It’s the prom for San Francisco’s most soigné—the midwinter gala to benefit the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum—and the impeccably mannered host, Trevor Traina, scion of one of the city’s most established families, gives Jeremy Stoppelman, co-founder and C.E.O. of Yelp, a head-to-toe assessment. “You made the right call with the tux,” says Traina approvingly.

“Yeah, glad I asked you,” replies Stoppelman, who’d thought maybe he could get away with wearing just a jacket and tie to this thing. (Please, my friend.)

A few years ago, a major-league gala such as this would have starred a small and unchanging coterie of social powerhouses: Traina’s indomitable fund-raiser of a mother, Dede Wilsey, grande dame Denise Hale, and Vanessa Getty, one of the prettiest girls in town. Tonight, though, the marquee names are the C.E.O.’s from your bookmarks bar. Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer is swanning through Wilsey Court in a blue Angel Sanchez gown, collecting total props for her recent call for telecommuting employees to work at the company headquarters. Twitter C.E.O. Dick Costolo is talking social media with Stoppelman. The bubbly Alison Pincus, co-founder of the online-shopping destination One Kings Lane, is contemplating the question of who is San Francisco’s most eligible bachelor: Stoppelman or Benchmark venture capitalist Matt Cohler, formerly a giant at Facebook. “I only have eyes for one man,” Alison says. That would be her husband, Mark Pincus, founder and chairman of Zynga, the gaming platform on Facebook and elsewhere. Over here is Sir Jonathan “Jony” Ive, head designer at Apple, who with Steve Jobs designed the iPhone, iPad, and iPod; over there, Juliet de Baubigny, the fetching tech-talent recruiter from Kleiner Perkins. In every corner congratulations are in order—on initiatives, growth, valuations, and generally “killing it.”

The high-tech elite has arrived, with more money than anyone knows what to do with. At the helm of companies that are focused on social media and commerce, as opposed to algorithms, this new generation of Silicon Valley titans has abandoned the Valley and made homes and headquarters in San Francisco. Alas, San Francisco, with just 812,000 people, is one of the few American cities in which Old Money still carries formidable status, and traditions are entrenched. Edith Wharton, had she lived in the time of instant messaging, would surely have found rich fodder in the collision of these worlds. As in mid-19th-century New York City, some from the Old Guard find the new breed well short of scintillating.

“They bore the hell out of me,” says Denise Hale, a Serb refugee who married Hollywood director Vincente Minnelli and then San Francisco department-store magnate Prentis Cobb Hale. “They’re one-dimensional and can only talk about one thing. I’m used to brilliant men in my life who leave their work, and they have many other interests. New people eventuallywill learn how to live. When they learn how to live, I would love to meet them.” (An exception, she says, is Marissa Mayer. “Marissa is something which I like. Marissa has a handsome husband, in love, beautifully dressed, a lady. I don’t go for this slob culture—leave me alone.”)

For society’s more junior members, however—for whom Facebook is the very essence of worldly relevance—the arrival of the high-tech elite is a cause for celebration, or at least an opportunity for mutual enhancement. “We love our new neighbors. It’s all great,” says Vanessa Getty, who’s married to oil heir Gordon Getty’s youngest son, Billy, and who has been the most prominent young woman on the charity circuit for a number of years. “For society—and I hate that word—for things to continue to be exciting and interesting, circles have to keep expanding,” says Getty. “Even when [designer] Tory [Burch] was out here, she spoke at Stanford. She went to Google. It’s all interlinked.”

Traina, with whom Hale has had a special friendship since he was a 14-year-old gushing about her jewelry, sees the collection of these folk in his backyard as a momentous occasion. “If you think about what came out of the brain of a Jony Ive or a Mark Pincus or an Ali Pincus or any of these people,” he says, “Facebook, Zynga, Apple, they are defining the experience of people around the globe. And it’s all happening right here.”

With all that defining they’re doing everywhere else, the thinking goes, just imagine what they could do for San Francisco—a city in which the natives take enormous pride and from which they derive a sense of identity. All they need is a little cultivation, a few helpful pointers on where to live, whom to know, how to entertain, and how to give back—a task that Traina, along with a handful of other San Franciscans in the know, has taken on with gusto. With all the networking and good cheer buzzing about, it should be so easy.
Gold Coast Rush

It all begins in Pacific Heights, a Waspy and conservative enclave to the north by San Francisco Bay, where the children of San Francisco’s “leading families” grew up, going to the same three boys’ schools (Stuart Hall, Cathedral, and Town) and the same three girls’ schools (Convent of the Sacred Heart, Hamlin, and Burke’s), attending the same cotillions as teenagers, the same fund-raisers as adults. As one Pacific Heights native puts it, “Imagine growing up on the Upper East Side and never leaving.”

Two families ruled the roost 30 years ago—the Gettys and the Trainas—and they continue to do so today. But now the tech elite has bought there en masse: Pincus, Ive, Stoppelman, Cohler, Yammer C.E.O. David Sacks, Facebook designer Aaron Sittig, Michael and Xochi Birch, of Bebo. They are concentrated especially densely in the inner sanctum, called “Outer Broadway” or “the Gold Coast”—due largely to Traina’s efforts. Perched at the highest point above the bay, the Gold Coast is a hushed, two-and-a-half-block showcase of freestanding, stately mansions designed by such iconic 20th-century architects as Willis Polk and William Wurster. Its main selling point is its endless views—of the bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, the lush Presidio, the Marin headlands, Tiburon, Sausalito, and the island of Belvedere. The Old Guard residents have included Spreckels-sugar heir and Kransco toy tycoon John Rosekrans and his eccentric, international fashion-plate wife, Dodie; Levi Strauss heir Peter Haas, a member of one of the city’s leading philanthropic families; Lucy and Fritz Jewett, of the Weyerhaeuser lumber fortune; and Maryon Davies Lewis, of APL Shipping. The venerable names are still very much kicking: art collectors Norman and Norah Stone and part-time opera composer Gordon Getty and his decorator wife, Ann; the Gettys have combined three contiguous houses and built a pre-school on their property for their grandchildren and the children of the neighborhood elite.

It’s a place where privacy has been paramount—“friendly, but not overly friendly,” as Norah Stone puts it—and family scandals could be weathered. In 1999, for example, when it was revealed that, after 34 years of marriage and four sons, Gordon Getty had an entire second family he’d been keeping secret for 14 years, life went on as usual. Traina would be touched by scandal, too, when his stepbrother Sean Wilsey came out with a 2005 memoir, Oh the Glory of It All, in which Dede Wilsey was portrayed as the ultimate evil stepmother. And though people still refer to the memoir in hushed tones as “the book,” it in some ways has merely enhanced Wilsey’s dominance.

“It’s like Knots Landing,” says Traina, with little irony. He moved to his first home on the Gold Coast—a 5,500-square-foot Wurster house—in 2000, after selling his tech company Compare.net to Microsoft for $100 million. When he decided to get married (to Swanson-food-and-wine heiress Alexis Swanson) and start a family, he deemed the house too small (“O.K. for one kid, but not multiple kids”) and moved across the street to his current house. A 1905 Georgian, it would fit not only a growing family but also his 300-piece photography collection, which includes works by Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Garry Winogrand, and William Eggleston. The house is an unabashed paean to extravagant beauty. In one corner is a pair of taxidermy peacocks from Paris—a gift from his stepmother, novelist Danielle Steel. In another, an ornate console table that belonged to movie director Franco Zeffirelli and took center stage at Traina’s dramatic marriage proposal to Alexis in the handbag section of New York’s Bergdorf Goodman. Then there’s his art-book reading room, for which he had a wild notion. “I said to [our decorator] Ann [Getty], ‘Could you do a wall of hand-sewn peacock feather?’ And she said, ‘Absolutely, no problem.’ She had her people hand-sew it.” He has infused his love for over-the-top exquisiteness into his latest Internet venture, a company called IfOnly, which raises money for charity by enlisting the world’s foremost talents to offer “life-enriching experiences” such as cooking with Thomas Keller or getting the world’s “top mixologist” to invent a cocktail for your friend for $250. “We all have too many cashmere sweaters,” he says, explaining the inspiration behind it. “What people want today are experiences and memories… A lot of friends aspire to have incredible experiences, and so I thought, What if we could really delight people by connecting them in the most incredible ways with their heroes and do good in the process? … It’s sort of what I already do.”

Indeed, Traina has become the Gold Coast’s curator-in-residence. Relaxing in his sun-flooded Kew Gardens–style conservatory, he happily chronicles the transformation of the Gold Coast into the tech elite’s haven. The first tech giant to arrive was Oracle’s Larry Ellison, in 1988. He paid $3.9 million for the William Wurster house right next to the Gettys—a mere pittance for him, to be sure, and just one of his dozens of properties. “He ruffled every feather,” says Traina. “[Ellison] essentially became ‘the Wurster-minator.’ He tore out the entire house except for the courtyard, and then he built this very modern house. People were extremely upset.” Ellison didn’t make any more friends when he raised hell about a neighbor’s redwoods that were obstructing his views of the bay and harming his property value, he said. He took the couple to court, and they ended up cutting the tops of the trees in the undisclosed settlement. Some bad blood followed Ellison to the Gold Coast when Nicola Miner—daughter of the Oracle co-founder Robert Miner, with whom Ellison had clashed—bought across the street from him and erected on the terrace a nine-foot robot sculpture which you can’t help but notice is male, due to the steel gas-pump nozzle and hose he has for a penis. It’s aimed directly at Ellison’s house. “There was a lot of talk about this being a thumbing of the nose at Larry,” recalls Traina. But Miner replies that the robot “has nothing whatsoever to do with my father’s (or my) relationship with Larry Ellison,” which she describes as “largely harmonious… We just thought it would make a fun contrast to our serious neighborhood … though I do know some neighbors disagree.”

The more recent wave of Gold Coast colonization by the techies began in 2008—slowly at first, with Michael and Xochi Birch, a husband-and-wife programming team who’d met while he, a Brit with long hair and thick glasses, was a physics major at Imperial College London, and she, a Bay Area native, was studying abroad. In 2005 they launched a Web site called Bebo, a Facebook-like social network that became one of the most popular sites in Britain. In 2008, right before it was clear that Facebook would crush the competition, AOL bought Bebo for $850 million, ample funds for the Birches to buy a $29 million house on the Gold Coast, along with a 360-acre vineyard in Sonoma for $13.6 million. Gold Coast sales were slow for the next few years. Then, in 2012, in a total fluke, Traina got word about a number of houses coming on the market. He got on the horn with his high-tech friends, telling them the opportunity of a lifetime had just arrived.
“Trevor basically handpicked the neighborhood ,” says his friend Nirav Tolia—C.E.O. of Nextdoor, a fast-growing social network for neighborhoods—who bought on Vallejo Street, one block north of Broadway. First to come up on Broadway was a rare midcentury-modern house. Ive was circling it, as was Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and Square, when Facebook designer Aaron Sittig swooped in and took it away from both men. Ive satisfied himself with the $17 million Willis Polk house two doors down. “Jony has Norman Foster doing his house,” says Traina. “So it’s going to be incredible. But I pity the contractor.” In August, Mark and Alison Pincus bought a 12,000-square-foot Dutch Colonial Revival-style house for $16 million, two doors down from Nicola Miner. “Their house needs a lot of work but also has superb potential, so I’m really excited for them,” says Traina. In September, David Sacks, a former member of the PayPal mafia and a founder of Yammer, spent $20 million on a 17,500-square-foot mansion and 6,000-square-foot guesthouse, between Miner and the Pincuses. “It’s hollow, but it has superb potential,” reports Traina. Meanwhile, New York transplants Shaklee C.E.O. Roger Barnett and his wife, Sloan, who’ve lived on the Gold Coast since 2005, bought the house across the street that belonged to the Rosekranses for $33 million. In 2011, they sold their original Broadway house for $23.5 million to venture capitalist Matt Cohler. He is renting it back to them until their renovation on the new one (led by interior designer Peter Marino) is completed. For the interim, Cohler has bought a second house on outer Broadway—which happens to be Traina’s original home.

Traina takes great satisfaction in what he’s brought about. “My aspiration for my good friends is that they all love their homes, and selfishly it’s wonderful to have so much incredible magical brainpower nearby.” And how do the other older families feel? Max Armour, the strapping young business partner of Pacific Heights real-estate queen Malin Giddings, delicately suggests, “It’s not always been so harmonious.” To which Giddings, an oh-so-chic Swede wearing weathered leather pants and bejeweled gloves, shoots back, “What do you mean? The older guard is very happy that a younger guard has money! It would be much worse if they didn’t have money.”

From the standpoint of the entrepreneurs, it wasn’t the pedigree that impressed them. “I probably don’t know who those people are,” says Sacks when asked about the prominent Gold Coast forebears. What mattered was that the neighborhood was considered, well, the best. Tolia, who by virtue of his particular tech business is constantly analyzing neighborhoods, explains, “For me and many of my peers, you do actually ask people all the time, ‘What’s the best neighborhood in San Francisco?’ ‘What’s the best car?’ ‘What’s the best restaurant?’ And when people tell you, ‘Well, it depends on what you’re asking for,’ you say, ‘Yeah, I know it depends. But if you just had to pick one, what would it be?’ Most people say, ‘That’s Pacific Heights.’ And then you get hooked up with someone like Malin, and she says, ‘Darling, there’s only one street that you want to be on.’ ”

While Traina has given the tech crowd the keys to the kingdom, another man, 47-year-old design guru Ken Fulk—whose clients include the Pincuses, the Birches, Traina, Tolia, Sean Parker (Napster co-founder and the first president of Facebook), and many more flush digerati—is spreading his own brand of glamour and happiness. A small-town boy from Virginia, Fulk arrived in San Francisco over two decades ago and found a place where gay people could kiss in public and people like Trevor Traina could talk about having met the Aga Khan—“all the things I fantasized about in rural Virginia.” He’s never looked back.
“Ken’s the most incredible person in every possible way,” says Hale, who immediately found in him the kind of charming, sophisticated, always-game adventurer they don’t make anymore. She recalls their courtship: “I said to Ken, ‘M.T.T. [San Francisco Orchestra conductor Michael Tilson Thomas] wants me to hear some concert in Tanglewood. I’ve never been to Tanglewood. Would you come with me?’ ‘Yeah, I’m coming.’ ‘Ken, I have to go to Dubrovnik.’ My friend Zubin Mehta was conducting an orchestra from Belgrade there. ‘O.K., we go to Dubrovnik.’ ‘Ken, after the party, I want to walk.’ Two o’clock in the morning, with champagne, we walk on Fifth Avenue. Where do you find any friend like that?”

For the past few years, the sprightly Fulk—who favors trim, natty suits and bow ties but also counts vintage peep shows and Provincetown drag queens as style touchstones—has become the tech elite’s go-to guy for every possible matter of taste. “For a lot of them, I’m a shortcut to things they want to do,” he says, zipping through Pacific Heights in his black Maserati, “to have a good party, to buy the right suit, to know where to stay when you go to Zurich. I have clients move here, and the women, I’ll give them a list: This is where you should cut your hair. This is who you should wear if you want to go to lunch, to eat the right thing. They want to know and I love telling them! It’s not like I want to be in charge, but you want people to have a good experience.” He wears the role breezily; his favorite words to describe his projects are “silly” and “ridiculous.” Adorably, he is forever jumping up in the middle of a conversation to vigorously dust whatever needs dusting—his pants, your jacket, a decorative box that’s just sitting there collecting dust.

The tech elite, normally control-freakish about their toys, have put themselves completely in Fulk’s hands when it comes to their offices and homes. (The one exception, he notes, is Mark Pincus, “who’s uninvolved, and then suddenly very involved. It’s exhausting.”) After Michael and Xochi Birch bought their Gold Coast house, they decamped to London for seven weeks and let Fulk do his thing, redesigning every square inch, without so much as presenting them with a swatch. Instead, his preparation was solely about becoming friends with them and getting to know what they were all about: kind, unpretentious brainiacs, interested more in making cool computer programs than in making a fortune. But lurking not far under the surface is a love of eccentricity and fun. With that in mind, Fulk outfitted the house with a cheeky take on an old-world portrait gallery, lacquered cerulean walls, a mosaic of the Union Jack done inside the fireplace, and an actual old English pub, brought in from England, because Michael counts drinking as his main hobby. Before the Birches’ arrival at their new home for what Fulk calls “the Reveal,” Fulk sent Michael to trim his hair. Fulk then gathered all the Birches’ friends at the house, got two Beefeater doormen from the Sir Francis Drake hotel to greet everyone, and enlisted a singer to serenade the group with Beatles songs.

With San Francisco social life revolving around predictable fund-raisers, Fulk is the only one throwing party parties, usually at his baroque, slightly naughty-looking South of Market loft, which was once a leather and bondage-equipment factory. His weekly Sunday suppers—at which he glides around making sure that no glass is empty and that everyone feels like the most fascinating person in the room—are a careful mix of his society friends, his tech clients, and an artist or two thrown in. “There is this dichotomy of people who live in this town and they live harmoniously, relatively, but they don’t always mix,” says Fulk. He’s made it his mission to bring them together and to give them a gentle jolt of the outrageous. The rager not long ago for Hale’s birthday featured a venerable troupe of gay nightclub performers called the Cockettes. “At eight in the morning, we had people taking showers,” says Fulk. People are still talking about the party for Jean Paul Gaultier, featuring burlesque queen Dita Von Teese stripping on a velvet bull for the upright patrons of the de Young museum. He has lent this exuberant flair to the tech crowd as well. When he is called upon by the rotating host of the “C.E.O. dinners,” a monthly tradition that has emerged among a group of high-tech leaders, he always includes an indulgent surprise, as when he had Tolia’s tailor from Italy fly in for the event, bearing shirts for the guys. His latest coup was creating the enchanted-forest backdrop of Sean Parker’s multi-million-dollar wedding, an event he admits was “beautiful enough to bring you to tears.”

This feeling that San Francisco is poised for a social rebirth—it just needs a little push—is palpable. In the wake of their $850 million windfall, the Birches, under the creative direction of Fulk, have undertaken the monumental task of transforming an old brick-and-timber marble warehouse in Jackson Square, the old Barbary Coast, into a five-story, 60,000-square-foot social club called the Battery. It will feature a 100-person dining room, six bars, a gym, a spa, a library, event spaces, and hotel rooms. “For whatever reason, despite all this creativity and entrepreneurship, there’s not been a lot of creativity in the nightlife,” says Birch, who has seen London flourish in the last 20 years and thinks San Francisco can as well. While the old-money San Francisco gentlemen are still socializing at all-male clubs like the Bohemian and the Pacific-Union, “the tech people have been so heads-down building their business,” says Birch. “[But] now lots of people have come out the other side. They’re putting their heads up and saying, What else is there to do?” Aiming to attract groups from various San Francisco tribes—cash-strapped, struggling writers and artists included—they’ve set an annual membership fee of $2,400, with scholarship opportunities so that wealth won’t be a filter. As Fulk puts it, “The Battery is meant to take the scientists, the artists, the mucky-mucks and eccentrics and crazy people and throw them together.” Traina, who jumped at the chance to get involved when the Birches asked him, calls it “a gift to the city.”
Charity Circuit

To the pillars of the Pacific Heights community there is no higher calling than to “give back” to San Francisco. Traditionally, supporting the cultural institutions—the museums, the symphony, the opera, and the ballet—was de rigueur for any self-respecting millionaire. But with each passing year, those sources are dying off. It would seem the emergence of this high-tech crowd would fill the void and then some. And indeed, as Fulk reports, “there was a mad dash” to grab them and put them on boards. But, alas, charitable largesse has been the one arena in which the new folk have not so easily assimilated the ways of the old.
Under the leadership of angel investor Ron Conway—who has done more than anyone to keep the tech community in San Francisco by investing in hundreds of start-ups—the tech entrepreneurs have begun putting their know-how to use for the public good in the areas of education, job creation, and public safety. But it has required arm-twisting: at Conway’s insistence, Mayor Ed Lee had fought successfully for the kind of tax breaks that would encourage companies such as Twitter and Pinterest to headquarter in the city. But, as Conway admits, once those breaks passed, “Lee said, ‘Hey, the tech community is going to stay engaged, aren’t they?’ And I kind of said, ‘Not really. We’re going to go back to work.’ ” But Lee would not let Conway and his gang off the hook. Conway rallied his tech troops to become involved in a number of civic-minded initiatives, such as placing San Francisco public-school students in tech-related internships and designing a mobile field-report application for police officers so that they can file reports remotely.

Yet when it comes to significant personal giving, the tech community has been less responsive. Salesforce.com founder and C.E.O. Marc Benioff, a fifth-generation San Franciscan, recently gave $100 million to the University of California, San Francisco, to build its Children’s Hospital. But he stands alone in his generosity, and his efforts to encourage that kind of giving have been frustrating. “One of my goals is to be an inspiration to people,” says Benioff. “I hope that people start thinking differently, that they’re not just making money but also giving it away. But Silicon Valley executives have not really been giving away money. They’ve held on to it.” Mayor Lee has had to sit down with members of the tech elite and school them in the previous generation of titans, who built the parks, the universities, the cultural institutions—people such as Charles Schwab of the eponymous brokerage firm, private-equity investor Warren Hellman, real-estate tycoon Walter Shorenstein, and the Haases (Levi Strauss), who for five generations have given hundreds of millions to every sector of San Francisco life.

“I’m trying to encourage much more philanthropy,” says Traina, who sits on a long list of business and philanthropic boards. “I was doing these things at the age of 30, but that was because I was brought up that way, and I had the ability to at that point.” He is quick to recognize those who have heeded the call to tend to the city’s institutions, such as Marissa Mayer’s venture-capitalist husband, Zachary Bogue, who is on the board of the Fine Arts Museums, and Matt Cohler, who’s on the board of the symphony and ballet. And others from the Old Guard are touting the new people who are showing interest, too. Gold Coast art collector Norah Stone, who recently hosted a tour of her collection, hoping to spark an interest in SFMoMA, points to the enthusiasm that Alison Pincus and David Sacks’s wife, Jacqueline, have shown for the institution. Vanessa Getty reports that an anonymous tech donor has just given her animal-rescue charity, the San Francisco Bay Humane Friends, a substantial gift. Still, despite the acknowledgments, there seems to be a large gulf between what the new people can give and what they are giving.

Some tech people think they’re getting a bad rap. True, there are a handful who seem to feel unburdened by the responsibility of sudden wealth. “I didn’t really think about it,” says Sacks when asked about the moment last year when he knew he was $1.2 billion richer thanks to the sale of Yammer to Microsoft. He threw himself a $1 million 40th-birthday party, called “Let Him Eat Cake,” for which the guests were asked to dress up as members of Marie Antoinette’s court. (Perhaps understandably, he insisted that the guests keep the party secret from the public.) As for his philanthropic giving, it’s mostly anonymous, he says. For others, the sudden fortune causes a degree of soul-searching and analysis. As Michael Birch says, “I’ve met a lot of people who’ve made money and ask, ‘What should I do?’ Everyone seems to want to do it. It’s not ‘Should I do philanthropy?’ It’s more like ‘I need to do philanthropy. I’ve made this money and now I need to give back.’ Most people want to give back in an intelligent way.”

But the notion that some higher class of citizenry should dictate which causes are worthy runs counter to the very DNA of the tech talent. “Silicon Valley people tend to be allergic to this notion of ‘society,’ ” says Nirav Tolia, a second-generation Indian who grew up in Odessa, Texas. He sees Silicon Valley as the ultimate meritocracy. “Kissing the ring doesn’t do anything. Like, who kisses the ring? What people do is they commit themselves to excellence and they work really hard to create that… The people with privilege aren’t the ones creating the great companies. It’s the people who work the hardest, have the best ideas, and are the most passionate and most innovative.”

Among this crowd, the old ways of doing philanthropy seem hopelessly retrograde. According to Birch, tech people “don’t want to just go to dinners and write checks and do auctions. They actually want to sit back and think, What are the values that they require? Is this a good fit? They want to do due diligence in the same way you would if you were doing an investment.” The traditional areas of interest feel narrow, he adds. “Tech people like investing in stuff that’s kind of disruptive—most of the companies that they started are disruptive—[as opposed to] the arts scene. They’re engaging in arts to a degree, but most of the capital is probably going to something that they think is going to change the world.” With that in mind, Birch, after being approached by countless charities, decided to devote his money and energy to Charity Water, a nonprofit that brings clean water to developing nations. He contributed $1 million, an entire year’s operational budget, and redesigned its Web site, which “kind of sucked.”

It’s hard not to get behind the idea of clean water for everyone on the planet. But clean water in sub-Saharan Africa doesn’t do much for the San Francisco Symphony. Therein lies the tension. As it happens, an organization called Tipping Point has emerged that’s coming as close as anything to bridging these interests. Dedicated to eradicating poverty in the Bay Area, it’s pushing the new generation of tech wealth to focus on its city, but, alas for the Old Guard, on people who will probably never set foot in an opera house. Fittingly, it was founded by Dan Lurie, the son of Peter and Mimi Haas, who saw that those living in poverty needed a voice.

Based on the Robin Hood Foundation, in New York, where Lurie worked for four years, Tipping Point treats charitable donations as if they were business investments, demanding results and not being afraid to cut ties if those goals aren’t met—the very model that appeals to data-driven tech leaders. Consequently, he’s been able to attract to his board people such as Zachary Bogue and Tony Bates, of Skype. Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his wife, Anne Wojcicki, have given Tipping Point $1 million three years in a row now. Earlier this year, the organization received a major gift from Mark and Alison Pincus. “We’ve been blown away by the generosity,” says Lurie, “yet we need them to give more… These leaders are changing the world, with how we communicate, how we get our news, how we do all sorts of things. And yet right here in our own backyard, where all this innovation is happening, we have 1.3 million people who are too poor to meet their basic needs.”

Lurie was brought up on the belief that the super-wealthy ought to give away 10 percent of their fortunes. To provide some perspective, that would mean someone like Sergey Brin, whose net worth is almost $23 billion, should give away $2.3 billion. Nothing of the sort is happening. To be sure, 10 percent sounds high, but Lurie believes it’s critical that the new leaders push themselves, to feel strained, to think in a way they never have before. And after all, isn’t thinking innovatively what it’s all about for these visionaries? It’s a long way off, but if 10 percent of all the tech wealth were devoted to fighting poverty, a brand-new San Francisco would likely emerge. The wall that separates Pacific Heights families like the Trainas and the Gettys from the man on the street might start to give way just a bit. Then the techies and Denise Hale might really have something interesting to talk about.

