book. “Donald Trump was somebody to aspire to [be].”
But if Bateman were around today, says Ellis, his allegiance to The Donald would run a bit hot-and-cold. “Trump seems to be connecting to the blue-collar, disaffected workers, and they are not part of Patrick’s crowd,” who were the snootiest of the 1-percent. Still, he continues, “I think Trump would be a father figure for him. He would see a kindred spirit in the Donald Trump of today: Somebody who calls out bulls - - t when he sees it.”
Though “American Psycho” goes down in history as one of the bloodiest books ever written (so much so that its intended publisher, Simon & Schuster, rejected it on moral grounds; the book went on to be a New York Times best seller after Vintage picked it up), it did not start out that way.
Initially, says Ellis, he intended to write a straightforward narrative centering on a corrupt Wall Street trader. In preparation, he hung around with burgeoning masters of the universe. “We’d be eating and drinking” — inside the era’s big-ticket Manhattan spots such as Indochine and Texarkana — “and conversations were all about one upmanship: who was f - - king what babe, which hot club to go to, new watch acquisitions, who had the fastest cars. I was at one of my last dinners with them when it hit me: ‘My character is a serial killer.’ I decided to make it be narrated by a psychopath — a very frustrated one.”
He also found room to get in a sharp dig at his friend and fellow novelist Jay McInerney. Appearing in the book as an unsympathetic party-girl is a character named Alison Poole, whose name was lifted from McInerney’s book “Story of My Life,” in which the character is based on the model Rielle Hunter, who had once been McInerney’s girlfriend. (Hunter would later go on to be famous for her affair and love child with 2008 presidential candidate John Edwards.)
“Rielle never said anything to me about it, but Jay was not happy. He pissed me off over something while I was writing ‘American Psycho.’ So I had [a character known for being based on McInerney’s ex] tied up and beaten.” Ellis smiles tightly and shrugs. “You have to write what you have to write.”
When Ellis thinks of the era’s excesses — he says that Bateman’s “gazelle-skin wallet” was pure invention and that he kept lifestyle magazines and high-end catalogs open to brand-name-drop as he wrote — one thing that stands out is the storm of cocaine that seemed as de rigueur as French cuffs among Wall Street’s fast set.
“You went to certain places — Nell’s, Tunnel, Save the Robots — and you could always find guys selling coke. And [the Wall Street crowd] didn’t share,” Ellis recalls.
Ellis didn’t need to research that one. “I was a functioning cocaine addict,” he says. “The weekend [preceding] Black Monday in 1987 was a lost weekend for me. I met a friend for lunch, everyone was wearing suits [and] doing coke and then I saw everyone leaving the restaurant. The waiter told me that the stock market was crashing. I tie that [event] to cocaine.”
Now directing commercials and developing a Web series called “The Deleted,” the author is based in California — as, he says, a young Bateman today would be, probably running roughshod over Silicon Valley. “His longing to be an exhibitionist would land nicely in this era of selfies and social media.”
Ellis finds current-day New York a bit unsettling: “I ate last night at the Ace Hotel and it was like a hipster museum. Dinner was incredibly expensive and I was the oldest person there; everyone was dressed in their artisanal finery and going home to watch ‘Girls.’
“New York once seemed to be a place for adults. You went knowing that it was going to be about sex and grit and drugs. Now New York seems childproof, like a moated, gated community for tourists and rich people.”