At 83, Nan Talese might just be the new image of having it all. She’s dressed in a black sweater, cozy black pants, and black ballet slippers, girlishly ensconced on her tufted leather couch with a manuscript she’s considering for publication by her imprint at Doubleday. She’s looking rather adoringly at her husband, Gay Talese—best-selling author, iconic charmer—who’s emerged from the top floor of their town house, in a three-piece bespoke suit as per usual, and is already commanding the room. The subject is the original residents of the house, on East 61st Street, a cast of characters that brings to mind a Billy Wilder movie. They included model Hope Bryce (with her blind dog), who was having an affair with director Otto Preminger. “I’d see Mr. Preminger sneaking in and out,” says Gay, at 85 still razor-sharp. There was an airline stewardess who “went on a flight, leaving her goddamn toaster on . . . and it burned the goddamn fourth floor enough that they kicked her out.” And don’t forget Lucile Lawrence, the ex-wife of world-renowned harpist Carlos Salzedo, “the most famous teacher of the harp in the history of America . . . . Beautiful girls playing the harp would wind up in bed with him sooner or later. He was a notorious guy. The Donald Trump of harps.”
Nan has a small correction to make, but when she tries to interject, Gay’s not having it. “Either you’re telling the story or I’m telling the story,” he barks. “But if you keep doing this, I’m going to talk to her alone. You’ve had your chance . . . . You can correct it later. Write a letter of correction.” Nan responds with an eye roll.
At first glance, it may look like another marriage between an egomaniacal genius and his docile enabler. Indeed, Gay’s the famous writer—one of the pioneers of New Journalism with his rich, novelistic articles for Esquire about Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, and others, and the author of 15 books of nonfiction. He’s one of New York’s great scene-makers—in all senses of the term. A social peacock, he’s been out “every goddamn night” of the week for the last five decades (this week includes writer Erica Jong, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, former New York City police commissioner Bill Bratton, and a Mexican thief, as Gay puts it, who visits from time to time). He’s the one who, in the service of his work, freely enjoyed the pleasures of other women while researching Thy Neighbor’s Wife, an immersive look into sexual liberation in America.
And yet, all this time, Nan was quietly doing something extraordinary—becoming one of the first female editors of literary fiction, and rising through the ranks at four major publishing houses before getting her own, eponymous imprint at Doubleday. After nearly 60 years in the business, she’s now one of a small handful of living publishing pioneers, with a list of authors that includes Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, the late Pat Conroy, and Thomas Keneally, Barry Unsworth, Louis Begley, Peter Ackroyd, Antonia Fraser, and Thomas Cahill. But, like many remarkable women of that generation, Nan has no interest in being celebrated, and can’t even see her accomplishments. A Vanity Fair profile? Well, it seems like a lot of fussing. In an initial e-mail, she pooh-poohed the idea that she’d done anything noteworthy. “Doesn’t breaking the glass ceiling mean becoming president or CEO? I simply have my own imprint and I have been lucky to have authors follow me when I went to another publishing company. Best wishes, Nan.” But her daughters, Pamela and Catherine, twisted her arm. They were tired of her attributing her success to Gay. “She’s always giving him credit for things,” says Pamela, an intense and darkly wry 52-year-old painter, who has had years of therapy trying to figure out her family. “But maybe she knows best. It’s her career; it’s her life; he’s her husband.”
Indeed, Nan is a bit of a mystery—wherein may lie her power. At first glance, she’s an enchanting paragon of grace, with a bearing designed to make others comfortable. Consider Ian McEwan’s rapturous recollection of first setting eyes on her in the mid-70s, a description that still feels apt. “Oh, she was beautiful, with this wonderful, fluting, bird-like voice that has never changed. It often starts improbably high and ends improbably low, a sort of charming kind of ripple and peal of a voice. And very merry eyes. [She] shimmered in front of me.”
But beneath the white gloves, as some admirers have said, are brass knuckles. “What would they call Margaret Thatcher, the ‘Iron Lady’?” says writer Nick Pileggi, Gay’s cousin and a longtime friend of both. “She’s bubbly and sweet and charming, but you don’t get to be able to put her name on books, major books, without being able to really get what she wanted. She’s very competitive. She’s not a backstabber or anything like that . . . . I’ve never heard her in my whole life ever boast or name-drop. But she knows what she wants, and she will fight to get it.” Gay goes even further, warning one to not be fooled by her agreeableness. “She does what she fucking pleases,” he insists over dinner at Le Veau d’Or, one of his six regular restaurants. “She just does it quietly, nicely. It’s really amazing! I’ve watched this with awe. How do you get away with this stuff?”
The most intense mystery has surrounded the Talese marriage—and why it’s lasted so long. She’s as decorous as he is licentious, as easygoing as he is bossy, as content to stay home with a glass of wine and Masterpiece on PBS as he is voraciously social. And then there are his romantic adventures, which have been something of an open secret for some time. “She’s had a lot of hoops to jump through,” says Margaret Atwood. “One of the big mysteries of Nan and some of those years was: How does she manage to remain so cheerful?” Her daughters have a perspective from nearly 50 years of observation—that she was forever twisting herself in pretzels to accommodate him, and subjugating her own desires to his. As Pamela puts it, “There was one pedestal in the household, and my father was on it.” But in Nan’s narrative, she’s the one who got her way. Sure, there’s been pain and frustration, but she got to marry the most glamorous, interesting man she’d ever met—she’s never been bored for a day. And Gay still believes she has called the shots.
Good Girls Do
Whatever the truth is, this wasn’t the life her parents imagined for her, growing up in the well-to-do suburb of Rye, New York, in the 1930s and 40s. Her father, Thomas Ahearn, 18 years older than her mother, was a banker, who served in F.D.R.’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and liked to drink. Her mother, Suzanne—“Mummy,” as Nan still refers to her—was from an old family in Houston, Texas. The Ahearns went to church every Sunday but never spoke about religion. The children ate separately from the parents, who dressed for dinner and ate alone. “We would paddle down in our bathrobes and slippers and say good night to them,” says Nan, the third of four siblings. The older two turned out to be rebels—her brother got kicked out of school for throwing rotten tomatoes at the prefect; her sister eloped at age 18. Nan, already a big reader, was the good girl, getting high marks at Convent of the Sacred Heart, and an eager debutante. At Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart, where she majored in philosophy and literature, she did what other good Rye girls did: joined the Ivy League dating circuit, a world of football weekends and illicit gin-and-tonics, in hopes of meeting a nice future banker or lawyer.
In 1957, fate intervened when a college friend said there was someone she should meet, a young man who had served as a tank officer at Fort Knox. Gay’s background couldn’t have been more different from those of the boys in her world. The son of an Italian immigrant in Ocean City, New Jersey—his father was a tailor, and his mother ran a dress shop—Gay got rotten grades in school and ended up at the University of Alabama. Though his pedigree wasn’t up to snuff, he had something else: an edgy, obsessive curiosity about the world, which he was honing as a reporter for The New York Times, where he was writing about sports.
Pileggi, then living with Gay on MacDougal Street, in Greenwich Village, says of the couple’s attraction, “She was just about everything he was looking for: clearly really smart, really beautiful, and she had it all. While it’s hard to talk about Gay’s earthiness, he’s a very practical, straight guy. He has a sense of the street. He had, more importantly, from her point of view, an artistic temperament.” Their first date was lunch at Toots Shor, a saloon frequented by sports people. “She was not impressed,” recalls Gay. But they’d soon find their connection in books. The next date was at P. J. Clarke’s restaurant. Nan recalls, “We talked and talked and talked”—about Graham Greene, John O’Hara, Irwin Shaw, John Cheever—“and finally they said, ‘You really have to leave.’ ”
Gay brought out her inner wild child. Still living with her parents, she called him one night to inform him that she was coming to spend the night with him—like it or not. “She came down to MacDougal Street. Her parents thought she was with somebody else,” recalls Gay. “I’m like, ‘God, she’s going to get caught. What’s wrong with her?’ ”
Gay was it—the man she wanted to marry, and yet there were looming obstacles. The first was her parents, who considered him an unpredictable rascal. Nan recalls, “Mummy said, ‘Nan, you don’t know what it’s like to live with a writer.’ [I thought,] How would she know?” The more serious obstacle was Gay himself, who was burning with ambition to be more than a sportswriter and had no interest in being tied down, period. “I had a lot to do. I had ideas I wanted to follow up on. And I didn’t want anyone in my way,” says Gay. “I didn’t want to see her mother play tennis somewhere . . . . They’d go on yachts. I didn’t have time for that. But Nan was not going to let that stop her. She really wanted me.”
In the summer of 1959, Nan willed her marriage into existence. Gay invited her to visit him while he was in Rome, writing a story for The New York Times Magazineabout the Via Veneto, where Fellini was shooting La Dolce Vita. Nan, the sly go-getter, saw her chance. She bought a ticket on Alitalia, told her parents that Gay had asked her to marry him—a bald-faced lie—and collected Gay’s baptismal certificate from his parents. She arrived in Rome and informed Gay that his bachelor days were ending, and that they would be married at the Trinità dei Monti. Turned out, the chapel was no longer performing weddings, so they married in a civil ceremony, with writer Irwin Shaw, who happened to be in Rome, as the best man, and some of the cast of La Dolce Vita at the after-party, including Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni.
“You know, I only think of things a step at a time,” recalls Nan of the episode, all la-di-da, a breezy deflector. “I don’t look at things in the future. And I thought, We’ll see what happens! But it was a beautiful wedding—you saw the pictures.”
As for Gay, he says he was strong-armed. “It wasn’t my choice. She decided she’s going to marry this guy. She could have married the secretary of state,” he says. Still, he didn’t want to lose her, and to turn her down would be to bring disgrace to her. And so he agreed, but made her make a promise—that he would always be “free,” a loaded term that neither parsed. “I really have a fear of losing my freedom. But she guaranteed that I wouldn’t have to. And it turns out that’s the one pledge she made that lasted almost 60 years.” The newlyweds had her parents over for dinner once, and then Gay never saw them again, until Suzanne Ahearn developed Alzheimer’s decades later, forgetting what it was she had objected to about him. Nan rolls her eyes at his refusal to make nice with them. “If someone doesn’t approve [of him] 100 percent, he wants nothing to do with them.”
With his allergy to domesticity, Gay was eager that Nan should work. In fact, she had a job at the start of their relationship—as an assistant in the accessories department of Vogue—but it was of limited interest to her. Gay saw that she loved reading, and in 1959 he suggested that she try to get a job at Random House. She aced the test they gave her—to spot all the errors on a page of text—and landed a job as a proofreader. Little did she know she was stepping into one of America’s premier publishing houses, in its heyday. Located within the Villard mansion, on Madison Avenue and 51st Street, Random House was an unusually intimate place, with a staff directory the size of a postcard, which Nan keeps framed in her current office. The famously charismatic Bennett Cerf, who founded the firm with Donald Klopfer, set a tone of joviality. Every Friday the editorial staff gathered for a drinks party. As editor Jason Epstein wrote in Book Business, writers would show up unannounced—W. H. Auden in a torn overcoat and carpet slippers; John O’Hara in a three-piece suit, his Rolls-Royce parked outside; Ralph Ellison, smoking a cigar, talking Thelonious Monk; Andy Warhol, speaking in hushed, obsequious tones.
But, for all its intimacy, Random House, like the publishing world at large, was still a boys’ club. The editors, all male, became the giants of the business—Epstein, Albert Erskine, Robert Loomis, Joseph Fox. The women were secretaries, edited the cookbooks, mysteries, and children’s books, or were copy editors. Nan’s gaggle was a whip-smart group that included Berenice Hoffman, who went on to have her own literary agency, and Alice Stewart, who would marry Calvin Trillin. Maxine Groffsky, who was the “first reader” of the manuscripts that came in (and later an editor of The Paris Review), recalls, “I’d never met anyone like Nan. I thought she came straight from the convent.”
Rising in the ranks seemed inconceivable for a woman, which was just fine for Nan, who was thrilled just to be Gay’s wife and to spend her days reading. And so it was much to her surprise when Erskine told Nan that his plate was full, and asked if she might edit a new novel, Flood, by Robert Penn Warren, who’d been impressed by her copyediting on his previous book. “I remember thinking, How am I going to ask the author of [the book-length poem] Brother to Dragons if he really means that word?” But she steeled herself, at one point gingerly pointing out that a character who had suddenly appeared had not been clearly introduced. According to Nan, “Warren replied, ‘Oh, I talked about him in Chapter Two.’ I thought I had failed. But he said, ‘No, no, no. If you don’t remember him, then I need to strengthen his introduction at the beginning.’ It really taught me to ask questions.”
Not every male author was as immediately receptive to a young woman questioning his brilliance. A. E. Hotchner had finished the first draft of his biography of Ernest Hemingway—which he called Mr. Papa—when he came into Cerf’s office at Random House. Cerf informed him that he was putting a good editor on it, and called in Nan, who looked to Hotchner as if she’d stepped off the campus of Bryn Mawr. As she led him out of the room, he naturally assumed that she would be taking him upstairs to her boss’s office. Instead, he recalls, “we proceeded to go downstairs three flights. And she opened a door to a small room that obviously they had taken the mops and other utensils out of . . . . I suddenly realized that I’d been downgraded to the most junior of all editors.”
The affronts were only beginning. After a few pleasantries about the book, she laid out her concerns. First off, his title, Mr. Papa, was a bit inscrutable. How would people know the book was about Ernest Hemingway? How about Papa Hemingway, she suggested—isn’t that more to the point? Second, the thing was fairly unwieldy. Could it be cut by 50 pages? Most important, where was he in the work? He was calling this a memoir, after all. “I felt that was outrageous,” says Hotchner. “I was on the verge of parading upstairs, the three flights, and telling Bennett that maybe Simon & Schuster would be a better fit.”
Alas, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the young lady was right about everything, and executed every note. Putting himself in the book elevated it to a universal story of transference: the son to a formidable father figure ultimately watches his physical and mental decline and becomes his caretaker. Under Nan’s guidance, Hotchner went further and revealed the truth about Hemingway’s death—that it was a suicide and not a rifle accident, as the world had believed. When Hemingway’s widow, Mary, read it, she was furious and sought an injunction against its publication. Mary made an overture—she would agree to let it be published if they took out the last three chapters, which detailed his decline and suicide. But Nan, according to Hotchner, said, “I’m not going to take out one word. This is the way it is.” The case ended up in court. “Nan just stood there the whole time with her battle garments on and fought them off.” The book would be excerpted in Life, a major coup, and became a huge best-seller.
Her success put the other editors on edge. Nan recalls, “Joe Fox said, ‘Well, I suppose you’ll be uppity now.’ I said, ‘Did you hear what you just said?’ ” With no political point to make, no precedent or road map for a woman, Nan simply assumed the duties of editor. She brought in groovy poet Rod McKuen, who’d been selling books out of his car in California; he ended up accounting for 24 percent of Random House’s revenue for a few years. She found A. Alvarez’s daring The Savage God, an unlikely best-seller about suicide and art. The concept of maternity leave didn’t exist then. So in 1963, when she got pregnant for the first time, she didn’t tell anyone until it became obvious—not because she feared for her job, but because it was none of anyone’s business. She’d been working on copyright certificates up until labor and continued to do so from her hospital bed. Following Pamela’s birth, Nan immediately returned to work.
Nan and Gay had their second daughter, Catherine, in 1967, and together the young couple made a life that was bustling with people, endlessly varied—and, according to their daughters, geared largely toward Gay, whose fame was on the rise. Nan raised her girls with the kind of rules she had been brought up on—no candy, no television (except for Masterpiece and other shows with English accents)—and with an intense dash of playfulness from the hours of six P.M. to eight P.M. “At bedtime, she’d kiss us good night and we’d say our farewells, and then we’d ask her to do this little jig she would do,” recalls Catherine, a photographer, who’s as wry as her older sister. “She would jump up and click her heels . . . . So it always felt that she was this marvelous playful spirit.” But the moment their father walked in, she recalls, the room was “on hold. Suddenly, they’re enlocked, and you’re in suspended animation until he leaves.” As Pamela puts it, “In my mind, there was an urgency to [my mother’s] joy,” because Gay exacted so much.
There was Gay’s writing. Each night after playing with the girls, Nan would read what he’d written that day and give him her thoughts. There was his preferred weekend milieu, a house in Ocean City, which Nan didn’t especially love, but which they bought because it reminded Gay of his childhood. There were his routine needs—the doughnut and coffee at 8 A.M., the two poached eggs at 11 A.M. that Nan or one of the girls walked up to his office, on the top floor, if they were home. And there were the many unforeseen needs that could pop up at any moment. Conversations happened on the stairwells, or in other catch-as-catch-can moments. Catherine recalls, “I’d call home, and he’d be like, ‘Hi, Catherine, just one minute—Nan, are we going to the Schlesingers’ [Arthur and Alexandra] tonight? I just want to know because it’s black-tie, and are you going to be ready on time, because I have a car coming?’ And she’d be like, ‘Yes, dear,’ and he’d go, ‘All right. Good-bye, Catherine.’ He hangs up.”
In between her duties as wife, mother, and editor, Nan was also the foreman of the town-house renovation and an amateur mechanic. When Gay’s vintage Triumphs would break down, as they constantly did, Nan was often the person he consulted first—once while she was in the middle of a work lunch at publishing lunch spot Michael’s.
And then there was the socializing, starting with the dinners at Elaine’s, the Upper East Side literary hangout frequented by writers and artists, such as Woody Allen, magazine editor Clay Felker, Joe Heller, and Hotchner, who’d become a close friend of Gay’s. Their town house became the fizzy center for Manhattan’s literary giants—Norman Mailer, William Styron, Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, David Halberstam, George Plimpton, Pileggi and Nora Ephron—and the city’s cognoscenti in general. The daughters recall falling asleep to sounds of chatter, clinking glasses, the smell of cigar and cigarette smoke, and of Nan’s perfume, when she came upstairs to check on them. Socializing wasn’t second nature to Nan, but this was part of the deal. “She would talk about breaking out in hives because of the social anxiety,” says Pamela. Later, when Pamela became an insecure teenager, mortified to go to a fancy party, “my mother would say, ‘Well, just pretend you’re invisible!’ I would say, ‘No, I want to be visible and adored.’ The indication there is that she’d much rather be invisible.”
And yet, there was something intoxicating about it all to Nan—even in its discomfort, or perhaps because of its discomfort. One can imagine the odd thrill young Nan had in 1957, when Gay, writing for The New York Times, told her about chasing alley cats for a column he was writing about the lives of New York cats. Nan was drawn to stories, after all, and here was one of the country’s pre-eminent storytellers—a master in the art of “hanging out,” as Gay puts it—bringing his subjects into their living room on a regular basis: the prizefighters he wrote about in his magazine articles; the New York Times writers and editors he was meeting for his book on them, The Kingdom and the Power; members of the Mafia, for his book about the Bonanno crime family, Honor Thy Father. One night, in a pinch, mafioso Bill Bonanno even babysat for the girls, his two bodyguards in tow. “They were never safer in their life,” says Gay. What stay-at-home mother, wife of a banker in Rye, was having this kind of fun?
The Husbands Life
But there were limits to how far Nan was willing to become enmeshed in Gay’s world. One night in 1972, while they were walking down Lexington Avenue, Gay spotted a sign that said, LIVE NUDE MODELS. He turned to Nan and said, “Let’s go see what’s going on.” Nan declined. She recalls, “I put out my hand and he gave me the keys. And I saw that it was a very significant moment. And I said, ‘Just buzz when you want to come home.’ ” Thus began the research for Thy Neighbor’s Wife, a project he’d been noodling on—about the changing morals around sex in America. Believing this to be the most important cultural shift in the country, Gay took immersion journalism to a new level. He became the manager of a Manhattan massage parlor, Middle Earth, just a block from Nan’s Random House office, and freely enjoyed himself with his female subjects. For six months, he participated in Sandstone, a swingers’ retreat in Malibu. He was unnervingly public about his adventures from the start. In 1973, eight years before the book would come out, he agreed to let Aaron Latham, a New York-magazine writer, shadow him in sex clubs and orgies. Nan was beside herself and told him, “Are you crazy? You’re looking like a fool here!” But Gay didn’t care. It was too much for Nan to bear. One night, she left a note on the living-room side table saying she was leaving. Gay was with Latham when he made the disconcerting discovery, and privately panicked as they went on with their scheduled interview. But Nan was back a few days later, with no explanation given. According to Nan’s best friend, Susan Madigan, Nan never spoke about what she was going through during those years. Little has changed. With the exception of the New York-magazine moment, Nan insists that it was fine. “He was very considerate of me,” she says. “And we used to meet in Chicago every six weeks. And that was very romantic.” But the daughters, who didn’t understand their parents’ relationship—and knew nothing of the pledge—felt the tension.
Gay’s absences during the eight-year period of researching and writing Thy Neighbor’s Wife might have enabled Nan to have fleeting adventures of her own. Instead, she spent the time making more lasting, significant relationships—with great writers, at the moment when books were becoming big business. By 1974, Nan had been hired away from Random House by Dick Snyder, of Simon & Schuster, at the suggestion of Alice Mayhew—another important woman editor in the business at the time, by virtue of her smash All the President’s Men. (Mayhew’s distinguished career would focus on history, biography, and politics.) Unlike Random House in the 60s, Simon & Schuster was cutthroat and competitive, which rubbed up against Nan’s civility. “Sometimes they’d say, ‘Oh, that piece of trash.’ It was pretty ruthless. People were rather harsh to each other.”
Determined to squeeze the most out of his employees, Snyder tried to get Nan to work during August—but she wouldn’t have it. She recalls her response, which she considers so “smart-alecky” she almost doesn’t want to repeat it. “I said, ‘You know, Dick? I don’t want your job. I just want to do what I’m doing.’ That was the end of any problems with my going away for the summer!”
And Nan wouldn’t let the hunt for the best-seller stop her from looking for great literature. There was some luck involved in nabbing her first future star writer, Margaret Atwood, as Atwood’s previous novel had been published at the imprint. But when the editor of that novel left, Nan’s notes on her next book, Lady Oracle, gave Atwood confidence in hitching herself to Nan. Ian McEwan was a more arduous courtship. Jack Leggett, one of Nan’s writers, who was running the Iowa writers’ workshop, had told her about an extraordinary young English writer who was teaching there and had just finished a draft of his first novel. Nan read McEwan’s first collection of stories, which had been largely ignored, and saw he was something special. She called him, asking if she might read the novel. McEwan resisted.
“For reasons I can’t quite connect with now emotionally, I said, ‘No,’ ” recalls McEwan today. “What was I doing? What was I saying? I felt possessive about it. I didn’t want it out of my sight. I was being very precious.” Nan persisted, saying, “Suppose I came out to Iowa and stayed with Jack and suppose your novel happened to be sitting on the bedside table at his house. Would you have any objection to that?” McEwan agreed. He went on a road trip to New Orleans with a girlfriend, while Nan went to Iowa to read his novel, then untitled, about four orphaned children who encase their mother’s dead body in cement to avoid going to foster care. Upon McEwan’s return, Leggett invited him to dinner, and he met Nan. “Nan was just the most excited person an author could wish his editor to be,” he says. “To imagine I said no to this person! A near folly.” Nan soon found the title: The Cement Garden.
It wasn’t all gushing and glowing. She was determined to make her writers’ work the best it could be, even when it called for criticism that could be crushing. Thomas Keneally, the author of Schindler’s List, which Nan had to fight Snyder to publish, says of his years with her, “I say this with considerable affection. Nan begins by praising the novel. And there follows then a letter that is full of its radical, irremediable, irredeemable flaws. I say ‘irredeemable’ advisedly because Nan then turns into the nuns that taught her. And then she becomes Sister Mary Nan, who is the only one who can save this document . . . . Having been praised to the skies, you are now terrified to the depths.” Even McEwan, who’d never received anything but praise from people, would get an uncomfortable wake-up call from Nan. In the early 80s, at a moment of personal turmoil, he sent her the first 50 pages of The Child in Time, about a couple losing their child. She wrote and phoned to say that she didn’t like them, that the tone of irony and comedy didn’t fit the subject matter. “Everything she said, you know it’s true even as it’s being said,” says McEwan. “That was very depressing. But out of that, I thought, she’s right . . . . And it set me off on a completely different direction . . . . The Child in Time was broader, more political, more historic, more evocative of a certain time, a certain place. A lot of that grew out of that letter from Nan.”
With other writers, like the late Pat Conroy, her stamina for streamlining byzantine plotlines into a clear narrative was epic. His 1,500-page manuscript for The Prince of Tides was something of a hot mess when he first handed it over to Nan. She graphed the story onto six pages of taped-together legal paper, mapping out the book’s dozens of characters, sorting time lines with forward arrows, backward arrows, and double backward arrows. He told her, “No one has ever read my books this carefully.” Conroy’s line on Nan became “I hand her the manuscript, and she finds the book in it.”
In 1981, when Thy Neighbor’s Wife came out, something discomfiting was starting to happen to Nan and Gay: their power in the world began to shift. Gay’s book was critically panned, not for the substance, which reviewers barely paid attention to, but for the salaciousness of its author. “What was alleged was I was doing frivolous research. Getting my jollies, hanging around massage parlors, getting laid, getting jerked off, all that,” says Gay, whose reputation dimmed. An active member of the writers group PEN, he’d been on the verge of becoming its next president. But in light of Thy Neighbor’s Wife, the women of PEN revolted, and he resigned. Nan’s career, meanwhile, was skyrocketing. In 1981 she was named the executive editor of Houghton Mifflin, the old-line publishing company based in Boston; she’d commute there while still running the New York office. Gay believes her rise was at least partially tied to his downfall. “She started getting a lot of publicity about Thy Neighbor’s Wife . . . . What about this guy’s wife? This guy’s wife is Nan Talese. She’s this terrific, revered editor, and she’s married to this disgusting guy.”
But, for Nan, who still saw herself first as Gay’s champion, the power shift hardly felt like comeuppance or victory. His bad reviews, and his fallen reputation, were as devastating to Nan as they were to Gay. She defended him publicly, as she does today. “I think most of the press told more about the reporters than it did about Gay,” she says. And so, for the next few years, life continued as it had before, in keeping with the pledge—only, now the pressure had intensified for Gay, as he was looking to recapture literary greatness. There continued his long periods of absence, notably in Rome, where he went to research Unto the Sons, about his ancestors in Italy. There continued romantic entanglements on the road. “I don’t want to degrade people by representing the whole all-star cast of women. I could, but I won’t,” says Gay. Pamela suspects his absences were, in part, tests of Nan’s will, with Nan coming out victorious. “ ‘You think I’m going to divorce you? No I’m not. We’re in for life, honey. You’re not going to shake me that easily’ . . . She has more tenacity than he is aware,” says Pamela. Whatever the motivation, while Gay indulged in his psychic, frustrating quest for freedom and literary redemption, Nan continued finding new books that captured the Zeitgeist—Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters, Judith Rossner’s August, Susanna Moore’s My Old Sweetheart. Upstanding and hardworking Nan was helping others win at his game, and it began to rankle him, say his daughters.
“Her infidelity was taking other authors’ books into bed with her,” says Pamela. “And then to read them in bed. And he would get very agitated about certain of her authors and become very competitive.” Indeed, it’s hard not to detect a tinge of irritation when Gay speaks about her devotion to her writers. “In our marital bed for more than a half a century there’s never a night in bed where there are not manuscript pages all over the sheets,” he says. “If you roll your foot around, there are manuscript pages under your feet. And all over the floor.” The daytime provides little respite. “I hate it because the goddamn phone rings all day long. I’m trying to work, the phone rings—it’s not for me. It’s always for her. Tom Cahill is on there, and she talks to him for an hour on the phone about something he’s writing.”
A Marriage of Likes
But by 1986 an internal shift began to take place within Nan—away from Gay. Deep into writing Unto the Sons, Gay planned to work in Sicily for four months and wanted Nan there with him. Nan told Houghton Mifflin director Austin Olney that she needed to go for Gay, and that she’d manage to get her work done with the help of DHL. At their rented villa in Taormina, Nan dutifully spent her days working two time zones on the phone, editing her manuscripts, bringing Gay his 11 o’clock poached eggs, to the tower where he worked, and seeming happy enough. But one day, toward the end of their stay, she snapped. Nan handed him the eggs and told him, “This is the last time I’m cooking eggs.” She exploded at him, telling him that this had been the worst four months of her entire life. “I thought we had a nice time!” recalls Gay, who was stunned. “‘This is the worst four months?’ . . . Jesus!”
It was a measure of her misery that, when she returned home, her right arm was frozen—every night she’d slept on the very edge of the bed, the resentment building in those muscles. Looking back at the Sicily stint, Nan says, “I didn’t feel real because suddenly there was no place to which I belonged.” She was no longer content to be just Gay’s wife. She had become a woman in the world, and she liked it.
Still, her professional empowerment would continue to happen a few steps ahead of her internal independence. In 1988 she was wooed away to Doubleday, and in 1990 she was given her own imprint. Her writers were intent on following, even those, like Conroy, who were under contract with Houghton Mifflin. He told Houghton that if they didn’t let him go he’d never write again. Atwood says, “My story about Nan is that she’s whipping the troika through the snow, followed by the wolves, with me clinging onto the back as she troikas from one publisher to another.”
At her Nan A. Talese imprint, she found new literary hopes, such as Mark Richard (Fishboy) and Jennifer Egan, who’d just written her debut novel, The Invisible Circus, and she attracted established high-profile authors, such as historian Lady Antonia Fraser (Marie Antoinette) and the wildly prolific Peter Ackroyd (London, Shakespeare, Hitchcock). Her tenure has not been without its bumps. Her major best-seller James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces ended in scandal when it was revealed that he had fictionalized portions of it. When Oprah Winfrey eviscerated him on air for his dishonesty, Nan stood up to her with grace. Remembering Nan’s support when he was alone in the wilderness, and how she took his hand in the limo as they left Oprah’s studio, still brings Frey close to tears. And he still laughs affectionately at a buck-up phone call he got from her. “ ‘James, I’ve just spoken to Philip Roth, and he went through many of the same things you are going through right now with the controversies surrounding his book. And that’s why you need to remember the career he’s had since and the career you’ll have after. And Philip said just to stay strong and keep writing.’ . . . I’ve just spoken to Philip Roth! Who else could do that, and who would do that?” says Frey.
Even now, after 58 years in the business, Nan’s energy hasn’t flagged. She speaks passionately about current projects—the recent World War I novel No Man’s Land, by Simon Tolkien, J.R.R. Tolkien’s grandson; the upcoming publication of Owen Sheers’ anti-war verse play, Pink Mist, which was a critical hit at the Bristol Old Vic; and The Cloister, James Carroll’s modern take on the love story of Abelard and Heloise.
Nan’s drive toward personal independence would come out in pent-up bursts. It took its most dramatic form about 10 years ago, when Nan bought a house in Roxbury, Connecticut, behind Gay’s back. She’d had it with Gay’s beloved Ocean City, a town where, she’d complained, “a person wouldn’t know a book if it hit them over the head,” says Pamela. After 50 years, Nan wanted to do it her way—she wanted green lawns, refined neighbors, a place that reminded her of her childhood. After a few summers of renting, she found the perfect house, saw that she could cobble enough money together to pay for it, and went ahead. At breakfast one Sunday morning, she casually brought it up. “You know that house in Connecticut I liked? I bought it.” Gay was furious. “I want a fucking divorce!” Gay announced. “God knows I wouldn’t do something like this without telling you.”
‘They’re always talking about getting divorced,” says Pamela. “And it may happen. Who knows? But one of the things that I said: ‘You’re just too lazy to get a divorce.’ ” Whatever is keeping them together, Gay is intent on figuring it all out. For the past decade or so, he’s been at work on a book about their marriage, using anecdotes, Nan’s letters, and various mementos he’s kept over the years in obsessively constructed files. “The only reason I’ve stayed married for so long, there’s never been one hour in almost 58 years I didn’t respect her,” says Gay. “It’s not sex, love. Fuck it. ‘Respect’ is the only word that matters . . . . No matter who I was with—beautiful, intelligent, successful women, I never felt I wanted to leave Nan for those people. I never felt anybody could match Nan on a full-time basis, meaning nighttime, daytime, bed life, breakfast. That’s the trick. The breakfast is a big deal.” He’s terrified of her dying first. “I don’t know how I would get along without her being close.”
Pamela, too, is still working out her parents’ issues and their effect on her. She sees Gay’s marriage book as an exercise in self-exoneration, and the anger from her childhood still feels raw. “They can say now in their 80s that they were clear. And I suspect that he was clear. She made a deal with herself that she would do whatever it took, that she wanted to be married to him and she would agree to his terms.” And though Pamela disapproves of those terms, “that’s the deal she made with herself.”