Admit it: the very premise of this article—that Marky Mark and his sidekick L.A. homey Steve Levinson are suddenly the hottest television producers in Hollywood—makes you roll your eyes. Sure, they’ve got their name on four shows on the most prestigious network—Entourage, In Treatment, How to Make It in America, and Boardwalk Empire—but, like Entourage’s Vincent Chase and his manager Eric “E” Murphy, you think, Wahlberg and Levinson are probably doing deals by cell phone from their Maserati convertibles between booty calls and trips to Vegas. Their success drives long-suffering television writers and producers crazy. I mean, it isn’t enough that Wahlberg is one of the hottest actors working today?

Even the guys at HBO are surprised. Michael Lombardo, HBO’s president of programming, says, “If you had asked us eight years ago, when we decided to green-light Entourage, whether we thought Mark Wahlberg and Steve Levinson would evolve to be probably the most important producers dealing with us today, we would probably have said no.”

The truth is even more surprising. It’s a story of friendship and mutual trust built over the course of two decades, perfectly aligned tastes, and two dudes who actually work their butts off. Levinson, 45, despite his suburban-jock appearance (jeans, sneakers, massive watch), is the detail-obsessed, story-nerd grind, getting into the weeds, draft after draft after draft. “Lev,” as he’s known by all, “is one of the guys I would have been hanging around the keg with [in college],” says Daniel Futterman, one of the show-runners of In Treatment. “Initially that’s what you think of him. And then he surprises you by how insightful and sensitive and intelligent he is about all these artistic decisions.” Or as V.F. contributing editor Evan Wright, the screenwriter of the upcoming movie Cocaine Cowboys (which Wahlberg and Levinson are helping to produce), puts it, “A lot of people assume that Lev’s an asshole. There’s no other way to put it—that he’s the business guy who’s an asshole. But in the whole creative process, he was the smartest guy I’ve worked with.”

Wahlberg, meanwhile, is the big-picture, charismatic leader, championing projects with do-or-die enthusiasm and sealing the deals with the big names, like Martin Scorsese, who came aboard Boardwalk Empire as a co-producer and directed the pilot. “Steve is the worrier, Mark the eternal optimist,” says HBO co-president Richard Plepler. “The combination is what makes the alchemy.”

“They have their rhythm down,” says agent Ari Emanuel, C.E.O. of William Morris Endeavor, who has represented them both since 1999. After 20 years together, they have naturally developed a shorthand—key phrases being “Gotcha,” “Don’t fuck it up,” and “Get them off the picnic blanket,” which has come to mean: Don’t make it so damn highfalutin. Pretentiousness, phoniness, fanciness—for these guys, nothing could be lamer. “Let’s just keep it real,” Levinson says, explaining their taste, sitting beside Wahlberg at the Beverly Hills Polo Lounge. “I know it sounds simple.” But it’s who they are and where they come from.

Entourage of One
Wahlberg’s badass youth in Dorchester, Massachusetts, has been well chronicled. The youngest of nine siblings, he was a cokehead by age 13, and by 16 was doing jail time for having gouged out the eye of a Vietnamese man with a stick in an attempt to steal his beer. Then, with the help of prayer and his older brother Donnie, from the boy band New Kids on the Block, he became Marky Mark, the rapper sensation, whose main skills were dropping his pants, grabbing his crotch, and sneering into the camera. This led to a stint as a legendary underwear model for Calvin Klein.

Levinson, who was born in Brooklyn and raised in New Hyde Park, Long Island, is every bit as self-made, even if his was a less exciting route. The son of a schoolteacher mother and a father who worked in the garment business, he attended Tulane, then briefly worked as an accountant, and then—just like the two main characters of How to Make It in America—joined forces with a friend to start a sportswear line called Local Athletic, which sold baseball hats and sweatshirts. Not enough of them, alas. After the business folded, in the early 1990s, he went to Los Angeles, where he was determined to make it as a producer and to do it the old-fashioned way.

“I was driving out,” says Levinson, his Long Island accent still pronounced. “I read this article about [CAA founder and current Universal Pictures president] Ron Meyer. It said that everybody, most people, start in the mailroom. I wanted to start from the ground up, so I got a job delivering packages.” The agency was the now defunct InterTalent, the precursor to UTA. Soon he became an assistant to talent agent David Schiff, who represented a small stable of actors, including Wahlberg, who wanted nothing more than to put that bad-boy underwear-model image behind him. The bromance began.

“We spent more time talking than I would with my agent about material and goals and what I wanted to do,” recalls Wahlberg, his voice a manly notch-above-a-whisper, his physique, at 39, still a rock-hard wonder. They quickly learned that their tastes were simpatico, and they bonded over their love for the Steve McQueen movies The Great Escape and Papillon. More important, Wahlberg found in Levinson someone who didn’t love him just for his body. From the time they met, Levinson boasted to anyone who’d listen that he was working with a kid who was going to be the biggest movie star in the world one day. When this memory is brought up, Wahlberg and Levinson look at each other with a tinge of dude embarrassment. “How do you feel knowing that didn’t happen?” Wahlberg says, ribbing him, before going on to give Lev his due props. “People have asked for advice on how to build a real career in this business. I would say, ‘Find someone who believes in you, a guy who’s hungry.’” With that in mind, in 1997, when Levinson struck out on his own, forming Leverage Management, Wahlberg followed.

“We had a cardboard box and a phone,” says Levinson of his first Santa Monica office, a description that recalls Entourage’s E moving into his sad little office/hovel when his only client was Vincent Chase. Levinson struggled to put the image of the snarly little Dorchester punk behind Wahlberg. “It wasn’t commonplace for a musician to make the transition [to acting] smoothly. It was frowned upon,” says Wahlberg. “Never mind a white rapper who pulled down his pants.” Together, they were intent on building Wahlberg a respectable reputation bit by bit. “I knew that it was a marathon, not a sprint,” says Wahlberg, “and I knew I had to go role by role, convincing filmmakers that I was the best guy for the part.”

Levinson and Wahlberg did what they could with Wahlberg’s tough-guy image, parlaying it into roles as a junkie in The Basketball Diaries, the 1995 coming-of-age film, which starred Leonardo DiCaprio, and as a violent, psychopathic boyfriend in 1996’s Fear (opposite Reese Witherspoon). So far, so good. Then came the chance to play something riskier—a spectacularly endowed porn star based on John Holmes in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights—and Wahlberg put the brakes on. “I didn’t like the idea of the subject matter,” he says, “coming from the world of the underwear thing, and wanting to act and stay away from taking your shirt off, your clothes off.” The character was also a vulnerable and sensitive flower, and Wahlberg feared ridicule from the boys back home; it didn’t matter that the character’s penis was a legend. But Levinson, for the first time, dug in and told Wahlberg to get over himself.

He was right. The movie was a hit, and the choice of the role was seen as courageous. With Wahlberg hitting new success, the guys back home found that some new fringe benefits were in the offing. Suddenly they were around a lot. They included Wahlberg’s best friend from childhood, Donnie “Donkey” Carroll (rapper name, “Murda One”), and Johnny “Drama” Alves, the melodramatic cousin of a bodyguard for New Kids on the Block, whom Donnie Wahlberg had hired to watch out for Mark after he was released from prison. “Wherever I went, Johnny went,” remembers Mark. Rounding out the group was Eric “E” Weinstein, a former junkie Wahlberg had met on the set of The Basketball Diaries (he’d been hired to teach the actors how to shoot up) who became Wahlberg’s assistant. “I don’t think I could go anywhere without him,” says Wahlberg. (Those interested can follow their movements on Weinstein’s Twitter account: “Cigar Time at Four Seasons Beverly Hills.” “Cigar Time at Time Warner Center.” “Back in action at Café Habana.”) Four East Coast street dudes were suddenly living high off the hog in Los Angeles and settling disputes the way they had back home: with their fists.

Getting Their Act Together
‘It was Lev and Mark’s idea, and maybe Eric Weinstein, and maybe about nine other people,” says Entourage creator Doug Ellin about turning this bizarre, quasi-embarrassing reality into a television program. Levinson and Wahlberg put Ellin (a Levinson client and friend since college) through the wringer, rejecting draft after draft of the pilot—about 50 in total. Ally Musika, one of the show’s producers, who started as an assistant, recalls thinking, “There’s no way the show is making it on the air. These guys don’t know what they’re doing. They just yell all the time.” Among the many changes made over the course of those drafts, one bears special mention. Initially the inspiration for Vince’s agent had been Jeff Jacobs, Ellin’s rather conservative agent. Ellin changed it to Emanuel, he says, after a particularly memorable meeting in which Emanuel barked out, “The star of the show is Mark and his life. This guy’s going to write it. If it sucks, we’ll fire him and someone else will re-write it!” “I thought, Wow, this guy’s crazy,” says Ellin. “That’s why I changed it to Ari.” (Despite this, Emanuel denies that the character is based on him. “I don’t believe it’s a portrayal of me,” he says, sounding a bit irritated. “That’s not who I am.”)

After a year and a half, Ellin had a script that Wahlberg and Levinson were happy with, and they sent it in to HBO. “I was sitting on my bed, and Steve called me and said, ‘They don’t like it,’ ” Ellin recalls. “I said, ‘What don’t they like about it?’ He said, ‘They don’t like anything [about it].’” One of the HBO executives told Ellin that they wanted the guys to speak their own language that no one else understands. “I literally didn’t know what she was talking about. I went to Palm Springs, and I wrote this new script, and I swear I made up this weird dialect. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was going crazy.” When he finally gave it to Levinson to read, Levinson’s reaction was “I don’t know what this is, but it’s so funny.” HBO thought so too.

Casting the two leads of Vince and Eric was as much of a struggle. Casting director Sheila Jaffe brought up the name Kevin Connolly, who’d acted in a couple of television series, for the role of Eric, who by now was seen as a cross between Eric Weinstein and Levinson. Connolly fit the script’s description of E as a “Jack Russell terrier,” and as the foremost member of Leonardo DiCaprio’s real-life entourage, Connolly knew firsthand what it was like to bask in a star’s reflected glory. But he had become disillusioned with acting and had turned to directing videos and commercials, vowing never to look back. “You know how many pilots I’ve done in my life?” says Connolly, who’s even more chipper and excitable than his wound-up character. “Pilots don’t go. To me it was a setup for disappointment.” But Wahlberg’s gang persisted. “It was kind of like being chased by the Mafia,” Connolly says. “And then finally it came straight down from Mark. And when Mark calls you and tells you he needs to talk to you, you call him back and you sit and talk with him immediately.” Wahlberg, who knew Connolly from the set of The Basketball Diaries (where he had been entouraging for DiCaprio), sat him down at the Beverly Hills Polo Lounge and told him in no uncertain terms, “You got to do this. This is a game changer.”

Meanwhile, Adrian Grenier, a rather dark and brooding searcher, fancied himself above it all—even though he was one of Levinson’s clients. Grenier was in Mexico, penniless and planning on sneaking into Cuba to make a documentary when Levinson called and spent hours trying to convince him to audition for the lead. “I said, ‘Yeah, but it’s television. And I don’t do television,’” recalls Grenier, parodying his younger self. “ ‘I do dark, independent films in New York, where I make no money and freeze my butt off, or I do documentaries in countries that I’m not allowed to go into.’ Steve made it very clear that this was an absolute necessity for me, for my career, for everything, and I heard it.” While Wahlberg and Ellin had been leaning toward somebody harder, more street, more Mark, Levinson’s gut told him to go with someone dreamier, prettier, more Leo. That was Grenier.

Once the others had been cast (Jerry Ferrara, Kevin Dillon, and Jeremy Piven), Wahlberg, in a very Entourage move, flew both the TV entourage and real-life entourage by chartered jet to Las Vegas for the weekend—“a crash course,” says Grenier, “in what it’s like to be in the entourage, or to be part of the gang.” While the two groups indulged in the expected crazy mix of partying, gambling, and girls, Grenier, who felt completely out of his element, soaked up something subtler and ultimately more important from watching Wahlberg. “I discovered,” he says, “that it’s not about the luxuries … the bottle service, or going to the front of the line It was about how Mark dealt with all this, which was the movie-star part, with his ease, his nonchalance, his confidence, his generosity.” Suddenly, Grenier began to connect. He started to believe that his very indifference to the show was, ironically, the key to making his character work. “I was perfect for the character because I’m just by nature detached. I’m not looking to further my career at all costs.”

Alas, Wahlberg’s crew didn’t see it that way. At the screening of the pilot at Wahlberg’s house, one of them, upon seeing Grenier on-screen, called out, “I could kick that guy’s ass!” Ellin walked out of the screening feeling awful. But Wahlberg was flying high. “We’ve got a huge hit,” he announced.

While Ellin ran the show, Wahlberg and Levinson became its shepherds, with Levinson digging into every script, every casting decision, every cut, and Wahlberg serving as the show’s godfather. “Mark was the commanding presence that [would] come in and make everything better,” says Musika. “If two actors had a tiff,” says Connolly, “Mark would be like, ‘Guys, listen, are you crazy? I’ll come down there and smack everybody around.’ ” Over the course of a few years, Entourage solidified itself as one of HBO’s stalwart comedies: the guys’ answer to the HBO hit Sex and the City—which the girls happened to love, too. As Grenier puts it, “Entourage taught me how to laugh and have a good time—along with the rest of America.”

Wahlberg and Levinson had proved they could do modern, crackling, young. But were they just one-trick ponies who’d gotten lucky
In 2006 they surprised Plepler and his colleagues at HBO by bringing them something that couldn’t have been more unlike Entourage—a show that was about, well, feelings. In Treatment had been an Israeli TV program, written by Hagai Levy, about a psychiatrist and the patients he sees every week. Noa Tishby, an Israeli actress whom Levinson represented, brought it to his attention. “I popped it in the DVD [player],” says Levinson. “You could see how great it was in a second.” “I vividly remember the first conversation with [Steve] and the passion with which he talked about it,” recalls Plepler. “I remember saying to Mike [Lombardo], ‘This is the quintessential HBO show.’” It was something of a gamble for the network. HBO had just tried out a therapy program with Tell Me You Love Me, but it failed, in part because it was too morose, too arch, and tried a little too hard. In Treatment was therapy done the Wahlberg-Levinson way: at once more real, more accessible, and more human.

Now having concluded its third season—and the first in which the story lines are not taken from the Israeli version—the show is being run by a married couple, Anya Epstein and Dan Futterman (screenwriter of Capote). They have found in Levinson the dream producer: trusting and supportive, but also hands-on and persistent when something matters, whether it’s a casting choice, a character’s reaction in the script that feels false, or a performance in which an actor is trying too hard to be liked. As close as he is to HBO, Levinson has gone to bat for them in ways, says Epstein, “that have surprised us and touched us.” The viewership is relatively small—about half a million—but it’s fanatical.

Take a Walk on the Boardwalk
Wahlberg and Levinson wouldn’t be television giants, however, until they had their showpiece—their Sopranos or Mad Men—that complicated, big-budget, wholly original surprise that gets so talked and written about that it becomes part of the culture. In 2006, Emanuel sent Wahlberg and Levinson the book Boardwalk Empire, by Nelson Johnson, which told the history of Atlantic City, spanning about a hundred years. They could easily have overlooked it—Emanuel sent them all kinds of material all the time. But Wahlberg and Levinson saw huge potential and knew it would depend on whom they could get involved. Wahlberg went straight to the top and asked Scorsese, who rarely does television, whether he could visit the set of Shutter Island (which Scorsese was directing outside of Boston) to tell him about the project.

He and Scorsese had worked together on The Departed, and the director viewed Wahlberg not just as a terrific actor but as someone with a unique sensibility and way in the world. “I had a very good reaction to the way he worked,” Scorsese says, “and to his taste and style as an actor and about other projects and other people.” Scorsese immediately said yes to the visit. “He knew exactly how long to stay … only a few minutes, and he said what he had to say and made me feel confident,” the director recalls. “And he reiterated to me that if I were to at least stay involved but also direct some of them I’d be given a warm welcome there at HBO. He clinched it for me.” For directors as busy as Scorsese, there’s always a reason to drop out of a project. Wahlberg, says Scorsese, “was the one who kept me interested, attached, involved.”

Matching Scorsese up with Terence Winter, a lead writer for The Sopranos, who was bringing that series to a close and looking for his next project with HBO, was a no-brainer. After studying the book, Winter zeroed in on the 1920s, when Prohibition went into effect, women got the right to vote, the streets were rife with racism, and the giants of organized crime—Lucky Luciano, Arnold Rothstein, and Al Capone—took hold of New York and Chicago. At the center of this world was a lesser-known mobster, Nucky Johnson, the charismatic and conflicted unofficial mayor of Atlantic City, who led the underworld struggle against Prohibition. Wahlberg and Levinson, Scorsese, and HBO were all sold—so much so that the network was willing to spend an unprecedented $18 million on the pilot.

In spite of their previous success, Wahlberg and Levinson could hardly believe their good luck. When they talk about it today, they sound like two excited kids meeting their sports heroes.

“You just go for the ride,” says Levinson with a big smile, about working with Scorsese and Winter.

“Everything that they were doing was just like ‘Holy shit,’” says Wahlberg.

“Yeah, [our job was] just don’t fuck it up.”

“As producers, they’re terrific,” says Winter, “because they’re involved as much as you want them to be. One of the first things Steve said is ‘If you want me to sit in the writers’ room with you, I will. If you never want to hear from me again, I won’t call you.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m sure it’s going to be somewhere in between,’ and it is.”

The premiere was as compelling and as richly drawn and painstakingly executed as any of Scorsese’s films, from the Jazz Age score to the beaded chiffon gowns. Heavily advertised by HBO, the episode was watched by 7.1 million viewers, and the international rights were sold to 160 countries. Reviews have been almost unanimously favorable. There are those who scoff at the notion that the show is “the next Sopranos,” but bear in mind it took a couple of seasons for that show to become a monster hit. Boardwalk Empire won two Golden Globes: for best TV drama and best actor (Steve Buscemi). It was immediately picked up for a second season, and Scorsese is planning on directing the next finale.

Meanwhile, Entourage, the show that started it all, is coming to an end after eight seasons—in step with the inevitable devolution of the actual entourage. For one thing, Wahlberg is married, to model Rhea Durham, and has four children (Ella Rae, seven, Michael, five, Brendan, two, and Grace, one). More devoted to his Catholicism than ever, he goes to church every morning. There’s still room in his house for the gang, but not much—two bunk beds, both with trundles, in one room. “I call it the barracks,” says Wahlberg with a laugh. “I tell them, ‘If you need a place to stay, you can sleep in the barracks.’ Mainly, there are too many exciting projects lined up to care about dude shenanigans. Among the shows Wahlberg and Levinson have in development for HBO are Screens, about how technology has affected interpersonal communication; a show set in the Napa Valley from Rex Pickett, the author of the novel Sideways; Lifestyle Lemonaid, inspired by the Nikki Joel blog, about a wacky woman who writes about her marriage and parenting; a Cold War-era spy show generated by writer Malcolm Gladwell; and a show set in the adult-film industry being developed by James Frey.

On the movie end, their involvement as producers has allowed them to mold Wahlberg’s acting career. He’ll soon start shooting Contraband (based on the Icelandic movie Reykjavik-Rotterdam), in which he plays a former smuggler trying to go straight, and Peter Berg’s Cocaine Cowboys, in which he plays Jon Roberts, the top domestic drug distributor for the Medellín cartel.

Obviously, not everything the guys touch is an instant hit. On a drizzly December afternoon, while Wahlberg is on his way to some fabulous event to collect praise for The Fighter, his current movie, directed by David O. Russell, Levinson is huddled in a windowless room with cinder-block walls at Leverage’s no-frills office in Santa Monica with Ian Edelman, the affable young man who created How to Make It in America. Levinson’s got three scripts in front of him, marked up.

“[Episode] Four’s in pretty good shape,” he says with a smile.

“That’s a special day!” says Edelman.

Then again, there are Episodes Five and Six …

“Page 12,” Levinson says, flipping through the pages, propping his sneaker on his blue-jeaned knee. “It’s clear that Ben has initiated this. It’s a little unclear what the motivation is. I think the actors … Bryan [Greenberg] and Lake [Bell] are going to need to know what that’s coming from. Is it ego? Is it he wants to keep her close?”

“Gotcha,” says Edelman.

“Page 24. It’s still too definitive. You’ve got ‘If he talks, I’m going down.’ Should it be ‘If he talks, I’m next?’”

“Definitely,” says Edelman.

“It’s not really ‘his brands.’ He’s just a manufacturer. The vernacular would be ‘He makes a lot of goods for them.’”

It goes on like this for hours—grueling, tedious, especially when you consider that they went over the very same scripts two days ago. While How to Make It in America has things going for it, the show has yet to find its footing. Most networks would have yanked it after a couple of episodes because it didn’t make an instant splash. But this is HBO, and more important, this is Levinson and Wahlberg believing in a young writer. If anyone has earned the right to be trusted in these things, it’s them.

As Josh Hudelson prepares to leave Deep Springs College and head to Columbia University as an anthropology major, there are a few things he is taking care of—among them, slaughtering a cow and spending the night with the corpse in a 40-degree meat locker. “I was worried it was airtight and I was going to suffocate, so I had people check on me throughout the night,” he says cheerily. “It was kind of enjoyable.” Good-looking and fit, Josh is a young man of supreme confidence, able to play the guitar and sing out, campfire-style, unembarrassed. A golden boy, you might think at first glance, the kind who’d make any mother proud. But he is also, he admits, a tad possessed, driven by passions most Ivy League–bound 19-year-old guys from upstate New York would not be able to wrap their heads around. At first, it was socialism, and now, after two years at Deep Springs, the campus of which is a 2,500-acre ranch 35 miles from Death Valley, it appears to be dead animals. In addition to sleeping with the slaughtered, frozen cows, he has been tanning sheepskin, for what purpose he doesn’t know yet. But there are scraps of sheep flesh lying all over the living quarters and in the shower, the way most college dorm rooms are littered with pizza crusts. “This place smells because I’ve got some rotting materials,” he says, breezing through the dorm. He has no plans to clean it up.

Hudelson might seem like an oddball, but Lucien Lucius Nunn, the eccentric electric-power magnate who founded Deep Springs in 1917, would have considered him a future world leader, which he believed could be anyone from a great preacher to a civic-minded carpenter. Nunn considered the material world “an evil system,” rife with “sensual pleasure,” such as “girls” and “kid excitement,” and felt that the masses, “dull-witted, sluggish, [and] incapable,” needed leadership from an elite few. These few, like Jesus, Moses, and Theodore Roosevelt before them, would be able to hear “the voice of the desert.”

With that in mind, Nunn set up his Utopia in an uninhabited desert valley, a mile up in the White Mountains on the California-Nevada border, where the climate vacillates between bone-dry scorching and arctic. The desert floor is perfectly flat. At its edges, the mountains—dappled with sage and loose rocks—rise up like 3,000-foot fortress walls. It’s a landscape intended, one senses, for existential thought. The nearest “towns” are an hour away—Big Pine, California, population 1,350, and Lida Junction, Nevada, whose only permanent inhabitants live in a brothel.

Nunn’s 26 select students were forbidden to leave the valley or take drugs or alcohol. Beyond that, all other decisions would be left to them. They would be given the power over admissions, discipline, and the hiring and firing of faculty. Tuition would be free. The students, who attend for two years, would support themselves by working on the college’s cattle ranch and by doing the administrative and maintenance tasks of the college themselves.

By all rights it should have ended in a sex cult or mass murder—Lord of the Flies come to life. Indeed, as Isaac Ericson, the 20-year-old head of admissions, reports, “I keep getting e-mails from parents wanting assurance that this isn’t some cult.” Instead, as other Utopias founded at the same time have withered and died, Deep Springs, while it seems perpetually to teeter on the brink of implosion and sometimes even lunacy, has become the most successful experiment in higher education in U.S. history. Deep Springers—and there are only 13 a class—include ambassador to the United Nations William J. vanden Heuvel, now the co-chairman of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute; famed CBS newsman Charles Collingwood; Virginia congressman Jim Olin; top Internet entrepreneurs; edgy novelists William Vollmann and Peter Rock; Tim Oslovich, a Lutheran pastor to native Alaskans; and Norton Dodge, an economist who through spycraft and smuggling single-handedly saved underground Russian art from total oblivion during the Cold War. Roughly 80 percent go on as juniors to colleges such as Harvard, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Chicago, Cornell, and Oxford, while the remainder typically embark on a year of service first. For the fifth time in three years, a Deep Springer has won a Truman scholarship, a highly prestigious fellowship for students embarking on careers in public service.

With the rare exception, only students who score in the top 1 percentile on the S.A.T.’s have a shot at getting in. They write nine essays, the equivalent, basically, of an average high-schooler’s entire output for a year. (A typical “essay” might be a 30-page paean to Ayn Rand or a hermeneutic analysis of Where the Wild Things Are.) Applicants sit before a committee of nine 19-year-olds who, after asking about books and goals, might throw out, “If a shark and a polar bear got into a fight in a neutral, jellylike medium, who would win and why?” Naturally, most high-school seniors have better things to do than go about such vigorous mental journeying for the privilege of two years of celibacy, dishwashing, and animal blood. But then there is the tiny remainder who think, This place sounds so fucking crazy it just might be for me. (Full disclosure: my husband, Deep Springs class of ’86—class year refers to date of entry—was one such person.)
This morning, they are in the boardinghouse (called the “BH”), sitting below a portrait of Nunn, which hangs next to one of Marilyn Monroe. Over a breakfast of pancakes, ice cream, and milk that just hours ago was inside a cow named Ayesha, they are ripping into one another over some hot-button Deep Springs issues.

“I think consensus is evil,” announces Alex Blasdel, the oldest and most feared of the bunch.

“Yeah, I think consensus is evil, also,” says Dave Mahfouda, the soft-spoken irrigator who has taken to sleeping outside near his alfalfa.

