Crystal McCrary Anthony

1969—

Writer, producer, lawyer

Crystal McCrary Anthony is no stranger to the high life. During the 1990s, as an up-and-coming entertainment lawyer and wife of National Basketball Association (NBA) star Greg Anthony, she became part of a circle of affluent, influential, upper-crust African Americans living in New York City. Now, after splitting from her celebrity husband, she stands on her own in that world, having left behind a career in law to become a best-selling author twice over and a high-powered television and film producer. In her novels Homecourt Advantage (1998) and Gotham Diaries (2004), she takes aim at the very social milieu she is a part of, satirizing the glamorous and gaudy lives of basketball wives, back-stabbing socialites, and business tycoons, all the while leaving readers wondering how much is fact and how much is fiction. Leveraging the success of her books, she has gone on to launch yet another career as a television personality and producer, becoming a key player in the entertainment world.

Crystal McCrary was born in October of 1969 in Detroit, Michigan. After attending the University of Michigan and earning a bachelor's degree in English in 1991, her next move seemed clear: She would go on to law school. "There are 10 lawyers in my family," she told Crain's New York Business in 2007. "I always knew law was an option." After a stint at American University in Washington, DC, she moved to New York City to attend the New York University School of Law, completing her degree in 1995.

Wrote Draft of Novel While Lawyer

McCrary Anthony began her career as an associate in the New York firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, where she practiced entertainment law, representing authors, playwrights, and directors—Andrew Lloyd Webber was a notable client—in their contract negotiations. But she harbored much more creative ambitions, she told Crain's, keeping a draft of an unfinished novel in her desk, working on it in her spare time but telling no one. In 1997 she made the leap and quit her job as an attorney to focus on writing full time.

For her first effort, she teamed up with best friend and fellow NBA wife Rita Ewing, who was then married to New York Knicks center Patrick Ewing, to write Home-court Advantage, a racy novel that lays bare the lives of the fictional "New York Flyers" basketball team and their wives and girlfriends. Writing for the Washington Post in 1998, reviewer Kevin Merida described the book as "336 pages of lust and distrust, gossip and innuendo, the trappings of money and the seductions of power. Love and heartache turn in strong performances. So do friendship and betrayal. And, oh yeah, basketball makes a cameo. That's because basketball is just a prop for the narrative, which centers on the dysfunctional off-court lives of multimillionaire athletes and their significant others."

Though some called Homecourt Advantage the Primary Colors of the basketball world, suggesting it was a thinly veiled exposé of the athletes' lives—the Ewings were then in the midst of a messy and public divorce—McCrary Anthony and Ewing maintained that the work was strictly fiction, with no parallels to real life. The novel became a best seller, perhaps more for its salaciousness than for its literary merit, and film rights to the book were quickly snapped up.

McCrary Anthony's second work, Gotham Diaries, grew out of a collaboration with Tonya Lewis Lee, a lawyer and the wife of filmmaker Spike Lee. With both lawyers seeking a more creative outlet, the two women initially envisioned a television series that would profile upper-class black New Yorkers. When their pitch for the show, however, scheduled for September 12, 2001, was interrupted by the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, McCrary Anthony and Lee decided instead to turn their idea into a book.

Once again, McCrary Anthony and her coauthor provide skewering social commentary. The novel centers on Lauren Thomas—the trophy wife of a billionaire who yearns to be so much more—and her backstabbing friends, Tandy, an aging socialite, and Manny, a real estate broker who has moved to New York from Alabama to make it big. Gotham Diaries is, McCrary Anthony told the New York Post in 2004, "a cautionary tale of coming to New York City and getting chewed up and spit out—and the danger of believing the hype that New York will feed one."

The novel put McCrary Anthony on the best-seller list a second time, but again, readers could not help but wonder how much of the book was really fiction. Reviewer Heidi Singer in the New York Post noted, "All that's missing in ‘Gotham Diaries’ are the real-life boldface names…. A reader can only speculate on whether the flamboyant rapper couple greeted with such distaste by the other characters was based on anyone in real life."