The only one who seems to have gotten over it is perhaps Nan. After all, she got the man she always wanted, the daughters, the dream house, and a career for the ages, so what’s a book by Gay Talese really going to matter at this point? She smiles sweetly and gives her line on the book: “He doesn’t know anything about marriage, so I’m not concerned.”
There are many Hollywood-star things you will never see Natalie Portman do. You will never see her pole-dancing with Kate Moss at Scores, or read obscenities she scrawled about Scarlett Johansson on a bathroom wall. You will never see her in a homemade porn video. And you will never see her slip into the ladies’ room with pals and re-emerge distinctly re-invigorated.
“I saw cocaine for the first time a month ago in Spain,” says Portman, her large, innocent, Audrey Hepburn eyes popping wide open as she curls her tiny body into an armchair. “I mean, for the first time in my life somebody was like, ‘You want a line?’ I was like, ‘Oh, my God!’” she says, recalling the unbelievable moment.
Her only sniffing addiction is to handbags, to make sure they don’t contain a trace of leather, as her strict vegetarianism extends to the materials she lets touch her skin. She wears sneakers every day (usually Converse), and for special events, like the Oscars or Golden Globes, a brand called Beyond Skin, vegan footwear that looks a lot like Easy Spirit. She doesn’t wear diamonds to such events, but rather “conflict-free” earrings, such as $3 knockoffs from a place called Claire’s that she swears look just the same. She drives a Prius. She had wanted it in black, but when they didn’t have it in stock, she settled for lavender. She has no idea what kind of jeans she wears. “Citizen?” she asks hesitantly, about one pair that she got after a photo shoot. Most of her clothes are the same ones she has had since she was 14, when she stopped growing.
Her entire wardrobe fits into a normal-size closet, in a normalsize house, in a deeply normal part of suburban Long Island, 20 minutes from her parents’. She has a Mac computer, but only uses it to check e-mail and the news on the Web sites of The New York Times and Ha’aretz, the Israeli paper. She has a television, but doesn’t actually watch any shows—except for the occasional David Chappelle or Ali G on DVD. Her taste in comedy is the only thing about her that veers toward stoner: the one movie she can watch over and over is The Big Lebowski. Her real weakness is for books, which are arranged neatly on massive shelves. (On her most recent film shoot, she took along 30 of them.) Her Harvard diploma, for “Natalie Hershlag” (her real last name), is displayed proudly in her bedroom, near a stuffed animal that belonged to her mother.
How can a young woman so levelheaded and brainy be such a hot Hollywood commodity, you wonder? Certainly, the tabloids have never found her interesting, except on two minor occasions, when she was sunbathing topless on vacation and when she was picking a wedgie. She puzzles, quite adorably, about her Goody Two-Shoes image, saying, “Granted, I’m not superscandalous, but I’ve had drunken nights out, you know?” Yet she can’t help but acknowledge the reality. “I don’t court it, I don’t go out every night. I don’t date famous people most of the time.” (She has, however, been linked with actor Gael García Bernal, something she will not comment on.)
Portman, however, is anything but a bore. Anyone who has spent real time with her invariably comes away mesmerized; first by her exquisite beauty, which she seems oblivious to, and then by the thing that sets her apart from almost every actor in Hollywood—a total, intelligent absorption in everything but herself. Her curiosity about the world knows no bounds. She will talk breathlessly about her old law professor Alan Dershowitz’s ideas on justified torture, or about how the New Zealand Moriori tribe’s philosophy of nonviolence doomed them to extinction, or how the two-party system is hampering American politics. She never sounds pompous, because it’s all punctuated with “like”s, goofy laughs, and the word “super,” which she frequently uses as a prefix to adjectives. “She’s got a little bit of the spaz going on,” says Peter Sarsgaard, who worked with her in 2004’s Garden State. Still, highly educated people often walk away from her questioning their own intelligence. “Sometimes when I’m talking to Natalie about a book or a film, it feels like I’m in grad school. And she’s the professor,” says Aleen Keshishian, who, like Portman, went to Harvard and has been managing Portman’s career since its start. As Dershowitz, one of her several prominent admirers, puts it, “She’s not one of those Hollywood stars who plays on her stardom to have you listen to her on other issues. She’s worth listening to because of her own inherent intelligence, experience, and background.”
Besides all that, she exudes a warmth and an authenticity that carry over onto the screen and have made her one of the most moving actresses working today. Mike Nichols, who directed her in 2004’s Closer and who has become her mentor, sees her on a very short list of all-time icons. “It confuses people to think that someone so completely beautiful could really be a first-rate actor too. It’s hard to grasp, but it’s happened. It’s happened a few times before, with Garbo and Louise Brooks.” Just the other night, at the 50th anniversary of New York’s Public Theater, he was reminded of Portman’s odd, transcendent power when the petite actress was onstage surrounded by many other actors. “I said to [the person] I was with, ‘Look. Everybody, if they’re near Natalie, they look like they’re out of proportion.’”
Given her thirst for probing complex questions, it’s no surprise that she jumped at the chance to work on the controversial new humor, about how to stop doing that. We are all in this club. We’ve all suffered; if you’ve gotten to be in your 40s, you’ve won and lost, been up and down, and all the while you’ve given and given and given and given to everyone in your life, because that’s a woman’s job. I know the reality of what I deserve, and yet often I find myself not making the choice to treat myself right—the choice to pick the right guy, or realize that it was not my fault. I want to start treating myself better, and I want you to start treating yourself better, too.”
And since the heaviest part of Hatcher’s lifelong burden is the story of her sexual abuse, she’s finally unloading it. “I only wanted to talk about it if I thought it was going to help people,” she says. “But I’m 41 years old, and it’s time for me to stop hiding. It’s time for me to accept all the complicated things about me—and if I do that, maybe I’ll find somebody who wants that whole package, instead of continuing to hide and finding somebody who doesn’t. I want to be able to say, ‘Yes, this did happen to me, and it did have an effect—but you can put somebody in prison 35 years later; you can have a voice; you can be part of stopping it.’”
Perhaps in retrospect, this year’s Valentine’s Day will have marked a turning point in her life. Mystery Man never made an appearance; now he’s burnt toast. “If you want to be open and generous and loving and somebody creams you,” Hatcher concludes, “you just move on to the next guy.”
In her book, she never does explain why she and her ex-husband didn’t have sex on their honeymoon, but that pattern endured throughout their nine-year marriage. “I know exactly when Emerson was conceived, because we had sex once that year, on Valentine’s Day,” Hatcher says. “From the beginning, our marriage was probably more defined by friendship.”
Tenney declines to comment on his sex life with Hatcher, but through a spokesperson he says, “She’s the mother of my daughter, so obviously I wish her the best.” For her part, Hatcher says her days of avoiding intimacy are over. “Now I want sex: trusting, deep, fabulous, open—did I say trusting?—wild, crazy sex, with the same person, over and over. Without a marriage license!”
And with any luck, maybe that person will finally appear. After all, stranger things have happened to the poster girl for the over-40 set. “Since the success of Desperate Housewives, people keep asking me, ‘Aren’t you angry about all those people who didn’t hire you before? Don’t you want to say to them, “Screw you!”?’ But I don’t feel angry at all,” Hatcher says. “I feel like, Aren’t I lucky that I’m actually getting to have this time! Wow—I got this blessing! And deciding that this is the moment to tell my story is another blessing. I don’t want to pretend it never happened anymore. Now everyone is going to know. I’m really a survivor, but I’ve learned so much, given so much, and received so much out of all of it that I don’t think I’m damaged goods. I think I’m a deeply sensitive, knowing, beautiful woman.”
She stops, glancing around apprehensively, as if someone might contradict her. No one does. “There—I said it!” she says, looking surprised.
On the street in front of Susan Mayer’s cozy little house, Teri Hatcher is sprawled on the pavement, shooting yet another take of the wheelchair scene. Hovering worriedly at the outskirts of camera range, Wally Crowder, the stunt coordinator, shakes his head. “She’s just such a trouper,” says Crowder, who still feels guilty about the time that Hatcher, called upon to fall into a large fake wedding cake, cracked several ribs on a protruding tier of frosting-covered cardboard. “She went on like nothing happened. She k eeps her mouth shut and doesn’t say, ‘Wally, I’m hurting!’”
But even as Hatcher conceals how much she’s hurting, she’s started to hope for a different way of living. “I guess the biggest effect of everything that happened to me is this area of fault and love and men, which hasn’t been so great,” she tells me later, as earnest as Susan herself. “But I’m working on that.”
On the set, however, she goes off to take another fall. As the cast and crew focus on what the cameras are recording, few take note of the rustling and scrabbling in the tall trees beside the house. But every once in a while, a dark, masked face peers out from behind a curtain of leaves. Four large raccoons are racing up and down the trunks and darting through the branches.
Suddenly there’s a blood-curdling howl— one that’s not in the script. A rat has fallen out of a tree and scurried up the inside of a hairdresser’s pant leg. As he jumps up and down, screaming, another crew member shrugs. “That’s nothing,” the man says. “Somebody saw a mountain lion around the craft-services area a while ago.”
To a visitor, that seems like an awful lot of wild animals for a working night on the set of Desperate Housewives, which is filmed at Universal Studios in Los Angeles. But to reach Wisteria Lane from the congested studio lot below, you have to drive up a long road that winds around and around through the pitch-black night. The road is deserted; there are no lights to guide the way, as Mary Alice, the spectral narrator of Desperate Housewives, might point out in one of her chilling voice-overs from beyond the grave.
And you never know what dangers could be lurking in the dark, waiting to leap out when you least expect them.
film V for Vendetta, written by Andy and Larry Wachowski, the brothers who made the Matrix films, and produced by Joel Silver. Based on the 1989 graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, the film tak es place in a post–World War III, totalitarian Britain. Its hero is V, a masked vigilante who blows up London landmarks, takes over the airwaves, and urges citizens to overthrow their tyrannical government. Although the original was written in response to Thatcher’s England—with V an updated version of Guy Fawkes, who attempted to blow up Parliament in 1605—the film plays as a commentary on the Bush administration and its policestate tactics. It is one of the most genuinely subversive films to come out of Hollywood since the 70s.
“I started reading it out loud,” says Portman, who plays a mild-mannered girl who is imprisoned by V before falling in love with him and, finally, carrying his torch of destruction. “That’s always a sign to me that it’s something I want to do.” Throughout filming, Portman, Larry, Andy, and director James McTeigue plumbed notions of violence through a book-and-film circle, passing back and forth such works as David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, White Nights, an autobiography by Menachem Begin, the 1965 film The Battle of Algiers, and a documentary about the Weather Underground Organization, the 1970s radical group.
“People are asking, ‘Does this movie justify violence?’” says Portman. “I think it tak es you to look at terrorism from a new perspective. It puts it in new shoes so that you can see reasons where the methods of terrorism might be justifiable. . . . I think when you make any kind of art you’re trying to open a conversation—you’re not trying to tell someone what to think.” The seriousness with which she contemplated those issues is reflected in her performance, a subtle yet powerful transformation from good girl to revolutionary. As McTeigue explains, “Natalie transcends the actorly thing. . . . She’s not just drawing on past actor experience. She’s drawing on autobiographical experience and fiction experience.”
If you ask Portman, naturally, the autobiography is tedious. “I get really bored reading about myself,” she says a little guiltily, and a little embarrassed. “Really nice, good parents. I grew up really well. Happy.” Indeed, the Hershlags—he is an Israeli doctor; she is an artist and homemaker from Ohio—were Long Island’s anti-Lohans, their household the epitome of safe, supportive, and wholesome. Natalie’s idea of a crazy good time was watching Dirty Dancing, the ultimate Long Island Jewish girl movie, which she has seen countless times. “That was my movie growing up.” It was Natalie who pushed the acting thing, and her parents resisted. When a Revlon scout approached the nine-year-old in a pizza parlor and asked if she wanted to get into modeling, the hammy little girl said, No, but I would like an agent. When, at age 11, she landed her first film, Luc Besson’s The Professional, a love story of sorts between a hit man and the waif-like orphan he takes in, her father didn’t hesitate to address his issues. “My dad had stipulations about how many drags on a cigarette I could take [in a scene], how many times I could curse. I wasn’t actually allowed to inhale. My dad would have people standing behind me, blowing the smoke out.”
Audiences found her enchanting, and, as much of her fan mail revealed, many dirty older men found her titillating. “I think I saw one [letter],” Portman recalls. “My parents didn’t allow me to look at anything after that.” She did, however, read the many editorials “about how my parents should be in trouble for allowing me to be in that movie. It was really upsetting. They kept saying ‘Lolita-esque.’ I had no idea what Lolita was.” Ted Demme’s 1996 film, Beautiful Girls, in which, as the self-confessed “old soul” on ice skates, she stole Timothy Hutton’s heart, didn’t do much to quell the unwanted attention. Finally, Portman’s parents and her manager, Keshishian, decided that, moving forward, it would be best for young Natalie to keep a low profile and simply not engage. There would be no talking to fans and no signing of autographs, except for children. (Her aloofness at public appearances has occasionally led paparazzi to call her “cunt.”) And when it came to choosing film roles, she steered clear of anything too erotic. She turned down the actual role of Lolita in Adrian Lyne’s 1997 film of the Nabokov novel, and she turned down The Ice Storm (1997) because there was too much sexual content. She even turned down Havana Nights, the sequel to Dirty Dancing, which, naturally, was harder to resist.
Her performance in The Professional captured the attention of major directors—Woody Allen, Michael Mann, and Tim Burton, who cast her in small roles in, respectively, Everyone Says I Love You, Heat, and Mars Attacks!—and she landed a starring role opposite Susan Sarandon in the charming but overlooked Anywhere but Here. While many teenage actors might have struck while the iron was hot and moved to Hollywood, Portman went to college. It was simply a given. The decision to go to Harvard, above Yale or Columbia, where she also applied, came from her grandfather—on his deathbed. “I was like, ‘Where should I go?,’ and he was like . . . ‘Harvard,’” she recalls, laughing. “No explanation, nothing, and he died two weeks later.”
Harvard freshmen tend to be an insecure, arrogant group, and nothing threatens them more than a person who’s really good at something. “I felt like I had to prove myself more,” says Portman, “and it made me nervous all the time because I felt that people always thought I was there because I was famous and not because I deserved to be there. And so it makes your stupid comment in class even stupider. Everyone’s got a moment when they say something really lame. But me, I was like, Oh my God, I’m just confirming everyone’s belief here—everyone thinks I’m the dumb actress.”
But Alan Dershowitz, who taught her in a seminar on neurobiology and the law, says she was one of the most remarkable students he’s had. He still cites a paper she wrote debunking a new method of liedetector tests, well before this particular practice had come under question. “She was really on the cutting edge,” says Dershowitz, who, for a time, had no idea that Natalie Hershlag was a Hollywood movie star. “I think there were a lot of people in the class who really were taken with this new methodology. She just ripped it apart.” Eventually she became his research assistant, and he encouraged her to go to graduate school in psychology.
Still, her self-consciousness about being an actress was apparent. Dershowitz recalls one evening when the students from the seminar came over for dinner. “She was embarrassed,” he recalls, “saying, ‘I hope you don’t see this movie or that movie.’” To some classmates, she came off as aloof or mistrustful. One student notes how, at the beginning of freshman year, she tried overly hard to pepper everyone around her with friendliness, but then withdrew from the masses, hanging out only with the jock types who were members of “final clubs.” Another, who shared the laundry room with her, recalls the awk ward time he held the door for her. “She look ed at me as if I were a stalk er,” he says. Many classmates were stunned, says one student, when they saw her on David Letterman, being overly coy about where she was at college and sounding like a ditz. “It was a huge disconnect,” this student says.
On either side of her college career, and over one summer during it, she completed three episodes of Star Wars, for which she was paid enough millions on the back end that she could have retired at age 18. (However, she now makes about half of what her comtemporaries like Kate Hudson and Lindsay Lohan make, due to her choices of smaller films.) At once she became a bank able, global household name, the face of a deity in the Star Wars pantheon, and, in the eyes of some important directors, a bit of a hack. She now admits that, for a time, Queen Amidala hampered her career. Episode I—The Phantom Menace was downright suffocating. One can see how Portman suffered—delivering lines like a robot and being crushed under the weight of a headdress the size of an armadillo, all the while trying to sell romantic chemistry with a nine-yearold. Although the next two episodes were improvements, they didn’t exactly expand her acting horizons. (Sample dialogue—Anakin: “You’re so beautiful.” Amidala: “It’s only because I’m so in love.” Anakin: “No, it’s because I’m so in love with you.”) One reviewer called their romance “a love affair between a hothead [Hayden Christensen] and an ice bucket [Portman].” “After Star Wars,” she admits, “people were really like, ‘Uh, I don’t know if she can really act.’”
But the dearth of interesting scripts coming her way opened her up to something special: Zach Braff’s 2004 directorial debut, Garden State, the sort of film she wouldn’t, at face value, take at this point in her career. “Now, I wouldn’t be lik e, ‘Let’s work with the first-time director who’s in a television show that I haven’t seen.’” But the movie, whose budget was just $2.5 million, allowed her to do something she’d never quite done before: play someone utterly kooky. For Braff ’s part, he had landed someone who ultimately could get the film financed, as well as his dream actress. His only reservation was that she might be too pretty. “I said to her, ‘I don’t want you to wear makeup,’” recalls Braff. “Some people will laugh, ‘Oh, it’s Natalie Portman, so who gives a shit,’ you know? But women, I think, in general are terrified about that. She wore the most minimal makeup I’ve ever seen any person on film ever wear.” Sarsgaard was particularly impressed by her instinctual, non-intellectual approach to acting. “You think of someone who went to Harvard and is very well read and all of that,” he says. “As far as I saw her, the camera rolls and she goes. She doesn’t whittle the scene down into its finer elements.” Around the same time, she stood out as the lonely, desperate Civil War widow in Anthony Minghella’s Cold Mountain.
Her biggest leap was undoubtedly in Closer, Nichols’s 2004 film about the ugly ways four beautiful people treat one another. Portman took on the erotically charged role of a stripper. “I will not allow myself to be on a porn site, which happens,” Portman says, explaining her modesty. “I don’t want to be used by someone else for turning me into something I’m not.” But for Closer she agreed to shoot a scene topless—only because she was working with Nichols, someone she’d come to trust since being directed by him in his Central Park production of Chekhov’s The Seagull. “I was doing everything because I knew that Mike was going to get my permission about everything and show me everything and talk to me. . . . And he was like, ‘That stuff’s going to be burned if we don’t use it.’” Indeed, it was destroyed.
Portman earned an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe for her performance, but she never got puffed up over it. “She said such a Natalie thing after seeing Closer,” recalls Nichols. “She said, ‘I’m not awesome yet.’” In fact, she e-mailed Dershowitz and said, “Please don’t watch Closer. It’s embarrassing to have my teacher see me half-nak ed.” (“It was embarrassing,” Dershowitz admits.) While most Oscar nominees gleefully rifled through their gift bags, which are worth more than $100,000 these days, Portman, Keshishian recalls, showed zero interest. “I honestly don’t know what she did with it. She probably gave it to her grandmother or a friend.” For Portman, the most important thing she got out of doing Closer was Nichols’s devoted friendship and mentorship. “[Mike] will take me out to dinner and be like, ‘This guy’s not treating you right.’ He’ll take me out to dinner and be like, ‘You need a new agent,’” she says, referring to her change from ICM to CAA. “You send him a book, he reads it the next day. You ask him for advice on a script, he reads it and gives you notes on it. I call him and I’m like, ‘I’m stuck with this character.’ He’ll spend three hours on the phone with me and give me his thoughts. And he doesn’t have anything to do with it, you know? It’s not his movie.”
As for Nichols, who has had that sort of affinity only with Meryl Streep and his old Second City colleague Elaine May, he says, “I love her very much. I feel something akin to the way I feel about my kids.” Since V for Vendetta, she has created yet another older, male admirer—this one more unlikely: Joel Silver. Known for his brashness and liberal use of obscenities, he becomes positively gentlemanly in her company, says one observer. “She is remarkable,” Silver gushes. “She is this oddity—this beautiful, intelligent, warmhearted, fantastic person, you know?”
Following the accolades brought about by Closer, Portman did another very Natalie thing: she left Hollywood in the dust and went to Hebrew University, in Jerusalem, to study for six months, kicking back with spoken Arabic, spoken Hebrew, the history of Israel, the history of Islam, and the anthropology of violence—a course taught in Hebrew. And for the past few years she has thrown herself into her charitable work with the Foundation for International Community Assistance (FINCA), an organization she discovered through a meeting with Queen Rania of Jordan that provides micro-loans to poor women in developing countries who are starting small businesses. Between trips for FINCA to Uganda, Guatemala, and Ecuador, she has had oneon-one sit-downs with members of Congress, including Hillary Clinton and John McCain, to discuss the organization and its issues. “McCain really cared,” she says. “Sincerely. I mean, I’m an actor so I can pick up on bullshit pretty quickly.”
The only things calling her back to Hollywood are interesting projects—really interesting projects. Up next is Milos Forman’s Goya’s Ghosts, a drama set against the Spanish Inquisition about Goya’s relationship with two subjects. What she’d really love to do, somewhat surprisingly, is a romantic comedy. In Portman’s opinion, comedy is the most socially valuable genre. “That’s the movie we want to watch a thousand times. That’s the movie that when you’re sick you watch. When you’re sad, it makes you forget.” She only wishes that every female lead in every romantic comedy didn’t have to work in fashion. “The girls are either a model’s agent or a photographer’s assistant or a stylist or a fashion designer,” she says, annoyed, “because they want to have cute clothes.”
Hollywood—the ass-kissing, backstabbing, social-life aspect of it anyway—simply holds no interest for her. In fact, it gives her the creeps. “I always make sure that anytime I go to a Hollywood event I have five school friends with me, because they’re like my monitors. They’re like, ‘That person’s nice, that person’s not. That person won’t even look me in the eye or shake my hand to say hi.’ You sort of see how people are by how they relate to people around you. With me, everyone’s like, ‘Hey, how are you?’ Like, super-over-exaggeratedly sweet.”
But even the most obnoxious antics of the Nicole Richie–Paris Hilton–Lindsay Lohan set won’t illicit any snottiness from this young woman. To start with, she barely knows who Paris and Nicole are. As for Lindsay, she thinks she’s a sweet girl and has a Long Island bond with her, starting with Lohan’s signed head shot from The Parent Trap hanging at the local bagel shop. “You can’t judge anyone else,” says Portman. “Every moment in my life I’ve always known my parents would go to the end of the earth for me. And when you have that k ind of rock , you can’t judge anyone who doesn’t, and most people don’t.”
Still, she’s had her moments of Hollywood craziness. With her dad, the doctor. Her wildest night in recent memory was in December in Madrid, while filming Goya’s Ghosts. “We went to this club that had really fun music and we were dancing with people from the crew until five in the morning. It’s the latest I stayed up the whole time I was there. I was with my dad. I was like, awesome.”
They work in places like Kosovo and Grozny, but they live—most of them, at least—in London’s Notting Hill, a neighborhood better known for its Victorian-camisole street fairs than its rocket-propelled-grenade launchers. The town house of CNN chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour, the world’s most famous war reporter, is smartly appointed, with African sculptures and socially conscious photography books stacked just so on the coffee table. Even the vase on the hallway floor works—but only after you hear the backstory: it’s the 155-mm. howitzer shell that landed two doors down from Amanpour at the Sarajevo Holiday Inn during the war in Bosnia. “If it had exploded, I and everyone else in that wing would have been killed,” says Amanpour, feet on coffee table, hands behind head.
The daughter of an Iranian father and British mother, Amanpour is part of a small brigade of women who have trooped, more or less as a group, from misery to misery, from Iraq to Bosnia to East Timor to Chechnya and, lately, to Afghanistan and Israel’s West Bank. They have shared rooms and deep friendships. They have elbowed each other out of the way to get the story, and gossiped behind one another’s backs. And they all think an article about female war correspondents is pretty lame. “Safari Susans!” exclaims Amanpour facetiously.
Amanpour and her colleagues are reporters, they insist, not women reporters, as rugged as any man, and they’ve got the war stories to prove it. Take Afghanistan alone. Amanpour discovered what she believes were “mini– training camps” and a trove of documents about how to make chemical and nuclear weapons. The BBC’s newest sensation, a confident and exuberant 37-year-old Brit, Jacky Rowland, completed her mission of being one of the first Western correspondents into that country after September 11. “We left CNN and their equipment on the tarmac [in Tajikistan], which was a sheer delight,” says Rowland. During the first few days of the U.S. bombing, *The Guardian’*s Maggie O’Kane—a disheveled human tornado from Ireland who now lives in Edinburgh—endured a weeklong trek from Pakistan into Afghanistan, traversing “Horse Killer Pass.” Janine di Giovanni, an Italian-American with Jessica Rabbit looks, who writes for the London Times (and is a contributing editor at this magazine), vigorously dodged al-Qaeda fire while in Tora Bora. The only member of the group not to have recently visited Afghanistan is the toughest of them all, Marie Colvin, an American who writes for The Sunday Times of London. Instead, she was relearning to negotiate stairs after losing sight in one eye to shrapnel. She now wears a black pirate’s patch. She also has a beaded, sparkly one that was given to her by her friend Helen Fielding, who wrote Bridget Jones’s Diary. “It’s my party patch,” says Colvin as she brings her shaky match to her Silk Cut cigarette. “I never thought in my life I’d be the woman with the patch. But there you are, life changes.”
Despite toughness to burn, they concede that a woman reporter’s experience at war is different from a man’s. In traditional societies, where there is the residual belief that women are ultimately harmless, they may slip past checkpoints unhassled, or even unnoticed. Among Muslim extremists, such as in Afghanistan, they are the only conduit to half of the population, while the other half often views these Western women as different creatures altogether—“a third sex,” as Rowland puts it—to be both avoided and respected. (Perhaps that’s why many Northern Alliance soldiers could only handle calling her “Mr. Jack.”) There is, some suggest, an intrinsic, even biological difference between the ways they and their male counterparts look at war. “Boys get fascinated by toys about age two, and that never changes,” Colvin says. “That’s not what I think is important about covering a war. I think the story is the people.”
It’s an uneasy claim to make, and Colvin cringes at the notion that “women care about dying babies” and men don’t. And, to be sure, the point is often debated among female war reporters and their male colleagues. Nevertheless, it’s no coincidence that most members of the group revere Martha Gellhorn, the grande dame of women war reporters (once married to Ernest Hemingway), whose accounts of the Spanish Civil War and beyond reflected an interest not so much in bombs as in what lay beneath them—and a devotion to her own conscience. Patrick Graham, a longtime journalist who has met several of the women, admits that only someone like Marie Colvin would have hopped out of a car just because she saw a man sitting on the side of the road. As it happened, he was sitting by the grave of his young child and wife, who had warned him to leave town because Serbs were encroaching. “It was an incredible story,” says Graham. “And I think a lot of male reporters would have been too busy trying to find the next commander.”
Other characteristics they possess—which are inarguably feminine ones—have made it easier to get the incredible stories, too. A lover of tall, stiletto boots and good restaurants in her downtime, di Giovanni has the kind of large green eyes that inspire soldiers to unload their tales of woe. Petite and scrappy, Maggie O’Kane, 39, has routinely equipped herself with urgent stories and fake, “embarrassingly erotic” love letters to make it past police checkpoints. She has also turned endless jabbering into a professional calling: her epic grill sessions with her subjects—about wives, girlfriends, shoes, virtually anything—have had fellow journalists storming away, frustrated that they can’t get a word in edgewise, and even falling asleep.
It has also helped that all of them are easy on the eyes—a fact that none of them rushes to admit, especially Janine di Giovanni, she being perhaps the sexiest of the group. “I’m always getting called ‘the babe,’” says di Giovanni of her public image as she luxuriously goes to work on the shrimp in Notting Hill’s hip pan-Asian spot E&O. “It’s so tiresome.” Jacky Rowland, a five-foot-eleven blonde, had been sleeping in a freezing tent when she ran into her in Afghanistan late last year; di Giovanni suggested that Rowland do what she herself had done: just ask the French guy from the aid agency for permission to sleep in his office. “I can just imagine Janine … ‘Oh, it’s so cold outside. Can I sleep in your office?’” says Rowland. “He just kind of melted in front of her. She was very kind in giving me that idea.”
Inevitably, there is also competition in this department. In Sarajevo, Maggie O’Kane wondered how di Giovanni managed to look so much better than everyone else. “There was a secret shower down in the garage [of the Holiday Inn], which Janine learned and didn’t tell us about,” says O’Kane. But there can be a downside to being pretty, too, as Rowland discovered when she met a leader of the terrorist group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. While other Middle Eastern leaders had refused to shake her hand, he was more than happy to try to make out with her.
Ultimately, however, Rowland admits, being an attractive female helped her career along. The BBC correspondent in Belgrade during the 2000 elections in Yugoslavia and the fall of Milošević, Rowland says that “the only reason I survived as long as I did was because I was a woman,” and that Yugoslav information minister Goran Matic developed “a bit of a thing” for her, repeatedly summoning her to his office, where he’d binge nonstop with his cronies.
A rumor eventually emerged that the two were having an affair, and after doing some digging, Rowland theorized that Matic must have started the rumor himself. Given the fact that their affair would remain in the realm of Matic’s fantasy life, she says it’s no surprise that a few months later, in October 2000, he took particular enjoyment announcing her expulsion from the country for reporting—prematurely, he claimed—that Miloˇsevi´c was finished. “There is now a media war in Yugoslavia,” said Matic in a press conference, “and I see in this very room, over there, the correspondent of the BBC, Jacky Rowland, who says the elections are over and that the opposition has won.” Rowland didn’t leave the country, but went into hiding for five days. She came out to witness—and report—Miloˇsevi´c government’s literally going up in flames. Two months later she had a chance to speak to Goran Matic again at the fancy villa serving as party headquarters.
“Why did you expel me?” she asked.
“Jacky, you were just collateral damage,” Matic said.
“Did you know that I’d stayed?”
“Yes, I knew you stayed.”
“Did you care?”
“I didn’t care.”
Male correspondents can be just as love-struck and helpful as post-totalitarian bureaucrats. Consider the case of Bruno Girodon, a French television journalist, who fell in love with Janine di Giovanni at first sight, in Sarajevo in 1993; made serious headway in Algeria in 1998; and sealed the deal by Kosovo in May 1999. Girodon (in Kukës, Albania, at the time) got word that nato was bombing the Kosovo Liberation Army camp where di Giovanni was staying and that a number of soldiers had been killed. He decided it was time to act. After a dizzying maze of phone calls involving French secret-service agents, he finally got through to a Peruvian photographer: “Tell her to get out of there, it’s very important, she’s in great danger!” said Girodon before they lost the connection, hoping the photographer would relay the message to di Giovanni. Girodon’s crew moved on, but Girodon stayed behind at Kukës’s Bar Amerika hotel for two days, still unsure of di Giovanni’s whereabouts and going out of his head. After all, just one month earlier di Giovanni had been detained by drunken Serb soldiers who performed a mock execution on her and her colleagues. “And one day as miracle, she just appeared,” says Girodon, who didn’t recognize her at first. “And she said, ‘Here I am. I am still alive.’ And she was very muddy.”
Recalling his words, di Giovanni gets almost misty. “He just said, ‘I’ll never feel that kind of joy.’” As luck would have it, Girodon was staying in the hotel’s “nuptial suite”—which consisted of nothing more than a dirty mattress and one dinky pink pillow.
When it came to impressing his crush, Patrick Bishop didn’t have quite the luck that Girodon did. It was late 1986, six years into the Iran-Iraq war, and Bishop, a battle-hardened Sunday Telegraph reporter who’d made his name in the Falklands War, was imparting to Marie Colvin pearls from his bottomless reservoir of military knowledge. She was the new girl, after all, an American and a Yale grad, just 30 years old, and she happened to have this amazing, out-ofcontrol mane of brown curly hair.
“You don’t have to worry about that. That’s all outgoing,” said Bishop above the explosions surrounding them on the Iraqi front line. “You’ll learn when you’ve been around like I have to distinguish between outgoing and incoming…. That’s outgoing,” he continued, “and that one is … incoming!” Bishop dived for cover, Colvin remained standing, and the Iraqi soldiers walked away laughing.
“For the rest of my trip,” recalls Bishop, “I was thinking, How can I redeem myself having made such an ass of myself? I had these fantasies that the Jeep would be hit and shelled, and I’d be able to drag her from the wreckage and save her life.”