“Consensus is evil because of you!” Alex snaps before turning the conversation to the Deep Springs “isolation policy,” another subject he is passionate about. “I don’t want anyone to leave unless it’s on serious college business. I think isolation is a means to an end.”

“Ah, rhetoric,” says Nathan Leamy, a tall, happy-go-lucky blond, who looks as if he should be selling bread on Martha’s Vineyard. “Oh, look how macho we are.

We don’t go anywhere,” he says, mocking.

“How do you know that,” says Alex. “You’ve never engaged in the experiment of isolation.”

“I like having friends visit out here. I like having random people out here.”

“You’re a sissy,” says Alex.

Alex is what’s known in Deep Springs argot as the quintessential “nasty-meanie.” He is also the sort that Nunn would have deemed a model young man. Raised in privilege in San Francisco, he’s headed for Oxford next year to become a poet, because, as he explains, both ironically and seriously, “I’m driven by elitism.” He reeks of testosterone. He is usually dressed in a trucker hat and Western shirt, and his jeans are encrusted with mud. His hands are nicked and cut up, and feel like old baseball mitts. One of the notes in his application file reads, “I definitely would not let this kid date my sister.” And though he sounds tortured beyond his 21 years, his low, gravelly voice is so saturated with conviction that he never loses an argument. “Alex is the Devil,” says Dave, the irrigator. “Alex is the person you don’t want to be against your motion [in a meeting].”

So formidable is Alex, in fact, that he almost revels in exposing his innermost feelings. “I mean, yes, we’re assholes, and we’re macho part of the time. But in my experience we are forced into mothering roles. Chris and I were as close as two people could be without having sex.” He’s talking about Chris Jennings (the son of ABC anchorman Peter Jennings), his best friend at Deep Springs, now attending Wesleyan University. As Chris tells it, on the night of their first meeting, while hanging out on “the smoking porch,” Alex told him that he was a “romantic” in the classical—he means nonsexual—sense of the word and the two just started rapping. “We slept outside that night,” says Chris. “We were immediately bonded.”

Part of Alex’s mystical powers comes from the fact that he is the Deep Springs Senior Cowboy, who, after being out in the world for one year, returns for the summer and roughs it in the mountains at “cow camp” with just one other man, the Junior Cowboy, and a herd of cattle. The first thing to understand about cowboy is that it’s the most sought-after job at the college. (“Don’t want to talk about it,” says Josh, the butcher, only half-jokingly.)

The second thing to understand about the cowboy is that he has been carefully selected by Geoff Pope, 56, the ranch manager for more than 20 years. Lanky, lean, perfectly mustachioed, and exceptionally well read, Pope is the embodiment of the poet-cowboy-educator, “a combination of intellect and yet down-to-earth pragmatism—‘We’re up to our ankles in cow shit,’” explains former cowboy Dave Hitz (’80), who went on to found Network Appliance, a software company now worth $7.7 billion. Pope’s hands-off educational approach—by which he might, say, knock on a student’s door at four a.m. in the dead of winter and flatly announce, “Dairy’s flooded,” and then walk away with no further instruction—has defined one of the main things Deep Springs is all about: dealing when you haven’t got a clue.

Pope selects the cowboy not by his ability to ride horses but by such things as how he washes dishes in the boardinghouse. “Alex distinguished himself as a first-year guy, by being so hard-core on BH that half the student body thought he was completely nuts,” says Pope, kicking back, boots propped up on the coffee table, in the ranch house he shares with his wife, Iris.

“Geoff says, ‘I can train anybody to ride a horse,’” says Iris, an irrepressible straight shooter, loved and feared in equal parts. “‘Any darn fool can ride a horse! You have to have heart.’”

The history of Deep Springs is full of cowboy legends, such as Adam Nyborg (’97), who could run to “the druid,” an oddly shaped rock formation a mile and a half up in the mountains, and be back in 15 minutes; John Dewis (’94), “the sexiest guy I’ve ever met,” says Alex; and Kevin West (’88), now the European editor of the high-society fashion magazine W. The best-dressed cowboy in Deep Springs history, West was a connoisseur even 10,000 feet up in the White Mountain wilderness. “I remember Kevin up at cow camp,” says Iris. “He would have this wooden bowl, and he’d wipe the wooden bowl with buttered garlic… Geoff and I get tickled about W magazine, him rubbin’ shoulders with royalty!”

Being cowboy is its own head trip. It must be said that Deep Springs can encourage the cowboy to spout off like a latter-day Ralph Waldo Emerson. “I think participating in the life cycle of the cattle is wonderful,” Alex says, his voice intense and raspy, “but you’re also, both symbolically and practically, participating in your own life cycle in a very intimate way. You’re providing your own food… A big part of being a cowboy is you take a level of responsibility over your own life, and I think it makes you freer in a lot of ways.”

A bit pretentious, maybe, but it’s not just spouting off. In addition to feeding himself (sometimes, it’s just a single side of dried beef for the whole summer, stashed under his bed), the cowboy has to raise 300 wild animals as if they were his children. It can be harrowing, as Dave Hitz and his Junior Cowboy, Joe Gibson, discovered. Four cows had gotten into some clover, which causes “bloat” that will kill them unless the proper stomach chamber is stabbed with a knife and the gas let out. Joe had the right knife but the wrong chamber. Desperately poking into their flesh, he watched them asphyxiate and die. “He was traumatized,” recalls Hitz. “Not only was he not poking them in the right place to save them. He’d been torturing them while they were dying.” Alex, too, has stood by helplessly—as Angel, one of his favorite cows, was stuck in the mud, half devoured by coyotes and still breathing. “We got there 12 to 24 hours too late and we had to put her down,” Alex says. “She was still alive. It was totally upsetting.” At random moments, he’ll get a faraway look and say, “I miss Angel.”

But you don’t have to slaughter, rassle, or horse-whisper to be a Deep Springer. There are some students, often referred to as “touchy-feelies,” who are about as ranchero as Hugh Grant. This year, they are the cooks—Nathan, Phil, Jody, Myer, and Cyrus. You can spot them by their dyed hair—pink, blue, canary yellow—and they can be seen huddled together clipping artichoke leaves or peeling hazelnuts. But the word “cook” does not do them justice. They are aspiring Escoffiers, living and breathing haute cuisine, forming their own food clubs. “We got my mom to ship us cheese from the local grocer, because we don’t get nice cheese here,” explains cheese-club president Cyrus St. Armand-Poliakoff, a sprightly first-year student, whose clipped speech sometimes makes him sound like he’s in a snit. “And Theodore [a visiting professor] went to Paris, so he brought back some cheese, and we’re going to have a little picnic tonight. We’re making up some baguettes.”

Although they are at least five hours from anywhere they could buy such delicacies as Meyer lemons, they are nonetheless lovingly attempting to prepare for their fellow Deep Springers dishes like pea soup with crème fraîche, mint risotto, and apricots marinated in chamomile flowers. But the random herbs that happen to sprout in the desert do not add up to Chez Panisse. The flavors aren’t working and the portions are so damned nouvelle that stomachs are growling nonstop.

“The cooks are idiots,” says Josh, ripping the throat out of a rooster. “The whole thing with the beef broth and ‘appetizers’ at lunch today. I think Phil probably stayed up all night to cook. I mean, it’s kind of cool that he stayed up all night. But it’s not the most thoughtful thing when you have a community of people who need to eat a hearty meal before they go out for the next five hours.”

This is the other thing that Deep Springs is all about: understanding that one’s particular role—be it cook, dairy boy, mechanic, “feed man,” librarian—is critical to the well-being of the community. That if you can’t fix the tractor, no one eats. And while the cooks think everybody’s being unappreciative, rude, not to mention conforming to a very Lacanian power structure, they may be starting to get it. They have to admit that tonight’s coq au vin—made with Josh’s scraggly old roosters—wasn’t all they’d hoped it would be.

There are a million episodes like this at Deep Springs. The guy who didn’t chop enough wood to keep the BH warm is the same guy who’s deciding whether you can come back next year. “It’s like the army,” as one Deep Springer puts it. “The guys you hate, the guys you officially hate, are still fucking close to you.” Occasionally students deal with this by wandering off and trying to find the voice of the desert that Nunn talked about. They may even decide to live out there for a while, by killing and eating rabbits and sleeping under boulders. In Cyrus’s case, he vents his anger by dancing his head off at the occasional “boojies,” the free-for-all, all-male dances out in the desert. “It feels so good to dance,” he says, with emotion. The last boojie—entitled “Questions Concerning Technology” after a Heidegger essay—was accompanied by some of Cyrus’s impressive avant-garde synthesizer compositions. For good measure, he also performed some improvisation with a robot he and Josh built which has a cannon for a penis.

But fully erect robots don’t do it for everyone. Deep Springs basically throbs with free-floating sexual energy—“a stench,” says one Deep Springer—with nowhere to go. The straight guys valiantly do everything they can not to lose it: hoard magazines such as Maxim and Cosmopolitan, watch cute-girl movies over and over and over. (Currently in heavy rotation is the 1994 Gen X hit Reality Bites, which has spawned a raging debate over who’s hotter—Natalie Portman or Winona Ryder—and a disturbing realization: “We hate Ethan Hawke,” says Josh. “He’s kind of a Deep Springer.”) The rare presence of any youngish female visitor to the college will have the men spontaneously wrestling in the dirt.

It’s not just the students who can’t control themselves, but also the female teachers who should know better. Lonely, surrounded by young men who have been fully empowered and who don’t necessarily wear shirts, female teachers have sometimes been unable to resist. “It’s a custom-made trap for young female faculty members in their 20s,” says Geoff Pope, “if they’re having any kind of disruption in their own lives, or any sense of not having achieved something they want… Some of these women knew exactly what they were doing, and they were really wielding that power that came with being older.” Over the years, there have been serial offenders who slept with so many students the idea of sexual relations between students and the older women on campus ceased to shock. Eventually, it fostered such a sense of mistrust that one student was throttled by the husband of a faculty member who believed him, wrongly, to be sleeping with his wife.
It is a measure of Deep Springers’ unique logic that some choose to attend the all-male school because they think it will help them get laid. It’s true, however, that Deep Springs groupies do exist. They are smaller in number than Bon Jovi groupies, to be sure, but they are just as devoted (as Alex has discovered in his time out in the world). Still, the isolation manages to make itself apparent. A recent date Josh went on while on break is torturing his mind like a Vietnam flashback. “I was absolutely insane,” he says, still cringing. “I talked about … ‘dealing with text on its own terms,’ things like that. ‘Oh, let’s talk about Hemingway.’ I’m talking this poor girl’s ear off. I’m watching it happen. I know that I’m not talking about normal things.”

Most love affairs at Deep Springs, fortunately, are with learning. William J. vanden Heuvel’s pronouncement that Deep Springs was “the most important educational experience of my life” is not unusual. He waxes nostalgic about his education there as if he were talking about his first romance: the trips up into the mountains with Beethoven and opera played on a hand-wound gramophone; the German-Jewish refugee faculty couple, Alice and Kurt Bergel, who would have musical games at their home, humming bars of music for the students, who’d have to guess the piece. Even falling into the vat of boiling water that was reserved for a pig was an event he considers a crucial learning experience.

Deep Springers, in recent years, have used pencils that bear a Wallace Stevens passage, “One must have a mind of winter,” and worn T-shirts that say wittgenstein party bus, to celebrate a philosophy seminar. (This particular one was courtesy of Pete Rock, author of The Ambidextrist and the forthcoming The Bewildered.) When the scheduled time for class is finished, enthusiastic students (there are about four to a class) often invite their teachers to continue the discussion on the lawn. Sometimes they lobby for more classes per week, to get more in. For professors, who come for a few years from schools such as Berkeley and Yale and get paid in the $30,000-to-$40,000 range, there is no comparison. Humanities professor Dave Arndt, who studied at Yale, assigns 4,000 pages of such heavy reading as Heidegger and hundreds more of literary criticism each eight-week term. “I don’t think there’s any college in the United States where you can assign that kind of reading and have the students respond as enthusiastically as they do,” he says.

The question remains: What does all of this strangeness get you? A minority of Deep Springs alumni believe the very ideals that make the college unique make the graduates ill-prepared for our world. “The fact that you have a different sense of self-reliance and self-responsibility actually puts you out of step with the society we live in,” says Byron Estep (’86), a guitarist who dresses up in Day-Glo yellow pajamas to perform in Manhattan with the Blue Man Group band and who manages its musicians around the world. “You add onto that missing out on some very critical years in relating with women, you wind up with a person who is pretty significantly out of step with the mainstream of society… It’s like people who go to the Peace Corps, and they come back and live for two years in their parents’ basement drinking beer and watching TV.”

Far more often, however, graduates regard it as the defining experience of their lives. They find meaning and inspiration particularly from its devotion to service. A typical Deep Springer is Nicholas Gossen (’99), who upon graduating deferred Harvard and went to Bosnia with the International Rescue Committee. He’s now a Truman scholar working at the Department of Homeland Security. But Nunn’s interpretation of service was expressly broad. “The L. L. Nunn phrase that is most resonant with me is ‘the blacksmith with heart,’” says Zac Unger (’91), who went on to Brown before becoming a nice Jewish firefighter. “He wanted people to be of public service, but it didn’t mean you had to be the head of an NGO. You could be of public service by doing what you do and being a servant to your small community.” While at Yale, Estep led the successful effort to admit women to Skull and Bones. Dave Hitz, at the forefront of technology that stores the special effects from movies like The Lord of the Rings, has taken comfort in and is guided by that idea, too. “The point is, you don’t have to go out and be like Mother Teresa. Maybe it’s O.K. to go out and, whatever it is that you are, be a good one and a moral one and an ethical one.” Though he lost a billion in the tech crash, Hitz understands that “I still have way more money than any person should have,” and he has given several million dollars of it to Deep Springs.

With Hitz’s millions, Deep Springs has come full circle. Eighty years ago, Telluride, Colorado, was like Silicon Valley and Nunn was as wealthy for his time as Hitz, having pioneered the transmission of electrical power long distances, which helped make Telluride one of the first electric cities and ushered in a gold rush. To keep the lines running, Nunn had to teach young men to run the switching stations between the power plant and Telluride’s mines. Eventually, this new project—training young men—proved more inspiring to him than high-voltage electricity. After cashing out of his company, which sold power to other mines, he founded the Telluride Association, an intellectual fraternity at Cornell University that has since become a breeding ground for neocon thinkers. But Nunn soon found that the students of the Telluride Association had been “seduced by the bright lights of Ithaca.” Hence Deep Springs. Upon his death, in 1925, he left the school $600,000.

While Deep Springs’ endowment is now roughly $9.5 million, the coffers haven’t always been so healthy, and over the years the college has flirted with extinction many times. After a golden period in the 1930s and 40s, which saw Deep Springs graduate James Withrow help found the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the C.I.A., the presidency of the college passed to William E. Fort, a professor of philosophy from Rollins College, who turned out to be a right-wing fanatic. According to current president Jack Newell, after Fort revealed that he was an F.B.I. agent, his first order of business was to have the students erect a giant satellite dish so he could communicate with the outside world. Then, when the students built a rifle range for recreational use, he became especially excited: he wanted it to be used to defend the school against potential enemies. Meantime, he went to all the students, privately, demanding that they turn in any classmates who were Communist.

Another dicey moment was the late 80s, when the occasional motorist desperate for gas would drive up to the college’s main circle, take one look at the dilapidated buildings and the cluster of Charlie Mansons hovering at the end of the road, and turn right around in terror. Wind whistled through 60-year-old doorframes, heat and hot water were scarce, and the student body was, even by Deep Springs standards, eccentric. One student was training himself to be a vigilante. Another claimed to be the youngest currency counterfeiter ever to be brought down by the Secret Service. Another pulled a gun in the middle of a student-body meeting as a way of bringing up the issue of firearms. Another managed to run himself over with a truck. “He had tire marks on his back,” recalls Iris Pope. “Not the kind of guy you want to tick off!” One, during an attempt to learn to hunt like Paleolithic man, stabbed himself in the foot with a homemade spear. “The inmates were running the town,” says Byron Estep, who, as the nasty-meanie labor commissioner, was considered, he says, “the Saddam of labor.”

By 1994, Deep Springs had hit rock bottom. The college was so strapped financially that buildings were on the brink of collapse. “Anybody who had a million dollars that they were thinking of giving to Deep Springs would have to ask themselves, If the college is likely to close, my money has gone down the drain,” says Newell, who attended Deep Springs in the 50s, taught there in the 60s, and was the head of the board of trustees in the early 90s.

More important, the faculty and staff were not on speaking terms, due largely to the issue of co-education, which had come to an ugly impasse among the trustees, who, as now, included two students. “It was appalling,” says Newell, who came down on the side of co-education. “Students and faculty members were shouting ‘asshole’ at one of the board members… Anybody who had hopes for co-education was really bitter, and everybody else was bitter, because there had been so many dumb things said.”

It looked like the end. So Newell did what any good Deep Springer would when faced with disaster: he took a walk in the desert. Accompanying him was fellow board member Dick Cornelison, who held the opposing view, and they talked it through. “We said, ‘This place is about over. And unless we can find some way to put these two broken pieces back together and work for the future of the college, it’s hopeless.’”

Newell and Cornelison agreed to abandon the issue of co-education, with the greater goal of saving the college. They brought their plea back to the trustees and students, telling them, “The one thing we’ve demonstrated by the ferocity of our debate is that we care an awful lot about Deep Springs.” “It was amazing and it worked,” says Newell. But the other problem—how to raise $10 million—remained. And given that the issue of co-education would inevitably remain a hot topic in Deep Springs’ future, it was expected that big donors would try to influence that policy.

Indeed, at that very meeting, Congressman Jim Olin, who’d attended in the 30s and held firmly to the strictest traditions, stood up and, according to Newell, said, “[My wife] Phyllis and I believe strongly in Deep Springs, and we want to be the first to stand up and to commit a major gift to help rebuild the endowment and start the building. But there is one issue that is desperately important. We will make a commitment right now of half a million dollars to the project, with one condition.”

Newell braced himself…

“The condition,” Olin continued, “is that the board will commit itself absolutely to accepting no money to which conditions are attached.”

Newell breathed a sigh of relief. “It was a real act of moral leadership,” he says. Newell was named president a few months later and successfully raised the money.

But the episode doesn’t answer the question of why, when other colleges with similar ideas, such as Black Mountain in North Carolina, fell apart, Deep Springs survived. In Newell’s opinion, the answer lies at the very heart of Deep Springs’ founding philosophy. “I think the tiny size and the isolation and the power of this ideal, that you’re given something truly unusual, and you’re responsible to go out and do something worthwhile with your life—that’s just a compelling idea,” he says. Deep Springs is also a feeling—one that Deep Springers can’t quite articulate but understand perfectly. When vanden Heuvel returned to lecture in the late 90s, 55 years after he’d attended, it crept up on him. “My wife was with me, and Jack Newell picked me up at Las Vegas and drove us to the ranch,” he recalls. “We got to the top of the canyon and looked down in the valley. Jack said to me, ‘There it is, Bill.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ When we got down to the valley, my wife turned to me and said, ‘There what is?’ If you’re a Deep Springer, you see a lot more than anyone who’s never seen it before.”

Credit must be given to the men who made these abstract notions work, such as Newell himself, a Mormon originally from Ohio, who in his capacity as president has been living on the campus with his wife, Linda, for nine years. After saving the school from the brink of extinction, he later shepherded it through its darkest hour, following the death of student Michael Pihos, in 1999.

Pihos is not remembered for any labor position in particular, but by all accounts he was the leader of his Deep Springs class, a kid who lived for fixing things and seeing anything grow. With long curly hair, sometimes dreadlocked, sometimes blue, he was an exceptional guitarist. He spent his summers at a farm in Wisconsin and building schools in Guatemala. “He was just a ball of energy,” says Mark Kirby, his best friend at Deep Springs, who drove across the country with him in the summer prior to their second year at Deep Springs.

That September, Michael’s brother, Peter, was visiting the college. They were returning a station wagon to a ranch friend who lived in the valley. A wrong turn took them down a steep embankment and they got the car stuck in a gorge. As you’d expect from a Deep Springer in a jam, Michael didn’t consider calling the local mechanic. This was his own problem. He and Peter hiked around until they found a tractor they could borrow. But on their way back to the gorge, the slope proved too steep, and the tractor flipped. Peter managed to jump out in time, but Michael was crushed instantly.

“It was the most ungodly day of my life,” says Newell, one of the first to hear what had happened from Peter. He and Linda went about breaking the news to the students. “I was washing pots in the kitchen and Linda came into the kitchen and announced what had happened,” Kirby recalls. “I remember running out into the main circle and hugging her as if she were my mother. Then Iris got her pickup truck, and we all loaded in and drove to the site to see if there was anything we could do to help.”

But there was nothing to be done. For the first time, Deep Springers came face-to-face with the fact they were not invincible. “A person would flip a truck over five times and walk away smiling. That was part of the culture of the place. It was blessed,” says Kirby. “Once Michael’s death happened, it just changed that… Michael’s death tore that apart.”

Many parents in the situation would have sued. Not Michael’s. Instead, recalls Newell, they urged the college to devote increased attention to safety but encouraged it not to alter anything beyond that. “They said, ‘We hope that you will not redesign Deep Springs in such a way that would take dangerous experiences out of the hands of the students, because that’s part of what the program is about.’”

Newell did indeed strengthen the college’s safety precautions. He also persuaded a psychologist, Mel Lewin, who was familiar with Deep Springs, to come immediately and encourage the students to deal with the death in whatever way they felt was comfortable. For Michael’s roommate Nicholas Gossen, that meant continuing to work on the ranch. “I thought that, for me, maybe the best tribute I could give him was to stay there and ride the tractor and irrigate the fields,” says Gossen. He, Kirby, and other men from Michael’s class get together every year and have a party where they tell Michael stories. At Deep Springs itself, a cabin has been built in his honor by a friend, who had the distinction of going through an entire year without showering. Painted on the walls, among big, colorful feet, a Pablo Neruda quote, and a Chinese character, is a poem: “I don’t know about life. I don’t know about love. I don’t know about God. I don’t know about art. All I know is I miss you.”

Tonight will be the last student-body meeting for half of them, as the second-years are set to graduate in about five days. Listening to the bittersweet twangs of Lucinda Williams, lost in their private thoughts, they make their way in vans to Owens Lake. They gather in a circle and have the kind of moment L. L. Nunn talked about. The only sound is the trees blowing in the wind. The smell of sage wafts through the dry air. The moon is providing all the light they need. Etay Zwick, the president of the student body, gently breaks the silence, telling them that they have become like brothers, that they have changed his life forever. He then opens the meeting to the floor, for the real Deep Springs stuff.

“I want to know why Josh hasn’t cleaned up his sheepskin crap,” says one.

The men break out in agreement, ganging up on him.

“I know, I know,” Josh says, defensive and flustered. “It’s been discussed and discussed, and”—he sighs, conceding—“it’s disgusting.”
Next up, Cyrus would like to bring his “mildly retarded” poodle, Brutus, to Deep Springs next year. “I will care for him like my own child,” he says. “I’ll use one of those toddler gates.”

“I find those gates very psychologically taxing,” says Myer, his fellow cook.

But Cyrus sticks to his guns. Brutus is hypoallergenic, he explains, delivering the dictionary meaning of the term. Cyrus will vacuum regularly. He will take Brutus on regular walks.

A vote is taken; the dog’s coming.

Two hours later and meeting adjourned, the boys get to their feet, strip off their clothes, and jump into the lake. They howl as they hit the cold water, splash one another, and scream. Tonight, it’s not about finding the voice in the desert, or even the voice in the lake. It’s about a bunch of guys skinny-dipping together before they have to say good-bye.

Not since French president Nicolas Sarkozy and supermodel and former Mick Jagger girlfriend Carla Bruni announced their relationship at Euro Disney had the French witnessed something so alarming involving the occupants of the Palais de l’Élysée, home and office of the president of France. On June 12, just one month after François Hollande had been installed as the new president of France (succeeding Sarkozy), his stunning magazine-writer girlfriend, Valérie Trier­weiler, took to her Twitter account in a towering rage against Ségolène Royal, Hollande’s former partner and the mother of his four children. The words of the tweet sounded innocuous—a message of support for Royal’s opponent in a legislative race—but the meaning was clear. Something was seriously dysfunctional in what Hollande had promised would be Boring Land.

Hollande, after all, was supposed to be the “normal” one, the one who wasn’t a crazed pervert like Dominique Strauss-Kahn, or a louche, yacht-hopping modelizer like Sarkozy. Sure, he had once upon a time been with Royal, had a family with her, and had fallen in love with Trierweiler, but this was France, after all. Nothing to bat an eyelash at. Suddenly Hollande’s carefully tended, oh-so-evolved image was blown apart by his girlfriend. Soon, the newspaper headlines about him could have graced any given cover of the Enquirer. the poison of jealousy and secrets of a trio from hell, hissed L’Express and Marianne.

Far from idle gossip, what has emerged is a twisted 20-year-long psychodrama, involving professional rivalry, betrayal, blackmail, revenge, and politics at the highest levels. Hollande is being cast by the press as a weak-willed cipher, a man who has let himself be pushed and pulled by two impulsive, egocentric women, one driven by ambition (Royal), the other by paranoia and jealousy (Trierweiler). The damage to his image couldn’t have come at a worse time—as he faces the Eurozone crisis, zero economic growth, double-digit unemployment, and an unprecedented pessimism permeating the country. As Marine Le Pen, candidate of the far-right National Front Party, bluntly puts it, “How can he have any authority over his country while he has absolutely none with his ex-girlfriend or his current girlfriend?” Though by all accounts Hollande is decent and hardworking, Le Pen’s sentiment is shared by Frenchmen from cabdrivers to academics.

