She’s 75, smokes and doesn’t own a mobile phone: Why Gen Z is mad for Fran Lebowitz

When Fran Lebowitz answers my call on the landline in her New York City apartment, there’s no answering machine vetting the process. That’s the usual route for first-time callers, but this is not my first rodeo with the best-selling author and star of the Netflix documentary series Pretend It’s a City (directed by her friend Martin Scorsese) – it’s my fourth.

The 75-year-old American author, orator and cultural commentator is a little raspy. She’s still a smoker and doesn’t care for her doctor’s request that she quit. She’s had a coffee and lit a cigarette and is ready to talk.

There’s a proud stubbornness to her tone, but that hasn’t come with her age. She says she’s been like that ever since she was a kid. “I am angry,” she says, “but the truth is, I’ve been angry my whole life.”

Lebowitz is speaking to Sunday Life ahead of her return to Australia in May for a national tour, and she’s ready to share her thoughts on politics in the Trump 2.0 era, culture, New York’s changing pace and why she’ll never leave “the best city in the world”.

On the morning of our call, the news from the US is setting Lebowitz off. She doesn’t own a computer or a mobile phone and prefers discussions at dinner parties to online comment sections, but she’s been frantically reading the newspaper headlines.

“I don’t think I deal with the news very well at all these days,” she says, admitting that not even a cigarette can calm her nerves. “To see ICE agents grab people off the streets,” she says, “it’s actually the opposite of America, and he [Donald Trump] is the opposite of what America is supposed to be, and has largely been, to Americans.”

She adds, “What’s happening in Iran is very scary. What’s happening in America is very scary. I’m very conventional – I am a liberal democrat, not radical lefty – but this is pushing me over the edge.

“Extremism breeds extremism. Most of my life, I’ve been saying to my friends, ‘No, you’re wrong. This isn’t like Hitler, this isn’t like the Nazis.’ But this is exactly what the Nazis did – grabbing people off the street, masked law enforcement, this incredible violence towards people who have done nothing. They grab a little boy wearing a hat with cute ears. They grab a woman from a car who says she’s disabled and throw her to the ground. This is the worst of America right now.”

It would be apt to describe the outspoken Lebowitz as an original influencer, making her mark long before social media. Traipse through photos from New York City in the ’70s and ’80s and you’ll see her wearing the same fashion armour she’s still wearing – a pair of Levi’s, a Savile Row blazer, cowboy boots (these days custom-made in Texas) and a white or striped shirt (she uses the same London tailor, Anderson & Sheppard, as King Charles, and hopes to run into him there one day). But she also admits she hates shopping and might give up on fashion purchases this year, given she has enough clothes in her wardrobe to last the rest of her life.

What won’t change is her distinctive style, which has helped attract a new wave of adoring Millennial and Gen Z fans. There’s even a “Fran-Con” event held in NYC each year in her honour.

“I had a very turbulent adolescence because I did badly in school. As I got older, I had a better relationship with [my parents].”

Fran Lebowitz, author

Lebowitz is still most famous for her two bestselling books, Metropolitan Life (1978) and Social Studies (1981). But after their release, she developed writer’s block and hasn’t written a book since, though she’s become a fixture on the speaking circuit.

“When my first book came out, some of my father’s friends said I got my humour from my father. My response was, ‘My dad is funny?’ He was never funny around us at home,” she says, a comment that still feels loaded with teen angst.

Her parents, Ruth and Harold Lebowitz, were Eastern European Jews who settled in New Jersey. Her father was a furniture upholsterer and her mother a homemaker raising Fran and her sister Ellen, who’s four years younger and considerably taller, according to Fran.

Lebowitz was kicked out of high school at 17, much to her parents’ disappointment. She was an outspoken non-conformist who, you guessed it, smoked in the toilets. “My parents never forgave me when I was expelled. I couldn’t get into a college, and didn’t want to go to one. It wasn’t the law that you had to do it.

“My parents were first-generation immigrants,” she adds, “and the total focus was on college and setting yourself up for the rest of your life. I had a very turbulent adolescence because I did badly in school. As I got older, I had a better relationship with them because I wasn’t expected to pass algebra any more.”

Leaving New Jersey, Lebowitz arrived in New York as a 19-year-old and tapped into a creative circle she found in the East Village. It was the height of Studio 54’s golden era and Lebowitz was hanging out with everyone from Andy Warhol (whom she never got along with) to Grace Jones and fashion designer Betsey Johnson. She initially made a living as a taxi driver before she began writing a column for Interview magazine, which in turn led to her book deals.

Her relationship with her mother Ruth, a jitterbug dance champion in her time, became less fraught as time marched on, and she lived long enough to see Pretend It’s a City when it came out in 2021.

“I gave my mother a tape that Marty [Scorsese] gave me so she could watch it before everybody else,” recalls Lebowitz. “I asked her if she saw it, to which she replied, ‘I thought you were going to be in a Broadway show.’ She looked at me all disappointed.

“That’s like saying to me, ‘I thought you were going to be in the Olympics.’ I’m not a singer, I’m not a dancer, I’m not a skier, I’m not going to be in the Olympics. Don’t wait for me to be in the Olympics, Mom!”

Looking back, Lebowitz says her 50s were by far the best years of her life, as they are for most women, she argues. “You still look all right,” she says. “You aren’t perfect, but everything is still working.

“It was good for me and my friends. Nothing was really wrong with me, and nothing is wrong with me now, considering I still smoke. But at a certain point in my life, I couldn’t believe how much I looked like my mother, and now I look in the mirror and look more like my grandmother. It’s startling. But it’s ridiculous to think about your looks all the time as you get older. I am a little shorter than I used to be – now my jeans and shirts are too long – but it’s not that I was tall to begin with.

“At my age, paying only enough attention so you don’t fall apart is the key. To pay extreme attention to oneself is never a good thing, because you’ll never be happy. It’s normal if you’re a teenager – but being a teen isn’t delightful, remember that!”

When it comes to taking care of herself, Lebowitz says nothing beats a bottle of hair dye. “I remember a friend of my mother saying the best thing women can do is never change their hairstyle,” she says. “I colour my hair and that makes me feel good. My hair is white, and has been since I was in high school, but dying it is something I can do and feel better instantly.”

With family members on both sides living into their late 90s, Lebowitz has some trepidation about sticking around that long. “Let me assure you, I don’t expect to. Nor, truthfully, could I afford to live that long,” she laughs. “Being 75 is not a thing anyone aspires to, except in the sense that when you have your birthday people say it’s better than the alternative.”