Bishop never had the opportunity to save Colvin, but she eventually fell for him anyway, unaware at this point that falling in love in a war zone often means acquiring an ex-husband. The marriage lasted two years. By the end, Colvin had decided that he was “the last person I ever want to see, speak to, hear of again.” As Colvin looks back on her marriage to Bishop, a picture emerges of two restless kids too caught up in destruction and death to concern themselves with anyone else—even each other. “If you have the war, the conflict, it becomes so important that those details are something you just forget,” Colvin says. “You get on a plane and you’re off somewhere, and if the phone gets cut off, the phone gets cut off. Your life is lived in this very … almost schizophrenic way, and that is not what relationships are. [Relationships] are about squabbling over who forgot to buy the milk.” Surely Marguerite Higgins, the Pulitzer Prize–winning war correspondent from the New York Herald Tribune, would have understood: she once said she would not marry “until I find a man who’s as exciting as war.” Unfortunately, Colvin had to learn her lesson twice. A few years later, while covering an outbreak of violence in the West Bank, Colvin met Juan Carlos Gumucio, a reporter for El Pais. They, too, got married; they, too, split up not long thereafter.
Which brings us to the other problem with meeting husbands in the war-correspondent trade: once the marriage is over, you may very well run into them in the next war zone. In Kukës, Albania, around the same time di Giovanni and Girodon were having their emotional reunion, Marie Colvin returned to her room, only to find that someone else had moved in—judging from the stuff, a man. “I thought, Oh my God, what if that is one of my ex-husbands?” recalls Colvin, who knew they were both covering the story. She did what any grown woman would do: rummage through his bag. She was relieved to find a Rolling Stones tour T-shirt. “I knew neither of them would wear that.”
Relationships aren’t the only casualty. As a group, these reporters have lost close friends, such as Kurt Schork and Miguel Gil Moreno, two veteran risktakers who were slaughtered in Sierra Leone. At least one has lost pregnancies. Maggie O’Kane speculates that her four miscarriages may have been due to the fact that “I’ve kind of knocked myself around a lot.”
Also at risk is a healthy head space. Once the gunfire has stopped, normal life can seem eerily quiet, and disconcertingly shallow. Jacky Rowland, after running through the burning streets and tear gas in Belgrade on the day Miloˇsevi´c fell—the day she describes as “one of the best days of my life”—found smart London insufferably boring. “I was incapable of having an ordinary conversation with people about ordinary things,” says Rowland. “The experiences of being in a war and being bombed, and being on the run and being chased by authorities, it just makes it quite difficult to come down and talk mortgages and the latest fashions at Top Shop.” Belgrade was like an epic motion picture in which “time seems to move more slowly; the quality of light, everything, looks different.”
Like addicts, they need their fix. It’s worth noting, though, that it’s the former war journalists, such as ex–CNN correspondent Siobhan Darrow, author of Flirting with Danger, who will compare war to drugs. “I had the feeling of being a junkie,” says Darrow, who covered Chechnya, the Balkans, and Albania and now refers to herself as a “recovering war reporter.” “I was so used to being in a constant state of crisis that that was a comfortable place for me. If I stopped it for any amount of time, I was sort of left with myself and the void.”
Sometimes the void is filled with a nagging sense of guilt that they are war profiteers of a sort. “We are vultures, really,” says di Giovanni, whose reports about amputees and child soldiers in Sierra Leone made great copy and earned her high-profile awards. “We are peeling horrible stories from them. And then we are leaving their lives.” Colvin, too, sometimes feels “like a fake because … I get to go home.” But the images rarely dim, a point brought home in February when Colvin’s second husband, Gumucio, took his own life—“a brutal reminder,” she says, “of seeing too much.”
What makes it all worth it—their fundamental passion—isn’t the romance or the adrenaline rush. It’s the quest for justice. And once, in Bosnia, as a group, they achieved it. “It was,” Amanpour has said, “my Vietnam.” For di Giovanni, “Bosnia broke my heart more than any man could.”
A campaign of ethnic cleansing waged by the Serbs against an essentially helpless civilian population of Muslims, Bosnia, says di Giovanni, “was a lot like the Spanish Civil War. You had a group of very idealistic young reporters who believed that we had to do something.” For her, that meant writing The Quick and the Dead, a wrenching account of the siege of Sarajevo told entirely from the perspective of the victims—the children who’d lost parents, the terrified mothers trying to keep it together, the disillusioned soldiers—as Europe and the U.S. stood by and watched. “It broke my heart,” says di Giovanni, “that tens of thousands of people died that did not have to die.”
While di Giovanni’s approach was that of a sympathetic witness, O’Kane was a “one-woman war-crime tribunal,” as journalist Patrick Graham puts it, and she made it her duty to doggedly hunt down murderers, such as a disgruntled bus driver said to have massacred an entire family in Suva Reka. It made a difference. In 1992, after reporting on the horrors of the Serb detention camp of Trnopolje, O’Kane concluded that it was a “concentration camp.” Three hundred and fifty journalists promptly raced into the area, among them an Independent Television Network reporter, Penny Marshall, who was filmed shaking hands with an emaciated man behind barbed wire. The image—eerily reminiscent of another 20th-century atrocity—was beamed around the world, and within 20 minutes of its airing on American television, President George H. W. Bush suddenly decided that “the international community cannot allow innocent children, women, and men to be starved to death,” and Prime Minister John Major recalled his Cabinet from vacation for an emergency meeting.
That camp was soon closed, the war went on, and the reporters did not let up. Two years later, CNN sponsored a town-hall forum starring President Clinton, who had promised during the 1992 campaign to take action in Bosnia but had done very little since taking office in 1993. Amanpour appeared on satellite television from Sarajevo and asked, “Do you not think that the constant flip-flops of your administration on the issue of Bosnia set a very dangerous precedent?” His feel-your-pain act dissolved. “There have been no ‘constant flip-flops,’ madam,” Clinton replied.
Amanpour soldiered on, relentlessly exposing Bosnia’s suffering to remind the Western powers of the tragedy they were letting occur in their backyards. Eventually, the flip-flops ended and the leaders acted decisively. “What we reported in Bosnia made it untenable for democracies to allow that kind of thing to happen again,” Amanpour says. As for the flak they sometimes received for not being “objective,” for rushing to hysterical judgment, all of them roundly dismiss it. “I certainly wasn’t objective,” says di Giovanni, “because I really believed there were very clear sides to be taken.” Or, as O’Kane explains, “The truth isn’t objective.”
Bosnia helped make their careers, brought them acclaim—and, in the case of Christiane Amanpour, made her an international icon, her own wing of the United Nations. By 1996, Clinton was introducing Amanpour as “the voice of humanity” at White House dinners. He wasn’t the only famous politico who developed a soft spot for Amanpour toward the end of the Bosnian conflict. So did then State Department spokesman James Rubin, who, before meeting Amanpour, divided the world between those who “thought that Bosnia was a fundamental moral imperative and people who saw it as another problem in a faraway land. Those who were in the first group were special.” When their courtship began in 1997, one of the jokes Rubin played on her “was to sort of pretend that I didn’t really know of her that much, and I didn’t watch much TV.” It wasn’t long before Rubin had to start taking it all a bit more seriously, as when he recently worried that Amanpour might meet the fate of the eight journalists killed in Afghanistan. “I bought into this package knowing that this was always part of it,” says Rubin, who married Amanpour in 1998 and has now spent many days and nights alone with their two-year-old son, Darius. “You never like it, but you get used to it, and you develop devices. We talk an enormous amount on the phone, we see each other on TV.”
Now Amanpour has men worldwide deciding that she’s a new kind of sexy, and Gwyneth Paltrow wishing aloud in Harper’s Bazaar that she could be her. Even when she receives nasty barbs in the press, as when the *New York Post’*s Andrea Peyser called her a “war slut,” she’s left with the upper hand. Post owner Rupert Murdoch wrote Amanpour a personal letter of apology.
Naturally Amanpour claims, “I’m not caught up in the celebrity culture,” but the words roll off her tongue so readily that one wonders if the lady doth protest too much. The photo gallery in her living room—basically limited to her family and various Kennedys—suggests celebrities aren’t so horrible. As does her reaction when a friend’s phone call brings the news that the actor Aidan Quinn thinks she rocks. “Aidan Quinn? I’m in love with Aidan Quinn!” she squeals from the other room. She returns to her interview blushing a little and, shrugging, says, “Another fan.”
For Maggie O’Kane, her five-year-old son, Billy, has given her joy and a keener perspective on her work. The story of the Bosnian woman who saw her four children machine-gunned down in Suva Reka is, she says, “a horror I wouldn’t have understood without being a mother now.” But he’s also brought her new conflicts. Sitting by the fire in her Georgian house in Edinburgh on this cold day in November, her little boy and his cat, Sylvia, cuddled in her arms, O’Kane says, “I’m not prepared to miss the next year of his life.” But when the radio brings the news that Mazar-e-Sharif has fallen, she fires up another Silk Cut and becomes restless—and one wonders whether she wouldn’t mind missing, well, maybe the next month of it. This spring, she was back in Bosnia, on the trail of Radovan Karadzic, wanted for six years for genocide.
At 37, single and on the up-and-up, Jacky Rowland isn’t yet plagued by such matters. She’s too busy providing testimony to the U.N. war-crimes tribunal about the grisly Serb prison she visited in Kosovo—which just happened to be bombed by nato forces on the afternoon she was there. Like Amanpour, she’s coping with both the thrill and the awkwardness of her newly minted celebrity. Her name and picture have recently been popping up in the U.K. press, and the media have dubbed her “the new Kate Adie.” Unfortunately, it’s a title that doesn’t sit well with the old Kate Adie, the 56-year-old doyenne of the BBC, who covered Libya, Tiananmen Square, and the Gulf War, and was once Rowland’s role model. Last fall, at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature, Adie launched her own Scud missile at Rowland and her ilk, saying BBC bosses were now looking for reporters with “cute faces and cute bottoms and nothing else in between.” Rowland took it as a direct affront. “To see that the person who inspired me as a teenager is making bitchy comments about the young women who are following in her footsteps, I just don’t think that does justice to a proud tradition,” says Rowland. “She did establish women as war correspondents— and time ticks on.”
Fueled by Bosnia, Janine di Giovanni has continued the good fight. One of a handful of reporters willing to risk getting kidnapped, di Giovanni, in 2000, sneaked into Chechnya, where she witnessed—and was first to call—the fall of Grozny. Just as she had done in Bosnia, di Giovanni waited it out with the victims as they were bombarded, this time by Russian planes and tanks. The sights—from the dogs eating dead bodies, to the house filled with hungry, blind Chechens waiting in vain for help to come—were every bit as grim as those she saw in Bosnia. But this time the Western world did not intervene to stop the violence. After she tried without success to send help back from London to the blind Chechens, a bitter reality of being a war reporter hit her. “I felt so defeated,” says di Giovanni. That sentiment deepened in April when she returned to the site of her first story in 1989, the West Bank. “I see people who 12 years ago were throwing stones,” she says from the battle of Jenin. “Now they’re gunmen.” Finding comfort with Bruno Girodon isn’t easy. Based in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, he says, “I’m not thinking about the future. She wish I could think about the future, but I’m not living like that.” To which di Giovanni can only sigh, saying, “You choose to fall in love with a gypsy, what do you get?”
Colvin, too, has continued the quest—at times triumphantly. In East Timor in 1999, after machete-wielding militiamen went on a rampage, the U.N. staff and the journalists decided to evacuate, but Colvin stayed behind to act as a kind of human shield for 1,500 Timorese women and children, among them mothers who were so desperate they were throwing their babies over the barbed-wire fence surrounding the U.N. compound. Embarrassed by Colvin’s reports, the U.N. reversed its decision to leave the innocent behind, and the civilians were taken to safety in Australia.
And last April, Colvin took a 30-mile journey on foot through the jungle into the northern, Tamil-controlled area of Sri Lanka, a corner of the world truly forsaken by the West. Journalists were banned, and a humanitarian crisis, in which government forces had besieged 500,000 civilians, denying them food and medical aid, remained hidden from the world. Colvin filed her story, exposing the horror, and during her nighttime exodus she was caught in a fiery ambush; shrapnel from a grenade landed deep in her left eye. Despite her protests—“Don’t shoot! American! Journalist!”—she was pummeled by the government soldiers, who believed she was with the enemy Tamil Tigers. She was grilled by soldiers before being flown to Colombo, then to London, and then to New York. A doctor was able to save her eye—but not the ability to see out of it.
Colvin isn’t pitying herself, nor does she think she’s a hero for having nearly died for her cause. “I feel that I am very lucky,” she says. “These people you are leaving behind are much braver. If they want to live, they have to be brave every single day of their lives.” One such person was a Catholic priest she had met in Sri Lanka, who told her, icily, “No journalists have come, no one cares about us, so why should I talk to you?” After hearing of her injury, he had a letter smuggled out of Tamil Sri Lanka, where there’s no postal system, and had it sent from Colombo. The letter read, “I am very sorry to hear of your injuries. You are remembered here as a brave and honest person.” “It was just two lines,” Colvin says, “and it was so … it made me feel good.”
After her injury, there was someone else who made her feel good, too, who treated her swollen eye with endless drops of steroids and antibiotics and ate meat loaf with her. In Kukës, Albania, three years ago, the night Colvin feared one of her two ex-husbands had become her roommate, ex-husband No. 1, Patrick Bishop, was actually just down the street and after 13 years apparently still held onto the hope that he might get to rescue her. He believed her to be in Bajram Curri, an area on the Albania-Kosovo border so dangerous he needed to get her out immediately. Desperately trying to find an armed escort for the mission, he asked a fellow reporter if he knew any reliable men: “Well, why don’t you go and ask Marie Colvin, she’s a great expert. She’s in the bar down the road.” “I went in there,” says Bishop, “and she was surrounded by young male acolytes who were listening to her every word. They were all dismissed as I sat down, and we started talking and that was that. We’ve been together ever since.”
Though they have figured each other out a little better this time around, Colvin and Bishop continue to butt heads. Two days before Colvin was injured, Bishop had a nightmare that she was killed. But knowing Marie, there was no point in telling her. And as of March, she was back, eye patch and all, in another war zone banned to journalists—Ramallah—braving the crossfire and stun grenades lobbed her way. There are no plans for marriage. In fact, Colvin wears her two wedding rings “to remind myself never to get married again,” and the Patrick Bishop problem seems to have found a workable solution. “He lives in Paris,” says Colvin from her garden flat in Notting Hill, “which is perfect.”
Picture, for a minute, a perfectly coiffed London billionaire. He’s just nabbed his first aardvark-in-formaldehyde by Damien Hirst for £10 million. This is his moment—and so he’s at Scott’s in London’s Mayfair district, savoring a dozen spéciale de claire oysters with his beautiful wife. He notes his fellow diners: Tony and Cherie Blair, and over there, Keira Knightley. Not too shabby, he thinks. His suit is Savile Row. His watch is from Patek Philippe. His mollusks are from Richard Caring.
Around the corner on Berkeley Square, a white-haired lord and his wife are sequestered in a cozy banquette at Annabel’s stoically attempting to blot out that their son and heir is all over the tabloids, having been caught soliciting sex from an Amazonian blonde named Bruce, whilst wondering if that fellow over at the bar will ever shut up, for God’s sake. The gimlets they’re enjoying (their fifth pair of the evening, if anyone’s counting) are being provided by Richard Caring.
Across town at Electric House, in Notting Hill, a publicist, a modeling agent, and other assorted “media types” are shrieking incoherently and taking an unusually high number of joint trips to the loo. The chipolata sausages sitting on the table are courtesy of Richard Caring.
At this point, if you are a Londoner who bears any resemblance to one of these archetypes, all the food you’re eating and drinks you’re enjoying are being provided by Richard Caring. If you want to avoid it, you’re going to Au Bon Pain.
Until 2005, Caring was known simply as the tanned fellow who supplied merchandise to his billionaire friend Sir Philip Green, who with his family owns British Home Stores and Arcadia Group, which includes Topshop, in London. In 2005 he turned to what Britain calls “the catering business” and in three years has acquired London’s very best restaurants for some very high prices. First he bought the Caprice group (including the Ivy, Le Caprice, J. Sheekey, Daphne’s, and Bam-Bou) for $57.2 million, followed by Scott’s, which he bought for $614,495 and refurbished for about $10.5 million. In June 2007, for $198.8 million, he snapped up the ultra-exclusive, members-only clubs of Mark Birley (which in addition to Annabel’s include Harry’s Bar, Mark’s Club, George, and the Bath & Racquets Club). In January 2008 he bought an 80 percent stake in Soho House, which also includes Shoreditch House, Electric House, Babington House, and High Road House, for another $205.4 million. To provide some context, that’s like one man in New York suddenly owning the Four Seasons restaurant, ‘21,’ Café des Artistes, Union Square Cafe, Nobu, Balthazar, and Pastis. Come to think of it, he may soon own Balthazar and Pastis if he gets his way—but more on that later. He’s on an acquisitions-and-expansion blitz, taking his brands to numerous U.S. cities (including Los Angeles, Miami, and Chicago) as well as Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Istanbul, and, especially, Dubai. The plan is to open in 22 countries over the next seven years. Soon, he will have the world’s first global luxury-food conglomerate. But is such a thing really possible?
For the food snobs, a restaurant is a proprietorship, and you just can’t treat it like a Starbucks outlet. “The notion of a conglomerative luxury restaurant is almost a contradiction,” says a key member of the London restaurant fraternity. “All the restaurants he’s bought up to now were built upon personal attention. They were built by restaurateurs, not restaurant owners.” Sam Hart, who with his brother Eddie revamped the Soho institution Quo Vadis, says, “It is not a good situation when one person controls so many restaurants. It’s difficult for creativity to flourish.” And the money he has spent? “Ludicrous,” says one restaurateur. “He must have a printing press somewhere to manufacture all his money,” says another.
The regular old snob snobs feel that his whole “corporatizing” thing is beyond tacky. “‘He’s trashed [Annabel’s] completely and we’re not going to have anywhere to go and this is awful!’” says one social fixture, imitating the hysteria that ensued after Caring bought the crown jewel of the Birley group. It didn’t help that he came with some most distasteful baggage: a house in London nicknamed the “Versailles of Hampstead”; a shooting lodge on the border of Devon and Somerset that was known to be hopelessly nouveau, complete with a helipad and way too many pheasants tearing away at the neighbors’ plantings; and, worst of all, a close friend in Sir Philip Green, the notorious retail merchant who proudly awarded himself $2.1 billion—the largest bonus in British corporate history—paid to his wife in Monaco, where it would not be taxed.
But if a luxury-food conglomerate is feasible, Caring may be just the man to pull it off. He is not simply another successful businessman hitting middle age and buying trophies. He’s doing for food what he has done for clothes. At a time when high fashion was only for the very rich, Caring was bringing chic, or at least semi-chic, fashion to the masses, by manufacturing clothes in Asia and selling them in stores like Marks & Spencer. As a result, a great many more European women looked better. Now he’s doing the same thing for fine dining, boiling down successful brands into formulas that he believes can be replicated and applied in cities where Tony Roma’s now qualifies as cuisine. He’s not making the food any cheaper, but he is making it available. What Conrad Hilton did for luxury hotels in the 1950s and 60s, Caring proposes for Dover sole.
And he is far from the cigar-chomping beast the hysterical snobs of London might expect. A trim 59-year-old in Armani with a dazzling tan, very white teeth, and steel-gray hair swept back in a slight bouffant, Caring has a kind of cool 80s stylishness and quiet vanity. (He is rumored to have once decided against buying a site because he would have had to wear a hard hat to tour it.) He is studiously polite, asking permission, for example, to take off his jacket in his own office, which is sprawling and features two large Degas drawings of ballerinas. “He’s got the most beautiful manners,” says P.R. man David Wynne-Morgan, who was Birley’s right-hand man for 43 years. “It was the last thing I would have expected of him from what I had read.”
He doesn’t gush about balsamic reductions or rarefied vintages. What Caring thinks about—and talks about—are “positions” and “directions.”
“The idea of [buying] Balthazar [the fashionable Manhattan bistro owned by Keith McNally] would be another customer again, another profile, so it would give us width,” he explains, sitting across from me at a conference table.
Buying McNally’s empire appealed to him, he says, “because I’m very keen to get some depth in the States.”
“We bought the Robinsons-May [department store] site in L.A., for condominiums, so that’s our luxury position.”
His customers aren’t old friends or new obsessions or lovable eccentrics. Rather, they represent “60,000 quality names and addresses.”
If he seems to lack passionate beliefs about how to brine chicken or where to seat a suddenly disgraced media mogul, it’s because he does. Caring knows these details are important, but he’s the first to admit he’s no expert on them. That’s what management is for, he says. Caring has inherited some of the best, and he’s not messing with it.
But will the standards of London’s top restaurants continue when they all have the same guy at the top? Can a trophy remain a trophy if there are 19 of them all over the globe? Caring believes the answer is yes. “Let me show you something,” he says, getting up in the middle of our interview. He returns with a letter Mark Birley sent out to the Annabel’s membership at the time of the sale, assuring them that Caring would respect and maintain tradition. To win Birley’s trust was no small feat, as he was famously fussy and stingy with praise. Caring had the letter framed.
Others believe Caring can do it, too. His friend Sir David Tang, the Hong Kong entrepreneur who co-owns Cipriani Hong Kong and founded the international clothing chain Shanghai Tang, says, “I think that Richard Caring understands the delicacy of some of the rather conservative and perhaps pompous elements of the [Birley clubs’] membership and then the much more relaxed way and less pompous, less feudal feel of the modern age.” Indeed, despite the gossip of the toffs, Annabel’s is still the place to be, even if one opens in Dubai. “Anything that stands still moves backwards,” Caring says. And as to the question of overpaying, if his plan works, he will have made another fortune. “I think he paid too little,” Tang says. “As we are speaking, there are probably people trying to seduce him to sell at a premium.”
Growing up, Caring had no access to the kinds of eating experiences he’s now spreading throughout the globe. His father, Lou Caringi, was an American soldier injured during the Second World War who convalesced in London, under the care of Caring’s future mother, a British nurse named Sylvia Parnes. After dropping the i from his last name and putting down roots in North London, a largely working-class Jewish neighborhood, Lou set up a small showroom in the fashion district, north of Oxford Street. “It was needs must at the time,” says Caring. When he left school, at age 16, he briefly apprenticed in the real-estate business, but was soon called away by his father. “He said, ‘Come on—I need some help. The family has to get together and do this.’” Both Richard and his mother joined Lou, with Richard packing and shipping dresses. Two years later, London’s Carnaby Street era was beginning, and Caring got creative. Together with a girlfriend in fashion school, he designed a set of dresses that actually looked good. Caring had them made by the local Greek-immigrant “outdoor factories” and began pounding the pavement. “I had a target that I had to sell 200 [dresses] a week. They would cost a maximum of £2 [at the time, $5.60], and I would sell them for 69 shillings and 6 pence, which was about £3.50 [$9.80]. I was out there knocking on doors. I had a little route of shopkeepers that I would take an order from. Someone would buy five, another girl would buy eight. If I got an order of 36 it was a big day for me.”
Caring didn’t dream of fabulous wealth and luxury. “I was interested in being able to take out a girl to a decent restaurant and have a car that I wasn’t ashamed of,” he says. Soon, he was able to make his rather modest goals come true. Two hundred dresses a week turned into 500, turned into 1,000, turned into 60,000 to 70,000 a week. By 1971, he had landed a beautiful wife: Jacqueline, a model whom he had first spotted on the catwalk. Around the same time, a shrewd buyer made the suggestion: Why aren’t you in Hong Kong?
“I hadn’t even heard of Hong Kong,” Caring recalls. “My geography was awful.” With a why-not attitude, Caring and his father decided to send one of their employees to scope out the scene for a few days. He ended up staying for seven months. The materials, the labor, it was all chicken feed over there. This was gold. In 1980 he moved to Hong Kong with his wife and young son, Jamie (his second son, Ben, would be born there), to oversee his growing business. Other companies had discovered the promise of the Far East, but they were making “basic stuff,” Caring says. The Carings, on the other hand, were making fashion—well, fashion enough to appeal to discerning shoppers who might be on a budget. Before long, the company had a virtual monopoly on the low-cost fashion industry in the U.K., supplying clothes to chains such as Marks & Spencer, Next, and Philip Green’s Topshop.
When Green purchased the department store BHS in 2000, he and Caring became virtual partners, with Green reportedly cutting out all other suppliers and directing his buyers to go through Caring. With Green’s other company, the Arcadia Group, which Green bought for about $1.6 billion in 2002, their partnership flourished even more. In the first year, Green doubled profits and more than doubled Arcadia’s value.
Green was the flashy one—he threw his son an estimated $7.4 million Bar Mitzvah, complete with performances by Destiny’s Child and tenor Andrea Bocelli—while Caring was his little-buddy workhorse. That is, until Green’s 50th birthday (for which he flew 200 guests to Cyprus for a three-day extravaganza concluding with a toga party). Then Caring publicly presented him with a red Ferrari Spider, thereby making his point: he was no longer content to remain in the shadows.
In 2004, the opportunity to step out of the “rag trade” into something more glamorous fell into his lap when Caring got a call from a friend saying that there might be an opportunity to buy Wentworth Club—a historic 19th-century house in Surrey, around which was built the 1,750-acre Wentworth Estate and three of the most prestigious golf courses in Europe. It oozed “class,” and for Caring it also held personal appeal. Caring had played golf since childhood; he had had a golf scholarship at the Millfield prep school, and played competitively—once, even on a course at Wentworth. (A large watercolor of the grounds hangs in his office.) His attack was aggressive. He paid $232.9 million for Wentworth when the book value was only $197.1 million. The golf snobs were beside themselves. “I was asked questions like ‘Are you going to turn this famous golf course into a racetrack?’” recalls Caring. “‘Into a casino? Into residential housing?’ I said, ‘No. All I want to do with Wentworth is maintain the image and the character and just move it forward.’”
Among the steps he took to move it forward was to bring in modern cuisine. He sought out the Caprice group, then owned by Luke Johnson (the son of the historian Paul Johnson and current chairman of the U.K.’s Channel 4), to provide the club’s food. In the midst of those negotiations, another seed was planted in his head. “I think I made a statement like ‘At the price you’ve just quoted me, I might as well buy the company,’ ” recalls Caring. “The inference I got from that was: Maybe there was a possibility to acquire it.”
The Ivy and Le Caprice—the two jewels of the London restaurant scene—were owned by Luke Johnson’s restaurant group. Both theater haunts, before disappearing under the radar, they had been bought in 1981 (Le Caprice) and 1990 (the Ivy) by Jeremy King and Chris Corbin (current owners of the Wolseley, on Piccadilly—and partners with the editor of this magazine in a small restaurant venture in New York), who gave them fresh buzz and mystique. The Ivy, especially, came to be bursting with important names from the worlds of theater, movies, politics, literature, art, and journalism. It was a club, really, and the management wanted to keep it that way, giving away three tables maximum a day to people who were unknown. According to food critic and Vanity Fair contributing editor A. A. Gill, who wrote a book about the Ivy, the daily morning meeting between Mitch Everard, the manager, and waiters would go something like this: “Table Four is Mrs. Hirschvitz. She’s having dinner with her client. Move her to Table Five, because the table next to her is another agent and they don’t want to be sitting next to each other. Dustin here. Salman Rushdie is going to be in the corner there—I think he’s with a new girl. Be particularly nice to her. The Pintos will be over in the far corner. Remember that she’s not eating onions at the moment.”
“There was no form to fill in,” says Luke Johnson, who bought the Ivy from King and Corbin in 1998 for $24.2 million, “but you knew if you were in and you knew if you were out.”
Caring paid $57.2 million for the Caprice group, of which Johnson was majority owner, and threw in another $104 million three months later for Johnson’s 23-outlet pizza chain, Strada. According to a source with knowledge of the deal, Caring had done the minimal due diligence and was practically flying blind. “Everyone thought I’d gone nuts,” says Caring. “‘How can you pay £57 million for a pizza restaurant?’” Less than two years later, he would sell off those pizza joints for $286.9 million, making a tidy profit. And now he owned the Ivy, the kind of restaurant he’d once been barely allowed to set foot in. The day after the deal was complete, he called the restaurant: “‘I’d like to book a table for dinner tonight,’ I said, and they said, ‘I’m sorry?’ I said, ‘I’d like to book a table for dinner tonight for four people.’ And they said, ‘Who’s calling?’ And I said, ‘Richard Caring.’ ‘What time would you like to come?’ I’d waited 25 years to do that!”
With the Ivy and Le Caprice under his belt, it was time for his social debut. He found himself a cause—the Children’s Charity, which fights child abuse and pedophilia—and threw a $13.7 million benefit for 480 people, including Elizabeth Hurley, Sting, Jimmy Choo founder Tamara Mellon, and many of the most prominent figures of London society. No one had heard of this Richard Caring, but the invitation piqued everyone’s curiosity: a giant Russian matryoshka doll, inside of which was a bottle of vodka and an invitation to fly by private jet to St. Petersburg. It asked for measurements, which meant only one thing: a fancy-dress party!—something rich Brits can’t resist. En route to Russia, the guests sipped champagne while being entertained by comedians wearing Russian peasant outfits. When they arrived in their hotel rooms, tailor-made 18th-century Russian costumes were waiting, while seamstresses buzzed about making last-minute adjustments. The next 48 hours were a caviar-and-champagne orgy, complete with performances by the Kirov Ballet, Sir Elton John, and Tina Turner; a charity auction held by Sotheby’s Europe chairman Henry Wyndham; and a surprise visit from Bill Clinton, who dressed up like a Russian general.
The guests didn’t know what to make of it all. The party “was seen very much as a man trying to launch himself into society,” says one of the guests. But Caring’s actual behavior was not that of a showman. Rather, he seemed like a polite man from, well, the rag trade. “He was the person with the tape measure around his neck,” says Vassi Chamberlain, an editor at Tatler and one of the guests. The party earned the charity $24.9 million and was deemed the most extraordinary weekend anyone had had in a long time.
The big gesture—this was Caring’s way of doing everything, including, for example, shooting, a sport he took up only three years ago. A young aristocrat who had the opportunity to shoot at Caring’s country estate explains that a traditional English shoot consists of “old tweeds, a sausage roll, and a glass of sloe gin at 11 o’clock. And you’re not supposed to make a big fuss about how many birds you shoot.” But Caring’s lodge, in addition to the helipad, has a modern design and “a butler with a tablecloth and this whole bar laid out, incredible herbs and sandwiches.” A little gauche, maybe. “But you know what?” says this source. “You can’t knock it, the new way of doing things. It’s very comfortable.” If there is a person keeping Caring’s ego in check, it’s his wife, says his friend Christopher Biggins, an actor. “She won’t have any nonsense,” Biggins says. “When you go on the boat with them”—a 200-foot yacht—“it’s not all the grand people you might think. It’s really old friends who’ve been friends for 20 or 30 years. The grounding comes from her.”
But with the next chapter in Caring’s rise—the purchasing of the Birley group—London’s establishment felt he’d gone too far. A national treasure in London’s high society, Annabel’s was said to be the only nightclub ever visited by the Queen. Birley represented the ultimate in British snobbery and good taste, fanatical about every last detail, from the way the butter was rolled to how the napkins were starched. Imagine Caring—Philip Green’s close friend—thinking he could just step into Birley’s shoes by waving around obscene amounts of cash! According to one story making the rounds in the restaurant world, a Brit, asked by an American whether Caring was going to ruin Mark Birley’s clubs, responded, “There’s no reason why he should ruin them.” Then he hesitated: “Just so long as he doesn’t let his friends in.” Was this really just a sign of a deep-seated anti-Semitism? “The British establishment, the aristocracy, the people who are members of Annabel’s and who have been since day one,” says a social observer who has come to know Caring well, “they will never explicitly say this—but [they didn’t like him] because he’s Jewish.” In fact, in the first weeks of Caring’s taking it over, members could be heard muttering to one another, “I can’t do Annabel’s any longer. It’s just sort of loud, fat Jews.” While the British press didn’t dare wade into the anti-Semitism issue, it did print complaints that he had trashed Annabel’s.
Caring was devastated by the reports, says a club member in whom Caring confided. He had worked hard to earn Birley’s confidence. Now he simply put his head down and worked quietly to win the confidence of the members. When, for example, one member wrote him saying that he could no longer have anything to do with the club, Caring wrote back, “Give me a chance.”
He also sought out the advice of David Tang, a close friend of Birley’s who had managed to be both a member of the new rich and beloved by society. Tang, expecting an egomaniac, was impressed: “When you meet somebody [who has] actually bought something trophy, you cannot but expect that person to be slightly pleased with himself. There was nothing like that in Richard, and he was genuinely interested to hear what I had to say.” Tang didn’t feel it was his place to give concrete advice about the direction to take Annabel’s, but he did share his basic belief.
“There’s a balance between what you want to do with your members and what you want to do yourself,” says Tang, “and I’ve always held this idea that clubs are inclusive rather than exclusive.” All that grousing about the right sort and the wrong sort struck Tang as nothing more than jealousy. “If I were Richard Caring, I wouldn’t give a toss, and I’ve told him so.”