Paris Is Burning
It’s a sad irony that Hollande’s personal life may be his downfall, for in the beginning he tended the public image of it so carefully. In the late 1980s, Hollande and Royal were the bright, young First Couple of the Socialist Party. They met and fell in love at the École Nationale d’Administration, the elite breeding ground for France’s politicians, including Presidents Jacques Chirac and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Traditionally, French politicians had put a decorous distance between their personal lives and the public—and the French press has generally respected the division. But Royal and Hollande broke that taboo, presenting themselves as the very picture of left-wing modernity—attractive and unmarried with a growing brood. “The model [for them as a couple] was Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir,” says Sylvain Courage, an editor in chief of Le Nouvel Observateur and author of a new book on Royal, L’Ex. In a move unheard of at the time, they invited Paris Match into their apartment on the Rue de Rennes in the Sixth Arrondissement. In one picture, Royal is contentedly feeding baby Julien, while Hollande is on the floor, doing puzzles with their toddler, Clé­mence. In another, Royal and Hollande are standing in front of the National Assembly, clutching matching briefcases. They were the couple that had it all, the young Bill and Hillary Clinton of France.

But is it possible for a couple to live forever in harmony when they ultimately share a single, albeit unspoken, goal—the presidency of France? Beneath the surface of domestic bliss, a rivalry was simmering. Though Hollande graduated higher in his class than she, Royal was on the fast track to political stardom. In 1982, at the age of 29, she was recruited into President François Mitterrand’s government as a junior adviser. By 1988 she had been elected deputy in the National Assembly. Four years later, she was a government minister. Hollande had to satisfy himself with the less glamorous role of a deputy in the National Assembly representing Corrèze, a forgotten region of farmers and jam-makers. He was the congressman from nowhere, she the political rock star, and the power differential rankled him. “Friends were always saying that François Hollande was so much more talented and so much smarter than she,” says Ali Baddou, a political anchor at Canal Plus who is well acquainted with Hollande’s circle. According to Trierweiler, Hollande has admitted to being envious of Royal in the early years. His ambitions were not so secretly churning. Jacques Rupnik, a professor at the Institut d’Études Politiques, recalls his shock a few years ago when he and Pierre Moscovici (now the minister of finance) were discussing the people who intended to run in the Socialist Party in 2012. “He mentioned Hollande, and I said, ‘You cannot be serious. He hasn’t even started thinking about it.’ He replied, ‘Of course I’m serious! He’s been thinking about it nonstop for the last 30 years.’”

In Hollande’s quest for the presidency, a certain wom­an would come into his life who would prove very useful: one Valérie Trierweiler, a young, drop-dead-gorgeous reporter from Paris Match who had been assigned to cover the Socialists. Her talent was seen by other journalists as unremarkable. “She was not very curious,” recalls Tho­mas Legrand, columnist at the radio station France Inter and Paris Match, who worked with her in the pool of political reporters in the late 80s. But her icy, Hitchcock-heroine looks were useful currency. Legrand recalls that the mention of Trierweiler’s presence at a proposed lunch with a busy politician would have the magical effect of freeing up his schedule. “[The response] was always ‘Oh, I’ll check my schedule … Yes!’”

For a young reporter on the Socialist beat, Hollande and Ro­yal were, naturally, the couple to know. Trierweiler successfully courted and charmed them; they dined with her and her fiancé, Denis, an editor at Paris Match, whom she would marry in 1995. Hollande was only too happy to make himself a source to this fetching young fan. Royal, it seems, fell for her as hard as Hollande did. In 1992, for the birth of her fourth child, Flora, Royal invited Trierweiler into the maternity ward for an interview, a plum assignment for its novelty.

Throughout the late 90s, Hollande and Trierweiler, who now had her own expanding family, grew closer; at the same time, the power was shifting between him and Royal. Royal, having alienated many of the established names of the Socialist Party with her ambition and confidence, was given a position she perceived as a demotion— junior minister of school education. Meanwhile, Hollande’s stature rose, and in 1997 he became the leader of the Socialist Party.

He had his own challenges, to be sure. While competent and affable, he struggled with a reputation for being a softy with wobbly views; he earned the nickname “Flanby,” after the mushy dessert flan. (It didn’t help that he was chubby.) Legrand recalls a joke that went around at the time about his malleability. “If one guy tells him it’s six a.m., and another guy said, ‘No, it’s six p.m.,’ he’d say, ‘Let’s say six. We all agree that it’s six.’”

But to Trierweiler, Hollande, with his intellect and dry sense of humor, was a star, and it was only a matter of time before the world knew it. He invited Trierweiler, in her capacity as reporter, to follow him on trips at home and abroad, where she would report on his talent. It was intoxicating to him. “We all knew Hollande was fascinated by her,” says a Paris Match colleague. Soon, rumors of an affair emerged. In 2003, Royal reportedly called Trierweiler into her office and confronted her, saying, “You have three children. I have four. Be very careful.” Royal contacted several higher-ups at Paris Match to warn of the inappropriate relationship and to demand that Trierweiler be taken off the Socialist beat. (Trierweiler denied the affair, but eventually she was reassigned.) Royal did her best to reel Hollande back in, asking him on television to marry her, to which he replied with an uncomfortable laugh, “I’ll let you know after the show.”

Liaisons Dangereuses
Despite the rumors of an affair, Trier­weiler went on to use her professional perch to celebrate Hollande and tarnish Royal, becoming, no doubt, Hollande’s mouthpiece on his companion’s shortcomings. In an article from April 2004, for example, Trierweiler wrote about the early days, when Royal was a minister and Hollande a mere rural deputy: “The star is decidedly her, but it is he who trains Ségolène in her ideological choices.” He was superior as a parent as well, Trierweiler reported. Royal, she wrote, “sometimes stayed away for more than ten days at a time without returning to the house.” Hollande, by contrast, “has returned more than once from a meeting on the other side of the country at 2 a.m. only to return before 7 a.m., so as to not disappoint the children.”
The lovers were rumored to have found a safe place to rendezvous at the home of Olivier Falorni—the very man whom Ro­yal would run against and whom Trierweiler would support via her notorious tweet. Brazenly taunting her cuckolded rival, she continued, “Ségolène knows to take out her claws if she has to. She warns women who get close to François Hollande and reacts at the slightest attack on her man.”

In anticipation of the 2007 presidential election, Hollande’s special friend wasted no time in anointing him, in Paris Match—“One day in December, François Hollande became presidential”—while portraying Royal as irrelevant and pathetic: “[Royal] comes more and more often to [Socialist Party headquarters], attends meetings she wasn’t invited to, and annoys certain members of the Socialist Party.” Lest Ro­yal herself got any big ideas about running for president, Trierweiler wrote that Royal would never succeed “without the support of François Hollande. . . . The maker of the king or queen, it is him. Unless he decides to keep the crown for his own head.”

But Royal had Hollande checkmated—by the secret affair—and she insisted it was her turn to run for president. As Courage explains, if Hollande tried to become the Socialist candidate, she warned, his affair would be exposed, and his chances would be destroyed. Yes, this was France, but a presidential candidate sleeping with the woman who has been covering him so favorably in the press? It didn’t look good. Hollande and Royal’s eldest son, Tho­mas, by then in his 20s, was aware of his father’s indiscretion and sided with his mother. Hollande had no choice but to make a deal. He would step aside and let Royal have her shot. They would keep up appearances of being a couple, and Hollande would eagerly support her—even as he kept seeing Trierweiler.

There was only one problem: Hollande felt that Royal had hijacked a role that should have been his. “François Hollande was castrated by Ségolène Royal,” says an observer. He supported Royal in the primary only officially and did little behind the scenes for her as she ran against the more established Socialist politicians, International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn and former culture minister Jack Lang. “I campaigned strongly and on a daily basis for Ségolène Royal,” says the writer Bernard-Henri Lévy, who has served as an unofficial adviser to many French politicians. “And I have a weakness for loneliness and solitude. She received nearly no help, if not worse, from the party.” Her campaign manager, Arnaud Moutebourg, couldn’t hide his frustration. He said publicly, “Royal has only one flaw—her partner.”

Proving to be an enterprising and dynamic candidate, Royal used the absence of party support to her advantage. Characterizing herself as a “gazelle among the elephants,” she made her gender a key selling point. She traveled throughout France talking about participatory democracy and urging supporters to join the party, so that they—and not just party members and leaders (i.e., Hollande)—could have a voice in the primary. Suddenly, the Socialist Party doubled its membership; lo and behold, she won the nomination. “The way she built her campaign was to completely outsmart the political machine,” says Jacques Rupnik. Beating Sarkozy in the general election was another matter. She lost her cool in debates with him, and a number of gaffes pointed to her limited understanding of international affairs.

Following her defeat, Royal blamed Hollande and the party, saying, “Every morning I would open the newspapers and ask myself which Socialist was going to attack me.” With Sarkozy now in office, there was no point keeping up the charade that she and Hollande were together. Royal issued a statement announcing that she and Hollande had split. He and Trierweiler, in the middle of divorce proceedings from her husband, moved into an apartment in the 15th Arrondissement. The French public was cool with it all, hardly raising an eyebrow at the glaring conflict of interest that had just been revealed in the Hollande-Trierweiler pairing. Royal returned to her now relatively small-potatoes job as president of the region of Poitou-Charentes.

Four years later, Sarkozy was turning out to be a failure, due to general revulsion at his hyperkinetic, flashy personal style. With the election of 2012 ahead, Hollande and Royal, no longer hamstrung by the need to keep up appearances, squared off against each other in the Socialist primary. Both were determined to take back what they’d been robbed of by the other. Royal pulled no punches. “Can the French people name a single thing [Hollande] has achieved in 30 years of politics?” she asked during the race. But Royal, unable to shake her losing performance in 2007, was running close to last. Hollande was behind Strauss-Kahn. As fate would have it, Strauss-Kahn was caught in his own monstrous drama—he was accused of having committed rape in the Sofitel hotel in New York, and left the race in disgrace. (The criminal charges have since been dismissed.) The vast majority of his supporters went with Hollande. Voilà. Now was his moment to prove what Trier­wei­ler had known all along—that he had what it took.

Together, Hollande and Trierweiler refined the theme of Monsieur Normal, which she had been pushing seven years earlier in Paris Match. Hollande made his ordinariness versus Sarkozy’s bling-bling the cornerstone of his campaign. The French appreciated it. “[Hollande] eats. He likes the country. He likes the food. He likes being in the café with friends,” says Legrand. Whereas once upon a time Hollande had opened the doors onto his private life with Royal, he now targeted Sarkozy’s gross display of his personal life. “I respect private life, and the private life of the president,” he told the radio station Europel during the campaign. “But I don’t think it needs to be exhibited.” The message resonated. Who didn’t miss the more dignified era of 30 years ago, when President Mitterrand could have an entirely secret second family, and the press wouldn’t touch it, simply out of respect? Hollande specifically criticized the omnipresence of Carla Bruni, telling journalists, “Carla is no longer an asset for Sarkozy. She annoys me more than him. I saw her wiping his brow and neck in front of the cameras, in the An­tilles. She infantilizes him.”

The fact that he and Trierweiler were unmarried—which would make him the first unmarried president in French history were he to win—fit into the “normal” narrative. It made them just like millions of other French couples. Sure, he had a past with Royal, but they spun it as ancient history and condescendingly pooh-poohed the idea that this should be of interest to anyone. “Yes, the man I love had a woman before me,” wrote Trierweiler. “It happens to be that she was a presidential candidate.” The press gave them the benefit of the doubt.

Behind the scenes of the campaign, however, Trierweiler, though still working as a journalist, gave herself a role far more disruptive than Bruni’s brow wiping. Hollande and Royal had made a deal: She would throw her support behind him in the presidential election. Should he win, he would name her the head of the National Assembly if she could win a deputy seat in the next legislative election. It was a delicate peace treaty, to be sure, and Trier­wei­ler did what she could to botch it up by aggressively trying to erase all traces of Royal from Hollande’s biography.

At the Socialist Party convention, in Le Bourget, in January of this year, some 20,000 supporters and 450 journalists gathered for the presentation of the candidate. Over the course of three hours celebrating Hollande and the Socialist Party, in speeches and film footage, the name Ségolène Royal was not mentioned once. Royal later complained to Hollande, “You can’t act as if my 2007 campaign didn’t exist. Your team is giving you very bad advice. They want to bury me. If you erase me from the picture, it’s going to turn against you.” Two months later, his campaign manager, Manuel Valls, now the minister of the interior, said that Trierweiler, with whom he was close, had made him exclude Royal. “I wore the hat,” he admitted. At another campaign event, in Rennes, Royal made a speech praising Hollande and formally passing her supporters over to him. She had been told that Hollande would join her onstage. But Valls prevented that bit of stagecraft, and Hollande appeared only momentarily. At the insistence of Trierweiler, Royal was also reportedly excluded from the funeral of Hollande’s mother—her children’s grandmother—and the inauguration itself.

Trierweiler was relentless—even in victory. It was Election Night. Laurent Binet, who followed Hollande for several months for his book Rien Ne Se Passe Comme Prévu (Nothing Happens as Predicted), relays how Hollande, Trierweiler, and a few of his inner circle were on the campaign plane and had just learned of his victory. It was a moment that might have been filled with unbridled joy and optimism for some. Trierweiler, however, was thinking about something else, and she put to the group the following question: “At this great moment of accomplishment, which person does it feel like a personal revenge against?” She didn’t provide an answer, but it’s not hard to guess who was on her mind.

“It was an interesting question and a strange question,” admits Binet, who had been handpicked by Trierweiler for the job. “It says something about her.” Hours later, onstage during the Election Night celebration, when Hollande gave Royal a cele­bra­tory peck on the cheek, Trierweiler couldn’t stop the words from coming out of her mouth: “Kiss me on the lips!” He dutifully obliged. The cringe-inducing moment was caught by all the cameras.

‘We tried to give [the normal thing] a chance,” says Anne Rosencher, reporter for the political weekly Marianne and co-author of the new book Entre Deux Feux (Between Two Fires). “But, in fact, the warnings were there,” warnings that Trier­weiler was seriously out of whack with reality and capable of thinking or uttering the most grandiose, deluded notions. Once safely ensconced at the Élysée Palace, for example, she said she ought not to be called “First Lady of France,” but, rather, “the First Journalist of France.” In a review she wrote about a biography of Eleanor Roose­velt, she compared herself to the famous First Lady.

But, still, no one quite imagined that Trierweiler could undermine Hollande’s presidency. Alas, Royal had unfinished business—that post of head of the National Assembly she had been promised by Hollande if she could win the local election for deputy. Her choice of locale—La Rochelle, a beautiful port she assumed was a safe seat on the left—couldn’t have been more provocative to him. The city already had its own Socialist contender: none other than Olivier Fa­lorni, Hollande’s old friend and supporter who was rumored to have let him and Trierweiler hide out in his home when their affair was secret.

For Trierweiler, the thought of Royal becoming head of the National Assembly was hideous enough—that would put her in daily contact with Hollande. Now Royal, “the crazy woman from Poitou-Charentes,” as Trierweiler once called her, had the gall to go up against Hollande’s old friend? Royal expected nothing less than for Hollande to clear the decks for her and force his old ally out of the race. She considered herself a shoo-in and was already calling herself the next head of the National Assembly. Hollande responded to the problem by sending a colleague, Bruno Le Roux, to propose to Royal that she run, instead, to represent French citizens living abroad. She declined. He sent another colleague, Stéphane Le Foll, to urge Falorni to get out of the race. He declined.

Royal, seeing that the race was closer than expected, was getting desperate. If Hollande couldn’t get rid of Falorni, the least he could do was give her his endorsement. She dug in on the matter, telling him how imperative his support was. Thomas followed that up, telling his father how miserable his mother was. The next morning, from her office at the Élysée, Trierweiler heard the news on the radio—it was Royal herself announcing that she had just gotten Hollande’s support. A friend who was pres­ent shared with Le Point journalist Anna Cabana (co-author of Entre Deux Feux) what happened next. Trierweiler flew into a rage and called Hollande at the office, where he was in a meeting: “You supported her without telling me. Behind my back! … You will see what I’m capable of!”
Minutes later, the message of the tweet was reverberating throughout France. Valérie Trierweiler to Ségolène Royal: Drop Dead. We have a problem, Hollande’s advisers told him as he concluded his meeting. “She’s been irresponsible.”

Dommage à Trois
Hollande tried to sweep the matter under the rug and get on with business, but the mess wrought by Trier­weiler made him look like a weakling. As one close observer explains, “French people can accept a man who is between two women under one condition: that it is clear he’s the master, that he pulls the strings.”
Fairly or unfairly, Hollande’s every move has been clouded. As a public gesture to demonstrate how normal he and his companion were, for example, he and Trierweiler traveled to Brégançon for their August holiday by train, not plane, and smiled for the cameras. A fine gesture, but given recent events, it looked like an embarrassing charade. His approval ratings have plummeted in less than half the time it took Sarkozy’s to fall. As he looks to come up with 30 billion euros to lower the budget deficit, the frustration is coming from both sides of the political spectrum. The right is incensed at his proposed new taxes, including a 75 percent income tax for those making above one million euros. Coincidentally, or not, Bernard Arnault, the richest man in France, has just announced that he has applied for Belgian citizenship. (He claims he will continue to pay taxes in France.) The left, learning of the austerity measures Hollande accepted from German chancellor Angela Merkel, feels betrayed as well. Here he was again, telling one side one thing, another side something totally different, and folding under pressure, again, to a woman. As a result of his policies, many on the left feel he’s as bad as Sarkozy, while those on the right want Sarkozy back. Indeed, there have been rumors that Sarkozy is waiting until the state of affairs hits rock bottom so he can swoop in as France’s only recourse in 2017, and recent polls suggest he would win if the election were held today.

For now, due to the damage done to his image, Hollande is France’s whipping boy. A recent editorial in Le Point by respected columnist Philippe Tesson summed up the perception of his performance: “Hollande, le Fiasco Total.” The personal mess, says a well-placed source, “is the main origin, the main reason, for the recent fall, the disgrace.”

As for Trierweiler, Royal may have been the intended victim of the tweet, but she brought far more damage upon herself. She solidified the hatred of Hollande’s children, who vowed to have little to do with her. Thomas told a journalist at Le Point, “It pained me for my father. … It destroyed the ‘normal’ image he had built.” Hollande, belatedly realizing that his companion has become an epic liability, has effectively banished her from important public appear­ances. Some suspect that she won’t be around for much longer. As one insider suggests, it’s a good thing she didn’t quit her day job. Trierweiler recently said she regretted sending the tweet, but according to Sylvain Courage, who has been in touch with her recently, she’s not exactly doing much hand-wringing. “She feels guilty,” he says, “but not that much.”

Ironically, all Trierweiler has done is give her sworn enemy a boost. Royal lost the race to Falorni, but Trierweiler’s tweet played zero part in the defeat; as it turned out, right-wingers came out for Falorni only so that they could see Royal go down. But now Royal gets to be the victim—legitimately—of Trierweiler’s vindictiveness. “La Rochelle,” she recently told Le Figaro, “it was an injustice. A crash. I didn’t deserve that . . . to be subject to a humiliation like that, from so many angles. . . . It’s violent. It’s violent for my children. I have to be strong for them. But it’s a double shock.”

Royal has earned the sympathy of the French people, who feel she’s owed it. In what must be an unpleasant turn of events for Hollande, his girlfriend may be the one who gives Royal another chance.

Picture Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Only it’s lunch, at the Midtown restaurant Michael’s. The disciples scattered around the long table are 13 very glamorous New York women. And the man in the middle with the wine is a super-tan 54-year-old kid from Long Island, now planting a double kiss on Manhattan social fixture Marjorie Gubelmann. “Hello, gorgeous,” he says in a nasally drawl.

The women—actresses, models, businesswomen, television personalities, social swans, and various combinations thereof—are dying to share their Michael Kors stories. After all, as they see it, without Michael they might have been a bunch of frumpy paper-pushers and soccer moms.

Actress Debra Messing, who made Kors her go-to designer after his clothes had become a staple for her character on the television show Will & Grace, recalls how intimidated she’d been before their first in-person meeting. “I’d borrowed a chocolate-brown suede pant,” she says, gesticulating with her hands, “and a long 60s coat with white piping, and the belt.”

“Look what she’s doing!” Kors shrieks gleefully, imitating the hands. “Piping and the belt. Go ahead …”

“We met at a bar in some hotel. And literally I felt like I’d met my long-lost Jewish cousin from Long Island.” Kors claps and roars with laughter.
His shows have brought out the spaz in the normally cool Sigourney Weaver, who’s always hopelessly trying to make sense of, and mark up, the list of looks she sees on the runway before the models disappear from view.

“I always feel like Lucy in the candy store,” she says, frantically grabbing at the the air, which sends Kors into cackles. “I sat next to [socialite] Anne Bass—she’s so organized, going like this [making careful check marks]. I’m flailing around.”

“That’s heaven,” says Kors, “Lucy at the candy store!”

He looks to Patti Hansen and Iman, the original supermodel rock-star wives, on the other side of him. “The first time I met them, I’m not just shoveling it to them—they were both all over my walls. I don’t want to sound like a stalker. But to be able to see clothes on women like this blew my mind.”

“I’d just pick up what fits,” says Hansen. “I’m an American kid. Woman.”

“Kid!” Kors corrects her. “We’re all kids!”

“He’s the first designer who understood that the girl next door is no longer just blonde and blue-eyed,” says Iman.

“He didn’t just put you in colorful things because you were black.”

“I put her in riding boots, turtleneck, and gray flannels!” says Kors, recalling what Iman wore in his first show, in 1984.

“I was thinking about the punk thing at the Met?” she says. “I was thinking, Who could I call today who’s a punk designer? And I thought of you, because it’s a totally punk idea to stay original and not change your course.”

“How many peacoats have I made?” he says in agreement.

Which brings him to one of his own favorite Michael Kors stories—from when he began working as creative director of the French fashion house Céline in the late 90s. “I’m walking down the Avenue Montaigne and I see a girl across the street. Long hair blowing, gray flannels, peacoat, cashmere turtleneck, aviators [all of them Kors staples]. I was like, Oh my God, I changed French fashion in one season! And I see her coming towards me … ” His voice falls to a flat, disappointed drone. “And it’s her.” He’s glaring pointedly at designer Aerin Lauder, across the table. “I’m like, ‘Oh, it’s you. Oh my God, I’m so depressed.’ ” The table erupts in laughter. More wine is poured.

He looks around the table of women and gets momentarily sentimental. “All of you bring what I do to life. You’re my fantasies and realities. It’s Almodóvar,” he says (referring to the Spanish movie director), which might just be his favorite feeling.

After 32 years in the business, Kors is experiencing a moment that couldn’t be any sweeter. He’s a red-carpet essential for everyone from Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow to Michelle Obama. His ready-to-wear men’s and women’s clothes (as well as jewelry, accessories, watches, footwear, and fragrance) are sold in more than 400 stores throughout 89 countries, making him one of the most recognized fashion designers working in the world today. Now multiply that many times over, thanks to his 10 seasons as a judge on the hit reality show Project Runway. He’s also among the richest. His I.P.O. in December 2011 valued the company at $3.8 billion. Since then he’s personally sold shares totaling more than $700 million. His clothes have always connoted jet-set luxury—the lush cashmere sweater, the camel-hair coat, the bold watch. No Kors advertisement lacks the image of a yacht, limo, or helicopter. Now he inhabits that world, complete with a globe-trotting lifestyle, a year-round tan, aviator sunglasses worn on the red carpet, and a gorgeous, blond, younger husband, Lance LePere, a former intern who is now a creative director at the company.

It all might seem a little, well, obnoxious were it not for the fact that he has invited every woman, no matter the size of her body or wallet, to get in on the act, even if it’s fantasy. This human expansiveness is smart business, to be sure. But it’s also who Kors genuinely is: an empathetic, in-your-face chatterbox, allergic to the idea that fashion should be treated so preciously.

‘I don’t understand these designers who end up living in a bubble,” he says, riding down Fifth Avenue in the back of a town car, counting the number of his bags he’s spotting on women—so far five. “You’re never outside, you’re never on the street, you’re never with normal people who go to work! … They’re locked up, surrounded by staff: ‘Oh, that’s so amazing, you’re amazing.’ ”

For Kors, by contrast, boundaries are there to be ignored. He’ll hop out of a taxi to behold how pedestrians are wearing his clothes or accessories. He’ll burst into a dressing room to tell a stranger, Take this up, Take this out, or just to prop her up. To wit: “Angelina Monroe!” he squeals to a startled full-figured, seventysomething woman who has just stepped into a black gown at a pre-fall event at his store on Madison Avenue and is looking terribly vulnerable at the moment. He opens the neckline just so. “Or is it Marilyn Jolie?” The woman takes another look in the mirror, and it’s as if three decades have fallen away.

“Most personal appearances are sitting at the desk,” says Gubelmann. “Not Michael. He’s in the changing room: ‘No, no, honey.’ He’s put me in three Spanx and zipped me up.”

Lest anyone around him have a moment of restlessness, he’s there with a bottomless grab bag of fashion stories.

“Do you know Iman’s best line ever?” he says to a roomful of colleagues, working on resort fittings on a hot June day that’s only getting hotter. “She went to Halston for her first go-see [as a model], and he said to her, ‘Can you walk?,’ and she looked at him and said, ‘What do you mean, can I walk? How do you think I got here?’ ”

How about his run-in with Ashley Olsen, who told him that she and Mary-Kate were starting to do men’s wear and that he’d love it—it was for men just like him. “I said, ‘What do you mean?’ She said, ‘It’s quality, it’s comfortable, it’s cut well.’ I said, ‘You mean it’s for fat, rich, old men.’ She literally went white. I said, ‘I’m pulling your leg. Good luck.’ ”

Or “the best ever”? When Marina Schiano, Vanity Fair’s fashion editor during the 1980s and early 90s, was so desperate to get her hands on a certain Michael Kors dress before anyone else did that she hopped out of the dentist’s chair mid-appointment to go to his studio. “She walks in, and she still had a cotton ball in her mouth.”

The models aren’t just mannequins. Aside from the continual gentle reminders to walk through a spray-tan machine this weekend if you have a minute, he wants to know what their parents look like, what languages they speak, and did Gerard Butler hit on you at the Voss event in Shanghai. “Dan-ger-ous!” he says in a singsongy warning voice to Grace Mahary, an African-Canadian model he’s fitting. “Gerard Butler in a room full of models? He’s very charrrming. The Scottish accent? Trust me, I used to make my sweaters in Scotland. No one looked like him. You’re talking about a country where people eat fried Mars bars.”

