‘Sex and the City’: The orgy continues

Since Carrie Bradshaw sashayed into our living room in her tulle tutu, she’s got us addicted to Sex and the City. For the past six years, we watched Carrie (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) – and, yes, her bosom gal pals Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall), Charlotte York (Kristin Davis), and Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon), too – fall in and out of love, hop in and out of bed, wiggle in and out of a relationship. Saturday night just ain’t complete without turning on the tube and finding out on HBO what the girls are doing (and who they’re doing it with) and, yes, what the girls are wearing (or not wearing). So, when TV’s toothsome foursome bid us goodbye late last year, it was as if we lost our own best friends. Good thing it’s in syndication and now comes the one-of-a-kind book Sex and the City Kiss and Tell that sizzles with behind-the-scenes stories and over 750 full-color photographs (plus a steamy sextionary at the end).

In the book’s introduction, Sarah Jessica Parker herself tells us what Sex and the City is about: "Some of the original elements of the show that first attracted me were the candid, forthright, and intimate friendships of four women; the uniqueness and importance of these friendships; the fresh voice of a very specific single woman in a very specific city; the heartbreaks, hopes, loneliness, and triumphs of being single and searching for love; and the way in which each of our characters illustrates her love for our home, New York City ... "

(Sarah herself resides in New York with actor husband Matthew Broderick and their son.)

It was in June 1998 that Sex and the City premiered and made TV history. The first scene from the first episode of the first season shows the four women at Lucky Cheng’s celebrating Miranda’s birthday over Chinese food and tea, and immersed in a hot topic: sex. They were debating: Can women have sex like men? Then followed other hotbed topics, a lot of which would make a nun blush a beet-red. This set the tone for what would become an Emmy awardwinning TV show – and a TV habit among millions of viewers around the world.

"A lot of my girl friends identify with Carrie," says one Sex and the City fan. "And my gay friends, too."

You’d probably see a bit of yourselves in one of the four leading characters on the show. There’s Carrie Bradshaw, the journalist who’s forever in search of her soul mate. She writes: "Soul mate. Two little words. One big concept. A belief that someone, somewhere, is holding the key to your heart and your dream house. All you have to do is find them. So where is this person? And if you love someone and it didn’t work out, does that mean they weren’t your soul mate?"

Carrie’s forever in a quandary. She asks, "What if Prince Charming had never showed up? Would Snow White have slept in that glass coffin forever? Or would she have eventually woken up, spit out the apple, gotten a job, a health-care package, and a baby from her local neighborhood sperm bank? I couldn’t help but wonder: Inside every confident, driven single woman, is there a delicate, fragile princess just waiting to be saved?"

There’s Charlotte York, smart art dealer who plays by the rules.

Here are some of Charlotte’s rules:

• No one buys a classic six on the Upper West Side unless they are seriously thinking about marriage.

• It’s not a rebound when the other person’s dead.

• If you don’t have sex for a year, you can actually become revirginized.

There’s Samantha Jones, PR executive who believes that women can have sex like men. She defies the Rules and says, "The women who wrote that book wrote it because they couldn’t get laid. So they constructed this whole bullshit theory to make women who can get laid feel bad."

More Samantha-isms:

• On premarital sex: Before you buy the car, you take it for a test drive.

• On marriage: Marriage doesn’t guarantee a happy ending. Just an ending.

And finally, there’s Miranda Hobbes, the corporate lawyer who wouldn’t settle for less than she deserved.

If they had one thing in common, it was that none had found Mr. Right (the girls eventually did, six seasons later – Carrie got back with Mr. Big, played by Chris Noth, after a brief heartbreaking relationship with artist Aleksandr Petrovsky, played by legendary dancer Mikhail Barysnikov).

And yes, they all "lived on one shimmering island where the strangest sorts of people have a way of coming together. Where people get around in small yellow buggies, go to delis at 4 a.m., drink big, pink cocktails, and run into exes. An island with so many single guys that you can find a ‘man’ right inside its name – Manhattan."

The story goes that executive producer/creator Darren Star wanted to create a true adult comedy where sex could be handled in a frank and honest way. The scripts were penned by some of TV’s brightest writing talents. Executive producer Michael Patrick King was one of them. Then there were Cindy Chupack, Jenny Bicks, tandem Julie Rottenberg and Elisa Zuritsky, Allan Heinberg, Amy Harris, and Liz Tuccillo. They would meet four months before the show started shooting, sat down and asked the questions that Carrie asked in her column.

Often, the plot of the story was influenced by what actually happened in the lives of the writers. Often, too, the episodes were influenced by how the actors interacted with each other. For instance, Steve (David Eigenberg) – the guy who had a testicle removed – was supposed to last only three episodes, but the writers saw the chemistry between David and Cynthia so they decided to bring him back twice and keep him till the final season.

And thanks to ingenious costume designer Patricia Field, women love watching Sex and the City for the clothes as much as the story. Fact is, Carrie’s TV’s most influential fashionista. Like when Carrie wore plastic nipples on the show, they became such hot fashion items that the next day, women were snapping them up from the store shelves like crazy.

But if you never saw the same dress twice, it’s because no outfit was ever repeated. Why? "We don’t repeat a story, so why repeat a dress?" argues the costume designer.

Fun, exciting, and intentionally provocative, the clothes tell a story.

Some 40 percent of the clothes on the show were borrowed; the rest were bought. Pat Field, who’s run a boutique in Greenwich Village since 1971, would scour the thrift shops for exquisite finds. For instance, she bought Carrie’s little blue cape for only $5 in a thrift shop in Miami. She’d also attend couture shows in Paris where she’d get those to-die-for designer clothes the girls wore on the show. Designers who dressed up the girls include Tracy Feith, Agnes B, Prada, Marni, Celine, Isaac Mizrahi, Dolce & Gabbana, Christian Dior, Anna Molinari, Givenchy, Xoxo, Moschino, Chanel, Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen, Roberto Cavalli, Azzedine Alaia, Alberta Ferretti, Richard Tyler, Helmut Lang, Castelbajac, Blumarine, Gucci, Missoni, Emanuel Ungaro, Badgley Mishka, Armani, Jean Paul Gaultier, Dries Van Noten, DKNY, Chloe. Costs of the clothes the girls wore ranged from a measly $5 to a pricey $20,000.

Of course, there were the shoes, bags, and accessories to match those clothes. Carrie was a self-confessed shoe freak whose love affair with Manalo Blahnik and Jimmy Choo (and shoe forth and shoe on) knew no bounds. It was de rigueur for the girls to wear high heels.

After the show, the girls could choose to buy the clothes that were bought. Those borrowed were promptly returned. Kim Cattrall said that a quarter to a third of her own wardrobe came from the show. Kristin Davis often bought Cynthia Nixon’s clothes (like the big chunky Miranda sweaters) because she dresses more like Miranda in real life.

A lot of the clothes got auctioned off at a benefit or on the HBO website. Like Mr. Big’s white shirt, which fetched a lot a money; so did Carrie’s sequinned American-flag bag.

Let’s not forget the sets and the city. Production designer Jeremy Conway with set decorator Karin Wiesel had the sets constructed so that they’d feel as true-to-life as possible. The girls’ apartments say a lot about their occupants. Samantha’s done in bold ochre and red; Charlotte’s in immaculate white; Miranda’s in plum and green while Carrie’s in soft sea-foam teal.

Certainly, it’s been one hell of an orgy!