Alas, it’s still a subject Caring is sensitive about. When I ask about the difficulty he has experienced in confronting London’s snobbish elements, he responds, with an affable but somewhat nervous laugh, “Do you want to get me shot?” At pains not to offend the establishment, he says carefully, “British people are more protectionist. It’s tighter here. You have to prove yourself here. Once they do accept you, they are very solid, very loyal.”
Birley’s clubs have changed since Caring took over. “[Mark’s clubs] were commercially successful by being overtly, totally noncommercial,” Wynne-Morgan explains. “For Mark, the clubs were not just his business, they were his whole life and very justification of his existence.” Now they are part of a real conglomerate with an eye on the bottom line, as are the other clubs. Membership at Annabel’s has broadened. Circulars are now sent out to members advertising special events such as musical performances at Annabel’s and wine-tasting nights at Harry’s Bar. A few corners have been cut. The truffle guy at Harry’s Bar, says one source, used to go to Tuscany to find the white truffles. He’d take a couple of weeks and visit his family there. Now the truffles are purchased from a supplier. A longtime Annabel’s staff member says that Caring’s C.E.O., Des McDonald, wants the clubs to be filled to 100 percent capacity each night, just as Scott’s is, even if that means rushing long-term members out the door. Dress-code standards have fallen through the cracks, too. “Caring may ask why there’s a guy at the bar wearing a T-shirt,” says this source. “Someone will point out, ‘But it’s Marc Jacobs.’ He’ll say, ‘Oh, O.K.’ Mark Birley never would have stood for that.”
It all was too much for Alberico Penati, beloved chef at Harry’s Bar for 20 years, who left a couple of months after the sale. “It’s not my cup of tea to work for a big company, because I am an artisan,” says Penati, now the chef at the gaming club Aspinalls. “An artisan is a small thing. There is no one director, then another director, then another director. There is just me and the owner. Simply said.”
Then again, other staff members find Caring’s more democratic approach refreshing. “He listens to our advice and he gives us quite—how can you say?—a free decision on certain things,” says Luciano Porcu, the utterly charming manager of Harry’s Bar. “Like, for example, one day I was talking to him and he told me, ‘So, how’s it going?’ I said, ‘Well, I had someone complaining that we still have jacket and tie, no jeans, no sneakers.’ And he says, ‘What would you do?’ I said, ‘I would keep it the way it is.’ ‘And so let it be,’ he told me.” And at the end of the day, it’s hard to imagine that a truffle not personally plucked from the Tuscan countryside will spoil anyone but the biggest food snob’s evening. It’s hard to conceive that a performance at Annabel’s by Bryan Ferry doing all the old Roxy Music hits should be so offensive—simply because it didn’t happen in Mark Birley’s day. Wynne-Morgan sums it up: “I think he’s trying extremely hard to maintain the standards of Annabel’s. Equally, you know, things shouldn’t stand absolutely still. We are now in a different era with different values.”
The Ivy, too, has been knocked around a bit. “It’s football wives from New Jersey,” says one high-profile source. “The media figures and crucial showbiz types that gave it such a buzz are only there in limited quantities.” Many find the thought of the Ivy opening up in Dubai puzzling. “The Ivy is a London-theater institution, steeped in history,” says a source once dedicated to the place. “What the hell is it going to do in some sort of marble building in the middle of Dubai?” And some aren’t so crazy about the Club at the Ivy, which Caring has just opened upstairs and which features a sushi bar, a screening room, and a drawing room.
“Where the problem comes in is when Richard Caring suddenly goes out and splurges on a whole load of boat and car memorabilia, to litter around just to make it look ‘authentic,’” says a prominent London restaurateur. “As they say, ‘Mark Birley he ain’t,’ and he’s trying to be, and in the Ivy Club, if he’s trying to be the new Mark Birley, he shouldn’t give up his day job.” Furthermore, having an official Club at the Ivy is making some regulars worry that the real Ivy will seem even less like the unofficial club it used to be.
But is that such a terrible thing either? Henry Wyndham, the gregarious chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, believes that Caring has tapped into a positive social development: “London has become this extraordinary cosmopolitan place, where we were very insular probably 25 years ago, and now London is absolutely brimming and booming with … people from other countries living and enjoying London life. There’s less of a class system. There’s a much better atmosphere.” In other words, isn’t it time the Brits stopped getting their knickers in a twist over the thought of other people having fun? The new reality, at least at the Ivy, might have been summed up when Christopher Biggins—who’d just been named “king of the jungle” on the reality show I’m a Celebrity … Get Me out of Here!—returned, victorious, from the Australian jungle. He reports, “The first night I came back, I went to the Ivy, and I got a standing ovation!”
Right now, the restaurant that many Londoners consider the most fun is the one Caring truly did himself, Scott’s. It was a “rotting bomb,” as Caring puts it, and he invested $10.5 million in transforming everything about it. “It’s probably the best restaurant in London right now,” Wyndham says. “And it’s the most fun restaurant, it’s got a real buzz to it, and that’s his own creation.”
As for Caring’s inroads into the U.S., he’s opening up Soho Houses in Miami, Chicago, and Los Angeles—on the top two floors of a high-rise on Sunset Boulevard—with Soho House founder Nick Jones, who still retains 20 percent. (Caring’s sons both work for Soho House in London.) Caring and Jones will also be opening the second branch of their Italian restaurant, Cecconi’s, in the building where Mortons used to be, on Melrose Avenue. (After nearly 30 years, the famed Hollywood restaurant has closed.) Caring may also bring Scott’s over to L.A., he says. “And if you’re going to bring over Scott’s, why not one or two of the other brands?”
In New York, he’s opening Le Caprice in the Pierre hotel. And, most notably, he has been doggedly trying to buy the empire of fellow Brit Keith McNally, who owns Morandi, Pravda, Lucky Strike, and Schiller’s Liquor Bar, in addition to Pastis and Balthazar. Encapsulating the Sex and the City age, they are not necessarily known for their food, but certainly for their buzz—combining the right location and the right look. The goal, again, is expansion. Caring wants to replicate Balthazar in London, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
But in McNally, Caring couldn’t have found a tougher customer. “By nature I have an intense dislike of chains and sister restaurants. Even the phrase appalls me,” McNally told me. He has turned down many offers to sell, including “an incredible” one from Las Vegas mogul Steve Wynn. “But lately I’ve seen so many copies of my places … that I’m coming round to thinking it’s not the worst thing in the world.” And after meeting Caring, who came to him with no “bullshit” or phony flattery, McNally felt he was someone “I could work with. Or for, I should say.” It also helped that McNally fell in love with Caring’s places in London, especially Scott’s and the Club at the Ivy. “Unfortunately, I like most of them more than my own!” he reports. “In fact I’d like to buy them.”
Still, for the moment, McNally is holding off on a deal, despite Caring’s “very, very generous” offer, which according to another source is about $100 million. Though Caring assured him he could retain as much involvement as he wanted, McNally is not ready to have his staff ultimately answer to someone else. And there’s another nagging concern. “If I duplicated Balthazar or Pastis, I’d be ripping the soul out of the original. I’m not the kind of person who goes to Nobu in Moscow because I like the Nobu in New York. Quite the opposite—I’d never go to another Nobu again anywhere!”
Whatever McNally’s reservations may be, Caring hardly has time to wring his hands over them. He has plans for a new hotel in London called Bed and Brasserie. He’s expanding a chain of mid-priced bistros called Côte. He wants to start a “spectacular worldwide concierge” service to take on the needs of anyone who’s a member of one of his clubs. He’s looking into buying some luxury fashion labels, and getting into wine production.
And there may be more in Caring’s future than even he himself has considered. Upon hearing the vague rumor that he was interested in buying New York’s Four Seasons restaurant, I called up co-owner Julian Niccolini to ask about it. He hadn’t even heard of Richard Caring. Who is he? Niccolini wanted to know. What is he about?
“Interesting,” he said at last. “I think he should give us a call.”
The first thing is, you’re saying it wrong. It’s CAH-pree, not Cah-PREE. (It’s O.K.—Frank Sinatra made the same mistake.) The second thing is that Capri, in its four square miles, has more fabulous people per square foot than anywhere else on earth: Americans who require only one name—Puffy, Mariah, Julia, Tom, Oprah; luxury-fashion designers Valentino, Armani, Ferragamo, and Diego Della Valle of Tod’s; and European royalty, whose names alone—Prince Lallo Caravita di Sirignano and Princess Mafalda von Hessen—are enough to remind the rest of us how basically low-rent we really are. Why, you ask? Sure, Capri is beautiful, with bougainvillea roaming over limestone cliffs that rise 1,000 feet from the turquoise Mediterranean, but so is Bermuda. The allure of Capri—which lies 20 miles off Naples and has a population of 12,000—is transcendent and, as such, is nearly impossible to describe. Everyone on the island knows what is, and isn’t, “Capri,” but ask someone what Capri is and you’ll usually get meaningless one-word proclamations—“Capri is harmony!” “Capri is the absolute!”—and sometimes, with an Italian wave of dismissal, “Capri is Capri.”
For a primer, you might spend a day with Maurizio Siniscalco. The very picture of simplicity, Siniscalco is slim and gray-haired. He wears loose-fitting cotton pants and red espadrilles. His tan is deep and unbroken, the kind he’s probably had since age three. Every day at one o’clock he goes out on his boat, a no-frills fisherman’s skiff about 15 feet long. And every day he does the same thing on it. He fishes with a handheld line for what must be very small fish. He takes off all his clothes and goes for a swim. He climbs back on board, oblivious to being naked and, in fact, looking great at 56 years old—tall, healthy, and gleaming against the afternoon sun—a gracefully aging Mediterranean demigod.
He drapes himself in a towel, and then he has his humble peasant lunch—bread, mozzarella, prosciutto. He pours some wine into a dirty cup, sits back, and slowly lets himself get lulled into the perfect Capri moment—a moment far away from the rigidity of the real world, a moment untouched by anything ugly, a moment just right, it seems, for gossiping about the von Fürstenbergs. Siniscalco knows the whole gang—Egon, Diane, Tatiana, Alexandre, and the rest. He tells you which ones he’s seen most recently and where. He tells you which ones are brilliant, which ones aren’t so brilliant. He could talk about them all day long. They are his friends and they are his people.
Siniscalco is one of the Neapolitan elite. (Some are under the impression he’s a baron.) He divides his time among Naples, Milan, New York, and Capri. But Capri is his center of gravity, and he is Capri’s. When not on his boat, he is at his antiques shop on Capri’s Via Camerelle, Siniscalco-Gori Antichita, talking on the phone with, say, Alba Clemente, the wife of painter Francesco Clemente, or showing his well-traveled clients everything from 18th-century Chinese ceramics to works by modern Italian artists such as Ernesto Tatafiore, to pictures by the 30-year-old photographer Salvino Campos, who also happens to be Siniscalco’s good friend. Or he is seated outside, keeping a keen eye on people’s comings and goings, his regal bearing managing to make even mildly sophisticated tourists feel like extras from Deliverance.
“He’s like the grande dame,” says his friend Peter Van Schalkwyk, a British freelance art director who divides his time between Capri and Milan. “He’s never opened a door in his life.” This isn’t an insult, mind you. Siniscalco takes great pride in being a snob. “I like-ah the people nice. I like-ah the people important,” he says matter-of-factly.
As he lounges in his boat on the Bay of Naples, Capri drifts by. It is entirely limestone—a rugged, craggy mass of greenish-gray rock that rises to two peaks (Capri, at 1,000 feet, and Anacapri, at about 2,000 feet) and that one imagines emerged from the sea at the command of Poseidon. That Capri brings to mind images from mythology is no accident. The Sirens who tempted Odysseus are said to have lounged about the stalactite-dripping grottoes that dot the island. But when Siniscalco buzzes by the world-famous caves, such as the Blue Grotto, or passes the ruins of the Roman baths, there is no mention of these. To yammer on like a tour guide is really not Capri. There is one site, however, that Siniscalco decides deserves noting. He motions up to a grand villa hanging on to the cliffs hundreds of feet above the water, covered in a tangle of trees. “This is house of Fersen,” Siniscalco says quietly. “Very important man.”
Born in 1879, Jacques Adelswärd-Fersen was a Swedish baron-slash-poet, raised in France, who, after being arrested for “incitement of minors to debauchery,” sought refuge on Capri, where he decided to build himself a villa. He chose a plot of land right below the palace of the Roman emperor Tiberius, the island’s first A-list resident, who, when he wasn’t tossing his betrayers off the side of Salto di Tiberio, was, according to Suetonius, training “small boys whom he called his ‘tiddlers’ to get between his thighs and play while he was swimming … and he even put sturdier, though still unweaned, infants to suck his member like a nipple.”
Fersen called his house Villa Lysis and gave it its own tag line, which he inscribed in black marble: amori et dolori sacrum (Sacred to Love and Sorrow). He installed in it a sexy newspaperboy from Rome, named Nino Cesarini, as his “secretary,” and kept his stash of opium fresh. Like Tiberius, he was always up for something different, like, say, mock human sacrifices, using Nino as a victim. The fun came to an end one day in 1923 when Fersen put on a great robe of rose-colored silk and overdosed on cocaine.
Fersen was only one of a community of expatriate free spirits and pleasure-seekers who settled on Capri at the end of the 19th century, and it is the spiritual communion with this group that has defined Capri for Siniscalco and his compatriots as much as the grottoes, ruins, sunshine, and sea. Seeking freedom of body and mind, German artists, American lesbians, and Russian revolutionaries, such as Lenin and Maxim Gorky, came pouring in at that time to lose themselves in Capri’s jasmine-perfumed air and secret pine forests. So did a parade of male homosexuals, such as Somerset Maugham and Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s young lover, during the years that Wilde was wasting away in Reading Gaol.
For pedophiles, it was heaven. In addition to Fersen, there was Fritz Krupp, the German munitions king, who, when not studying the local marine life or building the Via Krupp, one of Capri’s main roads, was enjoying the charms of the island’s junior set in the grottoes, like his 18-year-old singing barber, Adolfo Schiano, who proved he could do a lot more than just cut hair. Not long after his activities were announced in the Naples press, Krupp died, some believe by suicide.
And then there was Norman Douglas. A freethinking British writer on just about every topic—nature, history, travel, food, the follies of mankind—he never let the law get in the way of his feelings for boys (and sometimes girls) aged 12 to 14. It was an interest, alas, that led to a life on the run, destitution, and (as with Fersen and Krupp) a murky death—in his case, a suspected overdose of sleeping pills. But it also helped cement his legacy on Capri as a hero.
Mussolini tried to end Capri’s libertine ethos, briefly prying the men apart from the boys, but it was too late to destroy what Fersen, Krupp, and Douglas had created. Even Mussolini’s daughter, Edda Ciano, couldn’t resist Capri’s call. Despite her marriage to Mussolini’s minister of foreign affairs, she was in love with Pietro Capuano, owner of Capri’s venerated jewelry store, Chantecler. When she was hunted by the Allies, Capuano, according to local lore, smuggled her into Capri under vegetables in a truck. Aurelio De Laurentiis, an excitable movie producer (and self-described “champion of box office”), who started his career as a peon on the set of his famous uncle, Dino, remembers postwar Capri as stirring with eccentricity. “When, in ‘55, I was six years old, you see these rich people dressed in ripped trousers, walking without shoes, jumping on these special animals—donkeys.”
By the late 50s and into the 60s, the tiny island was chockablock with the kind of explosive characters you’d expect to find only in a throbbing metropolis like Paris or New York. There were corners of intellectual life, represented by writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Graham Greene, and Francis Steegmuller and his Australian wife, Shirley Hazzard, author of the recent Greene on Capri: A Memoir. The show-business contingent was out of control, with visitors including Orson Welles, Elizabeth Taylor, Ingrid Bergman, Greta Garbo, Sophia Loren, Tony Curtis, Michael Caine, George Hamilton, Faye Dunaway, and Noël Coward and Beatrice Lillie, who’d sing until two o’clock in the morning in the “piazzetta,” Capri’s main square and most popular hangout. There was the fashion set (Marisa Berenson, Penelope Tree with her boyfriend, photographer David Bailey) and assorted millionaires (Philip Niarchos, Aristotle Onassis, Edmond and Lily Safra, Gianni Agnelli, Charles Revson, and the Shah of Persia).
“It was a crazy moment,” says the designer Valentino, who in the late 60s bought the Villa Cercola, one of Capri’s oldest villas, where he still stays. “All the fashion people, all the models, all the movie stars, it was a sort of dolce vita.” Indeed, it was on Capri that Jean-Luc Godard shot Brigitte Bardot in Contempt, and where Count Rudy Crespi started MareModa Capri, a fashion extravaganza that attracted every designer who mattered and made it cool for men to look like Siegfried and Roy.
“It was the moment,” says Valentino, “when all the men were dressed in shirts, very tight, in beautiful material, in lace, and trousers with what you call … elephant bottom. So it was very funny.” It was also a moment of a nearly deranged enthusiasm for accessories: big metal belts, Stetsons, and the ever present giant medallion hung around the neck. As De Laurentiis puts it, “It was the first time man was approaching the feminine side.”
Maybe, but they still prowled the island like pumas on the loose, knocking down barriers of gender, age, and status with the goal of having sex as often as possible. No one got more action than the members of one particular trio, Franco Rapetti, Rodolfo Parisi, and Gigi Rizzi, who was the boyfriend of Brigitte Bardot. “They were the most good-looking, suntanned Italian playboys. They ruled the scene on Capri,” says Pilar Crespi Robert, Count Rudy Crespi’s daughter, who herself was a fashion trailblazer on Capri streets in the 60s. “They were straight. They always had beautiful American girlfriends. Very glamorous. Leather pants, open shirts with chains.” “[We] had to fight against the multimillionaires to conquer,” says Rizzi on his personal Web site. “All I had was my face, and that made the challenge even more exciting.… We were poisonous.”
If not in the piazzetta, you might have found them at the house of Texan Bob Hornstein, the heir to the Puss ‘n Boots cat-food fortune, who’d turn the backyard of his villa, on the Via Tragara (Capri’s Park Avenue), into a wild, exclusive nightclub. “He was a professional snob,” says Semiramis Zorlu, a voluptuous, melodramatic sculptress of Ottoman descent who has lived on Capri part-time since 1963. “He wanted flashy names, loved titles, lots of nobility from Rome.” Indeed, Hornstein was eager to please, giving out fancy silk scarves as party favors to the likes of Jackie Onassis and Elizabeth Taylor. He also invited local fishermen and sailors (preferably the really hot ones), and troupes of gay men who, as Zorlu explains, “made a big noise” on the occasion when Joan Crawford showed up.
But underneath it all Hornstein was miserable. “He was very moody because he drank a lot,” says Zorlu. “One day he was charming and the next day he wouldn’t say hello.” As she tells it, he carried out a kind of raging, one-sided feud with Mona Bismarck, the Kentucky beauty who married the gay Count Eddy von Bismarck, and who threw her own parties on the island, which were generally considered one step up from his in the class department. Bismarck always got guests with great titles, and, like Hornstein, she also invited the locals—“the carpenter, the cook, these types of people,” says Zorlu, who had been Mona’s close friend, “and she danced with them all, we all danced with each other.” Afterward, says Zorlu, “they loved and respected her even more. They said, ‘Ah, I danced with the contessa!’ Because this is the South, they give a lot of importance to titles.” And so, for Mona, the cat-food guy from Texas just didn’t cut it.
It all came to an end when Hornstein hurried off the island after being involved in “an injury.” During what was probably not his finest hour, Hornstein, it is alleged, bit off a local boy’s penis. Then, in exchange for the boy’s parents’ not going to the police, Hornstein, in true Capri fashion, bought them a villa. He was never heard from again, and it sounds as though he is missed. “A lot of these gays I like very much. They added color,” says Zorlu. “Valentino and his crowd—they don’t do anything. Now they’re always at the Quisisana. Bob Hornstein? Yes, he was nouveau riche, but he was outstanding.”
stalgia for that Capri is thick in the air. Nothing elicits more sighing and spontaneous storytelling than the names Aristotle Onassis and Jackie Onassis. Each came separately in the early 60s: he with his first wife, Tina Livanos, and then with Maria Callas; she in 1962 with the Fiat mogul Gianni Agnelli. In 1968 they came together. It is virtually impossible to go into a shop or a restaurant and not see their picture—here they are window-shopping, there they are being serenaded by their favorite musician, the mustachioed guitarist Scarola. Everyone, it seems, has an Onassis anecdote, from Valentino—“I went for a drink on his boat the Christina, and he said, ‘Ah, I have to tell you, you are such a lucky person, to have a house on the island.… Magic, magic, magic’”—to the wealthy caprese merchants, such as the members of the Federico family, who run the jewelry store La Campanina.
In his memoir, Capri: Protagonists of a Golden Age, the family’s patriarch, Alberto Federico, whose favorite color appears to be cruise-director white, devotes an entire chapter to Onassises and makes a valiant effort to point out his family’s role in the Onassis union. Lina, his tiny, bejeweled firecracker of a wife, recalls nearly every bauble transaction as if it happened 15 minutes ago. Like the time when Jackie, eating dinner at the restaurant Pina, on a whim phoned Alberto and had him bring a gold chain for her to inspect in the rest room. “She no want nobody to see!” Lina screeches, flashing a gold tooth.
Meanwhile, Mariolì, their savvy, go-getter daughter, is nothing less than a Jackie expert. As her mother flips through La Campanina’s prized Capri-clippings scrapbooks, pointing and hollering out names—Goldie Hawn! Arnold Kopelson! Naomi Campbell!—Mariolì waits patiently for her favorite Jackie picture … and then pounces. “Very famous picture. She’s in the square. And she’s wearing a simple T-shirt, and a belt over the T-shirt, with all medallions, in blue enamel and gold. It’s the most famous picture.”
The parade has continued up into the present, complete with 140-foot yachts, luxury hotels, stilettos on the cobblestones, and celebrities for the MTV age, such as Sean “Puffy” Combs, who recently dropped into La Campanina to add to his collection. “We didn’t know who it was,” says Mariolì.
“But when he signed the check we find out who he was!” snickers Lina.
Anyone doubting Capri’s killer score on today’s hot meter should have witnessed the wedding of Antonio “L.A.” Reid, the new president of Arista Records, to Erica Holton, a substitute teacher, which took place on the island last summer. The 130 guests included Veronica Webb, Mariah Carey, and such ghetto-fabulous one-namers as Puffy, Usher, Eve, and Babyface. They were instructed to wear white linen, and they all stayed at the Capri Palace Hotel & Spa, a Moroccan-inspired behemoth situated high on Anacapri and owned by Tonino Cacace, who has helped make hot Capri possible.
“Here was full of candles. But when I say full, I’m talking about thousands of small candles,” Cacace says. “All red because the idea was white, and the red was the color of the coral. And there was a real piece of coral tied on each napkin.… And the ceremony was up on the roof garden with a priest. They built like a church, like an open church, up there, full of flowers, 500,000 roses from Ecuador. And the dress came by private plane from New York.”
Evidently something of a details person, Cacace is also a near-perfect specimen of the groomed male. He is wearing a cashmere turtleneck and a beige jacket with flawless suede elbow patches, and he has a supertrim beard. He greets female strangers by kissing them on the hand and making intense eye contact, undeterred by the presence of his girlfriend, Roberta Capua, a former Miss Italy with whom he fell in love after seeing her on television (she hosts a cheerful Martha Stewart–esque show called In Famiglia). He is, by all accounts, a ladies’ man. But, more than women, it appears that Cacace is in love with the Palace Hotel.
And why not? Just listen to the history: “During the Roman era, Augustus built here a huge palace,” says Cacace. “And then again 2,000 years later is another palace with columns and arches!”
But between the time of the Emperor Augustus and Tonino Cacace, there was, in fact, at least one interim period: the 60s, when the hotel was owned and run by Cacace’s father, who called it Europa Palace. “Europa in the 60s, it was nice,” says Cacace with a shrug. “But it was typical of the 60s.… The colors were not bright like this.” In addition to changing the name and dunking the hotel in shabby-chic white, Cacace gave it soaring arches and rooms equipped with their own swimming pools and gardens, and threw in an adjoining “Beauty Farm.” A state-of-the-art spa, it has dozens of elaborate machines, each of which looks like a different test for nasa astronauts.
What really sets the Palace apart on Capri are its customers. “The clientele of the Palace is younger and of course more trendy,” Cacace says matter-of-factly. In addition to Julia Roberts and Elizabeth Hurley, he has recently hosted Harrison Ford and his wife (“They are very simple people, unbelievable”), Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown (“She’s lovely, I like her very much”), and Mariah Carey, who comes to Capri about six times a year to record at Capri Digital, and holds a special place in Cacace’s heart. “We like to spoil her, because she works very hard when she comes to Capri,” he says, smiling shyly, increasingly moved the more he thinks about her. “And so I also understand that when she goes into the spa she wants to have the spa completely empty, only for her.… But because she’s also very nice, very kind, for me, caring for her is … ” He trails off, practically verklempt.
For the stars, Cacace explains, staying at the Palace keeps them away from the icky crowds. “They can enjoy the place without being bothered by the paparazzi and people that ask signatures,” says Cacace. “Otherwise they would be obliged to cross the square.” The Palace is also a proven arena for self-expression, giving important guests the freedom to break the bathroom sinks, for example. (“There are always strange positions,” Cacace explains.) And then there was the incident in which Puffy reportedly attacked a fellow Reid-Holton-wedding guest who had hooked up with one of Puffy’s ex-girlfriends, an event that Cacace denies. “It didn’t happen here.”
Some of the Old Guard believe that the new element is not very Capri. Rather, that it’s very Sardinia (that’s another island, 200 miles away). “In Sardinia everybody go, your rich, tacky people, vulgar people, easy people, rich people, boring people, Italian people,” says Aurelio De Laurentiis, furiously marching around his grand Filmauro office in Rome. Unfortunately, he suggests, the same types have started coming to Capri. How do you spot them? It’s easy! according to De Laurentiis. They are the ones complaining, “‘Oh, there is not the taxi! Oh, there is the line! Oh, there are too many people! These people touch me!’” Sardinia-minded people are obsessed, he explains further, with “making a show.” “When you make a show … that means you are a-doing a good show for your business, which is not tacky, not sleazy, it’s fine, but you cannot do that in Capri. You must live Capri!” he says, pumping his fist.
For those who understand Capri as De Laurentiis does, to “live Capri” means to live in the spirit of its history. Everywhere on Capri, the ghosts of those who defined it as a special haven are looming. When you meet Antonio De Angelis, the shy owner of the popular restaurant La Capannina, he may, if he trusts you, lower his voice and share a secret he holds most dear: “I was very good friend with a boy that used to live with Norman Douglas,” he says, referring to someone Douglas wanted “to raise.” The son of the chef at the Grand Hotel Quisisana and Trattoria Savoia, one of Capri’s first restaurants, De Angelis, as a teenager, was responsible for bringing them wine. “I remember he used to love Orvieto. It’s a sweet wine. He used to like a sweet wine.”
Indeed, no one has managed to carve as indelible a mark onto Capri as Douglas has. In her vivid and acclaimed memoir, Greene on Capri, Shirley Hazzard, who palled around with Graham Greene on the island, describes how Greene, while strangely immune to the charms of Capri’s beauty and locals, made one connection—Norman Douglas. “Douglas had supplied a last point of reference in Capri’s long expatriate continuity,” Hazzard writes, “and Graham had been the last notable figure to profit from it—received, at his arrival, into an easy ambience of liveliness and eccentricity.”
Over a spaghetti dinner at Settanni, one of Capri’s oldest restaurants, Hazzard, who is now widowed and divides her time among New York, Naples, and Capri, explains why Douglas, a minor writer and a pedophile, after all, managed to capture Capri’s imagination. “Graham, in that nice thing he wrote on Douglas, in the preface to Douglas’s cookbook, he uses a very good word about Douglas: ‘unashamed,’” says Hazzard, who herself combines a kind of rebellious soulfulness with old-world propriety. “When Douglas died, that whole period of Capri fell away.”
And yet, that Capri—Capri Capri—lives on. The piazzetta is still ripe for major-league people-watching, as evidenced by Alba Clemente and her friend Diego Cortez on one afternoon, post-yachting. (“Oh, look, it’s Edward Albee in disguise.” “Isn’t that the Johnson & Johnson heiress?” Etc.) The island is still fertile ground for unusual romances between foreigner and local. Thomas Mann’s daughter Monika was living with a caprese fisherman for 35 years, until his death. And there are still young people, such as Fiona Swarovski, the Austrian Swarovski-crystal heiress, breathing fresh life into the ancient idea of Capri as a land for self-invention and personal fantasies.
Swarovski is famous around the island for many things: her incredible body, which is tanned and shown off today to good effect by her Daisy Duke jean shorts and a white man’s shirt, unbuttoned to her navel; her three husbands; her one parrot; her six dogs, Tanita, Bingo, Dinga, Pablo, Gypsy, and Napoleona, who respond to her raspy, smoker’s coo, “Come to mama,” with lots of frenzied panting. And there’s her house. It’s a Deco mansion, complete with an enormous veranda and garden. It sits above La Canzone del Mare, one of the beach clubs that was hip in the 50s and 60s. It had been previously owned by Gracie Fields, the famous 1930s English pop singer.
But the story of how Swarovski fell in love with the villa, like everything else in her life, has the charmed simplicity that befits a young princess. “With my first husband, I came here for the first time when I was 18 years old, and we actually jumped out of the boat over there,” she says, pointing her lit cigarette at the Marina Piccola. “So I walked up, the first time I saw Capri in my life, and said, ‘This is the place.’” Cut to 11 years later and husband number two: Swarovski returned to Capri and fought over the house with Leonardo Mondadori, the Italian publishing magnate who was in the middle of a divorce. Swarovski and Mondadori ended up cutting a deal. He’d have it for the first five years, and then it was all hers. “Because after five years I really wanted this house desperately, because there was so much love in Capri, and this is, I think, the best spot in Capri.”
Apparently her third husband, John Balzarini, thinks so too. A blond, bronzed cut of young, shirtless hunkiness, he is stretched out on a chaise, drinking in the Capri sun and waxing poetic, somewhat incoherently, about the moon. He may also be wondering how he got so lucky. How did he get so lucky? “I saw Capri. I saw Fiona,” Balzarini says drowsily. “And I told myself, she’s one of the nice women worldwide.” Easy, breezy.
With “seven bambini” between them from previous relationships, Swarovski and Balzarini have created their own Italian Brady Bunch idyll. “I’m in my own paradise,” says Swarovski. “I have a lot of friends passing from all over the world. Coming there with their boats and having lunches and dinners here.… Friends from all over the world. I had John-John Kennedy here,” she says, adding, “not last summer, the summer before.” In addition, in her role as an “organizer” of a film festival called Capri Hollywood, Swarovski has hosted many boldfaced names at the house, including Matthew Modine and Anthony Minghella. And the movies that were shown? “We had Shine, we had Evita. I don’t remember them all.”
The few remnants from Fields’s home, like a mosaic table that seats 19, are the most beautiful things about the place. In addition to having hung some of her own artwork, Swarovski has decorated the walls with what can only be called impulse purchases. In the living room, for example, hangs a brightly colored, childlike picture of a young lady on a veranda that looks much like Swarovski’s own veranda. “I was married to my first husband and there was a thing in Sotheby’s in London and I saw this painting,” she says, explaining its provenance. “I said, ‘I want this painting. I absolutely want this painting,’ and I went to London and I got this painting. He’s a very famous Austrian painter. It’s like all the Romantic painters, 1890—actually I think this is a reproduction. I’m not sure about it.”
There also remain pockets of old-school eccentricity in Capri, as you learn when you enter the world of Peter Van Schalkwyk and his wife, Mariella Gardella Van Schalkwyk, former editor-at-large for Italian Vogue. They live in a pint-size, but glorious, home 40 minutes from town, up a forsaken road busy only with stray dogs and buzzing insects. Van Schalkwyk, while open and kind, is a creature of almost painful nostalgia. He is dark, with black hair slicked back. His paintings of Mariella, which line the walls, have her as a young woman, posing languidly in evening gowns and smoking, like Marlene Dietrich in her prime. His Cole Porter recordings, muffled and staticky, roam the hallway like thick dust, settling in with a collection of old hats and Horst and Norman Parkinson photographs. As Mariella puts it, “Everything for him a déjà vu.” By contrast, Mariella describes her general outlook on life like this: “Every moment for me is a new Romanticism!” Indeed, she is a glowing ray of hope and optimism, with flowing gray hair, vibrant blue eyes, and the tendency to grip your hand and whisper dramatically about virtually everything.