The more formal aspects of his job—the shows and presentations—are devoid of pretense. While most fashion designers do the faux-humble peekaboo wave after their shows, Kors walks the whole U with a big grin on his face. As he says, “It’s like having a cocktail party! I want to say hi to all my guests!” And here’s Kors providing commentary to the editors and buyers who have come to see his resort presentation, at the Kors office on 42nd Street: “It’s the tennis dress you can’t play tennis in! … Listen, I like après-ski. I don’t like during-ski.” Another model comes out in a super-slim skirt. “We make skirts that aren’t pleated in the back, so that no one has a fat ass,” he says, explaining the look. “I’ve been in enough fitting rooms to know that no one wants a pleated ass.”

“He’s irrepressible,” says his friend designer Vera Wang. “It’s why he is so much fun at the C.F.D.A. [Council of Fashion Designers of America] meetings, and so much fun as a friend. And he tells it like it is. It’s not a façade. Being really honest and real—those are things that are very much missed [in the fashion world].” Indeed, in an arena rife with feuds and fragile egos, Kors delightfully sails above it all, comfortable in his own skin, say his colleagues. “His work comes from a place of absolute security,” says Derek Lam, who cut his teeth as Kors’s intern and later as one of his designers. “He’s not neurotic. He’s not secretly self-loathing. He doesn’t think there’s a secret agenda that fashion needs to answer.”

Model Education
Kors was the same happy-go-lucky kid 50 years ago, growing up in Merrick, Long Island. He was born Karl Anderson, to a Swedish father and Jewish mother, Joan, who now serves as company ambassador and looms still as a large presence in his life. He laughed so much as a small child that everyone called him “Chuckles.” (When he was five, Joan got remarried, to Bill Kors, and Michael changed both his last and first names.) When not laughing, recalls Joan, a former Revlon model, he might be “crying a river,” in response to, say, the thought of Captain von Trapp and Maria parting in The Sound of Music. An only child, Michael was surrounded by female relatives, obsessive shoppers all, with varying styles—“weird Almodóvar archetypes,” he says. Joan was sporty. His grandmother was over the top, loving print and color and jewelry. One aunt was a boho hippie, “like the Lady of the Canyon.” Another aunt “was taking her cues from Cher. She wore a midriff top to my Bar Mitzvah.” A great-aunt was the first woman Kors saw wearing heels with no hose, and she worshipped beige. “I always joke that she taught me the power of camel.”

He soaked it all in early. Before Joan’s wedding to Kors, five-year-old Michael beheld her wedding dress—a Priscilla of Boston extravaganza, littered with bows—and deemed it too busy. Off the bows came. Joan loved to knit her son cardigans, and Michael became a yarn aficionado. “He never ended up throwing [his sweater] on with a pair of jeans,” Joan recalls, “but would wear it with a bow tie, saddle shoes, fully turned out.”

By age 10, he’d transformed the basement of his house into a retail space called the Iron Butterfly, where he sold his own homemade candles, hammered-copper bracelets, and leather bags. Three years later, he was taking trips to the train station in Merrick, where he’d buy one of the four copies of Women’s Wear Daily. When his senior prom rolled around, he skipped it to go to Studio 54, then in its heyday. He showed up wearing a piece of raw-silk jersey wrapped into a diaper pant, a burlap jacket, and three luggage straps around his waist and thigh.

He began studying at Manhattan’s Fashion Institute of Technology, where he fancied himself a trailblazer. “I was 18 years old and thought I’d abolish the button,” he says. But his real fashion education started with a job as a salesman at Lothar’s, at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, “the Gap for the Guinnesses,” which was then specializing in ultra-expensive tie-dyed French jeans. “This was Park Avenue University,” says Kors, who recalls his brushes with Greta Garbo, Rudolf Nureyev, and Jackie Onassis, whose boots he had the honor of pulling off. But the 19-year-old had confidence to burn, and would announce, for example, that the mannequins were boring and should be glossy black. When the owners told him they didn’t have the budget for new ones, he went out and got Krylon black spray paint. “I ended up spraying them myself, to be honest not very well. There were bubbles of paint running down their faces.”

Kors had such an instinct for what women wanted that the owners gave him a shot at designing, offering up a workshop in their town house, in the East 60s. “It was all very Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” says Kors, whose day consisted of digging through the garment center for fabrics, buttons, zippers, and shoulder pads, racing back to the workshop to sew and oversee the pattern-maker, and then bringing the clothes to Lothar’s. He made slip dresses and a strapless jumpsuit that Goldie Hawn bought. (“Are you kidding? I nearly had a heart attack!”) Beyond that, if there was a guiding design principle, it was the weather. “If it was raining for 10 days, I’d go make raincoats. If it was blazing hot, I’d make linen sundresses.” The clothes were enough to get him noticed by Vera Wang, then an editor at Vogue.

“He was a little white-blond god,” Wang says, recalling him on the Lothar’s floor in 1980, “with skinny-mini jeans on. So full of enthusiasm and passion and fun.” Wang invited him as her date to the Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute Gala, to which she wore one of his slip dresses with a cardigan tied around the waist. The night was an emotional roller-coaster ride. He met Yves Saint Laurent and “levitated.” The moment was followed by the news that John Lennon had been shot.

While Wang provided Kors his first peek into fashion’s inner circle, Dawn Mello, then executive vice president of Bergdorf Goodman, who’d had her eye on his windows from across the street, gave him his first shot in the business, offering to sell his line. All he needed was, well, a line. He knew by then the look that excited him: “Sporty, American, laid-back, but self-indulgent.” Think paparazzi shots of Jackie Onassis in a rain trench on the streets of New York City. But there were some basic things Kors still didn’t understand about big-league retail. “I had no idea how you actually got the clothes physically to a store,” says Kors, who loaded that first line for Bergdorf’s into the back of his aunt’s Mercedes. (He would later be told about U.P.S.) “I didn’t know that there was such a thing as a ‘style number.’ I just wrote descriptions: ‘black satin tank,’ ‘gray trouser.’ But then, of course, no store knew what it was, so they said, ‘You need a style number.’ So once again I didn’t really know, so my style numbers were Style No. 1, Style No. 2 … ” The line sold out.

American fashion was still in its infancy when Kors entered the scene. There were three big labels at the time: Calvin Klein, Anne Klein, and Ralph Lauren. Kors got a business partner, but the operation was still on a shoestring. His first show, in 1984, was a complete do-it-yourself affair. Spray paint became his best friend—for the cheapo shoes he bought on Eighth Street and for the wooden curtain rings he bought at the hardware store, which constituted the jewelry. He’d found a space to have the show, a gallery at Sixth Avenue and 18th Street. The only problem was the dark-green walls—so Kors decided to have them painted white the night before. He recalls, “My Women’s Wear Daily review opened with ‘In a gallery reeking of fresh paint … ’ ”

Otherwise the review was a rave, in part because Kors was ahead of the curve in understanding the importance of who was wearing his clothes. The models in that first show included Iman and “every other model of the moment.” Kors admits, “I don’t want to sound obnoxious, but I knew early on that whoever wore the clothes, both in real life and in a photograph or on the runway, it was all about the woman.”

The instinct was prescient. In the 1980s, American fashion exploded in the popular culture, due to the heyday of the supermodels. He recalls the Uh-Oh moment. “You saw the runway models looking at these print models, who were curvy and laughed on the runway and smiled and had fun. And the runway girls were serious—taking a glove off and spinning. And suddenly you had this energy I think about a few of the shows where we had everyone, from Helena to Niki Taylor to Christy to Cindy to Linda to Naomi, and you knew this was a whole new moment and that it wouldn’t happen again.” The designers were propelled into the spotlight as much as the models. Kors, Isaac Mizrahi, and Marc Jacobs (all Jews from New York, he notes) became the “Young Turks,” replacing the previous trio of New York Young Turks: Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, and Donna Karan, who were graduating to “established.” While there was competition among the three young men, “the pie is the pie, and you have to have a different flavor of pie. The simple truth is that Marc, Isaac, and I weren’t addressing things the same way.”

Everything was going gangbusters until one day he was informed that the licensee company he’d partnered with in Europe was suddenly pulling out of its American business amid financial difficulties. He was in a panicked stupor. “I thought, This is impossible!” he recalls. “The clothes are selling!” Ten years of hard work looked to be going down the drain.

“The funny thing is it coincided with what I think was a sad time in fashion,” he says. “Everyone got very dour—grunge and nose rings and Doc Martens. In a weird way, maybe it was a repentance for what had come before.” But Kors dusted himself off, trimmed down his operation, and zeroed in on his vision. “For the first time I had to really think about a brand: What do I represent?”

Despite the pressures of the trends, he remained true to his original inspiration of luxury sportswear. Soon enough, there was another cultural shift, and a new kind of girl emerged, the “young social,” for whom his look would resonate: Aerin Lauder, Samantha and Serena Boardman, the Miller sisters (Alexandra, Marie-Chantal, and Pia), and their acolytes. As Kors recalls, “I saw this group of women who were out and about, looked great in clothes, loved luxury, loved glamour, wanted to have a good time, but were smart. It was the perfect moment. I said, You know what? The last thing this girl wants is sadness.”

Kors became the rich girl’s everyday staple, a fact that was comically clear to him one season when doing business with Mouna Ayoub, a Lebanese couture hound then married to a Saudi billionaire. She had come to one of his shows and circled everything. Rather surprised that she would want 47 out of the 48 looks, he decided to show her the clothes in person. “I start showing her the clothes, and I said, ‘Do you want to try anything on?’ She said, ‘No, no, just hold up the hanger … Love … love … love … love … love … love … ’ We’re halfway through, and she looks at me and said, ‘Michael, I love you. You’re my Gap!’ I was so offended! Then I was like, I get it.”

His particular sensibility caught the attention of the French luxury conglomerate LVMH, which hired him to give new life to the French fashion company Céline in 1997. Kors was utterly shocked—and clueless. “I had no idea,” he says. “I was like, Am I supposed to make this look French? Whatever that might mean—poodles and berets?” The only pointers he remembers getting from the people at LVMH were: “Don’t drink Coca-Cola in a good restaurant. People will say it’s very American. … Don’t wear sneakers.” Kors refused to part with his Cokes and sneakers and held fast to the kind of clothes he’d been making for 20 years. Sure enough, Paris was soon teeming with Aerin Lauders in peacoats and turtlenecks and gray flannel trousers. “It’s the first time that I saw, in fact, that the world was getting smaller,” he says. “It taught me about the global world … [in which] Kuala Lumpur counts.”

Kors Lite
Indeed, by the time Kors left Céline, in 2003, to focus solely on his own brand, it was a different world. Sex and the City had become a global phenomenon. The Internet was beginning to provide instant accessibility to the collections. Suddenly, the masses wanted high fashion, or at least one item in their wardrobe that looked like it—be it a Lucite heel or a handbag with a giant logo. With new majority owners, Lawrence Stroll and Silas Chou, of Sportswear Holdings Limited, Kors made the most of this new development, launching MICHAEL Michael Kors, his more affordable line of clothes, accessories, and shoes, which would be sold in his “lifestyle” stores and alongside his luxury collection in the flagship stores. Today the line makes up the majority of the company’s business.

Fashion purists might scoff at the notion of commerce triumphing over art, but, for Kors, what’s the big deal? He was not making art in the first place, just clothes that he hoped would let a girl feel sexy and confident.

With three C.F.D.A. awards under his belt and nothing left to prove, Kors has fully embraced the democratization of fashion. The old rules simply no longer apply. There’s no such thing now as dressing your age. “The young ones are unbelievably sophisticated, and then adults are more plugged in and hip than they’ve ever been,” he says. “Everyone’s basically a 30-year-old.” Dressing for the seasons? “Excuse me, fur boots in Malibu in the summer, boys in L.A. in a heat wave in ski hats, girls in our office in sequins for work. It’s the Wild, Wild West!” A woman on a budget might spring for a python handbag, while one with unlimited funds will buy a MICHAEL flip-flop. It’s a free-for-all, and the whole “jet set” thing has evolved into a state of mind, says Kors. “Your jet set could entail taking two buses, a subway, and it’s still movement, fast, speed. She’s not lying around on the sofa.”

The accessibility, the irrepressible loud mouth, and the know-how made Kors a dream get for the people behind Project Runway, the reality show that brought competitive fashion designing into millions of homes. When host Heidi Klum and one of the producers initially approached him about being a judge on the show, he resisted. “I was like, ‘Hideous!,’ ” he says. He was then assured that the show would not treat fashion as a joke but rather as a real endeavor that required vision and dedication.

He thought the only people who would watch it were fashion-obsessed women and a few gay men. Before long he was getting approached on the street by entire families, who returned to the show each week largely to enjoy Kors’s creative zingers: “It literally looked like toilet paper caught in a windstorm. She just looks like Rigatoni Mad Max … a big bowl of sawdust. She looks like a pole dancer in Dubai. … You achieved the impossible: camel toe in big shorts.”

“I honestly just blurt out whatever I think,” says Kors, loath to think he might have come across as bitchy. “But then I always try to tell them what I could do to make it better. And, quite simply, if they’re going to have their own businesses, forget the fashion critics, the consumer’s going to vote.” Kors recognizes that the show’s popularity has been a major boon to his business. But it’s equally gratifying for him to see that he’s brought the fashion world to a new generation of kids. “Suddenly you have nine-year-olds with dress forms!”

As he sees it, the more people getting in on this party the better. When he walks into his lifestyle store at Rockefeller Center—throbbing with music and shoppers buying studded flip-flops and checking out fluorescent “MK”-embossed iPad covers—he is happy to be accosted by fans wanting their picture taken with him. He works the room like he’s running for president of Happyland. “Where are you from? Brazil? Fabulous From Holland? Perfect! We have a store in Amsterdam Enjoy them You’re from Holland, too? Everyone’s from Holland! … Miami? Wonderful. Have a good time in New York Singapore? We love Singapore. Every year, we go to Singapore at Christmas!”

His P.R. women remind him he has that lunch to get to. He gestures, just one more minute. Can’t they see he’s having an Almodóvar moment?

If you think her dad sounds unpleasant, you should meet the paparazzi. There’s “Sam the Skulker,” a middle-aged Richard Belzer look-alike–only scary. There’s the charmer in the Jaguar, who alternates between sweet-talking the 19-yearold actress and telling her she’s a bitch. And then there are the lowlifes on wheels, who dodge pedestrians on North Robertson Boulevard as they chronicle her trips to tanning salons and contribute to her car wrecks, she says, like the one back in October when she totaled her Mercedes Benz SL65 AMG near the Ivy restaurant and cracked her wrist.

“My first instinct was: Get out of this car–they’re going to start taking pictures,” says Lindsay Lohan, her voice raspy and excited, kicking back at Hollywood’s Chateau Marrfiont, her hotel home for the foreseeable future, as her new apartment, off Sunset Boulevard, is being renovated. “I ran into this antiques store that’s called Hideaway House Antiques–I mean, the irony of that is just creepy and weird. [The paparazzi] ran down, and I saw them out the window, and I ran into the corner and sat down on this old chair, and I look down and there’s blood specks all over the chair! … I looked at my assistant. I said, ‘Buy this chair. It’s riot getting sold on eBay!’”

It’s impressive that Lohan can find humor in it all–given that the tabloids have feasted on her for the past two years, spilling ink in hysterical tones on everything from feuds and fake boobs (which she denies) to the loose-cannon dad, the withering figure, the canoodling sessions with Colin Farrell and other older actors, the on-set meltdowns, and the speculation about drug use. But being in the tabloids’ crosshairs wasn’t her only problem. “I was sick,” she now admits. “I was sick. Everyone was scared. And I was scared, too. I had people sit me down and say, ‘You’re going to die if you don’t take care of yourself.’”

Before we get into all that, the news is that Lohan is no train wreck. In fact, she may be the most compelling and charismatic and real of all the actresses on the very young A-list. Perhaps that’s why on the heels of her new romantic comedy, Just My Luck, due out this spring and for which she was paid a reported $7.5 million, she will co-star in Robert Altman’s next film, A Prairie Home Companion, opposite Meryl Streep. “She has a quality that is really unusual in actors,” says Streep. “And that is that she is very present and alive, almost preternaturally alive, on camera.”

She’s genuinely fun to be with–affectionate, unguarded, mischievous, and a little loopy. Having lived at the Chateau Marmont for months, she is now the staff’s very own Eloise, careening in and out of the kitchen, taking five pieces of chocolate cake to warm up in her suite’s microwave; grandly reserving several orders of curried chicken each Thursday because you never know who’s going to drop by; and having amazing conversations with total randoms, like that cool, older Australian woman eating here the other night, who was, like, really sexy and 40 and had a kid and everything.

The Chateau is full of advantages. If Lohan wants her amazing Lip Venom, she explains, she can just call up her assistant and have her toss it down the stairs. “You can throw things down the staircases here,” says the actress, who has put on a few pounds and now looks normal-thin, wearing a white T-shirt and dark jeans tucked into high boots. “It’s like a house, it’s so weird. I’m like, ‘This is my den.’ Like, three people were lying on the second floor and walking up to my staircase.” She catches herself and lets out a goofy laugh. “My staircase!”

But behind the playfulness there’s a serious and emotional young woman. Though she has fallen many times in her life, she clearly has great reserves of strength. She has personally survived so much that at this point she can’t help but start to let it out–about her damaged relationship with her father, her loneliness and rootlessness, and the demons inside her that almost made her self-destruct. As they say, she is going there–even while her publicist, Leslie Sloane Zelnik, and mother/co-manager, Dina Lohan, work overtime to play the dark stuff down.

“A lot of people that are my age are sheltered, especially in the industry, and [publicists, managers, and executives] want them to have this O.K. image. I don’t have that,” she says. “All my decisions are things that I make.” Like putting out a hit single, “Confessions of a Broken Heart,” not about boys but about a difficult, absent, convict father Lohan began writing the song, from her new album, A Little More Personal (Raw), one night while she was sick with the flu in Paris. Hours later, it unleashed such hysteria that she was desperately trying to contact her dad in jail and bailing out of work at a crucial time in her career. The song came to mean so much to her that when she talked to Casablanca Records chairman Tommy Mottola about it he told her she was the only one who could direct the video. “We had to tone it down a drop for MTV–which is saying something,” Mottola reports. For the record, he declares the song “one of the best I’ve heard in my career.”

On the first day of shooting the video, in Manhattan, one sees a kind of snapshot of Lohan’s entire life. Outside the studio, on loud and dirty West 26th Street, tittering young girls with pen and paper and fancy little dogs wait alongside embittered, impatient paparazzi, including Sam the Skulker, who’s covered in muffin crumbs, muttering that this is fucking bullshit. Inside, Sloane Zelnik is telling you about some untrustworthy snake an the business who wants a piece of Lindsay. Forty-three-year-old Dina, a skinny, bottle-blonde former Rockette wearing heavy, dark foundation, is having a guarded chat with Doug Liman, a prospective director for Lindsay. Her demeanor is tightly wound and hard-edged, in complete contrast to her daughter’s.

The set is a replica of Lindsay’s middleclass house in Merrick, Long Island. Lindsay’s bedroom is pink, with pictures of puppies on the walls. The Lohan parents, played by actors, shriek at each other. Dad clocks Mom in the face. Meanwhile, the younger daughter–played by Lindsay’s real-life younger sister, Aliana (Ali), a stick-thin 12year-old-blocks her ears and coils up in terror. (Lindsay also has two brothers, Michael, 18, and Dakota–usually Called Cody9.) Lindsay, playing herself in a bejeweled Monique Lhuillier gown, crashes about the bathroom, singing and sobbing into the camera.

“Daughter to father! Daughter to father! I am crying. A part of me’s dying … Daughter to father! Daughter to father! Tell me the truth. Did you ever love me?” Subtle it’s not, but it’s hard not to get a bit choked up, and it’s a lot more intense than any song of, say, Hilary Duff’s.

“It’s a therapy,” Lohan says later, wrapped in a bathrobe, taking a cigarette break in her trailer. “It’s like the best acting that I’ve ever been able to do is in this video. I freak out and just kind of go with it and create my own scene …. It’s offensive and I want it to be. I’m saying, Dad’s what I needed: I was seeking your comfort and I didn’t have it.”

When Lohan describes her childhood, the picture that emerges is of a family trying to hold on to the trappings Of the middle class while being held hostage to a dishonest, unpredictable, and violent father. The terror didn’t take long to kick in After marrying in their early 20s, Dina and Michael separated when Lindsay was just three. “My parents were in court and I got kidnapped out of the courtroom by my father,” claims Lindsay. But, like many young people in love, Dina took her husband back for a period.

“It got to the point where my father would not come home for a few days,” Lindsay says. “He would come home three days later and be very angry, and we’d be walking on eggshells, and it would be a very tense, scary household.” Usually, he was “blow[ing] his fucking money away,” and doing drugs, which she first ,discovered when she happened upon them in a pack of his cigarettes. In addition to disappearing on drug binges, he was having run-ins with the law. “I remember I was coming home from an audition and that was when it was bad. My father was ‘away,’” says Lindsay. The first time, he was sent to prison for criminal contempt in a securities case. He has since amassed several other convictions–for assault, violations of a protection order, driving under the influence. “He’s been in and out of jail my whole life. My whole life,” Lindsay says. Even before she became hugely famous, she changed schools because her family life had become too exposed, and it was simply top mortifying. Eventually, her parents separated again, and Michael was not allowed hear the children.

Strange as it was to have a father in jail, the prospect of his being on the loose was downright frightening. For a time, Dina and the kids went to live with her parents because the family was too afraid to stay at their own home, which was just around the corner from Michael’s crash pad–his parents’ house. But four years ago, when things got too cramped and the drive to school became a hassle, the family decided to brave it and move back into their house. They pulled up in the driveway, and what happened next was, as Lohan puts it, “really fucked up.” Followed by Ali and Dakota, Dina took some things inside. She proceeded upstairs and went to use the bathroom. Ali and Dakota, already cautious at their tender ages, were right behind her. Suddenly, according to Lindsay, out of the shower jumped Michael. Dina and the kids ran screaming out of the bathroom and tore down the stairs. “He came running out of the house,” says Lindsay, “and I got in the car, and Ali and Cody ran into the car, and we all floored it out and drove back to my grandparents’ house and wouldn’t go back into the house and got rid of the house.”

One would never suspect anything about the personal drama from seeing the 11-year-old Lohan on-screen, playing identical twin sisters–one British, one American-in the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap. Director Nancy Meyers recalls a happy-go-lucky girl who bounced around and became almost like a member of her family.

“She was fun,” says Meyers. “She would come into my trailer and she and my daughter would play really loud music and dance like crazy.” Meyers also realized that, even at that very young age, Lohan had an instinct when it came to acting, even for rather complicated challenges. For the scenes in which sisters Annie and Hallie were together, for instance, Lohan played each sister in separate takes, with a stand-in actress for the other. Lohan had to remember every cadence of their interchange when she then played the scene as the other twin. “It was an amazing feat,” says Meyers.

After the success of The Parent Trap, which earned around $66 million domestically, the family might easily have gone Hollywood, but Dina opted to stay on Long Island and keep Lindsay in school. For a couple of years, Lindsay was a normal teenager, playing soccer and cheerleading. Then, when some of her friends from the young actors’ circuit, such as Lacey Chabert, landed roles, Lindsay started getting itchy feet. Dina recalls, “She’d see some of her friends surpassing her, and she’s like, ‘I have to do this.’”

The oeuvre that followed–Freaky Friday, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, Mean Girls, Herbie: Fully Loaded–is not what you’d call meaty. But in each of her movies Lohan has exhibited an unusual brightness and an intelligence about how people think and feel that sets her apart from other young actresses in their various princess movies. “She just got it,” says Sara Sugarman, director of Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, which is about an eccentric city kid who goes to live in the New Jersey suburbs. “It was exactly how I imagined it on the page.”

In Freaky Friday, her instinct for what’s real–and what’s not–kicked into full gear even before she was offered the part. As the script was written, the character was Goth, Lohan recalls: “No one could relate to the character when she was really Goth. There was nothing there.” She took it upon herself to change it–before the audition. “I dressed really preppy,” she says. “I wore a collared turquoise Abercrombie & Fitch shirt and khaki pants, swear to God, with a white headband. And my hair was really straight and pretty and red and blond. My agent calls and was like, ‘What are you doing?!’” The studio ended up re-writing the character entirely.

She was just as effortless when it came to the first movie she’d have to carry, Mean Girls, the 2004 high-school-bitch comedy that is up there with Heathers. “She never paraphrased a sentence once,” says Saturday Night Live’s Tina Fey, who wrote the screenplay and played the brainy, lonely teacher. “She has this really quick-to-memorize, spongy mind that you cannot have when you’re 17. Between takes she would be talking to me and Amy Poehler [who had a role in the movie]. At the time it was ‘I’ve got to find these baby-blue Ugg boots online’-which was obviously a few years ago because I know she wouldn’t wear them now-and then they would say they were ready to shoot, and she would just turn and be fully present and really good in the scene. Then Mark [Waters] would call ‘Cut’ and she’d be like, ‘Anyway, I saw this thing … ’”

Following her success in Mean Girls, Lohan’s life took a sharp turn from her high-school friends. While they were heading to college to live among their peers, Lohan moved into the Four Seasons in Los Angeles–alone. Even more alienating, her father’s embarrassing antics became public. He assaulted a sanitation worker. He beat his brother-in-law with a shoe at a family First Communion celebration. He reportedly passed out at the Manhattan strip club Scores and skipped out on a $3,800 hotel bill. He complained–through the New York Post’s “Page Six”–that his daughter was being destroyed by “lowlifes.” “I was going through the phase of wanting to be with my family more and [wondering], What exactly am I doing?” recalls Lindsay. “Who are my real friends? Do I have any? If I needed to call any, would they be there like they would if I was in New York?”

