The saucy single girls of Sex and the City kiss and tell about their most outrageous season yet.

SEX APPEAL
BY DANA KENNEDY

Will Big make a comeback? Is one of the good-time girls headed for the altar? Or are all men freaks? Since this is Sex and the City, the answers to these burning questions are yes, yes, yes!

There they sit, all four of them, looking gorgeous and talking trash in that New York City coffee shop that often serves as ground zero for life’s key questions: Are all men freaks? Can you be friends with an ex? Is it better to fake it than to be alone? This is what every lustful, thirtysomething power chick in America wants to know.
     Right now they’re dishing about the new man in Carrie’s life. He doesn’t want to sleep with her, and they’re trying to figure out what’s wrong with him.
     “Maybe he hangs to the right,” suggests Samantha.
     “Then I’ll curve to the left!” says Carrie.
     They, of course, are the “girls” from HBO’s Sex and the City (Sundays, 9 P.M./ET), the show about four man-hungry Manhattanites looking for love in all the hip places. Now in its third season, the series—which is loosely based on Candace Bushnell’s New York Observer column and her 1996 book of the same name—has gone from cult hit to bona fide smash, regularly beating the network competition on Sunday nights in homes that subscribe to HBO. And this year, with a plotline thicker than Carrie’s gold chains, it’s sure to stay on top. There’s a wedding looming for one of the women, a pregnancy for another and two new suitors for poor Carrie, who watched her ex, the cavalier Mr. Big, walk off with a fiancée last season.
     At the moment, stars Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kristin Davis and Kim Cattrall are actually far from chic Manhattan. Instead they’re stuck on a dreary soundstage at a place where their alter egos wouldn’t be caught dead: an outer borough. Queens, if you must know. And the mostly male crew can barely keep from cracking up at their ribald conversation—even after more than two years of listening to dialogue ranging from tantric sex and foot fetishists to uncircumcised men and power lesbians. (And those are just some of the printable subjects.)
     But while the crew is laughing, you can bet that Parker—who plays sex columnist Carrie Bradshaw—is cringing. Off-camera, the 35-year-old peppers her speech with words like “gosh” and “fellas,” sometimes seeming more like a grown-up Annie—the part she played on Broadway as a kid—than a sophisticated New Yorker. In fact, Parker was so embarrassed by a line in an upcoming episode titled “Are We Sluts?” that she had to do several takes to get it right. And just yesterday she struggled with a line that involved a slang word for female genitalia.
     “I can’t even say it in front of you!” she shrieks, hiding her face behind her hands. “It’s just the word p----. I hate that word! We recorded it in a brand-new studio with people I had never met, and I was, like, ‘I can’t believe this [audio engineer] is looking at me saying this stuff!’”
     Cattrall, on the other hand, sees her role as brazenly promiscuous public-relations exec Samantha not only as an actress’s dream but also as a political statement. “I started my career playing the cute girl in movies that were all about guys coming of age,” says Cattrall, 43. “You never saw TV shows or movies about women exploring their sexuality. And I look at some of our story lines, where we talk about orgasms or vibrators—just taking all these taboos and breaking them open—and it’s revolutionary.”
     The only actress to virtually escape the off-color dialogue is Davis, 35, who plays naive art-gallery owner Charlotte. But even Davis has her moments. “The other day I had to [film a scene] where Charlotte dates a man who swears at her in bed,” says Davis, who joined the show after a stint on Melrose Place as the conniving Brooke Armstrong. “He doesn’t realize he’s doing it, it just happens. When I read the script I was like, arggghhh! It’s such an odd thing to do sex scenes with people and then have them shout at you. It was a little harder to do than I expected.”
     Hard for Davis, but a moment of triumph for series creator and executive producer Darren Star, 38, who pitched the series to HBO in 1997. (Star handed control of the show over to executive producer–writer–director Michael Patrick King this season in order to work on his new fall series, WB’s Grosse Pointe and Fox’s The Street.) “I thought, if [HBO executives] look at me and say, ‘You gotta be kidding, we’re never doing this,’ then I’m in trouble,” says Star, who co-created Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place with Aaron Spelling. “But HBO got the joke.”