While there is something curious about this particular pairing, Peter and Mariella, who call each other by the same name (“Penguin”), have created a separate existence on the island, with its own rules and standards. In it, the simplest things, such as one of Mariella’s naïve watercolors, appear beautiful; tacky hors d’oeuvres like tiny hot dogs somehow look elegant; money seems irrelevant; and there’s no such thing as a secret. “From the first wedding I had my children, I had a passionate love, but not a real love,” Mariella whispers just minutes after making your acquaintance. “Here it’s real love, but it doesn’t mean we … live together,” she says, lowering her voice even more and then giggling. “In a certain way, I love him because of his head. Of his intelligence. He loves me in another way. More like a woman.” Anyone they bring into their home immediately feels intoxicated, special, and immune to all the bad things that life may have in store. Perhaps that is why they have collected an enormous list of friends, varied with art-lovers like Siniscalco, Zorlu, and Dino Trapetti, the head of the renowned Roman costume house Tirelli (once run by his partner, Umberto Tirelli); intellectuals and professors; European royalty such as Lallo Sirignano and Egon von Fürstenberg; and designers such as Gianfranco Ferré, Claude Montana, and Calvin Klein, who, during one particularly boisterous Peter-and-Mariella dinner party, accidentally set fire to their kitchen.
And then there is the scene at Valentino’s Villa Cercola, which is grand but somewhat neglected and overgrown with vines. A vision in beige, his sweater draped over the shoulders as usual, Valentino is mellow, even subdued, his golden complexion doing little to hide the impression that the light inside him has dimmed. It might all be slightly depressing were it not for the dazzling young pick-me-ups he has hanging around, his favorite being Carlos Souza. Discovered by Valentino at the age of 16 in São Paulo, Souza, a strong but sprightly dreamboat in white Capri pants, spanking-white sneakers, and lime-green sweater (which, like his boss’s, is draped over his shoulders), is his Boy Friday, taking care of Mr. Valentino’s P.R., and making sure Mr. Valentino has what he wants to drink. He’s also there simply to loll around on the grass like an adorable, well-bred puppy, cheerfully gossiping about people in the fashion world and flirting with his boss. “He doesn’t like my tattoo,” says Souza, mock-sulking. “He says, ‘What the hell you did?’”
Lately, history has been creeping up on the present more than ever. In September, everybody on Capri, it seemed, was talking about the recent purchase of Lo Studio, a house on the Via Tragara, which had once belonged to Capri’s leading family—the Cerios. The buyer was Kinka Usher, a director of commercials from Santa Barbara, California, whose one film credit is Mystery Men, and who is also a descendant of the Cerio family. Large, loud, and Hollywood-pitch friendly, Usher wants to “set the record straight.”
From start to finish, the story he wants to set straight is pure Capri. It involves the three Cerio brothers: Arturo, a painter, who was, by all accounts, gay; George, an eye doctor and Usher’s grandfather; and Edwin, an engineer and writer who is seen as one of Capri’s most devoted citizens and is credited with erecting some of the island’s most notable buildings. But, according to Usher, Edwin was “evil” and did nothing less than steal George’s property and legacy.
It begins around 1915, when George was living and working in Rome, where he met Mabel Norman, an American painter of wealthy Newport stock. They fell in love and Mabel went with George to Capri, where, using her giant fortune, he “created the most beautiful life for her,” says Usher. He built her a huge house, right below the Via Tragara, and a glorious painting studio—Lo Studio—where it just so happens Usher is sitting and telling his story now.
At age 65, George wanted an heir, but there were issues. Not only was Mabel over 50 years old, she was, says Usher, “a germ freak and was really into birds.” And so George, without telling Mabel, decided to find someone to carry his baby. In true Capri style, he chose a rock carrier from Anacapri named Concetta Viva, who, Usher says, “had a great sense of humor and was really smart. Street-smart because she was a peasant woman.” In exchange for her having his baby, he set her up in Rome and gave her $2,000.
Alas, Concetta did not have a boy, as George had hoped, but gave birth to a girl, Tamara, Usher’s mother. Growing up, Tamara was told that she had been adopted by George and Mabel. Meanwhile, Concetta, now set up in Rome, would occasionally return to Capri and “sit up on the stoop and watch Tamara, my mother, go back and forth, knowing that she could never speak to her.” The real problem arising from Tamara’s birth, Usher explains, was that Edwin’s hopes of handing the family’s newly acquired Norman fortune to his own daughter, Laetitia, were dashed. (As it stood, the only other child in the Cerio family was Arturo’s illegitimate son, Matteo, who, according to Usher, wasn’t a threat. He “had a very horrible deformity where he didn’t grow beyond four six. He had a large hump on his back, but he was a wonderful guy.”)
“All of a sudden my mom comes on the scene and it’s over for Edwin and Laetitia,” Usher says, “because now my mom’s going to inherit everything!” But not all worked out as planned. Right before the war, George, Mabel, and Tamara left for the United States, and during the war George died. Then, when it came time for Mabel, who was helpless in matters of money and estates, to write her will, Edwin offered to pitch in. In fact, he did the job himself and made the most of her limited Italian. “Edwin appointed himself sole heir,” says Usher. “He basically, during the war, took thousands of pounds of silver, melted it into bullion.… And then started to rewrite the record books, claiming he built everything, tried to erase his brother, wipe him off the map.”
When Tamara returned to Capri at age 17, she found that everything she’d grown up with had been appropriated by her uncle Edwin. She also found herself on the receiving end of her cousin Laetitia’s hostility. At age 18, Tamara received a letter from Concetta, telling her the truth about her birth. But even after everything was revealed, Laetitia “would always say, ‘This is my aunt’s adopted daughter,’” recalls Tamara Kinsell, a bubbly, free-spirited dancer who, like her son, lives in Santa Barbara. “She could never recognize me as a Cerio. She wanted to be the only Cerio on the island.” Even years later, when Kinsell’s daughter Giselle started painting and signing her works “Cerio,” Laetitia, who was also a painter, wigged.
A few years ago, Usher heard that the painting studio was on the market. As Tamara recalls, “He said, ‘I would never, ever have an opportunity to buy a house built by my grandfather ever again in my life.’” In September, the reaction of the neighbors seemed chilly. Here was this brash director of commercials, bulldozing into town out of nowhere, desperate to knock one of the island’s heroes, Edwin Cerio, off of his pedestal. None of it seemed very Capri. But a month later, after the whole family came to stay, the people of Capri did a 180-degree turn, proving that, while they can hold a grudge, they also want to be loving.
“They just said, ‘Oh, you’re back. You have a house!’” says Kinsell. “It’s wonderful! It’s just terrific.”
The wonderfulness of it all is only part of the Capri story. The film Contempt,while often overwrought, does get to the destructive overtones of Capri’s Siren call. The film focuses on the marriage of an ex-typist (Brigitte Bardot) and a screenwriter (Michel Piccoli). For the first two-thirds of the film, we watch their relationship crumbling. Then, partly in an effort to save their marriage, they decide to go to Capri. But the luxury, decadence, and relentless beauty of the island prove too much to handle. They follow their urges as far as they will take them, and end up breaking up for good, which leads to the film’s tragic ending. A sense of doom hangs over Capri in real life, too. Likely, it is the looming memory of the cast of characters who sought out pleasure—Fersen, Krupp, Douglas, and Hornstein—and came to pathetic ends. Standing on her white roof, Mariella Gardella Van Schalkwyk points out the breathtaking views: there is Vesuvius, there’s Ischia, over there is Sorrento. And to the left are trees that were planted by Norman Douglas, and up there is where Fersen lived and died. Suddenly she turns as melancholy as her husband and reveals, in her unique English, what few on Capri are willing to say. “Your brain go water, staying here too long,” she says. “Too much paradise.”
Over the course of 5,000 years, wandering Jewish teachers have brought their ancient wisdom to Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon, Caligula’s Rome, and Ivan the Terrible’s Moscow. Now they have found themselves at Kitson, a superhot store on Los Angeles’s Robertson Boulevard that sells “Betty & Veronica” baseball caps and tight little T-shirts that read, HILTON LOHAN 2004. Tonight the store is teeming with paparazzi and frantic camera crews, jostling as if this were the Emmys. The occasion is a publication party for The Red String Book, a pocket-size work about wool bracelets said to ward off the Evil Eye. It was written by Yehuda Berg, elder son of Rabbi Philip Berg (generally referred to as “the Rav”), founder and top guru of the Kabbalah Centre. The seekers of Jewish mystical wisdom here tonight include a smattering of girls in micro-minis and Ugg boots, checking out the Juicy Couture and eating red-dyed sushi, and several Colin Farrell look-alikes, wearing Kabbalah chic: beat-up T-shirts with suit jackets, cords, cool sneakers, and newsboy caps. Among the somewhat bold-faced names are the men’s-wear designer Bijan, former Nicole Brown Simpson intimate Faye Resnick, and Donald Trump’s second wife, Marla Maples, whose entrance causes Karen Berg, wife of the Rav, to crumple with joy.
As they have in other imperial capitals around the world for millennia, the rabbis are finding the jaded rich eager for their wisdom. Consider Wes Stevens, a type-A talent agent for voice-over actors. Given his Sikh doctor, his yoga instructor, his nutritionist, his dermatologist, and his almost daily lunches at Fred Segal, you’d think he would have been well taken care of. Then he found Kabbalah, and something amazing happened: his tendency to get snippy and all bent out of shape disappeared. Here is how he handled life’s hard knocks thrown at him this particular week: “I was stood up by a guy, my dog was discovered to have a mass, and my computer crashed,” he says. “Before [Kabbalah], I would’ve not been able to get out of bed. By the end of the week, I could laugh about it.”
The Kabbalah Centre, which opened in Los Angeles in 1984 and in Richmond Hill, New York, a year after, can seem frivolous—a Jewishy New Age emporium selling “Sexual Energy” and “Dialing God” candles, magic amulets, and elaborately tarted-up common sense. Its philosophy has little resemblance to the ancient Jewish mysticism whose name it bears. But, for thousands of people—especially those with short fuses and the conviction that the world revolves around them—the new Kabbalah has achieved some remarkable results. From coast to coast, film-industry people, members of the chattering classes, and creative icons are becoming more generous, calmer, and, well … nicer. While the teachings are filled with jargon—about opening curtains, plugging in, and becoming vessels—the message, in its purest form, is old and simple: giving makes life better. It’s the golden rule of the Jewish rabbi Jesus: Love thy neighbor as thyself. Getting that message into the head of a Hollywood agent is no small feat.
Trouble is, just as the kabbalist students are learning to exist on a higher plane, the Kabbalah Centre’s leaders seem to be falling for the material world whence these seekers have come. In their zeal to spread Kabbalah throughout the world (they already have some 50 Centres and satellite branches internationally), the Bergs, of late, have resorted to some unappealing commercialism, offering not only a catalogue’s worth of related but arguably extraneous products, but also the kinds of claims that some say give false hope. “They’ve taken the whole idea of Kabbalah and twisted it around,” says a disillusioned former student from the Centre. “Would you see the Dalai Lama taking out an ad and doing a party at Kitson?” asks another.
Kabbalah, which means “to receive,” traces its roots to medieval Provence and Spain. In those days, it existed on the far fringes of Jewish mysticism, which, in its broadest strokes, was about seeking a closer, more immediate relationship with God, as opposed to the traditional, legalistic approach of Orthodox Judaism. The aim of Kabbalah was to explain no less than the inner workings of the soul and the divine world, and to end humanity’s separation from God, which occurred at the moment of creation. Deeply complex, dangerous even, Kabbalah was reserved for married Orthodox Jewish men over 40. As a prerequisite, they had to have mastered the entire rabbinic literature. Once they joined the ranks, they routinely fasted and rolled around naked in the snow in the name of self-abnegation before God. “It was esotericism par excellence,” says Allan Nadler, director of the Jewish Studies program at Drew University, in Madison, New Jersey. “It was the equivalent of a truly elite monastery somewhere in the middle of nowhere.”
Today’s Kabbalah, by contrast, has been embraced by thousands of people worldwide, many of them not Jewish. On any given day at the L.A. Kabbalah Centre, located in a former Korean Presbyterian church and children’s nursery on South Robertson Boulevard, you might see an African immigrant, a pair of Mexican gardeners, or a Beverly Hills wife with false breasts wandering about to find out what Madonna and Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher know that they don’t. A Sting recording from the later years might be playing quietly in the background. There are lots of attractive things for sale: candles with names like “DNA of the Soul,” various ointments, cute baby clothes, energy bars. All the essential, glossy texts—written by the Rav or either of his two rabbi sons, Yehuda, 32, and Michael, 31—are on prominent display for easy perusal. Published in large print, sometimes with bold pink or red capitals, these revered texts are peppered with pop-culture references we’ve all heard of—A-Rod and Michael Jordan, pizza and chocolate cake—and phrases like “Big time!” and “Let’s Get Crazy!” But the promises are beyond what was previously thought possible: “total fulfillment,” “power of prosperity,” and “endless joy,” which, The Power of Kabbalah assures us, includes “the joy of sex and the ecstasy of chocolate.”
Some who seem to be seekers may simply be trying to catch a glimpse of Madonna, who has integrated kabbalistic symbols into the backdrops for her concerts, written children’s books inspired by Kabbalah, and reportedly donated millions to various Centre branches and initiatives. (The latest official sum, according to her publicist, Liz Rosenberg, is $5 million, but reports have run upwards of $20 million.) Though Madonna is the most famous celebrity associated with the movement, on any given night at the Centre you might also run into her husband, Guy Ritchie, Demi and Ashton, Marla, Donna Karan, Roseanne Barr, or Sandra Bernhard, the pioneer of the group, who started studying Kabbalah in 1995. Other famous people who have recently checked it out include Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Jackson, Courtney Love, Jerry Hall, Mick Jagger, Winona Ryder, Monica Lewinsky, Victoria Beckham, Sarah Ferguson, and blonde shiksa babes Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton. Train wrecks, skanks, convicted felons—all are welcome. Like any church worth its salt, the Kabbalah Centre is a hospital for sinners, not a museum of saints.
How does it work? First off, there’s not a lot of God talk. As Yehuda, a bearlike, somewhat insecure-seeming man in a yarmulke, explains, the world already has too much of the “My god is better than your god” thing. The word kabbalists use instead is “light.” Light is perfection, and light wants for nothing, but, rather, gives indefinitely. Think of a match lit in a football stadium, an analogy the teachers frequently use. Therefore, there is no “praying” to the light. The goal, instead, is to “make a connection” to the light, to become more like light itself; i.e., to give. While there are no E-meters to attach to your fingertips (as in Scientology), there is much electrical talk—of neutrons, protons, and, especially, energy. At the New York book party for The Red String Book, at DKNY in mid-December, an excitable Donna Karan explains that it was energy, in part, that drew her to Kabbalah. “I pick up on energy because I work with energy,” she says, bursting with enthusiasm, flashbulbs popping off behind her. “I’m very energetically sensitive.” She holds her hands in front of her. “Have you ever noticed how light comes off your fingertips? … Now, do you feel that?” she asks, placing one hand an inch from your chest, another an inch from your back. “That’s energy!”
There’s lots more energy in store at the Shabbat service at the L.A. Centre, where the men, all of whom wear white to “attract positive energy,” are separated from the women by a low screen, as in a traditional Orthodox synagogue. Vigorous, ecstatic singing fills the room as Esther Sibilia, the Centre’s stunning, 43-year-old book publisher, bellows above the din to this reporter, “I wouldn’t use the tape recorder!,” before explaining something about short-circuiting—due to all the energy. Suddenly the floor erupts in a new noise—“Ay!” “Ay!” “Ay!”—as the seekers deliriously pump their hands in the air and make like they’re throwing something. “We’re sending energy towards Chernobyl,” Sibilia cries, her bright, green eyes aglow. “We’re transforming negative energy to light!”
Throughout the Torah reading, the men meander, carrying small children on their shoulders and trading bear hugs, while the women—a logjam of large jewelry and excellent nose jobs—zip well-manicured fingernails along the Hebrew words at lightning speed. “This line gets us back to the seed,” Sibilia shouts, zeroing in on a line of the Zohar, the main kabbalistic interpretation of the Torah. “It takes us up to today with a corrected DNA. We’re moving forward with less robotic energy!” A routine activity is the meditation on the 72 Hebrew names of God, each of which is endowed with self-improvement properties—an innovation of Yehuda’s—such as “defusing negative energy and stress” and “dumping depression.”
The Jewish establishment is up in arms over Philip Berg’s kabbalism (or “Bergism,” as one critic prefers to call it). It has been denounced by the chief rabbis of Great Britain and South Africa, and by Jewish leaders in the United States and Canada. It’s been called “dangerous,” “cheap,” and “pagan.” Rabbi Yuval Sherlo, of an Israeli hesder yeshiva, spoke for many when he said, during the 3,000-strong Kabbalah Centre pilgrimage to Israel in September, “It’s hard for me to express in words how much I despise this festival and to what extent it has nothing to do with Kabbalah.”
Nadler, who slipped into a couple of lectures at the New York Centre, breaks down the problem. “They didn’t hold press conferences,” he says of the original kabbalists, “and they certainly didn’t put on cone-like bras and prance around. And strap-on penises.” More offensive, says Nadler, is that, while a couple of Berg’s concepts are loosely rooted in tradition, mainly his teachings are a subversion of real Kabbalah. “The goal of the mystic is not to get rid of lower-back pain. It’s actually to increase it,” says Nadler. “What [the Kabbalah Centre] is teaching is the antithesis. They are saying, Here is a vehicle for self-empowerment, to feel better. It’s about healing. It’s about getting laid more often.”
Whatever the ancient kabbalists would have thought about them, the new students are gung-ho, even fanatical. They all have stories about how Kabbalah has profoundly helped them. Addicts have been rehabilitated, broken families brought back together, the egomaniacal brought back to earth.
“L.A. starts to feel really egocentric,” says writer-actor-director Vanessa Parise (Kiss the Bride), who was introduced to Kabbalah through private classes in the home of rising star Monet Mazur. “I was like, God, everything is about me. I’m going to acting class and yoga. It’s all about me and my career, and then when I went there, and it is about you, but you’re just a vessel that you can share with the world.” Andy Behrman—whose riveting 2002 memoir, Electroboy, chronicled his struggles with bipolar disorder, drug binges, sex binges, Barneys binges, hustling, counterfeiting Mark Kostabi paintings during his stint as a publicist for the artist, five months in prison, and electroshock therapy—has found that Kabbalah is integral to maintaining the stability he now enjoys. (He is currently the Centre’s publicist.)
For Southern Baptist Marla Maples, Kabbalah has provided the answers to the spiritual questions she has pondered since youth, such as “Who made God?,” and also healed the rage she’d accumulated during her two-year “You’re Fired!” divorce proceedings from Donald Trump. “During that period of time, you think you’ve cleared out a lot of the pain by the time you decide to move on,” says Maples. “But, as I started looking deeper at myself, I realized there were still places inside where I held anger, or had blame. [Kabbalah] helped me learn to take responsibility for my own choices and no longer be the victim.”
Personal assistants and parking attendants all over L.A. have the Kabbalah Centre to thank for taming world-class divas. Consider Roseanne Barr, a woman who publicly accused her parents of sexual abuse, grabbed her crotch after singing the national anthem at the 1990 World Series, and casually talked about trying to stab a former executive producer. When she became involved in Kabbalah, her goal had nothing to do with changing herself; as far as she was concerned, everyone else was the problem. “I was one of those Jewish people that goes and studies Buddhism and everything else,” she explains. Then one day Sandra Bernhard mentioned that Moses had split the Red Sea by meditating on certain Hebrew letters. “I was like, ‘What?!’” recalls Barr with a cackle. Informed that Kabbalah encompassed some of her other interests, such as numerology and astrology, she went along with Bernhard to a class.
There she met Rav Berg, a man “so awesomely about love that it just blows your mind”—someone who is kind to animals and who, during every service, dandles on his knee his two-and-a-half-year-old grandson, Josh (Michael’s son), who has Down syndrome. That first day, the Rav had a surprise for Barr—a manuscript written by one of his colleagues about Roseanne Conner, the obnoxious crank she played on television, and how this woman could benefit from Kabbalah. “It was just so weird, I’m like, ‘Whaaa?’” recalls Barr. “The way this guy had written about Roseanne Conner, he was, like, seeing deeply into Roseanne Barr, and he was saying these things like, you know, that she always was quick to judgment.”
Barr went on to study with Rabbi Eitan Yardeni, a quiet, good-looking, 41-year-old Israeli, who is a teacher at the Centre. Magnetic, disarming, and patient, Yardeni employs the kind of techniques used by a tough therapist. He refuses to coddle and flatter, but rather forces the seeker, often through long silences, to probe his own role in his misery. One Hollywood power player found the Centre “sweaty” and “culty,” until this person met Yardeni. His roster—Barr, Madonna, Demi, Ashton—reads like the CAA client list and is growing. “Roseanne had a Kabbalah meeting,” says producer Sandy Gallin, recalling how he got involved. “I took Dolly Parton and Barry Diller. Something about Eitan really attracted me. When you meet someone like Deepak Chopra or Eitan Yardeni, you want to get as much as you can.”
After a few years of hard work with Yardeni, Barr became kind of … decent. “All my relationships and everything were pretty well damaged by my bad behavior,” says Barr. “I was able to turn around and heal because of the fact that I could find a quiet space inside my mind and get rid of my fear and feel love… . I had an estranged family—we didn’t speak for 15 years. Now I have a wonderful relationship with my mother and my siblings and with my children and with everyone that I have relationships with. I don’t get high off getting angry anymore.”
Nine years of Kabbalah have similarly mellowed Madonna, once a veritable crucible of selfishness, according to those who know her. “I stopped thinking that I was the beginning and end of everything,” says Madonna, who nonetheless admits that old habits die hard. When she starts acting out, the Rav keeps her in line. “I mean, I see people behaving like obvious idiots all the time, and I’ve had conversations, and I’ve said, ‘Oh God, that’s ridiculous. I can’t believe this person. It’s so selfish, it’s so this, so that.’ He’ll just look at me and just say, ‘You know, you’re using those adjectives again.’”
The kabbalists have a scientific theory for why being nice is a good idea—they call it the Butterfly Effect. Kabbalist Adam Isaacs, a UTA agent who handles Keira Knightley and Juliette Binoche, breaks it down into terms those in his business might understand: “If you scream at your assistant, which you’re allowed to do—I mean, not allowed to do, but you can get away with it ostensibly—you know, your assistant may not be in a position where she or he can yell back at you,” he says. “What they may do is go out to dinner that night and scream at a waiter. Just because it’s got to come out, they’ll scream at a waiter. You have to understand that you’re responsible for that waiter’s evening getting ruined.”
It’s unfair to say that all of the Centre’s adherents are raging tyrants. For many Jews among the crowd, the relevance and participatory ways of Kabbalah satisfy a greater spiritual need than the traditional Judaism they grew up on—the rote, “We destroy, we embitter, we falsify … ” Over a bland Shabbat meal of lamb and couscous at the Centre, attended by a couple hundred hard-core members, Erica Aaron, an attractive eye surgeon wearing a white newsboy cap, explains how the Centre was a refreshing antidote to her old synagogue in Beverly Hills, where, she says, “everyone would eye each other and gossip. ‘I saw her husband with so-and-so.’ They all looked each other up and down.” In the Kabbalah Centre, she found not only wisdom that made sense to her but a home. “This place is like a cocoon of love and trust. In this world, it’s so rare that it’s hard to believe it. [My husband and I] would go home and say, ‘Was that woman for real? Is she really that nice?’ There always has to be an agenda.”
Aaron is right; there is a good feeling during the Shabbat dinner at the Centre. Conversation is easy and full of laughter; time passes quickly. After the meal, Aaron goes to a microphone and, choking back tears, tells the group how much they have done for her this year. Throughout the rest of the evening, women come up to her and give her tight, warm embraces.
In addition, there is another category of modern kabbalists altogether: lovely, somewhat New Agey hoots—people like Jeanette Longoria, a fabulously blonde and sexy 77-year-old social queen from Texas. Raised Presbyterian, she has, over the years, accumulated seven gorgeous children, 13 grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, two mogul husbands (both now deceased), a magnificent estate in San Antonio, a Manhattan apartment at the top of the Olympic Tower, and friends who include Moroccan royalty, ambassadors, style expert Elsa Klensch, and the late Eleanor Lambert, founder of the International Best-Dressed List. For Longoria’s third act, she is spreading the word on how to have an amazing love life after 60, chiefly through her recent book, Aphrodite and Me, the cover of which features a picture of Longoria—looking all of 20—in a diaphanous gown emerging from the Mediterranean Sea in Cyprus. As she explains it, with a charming Texas lilt, “My whole thing is love.”
A key piece to her whole thing of love is Rabbi Moshe Rosenberg, 46, of the New York Kabbalah Centre, whom she met two years ago through a friend after lunching next to the Centre, on East 48th Street. “He was just wonderful,” says Longoria, recalling how she and the rabbi clicked that day, talking about family and, of course, love. Soon thereafter Rabbi Rosenberg, a stout Israeli with a small beard and an unassuming manner, was sharing his kabbalistic wisdom with the Bergdorf crowd in Longoria’s apartment, amid the mirrored walls, matching white furniture, mountains of frilly pillows, and soft paintings of lounging, Longoria-esque creatures.
She passes around clementines and dates, which are to be eaten simultaneously, she gently instructs. “Just bliss,” she promises. She settles into the sofa and smiles warmly, casting an eye toward the rabbi. “He says the books have energy,” she says, referring to the multi-volume Zohar.
“Not only books,” Rosenberg says rabbinically. “Objects. This silver has energy,” he says, picking up one of Longoria’s exquisite goblets and giving it a careful examination. “It’s white, so it reflects. That’s why you love silver.”
Longoria beams. Her eyes twinkle. “See what I mean? Isn’t he cute? … He’s a fabulous man. And I’m just a woman.”
“You’re not just a woman, and I think you know that,” says the rabbi. “She has Kabbalah inside already,” he explains. “She already is Kabbalah and doesn’t even realize it. Because Kabbalah is really just about love.”
“See, this is why we connected,” Longoria says. “I think everything should get to love.”
But even for this idealist, something doesn’t sit quite right. “I don’t like to see Kabbalah get too commercial,” she says privately.
Before all the star-studded parties, there was just one man. Born Feivel Gruberger in Brooklyn, Philip Berg attended yeshiva and was ordained as a rabbi before becoming an insurance agent. Then, in 1962, he met his first wife’s uncle, an Israeli kabbalist named Yehuda Brandwein, then dean of a yeshiva in Jerusalem, which would later become the Kabbalah Learning Centre. Berg and Brandwein corresponded by mail, examining kabbalistic questions. According to the Bergs, before Brandwein died he anointed Philip his successor. (Brandwein’s family, however, has denied the appointment of Berg.)
The mission was given fresh life in the early 70s when Berg happened again upon Karen, a Brooklyn woman who’d worked as a secretary in his office in the late 50s. A restless, ambitious nomad, said to have been into motorcycles, she was intrigued that this businessman was suddenly teaching Kabbalah and wearing a big fur hat, and she made a play for him. “I said to him, ‘I got a deal for you,’” recalls Karen, who beneath her wigs and silk jabot blouses still seems like a tough cookie. “‘I’ll work for free for you, but you teach me.’” Berg cautiously agreed, aware that teaching women was forbidden. But Karen wanted more. “Why don’t we teach it to the masses?” she asked him one day over lunch at Ratner’s Deli. “Because we’re gonna get killed,” he replied. Karen wouldn’t let up. “I said, ‘So what’ll happen? What can possibly happen?’ That’s how the Centres started.”
Berg married Karen, ditching his wife and seven children. After a few years of going back and forth between Queens and Israel, where their two sons were born, the Bergs, thanks to Karen’s chutzpah, went to Hollywood. Their first L.A. Centre was in Westwood, and it could fit no more than 60 people. If Kabbalah was to become a household word, if the Bergs were to be the McDonald’s of spirituality, they had to think outside the box.
Step one, they decided, was to play down the whole “Jewish” thing. Though they secured nonprofit “church status,” which relieved them of tax burdens, they began insisting that Kabbalah was not a religion, but rather “Technology for the Soul” that everyone should have access to. It paid off. When the Bergs opened the new Centre on South Robertson Boulevard, business increased tenfold. “It’s almost like Field of Dreams,” says Yehuda, who loves dropping pop-cultural references. “You build it, they will come.”
They became unabashed networkers, Karen in particular, making bold phone calls to whatever machers they knew, in order to connect to Hollywood’s biggest, wealthiest names. Now, with Demi and Madonna reportedly hosting $75,000 Kabbalah parties at the most happening clubs worldwide, like the private Home House in London, the Centre brings along its own videographer to document every scintillating exchange between a Berg and a boldfaced name. It markets its wares with as much splash as possible—hence a billboard at Sunset and La Cienega Boulevards for The Red String Book, announcing, BUY THE BOOK EVERYONE’S WEARING. “When I saw that sign on Sunset, I was like, They sold out,” says a former student. “Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard does stuff like that.”
The Bergs have made little effort to conceal their special treatment of famous people. Madonna, says this same student, prays behind her very own screen, to protect her from the Evil Eye. At Shabbat, she’ll sit at the A-list table with the Bergs or Eitan Yardeni. Recalls the student, who ate with the hoi polloi, “Madonna’s table had glass, real plates, and knives and forks. Everyone else ate off plastic… . We were eating this crap off, like, paper plates and didn’t know what was what. They had different, nice wine.” When this student pointed out the inequity to those around her, “I think that other people were like, ‘Oh my God, but she has more light. She’s more of a vessel.’” (The Centre denies that Madonna prays separately and that anyone uses plastic.)
Yardeni is refreshingly honest when asked about his reaction when she became his student: “I felt I had a bigger responsibility.” As for Madonna’s take, she explains, “I’ve worked on developing friendships and relationships with certain people, like Eitan and/or the Rav. So I probably have a more open-minded communication with them.”
The closeness between Madonna and the Centre’s leadership has led some insiders to believe that Madonna is borderline brainwashed, that she is “sucked in beyond a point of reason.” According to these sources, she has told friends that studying may help you get pregnant or remove the chaos from your life, that she has even lost friends, such as actress Debi Mazar, because they weren’t buying it.
Madonna denies that she pushes Kabbalah on anyone. “I just have a policy,” she says. “If people ask me questions and they’re interested, then I will discuss things with them, or I’ll give them books to read, or I’ll tell them about classes, or I’ll introduce them to a teacher. Otherwise, no, because Kabbalah isn’t something that you can drag anybody to. You really have to come to it on your own.”
On the other hand, there are rumors that Madonna has had her own frustration with the Centre. Sources say that during her most recent tour a couple of Kabbalah students, at the behest of the Centre, scalped a number of donated tickets and were caught. A source says that Madonna got steamed at the Centre’s leadership and told them in no uncertain terms that they needed to get their act together—leaving them quaking in their boots. (Both Madonna and the Centre’s leadership deny that there has been any tension whatsoever.)
Starting around 1989, the Bergs came up with another winning strategy: selling miracles. They came up with Kabbalah Mountain Spring Water, for which they charge $3.80 a bottle, claiming it cleanses the soul and can cure ills. No matter that there is little precedent in either traditional Judaism or Kabbalah for this water, and that it comes from a plant in Canada; followers swilled it. Barr, who had liver damage when she began studying, partially credits the water for restoring her health. Over Shabbat dinner at the Centre, Sandy Shadgoo, an attractive Angeleno of Persian descent, recalls how her two-year-old son, who had been afflicted with so many allergies that he couldn’t leave the house, was healed when she followed the advice of her teacher to mix Kabbalah water into his bottle and to have him sleep with a miniature Zohar under his pillow. “In three days, he was running around outside,” says Shadgoo. “He had a macadamia-nut muffin and nothing happened.” Erica Aaron shakes her head in awe listening to the account and shares her own miracle: “I can’t tell you how many times the Zohar saved me from getting hit by a car.”
When it comes to potentially fatal car accidents, it seems Kabbalah’s amulets are especially potent. Last spring, a red string bracelet ($26) allegedly saved the life of Centre P.R. man Andy Behrman. “I was walking across Wilshire Boulevard in front of Saks,” recalls Behrman, who speaks with a gentle drawl. “I was on my way to my therapist, and I crossed the street, and a car going about 55 miles an hour went through a red light and hit me. I was a pedestrian. There’s no way I could have survived that [without the string]. I went up in the air, my head went through the windshield, and I had this split second where I thought, The end of my life, right in front of Saks.” He suffered only a few cuts and scrapes.
In his book Becoming Like God, Michael Berg spells it out in giant pink capitals: “IT IS NOW POSSIBLE FOR LARGE NUMBERS OF PEOPLE TO ESCAPE THE PRISON OF PAIN, SUFFERING, AND DEATH.”