She did what many young women would do when faced with the strange combination of loneliness, public embarrassment, being worshipped, and suddenly having loads of money. She dabbled in Kabbalah. She began going out with a fellow star, Wilmer Valderrama, of That ’70s Show. She started shopping like a Trump wife. (She confesses that she dropped $100,000 in a single day.) With Paris, Nicole, or an Olsen twin in tow, she started hitting the clubs–Mood, Concorde, and Marquee–the sort that lavish free drinks on celebrities. She became a staple of the tabloids, which was how some family members were now getting their information about her. “I remember my sister called me up: ‘I heard you got Pamela Anderson boobs.’” And she now admits she began using drugs “a little,” but quickly says, “I’ve gotten that out of my system.” When asked later if those drugs included cocaine, she gets flustered, denies it, and says, “I don’t want people to think that I’ve done … you know what I mean? It’s kind of a sore subject. I’ve lost a family member over it, practically.” (The day after the admission, Sloane Zelnik goes into a tailspin, attempts to erase the drugs from the record, and then wonders aloud how she will “spin” it.)

By fall 2004 she had her first disastrous shoot, Herbie: Fully Loaded, simply because her life had become so toxic. “I was living with Wilmer at the time,” recalls Lohan, who played an aspiring NASCAR driver in the movie. “I had to leave the house at four in the morning to go [on set]. I would literally get home at two in the morning, sleep, and then sleep in the car for an hour.” While on the set at the California Speedway, she was trying to record her first album (Speak )–in her trailer, because it was overdue. “I can’t record the album in a trailer, in a movie set, because we’re hearing the cars driving around, on the record! So we start going to a studio. So I leave the set … so tired from the day, be in the studio until like 2:30 in the morning.” When it came to dealing with the pain of her parents’ situation, she’d turn to Valderrama, wanting to be with him “every five seconds,” because “I didn’t have anyone to go to.” At 24 years old, he couldn’t handle it, she says.

“I’m ruining this relationship with this guy that I think is my first love,” she remembers thinking. “I’m ruining it because I’m taking everything out on him.”
Then one day she realized that something was not right with her body. “I started to get really bad head pains, to the point where I was shaking in my trailer. I got a fever of 102 and they were like, ‘You need to go to the hospital.’ I was like, ‘No, I’m not going to the hospital.’ I went back to my boyfriend’s house, lay down on the bed. I started getting these shooting head pains, where I would wake up in the middle of the night. I kid you not, I was lying in that bed and I never heard someone scream so loud. I was screaming, throwing things, because the pains were so intense in my head, like someone was stabbing me in the head.”

She finally checked into the hospital and learned her diagnosis. “My liver was swollen, and I had a kidney infection, and my white blood cells were accelerated,” she says, laughing. “I love how I say it like that. I don’t know what it means, but it’s not good. I wasn’t eating. I was on an IV. They were giving me shots of morphine to numb the head pains every two hours.” Over the course of a week and a half, she began to look like a completely different person. She took out her hair extensions. The orangey glow she had achieved from frequent trips to Mystic Tan completely faded, and she lost around 15 pounds. By the time her family and best friend, Jesse Shulman, arrived from the East Coast, “I was really, really white, and I got really, really pale, and my hair was really short, and I was like this,” she says, shriveling up like a famine victim, “and I hadn’t gotten out of the bed. My legs were so numb from not walking, I had a walker to walk to the bathroom and back. My body didn’t have enough strength to take a shower.”

Upon seeing Lindsay, Jesse started to cry and had to leave the room. Her father showed up at the hospital but didn’t make it past the lobby. “I have to be honest,” says Lindsay. “I would have liked to have seen him. But my mother was there, and my brother and sister were there, and they were scared.”
While the illness was very real, Lohan admits that getting sick in such a dramatic fashion served as a cry for help. “I didn’t want to complain, but that was my way to complain, to actually let everyone know, Yeah, I actually am really sick,” she says. “I can’t imagine seeing your daughter lying in a hospital bed, white as a ghost, like so tiny and frail-looking.”

How did Dina feel? “Lindsay has had bronchial asthma since she was two,” Dina says, exasperated, a tad defensive. “She was shooting [Herbie] in the Valley in ll0-degree weather with the full racing suit on, in dust and in dirt. She had an asthma attack. She was breaking up with Wilmer. Her father was spiraling out of control at that time. And she was recording her album, which Tommy Mottola was trying to get out in an unrealistic time frame as well. It was the culmination of a lot of things, and of course any time you’re in a hospital and you’re on an IV, you’re going to lose weight.”

Life didn’t get any easier after the hospital. Wilmer was gone, and Disney, the studio behind Herbie, was so put off by Lindsay’s un-Disney-like behavior that for a time they de-emphasized her on the movie poster. Meanwhile, the drama between her parents got uglier. Her father reportedly violated an order of protection twice in 2004. On one of these occasions, following a soccer game of Cody’s, he is said to have chased Lindsay in a car. At the beginning of 2005, Dina, after 19 years of marriage finally filed for divorce. Among the charges reportedly in the legal papers, she accused Michael of having thrown her down a flight of stairs, and of having threatened to kill the family. “O. J. Simpson has nothing on me,” she claimed he said. “I know exactly how I’m going to kill [them]. I know when I’m going to do it, and I’m going to enjoy it.” He responded that he wanted Dina and other family members to submit to drug and alcohol testing and that he was suing for half of the 15 percent of earnings that Lindsay pays her mother–which could add up to $7 million a year for him–unless Dina and Lindsay signed on to a reality show he wanted to launch. Dina could not comment on the specifics of the case, except to say, “A lot of what makes Michael Lohan tick is money.” In December, the Lohans opted for a legal separation instead of a divorce.

The hideous parental battle made it impossible for Lindsay to work. While on a European tour to promote Herbie: Fully Loaded, Lindsay lost it. “It was the night I wrote ‘Confessions,’” she recalls. “I started writing the song and I literally had a breakdown in the hotel room, went to my publicist’s hotel room and sat there and just cried and started calling the Nassau County jail. Next thing you know I’m on the phone with a guard. I’m like, ‘My father’s in there–you need to put me on the phone with him!’ I was like, ‘This is not right. I’m Lindsay Lohan, Michael Lohan’s daughter.’”

Sloane Zelnik, afraid that the guard might call an item in to the tabloids, tried to stop her, but it was no use. Although the guard never put her through to her father, she later reached her brother Michael. “I was like, ‘I’m coming home, I’m quitting this press tour. I need to get home. I don’t care if I never work again. I need to be with my family.’” Lohan bailed on the remainder of the tour, which she now says she regrets because it was “irresponsible.” (Indeed, her behavior seems to have put some people in an awkward position. Nina Jacobson, the executive whom Lohan credits with shepherding her career at Disney, declined to be interviewed for this article, as did Herbie’s director, Angela Robinson.) As for her father, still incarcerated, he says, in an open letter to her through Vanity Fair, “Not a day goes by that I don’t think about the words to your song … They’ve been reminders to me to examine my conscience and re-evaluate my life.”

At the same time, Lohan discovered another way to find satisfaction in a world that was terrifying and no longer included Wilmer: being skinny. The once curvy pinup was fading into early Karen Carpenter territory. At the time, she used the old “working out with a trainer excuse, while Sloane Zelnik informed tabloids, “She’ll eat a muffin if she wants.” Any muffins she was eating, however, did not stay down for long. “I was making myself sick,” she says, referring to bulimic episodes. The situation came to a head in May 2005 when she was hosting Saturday Night Live. Having first been on the show a year earlier, Lohan had become a kind of favorite daughter among the S.N.L. group, and everyone in his or her own way wanted to keep her on track. Amy Poehler took a matter-of-fact approach.

“Amy was good and tough on her,” recalls Tina Fey, “saying, ‘You’re too skinny,’ like, ‘I’m not going to ask you why, but you’re too skinny and I don’t like it.’” Fey and producer Lorne Michaels, who’d seen John Belushi and Chris Farley die of overdoses, took her aside and had the kind of conversation that amounted to a parental intervention about substance abuse land eating disorders. “They sat me down,” recalls Lohan, “literally before I was going to do the show, and they said, ‘You need to take care of yourself. We care about you too much, and we’ve seen too many people do this, and you’re talented,’ and I just started bawling. I knew I had a problem and I couldn’t admit it … I saw that S.N.L. after I did it. My arms were disgusting. I had no arms.” The point was driven home when an issue of Star magazine came out in which she was wearing what she calls “that great whore’s dress.” “I looked at it and was like, Jesus Christ,” says Lohan. The sight of it devastated her siblings. “My sister, she was scared. My brother called me, crying.”

“It happens to people in different periods of their life,” says Dina, again exasperated. “She took it a little too far, maybe, and pulled back quickly and is fine. I don’t see it as what the press made it out to be. It was definitely more magnified, and I think it even made Lindsay think it was more magnified.
She was 19 looking at it. I’m 43 looking at it, going, No, it wasn’t as bad as it looked. They took one really bad picture somehow, and they’re probably not even her arms in that picture.” She’s similarly dismissive about the notion of Lindsay’s excessive partying. “When people would interview me and say, ‘Oh, she’s out at clubs,’ I’m like, ‘What did you do when you were a teenager? You go to clubs, or you go to parties.’”

Despite her mother’s belief that everyone was getting carried away, Lindsay felt it was a wake-up call. “You have to learn for yourself and you have to hit rock bottom sometimes to get yourself back up to the top,” she says. And in a very adult way she rejects the all-too-facile defense that young women in the spotlight need not be role models. With a younger sister walling in her footsteps, she can’t help but take responsibility. “With my sister, I’ve always had to be cautious of what I do,” Lohan says. “I feel like she’s my daughter.” At the same time, she says, “I want her to know what’s out there … And I think younger kids should know it’s O.K. to experience things in life, and I’m not encouraging going out and getting a fake ID and going off the deep end and having an eating disorder. I’m saying, if you at least admit those kinds of things, that that might happen, then they don’t feel the urge to go and do that.”

Her decision to address her problems coincided with a career turning point that upped the stakes: the invitation from Robert Altman to play Meryl Streep’s daughter in A Prairie Home Companion, an ensemble drama based on the public-radio show. Suddenly, the teenage tabloid sensation, who’d often felt inferior because she wasn’t a real actress such as Scarlett Johansson or Evan Rachel Wood, realized that the world took her talent seriously. The challenge ahead appeared immense. In addition to Streep, the cast included Lily Tomlin, Kevin Kline, John C. Reilly, and Garrison Keillor, of whom she was initially terrified because he seemed so quiet and brilliant. Her role required a cappella singing and improvisation, neither of which she had ever done. Scenes were 25 pages long and had to be shot straight through.

“I was scared,” says Lohan, recalling the first day of shooting, in Minnesota. She had to perform a long, intense scene with Streep and Tomlin, who plays Lohan’s aunt. “Meryl [and Lily] are singing this emotional song and I’m chiming in. And I don’t have a father in the movie, I don’t really know my dad. And she’s talking about the dad and she starts singing, and I just started to cry in the scene when we were improvising … They keep rolling and then all of a sudden Meryl starts crying, Lily starts crying. The crew members start tearing up … We cut. Robert Altman starts clapping and everyone starts clapping. Meryl starts clapping. And they start coming up to me and saying, ‘That was amazing, I can’t believe it wasn’t scripted’–it was so beautiful. That was the first day of shooting … They were so nice to me and kind, and I was so proud of myself. That changed me a lot, I guess.”

Altman, who had initially been nervous about casting Lohan, was particularly impressed with her final scene. “She has to do a song which is not very good–her character’s performance is not very good–and yet it had to be honest, so it couldn’t be tricked,” Altman says. “She was excellent.”

Over the course, of the shoot, Lohan began to grow up. For my [19th] birthday, I flew to L.A. for the weekend and sat in a little restaurant with my friends and just, like, had dinner, went back to my friend’s house and didn’t do anything. That’s how much I’ve changed. When I turned 18, I had a party at Avalon with an ‘I’m a Slave 4 You’ theme.“

Following the film, she had to shoot her music video. But before doing it she knew she needed to get away and clear her head. She took a three-mile walk on the beach in Northern California. “A year ago, I wouldn’t have known to do that, to do something that was a bit more earthy to make yourself feel better, rather than going out and getting wasted.” Though she still has three storage rooms full of clothes, she’s even tamed the shopping. With her Mercedes now history, she says, “I still have this BMW 745 that’s, like, white rims, blacked-out windows, so flashy. All I want to do is get rid of the car and get a Jeep.”

She has hit that moment when the future seems overflowing, delirious even, with possibilities–not for fame and fortune but to do something meaningful. She is currently shooting Bobby, about the assassination of Robert E Kennedy, directed by Emilio Estevez and starring Anthony Hopkins, Sharon Stone, and Demi Moore.

“Going through shit makes me that much stronger,” she says, sitting up in her chair, a bundle of intense excitement. “And doing great things makes me want to do even better things. I want to do things that make me feel good, and work with charities and see the positive side of things. With the position that I’ve kind of come into I’m in a place where I can really make an impact on people and really help girls that are, you know, people with anorexia, people that aren’t in good relationships with their lovers … people that don’t get along with their parents. I can change that a little bit.” At some point soon, she wants to write a film about a girl growing up in Hollywood and about “how crazy a person can go. But, at the same time, how much they can change.”

Admirable as her plans are, it must be noted that Lohan is still a work in progress. Her most recent foray into charity, for instance, was an event for Katrina victims that she reportedly barely made it to–after canceling a private jet, she then missed her commercial flight. In early December, she bailed out of Live with Regis and Kelly at the very last second, forcing them to improvise on-air. And she’s still a wee bit crazy when the sun goes down. Only last night, she says, she was hanging out at L.A.’s Roosevelt Hotel lounge with Paris Hilton, Jack Osbourne, the kids from the TV show Laguna Beach, and Adam Levine of the rock band Maroon 5. She’s not looking for a nice boy her age but has a number of crushes on older men. “I like the ones I probably shouldn’t like. The rock star kind of people … I’m obsessed with Johnny Depp. Oh my God, because he’s dark and cool and edgy and … dirty,” she says. Over the course of last autumn, according to the tabloids, she began and ended a relationship with Jared Leto, with whom she’ll star in Chapter 27, about John Lennon’s assassin, Mark David Chapman. (All she will say is, “We’re great friends.”) Mostly, she’s sick to death of people’s melodramatic concern. “Don’t ever say this to me,” she says, going into mushy group-therapy-speak: “’Are you O.K.?’”

She leans over, looks you straight in the eye, and delivers her classic Lindsay response: “It’s like, Yeah, motherfucker, I’m fine.”

Before Marc Jacobs arrives, a top-level advertising-strategy meeting at Louis Vuitton is just another fashion bitchfest.

“What about Eva Herzigova?” asks Antoine Arnault, the thirtysomething son of LVMH’s C.E.O., Bernard Arnault, as he drags coolly on his cigarette.

“Karolina Kurkova?” Arnault mutters.

“I find her . . . ” says Mert, searching for the word.

“Common,” answers art director David James, a Brit with thick glasses and funky teeth.

“Common,” says Mert. “She’s done so many lingerie things, and that’s made her a little, like, common.”

“Cameron Diaz?” someone offers.

“I find her very common,” says Mert, going with the word of the moment. “She has no fashion identity. I don’t think girls want to look like Cameron Diaz. They want to look like J.Lo.”

“Gwyneth Paltrow?”

“Dry,” says Mert.

Marc Jacobs enters, and the negativity eases. He’s in his typical getup—Martin Margiela sweater, navy-blue Marc Jacobs pants, Stan Smith sneakers, two silver hairdresser’s clips pulling back his hair, and a neck brace (the result of a recent dogwalking accident)—and he is apologizing profusely. Being late is something he hates. So is being unnecessarily harsh. He slips into the conversation and assesses the choice of models gracefully but decisively. “Daria’s great. Daria’s beautiful,” he says, his voice measured, with a touch of a lilt, “but in a believable way. There’s nothing out of this world about her. . . . I love Beyoncé, I think she’s fantastic . . . but that’s really not the way I’d like to go.”

Though Bernard Arnault, after the success of the last campaign, which starred Jennifer Lopez, wants Beyoncé Knowles, Jacobs’s hesitation has suddenly put everything in LVMH world into question: could it be that Beyoncé—whose 2003 anthem “Crazy in Love” Jacobs just blasted during the runway show for his own line a month earlier—won’t be all that two months from now?

At 40, Marc Jacobs may be the first “fashion darling” not to possess the qualities traditionally associated with that term, like queeniness, grandness, and absurdly thin skin. He is, in the fashion world, not “fabulous,” not “beyond,” but cool. Old-school cool. For most Marc Jacobs fans, he’s not just cool, he’s “so fucking cool.” The same thing might be said of Jacobs’s devoted followers—“Marc-olettes,” as *Vogue’*s Anna Wintour puts it—for whom he is known almost as much as for his clothes. They include filmmaker Sofia Coppola, scene-ster Zoe Cassavetes, Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, and actresses Lisa Marie Presley, Winona Ryder, and Chloë Sevigny. Though most are in their 30s and 40s, they are still considered the cool kids and, intentionally or not, have done their bit to impart to Jacobs a mystique. They sit in the front row of his shows; they wear his clothes in fawning New York Times Magazine cover stories and in court, when appearing for, say, shoplifting; they lend their names to his bags; and they star in his indie-rock advertisements, shot by Juergen Teller. Teller happens to be married to Venetia Scott, the stylist for Jacobs’s collection. Both are really cool.

Lots of other cool people are digging his scene, too. Attending his spring 2004 collection in New York in October were actresses Hilary Swank, Amanda Peet, and Sissy Spacek, P. Diddy and girlfriend Kim Porter, two Strokes (Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond), Red Hot Chili Pepper Anthony Kiedis, and Jane’s Addiction’s Perry Farrell, among others. Afterward, they kicked it at the Maritime Hotel, where one table after another lit up, and Sofia and friends drank Dad’s wine. The hottest models—Giselle, Bridget Hall, Angela Lindvall, Frankie Rayder, and Erin Wasson—do his shows for free. “It’s the epitome of fucking cool,” says Wasson, all pumped up backstage before the October show, wearing a T-shirt with a skull on it and sneakers with no socks. Giselle struts by with a glass of champagne. “Whoo! You go, Erin!” she yells, just because. Wasson drags on her cigarette. “Giselle’s the biggest fucking sweetheart!”

It must be said that, at this moment, the whole scene is so fucking cool it’s approaching too cool for school—i.e., selfconsciously cool—and this, alas, is the shortcut to uncool. And Jacobs, being the cool guy that he is, gets it. “I think I’m the most uncool person in the world,” he says. “I don’t know what cool is. I guess my definition of cool has always been something that I’m not. . . . I don’t think [my scene] is cool. I just think it’s real.”

Whatever the characterization, Jacobs has emerged as the designer who just gets what women want to wear. It is often said that he makes it look easy. In fact, he is a man who gives painstaking attention to his work, and in his 20 years in the business he has overcome more than his share of hurdles—public failure, near bankruptcy, and a severe substance-abuse problem—which makes his accomplishments all the more impressive. He has done nothing less than raise the luxury brand Louis Vuitton from the dead, just in time for its 150th birthday. With his own line, started 20 years ago with his business partner, Robert Duffy, 50, he has established himself as a modern fashion visionary.

In one sense his clothes defy easy generalization. Over the years he has given his take on prom skirts and prairie skirts, mod dresses and flapper dresses, Mary Janes and short military jackets, drawing on past decades the exact moment before the particular era is officially back. The one unifying characteristic of his designs is that his clothes all seem special in a quiet, personal way. “They don’t scream a label,” says Anna Wintour. “There’s a charm to the way he puts his clothes together, and an edgy attitude that young girls and women the world over adore. You feel the girl as much as you feel the clothes.”

Once upon a time Jacobs was just another alienated Jewish kid growing up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. His parents both worked at the William Morris Agency in New York. (His uncle, Sam Weisbord, was its president from 1975 to 1984.) After the death of his father, when Marc was seven, his mother, who Jacobs describes as troubled, remarried several times, making life chaotic for Marc and his two younger siblings (from whom he is now estranged). It didn’t help that Marc was only interested in subjects such as arts and crafts. “I was just a complete failure at things like sleepaway camp,” he says. “I hated being around kids my own age. Not girls, but boys. It was just really horrible for me.”

Things improved at age 12, when he moved in with his grandmother Helen, who lived in the Majestic building, on Central Park West and 72nd Street. She was his first fashion muse. “My grandmother was somebody who was always very well dressed, and she took care of her appearance,” he says. “I loved that she went to Saks Fifth Avenue to buy something, or to Bonwit Teller to buy a scarf, and Lord & Taylor to buy stockings.” For Helen, the sight of her grandson busily copying pictures from the fashion magazines and coming to her for knitting lessons lit up her life. “She would brag about me all the time.‘My grandson’s going to be the next so-and-so.’ I’d be cringing at the butcher, cringing at the checkout stand at the supermarket, cringing all over the West Side,” Jacobs recalls.

Seventy-second Street was not only home to Grandma but also the location of the uptown, ultra-chic boutique Charivari, where 15-year-old Jacobs landed his first glamour job, as a shirt folder. One day, a man named Robert Boykin, who owned an Upper West Side club called Hurrah, came into the store and asked him out. For Jacobs, then experimenting with “a punky look” (though, at five feet eight, he considered himself too short to fully achieve it), Boykin was his entrée into the world of Beautiful People. “I was just loving it,” says Jacobs. “Going to after-hours clubs and doing all kinds of crazy things—drinking and drugging, going to school, and checking my books at the coat check. I would see all the young, gorgeous boys and girls who were 19, 20 years old. It seemed like what they did was get dressed and go to clubs, all over the world—New York, Saint-Tropez. The idea of this glamour and hedonism was so fantastic, and I was just like this little voyeur, sort of dancing my head off on the sidelines.”

The 15-year-old dancing on the sidelines noted that the beautiful boys in 1979 were wearing silk Cossack blouses from Yves Saint Laurent—just one detail, Jacobs remembers, that led him to his calling. After high school, he attended Parsons School of Design, on West 11th Street, where his senior project—a collection of wacky knitted sweaters with smiley faces and polka dots—earned him the coveted Golden Thimble award. The sweaters also attracted the attention of Robert Duffy, who was working for an old-line garmento company called Rueben Thomas, then looking to expand into sportswear for younger women. “There was this friendly, lived-in feeling to the sweaters, and it was the first time I had seen that in clothing,” says Duffy, whose jaded exterior masks an inner warmth—and a childhood spent wearing his mother’s cashmere sweaters. “His sweaters were something that I could personally relate to . . . so I called him the next day. I guess it was love at first sight, as far as the clothes were concerned.”

In May of 1984, Jacobs and Duffy teamed up on a handshake, with Duffy serving as Jacobs’s business manager. They worked on a shoestring budget and went from company to company, looking for backing. Their luck changed in 1989, when Jacobs was selected to carry the torch of Perry Ellis, who had recently died of AIDS, while Duffy became the company’s president. Jacobs revered Ellis, not just for his dramatic good looks but also for the spirit of his clothes, the most whimsical finds on Seventh Avenue at the time. Ellis had one collection, for instance, that had been inspired by Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. But in Ellis’s later collections that feeling had been replaced by something more sensible. “Greige” is how Jacobs sums up the color palette. Seeking to recapture the early Perry Ellis spontaneity, Jacobs started making offbeat tweeds and ponchos, raccoon-lined boots, and cashmere blankets that looked like the American flag. While the typical Perry Ellis customer wasn’t thrilled, Jacobs was establishing his dauphin status in the fashion world—then on the eve of supermodel explosion. “I’d heard about Marc Jacobs,” says Naomi Campbell, recalling her nerve-racking first fitting with Jacobs, in 1987. “Marc Jacobs. Marc Jacobs. Marc Jacobs. I didn’t know whether he was going to like me or cancel me or what!” (He offered her a box of chocolates and the two became close friends. Remember—this is the fashion world.)

Jacobs continued to push the boundaries of Perry Ellis and in 1993 launched what’s now known as his “grunge” line—oversize flannel print shirts, slouchy sweaters, floral dresses worn with combat boots—inspired by the music scene of the time and the rock ’n’ roll friends he was making, such as Kim Gordon. “This is what it’s about right now,” Jacobs recalls thinking at the time, “and it turns me on.”

The fashion-press reporters had a cow. Ridiculing any fool who’d spend 500 bucks to look like an out-of-work lumberjack, they called the collection “a mess” and “a bummer.” One went as far as to say, “Marc had a show and who cares?” Perry Ellis executives were mortified and fired Jacobs and Duffy in such public fashion that Duffy’s name, which had barely been known before, was suddenly all over the fashion press. “It was probably the lowest point in my life, where I was really doubting my abilities and judgment,” recalls Duffy. “I was like, How can something I feel so strongly about have made so many people unhappy? It was just, like, I so do not have an eye. I’m so lousy at this.” As for Jacobs, he recalls sitting with Duffy in their empty office above Charivari, the two of them distraught and panicked, staring into the fashion abyss. “We were really scared, and we didn’t know what would happen, if we’d ever work again,” says Jacobs.
There were, however, about three people who saw that Jacobs was onto something. “He picked up something that was in the air,” says Wintour, whose magazine was one of the few not to eviscerate the collection. “It was the end of the 80s, of the glitzy way of dressing—with tightness, lots of buttons and jewelry, and stuff going on. And Marc captured that.”

Armed only with praise from the ivory tower of fashion, Jacobs and Duffy got drunk one night in 1993 and decided to take the plunge. Spending every last dime from their Perry Ellis severance, they started their own company, Marc Jacobs International, which had a total of three employees, and opened their first store. It was on Mercer Street in SoHo, and, alas, it remained empty for about four years, until the arrival of Jacobs’s next white knight, Bernard Arnault. The force behind the success of some 50 luxury brands, including Dom Pérignon, Veuve Cliquot, Fendi, and Givenchy, Arnault zeroed in on Jacobs’s particular talent for capturing the Zeitgeist. In January 1997 he hired Jacobs to revive Louis Vuitton, while taking a one-third stake in Jacobs’s own trademark.

Known for its bags and luggage with the staid, interlocking, gold “LV” monogram, Louis Vuitton had long been a label associated with airports and Japanese tour groups. Jacobs started shaking things up right away, first by hiding the venerable logo under buttons and on the soles of shoes. He then enlisted the talent of 80s graffiti artist Stephen Sprouse, considered at the time to be something of a has-been, to replace the traditional “LV” monogram with “Louis Vuitton” written in chubby graffiti-style letters. The choice was controversial. “I don’t think anyone believed in it as much as they should have,” Jacobs says, “but they quickly learned it was a success.” The Sprouse bag was just a warm-up for the Murakami bag, a collaboration with artist Takashi Murakami, whose busty, cartoonish “Hiporon” sculpture Jacobs discovered in a Christie’s auction catalogue. With bright colors against a white background, kooky faces inside of flowers, and hardware that resembles a bird, the bags, which cost up to $4,500, have become whimsical sensations, the jet-set version of Hello Kitty. Everyone from Madonna to Jennifer Lopez to Jessica Simpson carries them, and thousands have their name on a list to own one.

