‘Do you want to hear the story of the real Mr Big?” Candace Bushnell, the 65-year-old Sex and the City creator, is prancing around her pink boudoir in Manolo Blahnik heels. She has her hand curled around a theatre full of mostly women like a cosmopolitan glass that’s about to need topping up. Of course we do. We want to hear all the fabulous dirt she’s ready to dish.
Everybody here is a fan of SATC – the culture-shifting 00s comedy-drama about Carrie Bradshaw and her single thirtysomething friends in New York. It was a show that changed women’s lives, the sex and beyond. It still does. Just last week, down the road at the Savoy, a woman barely in her 20s sat next to me to watch Plaza Suite, starring Sarah Jessica Parker, who played Carrie. “Are you here because of SATC too?” she asked. She wasn’t even born when it started; I had to sneakily watch it on the telly. The “of its time” flaws have rightly been debated in the 25 years since it first aired, but its relevance is for the ages.
And here is the true Carrie. Bushnell struts through her story in a racy, raw and riotous one-woman show about becoming a sex columnist, turning that column into an Emmy-winning TV series and writing New York Times bestseller books. A game of “real or not real” confirms just how close to reality the show was. Did she really have a fling with a politician? Yes. Did he look like John Slattery and did he ask her to pee on him? Alas, no. Another spit-out-your-wine moment recalls her breakout article, How to Act in a Disco, about her time at Studio 54, which ended with the advice: “If someone dies, ignore them.”
There’s some time for darker moments, but Bushnell doesn’t want to dwell too much on the father who told her no man would ever love her. Or the fact that, yeah, it was wrong that men in their 40s and older dated her when she was barely 19. Instead, it’s a celebration of the single, child-free life that women who grew up in Bushnell’s time were told wasn’t to be enjoyed. And while she’s not here to give a lecture on feminism, she gives a glossy-lipped smirk throughout – when she first moved to New York, women weren’t allowed to have a credit card. One of her many life lessons is to be solely in charge of the roof over your head. And if you can afford to build a shoe closet to house those designer heels, go for it.
It’s everything a fan would expect – strong independent woman platitudes, odes to female friendship, realness about menopause, dating after divorce and “the plus years” – but that’s exactly why we’re here. And what of the real Mr Big? She might not have received a box with an engagement ring from him, but she did open a box of her first book proofs after they split.
“I don’t want to be with Mr Big,” she says, knowing full well the whooping applause she’s about to get. “I want to be Big.”