Among the true believers, as with Christian Scientists, medical science is regarded as useless. “How much money has gone into cancer research? And what has it done?” asks Esther Sibilia with such fervor that there’s no use pointing out the obvious evidence to the contrary. “You have to deal with the seed“—a key Kabbalah term. “What did that person do to allow that cell to attract the cancer?” However, this belief has not saved the Rav from health problems: in September he had a stroke. While his family insists that he is doing “amazing,” they have also kept him out of sight and quietly relocated him to New York for what they call “rehabilitation.”
For many who are sick—or who have family members who are sick—the message is clear and deeply unsettling: they are not being sufficiently kabbalistic. Many former students feel that the Centre is practicing spiritual blackmail. One tells how she has received the following kind of plea from the Centre: “Your child is sick and you can make them better by giving… . Give till it hurts.” Another says she was told that if she didn’t go on the grand High Holiday trip to New York—which cost about $2,000—her family would be in danger. “I have three little kids,” she says. “I’d leave them all and I would rush over to New York so I could be there.”
One member of a Florida group for former Kabbalah Centre members (the Kabbalah Support Group) claims that the Centre has destroyed people’s lives, becoming overly involved in marriages, for instance, advising Party A to divorce Party B if Party B has any doubts about the Centre. The Rav has said that six million Jews could have been saved from extinction during the Holocaust if only they had studied Kabbalah. He has also said that followers’ inner “opponent” is nothing other than a possession by Satan. To rid themselves of Satan, they must “share”—Kabbalah-speak for giving money and time to the Centre. Giving to other causes is actually discouraged, says a source. “They’re the ones who are really changing the world.”
Where does all the money go? To be sure, some is going toward the opening of new Centres throughout the world. But what about the rest? Tax records reveal that last year the New York branch had net assets of more than $24 million. The Centre has kept its financial books closed, leaving open the question of how much the family is taking out in the form of perks. As it happens, the Rav and Karen are building three houses in Beverly Hills for the family, all of which are titled to the Centre. Karen drives a Mercedes S500. She is given rings and necklaces by kabbalist jeweler-to-the-stars Neil Lane. As one source puts it, “Money is money, and they have a lifestyle that is supported by all of their students and all these businesses like the bookstore, the books, the red string, the candles—all of it. Quite honestly, it disgusts me.” (The Centre asserts, however, that anyone who doesn’t have the means to study can opt into the “scholarship fund,” and get free Zohars and free classes, which otherwise cost about $250 a course.) Another former student sees the motivation a bit differently: “These are people who want Kabbalah to take over the world.”
Meanwhile, the young volunteers, called Chevre (Hebrew for “friends”), live in apartments owned or rented by the Centre, and receive a $35 monthly stipend. Rick Ross and Steven Hassan, the country’s top cult-watchers, have each conducted interventions for such volunteers. Ross, who was hired by a prominent British family to persuade their daughter to quit, recalls, “At the end of the intervention, she decided to leave the Kabbalah Centre, return to England permanently, and she left with the clothes on her back. She had no savings, nothing.”
Few working Chevre, however, say they have a problem with the arrangement. Alison Cohen, 27, a sweet woman who appears to be at Yehuda’s beck and call, walks around with a somewhat glazed smile. When asked about her life, her job, the Centre, how she’s doing, the answer is always the same: “Amazing.” Another Chevre worker, Rachel Liberman, gave up her stipend when she got married, saying, “Right now I prefer not to get paid… . I like that idea that I’m putting that sharing out there.”
After all, for the true believers, no sacrifice is too great. Madonna speaks for many when she says that if Kabbalah were to spread throughout the globe it would mean an end to senseless killing. “The idea that hundreds of millions of people are conscious of the idea of cause and effect is huge,” she says. “I mean, there wouldn’t be any wars.”
Will Kabbalah move the world in the direction of peace, or will it become a victim of its own zeal? At the party for The Red String Book at DKNY, one can’t help but think that the latter is more likely. Ostensibly a benefit for Spirituality for Kids, the Centre’s outreach program for children —including at-risk inner-city youths—the party is a chaotic exhibition of materialism. The main event is a luxury auction. Among the wares are a Neil Lane necklace, a Chambord watch, and a Project Alabama jacket, all displayed in a glass case. The crowd feverishly pushes forward to take a gander as the hip auctioneer screams into his microphone, “Come on, guys, do I hear $525?” A woman with a paddle appears in doubt about whether to bid, prompting a boy in red to push his way through the crowd to get to her.
“I know the designer,” he shouts, nearly hysterical. “I can get it in your size! He’s one of my best friends!”
Meanwhile, a few other kabbalists are perusing the DKNY racks, trying to get a jump on Christmas shopping.
The paradox of the scene is inescapable. Yehuda, when he takes the microphone, is at least shrewd enough to know it should be addressed. “What we see tonight is a bridging of worlds,” he says, trying to sound cheerful. “You can be at DKNY in SoHo and still be spiritual!” It’s hard to tell whether even he believes it.
But even at her best, when she’s pleading, “Be My Tomboy Bride,” it’s difficult not to see and hear her parents, James Taylor and Carly Simon—James and Carly, who wrote “Fire and Rain” and “You’re So Vain,” respectively, when they were younger than Sally is now. Sally says she doesn’t care. “It never feels like ‘Oh, I’m never going to be as good as my parents,’” she explains. “It’s a question of interpreting my experiences and interpreting the melodies and interpreting my life.”
What’s remarkable about the many now grown children of rock stars is that, despite their parents’ wild success and their own, often painful childhoods “behind the music,” most of them feel the need to follow in their parents’ footsteps—if not into music itself, then into equally rock ’n’ roll fields. Identifying them could become its own parlor game. In addition to Sally, the group of musicians includes her brother, Ben Taylor, Jakob Dylan, Sean Lennon, Julian Lennon, Rufus Wainwright, Harper Simon, Jason Bonham, Emma Townshend, Jesse Wood, Chynna Phillips, Joachim Cooder, Zach Starkey (son of Richard “Ringo” Starkey), Francesca Gregorini (Ringo’s stepdaughter), William Collins (son of Bootsy), Tracy Lewis (son of George Clinton), and Elijah Blue (son of Cher and Gregg Allman). Another group of kids may not sing or play an instrument but are in careers that get them invited to rock ’n’ roll parties: The fashion designers—Stella McCartney and Jade Jagger. The model—Elizabeth Jagger. The actress—Liv Tyler. And the various combinations thereof—Mackenzie Phillips (actress-singer), Bijou Phillips (actress-singer), Kimberly Stewart (model-actress), Leah Wood (model-singer), Tracee Ross (model-actress), Nona Gaye (singer-actress), Moon Unit Zappa (writer-actress), Dweezil Zappa (actor-musician), Donovan’s daughter Ione Skye (painter-actress), her brother Donovan Leitch (filmmaker-actor-singer). The list goes on.
Among them you will find best friends, neighbors, lovers, ex-lovers, and sometimes rivals. Unifying them is the fact that, almost without exception, they were raised by wildly charismatic, irresponsible rebels who were loved by millions, most of all their children. If that love was reciprocated, it was not always felt. After all, there are great rock ’n’ roll songs about romance, drugs, and politics, but, with the exception of “Hey Jude,” written to console a negligent bandmate’s wounded son, no truly great rock ’n’ roll songs about children. From the new generation of rock stars’ children, however, it’s easy to imagine that one might emerge about parents.
For a child still in the single-digit years, life in the rock world is like an endless parade of loopy uncles. In the eyes of Cher’s then two-year-old son, Elijah Blue, for example, Mom’s boyfriend, Kiss front man Gene Simmons, was just this neat guy who wore black-and-white makeup and had a really long tongue, while four-year-old Jason Bonham, son of Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham, happened to have three a.m. play dates with boys six times his age. “They’d come and wake me up in the middle of the night and say, ‘Can you come play drums?’ And, you know, people would be there! I didn’t know who they were!” says Jason, 35, now an excitable drummer himself. “They were just people that spoke funny at that time in the morning. You know, with slurred words.” (They turned out to be Paul McCartney, Keith Moon, and the guys from Bad Company.) Meanwhile, the son of Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann, Justin Kreutzmann, who appears in the movie Woodstockas an infant being lifted out of a chopper, was put to use nine years later when the band was asked by NBC to provide urine samples before performing on Saturday Night Live. “My dad said, ‘Go in the bathroom,’” recalls Justin, a charmingly giddy and rambling film and video director, now 31. “And there were six little cups lined up. I’m like, ‘Get me some water.’”
There comes a point in childhood, however, when Dad’s limo and wide-brimmed leather hat become as horrifying as anything else having to do with parents. Mick Fleetwood might have thought those drawstring pants with the dangling balls—which he wore not only on the Rumours album cover but also in real life—were cool. But to his daughter Amy, his getup was the worst thing that could happen to a child. “I was just permanently embarrassed,” says Amy, a soft-spoken and willowy 30-year-old photographer and fashion stylist. “We were finally going to school in England, and we lived in this village, and all the parents were very straight, wearing tweed outfits and Remington boots. And I used to just say to my mum, ‘Why can’t Dad just be a farmer?’”
China Kantner, the daughter of Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner and Grace Slick, would “run for the hills” when her blue-haired mom emerged from beneath the wings of her DeLorean in the Marin Country Day parking lot. Kimberly Stewart tried, to no avail, to make her dad, Rod, in his “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” period, drop her off a block from school. And when the absurd rumor emerged that a quart of semen had been discovered when Rod’s stomach was pumped, life at school sucked. “They’ll say your dad is a fag. And your dad wears tight clothing,” says the lanky 22-year-old model-actress, kicking back in her part of the Stewarts’ Beverly Hills estate with a pack of Parliaments and some Ricola cough drops. “I actually punched a kid across the face once because he said something about my dad, and I just went crazy.… You question yourself. You’re like, Wait, is it true? Like, my dad wears tight clothes—that means he’s a loser?”
Sometime after puberty, the humiliation transforms to fist-pumping triumph. By 16, Kimberly “knew my dad was awesome, so it was like, ‘Fuck you. You just wish your dad was like that!’” As cool as rock-star life was for the rock star, it was even cooler for his hormonal high-schooler. For many, geometry homework—school, for that matter—was optional. Instead of class trips to the science museum to listen to seashells, they got to globe-trot from Jamaica to Paris to Tokyo. On tour with the Dead (whose adventures will be chronicled in Dennis McNally’s book A Long Strange Trip), a majorly psyched Justin Kreutzmann might start his day by ordering up three carts of ice cream from room service and end it with a bedful of hot groupies. “The funny thing is, they were always closer to my age than the band’s,” Justin says. “I invariably would be at the party suite, and they’d be like, ‘Oh yeah, you want somewhere to sleep? Come sleep in my room.’ So, I’d sleep on the floor, right? And there’d be four chicks in the bed, and I’d be like, ‘Something’s got to be done about this.’
No one had more freedom than Mackenzie Phillips, now 42, sober, and acting again. At 13, after running away from her mother’s house, she showed up at her father’s Bel Air mansion, where he was living with his third wife, Genevieve. In step with the latest trends, John Phillips answered the door wearing a floor-length, tie-dyed Indian caftan and a Jesus beard and smoking a joint.
“Dad, I’m moving in—could you pay for the taxi?” Mackenzie remembers saying.
“Sure, kid, come on in.”
“What are the rules?” Mackenzie asked.
“Well, let me see,” he said. After a moment of heavy contemplation, John replied, “You have to come home at least once a week. And if you come home from going out the night before and it’s light out, always bring a change of clothing, because a lady is never seen during daylight hours wearing evening clothing.”
She walked in to say hi to Dad’s friends—Gram Parsons, Keith Richards, Donovan, and Mick Jagger, most of whom she wanted to have sex with. Her little girl’s dream came true, when, at the age of 18, she found herself over at Mick’s place making tuna sandwiches with her father. John left to go get mayonnaise, and “Mick turned around and locked the door, and looked at me, and said, ‘I’ve been waiting to do this since you were 10 years old,’” Mackenzie recalls. “My dad is banging on the door, ‘Mick, be nice to her! Don’t hurt her.’ And I’m going, ‘Dad, leave us alone. It’s fine.’ And we slept together.” The next morning Jagger gave her a beautiful robe and fed her tea, toast, and fresh strawberries.
But, as they say on Behind the Music, the party got too wild. “It was opulence and beauty and sickness and despair. All swirling,” recalls Francesca Gregorini, 27, a somewhat jittery and disarming sexpot singer, of her time at Tittenhurst, John Lennon’s estate in Ascot, during the years after Lennon’s death, when her mother, Barbara Bach, and stepfather, Ringo Starr, were hooked on drugs and alcohol. “We had a lake and 80 acres of land. And we had dogs and cats and horses. But there was such a sickness going on in it.” Nona Gaye watched her father, Marvin, grow increasingly paranoid with his addiction to coke. And Amy Fleetwood experienced alcohol and drugs turning her dad into a cipher, babbling incoherently on the phone to her for 20 minutes about the importance of seat belts. “I was like, ‘Dad, I do wear my seat belt. You do this every time.’”
Often the habits rubbed off. Having been taught at the age of 10 to roll her dad’s joints, Mackenzie soon learned how to smoke them, too. Stoned, she might have heavy rap sessions with Alice Cooper in his suite at Hyatt House. For three months she went to school every day on acid. And that same year she slept with Jagger, her father introduced her to intravenous cocaine, helpfully injecting her for her first ride. Chided by Jagger for his all-in-the-family shooting up, John, Mackenzie recalls, told him, “You know what? Me and that kid have been friends for too long for me to hide anything from her.” Her younger sister Bijou, born prematurely to two addicts, John and Genevieve, started using drugs in her teens, too. “Maybe I did a little bit too much cocaine,” says Bijou, now 21 and starring in the stunning Larry Clark movie Bully.“Like I did cocaine every night for a month or something.” China Kantner, terrified and verbally abused during Grace Slick’s alcoholic rages, started in herself at age 12, getting loaded on whiskey and wine. “I used to drive drunk and black out,” says China, now 30, who has been sober for four years and is a devoted Christian studying Italian Renaissance art. “Pacific Coast Highway, windy roads, 50 miles an hour.”
In addition to drugs, genius also needed solitude and freedom. In the Zappa household, where there was all the junk food and television you could ingest, no such thing as bedtime, and a baby-sitter who wore tape over his nipples, one rule existed: “Even if the house is on fire, try to put the fire out before you disturb Dad in the studio,” says 33-year-old Moon Unit Zappa, now a novelist. “It was like: There must be a way we can intervene and stop it from reaching the studio!” As a result, her version of “life on the farm,” as she puts it, was “‘Dad? Dad? Dad? Dad?’ … and there is no Dad.” She wrote the 1982 novelty hit “Valley Girl” just so she could hang out with him.
Kimberly Stewart, whose father was often on tour or squiring around a new, tall blonde, recalls, “I’d either see him on the TV or I would hear him on the radio, and that would make me sad. ‘That’s my dad. Why isn’t he here with me?’ I didn’t understand it.” Even when she was with him, his attention was distracted by the hordes of adoring fans. “You see thousands of people loving and worshiping, and you’re there,” says Kimberly, gesturing an insignificant speck.
Some dads just disappeared. When Mackenzie was 14, “my dad and Genevieve went to New York for a weekend and never came back.” She and her brother Jeffrey were evicted from John’s mansion soon after and taken around by the owner to collect their belongings. (She went to live with her father’s sister, Rosemary, who became her guardian.) Elijah Blue, whose mom, Cher, split from Gregg Allman nine days after they got married, has yet to fully open the “Dad can of worms” and establish a relationship with his father. As for the revolving door of his would-be stepfathers—Gene Simmons, Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer, and bagel chef Rob Camilletti—well, enough said.
Other dads weren’t exactly the stay-at-home types, either. Ione Skye, star of Cameron Crowe’s 1989 classic, Say Anything, and daughter of Donovan and model Enid Solenberg, was conceived on the Isle of Skye, where they were living in a gypsy caravan and “grooving around with Crosby, Stills, and Nash.” But a few months later, Donovan—they called him Mellow Yellow—left Enid in Los Angeles, where she raised Ione and older brother Donovan “Dono” Leitch on little more than her waitress tips and what she earned as a limo driver. (Enid sought solace with her two best friends, Nurit Wilde and Cynthia Webb, who had just been ditched with kids by their rock-star lovers, Michael Nesmith of the Monkees and session bass player Klaus Vorman.) Making only minimal contact with his son, Donovan denied for a time that Ione was his daughter, insisting that she looked like a friend of his from the days of free love (Ione was spared this information until she was 16). Characterizing the events as “the family falling out of touch,” Ione, now 30 and a dreamy painter in the vein of Francesco Clemente, says, “I felt the longing. I had a friend when we were five years old who had a really nice relationship with her father. They just had this warmth. I remember thinking, Oh that’s—I wish—just, that looks nice.” Ione’s best friend, Karis Jagger, wasn’t acknowledged by her father, Mick Jagger, until she was nine. (Mick recently walked her down the aisle.) During his father’s life, Julian Lennon, the inspiration for “Hey Jude,” was ignored by his dad, and after John’s death, Julian saw half of his father’s estate go to Yoko Ono (the other half reportedly went to charity).
Understandably, not everyone’s self-esteem managed to grow wings and soar. “I don’t want to really say this, but I will,” says China, who has the same tough exterior as her mother, Grace Slick. “If your parents aren’t there a lot for the early years, you can feel like, as an adult, that maybe you’re not necessarily loved.… I don’t blame my parents for anything, but I had to take this into consideration when I really spiraled downward. My voice in my head talks real negative shit, real loud. It says, ‘You’re a loser.’ It says, ‘You don’t deserve to be loved.’ It says, ‘You’re not talented.… You will never make it.’”
Jackson Nash, a thoughtful, quasi-slacker screenwriter working on a script with actress Zooey Deschanel, spent many years feeling pointless, living “in the shadow” of his father, Graham, even though for a time he went to a school for “gifted youngsters.” “Inside I felt something was wrong and I also felt like I was missing something. Faster than you can say ‘self-destruct,’ I started smoking pot every day,” says Jackson, 24, managing to smile about it all. “I hated my family, I hated my life.” He ended up spending three years at Cedu in California, a psychological boot camp designed to tear down kids’ defenses and get them talking. “They’d take you out to a room, where they’d make you take off your shoes and your belt,” Jackson recalls. “The teachers come in, and basically it lasts all night and they just yell at you, to try to get you to emote.”
Despite everything, all of these kids—all of them—from Jackson and China to Ione and Mackenzie, very much love their parents. They tell you they feel guilty about certain things they’ve said about them. They remind you, and remind you some more, that their parents did the best they could. They insist that they don’t blame them, at least not any longer. They focus on the happy memories and lovable foibles. Nona Gaye melts when she remembers the way Marvin would put on “silly shows” for his kids; Amy Fleetwood laughs recalling how Mick would hide behind doors and jump out. Even John Phillips, who died last spring, had his shining moments as Dad. Bijou says, “He got me horses, and he would come to all my horse shows. He would get me puppies and things, and he would sing to me every night and tell me stories.” Now 33, Donovan Leitch remembers thinking, at age 11, that his dad’s song about poop, “Intergalactic Laxative,” was the funniest thing known to man.
Leitch also fondly recalls their eventual broaching of the past—”the conversation,” as Leitch puts it—which his father took seriously, in his dippy, mystical way. “He gets out the I Chingand rolls the coins,” says Leitch. “His wife was videotaping the whole thing. It was great. There wasn’t any anger or anything, it was just getting everything out.” Ione, who met her father at Leitch’s urging 11 years ago, says that, while things between her and her dad aren’t perfect, they’ve grown closer now, too. China credits constant prayer for allowing her to see her parents as “fucking amazing people.” And nine years ago, Amy Fleetwood, after years of pleading with her father to stop drinking, got a phone call from him—and this time it wasn’t about seat belts. “‘I want to take you out to dinner. I’ve got something to tell you,’” Amy recalls him saying. “We went to dinner, and he told me that he had stopped doing drugs, stopped drinking. That was probably the first real dinner I had with him where he was him.”
Given their similar histories, it’s no surprise that many have gravitated toward one another. Bijou used to go out with Elijah Blue and now lives with her boyfriend, Sean Lennon, in Los Angeles. Jagger’s daughter Karis, Ringo’s step-daughter, Francesca, Donovan, Ione, and Amy Fleetwood, who also live in Los Angeles, are like family. (Coincidentally, Donovan senior was once upon a time in love with Amy’s mom, Jennifer, and wrote “Jennifer Juniper” for her.) Stella McCartney and Liv Tyler are great friends; Leah Wood and Elizabeth Jagger are best friends. “You have the same sort of shorthand,” says Justin Kreutzmann, who hangs out with Annabelle Garcia, Jerry’s oldest daughter. Explanations aren’t necessary. No one is fazed by anyone else’s last name. They can trust that their relationships are genuine—something that has not always been the case. As Leah Wood remembers, some boyfriends in her past were interested more in her father, Rolling Stones guitarist Ron Wood, than in her. “They’d go out with me, and then as soon as they’d meet my dad they’d ignore me and chat away to my dad!”
As for their present and future, they valiantly insist that they are doing their own thing. (Perhaps that’s why Jakob Dylan, Sean Lennon, and Liv Tyler declined to be interviewed.) That’s true on some level. On another, their chosen passions are also conversations with their parents, messages, questions, homages, and even love letters—which some of them may be too shy to sign.
As the son of Allman and the icon Cher, Elijah Blue had to develop what he calls “my serious ownness to be able to survive in this world.” With that in mind, he lost himself in the work of British occultist Aleister Crowley, an obsession that begat the band Deadsy, which represents a brand-new movement in music Elijah calls “undercore.” If you have two weeks, Elijah could explain it all to you. But on this summer afternoon at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, he breaks it down in just an hour, with the help of his friend and manager, Josh Richman.
“The band is separated into five entities,” says Elijah, boiling with intensity beneath his tall, blond, reserved exterior. “There’s War, Leisure, Academia, Horror, and—”
“Medicine,” interrupts Richman, a human powder keg who wears dozens of rock-club bracelets, a T-shirt that says, loud, pushy jew. deal with it, and for no apparent reason carries a cane.
“And, as says the manifesto, these things, we think, are five kind of cornerstones, or whatever you want to call it, that we can kind of express all of humanity, history, whatever. We’re really kind of into showing Deadsy as, like, almost a relic. I want to associate us with, like, the cradle of civilization.”
“A philosophy. A legacy,” Richman adds.
Call it senseless jabbering if you want. As it turns out, Deadsy, a mix of heavy metal and melodic synth, is arresting and macabre, and Elijah is, as Richman says, “shredding” on the guitar. Untouched by Elijah’s past Deadsy is not. The band sounds like an evolution of Mom’s boyfriend’s band Kiss, with some Radiohead and Brian Eno thrown in. Like Kiss, its members wear makeup and have personae. Elijah’s is “P. Exeter Blue,” the rich kid who went to prep school. Whether he likes it or not, the man behind P. Exeter Blue is the son of Cher and Gregg Allman and, in the view of listeners, may have had an unfair leg up in the business. Elijah says he’s found a way to use that. “What’s fun is just to be able to make them suffer when you start conquering,” says Elijah. “Where we are playing in front of 20,000 kids, crushing them. It’s, like, the proof is in the pudding.”
Twenty thousand may be an exaggeration, but Deadsy does have its cult following, mainly in L.A., where a new metal scene is emerging. One of the more recent fans is Cher, who, in 1989, three years after sending Elijah to military school, invited him to play with her band on tour. “One of our newest songs is called ‘Winners,’” says Richman, momentarily toning it down a notch. “The other night, we were riding a Ferris wheel together at a party and Cher was like, ‘I love it. It’s so beautiful.’” Elijah tries not to blush.
For London native Jason Bonham, who spends most of his time in Indianapolis as the drummer for the rock band Healing Sixes, those three a.m. jam sessions as a toddler paid off. Following John “Bonzo” Bonham’s 1980 death after a drinking binge, Jason started seriously pursuing the drums—and listening to Led Zeppelin for the first time. Famous for his pounding style, which helped define heavy metal, John posthumously provided Jason with the “backbone” of his own style. So well did Jason master his father’s technique that for Atlantic Records’ 40th-anniversary concert he was asked to perform with two of the surviving members of Led Zeppelin, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page.
“You’re looking out and seeing your uncles, really. There’s Uncle Robert and Jimmy, and here I sat on my father’s stool, really,” Jason says. Unfortunately, Uncle Robert forgot the words to “Stairway to Heaven” and Uncle Jimmy’s guitar was out of tune. Jason recalls what the press said the next day. “Thank God [Jason] was there. He was the only one who knew the songs.” As if that weren’t surreal enough, Jason appears in the Mark Wahlberg movie Rock Star, playing someone not unlike his father—a lovable, temperamental drummer with a penchant for the bottle and for throwing television sets out of hotel windows. To hear Jason describe it, he’s also playing someone not unlike himself. “As my wife said, there was no acting involved in my part. I play an alcoholic drummer.”
Rufus Wainwright, the son of Loudon Wainwright III, may be the only musician in the group whose fame has surpassed that of his rock-star parent. Loudon was among the many once touted as the “new Dylan.” Rufus’s music, a wonderfully original mix of pop and cabaret, owes more to his childhood obsession with opera and Fiorucci coats than it does to folk. In fact, as open-minded as Loudon’s worldview seemed to be, there was little room in it for homosexuality, especially in his own family. “He’d walk in on me listening to opera in the dark and he’d be like, ‘You don’t want to toss the ball around?’” says Rufus, with a laugh and a coy flip of his hair. Still, like the other dads, Loudon was more wrapped up in his art than in the fact that he had a son whiling away the days thinking about Edie Sedgwick and Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Rufus hasn’t entirely forgotten this. One of the best songs on his gorgeous album Poses is his cover of “One Man Guy,” Loudon’s ode to himself, the lone artist, reconfigured in Rufus’s voice as, perhaps, a gay love song. It is a gesture of forgiveness and a thank-you, to be sure. But Rufus, who admits his dad was touched, adds, with Oscar Wilde– esque panache, “I think he was probably also touched because he can make more money off the record than I.”
The other musicians, while forging their own paths, are also drawing from their kid-of-rock-star experiences. Singer Francesca Gregorini’s music is brazen and steeped in the defiant “grrrl” tradition of P J Harvey—about as far from Ringo’s “Octopus’s Garden” as humanly possible. But she says that one day she’ll turn her Tittenhurst experience into a song. Bijou, working on her second album, is the author of the song “When I Hated Him,” about how life blew when her dad took up with his fourth wife, Farnaz, whom Bijou saw as an enabler. One of Sally Taylor’s less crunchy numbers is the funny “Strangest of Strangers,” about the boneheads she’s met in the music business who have wanted to sign her because of her last name. “Nobody had heard my music!” Sally says. “It was really disgusting.” Even Jakob Dylan, who famously never talks about his father but is closer to him than most imagine, cryptically opened up the topic in his recent song “Hand Me Down,” lamenting, “You feel good / And you look like you should / But you will never make us proud.”
The parents find their way into the works of those pursuing creative paths other than music, too. Moon Unit Zappa, warm, with a Garafaloesque cynicism, tosses off her poignant and very funny debut novel, America the Beautiful, as a “romantic comedy” about a girl looking for love in superficial Los Angeles. The other stuff—the heroine’s wacky name (America), her brother’s wacky name (Spoony), and the obsessed, unavailable artist father, now dead—has little to do with the Zappas, she claims, and is just “the wallpaper.” In fact, the book is far more personal than Moon’s description, and the more Moon talks about it, the more she admits it. “America is the me I was trying to leave behind,” she says eventually. Describing her heroine’s quest, she says, “If all the money doesn’t make the family have dinner together, then what is important? For me, the answer is being able to move through the world with somebody.” Like America, Moon has spent years obsessing about why her relationships have failed. She persuaded her fiancé, drummer Paul Doucette, to meet her therapist after only two weeks of dating.
For mellow and sensitive Nona Gaye, 28, her own childhood spent living in the shadow of an icon helped her win the role of Muhammad Ali’s wife Belinda for Michael Mann’s upcoming Ali. “She had to deal with some of the same things,” Nona says of Belinda. “Not ever being able to get away from it, not ever having just a regular life, a regular marriage, a regular family.” Donovan Leitch, who recently directed the emotional, if all-over-the-place documentary The Last Party, about the 2000 election, has been a model, screen actor, stage actor, singer, and all-around great party guest. Flighty, endearing, and living proof that “It boy” is a noble career, he’s also the reincarnation of his dad, whom he imagines as “a wandering, gypsy, minstrel guy with a denim cap and guitar swung over his shoulder.” Justin Kreutzmann, meanwhile, who has directed long- and short-form Dead videos, bluntly describes his kind of work as “the nepotistic kind.”
en those in more frivolous careers are paying their respects to Dad, if in mildly disturbing ways. After all, is it just a coincidence that Kimberly Stewart and Elizabeth Jagger, daughters of two world-class model-lovers, are pursuing modeling careers themselves? Surely it’s more than the good genes of their mothers, Alana Hamilton and Jerry Hall. In any case, neither of the girls seems overly concerned. Kimberly, for one, finds it hilarious that Rod, on their shopping trips, encourages her to get things like the tight leopard pants. As for her nude pictures in Black + White magazine, “My dad thought they were, like, awesome!” says Kimberly, dangling her long legs over the arm of her chair. For her part, Elizabeth Jagger has spent countless hours trying on, darning, and cataloguing her father’s trousers and concert T-shirts. Unfortunately, Mick’s reaction to her career has not been as positive as Rod’s to Kimberly’s; he’s encouraged the budding “It girl” to think about his alma mater, the London School of Economics. Perhaps it’s because he knows how some men can get with cute 18-year-olds. For the record, Steven Tyler has already hit on her.
Those who have had the most difficult relationships with their parents—Amy, China, and Ione—are now, after making peace with the past, parents themselves, but of a more traditional sort. A single mother to a seven-year-old named Wolf, Amy says her instinct is to be “incredibly protective.” China, in helping to raise her stepson, Jamie, with her husband, Jamie, a dentist, is taking a different approach than what she saw as a kid. “I watch out for him like I would a younger brother,” China says. “If he is doing something that is out of line, I don’t scream at him. I treat him like a human being.” As for Ione, who has gone out with Red Hot Chili Pepper Anthony Kiedis and was married to Beastie Boy Adam Horowitz, she now says rock stars are “a little bit like invalids” and is relieved that her new fiancé, designer David Netto, is, if anything, “too orderly.” Expecting their first child in December, she says, “I want things to be cleaner and more organized and more consistent, and just a safer overall feeling.”
Mackenzie Phillips is also a mother, of 14-year-old son Shane, “a computer nerd slash rock ’n’ roll star,” who helped her, Bijou, and Sean Lennon sing the Mamas and the Papas’ “Got a Feelin’” at the John Phillips tribute in March. When it comes to raising him, Mackenzie has laid down the law. “I’ve said to him, ‘Dude, if I find out you’re smoking pot, you’re going straight to rehab. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.’” As protective as she is of her son, however, her dad is the one who consistently brings tears to her eyes. “He never looked back and said, ‘God, I’m really sorry.’ Never, never, never,” Mackenzie says. “But I miss him every day.”
Some guys are just obsessed with size. You can tell them that size doesn’t matter, that it’s all about the motion of the ocean, and personality is what counts anyway. But to Laird, Snips, and Flea, among the world’s top big-wave surfers, it’s all about being huge, and the guy with the biggest and most terrifying one wins. It’s a contest not just of world-class tan and muscle but of beachfront philosophies that get to the fundamental question about surfing. Is it a religion? A sport? Or just a way for slackers to postpone adulthood?
In the mid–20th century, big-wave surfing emerged as a distinct branch of surfing—an activity exclusively for extremists, those heroic and nuts enough to tempt death on a regular basis. Today’s big-wave surfers look to Greg Noll, a thick-necked, cheeseburger-loving man known as “Da Bull,” as their Babe Ruth. On December 4, 1969, Noll was one of a handful of men in the water at a Hawaii break called Makaha. It was dubbed “the swell of the century” and the waves were so large that local homes were being evacuated. After paddling out and contemplating for an hour his will to live versus his desire to ride what might be the largest wave ever surfed, he went for it. Lying belly-down on his board, he furiously paddled—“as if the devil himself was on my ass,” he wrote in his autobiography, Da Bull—onto a 30-foot wall of water coming his way. Incredibly, he caught it. He got to his feet, assumed his tanker stance, and beelined it down the face. Before the lip came crashing down on him, he pushed off the back of the board, skidded hard across the water, and then got slammed by the wave’s explosion. It was probably the largest wave ever ridden, and Noll was wise enough to know that he could never top himself. He packed up his life and headed for Alaska, where he became a fisherman.