     The cable network also got a sharply written, seamlessly acted and, at times, poignant adult comedy. Not only did Sex and the City get nominated for two Emmys and win two 1999 Golden Globe awards (for best comedy series and, for Parker, best actress), it has also become a pop-culture touchstone — a That Girl or Mary Tyler Moore for the new millennium.
     Notably, while Parker is shown twirling girlishly on the street at the end of the show’s opening sequence, much like Marlo and Mary before her, there is no Donald or Mr. Grant calling the shots. “All the men are objectified in our show,” says Parker. “They play the [traditional] woman’s part. We just have our way with them, and when we’re done—next! Literally, some days you’ll be in a bed with two different men and you’re like, ‘Thanks so much, you were great—next!’”
     Nixon, 34, who plays cynical lawyer Miranda, puts it as succinctly as her character would: “We treat the guys as if they’re for sport.”
     Certainly there will be plenty of men falling in and out of bed with the women this season. And a few will actually stick around. Kyle MacLachlan (Twin Peaks) will play someone’s future groom, and David Eigenberg returns as Miranda’s bartender boyfriend, Steve. John Slattery (Homefront) began the season as Parker’s love interest, but by episode 5, John Corbett, best known for his part as the philosophy-spewing disc jockey Chris on Northern Exposure, will take over as her man. Corbett is such a hottie, reports Parker, that “both Kristin and Cynthia said to me, ‘If you don’t want him, we’ll take him.’ I’m like, ‘Ladies, he’s not a piece of meat!’”
     Speaking of prime cuts, Mr. Big (played by Chris Noth) will be back later this season. Whose arms will Carrie ultimately end up in? Everyone claims not to know. (Noth has a one-year deal with HBO to develop a series of his own.) “I’m so worried about when Chris comes back, and it’ll be [him and John] on the set,” says Parker, sounding not unlike her character. “I gotta be polite to both. I want to be sure both feel good to be here.”
     If sex is the first priority on Sex and the City, style is a close second. Parker, who is also one of the series’s producers, has a great deal of influence on the look of the show. “Sarah is so brilliant as a stylist,” says Star, “she could have had a second career as a fashion editor.”
     And what trends will we be seeing this season? “We’re doing a lot more jewelry, a lot of gold, sort of sophisticated uptown ghetto,” says Parker, who works closely with Sex and the City’s costume designer, Patricia Field.

     As far as hair goes, don’t get her started. “The hair rules are, If you can’t do it yourself, you can’t do it,” says Parker. “We can’t have freakin’ upsweeps or ’dos, because I don’t know any woman in America who can run out of the house in the morning and do an upsweep—except for maybe Ivana Trump, and I don’t want anyone on the show to look like Ivana Trump. And no scrunchies, no butterfly clips, no hair ornaments of any kind, period.”
     Parker, Field and the set designers are so obsessive about the look of the show that even the clothes in Carrie’s closet, seen only fleetingly on-screen, have to be “the real thing,” says Parker: “She’s not a woman on the Upper West Side with a stroller.”
     Parker knows whereof she speaks. She and her husband, actor Matthew Broderick, live in downtown New York City, housed in a Greenwich Village brownstone, and she has yet to purchase a stroller—though she definitely wants kids. “I’m always worried my time is ticking away, but I’m just not going to think about it and whatever happens happens,” she says. “I have been advised by my women friends that life is more important.”
     A cast and crew favorite whom everyone calls “S.J.,” Parker can also be tough. When Field tells her that Corbett is balking at wearing the pants they have chosen for him, Parker focuses on the problem with a laserlike intensity. The show is so important to her she even encourages the cast to resist cashing in on their Sex fame by doing commercials or other work she feels would cheapen their image.
     And while that image is of swinging city gals, only one of the women, Davis, is actually single. “Sometimes that’s pressure, let me tell you,” says Davis. Though she wouldn’t mind having a steady boyfriend, Davis does admit to having “a steadfast rule—I’m never going on a blind date again. So many men felt they were going out with Charlotte.”
     Like Parker, Cattrall is now happily married, to audio engineer and musician Mark Levinson. She says she endured some “lonely years” in L.A. after two failed marriages but met her future husband less than 48 hours after moving to Manhattan in 1998 to begin work on the show. She was in a Greenwich Village jazz club alone when he came over and struck up a conversation. They married nine months later, and their meeting became the basis for one of the episodes of Sex’s second season. (The show’s writers maintain that every story line is based on a real-life incident.)

     Although Nixon’s character has had trouble committing to her bartender boyfriend on the show, the actress has been with her real-life love, photographer Daniel Mozes, for 13 years. They have a 3-year-old daughter, Samantha. Nixon says she and Mozes decided within weeks of meeting each other that they would never marry because it could mean “taking each other for granted.”
     Davis and Nixon, who live near each other on New York City’s Upper West Side, socialize occasionally. “And we have a whole new career, going to awards shows,” says Davis. Parker notes that the cast rarely hangs out as a group after work, “not because of any ill feeling, but because we want to get home to the people we don’t see for 14 hours a day.” Cattrall, who divides her time between a Manhattan apartment and a country house in the Hamptons, says she prefers to keep her relationship with her castmates similar to what it is on the show, so when the camera rolls, “it’s easy.”
     So easy, the cast and crew often riff between takes on the provocative issues that come up in each episode. Nixon, however, insists the women don’t reveal the details of their off-screen sex lives.
     “We talk about men—we don’t talk about sex,” she says. “Most of us have guys we’ve been with for a long time, and I don’t think when you’ve been intimate with someone for a long time you go off and relate tales of the sex you had last night.”
     Or at least that’s what she wants us to believe.

Dana Kennedy is an entertainment reporter for MSNBC.