Louis Vuitton is now responsible for 60 percent of the operating profits of LVMH. Jacobs has gone beyond the bags and wallets. “It seems as though he now has the brand’s DNA blended into his own great talent,” says Bernard Arnault. “His ready-to-wear lines are very ‘Vuitton,’ even though Vuitton lived without any clothing for more than a century.” Indeed, the spring 2004 Vuitton show in Paris—which began with a dramatic whoosh! as a canopy fell over the atrium, and throbbed with Cleopatras-onthe-prowl—had Emanuelle Alt of French Vogue giddily pronouncing, “C’était le Top!”

With backing from LVMH, Jacobs’s own line was able to thrive. One after another, Jacobs was coming up with items that became “important” in the world of fashion: like the knife-pleated skirt and the so-called mouse shoe, which Jacobs claims was chosen by Juergen Teller and Venetia Scott’s toddler, Lola, from a selection of samples. Jacobs was impressing fashion editors from all over with his master tailoring and obsession with detail. “You turn it inside out and upside down, and from every perspective it’s just beautifully done,” says Grace Coddington, *Vogue’*s creative director. His stores were opening in SoHo, San Francisco, and Tokyo. The Marc Jacobs—painted billboard, at the corner of Seventh and Greenwich Avenues in downtown Manhattan, was becoming a city landmark. Jacobs was picking up one Council of Fashion Designers award after another.

While all this was happening, Jacobs was nearly killing himself with substance abuse. “I experimented with just about everything,” he says of the beginning of his habit, back in the late 70s and early 80s. “There was, if this is possible, some kind of innocence to it, even if it was very hedonistic. But, as often happens, it became a way of life, and then it takes over.” To ease his guilt, he surrounded himself with other hard-partying fashionistas, who were just as irresponsible and self-indulgent as he.“‘We are fabulous,’” he says, recalling the group mentality of the time.“‘We won’t eat. We’ll just drink and have a good time. And then we’ll go to somebody’s house and carry that on. And either we will or won’t go to work the next day. And someone will be there to pick up the pieces . . . ’ I was a crazy person. I was working and partying, working and partying. I kept looking over my shoulder and thinking, Well, this one does it, and that one does it, so I can, too. Because all designers are like that, and we’re creative people, and that’s how artists are.” Nights turned into mornings without rest. Jacobs recalls walking his dog at dawn, the sun blinding and painful.

Duffy would make halfhearted attempts to get Jacobs clean. Jacobs might sometimes cooperate—but not for very long. Mainly, Duffy says, his role was as Jacobs’s cover. He systematically lied for him when he wouldn’t show up for fittings the day before a show, and when he skipped work at Vuitton for weeks at a time. “Everybody makes it seem like Marc was this horrible, irresponsible person and I was just there holding everything together, and it’s not the case,” says Duffy. “I was an enabler. . . . I turned my head and pretended he’d be O.K. I didn’t want to think that he was destroying himself. I didn’t want to think that he was so unhappy, and I didn’t want to think that we were so dysfunctional.”

People weren’t fooled for very long. Duffy started fielding calls from concerned friends in the fashion industry, such as Naomi Campbell. At one party, a prominent magazine editor took Duffy aside and told him that it was time to act—that Jacobs was risking not only his career but also, it was becoming clear, his life. “When it got to the point that I thought he was going to die is when I intervened,” says Duffy. Finally, about three and a half years ago, he dragged Jacobs to a rehab center in Arizona. “It was the worst flight of my life, because he had just gone through withdrawal,” recalls Duffy. Jacobs, though his body fought against it every step of the way, knew he had no choice. “I thought, If this is something I’m so passionate about,” he says, “how can I be so hell-bent on destroying it?” As helpful as Duffy and friends like Campbell were, they give the credit to Jacobs. “I went through the same thing myself,” says Campbell, “and I think when someone takes the time to take a look at themselves and say they want to fix things it’s a very brave thing to do, especially if they’ve been in the public eye.”

Jacobs re-discovered the fashion world, sober. Quickly, that fucked-up, fabulous whirlwind he had been enveloped in revealed itself to be shallow, even creepy. He settled in Paris for good, far from the headquarters of his dark, former life. (He currently lives in the Seventh Arrondissement with his boyfriend, Pierre Bailly, a very shy photographer.)

Now, three years later, anything too fashiony seems almost painful for Jacobs to experience. All week leading up to the spring 2004 Vuitton show, for example, he has been trying to ignore the familiar phone calls. “‘I must have a front-row seat,’” he says mockingly, holding his cigarette obnoxiously. “‘Don’t you know who I think I am?’” It doesn’t end when he goes to London to check out some art at the Frieze Fair. Dinner at the trendy new restaurant Sketch, a sprawling, white, pulsating room, upon whose walls are projected random words and images, and whose bathroom stalls are futuristic little pods, drives him close to misery. “This is my worst nightmare come true,” he says, “and look at the glasses: oval at the bottom and round at the top. Ridiculous.” Later, he clocks a total of seven minutes at the after-party for the evening’s hottest ticket, something called Fashion Rocks, at Victoria and Albert Hall, for which hostess Elizabeth Hurley wears 17 different gowns and Camilla Parker Bowles requires eight hairdressers. A publicist grabs him by the arm and says, “Come say hi to Elizabeth Hurley and Denis Leary!” to which Jacobs replies, “Why would I want to say hi to Elizabeth Hurley? I don’t even know Elizabeth Hurley.” Perhaps most revealing, he doesn’t seem all that concerned with his appearance. “Just seeing him the other day,” says Sofia Coppola, “with his neck brace on and glasses and a clip holding his hair back was pretty nerdy. But in an adorable way.”

These days, Jacobs is on an almost scary creative tear. Consider the fittings taking place at his Spring Street studio in Manhattan on the evening of September 15, roughly 20 hours before he is to show his spring 2004 collection. In evident pain, with his arm in a cast and neck in a brace, a Marlboro Light forever burning in his hand, he slowly circles each girl, pondering her from every angle, and from across the room and up close. “The georgette needs to be repaired,” he tells the seamstress. “But leave it uneven like this. I like how it looks all funky . . . Do we have that in an ankle strap? . . . Let’s trim these spaghetti straps . . . fix the piping on the arm.” It goes on like this until four A.M., by which time models are getting some rest in sleeping bags that have been laid out. “He wants everything to be perfect,” says Venetia Scott, who has to slog it out by his side. “From the length of the stitch to the color of the stitch, to the type of thread that’s used, to the ribbon that trims the inside of the sleeve, to the insole of the shoe. It can drive you crazy at times ’cause you want to push it forward and say, ‘Let’s move on to the next thing!’” Tonight, Jacobs looks very much the adult, one so obsessed with his work that being coked up would be out of the question. “I remember him one day,” says Duffy, “maybe six months after he was sober, and we were working and he said, ‘You know what? You don’t treat me like a two-year-old anymore.’ And I said, ‘You don’t act like a two-year-old anymore.’”

In a quieter way, however, Jacobs is still brimming with youthful energy and wonder. “The idea of discovering an alternative appetite—actually waking up in the morning, instead of still being up in the morning,” says Jacobs. “‘Oh my God, it’s Saturday morning, and I feel great. I can’t wait to get out of bed and take my dog to the park and play ball with him.’” His newest appetite has been for contemporary art. Lately, he has been reading every auction catalogue in sight, traveling to art fairs, and buying pieces for his Paris apartment. (Most recently it was a painting by California artist Ed Ruscha, who makes him swoon like a schoolkid.) “I’ve never seen him so happy with anything [as he is with contemporary art],” says his diamond-dealer friend John Reinhold, who was in Andy Warhol’s circle and who encouraged this new interest. Indeed, at the Paul McCarthy show at the Hauser & Wirth Gallery in London—an exhibition of projected moving images of masked naked bodies power-drilling into President Bush’s eyes, cartoonish fist-fucking, and random scatological activity—London’s smart set is awkwardly hobnobbing, not sure what its reaction is supposed to be, while Jacobs is grinning daffily from the rafters. “That was fun,” he says later to Reinhold. Reinhold laughs. “It’s so nice to see you smiling again.” Jacobs has integrated contemporary art into his business: the latest Marc Jacobs print advertisement for his perfume, Essence, is a portrait of Sofia Coppola by Elizabeth Peyton. Jacobs’s fall 2004 collection was partly inspired by John Currin’s painting Rachael in Fur.

But fashion is about falling in love over and over again—usually with someone new. And Jacobs, who has 16 collections a year and who can no longer take cover in the false sense of invincibility that some drugs provide, admits that he is a man riddled with neuroses. At Vuitton, for instance, the French laissez-faire attitude—maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, maybe now that I have my Gauloise—often drives him insane, mainly because he’s comfortable only around other obsessive-compulsives. (He has discovered that this helps: “You have to say, ‘I know this is impossible, but if you could get this to me by tomorrow, I mean, it would be a miracle. Because it’s the impossible mission.’”) On a deeper level, he says, “I get so insecure, and I start worrying so much about what other people will think, that I lose the plot.”

It’s true that Jacobs has sometimes been criticized for “referencing” a bit too literally. Recently, Oscar de la Renta accused him of copying a coat he had made in 1967. After Jacobs’s fall 2003 collection, the widow of André Courrèges complained to Vuitton executives that the collection was a complete rip-off of her husband’s designs. Jacobs replies to such criticism by quoting Coco Chanel—“He who insists on his own creativity has no memory”—but it seems to bother him more than he would like. He takes the negative reviews seriously, particularly those by *Women’s Wear Daily’*s Bridget Foley, and even learns from them. “He isn’t like some designers who are there just to congratulate themselves,” says Wintour. “He’s about the next age, the next step. He’s never satisfied.”

The dissatisfaction has paid off. His less expensive line, Marc by Marc, has given teenage girls a look to aspire to other than Paris Hilton. “I see all the young girls at my daughter’s school,” says Wintour. “Their dream is to own that Marc jacket or that Marc pair of pants or that Marc handbag. So he’s got the next generation wanting it as much as Sofia’s.” His trio of boutiques on Bleecker Street in the West Village has revamped the neighborhood, transforming it from a musty antiques enclave to a quainter SoHo. (The same thing is bound to happen to West Hollywood’s Melrose Place when he opens his first L.A. boutique this summer.) Further sign that he has arrived? Like Tom Ford who resigned from Gucci in October and whom he considers the pinnacle of success, Jacobs is starting to feel penned in by his owner; he has been nagging LVMH to pony up more investment to expand the Marc Jacobs line. (He is currently in talks to extend his contract for another 10 years.)

Now that he has turned 40, one has to wonder, What will happen when Marc Jacobs is no longer the cool kid? Like most people, he does not particularly enjoy contemplating the future. “I am so safe where I am right now,” he says, “and anywhere else I’m screwed.” Maybe he’s onto something. Then again, where he is right now is a step ahead, though he might not realize it. Back at Vuitton headquarters, the executives are informing him that, after the wild success of the Murakami bag, they want to make the bag a classic and splash it all over their ads and stores. Jacobs, naturally, has already moved on. “It’s ridiculous,” he tells them. “It’s so wrong for this campaign.” What about the commerciality?, someone wants to know. “Fuck the commerciality,” he responds. The outburst is rare for him, but the sentiment is not—and it may be key to his climb, which has seemed so effortless and, well, cool. “I think that I’m very respectful of what they’re about,” he says of the people paying the bills. “But I can’t be too respectful, because we’ll go nowhere and do nothing.”

If, as they say, Hollywood is a high school, then a new group of cool kids are coloring in their sneakers in the wardrobe closet behind the theater, and their queen bee is Sofia Coppola. There are the directors: her friend Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic), P. T. Anderson (Mag nolia, Punch-Drunk Love), her exhusband, Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation), her best friend, Zoe Cassavetes (daughter of filmmaker John, now working on her debut feature), and her big brother Roman (director of CQ, he shoots on Sofia’s second unit). And the actors: her cousin Jason Schwartzman (star of Rushmore, I ❤ Huckabees, and Sofia’s latest film, Marie Antoinette), who is writing a screenplay with Roman and Wes for Wes’s next movie, and Bill Murray (star of Rushmore, The Life Aquatic, and Sofia’s Lost in Translation), their cool social-studies teacher, who takes them on unconventional field trips and signs their recommendation letters to the major studios.

They have a lovely thing going on. Unlike the cool kids of 20 years ago—Rob Lowe, Charlie Sheen, Bret Easton Ellis, et al.— who were regularly obnoxious, hard-living, and in some cases hung out with hookers, the new cool kids live in a peaceful kingdom where imagination, youthful naïveté, and impeccable taste reign supreme. They’re not a Brat Pack; they’re a Play Group. Their art is not about sex, money, or violence. It’s about mood and whimsy: frogs fall out of the sky; a Brazilian guitarist in a sailor suit appears sporadically, singing David Bowie songs in Portuguese; unicorns materialize. Their personal lives have a similar gentleness. They’re about warm and eccentric families, working with friends, sojourns in Paris, the best new bands, 70s songs that no one has ever heard, the perfect shoe.

Sofia, at age 35, has it all—plus a Marc Jacobs handbag named after her, a child (her first) on the way, with Thomas Mars, the front man of the atmospheric French rock band Phoenix, and an airy, unruffled way that manages to disarm those who come in contact with her. It’s all completely effortless, of course. Jacobs, who has used Coppola as a muse for years, cringes at the notion that she would be conscious of the iconic stature she has reached. “What people say is ‘cool’—it’s like outsiders looking at something and thinking, Wow, they have all these hip friends and they do all these fabulous things and they dress a certain way,” he says. “But Sofia’s … she’s just very natural.” Spoken like a true member of the in-crowd. Coppola puts it another way: “There’s so much bad taste out there that if you’re just natural … ” She does the characteristic trail-off . “I don’t know.”

It might be tempting to dismiss Coppola as a ditz who has successfully parlayed her famous name, the right clothes, and the right friends into an overblown image, if it weren’t for the enormous, deserved success she has had as a director, whose three films seem to be extensions of herself: ethereal, stylish, child-like, yet powerful. Her first feature film, The Virgin Suicides (1999), a dreamy, sun-bleached re-invention of adolescence in the suburbs, proved that she could masterfully execute a mood (though some male viewers felt as if they were being forced by their girlfriend to flip through a fashion magazine). Lost in Translation (2003), starring Murray and Scarlett Johansson as two alienated travelers who connect in Tokyo through a filter of jet lag, was greeted as a revelation, and put to rest any suspicion that her filmmaker father or husband must have had something to do with her success. Exquisitely shot, quietly funny, it also had the kind of odd, true observations of an old soul. “Every girl goes through a photography phase,” Johansson’s character, Charlotte, tells Murray’s Bob. “Take dumb pictures of your feet.” The movie had just the right amount of emotion for the edgy filmgoer of 2003: a recognizable, fuzzy, melancholic feeling that was never taken to the limit—a trademark of the new cool filmmakers.

Lost in Translation grossed more than $44 million domestically, well beyond what anyone expected, and earned the Golden Globe for best picture and best screenplay, plus four Academy Award nominations, with an Oscar for her screenplay. But in Sofia’s world, nice reviews in the school newspaper are nothing to get worked up about. “The Oscar thing was exciting, but it’s not … you know. It was exciting, but it’s not like … I don’t know,” she says, her delicate hand slowly working a hot chocolate, her voice a mix of girlish California and blasé. Her movies, as she has said, are really just for her friends. As to whether she would be happy if they reached the world, she says, kindly enough, “I don’t really care.”

Presumably, the suits at Sony, who have invested $40 million in her Marie Antoinette, do. But Marie Antoinette is true to Coppola’s word: so idiosyncratic and willfully careless of the conventional thinking about the ill-fated queen that it has either entranced or enraged those who’ve seen it. (In a rare move for its “Arts” section, The New York Times, post the movie’s Cannes showing, ran two pieces side by side, one glowing, one that bashed her.) A quick history: Marie Antoinette left her homeland of Austria at age 14 to become Dauphine and then Queen of France. The French court was nonsensical and meddling—particularly on the subject of her sex life with King Louis XVI and their inability, for several years, to produce an heir. In order to escape the frustration, she threw herself into a life that was decadent and extravagant even by royal standards, and said shove it to anyone who suggested she had an image to uphold or a nation to improve through wise governance. (She was the one who allegedly said, “Let them eat cake.”) But her indifference to the world outside the royal gates proved her downfall. When France descended into poverty and revolution, she was the one the masses came to get for the guillotine—some believe rightfully so.

Coppola’s movie, based on a revisionist biography by Lady Antonia Fraser, is her version of that extravagant royal bubble—and it is much less a critique of the decadence than a madly cool celebration of it. Credits are done in postpunk pink lettering. Crazy parties and feastings on pastries and candy-colored shoes (designed by Manolo Blahnik) are set to music by the Strokes, the Cure, Bow Wow Wow, and Gang of Four, filmed using a jumpy, 60s pop sensibility. There is modern-day fashionista-speak: “I love your hair,” shouts her “It girl” friend la Duchesse de Polignac above the din at an over-the-top court rager. “What’s going on there?” But it all remains good, frothy fun. There are no orgies or truly revolting gluttonies. Just like the queen, Coppola pays little attention to what’s going on outside the court—the starving, tattered masses of Les Misérables are a distant rumor. In neglecting them she has unwittingly taken a political stance.

Comfortably situated as the kind of filmmaker who invents enchanted worlds that have no bearing on the universe beyond them—that is their beauty—Coppola was not prepared for what was to come. When the film opened last May in France and screened in Cannes, most people swooned (this was, after all, the Riviera). But others booed (this was, after all, France). At the press conference, the booing was the first subject any reporter asked about, and the headline COPPOLA’S FILM BOOED was beamed around the globe, even though there had been, in fact, a standing ovation too. Still, viewers and critics were determined to know what she was getting at. “I had people ask me, ‘Do you think she should have had her head cut off ?,’ ” Coppola reports, surprised, apparently, that anyone would inquire about her position after seeing the film. Defending some kind of political position is not something Coppola relishes, nor is she particularly good at it. “It’s not like I’m a royalist,” she says. It has yet to be seen how it will be greeted in the States when it opens next month. Perhaps American viewers will give her a grilling for biting off a topic too real and complicated for her to chew. Or perhaps they will be so swept up in the fabulous party that they just won’t think too much about the missing bit involving the guillotine.

Like the title character of Marie Antoinette, Coppola was a young girl in a royal court—the court of Francis, in which every small act of artistic creation was to be revered. Most little girls dress up their dolls. Sofia, using pictures torn from magazines, “would design their wardrobe,” says her father. He’s not being facetious. “All children’s art is beautiful,” he says, sounding a lot like he must have when he was a young father, making some of the most daring, exciting films ever: The Godfather, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now. Akira Kurosawa and Werner Herzog were regulars at the home—a big Victorian in Napa, overlooking a 256-acre vineyard, where the kids, Roman, Sofia, and Gian Carlo, in a bucolic idyll, all but stomped on grapes. The children sat at the grown-ups’ table, where conversation was usually about filmmaking and writing. “I remember being 11 or something,” says Sofia, “and [my father] talking about story structure. He made these notepads, breaking down the story, and he’d give them to us. What other guy would be talking to his 11-year-old about screenwriting?” Making films became a valid alternative means of expression to schoolwork. “I would make a little video short of George Washington instead of writing a paper.”

There was no separation of work time and family time—they were one and the same. When Francis went on set, he took the whole family, and the kids would attend whatever school happened to be nearby. In the Philippines, where he shot Apocalypse Now, beginning in 1976, he recalls, “they had the run of the sets. Sofi a would go into the wardrobe department, and they would make her little clothes for her dolls.” When he shot The Outsiders, Rumble Fish, The Cotton Club, and Peggy Sue Got Married, he cast Sofi a in small roles, not because he wanted to begin honing her career as an actress but because she was there. Quietly, she was soaking it all up. Her tastes in music and fashion developed beyond her years. Instead of Seventeen she read French Vogue and The Face.

The precocious, dark-haired girl bewitched Dad’s neat friends. Francis remembers the stint, during the making of The Cotton Club, when the family lived at Manhattan’s Sherry-Netherland hotel, on Fifth Avenue. “We’d be out somewhere, going to a party or something, and we’d come into the room and she’d be sitting on Andy Warhol’s lap, having some serious conversation with him at age 11.” On another occasion, he walked into Area, the hip nightclub of the early 80s, and found his daughter as he had never seen her. “As you walked down the corridor there, there were these windows on the sides that had art displays. As we walked up, there she was. This art display. How she got there and everything, I’m not exactly sure.” A few years later, she was photographed by Steven Meisel for Vogue. The era became the inspiration for the Coppola segment of the 1989 movie New York Stories, called “Life Without Zoe.” Sofia contributed on the screenplay (i.e., she told her dad what life was like from her point of view) and, naturally, on wardrobe.

But eventually that rarefied, fabulous bubble was disturbed by the real world—her brother Gian Carlo, an adventurous sort who’d taken her to Rome and Paris as a kid, died, at age 22, in a boating accident, and then came the expectations of growing older. In her later teenage years, she indulged in a variety of pursuits that struck some—including herself—as disturbingly close to those of an aimless rich girl. She worked for a time in Karl Lagerfeld’s studio. She took pictures for magazines such as Paris Vogue and Interview. She went to art school, where she studied painting. She let her father persuade her to take on the role of Al Pacino’s daughter in Godfather III, a movie that was savaged by critics—mainly because of her. “I remember there was a cover of a magazine, like, ‘She Ruined Her Father’s Movie.’ And you’re like, you know, ‘Great.’ ” She started a fashion line, called Milk Fed, with a friend. She and Zoe Cassavetes got their own cable talk show, an inane program called Hi-Octane, in which they’d race around town and hang out with cool friends, like her cousin Nicolas Cage. “I wasn’t really great at any of those things, so it was kind of frustrating,” says Sofia, “because I liked all those things, but didn’t have the focus.” She entered her first period of self-doubt.

“She said, ‘Oh, Dad, am I just a dilettante?’ ” Francis recalls. “I thought just the opposite was happening now, and I said to her, No, you don’t have to specialize—do everything that you love and then, at some time, the future will come together for you in some form.”

His instinct was correct. After making a short film, 1998’s Lick the Star, she embarked on something no rational aspiring filmmaker would take on: adapting a book—Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides—that had already been optioned for a movie and was in the works elsewhere. But the visual touchstones—the photography of William Eggleston, the suburban portraits of Bill Owens, the fuzzy backlighting and pastoral settings of 70s Playboy photography— were already in her head and part of her pre-production collage, something that has become a staple of her moviemaking process. Sofia knew she had something unique and chanced it. When the other version fell through, the producers took on hers.

Sofia—quiet, non-aggressive, a bit hazy— fits the image of Hollywood director about as well as Rush Limbaugh does that of Trappist monk. Even her father, who’d had so much faith in her talents, was a bit nervous about her pulling it off . “She’s a slip of a girl,” he says. “She’s feminine and not very big. I was curious if her personality would be big enough to control all the disparate things that you’re doing [as a director].” He told her that she should say “Action” more from the gut, and that she should always sit in the same spot, to the side of the camera, as opposed to over by the video monitor, which is 50 feet away from the actors. “I wanted everyone on the crew to know who was directing,” says Francis. Sofia did what any strong woman would do in the situation: told him, Thanks, Dad, you can go now.

Sofia, it was clear, had her own way of doing things. According to those who have worked with her, she is not one to put on a director’s cap. Rather, her direction is just an extension of her personality. “She doesn’t give you a ton of notes. It’s kind of a feeling-out process,” says Kirsten Dunst, star of both The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette. “She lets whatever comes out of it naturally breathe. [On The Virgin Suicides] we rehearsed a little bit, but the rehearsal was more about making sandwiches together, and me and the girls playing games.” Jason Schwartzman, who plays King Louis XVI in Marie Antoinette, describes her as a kind of horse whisperer for actors. “Her idea of what she wants is so well thought out and just so well worded that even the sentence sounds beautiful,” he says. “She doesn’t have to say anything else. She just has to say one sentence and you totally get it… I’ve never been on a set like that, where you go there and it’s as if a spell has been cast. It’s not relaxed like lazy. It’s very focused and efficient. But it’s like a submarine, when a submarine goes into stealth mode.”

No amount of moviemaking chaos can shake her from her Zen attitude, say her friends and colleagues, not even the madness of her latest film, which required hundreds of extras, enormous, complicated costumes, mountains of pastries, and working in Versailles. “I never saw her freak out once,” says Schwartzman. “I never heard, ‘We got to get this shot now!’ Or ‘We’ve got to do that!’ The words ‘we’ve got to,’ I never heard them… To me, we were always in the middle of chaos. Oh, there goes the guy with a ladder! Oh, there goes a guy with five horses! And then you’d see Sofia stand there and she’s totally calm and she’s like this lighthouse.” All her friends who visited the set—Jacobs, Cassavetes, screenwriter and producer Mitch Glazer—are in awe of her cool. “She’s in Versailles, in Louis’s private chapel, which is just this vast gold thing, one of the most ornate, over-the-top places I’ve been in my life,” recalls Glazer. “There are thousands of people, this huge cast and crew, and women in gowns—the whole look is going on—and I’m watching her direct, and I hear her go, ‘Action,’ ” he says, doing a calm, birdlike voice. “And the thing started and then”—birdie again—“ ‘Cut.’ … And that’s a really pressured situation—burning money by the second.”