His record stood for 25 years, becoming more venerable and sought after with each passing season. (The quest is described in detail in Matt Warshaw’s Maverick’s.) Seventies surf legend Gerry Lopez and his crew would charge up the giant swells that periodically form over the monstrous Maui reef called Jaws, only to turn back minutes later with their tails between their legs. New big-wave spots, such as Todos Santos, a deserted island 12 miles off the coast of Baja California, and Maverick’s, a hellish break near Half Moon Bay, just south of San Francisco, were discovered in the late 80s and early 90s, which gave fresh—but false—hope. In 1994 the pursuit turned tragic when Mark Foo, one of the best, wiped out and drowned at Maverick’s, most likely because he was held underwater by a wave in the 20- to 30-foot range. As Hawaii’s big-wave icon Brock Little once said, “You have to believe that it’s mind over matter. But sometimes there’s just too much matter.”
Then there was Laird. A six-foot-three-inch chiseled block of manliness, Laird Hamilton had jumped off 125-foot cliffs, wrestled tigers, paddled the English Channel on a paddleboard, and generally established himself as the god of Doing Cool Shit. The stepson of famous competitive-surfing stylist Bill Hamilton, who settled in Hawaii, Laird decided at an early age against competition, preferring “to make surfing more of an artistic expression.” But surpassing Noll’s record, it seems, was an art project worth taking on. While windsurfing breaks on the outer reefs of the Hawaiian islands, he realized the advantage of speed in traveling across big, bumpy waves. So one day in 1992 he and fellow big-surf chasers Buzzy Kerbox and Darrick Doerner loaded up their boards and drove out to an Oahu break called Backyards, as they’d done many times before. Only, this time they took with them an inflatable, motorized Zodiac skiff. With Kerbox at the helm, they motored out past the “lineup,” where the surfers hang out waiting to charge the oncoming wave. Laird got on his board and grabbed a nylon water-ski rope tied to the boat. The Zodiac made a few circles, pulling him around slowly. Then, as a swell was mounting, Kerbox opened the throttle and whipped Laird onto the crest of the wave at a speed of 30 miles an hour. Laird released the rope and rode the face into the deep, safe waters of the channel.
It wasn’t gnarly, it wasn’t insane—the waves were only 15 feet or so—but it was the beginning of an era. “We realized that this was a whole new frontier,” recalls Laird. Over the next few months, they towed one another into bigger and bigger waves—to 20, 25 feet, whizzing down the faces faster than they’d ever done before. The surfers’ true speed (between 35 and 40 miles per hour) combined with the speed of the wave (about 25 m.p.h.) gave them the sensation of going 50, 60 m.p.h. In 1993 they conquered Jaws, where Noll’s record was finally beaten, by Dave Kalama, who surfed a 35-footer there (and who would later become one of Laird’s tow-in partners). But it was Laird who came to own Jaws, mastering 40-foot barrels (or “tubes”), and founding something of a cult. Anyone who wants to understand the religion of Laird need look no farther than his new, self-produced DVD, Laird. “If you keep watching that spray, it transcends into something else,” says Doerner, his chief “brah” (trusted posse member) and occasional tow-in partner, in voice-over as Laird conquers one water monster after another. “There’s hidden things in there.” And, lo and behold, at the climax of the film, a massive barrel erupts, and digitally superimposed on its mist—ever so subtly, so as to seem supernatural—is the enormous face of Laird. “It’s almost like he is as awesome as the wave,” says Doerner, not to put too fine a point on it.
As the good news of Laird’s and Kalama’s and Doerner’s conquests went forth, the tow-in virus spread from Hawaii to California to Australia. Some scoffed that it was cheating—they were using a machine, for God’s sake. But the lure of size is irresistible. The race was on to become the new size king, and it’s ongoing today—The Right Stuff in Billabong wet suits. Its heroes, such as Laird, are lovingly chronicled in surf magazines and slapped with logos.
The popular favorite in the big-wave race is Mike “Snips” Parsons, Southern California’s premier big-wave surfer. He’s 37 years old, six feet tall, and he’s as ESPN-ready as they come. He smells like clean laundry and loves his parents. He’s quite possibly the friendliest person in the entire state. His San Clemente home is spartan and tidy, and the closest thing to an illegal substance lying around is iced tea. He’s routinely called “the Richie Cunningham of surfing.” His dog is a happy yellow Lab that he named Sunny.
As is the case with most positive-thinking jocks, Snips’s interest in gear knows no bounds. He keeps everything in an enormous, well-lit garage, organized to Marine perfection. There’s a rack of 30 wet suits, and stacks of large plastic crates, each clearly marked, containing booties, gloves, ropes, and radio equipment. In the center of the garage sits his “watercraft.” “The one word we don’t use is Jet Ski,” Snips explains corporately, “because that means it’s Kawasaki and we’re sponsored by Polaris.” It looks like a big Harley-Davidson without wheels. On the back wall are Snips’s surfboards; there are about 30 of them, hanging in order of ascending size. He takes down one of the kind made for tow-in surfing—a short, pointy thing with foot straps—and cheerfully explains how it is superior to the regular, paddle-in big-wave board. “This will turn and perform,” he says. “It’s shorter, narrower, heavier. It’s more like a water ski, so when you’re stuck in a wave, you can turn and go all over these waves.” He puts the board back up and shakes his head. “It’s incredible, the advancement from those to this. It’s just day and night.”
And the improved gear might just save his life. In 1994, on his first day surfing at Maverick’s, he helped retrieve the dead body of expert big-wave man Mark Foo. “It was a real reality check for all of us,” Snips says. “It took me about a year to get my nerve back.… I’m more calculated now. I feel better prepared, and I have better equipment.”
Snips wouldn’t be where he is today without Brad Gerlach (nickname, “Ger”; pronunciation, “Grr”), the man whom he tows into the waves, and who in turn tows him into the waves. Fifteen years ago, they were fierce rivals on the competition circuit, trying to outdo each other on style points. Ger, the cocky party boy, despised Snips, the apple-polisher. But a few years back they crossed paths, and with a little help from Snips, Ger straightened up his act, got a Jon Bon Jovi makeover, and now has a love for Gucci. With Ger’s emphasis on style and Snips’s quarterback calculation, they are the dream team of the big-wave set, considered the best technical surfers in the world. Still, when the moment calls for it, Snips can get as philosophical as Pete Sampras. “The reason we surf,” he says after some thought, “is to sit in a quiet place. It’s kind of our church.”
Their Northern California rivals aren’t buying the corny stuff. “Snips is a full-on porn addict. He’ll have sex with chicks in front of everybody. Puts on the whips and chains. But you didn’t hear it from Skindog!” says Ken “Skindog” Collins, a rambunctious chatterbox who, with a longish face and random chin whiskers, might be the badass brother of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo.
Not all surfers are white-bread, well-adjusted jocks like Mike and Brad. Skindog is part of a different scene of world-class big-wave surfers—the modern, gnarly beach bums. They have gathered in the small clapboard Santa Cruz home of Darryl “Flea” Virostko to take part in the key surfer ritual of getting totally wasted on Corona and pot. Skindog’s tow-in partner is Josh Loya, a lumbering hunk in flip-flops who moves slowly and speaks even slower, and is so good-looking the boys call him “maggot face.”
“Brad just got his hair done,” Skindog reports. “Little highlights. Gnarly.
“Hey, did Brad have one of those nice little sweaters he bought in France?” asks Shawn “Barney” Barron, the mascot of the group—slightly hapless but beloved. His meandering conversation about Kate Moss, Indonesians, his painting, the nature of love, and “boobies” might be annoying were it not so heartfelt. (“We try to rag on him,” Skindog says about Barney. “See that smile? You can’t break it.”)
The ringleader, the chief shit slinger, and the gnarliest surfer and surfer dude is Barney’s tow-in partner, Flea. He’s holding court, slouched into the couch, roughly stroking his black boxer–pit bull, Passion.
“This is Vanity Fair,” says Barney, apropos of nothing, as he enjoys his second joint of the afternoon. “They cater to an immense population of yuppies.”
“I don’t care what she writes,” says Flea. And why should he? His picture is all over the surfing magazines, and he already gets laid constantly. He is the Tommy Lee of surfing—strangely magnetic, yet smelling of beer and utterly careless, especially when it comes to giant waves. Flea and the gang, who call themselves “the dark stars” or “the west siders,” and whom others call “the vermin,” have training regimens far more traditional than their Southern California rivals. Snips and Ger keep in prime shape and practice wipeout survival by holding their breath for minutes at a time. “I beat off a lot,” says Flea.
Sam George, the editor of Surfer magazine, whose job it is to think about such things, says about Flea, “He’s not the best surfer of the bunch, but he surfs with such reckless, heedless abandon that it can’t be explained.”
Jonathan Paskowitz, a member of the Paskowitz-family surf camp in San Clemente, California, and something of a wild man himself, has never seen anything like Flea. “I’ve seen him paddle out through the lineup at beach breaks in Oaxaca, Mexico, and then have the fin [of his board] cut his finger to the bone,” says Paskowitz. “He just duct-taped it with the pink meat sticking out between the fingers, and paddled back out.… Not only that, he’s doing this on three hours of sleep, and half a bottle of tequila.”
Flea’s waves make him one of the most talked-about tow-in surfers in the world and a perennial top contender in the big-wave contests—contests with names such as the Men Who Ride Mountains, the XXL, and the biggest one of all, the Billabong Odyssey, a three-year global expedition for the elusive 100-foot wave—all of which involve a cash reward, usually in the five figures. But to Flea it’s not about the money. “If you wipe out, you die,” he says, summing up the sponsors’ attitude. “But we’ll give you four grand a year!”
Laird Hamilton surfs Hawaii; Snips and Ger surf sunny Todos Santos; the west siders surf Maverick’s, whose colors are brown and gray. Backed by sheer cliffs and a craggy shoreline, it’s exposed to winds and storms coming from every direction. The area where the waves crash, called the “bowl,” is a vicious cauldron. Rock formations—above the surface and hidden below—jut up willy-nilly. Seals are commonplace, which means that sharks are, too. The water gets as cold as the high 40s. The surfers’ ears pop, their vision blurs, they get ice-cream headaches, and that’s not all. “Our nuts gets so cold,” says Flea. “They’re up in my belly and shit.” And then there are the waves, which climb to 30, 40, sometimes 50 feet. “I’m not talking The Perfect Storm,” says Barney of the first time he laid eyes on Maverick’s. “But it felt like it. On the horizon, a big wall of water.” It was a challenge that took them years to work up to.
They started at their local Santa Cruz break, Steamer Lane, a greener, gentler spot that breaks anywhere from 2 to 15 feet. When Skindog and Josh Loya weren’t “snappin’ on” Barney and Flea at the neighborhood Ben and Jerry’s (“Skindog was the older fucking dick face,” says Flea, who at 17 was four feet nine), the guys were surfing, usually as a group. “We pushed each other to ride 6-foot waves, 10-foot waves, 12-foot waves,” says Skindog. “Once you’ve graduated from Lane, Maverick’s is like going to college.” They first surfed it 11 years ago, and Flea was on drugs. “I was 20 and on acid,” he says. “I was psyched.”
He was not as psyched seven years later, in 1998. After getting crushed by a Maverick’s wave and flung into the pit of churning white water, Flea was thrown in the direction of the rocks, and his leash (which attaches one foot to the board) got caught on an outcropping. Underwater and thrashing about, Flea frantically reached for his leash, reached for the surface, reached for anything. He finally got his head above water and gasped. Bam! Another wave came crashing down, sending him under. Six more explosions followed, until a rush of water loosened the leash and washed him to the shore. “I thought I was dead,” says Flea, who was carried home in the fetal position. “It’s like a big fat lady sitting on your head.” The day is immortalized in a large and spirited painting Barney made for him, which hangs on the wall. It’s Flea riding through a barrel and, hovering above, supernaturally, a pair of giant breasts.
One thing Flea learned that day was to take off his leash before going near any rocks. He also brought his fearlessness to bear in a new role—that of lifesaver. A noble tow-in driver has less than 20 seconds to zoom into “the impact zone” gobbling up a surfer in distress, grab hold of whatever part of him is visible, haul him onto the Jet Ski, and get out before the next wave hits. Often hell can break loose—the venomous white water can make mincemeat of the Jet Ski, throwing the driver into the same icy nightmare as his partner—and many a driver has stood by, paralyzed with fear, as his fellow surfer got seriously “rag-dolled” or “Maytagged.” For Flea, it became a calling. “If I’m on my Jet Ski, and I see someone getting hit, I’ll go in,” he says. “I hate the fucking faggot, hate the guy so much, but it’s a life.”
On December 22, 2000, a day of rough surf, Flea rescued one of Maverick’s longtime paddle-in devotees, Grant Washburn, who wiped out on his only tow-in ride ever. “When I came out of the wipeout, the wave that was in front of me was the biggest wave I’ve ever seen,” says Washburn, who found himself buried by about 50 feet of unforgiving foam. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I could never have gotten myself into this position under my own power—I wouldn’t ever have risked it—but here I am,’ and nobody can rescue you at all.… I looked up, ‘Oh my God, I don’t know what to do.’” Three or four more waves came rolling over him. Someone grabbed hold of him and yanked his body onto the Ski. “I looked and saw—I said, ‘That’s Flea, of course. Nobody else is going to drive into this. He just doesn’t care.’”
The saving of Washburn’s life was just a footnote in the legend Flea made for himself that day. It was late morning, and a set of swells moved in that were among the biggest anyone had ever seen at Maverick’s, cresting and breaking in unpredictable ways over the reef. Amped as the crew was that day, many held back—it was just too ominous. Josh Loya (the low-energy hunk), who was towing Flea at the time, whipped him onto a 50-foot crest, and Flea headed down the face, the lip beginning to curl overhead. For a different surfer, this would have been enough; he would have headed down into the flatter, safer water to end what would have been a rad ride. But Flea cut back, up toward the lip once again, and into “the pocket,” the arc right beneath the cresting lip—a fairly safe move on a smaller wave, an insane move on a colossus like this. Flea was going for the tube (“getting shacked” or “the green room”), which is the surfing equivalent of an orgasm. Then something happened that surfers dread: the “clamshell,” when the lip section in front of the surfer doesn’t break smoothly and gradually, but chomps down suddenly, eating up the surfer in one ruthless bite, like Jonah and the whale. “It just threw down like a Hawaii Five-O nightmare,” says Barney, Flea’s emotional brah. “I just watched that and I couldn’t believe it.… I was fucking scared, man. My friends and I go, ‘Oh my God, this thing could kill him.’”
It’s a ride that’s gone down in history—huge in size, huger in gnarliness. In a phone conversation later, Barney says, “I’m looking at the photo now—it’s actually on my refrigerator. He is just a mere speck on a gigantic Saint Bernard.” He starts panting a bit. “I’m getting all nervous. When you start talking about this shit, it makes you rushed.”
As Flea and Barney and Loya basked in the rush of Flea’s 50-foot wave, in Newport Beach, Bill Sharp, the editor of a surf ‘zine called Surf News, got a jolt of his own. He was on his computer doing what he did every day for a few hours: tracking the weather around the globe. He noticed that a storm he had had his eye on off the coast of Japan was traveling across the Pacific, along the jet stream. He checked the satellite reading that picked up wave height—20-foot seas, it said, winds 60 to 70 miles per hour. He lost his breath. It was the storm he’d been awaiting for years.
As editor of Surfing magazine in the 80s, Sharp had spent countless hours looking at charts and maps, usually with his friend Larry “Flame” Moore, the magazine’s photo editor. In the late 80s, they spotted something 105 miles off the coast of San Diego that they’d never noticed before—Cortes Bank, a 5,000-foot underwater sea mountain, or “seamount,” that never makes it to the water’s surface, but comes to within three feet. “We thought, Well, you know what? Waves have to break out there, don’t they?” recalls Sharp. He and Moore flew out in a small plane to see for themselves. “Here are these gigantic, unbelievably big waves breaking out in the middle of the ocean,” recalls Sharp. “We were like, ‘Tee-hee. Don’t tell anyone. This is our secret.’”
There was only one problem: most of the waves couldn’t be surfed, which they learned when they later returned in a 29-foot fishing boat. “You could never paddle fast enough to get out of the way,” says Sharp. “You could get killed. It would just break over this huge arena out there, and you could only paddle two, three miles an hour. We got creamed.” He filed it away and, prescient perhaps of some future technology, said to himself, “Someday we’ll be back here.”
On January 19, 2001, that day arrived. A couple of days before, Moore had started making phone calls to the best big-wave surfers in California. At the top of the list were Snips and Ger, the SoCal gear-savvy professionals; representing Santa Cruz was Skindog, who at the time was tow-in partners with Peter Mel, another top tow-in surfer. With their Jet Skis, the teams met at about five p.m. at the 25-foot Pacific Quest, docked in San Diego harbor. The plan was to travel through the night and start surfing the next morning. Sharp and Moore would come out by plane and circle the session from the sky.
The surfers were stoked, amped—and spooked. It was a first for them all: they were heading out, into the night, into the open seas, into the 20-foot swells. It was the complete unknown.
That terror started almost immediately. “First of all, just jumping in a boat with a captain who looks like he’s 15 years old is already sketchy enough,” says Skindog. “I’m like, ‘Oh, right on. We got some kid taking us out to 30-foot seas.’”
The surfers learned that the captain, John Walla, was actually 22, but it didn’t ease their nerves. To relax, “we threw down a couple of coldies and I popped a little reefer with some guys,” says Skindog. They caught up on the big-wave action of the year, told stories, and tried to just go with it. Occasionally, their conversation was punctuated by moments of quiet dread—what the hell are we doing out here?
The dark started rolling in, and the men decided it was time to get some sleep. As Skindog settled onto a few square inches of floor in the captain’s quarters above, Snips and the rest of the surfers lay in silence belowdecks, listening to the waves crashing against the side of the boat, and trying to ignore its relentless rocking. Gradually, they drifted off to sleep, and Ger, Snips’s highlighted partner, fell into a dream in which he was mysteriously bobbing up and down.
At about three a.m., Skindog awoke to a young Captain Walla frantically running around the deck. “Oh shit! Fuck,” Walla was yelling. “The engine’s broke!”
Skindog shuddered and buried himself deeper in his sleeping bag. “This is a nightmare,” he said to himself. “This just isn’t happening. I’m just dreaming. I’m going to wake up any day now and it’s going to be nice.” Belowdecks, they woke up, too, and Ger thought to himself, “I don’t know anything about how to fix an engine. I can grab a pail and start bailing.”
Luckily, there was another engine on board, and the Pacific Quest continued chugging into the night. But two hours later the surfers were awoken by the captain again. “Fuck, man, no way can you see … ” He was looking at the radar and losing his grip. The surfers gathered round to see what was up. The excitable young captain pointed to the blip on the screen. “Those are waves on the radar!” For them to appear on the radar, he told them, they had to be huge. Standing there, in the middle of nowhere, Ger and Snips looked at each other and shared a moment. “The only thing that comforts you is you’re looking over at your friend and he’s feeling the same thing,” says Ger.
It was still only five a.m., but they were too buzzed to go back to sleep, so they decided to wait for the sun to rise. “We said, ‘O.K., let’s just wait right here and don’t get too close!’” recalls Skindog. “So we sat back about half a mile from it. When the sun and red skies opened, and you could see the peaks out there, we were like, ‘Wow, this is real.’”
The Pacific Quest inched up a bit closer, and Skindog volunteered to do some reconnaissance, but the first obstacle was actually unloading the Ski into the water: at 1,500 pounds it was acting like a wrecking ball against the boat in the wobbly sea. Once it was in, he sped off and then returned with the news that the sea life was out of control. There were hundreds of seals, feasting on every kind of fish imaginable. And where there are seals there are sharks. That wasn’t the only thing that sent chills up their spines.
“It was like being on the moon,” says Snips. “You usually have barriers on land. You have these markers and places to let you know whether you’re in shallow water, deep water, out of danger, in danger. Cortes Bank was a whole flat playing field. There was no way to get out there and go, ‘O.K., this is where I am.’ It was wide open. Any direction you looked, it’s just water.” He and Ger, being the more cautious and responsible of the teams, went first. With Snips driving and Ger riding, they initially went for the smaller, safer waves as they tried to get the lay of the land—so to speak.
The waves started climbing, to 40, 45, 50 feet—sizes they’d occasionally seen before, at Todos and Maverick’s. What was different was how fast they were coming in—a third again of what they were used to—because this was the middle of the ocean and there was no gradually shallowing water to curb the speed. The riders were tearing down the faces and getting some of the best barrels of their lives. Ger and Snips, hoping they could hold their own, watched in awe as the Santa Cruz guys flaunted their wild-man stunts. When Skindog went high “into the pocket,” much the way Flea had on his big wave a few weeks earlier, Ger turned to Snips and said, “Those guys do that?”
It was the largest barrel Skindog had ever had. But at the end the wave did the clamshell, or as Skindog would put it, “The curtain closed and the show was over.”
“I got a beating that was pretty gnarly,” says Skindog, who popped a rib and tore a rotator cuff. “I was on such an adrenaline rush that I was oblivious to it.”
Snips was getting nervous. The wind was picking up and he had yet to ride. Finally it was his turn; Ger hopped onto the Jet Ski and eyed a big one coming in. He looked at Snips. “You want this thing?” he said. “Yeah, yeah, yeah!” said Snips as he secured his feet in the straps. Ger opened the throttle and whipped Snips onto the top. As Snips flew down the face, the thing started growing, and growing, and growing. Jaws began to drop. Though tow-in surfers often don’t know the size of what’s behind them, Snips knew this was different. “I could feel the wave breathing down my neck.” It was the largest wave anyone of them had ever seen, a six-story building made of water, the freak-show wave of the day and their lives. Ever the controlled technician, Snips surfed it perfectly. He got onto the Ski and said to Ger, “Dude, I don’t need anything else to happen today.”
Skindog went nuts. “I was, ‘Oh my God! I hope there’s another one behind it!’ I went over, but there wasn’t another one. I’m like, ‘Ohhh! That bastard!’” He laughs. “But I’m not a hater. I’m stoked for him. He’s Richie Cunningham. You can’t get much nicer than him.… Still, I’d much rather it had been me on that wave!”
After examining the pictures of the wave, they determined that it was 66 feet, the largest wave ever ridden. It and Flea’s 50-footer were the top contenders that season for the XXL Big Wave Award, and Snips’s won. A check for $60,000—blown-up, lottery-style—was presented to him by none other than Da Bull, Greg Noll. Snips hung it up by his surfboards in the garage.
Flea dealt with the blow the best way he knew how—by plying Snips with tequila at a local Laguna Niguel dive until he threw up.
“‘Come on, Snips, you can drink this tequila! You just won 60 grand!’” says Flea, recalling the night. “I got him so fucked up!”
Even today, some Flea fans are muttering how their man should have won. Sure, Snips’s wave was bigger and happened in the middle of the ocean in a brand-new spot, but Flea had risked his life more, and as big-wave pioneer Buzzy Trent famously remarked, “Big waves aren’t measured in feet, but in increments of fear.” However, Snips’s victory did have the added benefit of providing another way to rag him. “‘Let me show you all my surfboards,’” says Barney in his best all-American Snips imitation. “‘Let me show you my check for $60,000.’”
While Flea and Snips quibble over the $60,000, there’s one man who remains above it all, in his own Zen stratosphere—Laird. Nonetheless, he turned in his own lovingly filmed monster ride that season, and Darrick Doerner claims that Laird is the only one in the world who could’ve done it. It happened at a break called Teahupoo (pronounced Cho-poo), in Tahiti, a glassy aqua lagoon of exquisite beauty, with a barrier reef so close to the surface that at low tide it rises above the surface and so sharp that just touching it will cut your skin. The wave doesn’t have the unpredictability of Maverick’s. It doesn’t have the height of Cortes Bank. What it does have is unbelievable force. “It’s like the parting of the Red Sea,” says Laird. “The whole entire ocean is behind the wave.” In the first week of May 2000, a Tahitian surfer named Briece Taera lost his life after being pulverized instantly on the reef.
Three months later, on August 17, 2000, Laird was there, with Doerner and crew. The day was so huge that after a few rides Doerner decided that he couldn’t hack it, so he stuck to the driving. Laird’s wave came just before noon. It rolled into the calm lagoon; Doerner put him high onto the glassy mountain and drove off. Then Doerner watched, his terror mounting as the wave grew. Laird remained firm in his signature heroic stance—arms outstretched like a Greek javelin thrower—as the wave picked up force behind him, becoming, he says, “a man-eating dinosaur, something small and thick and real aggressive.” He made it into the barrel—a green, crystal-clear, cylindrical room of his own. The more frightening part was yet to come. As the tube tightens, so does the pressure within it. Eventually, the barrel has to “spit,” shoot out the energy building within it. Teahupoo’s spit is perhaps the most powerful in the world, and has the potential to send the surfer off his board. Doerner watched for it on pins and needles. The green cannon roared, blasting 50 feet of white water, obscuring Laird. Had he eaten it? If so, he would surely be dead. He emerged from the foam, the Laird stance untouched. That night, he cried like a baby.
Even the west siders admit they’re impressed. “That was a big, gnarly wave,” says Flea, who has also surfed Teahupoo, but on a smaller day. “A lot of people, no way would they drop into that thing.” Would he have surfed that wave? Flea thinks for a moment, then admits, “I’d have to see.” On the other hand, the west siders seem to be aware that Laird’s on a tad of a God trip. Ruminating on the Laird DVD, Flea notes diplomatically, “He wants to be the center of attention.” Indeed, personal though his surfing may be, Laird will be doing it in the next James Bond movie and in Dana Brown’s Liquid. (With the release of John Stockwell’s Blue Crush, it is the summer of surf movies, it seems.) Still, he relishes his status as the untouchable outsider. “The only reason why I haven’t spent any time pursuing Maverick’s or Cortes Bank is that I feel like the challenge I have here is monumental enough,” he says, adding, “Jaws is just a lot faster than normal big waves.” Others believe that Laird is so intent on retaining his living-legend thing that he doesn’t want to risk a side-by-side comparison with Flea or Snips.
Whatever the reason, Laird is not taking part in the Billabong Odyssey, the three-year search for the 100-foot wave, which Bill Sharp conceived of after the Cortes Bank triumph. “It’s a little bit Jacques Cousteau and a little bit Chuck Yeager and a little bit MTV Jackass,” says Sharp, the Odyssey’s project director, who, in addition to enlisting Flea and Barney, Skindog and Loya, and Snips and Ger, has signed on Brock Little and Brian Keaulana, two veteran surfers and top risk technicians. Over the next couple of years, the teams will travel to Australia, Ireland, the middle of the international seas—wherever the waves take them. (The first months of the search are chronicled in the documentary The Billabong Odyssey.) When Sharp launched the program last fall, there were those in the surfing community who thought his 100-foot wave was nothing more than a giant wet dream. After Snips’s 66-foot wave, 100 feet seemed a big leap. Forget about surfing it—did such waves even exist?
Then came November 21, 2001, at Maverick’s. The early morning was a beauty. It was clear, calm, and big, but still mild enough to attract the paddle-in surfers. But by 10:30, things started getting out of control. The waves began climbing to the 40-foot range and the paddlers headed home. By noon the winds were picking up, it began to rain, and the currents started raging, pulling surfers down into the bowl, one after another. During what was the worst wipeout of his life, Barney found himself in “the death part” of the bowl. When Flea zoomed in to save him, he, too, got caught in the avalanche of water. Board after board was broken. So savage was the day that photographers, even ones shooting from the shore, turned back, as did the majority of the surfers. “We were watching people disappear and guys were just vanishing,” says Skindog.
In the late afternoon, Flea and Barney, Skindog and Loya, and a few other Maverick’s diehards saw it. It was about half a mile away, out to sea: 80-foot faces, coming in one after another. What is that? they wondered. Like Cortes Bank, it was a reef they hadn’t known even existed. Had the Odyssey crew been more prepared, Sharp believes they could have caught it.
The west-side boys believe that one of them actually did catch a wave 100 feet tall. It was part of the same swell, but it was the next day, Thanksgiving, and it belonged to the one guy who’d been relatively silent in the monster-wave category that season—the quiet stud, Josh Loya. As expected, his brahs are reacting by giving him major props and a little shit as the party continues in Flea’s surfer frat house.
“He almost died,” says Flea. “He cried twice.”
“It was raining, everybody split,” says Skindog. “You’ve heard of the 100-foot wave. He gotone! And no one even shot it!”
Was it really a 100-foot wave?
“It seemed like it at the time,” says Loya, standing a bit awkwardly in the middle of the room, “but no one took a picture of it, so I don’t know.”
“Was it a hundred feet or wasn’t it?” asks Barney, putting on his grand-inquisitor voice.
“I saw it. It was an easy 100-footer!” Skindog says.
“I say we get Ripley’s Believe It or Not on this one,” says Barney.
So did Loya or didn’t he? Even Laird brings a cameraman along on his big-wave pilgrimages. What the west siders did alone on Thanksgiving they didn’t bother to document, so it remains outside the semi-official log of great rides. The guys were just surfing for fun. Whatever the size of Loya’s wave, there’s one thing Flea is sure of: “He was beating off when he got it.”
When the 101-degree Crawford heat scorches the prairie, the dust blows through the sagebrush like a tornado, and fire ants attack your ankles like the Devil’s minions, you won’t see George Bush flinch. He’s too busy beating the hell out of the underbrush, not caring at all whether he soils his work shirts. He doesn’t talk fancy, but puts things “in English, or Texan.” That’s why he vowed to get Osama “dead or alive.” His folks aren’t “Washington types,” but the guys “down at the Coffee Station,” Crawford’s one, tiny diner. You may have even seen him there on TV, shooting the breeze with them—his trucker and farmer buddies—telling the owner, Nick Spanos, to fire up the grill and make him a cheeseburger.
Like Ronald Reagan and Lyndon Johnson before him, Bush has been impressively successful at packaging himself as that American archetype of honesty, courage, and unshakable conviction: the cowboy. The plan to become one was hatched in the late 90s, when the Connecticut-born Texas governor, who attended Andover and Yale, worked with his close adviser, Karl Rove, to prepare a run for the presidency. The first thing Bush needed was a ranch. In 1999, he picked one, a 1,600-acre spread in Crawford, current population 705, a “dry” town with one blinking traffic light. It was one of the most conservative corners in the country, overflowing with true believers, who would turn every available wall into a Bush photo shrine and tolerate no dissenters. He’d spend roughly 20 percent of his presidency there—more than any modern president has been on vacation—so the press would get a steady diet of him in his cowboy hat, walking tall down dusty roads.
For almost five years, the plan worked—until one mother from Vacaville, California, Cindy Sheehan, camped outside his ranch for most of the month of August, demanding a face-to-face meeting about why we went to war in Iraq and why her son Casey had to die there, a month and a half before his 25th birthday. Her astonishing presence, in addition to catalyzing a nascent anti-war movement, changed the meaning of Crawford—from Bush’s cowboy backdrop to the walled-off vacation compound of an out-of-touch president. Then, after ignoring Cindy, he ignored Katrina. As he squeezed out his last vacation days, a major American city drowned.
The hotbed of Bush delirium extends to Waco, the small city adjacent to Crawford, still synonymous with the 1993 Branch Davidian disaster, in which David Koresh’s band of arms-hoarding religious extremists went up in flames after a 51-day standoff with the F.B.I. and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Within minutes of meeting a visitor to their city, Wacoans let you know that the Branch Davidians were actually 15 miles outside of Waco—which is true. That said, the cultural center of Waco is Baylor University, a Baptist institution where, until 1996, students were not allowed to dance. To this day, women are required to cover their upper arms at the gym, because, as the girl at the front desk warns, “sleeveless shirts lead to sports bras.”
When Bush was governor, Baylor president (now chancellor) Robert B. Sloan Jr. made his case that Baylor was a perfect fit for Bush’s presidential library, which many Wacoans see as the best way to remove the Branch Davidian stigma. “We commented about the world of higher education and [how] the political, the majoritarian view in higher education tends not to be sympathetic to his own political outlook,” says Sloan over lunch at Waco’s Ridgewood Country Club. In his 10 years as president, Sloan has sought to strengthen the spiritual backbone of Baylor, by demanding that its students and faculty be more devoted to faith, and by fortifying its position in the culture war. When a gay student came out of the closet, for example, his scholarship was quickly revoked. At Baylor, Sloan explains, “you couldn’t advocate certain lifestyles. You couldn’t advocate pedophilia or bigamy,” in contrast, he seems to be implying, to other universities, where multiple spouses and sex between adults and children are encouraged.