Published in 2004, Gotham Diaries contributed to an emerging genre of fiction that some dubbed "black chick-lit"—a sort of African-American answer to such best sellers as Bergdorf Blondes and Sex and the City. In a 2004 article, Lola Ogunnaike of the New York Times described the genre: "Like its white counterpart, black chick-lit often centers on single women with dream jobs, precariously balancing the personal and professional…. Neither racially charged nor didactic, these books seem meant to be read on sandy shores from Sag Harbor to St.-Tropez. The protagonists, educated and decidedly middle to upper class, effortlessly mingle with both black and white characters. Love, not privilege, is the only real speed bump." Sales figures suggested a booming market for such literature.

At a Glance …

Born Crystal McCrary in Detroit, MI, in October of 1969; married Greg Anthony (a sports commentator and former basketball player; divorced); children: Cole, Ella. Education: University of Michigan, BA, English, 1991; New York University School of Law, JD, 1995; studied international law at Tulane University and European Community law in Paris.

Career: Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, entertainment attorney, 1995-97; author of books; legal analyst for Fox News Channel, CNBC, and Court TV; commentator for CNN's American Morning; guest host for The View; partnered with BET J network on various projects; television and film executive producer.

Memberships: JumpStart, advisory board; New 42nd Street, board of directors; Hyperion Books, Voice Imprint, advisory board.

Awards: Blackboard Fiction Book of the Year, 2005, for Gotham Diaries; chosen as one of Crain's New York Business's 40 under 40, 2007.

Addresses: Office—c/o BET, 1235 W St. NE, Washington, DC 20018-1101. Publisher—c/o Hyperion Books, 77 W. 66th St., 11th Fl., New York, NY 10023-6201. Web—http://www.crystalmccraryanthony.com.

Parlayed Success into New Career

McCrary Anthony used the success of her two books to channel her career into new ventures in television. She appeared as a legal analyst on the Fox News Channel, CNBC, and Court TV (now truTV) and delivered pop-culture commentary on CNN's American Morning. As a guest host on the popular ABC talk show The View, she interviewed Senator Hillary Clinton. McCrary Anthony went on to develop a partnership with the BET J (BET Jazz) network, cohosting the program My Two Cents and serving as executive producer of My Model Is Better Than Your Model (2006), a model reality show, and Real-Life Divas, a series profiling prominent African-American women (2006—).

McCrary Anthony made her first foray into Hollywood with the 2007 theatrical release of Dirty Laundry, a feature film on which she was an executive producer. When funds for the production fell short, she provided a bridge loan to cover the budget of just under $1 million so that shooting could begin. The film, which deals with homosexuality in African-American families, appealed to McCrary Anthony because of the story's "focus on strong, beautiful, well-rounded black women," she told Black Enterprise magazine in 2006. That year the picture took the Best Feature Film Award at the American Black Film Festival.

McCrary Anthony became a member of the advisory board of JumpStart, a national organization that works to increase early childhood literacy in low-income neighborhoods, in 2006. In the fall of that year she joined the Voice Professional Women's Advisory Council for Hyperion Books' Voice imprint, which publishes books focused on women thirty-five and older. In the fall of 2007 McCrary Anthony joined the board of directors of the New 42nd Street, a nonprofit that oversees the redevelopment of historic theaters. In 2008 she resided in New York with her son Cole and daughter Ella.

Selected works

Books

(With Rita Ewing) Homecourt Advantage, Avon, 1998.

(With Tonya Lewis Lee) Gotham Diaries, Hyperion, 2004.

Television

(Executive producer) My Model Looks Better Than Your Model, 2006.

(Executive producer) Real-Life Divas, 2006—.

(Cohost) My Two Cents, 2006.

Film

(Executive producer) Dirty Laundry, 2007.

Sources

Periodicals

Black Enterprise, December 2006.

New York Post, July 6, 2004, p. 33.

New York Times, May 31, 2004.

Washington Post, October 27, 1998.

Online

Crystal McCrary Anthony official Web site, http://www.crystalmccraryanthony.com (accessed July 30, 2008).

"40 Under 40: Crystal McCrary Anthony," Crain's New York Business, 2007, http://mycrains.crainsnewyork.com/40under40/profiles/2007/10003 (accessed July 30, 2008).

—Deborah A. Ring