2019-08-19_The_New_Yorker

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his is the true story of two strang-
ers who, on a recent morning, ar-
ranged to meet in a loft. The strangers
were Edwina Sandys, a British-born
artist of illustrious lineage (she is a grand-
daughter of Winston Churchill), and
Chris McCarthy, the president of MTV.
The loft was the very one in which, three
decades earlier, the first season of the
MTV reality show “The Real World”
was filmed. Sandys, wearing surprisingly
sporty sneakers, is eighty and bespecta-
cled, with flame-red hair. She has lived
in the loft, situated on a busy corner of
Broadway and Prince Street, since 1995,
but had recently decided to put it on
the market. (Asking price: seven and a
half million dollars.) Before Sandys bid
the space farewell, though, McCarthy
dropped by to take a look at the loca-
tion from which American reality tele-
vision was launched.
“This loft is natural for shooting re-
ality TV, because of the high ceilings,”


dren to be around, which was exciting.
His children collected bottles and such
for him to make still-lifes from. He called
it a bottlescape. This was his favorite
champagne,” she said, gesturing toward
a painted magnum of Pol Roger.
Sandys is not a professional politi-
cian, but through her art she has been
concerned with bridging international
differences. She directed McCarthy to
a photograph that showed Ronald Rea-
gan, in 1990, speaking at a ceremony
held in Fulton, Missouri, in which a
sculpture of hers—a swath of the Berlin
Wall from which two oversized figures,
male and female, are cut out—was in-
stalled. “It was the town where my grand-
father gave his Iron Curtain speech,”
she said. “And then Reagan gave the
sculpture’s dedication, because he had
said to Mr. Gorbachev, ‘Tear down this
wall.’ ” Last May, she returned to the
site for a commemoration. “I said, ‘I’ve
invited thirty lovely young guests to
come and show us about peace and
freedom,’ and I went behind the wall,
and thirty white doves flew out from
the cutouts.”
“When the Berlin Wall was coming
down, we were launching networks
around the world,” McCarthy said. “It’s
the spirit of youth, to drive change.” The
focus of “The Real World,” he explained,
has always been on bringing people to-
gether, in spite of their differences. “Now
there’s the Internet,” he said. “But, back
in the nineties, people would go on the
show and it would be the first time they
would meet people from different reli-
gions, different races.”
“It’s like the United Nations,” Sandys
said. “A bit of diplomacy!” Never hav-
ing seen the show, she asked, “And they
live together?”
In June, the network launched three
new iterations of the franchise. One is
in Atlanta, the second in Mexico, and
the third in Thailand, with the latter
two airing, for the first time, in the coun-
tries’ native languages, with closed cap-
tions in English. “The Atlanta one is
good,” McCarthy said, “but in Amer-
ica people are familiar with the format,
and everyone comes in with a brand.”
He went on, “In Thailand and Mexico,
though, there aren’t as many unscripted
youth shows, so it’s refreshing. You get
to see people really acting real.”
“Will you have people from differ-

McCarthy said, the severity of his all-
black outfit and shaved head belying his
affable manner. “Nowadays, more often
than not we end up shooting in old
banks.” He gazed seventeen feet up, as
if envisioning the cameras that had once
been there to capture every move of the
seven youngsters—among them Julie,
the country bumpkin from Alabama;
Kevin, the poet and activist who lived
in Harlem; and Eric, the hunk from
New Jersey—who fought and made up
and fought again in the space. He pointed
at a twelve-foot-tall window. “And there’s
the fire escape where they used to sit
and smoke cigarettes!” he said.
In the “Real World” days, the loft—
sixty-five hundred square feet of old-
school SoHo grandeur, with cast-iron
Corinthian columns, mezzanines, and
marble floors—was done up with the
signifiers of Gen-X communal living,
including a pool table and a lava lamp.
Sandys has overlaid the surfaces with
colorful Matisse-like canvases and sculp-
tures of her own making. On one wall
hangs a portrait of her grandfather in
the act of painting, cigar in mouth, hom-
burg aslant.
“Painting relaxed him when he was
at home,” Sandys said, in a Queen’s-
English burr. “He always allowed us chil-

“ You should start taking probiotics now, before we discover
that they don’t make any difference.”
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