Not all true believers are so reasonable. Consider Bill Johnson, 63, who owns the Yellow Rose, Crawford’s largest gift shop. “This is God’s store,” says Johnson, an eerily soft-spoken, intense reed of a man with carefully parted sandy hair, a deep tan, and piercing green eyes. Outside the Yellow Rose, visitors are greeted by two giant tablets bearing the Ten Commandments and a replica of the Liberty Bell. Inside, one is greeted by a cornucopia of stuffed real tigers and bears, assorted crosses, old wagon wheels, and, mostly, Bush souvenirs: countless images of Dubya in military gear, Dubya with the Bible, Dubya flanked by eagles, Dubya bobbleheads, life-size Dubya cardboard cutouts, Western White House shot glasses—plus a sign that reads, HITLER, STALIN, CASTRO, AND QADDAFI SUPPORTED GUN CONTROL.
“Saddam Hussein—he disarmed his enemies so he could kill them,” says Johnson, explaining that, although everyone has a right to his own opinion, Americans who support gun control are no different from genocidal dictators. “That’s pretty much the way us folks feel about it.”
Just as his store is God’s store, the war in Iraq, Johnson insists, is God’s war. “In the Bible, it says if you don’t protect your family you’re worse than an infidel,” says Johnson. Jesus the pacifist needs to be seen in context, he explains. “The same Jesus that turned the other cheek is the same guy that … ran out the money changers. He whipped them.” The Bible also holds precious wisdom about how to treat people here at home, Johnson believes. Welfare, for instance, violates the message of the Good Book that those who don’t work deserve to die. “In Second Thessalonians, it says, ‘That the man shall not work, he should not eat.’ Just let him starve,” says Johnson.
Other true believers are simply basking in the glow of having the coolest guy in the world live in town. On this day in early August, to coincide with the start of Bush’s month off, Waco and Crawford society have gathered at Baylor for one of the summer’s hottest tickets—a photo exhibition called “Presidential Retreat.” There’s Tommye Lou Davis, the stunning, extremely well-preserved right-hand woman to Robert Sloan. She’s in a cream pantsuit accented with a George Bush scarf fanned out across her blouse like a bib. Over there, taking in a picture of Laura and George, is Shirley Westerfield, who became Crawford’s social queen when Bush danced with her at the inaugural ball she threw for him.
“She’s so pretty,” says Westerfield, a peppy chatterbox, wearing a button-down shirt with a pattern of ferns, as she moves on to the other cheerful images on display here tonight: George giving the thumbs-up; George with his dog Barney; George with his girls; George with his top Cabinet members, enjoying a walk down Prairie Chapel Road; George charming the pants off a black woman getting a house from Habitat for Humanity. Should 60 pictures not be enough, the show is followed by a montage film of more of the same, set to music. Over the movie-soundtrack crescendos and heroic cymbal crashing, one detects “ahs” and even sniffles in the audience. “I got chills,” says Westerfield, regaining her composure as she files out of the auditorium.
He’s one of us,” she enthuses, over a barbecue-on-paper dinner. “I just like him. He reminds me of my father. You know—blue jeans, ‘Let’s get in the truck.'” His accomplishments as president—even his war in Iraq—are not only beside the point but barely on the radar. “I don’t think about [the war], because I have about five or six girlfriends that I kind of stay in touch with, and we’re not talking about the war when we get together.”
Friendly and hospitable as most locals are, they can quickly turn into a lynch mob when their man is criticized, as W. Leon Smith, 52, the editor of The Lone Star Iconoclast,discovered. Hardly your fire-breathing liberal, Smith endorsed Bush in 2000 and, in addition to editing the paper, works, unpaid, as the mayor of Clifton, a small town near Crawford.
“We monitored his first term,” says Smith, a rather sober-looking grandfather type, sitting back in his decrepit office, where parts of the ceiling are being held up by cardboard and duct tape. “And at some point we needed to make a decision on who we were going to endorse, and the cards kept coming up ‘not Bush.'” He and his senior staff members, Don Fisher and Nathan Diebenow, fretted over the endorsement. “I lay there some nights staring at the ceiling, thinking about what we should do,” recalls Fisher. In the end, he says, “I don’t think we could do anything else in all conscience.”
The September 29, 2004, editorial endorsing John Kerry was a dispassionate account of how Bush had failed on a number of issues—stem-cell research, his plans for Social Security, the economy, the debt. But the local reaction was near hysteria. Letters to the editor would not suffice. The paper lost half its subscribers and most of its advertisers. Businesses in Crawford refused to sell it. “There was an active boycott put into place,” says Smith, “and [shopkeepers and advertisers] have been told they will be boycotted if they support us.”
It didn’t stop there. Diebenow received phone calls demanding, “Are you a Christian?” (In fact, his father is a local pastor.) “We had e-mails saying, ‘We hope you die,'” says Fisher. “Literally, ‘We hope you die.'” One man came by the office to say that he and his buddies were going to “run you out of town.” Two college students who were covering a local festival for the paper were denied admittance and were told that their names were on a list, and to wait right there so the sheriff could be summoned. Should the editors attempt to go into the Coffee Station, “you [would] have to carry your six-guns and go down, like High Noon,” says Diebenow. “It really wouldn’t surprise us if we were served the door instead of a hamburger.”
“If anyone thought that the opinion of three guys in central Texas was going to sway this election one way or another, that person needs to get out more, O.K.?” says Fisher, able to laugh about what happened. Mainly, the three men are profoundly disappointed. “The last defense, the last defiance, that you have is your voice,” Fisher says. “When you’re lying helpless and injured on your deathbed, so long as you have your voice, the thing is not over.”
For the true believers, handling the White House press corps—those neurotic liberal show-offs who descend on their turf for a total of about two months a year—requires a bit more finesse than hate mail and death threats. The press spend their days in the Crawford Middle School gym, sitting in a forced vigil on folding chairs at cafeteria tables beneath basketball hoops. By noon, they’ve usually clocked 3,000 calories, thanks to a constantly replenished feeding trough of double-smoked bacon, barbecue, and chicken-fried steak provided by local restaurants. In spite of all the food they get to eat, they are a bunch of whiners, say the true believers. They whine about the heat, they whine about the crickets, they whine about how there’s nothing to do.
“I hear a lot of complaints,” says Westerfield, who, as part of her volunteer work for the president, picks up his staff and the press corps from the airport and takes them to their hotels in Waco. “Especially when they’re right off the plane. They’re all busy, ‘filing their reports.’ I just keep quiet.”
Locals feel free to remind the press how out of touch and wrong they are—particularly when the reporters air their opinions in public, like at restaurants. CBS’s Mark Knoller found this out after he complained to his dinner partners about the security precautions now taken at airports. A fellow diner overhearing the conversation “felt my remarks were out of line,” says Knoller, “and he let me know it.” Some locals think such conversations are designed for them. “I was at a restaurant,” says one Baylor grad, “and they were having a very grand, esoteric conversation—for my benefit. About cancer research,” she says, rolling her eyes. Some true believers will speak up even when a reporter is quietly minding his own business. When The New York Times’s David E. Sanger dropped by Starbucks to get his paper, a fellow customer asked him why on earth he’d want to read that liberal nonsense. Sanger admitted that he not only reads it every day but also works there. The man advised Sanger that he ought to go home and set them straight. (For the record, Sanger’s ancestors are from Waco and founded a department store there.)
Nick Spanos, whose Coffee Station is festooned with Bush cutouts and Clinton-bashing cartoons, doesn’t hesitate to let it be known he thinks journalists are idiots. “We have reporters running out of our ears,” says Spanos, his hand on a second, special cell phone he keeps on his belt, in the unlikely event that he needs to be alerted about the arrival of a certain someone. “Newsweek did a deal on where the president’s money goes. And one of the parts of the interview was: Does he pay for his cheeseburgers? Yes. And does he leave a tip? This and that. Just pretty much stupid questions, you know?”
The press have also been reminded that they are considered sordid and debauched. When they were first working out of the elementary-school gym, unhappy parents, afraid that child-molesters might be in the group, demanded that a large, steel door be erected between the press and the kids. “We are the unknown … sort of sleazy element,” says Julie Mason, White House correspondent for the Houston Chronicle. “I think they feel we’re there to attack their president.… We’re sort of these troublemakers who make the president unhappy.”
As Bush sees it, by bringing the press corps to Crawford, he’s introducing them to real America. In 2003 his conviction that the press is out of touch with the country was articulated in an interchange at the summer barbecue at the ranch. One reporter asked him, “How do you then know what the public thinks?,” to which he responded, “You’re making a huge assumption—that you represent what the public thinks.”
“He thinks we’re effete and elitist and ridiculous and consumed with garbage,” Mason says. “He calls it ‘goo-goo journalism’ when you ask him something introspective, like that question about had he ever made a mistake. We’re all a bunch of theater critics.… He’ll often say, as we’re heading there, he’ll say something along the lines of ‘We’re heading to Texas and you’re all better for it.'”
On press visits to the ranch, Bush enjoys torturing the journalists physically. He’ll drive them around in his John Deere Gator, or load them into one of his fleet of pickups like cattle, so they can feel him attack the rugged terrain. “When you’re in the back of his pickup truck and he starts bouncing around on purpose just to watch you sort of flail in the back,” says John King, CNN’s chief national correspondent, “I think he’s just trying to see if he can ditch anybody.”
According to NBC’s David Gregory, whom Bush publicly ridiculed for asking Jacques Chirac a question in French, “He loves the idea that it really sort of tweaks all of us—you know, the white-wine-swilling, beach-loving East Coast elitist press corps, who would just be dying to spend time on Nantucket instead of Crawford. The fact that it puts us through our paces,” says Gregory, “I think he enjoys that even more.”
Bush’s instinct to out-tough the press corps is so ingrained that once, when standing in front of reporters at a news conference in 106-degree heat, he said, “We’ve got to get in before we have a heatstroke,” only to quickly correct himself: “before you have a heatstroke.” That Sanger (a Jew from the Times, of all things) has Texas roots perplexes Bush. “It may not quite fit with his image of New York Times reporters,” says Sanger, “as a bunch of Ivy League East Coasters who have little understanding of his Texas world.”
The fact that they’re on location doesn’t mean the press can expect anything like candor. Most of the ranch visits are “off the record,” and Bush makes it clear that he’s not there to discuss policy. Walking tours are like “boot camp,” says Gregory. “He moves so quickly, and you can tell he doesn’t really want to talk about substance, so he ends up giving you this kind of Audubon Society tour of his property.”
They tell you nothing and then they slam the door,” says Jean-Louis Doublet, from Agence France-Presse, over dinner at El Siete Mares, a Waco seafood restaurant. White House reporters tempted to criticize Bush do so at their own risk, Doublet explains. “Any journalist covering the White House, if they write a story saying they’re a bunch of liars … he would do it once and he’d be gone. He’d be an outcast.” Then again, feeling outcast is not uncommon among White House reporters. “This administration is so tight-lipped,” says Jessica Yellin, a rising star at ABC News, “that I can’t imagine the reporters who are ‘frozen out’ get that much less information than the rest of us.”
They’re left with exactly what Bush wants to give them—endless shots of him strutting around in his cowboy hat, blue jeans, short-sleeved work shirts, and question-and-answer sessions in which he’s leaning on a fence rail. In the summer of 2004, the other reporters envied the A.P.’s Scott Lindlaw when he got invited to the ranch for a one-on-one with Bush—even though his dispatch was nothing more than a play-by-play description of Bush on his mountain bike, climaxing in the president shrugging off a crash. Lindlaw noted that Bush’s heart rate is in the range of Lance Armstrong’s. The New York Times’s Elisabeth Bumiller has devoted several columns to the president’s exercise regimen, and has chronicled his problematic knee. Other Crawford dispatches, such as those from Judy Keen at USA Today,read like resort pamphlets. “That natural ambience is what the Bushes love so much about their ranch,” Keen writes with Laurence McQuillan in one of her exclusives. “The only sounds are the chatter of birds and the murmur of the breeze through the leaves of the live oak and cedar elm trees. The ‘Texas White House’ is where the Bushes find peace and solitude.” Meanwhile, at the Crawford Middle School, television correspondents deliver their “stand-ups” strategically placed in front of bales of hay or tractors, giving viewers the impression that they’re on the ranch, because, as one cameraman explains, the executives back East love the whole ranch thing.
It has been left to Cindy Sheehan to expose the hollowness of Bush’s cowboy populism. Far from the treasonous left-wing crackpot she has been painted to be by many of the right-wing pundits, Sheehan was a Catholic youth minister and until recently worked in the Napa County Health and Human Services Agency. She passed on her strong Catholic beliefs and family values to her son Casey. He was an altar boy for 10 years and an Eagle Scout, and wanted to remain a virgin until he got married.
Casey enlisted in the army in 2000, with the dream of becoming a chaplain’s assistant. Instead, he became a mechanic. “His recruiter promised him that even if there was a war that he wouldn’t see combat because he scored so high on the military competency test,” recalls Sheehan one week into her vigil, quickly eating a McDonald’s breakfast in a dingy van that’s swarming with flies. “He said, ‘I’ll only be there in support, Mom. My sergeant said you don’t have to worry about me.'” Though he was skeptical about the Iraq war, says Sheehan, he went with an unwavering sense of service. “He said, ‘Mom, I wish I didn’t have to go to the war, but I have to. It’s my duty. It’s what I’ve trained for.'” He died on April 4, 2004, less than a month into his tour of duty. There had been intense fighting that night, and help was needed to bring wounded soldiers to safety. Although mechanics do not usually go on such missions, resources were thin, and Casey volunteered. When Cindy saw a burning Humvee on CNN the next morning, she knew somehow that her son was dead.
Together with others who’d lost loved ones in Iraq, Sheehan met with the president shortly after her son’s death. The meeting left her without a shred of respect for him. Bush, who had prided himself on his compassion for military families, began the meeting, Sheehan recalls, by asking, “Who are we honoring here?” He didn’t know Casey’s name. He didn’t look at Cindy’s pictures of him. He called Cindy “Mom” throughout.
After processing that meeting Sheehan made it her mission to hold Bush’s feet to the fire for a good explanation as to why the country went to war. Her quest, as she puts it, is “to make meaning out of Casey’s death.” In the process, she has seen her life crumble further. She lost her job due to absences. She and her husband, Pat, split up, owing in part to the difference in the way they handled Casey’s death. He wanted to distract himself, she wanted to immerse herself. None of this has dimmed her determination. “I’m not afraid of anything anymore,” says Sheehan. “I’ve already had the worst thing happen to me.”
Her decision to come to Crawford was not some grand stunt to become a media star. As she tells it, it was a spur-of-the-moment decision she made with her sister, Dede Miller. Here on Prairie Chapel Road, usually a quiet spot, where a truck might drive by every 10 minutes or so, Sheehan finds herself at the center of a surreal scene that’s in turn exciting, heartrending, infuriating, and silly. Supporters have arrived from all over the country. Other military families have come to speak out, some who have lost children, and some who are terrified that they might any day. A few left-wing nuts roam from pup tent to pup tent, muttering about how the government was responsible for 9/11.
Over the course of the past week Sheehan has stood in lightning storms, slept in ditches, fought fevers, and endured attacks of fire ants in the middle of the night, only to watch her character get slimed on TV day after day. But support has come from unlikely places. Republican senators Chuck Hagel, from Nebraska, and George Allen, from Virginia, both publicly announced that they believed the president should meet with Sheehan. Dozens of reporters are clamoring for just a few minutes with her. “It’s a miracle,” she says.
But she also harbors bitterness toward the national networks and newspapers whose reporters are now swarming around her. “I believe the media did not do its job in the run-up to the war,” Sheehan says. “They did not ask the hard questions. They didn’t do the investigating. I told that to CNN anchor Anderson Cooper last night, and he said, ‘Well, there are only so many questions you can ask.’ … Yesterday, a CNN producer told me I had really good timing because it was a slow news week. I said, ‘Tell that to the 30 families of the Marines who died last week.'” A few minutes later, Sheehan stands before the media at a press conference and tells them she is doing the job they should have done.
This sudden jolt of ugly reality into Bush’s conservative comfort zone naturally has driven the true believers bonkers. Pickup trucks routinely spray Sheehan and her supporters with mud and make sport of coming close to running them over. A local resident, Larry Northern, mowed down hundreds of crosses Sheehan and her supporters had put up, the names of fallen soldiers affixed to them. One shopkeeper remarked that she’d like to release skunks onto the whole group. Plots of land Sheehan’s group had been using, which had been county property, were suddenly handed over to Crawford residents, making the protesters trespassers.
But on August 16 one Crawford landowner, Fred Mattlage, stepped in to help, by offering up his property for them to continue their protest. With this, another Crawford was put in the spotlight. This Crawford sees the growing divide between rich and poor in their community and a president who is responsible for it and accountable to no one.
One such Crawford citizen is Larry Mattlage, Fred’s distant cousin, whose family has been in Crawford since 1887 and who owns a farm three-quarters of a mile from Bush’s property. Mattlage is the real Crawford cowboy—with land, goats, sheep, a white beard, legs that stretch a mile—and he believes that Bush has done nothing for his beloved town except exploit it. First off, the idea that Bush is some kind of “rancher” just makes him laugh.
“He don’t know dirt,” says Mattlage, who is friendly with Bush’s ranch foreman, Robert Blossman. All that brush clearing, Mattlage says, “is for show. It’s not necessary.… [Brush] is where the birds live. That’s birdseed. That’s deer food. That’s cow food.… [Cedar] makes cedar posts. If they’re grown properly, they make a good post that will last forever.” Bush’s ignorance on the matter doesn’t surprise him. “You don’t move into these boonies and really understand the land, you know?” says Mattlage. “[They] got a lot of money, and they got access to a lot of machinery and a lot of bulldozers and a lot of destructive equipment, and before you know it, they can screw up something so damn bad.… A rich man with a bulldozer is a dangerous thing!” Furthermore, the notion that Bush is “friends” with anyone in Crawford is hogwash. “He’s a visitor to this group of people,” says Mattlage. “Nobody knows anything about him. I know you better than I know my neighbor.”
The history of Crawford, explains Mattlage as he takes you in his white Chevy four-by-four down Prairie Chapel Road, began in the mid–19th century when a bunch of German families settled and became farmers. He knows the ins and outs—which Mattlage married which Engelbrecht, which Westerfield is buried in which cemetery—and he loves every piece. He also loved the way of life he knew until Bush became his neighbor. “These people,” he says, nodding toward the farms, “they like to lay their corn, their wheat.… Before George Bush, we knew everyone on the road. We knew who stopped on the road. We could go where we wanted.”
One of Mattlage’s favorite spots in Crawford is the old schoolhouse down on Prairie Chapel Road, which happens to be close to Bush’s ranch. But as he approaches Mattlage Road, named after a relative, he’s met by a large roadblock and an S.U.V. Mattlage comes to a stop. A young Secret Service man, his eyes hidden behind shades, gets out and approaches us. Mattlage rolls down the window.
“How you doing, sir?” says the young man, in Secret Service tones. Mattlage introduces himself and his visitors.
“One of the things that they’re writing on is the history of this area,” Mattlage says. “And there’s a Prairie Chapel Schoolhouse that we would love to take a picture of, the historical markers. Anybody that can follow us there just for pictures?”
“Not while he’s in town, sir.”
“O.K. Uh, is there anybody we can call to get permission to do that? I mean, we’ll have the highway patrol follow us—”
“No. It pulls manpower away from what we already have allotted to. So, I mean, you know, it’s a secure perimeter. If you want to wait, I hate to say this, but if you want to wait till September, when he goes back … I know that’s not what you want to hear—”
“No.”
“Well, these roads become open then, but until then it’s a secure perimeter and it’s like asking to get into the White House itself.”
“Well, I understand that,” says Mattlage, his frustration quietly growing.
“I know it’s, this is, you know, this is your guys’ home and we’re visitors here, and I recognize that, and I do apologize for the inconvenience, but, uh, you know, it’s, it’s the job that we have to do.”
Mattlage stares him in the eye, unimpressed. “That’s why we’re in the war, too.”
“I’m sorry?” says the young man.
“That’s why we’re fighting the war—we’re doing the job somebody wants us to do, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
Mattlage pulls away and moves on. There’s another road up ahead he wants to go down. This one, he explains, does not lead to Bush’s ranch. When we get there, same thing.
“What the hell we got here now?” he says, getting more pissed off.
He spots Billy Westerfield, another neighbor, waiting in his pickup to get through, and he rolls down the window.
“What’s going on, Billy?”
“He’s riding his bicycle.”
Mattlage pulls away. “Bush has got a whole ranch to ride a bicycle on. He closes the road so he can ride a bicycle. See, this is like the military. They took a quiet community and turned it into a base.”
But it’s not just that Crawford has become a police state that has Mattlage riled up. Under Bush, Mattlage has seen the country—and his own life—go downhill. For 30 years he worked in education while he ran his farm on the side. Nine years ago, when Bush was governor, Mattlage lost his job at Texas State Technical College, in Waco, where he was director of counseling. “He goes all over Texas talking about, ‘We need technical education,'” says Mattlage, popping chewing tobacco into his mouth as he roams one of Crawford’s cemeteries. “Hell, he’s the one who cut it when we were doing it. He’s the one who cut my job. He’s why I don’t have a job. Now he’s my damned neighbor!”
Mattlage has other problems, too—a family member who is H.I.V.-positive, addicted to cocaine, and can’t get help. “To get him into treatment, I’d have to be a multi-millionaire or I’d have to gamble and sell everything I got, and he may not even get it. There’s no places to go, there’s no insurance for him to have, and the fact is nobody cares.” Minute by minute, you can see his Clint Eastwood stoicism giving way to rage. He gestures, fed up, with his long arms in the direction of the ranch. “So we got a guy who can ride a bicycle and do all the rest, but I can’t get [my relative] into a drug-treatment facility!”
Mattlage is not the only one frustrated. He sees similar struggles going on with his friends and neighbors. “People want a job, they want a family, they want a house, they want to work. They just want to make a living,” he says. He insists none of his neighbors would dare complain about Bush, adding, “The things I’m telling you are just things that I know they would say to me.”
What about the true believers? “They’re making money off T-shirts. They’re making money off hamburgers. Their ski lodge is open.”
And Shirley Westerfield? Mattlage chuckles. “She got to dance with him and she thinks she was dancing with Jesus Christ,” he says.
If Mattlage is Crawford’s real cowboy, then Robert Campbell, a thin, soft-spoken, bespectacled, 62-year-old African-American, is its real president. A 20-year air-force veteran who built bases from the ground up in Vietnam, Campbell moved from Philadelphia to Crawford in 1981 after meeting his wife, who was from here. Upon arrival, he became the sole maintenance worker in Crawford while he put himself through night school, studying business administration. He followed that by earning an advanced degree in social work from Baylor. After that, he went through the seminary at Southern Methodist University. He’s now pastor at two churches, serving the African-American communities of Crawford and Waco. Until this past May, he was also Crawford’s mayor, an unpaid position he had held since 1999.
In spite of his credentials and in spite of the enormous role he has played in the community, he is someone the president has never shown an interest in meeting—though foreign dignitaries, such as the president of China and the prime minister of Australia, have. Which strikes Campbell as odd, particularly since Bush boasted to the National Urban League Conference in July 2004 about his two black mayors, one in Washington and one in Crawford.
thought, Well, that’s amazing, since he hasn’t had any contact with me since he’s been in the White House,” says Campbell, laughing as he sits in the pew of his tiny Perry Chapel United Methodist Church, his pressed yellow polo shirt tucked tidily into his jeans.
In Bush’s years in Crawford, Campbell has seen the place go from a small, laid-back town where no one locked his door to an uneasy place of opportunism, where trees are being cut down to make room for shops. Car parts and home-improvement projects sit in front yards and look as if they haven’t been touched in years. Roofs are literally falling in. Mangy dogs roam free. Campbell can count on two hands the number of people in the African-American community who have jobs. Bush has done nothing, he says. “We’re his photo op.”
Campbell has also seen political tension erupt when before there never was any to speak of. “Since Bush has been here, that’s when political affiliation became an issue,” he says. “Nobody ever worried about whether you were a Democrat or a Republican. It was a non-issue. Now it’s the big thing.”
Campbell knows whereof he speaks. After listening to John Kerry talk to the National Conference of Black Mayors, Campbell decided he liked what he had heard, and let it be known that he would vote for him. “That had a lot of people up in arms. They thought I had committed blasphemy because I said it publicly.”
Campbell’s decision had little to do with how Bush has treated Crawford. As a Vietnam veteran, he thought the war in Iraq was a mistake. “He’s sending young men and young women off to war. His Cabinet and these other folks are backing it. I said, ‘How many of them have children in the military? And how many of their children are going to go?'” says Campbell, whose nephew is now stationed in Germany and will soon go off to Iraq. “I’ve been there. I’ve spent five tours in Southeast Asia and Vietnam during the war. I said, ‘Those people shoot real bullets, killing folks.'”
Though neighbors were enraged and he was dissed by councilmen, Campbell doesn’t regret speaking up. “In church I say I believe the Lord made my shoulders broad enough and he gives me the strength to carry the load,” he says. “I cannot stand in my pulpit and tell the members of my congregation what thus sayeth the Lord and how they are to live if I’m not willing to be bold enough to stand for my own convictions.”
On the last weekend of August, marking the end of the president’s vacation, the true believers and the skeptics came face-to-face when some 5,500 Sheehan supporters and 1,500 anti-Sheehan demonstrators descended on Crawford. In the 101-degree heat, the tiny town became a tinderbox for the most emotional showdown since the war began.
On one side is “Camp Casey,” a giant tent located on Fred Mattlage’s land, about a mile and a half from the president’s ranch. For anyone who harbors a tinge of embarrassment from the peace-movement antics of the 60s, there is much here to poke fun at. The protesters, who come from Austin and San Antonio, Colorado, New York, California, and Massachusetts, are being shuttled in and out by “peace” vans provided by the Peace House, the local protest shack, which was all but defunct until Sheehan came along. Local volunteers haul around coolers of water and put out food—hamburger buns, but no hamburgers. Young people with piercings sit around tents, some playing guitars, some lazing about on top of one another. A few women are breast-feeding their sweating, unhappy babies. Some people are meditating amid the chaos. The government-was-behind-9/11 faction appears to be gaining ground. Folksinger Joan Baez, oddly clean and fresh among a crowd of the drenched and grimy, pours cold water onto the head of a young woman about to pass out. Without words, she shares lengthy embraces with whoever approaches her, including a hulking gay former Marine who recently came out of the closet on Paula Zahn’s show. Then there are the women of Codepink, the anti-war women’s group, which is handling press. Wearing pink garments which look like they came off the racks at Barneys, they work their cell phones and BlackBerrys like Hollywood pros. As Al Sharpton and Sheehan head toward Casey’s cross to kneel and pray—followed by dozens of cameras—the pink ladies become hysterical. “Media, get off the crosses! Off the crosses!” they yell, as if the crosses were not there for the media’s benefit.
In a counterpoint to the silliness, more parents of fallen soldiers have joined Sheehan here, seeking answers to not just why we got into the war but why their children were put in situations they never should have seen—situations which led to their deaths. Bill Mitchell’s son, Mike, a tank mechanic, had turned in all his equipment on April 3, 2004. He was one week away from going to Kuwait; two weeks from Germany; four months from his wedding day. The next day, when a group of soldiers was ambushed in Sadr City, Mike was called back to help rescue them. “The tank commander, said, ‘Mitch, I need you to ride loader on the tank today,'” says Bill, holding the cross around his neck, in which he keeps some of Mike’s ashes. “He said, ‘Sarge, I’m with you.’ So my son went into Sadr City that day manning a machine gun,” something that was not emphasized in his training to be a mechanic.
Nadia McCaffrey, from Sunnyvale, California, never even thought her son, Patrick, who joined the National Guard after 9/11 as a way of serving his country, would have to leave the U.S. “He asked if there’s a war would he be deployed, because he has two children, and they told him no, you will be sent to Utah to watch a nuclear plant,” recalls McCaffrey. But like about 37,000 other National Guard troops, her son was sent to Iraq, in March 2004, after just two months of boot camp. On June 22, out on a mission that likely involved a search for W.M.D., he was shot and killed by a group of Iraqi men he’d been training. “Patrick didn’t have a chance, because he was carrying the radio,” says McCaffrey. “The radio was 75 pounds. It was 125 degrees. People were dropping. Patrick was a combat lifesaver. He had evacuated two people that day by administering a saline IV. He should have been evacuated himself as well. That mission should have been called off, period.” McCaffrey has repeatedly requested of the Pentagon that an autopsy of her son’s body be done. None has been forthcoming.
On the anti-Sheehan side, made up of locals and people from the Sacramento-based group Move America Forward, the rage is equally palpable. Among the BUSH COUNTRY and SUPPORT THE TROOPS signs are those that read, HOW TO WRECK YOUR FAMILY IN 30 DAYS BY “BITCH IN THE DITCH” CINDY SHEEHAN. A group of teenage boys in the street yells, “Cindy, the fucking whore, get out!” Some of the pro-war group have chosen a spot across the road from the original site of Sheehan’s protest, which is still being maintained by a group of her supporters. As state troopers prevent them from crossing the street into each other’s camp, the two groups hurl slogans across the road:
“George Bush!”
“War criminal!”
“The Rapture is coming!”
“Love your brother!”
At the end of Sunday morning’s interfaith service at Camp Casey, in which clergy from Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, and Unitarian groups have taken part, Rabbi Hillel Gamoran from Seattle tells the crowd that he will now lead them in Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for mourners. Just moments into it, a ferocious-looking local teenager, there with his buddy, rushes the group. “You’re doing the work of Osama!” he yells, getting up in the faces of the clergy. His fists are about to fly when he is subdued by a couple of local cops.
Headquarters for the anti-Sheehan group is just outside the Yellow Rose gift shop. “We’re making ground,” says Bill Johnson, as he wanders rapturously around his tent, which is decorated with pictures of a muzzled Cindy Sheehan and happy Iraqi children. As at Camp Casey, small white crosses have been planted in the ground. “We got 30 crosses in one bunch and another 40 coming down.” Country musicians have been brought in for the day, but the music is drowned out each time a Bush supporter yanks the rope of the Yellow Rose’s enormous Liberty Bell, which makes a sound that reverberates for blocks and shakes the pavement. “If you don’t support George Bush, you’re not supporting the troops!” yells one Waco woman over the din.
This side, too, has its share of parents in profound pain. Gregg Garvey, whose son Justin, an army sergeant with the 101st Airborne Division, was killed in July 2003 in Iraq, believes that Sheehan is trying to dishonor the troops, and he came to Crawford to set her straight. “I went up there and retrieved my son’s cross from a ditch,” says Garvey. “[Sheehan] made the comment that ‘this country is not worth fighting or dying for.’ Then why in the hell doesn’t she take her protest thing and join her freedom fighters in Iraq and see how long it lasts over there?” In fact, what Sheehan said was that Iraq was not worth fighting for. The twisted words have been beaming from one right-wing media outlet to another.
By the end of the summer, Bush had driven past Sheehan only to go to and from a Republican fund-raising barbecue. He left Crawford on Monday, August 29—not to go to Louisiana and Mississippi, where a state of emergency had been declared three days earlier, but to Arizona, where he posed with John McCain and his birthday cake and tried to sell senior citizens on his Medicare proposal. On Tuesday, as New Orleans filled up with water, he went to Naval Air Station North Island, outside San Diego, where he messed around on a guitar with country singer Mark Wills. While conditions for about 25,000 citizens trapped in the New Orleans Superdome deteriorated into unimaginable filth, starvation, and death, and one million Gulf Coast residents found themselves homeless, Bush returned to Crawford for one more night.
It remains to be seen whether even the true believers will get all they want from Bush. Waco will likely not get its presidential library, as insiders say the president has all but decided to build his library at Southern Methodist University, in Dallas. He has been to Waco a total of six times, twice for summits at Baylor, twice to play golf, once to throw a pitch in the regional Little League game, and once for a photo op with Habitat for Humanity, which ended when Bush pinched his thumb between two boards and bled on the homeowner’s new floor. As one local newspaper editor points out, “The name ‘Waco’ has never come out of his mouth.”
What about Bill Johnson and his souvenir shop? Bush has never set foot in the Yellow Rose. But, like a doormat girlfriend, Johnson doesn’t complain. Rather, he makes up lame excuses for Bush’s absence. “He was going to come in here about three or four months ago, and it rained, so they couldn’t get in the back door.” He adds, weakly, that “the daughters have been in. And Arnie Schwartz.” (That’s Ari Fleischer.)
After his presidency, Bush will likely leave Shirley Westerfield and friends and buy a place in Dallas, which Laura has admitted she prefers. When Bush hangs up his cowboy hat, all that the Crawford residents will have left of him will be those souvenirs, photos, and cardboard cutouts—which, if you really think about it, was all they had in the first place.