Sofia didn’t need her father to tell her how to do it, but there is one lesson he imparted that she has lived by: Never compromise on your personal vision. That has meant many things to Sofia over the years—first and foremost that the Syd Field school of screenwriting was irrelevant. Inspired by European films, especially those of Antonioni and Fellini, in which, as she once put it, “people are just wandering around,” Sofia writes her scripts sparingly. Lost in Translation was just 88 pages, compared with the 120-page average. Not only is traditional narrative unnecessary, it’s kind of lame. Consider The Virgin Suicides, a story in which five young sisters are driven to take their own lives. The audience never knows why they kill themselves and neither does Sofia. As she puts it, “I’m not so interested in the whys.” It’s no surprise that she has immense appeal among her group of stylish filmmakers, such as Wes Anderson, and that what they remember are not emotional turning points but images. “I loved that kid [in The Virgin Suicides] who jumps off the roof to prove his love to this older girl, and he’s got his sunglasses,” says Anderson, who is impressed by very few movies these days. “I like the scene where they’re playing the records back and forth on the telephone. And the way Josh Hartnett walks, just like the supercool teenager.” For Sofia, the film was originally about images. Only in retrospect did she realize she had been thinking about losing her brother Gian Carlo. “I feel like every movie [I write] has something I’m trying to figure out,” she says, “but I never really know until afterwards.”

Following The Virgin Suicides, Sofia began writing Marie Antoinette, feeding a longheld interest in the extravagant ways of the court of Versailles—the powdered wigs, the fake beauty marks. But another story kept nagging at her—and she knew it involved Bill Murray in a kimono. Glazer, who’d been in love with Lost in Translation since it was a 10-page treatment with a cover page featuring Kate Moss from behind, knew this was a role for his old friend Murray, too, but it wasn’t until several drafts in that he and Sofia talked about it. “I’d known him 20 years, and I’d never sent him anything of mine,” recalls Glazer. “But I called him and said, ‘This is really weird and I’ve never done anything like this, but this is going to change your life.’” For eight months, Sofia left Murray messages on his 800 number, and Glazer nagged him. Murray wouldn’t say no and he wouldn’t say yes. “He was doing the same thing he usually does,” says Glazer. “‘Well, O.K., but did you see the game between the so-and-so and so-and-so?’”

Waiting for Bill became so surreal that Sofia’s husband, Spike Jonze, made a documentary about it, featuring a scene on a plane, for example, in which Francis would turn to his daughter and say, “Have you heard from Bill?” and she’d say, “Well, Mitch is supposed to call him.” After almost a year, the deal was clinched. One night, following the funeral of a mutual friend, Glazer, his wife, actress Kelly Lynch, and Murray went to have drinks at the New York restaurant Il Cantinori. After talking about their late friend, Glazer brought up the topic of Lost in Translation once again—asked Murray if he’d even read the thing yet—and told Murray that Sofia was in town. “Call her,” Murray replied. Glazer ran downstairs to the pay phone. She was on her way to a play. “Just get here,” Glazer told her.

“My memory of it was of one of those cartoon cuts,” says Glazer. “By the time I got upstairs, I have this image of her skidding into the restaurant, going sideways she was trying to get in so fast. She ran into the restaurant and sat down and had such a crush on him, which was palpable, which he just loved. It was as the character and as Bill. Her eyes were just like, ‘Oh my God.’ It was very feminine and great, and he just basked in it.” The night went on. The four had dessert at an Austrian restaurant in Tribeca, where Murray and Sofia feverishly traded ideas about the script. Murray said that when he travels he works out, and suggested a scene with an out-of-control treadmill. Sofia ate it up. As they left the restaurant, she mentioned to Murray that she’d never driven in the city. He tossed her his car keys. Glazer and Lynch were walking behind, admiring the setup. Then, Glazer recalls, “she turned and did this look—the open-mouth ‘Oh my God’ look.”

But the film turned out to be about much more than Murray’s kimono. Sofia was embedded everywhere in the film. On the surface level, Johansson, whose personal style is sexy and glamorous, went all-out Sofia, wearing preppy, almost wallflowery outfits that managed to look edgy. Her expressions echoed those of Sofia. Most profoundly, the character of Charlotte—the young, privileged girl having a breakdown about her purpose in life—was taken from Sofia’s own experiences. “I was just kind of coming out of that, and I was looking at that period of ‘What do I do with my life?’ ” recalls Sofia. Like Charlotte, Sofia had meaningful relationships with older men (she won’t name names) that she says remained chaste. Charlotte’s judgmental aspect, particularly toward her scrappy, flighty photographer husband—based in part, she says, on Spike Jonze—was also a reflection of what Sofia was wrestling with at the time. “I was just married and in a situation where I was questioning it all and probably kind of snotty.” (As for the ditzy actress who chases the photographer, she was allegedly based on Cameron Diaz, whom Jonze was rumored to have had a thing for during the filming of Being John Malkovich, but Sofia hedges on that detail. “It’s really a combination of a lot of people. There’s a lot of them—that clichéd blonde actress—so it wasn’t meant as a jab,” she says, adding, “but she could fall into that.”)

Sofia can blame herself now, but like most powerful, cool kids, she was quietly able to inflict some dam age. After the film came out, both Diaz and Jonze, whom Sofia was divorcing, seemed a little less hip. “It was sort of my young relationship,” she now says of their divorce after eight years together. “It wasn’t really the right life for me to be with him, and what he wanted in his life. I wasn’t fully formed.” When asked if he had any impact on her filmmaking, she responds with an emphatic “No … I made The Virgin Suicides before his first movie.” Just months after winning her Oscar for Lost in Translation, she started dating bad-boy coolio director Quentin Tarantino. But that is already two years ago, back when Tarantino didn’t seem quite as dated as he does now. “I was out of my mind for a minute,” Sofia now says of her affair with Tarantino. Not surprisingly, he did almost all the talking.

In many ways, Marie Antoinette represents the third piece in a trilogy about Sofia herself. If The Virgin Suicides was a beautifully executed collection of dreamy, teenage girl imagery, Lost in Translation a more personal story about alienation and coming of age, then Marie Antoinette is her celebration of her flighty, girlie side. One of her key inspirations was John Schlesinger’s Darling (1965), the ultimate doomed–“It girl” movie, starring Julie Christie, that style-conscious girls universally worship. Helmut Newton, meanwhile, provided the decadent images of women partying, running down a grand staircase in what looks like a palace. When writing the scenes involving gossip sessions, fantastically hip dinner parties, or snarky parlor games, she drew from her own life. “I just tried to imagine what you’d really talk about … what I would do in that situation … about the parties you’ve been to.” The wardrobe doesn’t have the buttonedup perfection viewers are used to in period pieces—it’s a little more rumpled and irreverent. The accents are “standard,” she says, i.e., how she and her friends might talk. She drew the line only at her characters’ sounding too Californian and gum-chewing. Though she had “tons of different things” on Marie Antoinette and the French Revolution, she chose to delve into Fraser’s book almost exclusively, because, as Sofia explains, “she’s not a stuff y or uptight historian.”

When Sofia talks about the character of Marie Antoinette, it’s clear that she sees something of a reflection of herself. “In the beginning, she didn’t like schoolwork. She was always charming her tutors, getting out of doing school. You know, there are things that are relatable… She’s known for being stupid, [but] then you read the letters and she’s sarcastic.” And, inversely, those close to Sofia describe a young woman who sounds quite a bit like Marie Antoinette— her better side, at least. “She likes to dish,” says Glazer. “She’s probably more fun than people assume. She’s not as mysterious and unknowable and regal.” When she and Wes Anderson get together, they don’t talk about filmmaking; she gives him girl advice. While her writing usually comes out of a more melancholic, troubled side, Sofia readily admits, “I have a whole other side that’s, you know, light and whatever … shallow.”

The difference between her and Marie Antoinette is that, while Marie Antoinette ignored the world, Sofia has made her way into it—as a female director fighting to come out of the shadow of her father, something that dogged her again when Marie Antoinette was screened. “They asked something in Cannes like ‘Did your dad help you?’ and I was like,
‘Give me a break,’ ” says Sofia. “Or ‘It must be easy. If you have a problem, you just turn to your dad.’ … I think there is that thing where you have to work harder to prove that you’re a hard worker and not some spoiled girl.” Roman, her brother and chief confidant in all matters personal and creative, takes particular umbrage at this characterization of his little sister. “There’s a misconception of a kind of privilege, particularly for the press of Marie Antoinette. They said, ‘Oh, well, it’s a girl living a life of luxurious privilege, and that must be a reflection of you.’ ” Marie Antoinette never had to get Bill Murray to commit to a start date.

Still, there are those two Times pieces, one gushing, the other savage. For those who love what Sofia does, Marie Antoinette is deliciously Sofia—because the director fully understands the emotional landscape of her subject and doesn’t compromise her vision of exploring only that. “I love that you really are experiencing Marie Antoinette’s feelings with her and through [Dunst’s] acting and not through hokey screenwriting scenes that people tend to expect in movies,” says Francis, the man who taught her to remain true to herself. “You’re aware moment to moment of everything she is feeling… It has Sofia’s personality throughout, which is what I hope as filmmakers my kids would do. In the wine business, we call it terroir, when you know it comes from the land.”

As for the other potential reaction, if Sofia is nervous about it, it’s not showing. For one thing, she’s focused on her newest project—having a baby. The idea, for now, is to divide her time between New York and Paris, where Mars lives; there are no plans to get married. For another, she claims that she’d rather make something controversial than something that got a mediocre response. Besides, anyone calling for her head, well, chances are Sofi a’s not making movies for you anyway.

Cuing up the CD player in his concrete Bel Air compound, Tony Kaye, known f or directing American History X but better known for making an absurd spectacle of himself while doing it, presents his latest project. It’s five minutes of ambient music of his own creation accompanying answering-machine messages, some painfully intimate, left for Kaye by the great Marlon Brando, Kaye’s hero and one time friend.

“Tony, this is your new friend, Marlon,” Brando says in formidable tones, bringing to mind the troubled heroes of The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris. “Oh, yoohoo, To-ny,” says the next one, a little more playful. “I have symptoms of a cold.” Brando goes on to describe his bowel movements and mention bran muffins. Then he reveals that “women depressed me today, particularly the mother of my children.” Kaye thinks this dance track could be major. “It’s going to the Buddha Bar now,” he says in an agitated Cockney, “so this could be a huge cult thing in Paris.” The would-be cult hit is among the ruins of Kaye’s friendship with a man who represented everything Kaye wanted to be. Instead of directing Brando in another masterpiece to add to the archives alongside Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, Kaye is turning the detritus of their relationship into the latest chapter of his Dada-esque magnum opus, one not necessarily destined to find a large audience: the legend of Tony Kaye, master of self-promotion and self-destruction.

Kaye, 50, is tall and thin, with a completely shaved head, large adorned ears, a postage-stamp beard, gothic bone structure, and intense, almost possessed eyes. He has Hebrew words tattooed randomly over his body. The overall look is a modern take on Savonarola, the 15th-century monk who was into self-flagellation and gripped by visions of apocalypse. Parked outside Kaye’s studio, a 15,000-squarefoot warehouse in West Los Angeles, is his black town car, outfitted with a vanity license plate that reads JEWISH and a driver with a black, 12-inch beard. Inside his studio are madman art extravaganzas hanging chockablock: giant photographs of dogs and lizards and fat girls showering, penises penetrating fish heads and rats burrowing into vaginas (which he staged with porn stars), and large scribblings pronouncing nonsensical slogans such as IF I FALL ON THE TABLE I’LL CHOOSE HOW I FEEL. Kaye digs at a tiny blemish on his arm that he’s sure is something horrible and points out which pieces he claims to be ashamed of, such as the pornographic ones. He is, he explains, “really paranoid and insecure.” The next moment, he puts forth with grand obscurity that what we’re looking at is a 17-year diary of his personal artistic life, something called the “Epicomedy . . . which is one word, and with one c.”

Kaye is obsessed with the idea of the “crazy genius.” Sometimes he’ll list his heroes unprompted, jabbering out their names in a crazy-genius sort of way. “I think, there’s, you know, there’s Marlon Brando, there’s Bob Dylan, you know what I mean? . . . There’s certain people that really . . . there’s certain performing artists that really . . . Elvis obviously is . . . I forgot him, but, you know, maybe not Elvis as much, I don’t think, but anyway, for me, but, I don’t know . . . yeah.” At other times he’ll state his credo with simple lucidity: “My heroes are people like von Stroheim, Orson Welles, Francis Ford Coppola—those kinds of crazy artists. I had read about them from my humble background, my humble London background, and I thought, That’s the way to do it. . . . You have to be a lunatic.” aye grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household in Stamford neighborhood in North London, and later in the suburb of Potters Bar. He spent the late 60s and early 70s at Saint Albans School of Art in Hertfordshire and at a design school in Kent, and shortly thereafter began his career as a “lunatic.” At the age of about 30, he made an inflatable E.T. doll his permanent companion. “I’d go out to dinner with the E.T. doll. I’d sit on a train with the E.T. doll. And everywhere I went, people would look at me,” recalls Kaye. “It was incredible. So I couldn’t ever leave the house without the bloody thing, you know what I mean? Because my whole world would’ve come to an end.”

Then Kaye began making what he christened “hype art,” which he explains as “an investigation into why certain pieces of art are worth certain amounts.” His friend Damien Hirst, darling of the young London art scene, whose world Kaye wanted to penetrate, recalls the heyday of Kaye’s movement, in the early 90s. “I remember he did a documentary where he said he was going to take a shit in a gallery,” says Hirst, “and I was crossing my fingers, saying, ‘Come on, Tony, you’ve got to do it, you’ve got to do it,’ and then he didn’t. You wished he’d never said anything, or if he said it he would have done it.” Kaye’s most noted work was Roger, wherein he retained a homeless man to wander the halls of international museums including the Tate, the British Museum, and San Francisco MoMA. The idea was not necessarily to raise consciousness about the problem of homelessness; it was to get Kaye’s name in the papers. “They always got a lot of media attention,” says Kaye, “and that was really what I was trying to do.”

But when others were proclaimed the geniuses—even though Kaye was clearly crazier—Kaye began his pattern of creative acting out. During the 1995 opening of Hirst’s show of medical equipment at London’s vaunted White Cube gallery, Kaye tried to steal some of the glory from his friend by hiring ambulances to drive around and around the gallery and blast their sirens in a project called Empty Vessels Make the Most Noise. Hirst was goodhumored about it; his dedication to Kaye in his 1997 book reads, “To Tony Kaye for sharing his world (with me) when he just wanted to steal mine.”

Throughout this period, Kaye was also doing something commercially viable: making advertisements. After having served as an art director at a London advertising agency, he directed his first commercial, for Olivetti typewriters, in the early 1980s. By the 90s he was working for such high profile clients as Guinness and Volvo, and making public-service announcements. His work was high-concept, visually daring, provocative, and memorable, and he eventually earned a reputation as one of the most remarkable craftsmen in the business. When the Florida Department of Health contracted Crispin Porter & Bogusky to warn of the link between chewing tobacco and cancer, the agency gave the job to Kaye. With his usual flair, he showed a man slathering his outstretched tongue with barbecue sauce, and then a vicious junkyard dog appearing to tear the thing off. Last year for the Super Bowl broadcast, Kaye filmed a powerful P.S.A., sponsored by the White House, arguing that drug users help fund terrorism.

Even when making millions selling sneakers, Kaye kept up his mystique as the brilliant madman. When the producers of Kaye’s Bacardi commercial decided they needed to change the ending and get a new director, Kaye reportedly flew the talent to a secret location so that they wouldn’t be able to participate. Then he parked a 10 -piece rap band on a flatbed outside the headquarters of the McCann-Erickson advertising agency and started screaming slogans into the mike, trying to foment an Al Sharpton–style political protest over the final seconds of a rum ad.

The notion of being a man who does commercials makes him cringe. “To my misfortune,” he says, “I’ve gotten quite good at them.” The millions he has made on them he has put into his pet projects, such as Lake of Fire, a sober and probing three hour documentary, 10 years in the making, about abortion, which contains the kind of graphic, chilling imagery that Kaye is famous for, such as close-ups of aborted fetuses; and Lobby Lobster, which was first about a depressed poet and is now about a psychotic comedian.

By 1998 his commercial reel was strong enough to earn him the job of directing a $10 million Hollywood movie, American History X, about young American neoNazis, for New Line. The concept was daring and socially conscious to a degree— right up his alley—and his plans were huge. “I was going to make Citizen Kane my first time out,” says Kaye. He immediately got to work proving that the enormity of his vision demanded the smashing of all conventions. At a breakfast meeting at the Beverly Wilshire with his agent and publicists, Kaye ordered a 30-egg omelette and exactly 2.7 ounces of dried oats, and insisted on weighing the oats in the kitchen when he suspected he had been given the incorrect amount. He held cattle calls, and made stars such as Ed Norton and Elliott Gould jump through hoops. “I had to read f or the part over and over and over and over again,” recalls Gould, a veteran of some 70 films, “until the producer, John Morrissey, said, ‘I think that’s enough. Decide whether you want this person or not.’” Finally, after endless debates on the casting— Kaye wanted many unknowns—he started shooting . . . and shooting . . . and shooting, a million feet in all, four times the amount usually shot f or a feature film. Every detail required that Kaye make a scene—often physical. Once, when Morrissey made a suggestion Kaye liked, Kaye dropped to the ground and started kissing his feet. On another occasion, though, when Kaye decided that the lettering on the crew’s jackets was “passé,” he went at Morrissey with his fists.

But the results of his obsessiveness were impressive. The actors blossomed under Kaye’s method of uninterrupted, marathon shooting. Morrissey, who remains steadfast in his belief that Kaye has the talent to be the next Fellini, felt that Kaye’s finished edit demonstrated his unique strength—a “commitment to psychological truth.” Kaye’s edit of the film pleased New Line executives Michael De Luca and Bob Shaye too, and for a moment everything seemed to be going smoothly. Then Kaye allowed the film’s star, Ed Norton, into the editing room to take a pass at the picture. Norton made some tiny changes, which mostly involved putting in more acting. De Luca and Shaye decided to go with Norton’s cut over Kaye’s, perhaps as an easy way to please the rising star.

Kaye “overreacted monstrously,” recalls Morrissey, “decided that, oh no, now enormous changes have to be made in the film. Throw out half the movie, create a new character, go back to filming, take another year to work on it—stuff that he knew was a cartoonish reaction.” New Line gave Kaye eight more weeks to work on his version, but by now Kaye was too devoted to his new project—“crazy genius takes on Hollywood studio”—to deliver an actual art product. Kaye brought along a rabbi, a Catholic priest, and a Buddhist monk to a New Line meeting in which he begged for more time. He spent $100,000 of his own money, taking out 38 ads in The Hollywood Reporter and Variety directed at the New Line top brass and all the film’s actors. One announced, TONY KAYE IS THE GREATEST BRITISH DIRECTOR SINCE ALFRED HITCHCOCK. Another one said, TO EDWARD NORTON, STOP LOOKING INTO THE LAKE AND LISTEN TO THE WIND. He lobbied film festivals not to show the movie. And he filed a $275 million suit against New Line over its refusal to let him take his name off the film and replace it with “Humpty Dumpty.” The stress of his martyrdom was too much to bear. He suddenly found himself unable to use the telephone and unable to eat in restaurants.

“I think he was scared shitless,” says Marty Bauer, Kaye’s agent at the time, whom Kaye unloaded when Bauer refused to get on the maniac bandwagon. “I think he was in a total state of panic.” Morrissey, too, felt that the root of it all was Kaye’s insecurity. “He’s such an incredibly selfloathing person and compensates for this with such a powerful self-promoting technique.” And these were his allies; the rest of Hollywood was not as understanding. An executive memo circulated around town saying that Kaye was “mad, bad, and dangerous to employ.” He was in director jail. In the midst of the drama, Kaye reached out to the one person who was nuts enough to understand him, genius enough to legitimize his talent, and superstar enough to get him another movie.

Marlon Brando is one of the greatest actors of all time. He is also very strange. He has been known to drive down Hollywood Boulevard with a prop arrow through his head. In the middle of the night he has instructed McDonald’s deliverymen to throw burgers over the wall of his compound. He sometimes shows up at friends’ houses in his briefs. Even to those who know him well, his actions can be inexplicable. Once, in the early 70s, singer turned actress Michelle Phillips—his Mulholland Drive neighbor who was dating his best friend, French actor Christian Marquand—was playing piano in Brando’s house, dressed to the nines in Missoni. Brando came up behind her and took a swing at her, knocking her onto the floor. “He just looked at me and said, ‘You’re lucky that’s all you got,’” recalls Phillips. In a five A.M. telephone “apology,” he told her that he had believed her to be one of the Manson girls. “That’s the kind of insanity he carries around with him,” says Phillips.

He is also famously impossible on sets. In 1961, during the filming of Mutiny on the Bounty, Brando almost bankrupted MGM by repeatedly storming off the set, refusing to learn his lines, and splitting some 50 pairs of pants. On his most recent film, The Score, Brando, for a critical scene in the film, refused to be directed by Frank Oz, whom he called “Miss Piggy,” in a reference to Oz’s being the voice of the famous Muppet, and insisted that he’d listen only to co-star Robert De Niro. He also requested that he be given his lines through an earpiece.

The key difference in Hollywood’s eyes between Kaye’s antics and Brando’s is the genuine-genius quotient. Even “Miss Piggy” believes that Brando’s stature excuses him. “He has paid his dues and he is also a genius,” says Oz. “He came from a time when he was working with demigods. He was working on the poetry of Tennessee Williams. He was working with extraordinary directors like Elia Kazan. He was working on large themes with the movies he’d done, from On the Waterfront to Streetcar.” To the handful of people that Brando keeps close to him, often speaking to them daily, whatever erratic behavior he may display is transcended by his heroism. “They always like to knock you behind your back. You’re crazy, you’re this,” says his close friend Helena Kallianiotes, an impassioned, throaty-voiced Greek actress who lived in Brando’s compound for years, tending to its every need. “They can call Marlon whatever they want, but he’s the most gentle, courageous, and sensitive man I’ve ever met. . . . He’s like Medusa. You cut one head off, another one grows, cut one head off, another one grows. You can’t destroy him.”

Kaye didn’t know Marlon Brando personally, but when he came to Hollywood in the early 90s, he put Brando on “the top of my list.” In the universe of crazy geniuses, after all, Brando was the gold standard. Kaye knew random Brando trivia that Brando himself didn’t know— such as the story that the Beatles were said to have taken their name from that of a motorcycle crew in The Wild One. Kaye also knew that Brando was big on pranks (crank E-mailing; responding to faxes only if addressed to his dog, Doctor Tim). Kaye sent Brando a personal message via—what else?— Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. MARLON BRANDO, HAVE YOU READ ONE ARM BY TENNESSEE WILLIAMS? it read, referring to a Williams short story about a one-armed prostitute which Kaye had recently optioned and sent to Brando. “I knew that would appeal to him,” says Kaye. “Oh, I most certainly knew that.”

“Do you know how I make a friend?” Brando told Truman Capote in 1957. “I go about it very gently, I circle around and around. I circle. Then, gradually, I draw nearer. Then I reach out and touch them— ah so gently. Then I draw back. Wait a while. Make them wonder. At just the right moment, I move in again. . . . Before they realize it, they’re all entangled, involved. I have them. And suddenly, sometimes, I’m all they have. A lot of them, you see, are people who don’t fit anywhere. They’re not accepted—they’ve been hurt, crippled one way or another.” For Brando, a man with plenty of time to kill, Kaye, this gifted 50- year-old child, was a project he could really sink his teeth into. Kaye fit the pattern of the sort of companion Brando had always been attracted to: damaged outcasts, such as nebbishy character actor Wally Cox, who played Mister Peepers and was the voice of Underdog, and whom Brando described as having “the mentality of an ax murderer,” and, more recently, Michael Jackson. Receiving an invitation in the fall of 1998, Kaye arrived at Brando’s house— which was once owned by Howard Hughes— and was led into the living room, where the actor was waiting near his large Buddha statue. Brando turned to him and said, “I hear that you’re as crazy as I am.”

Kaye began showing up at Brando’s house on a weekly basis. After discussing One Arm (a project that never got off the ground), Kaye asked Brando if he would participate in the video diary of the disaster he was embroiled in over American History X. Brando was game, and so the two sat together for hours, each holding a camcorder in the other’s face. But Kaye, perhaps to his disappointment, found that Brando’s aim was to make Kaye act less insane, so that his talent could shine through. As the tapes reveal, Brando quickly established a father son dynamic, in which he taunts, teases, and calmly tries to blow the lid off Kaye’s pretensions. Wearing a white track jacket, slouched back into the sofa, with one bloated bare foot millimeters away from a bowl of finger food resting on a coffee table, Brando wants to know what’s the deal with all of Kaye’s earrings.

“Well, I had one done many, many years ago,” says Kaye, perched on the edge of the opposite sofa, like a nervous sixth-grader in front of the school principal, “26 or 27 years ago, and I wore an earring in that hole for a few years and then I stopped.”

“You mean you took it out,” says Brando, dead serious.

“I took it out.”

“Why did you have it put in in the first place?” Brando asks.

“In the very first place?” asks Kaye.

“In the very exactly first place.”

“Because I thought I would appear more interesting to people,” Kaye replies.

“Do you think you’re four times more interesting now?”

In another scene, Brando receives a call on speakerphone from Scott Lambert, who was the agent of American History X star Ed Furlong. Brando seizes the opportunity to try to get Kaye to practice being like the rest of the humans. “Would you please say a word, Tony,” Brando instructs him before saying good-bye.

“W . . . w . . . w . . . what do you wantme to say?” asks Kaye, a bit panicked, his occasional stutter kicking in.

“I want you to say, ‘How do you do, Scott?’”

“Hi, Tony,” Lambert says gently.

“How do you do, Scott?” Kaye manages.

Kaye was getting the message from the master that the work—and the protocol—was important, not the antics. Brando tries to convince Kaye that having “Humpty Dumpty” as the credited director of American History X was ludicrous. “I pleaded with you not to make a spectacle of the events surrounding your taking your name off this picture and putting the name Humpty Dumpty in place of it,” Brando says with almost lawyerly calm. “It really didn’t serve any interest. . . . You had surrendered to something that was less than fully mature and worthy of your intelligence and your intuition, and I remind you that you had signed a piece of paper, as we all do, in this life, requiring certain circumstances, under certain circumstances, to produce certain results, and you seemed to make light of that, or considered that unimportant, and that was what I asked you to do. . . . Don’t you think, sometimes, Tony, that discretion is the better part of valor?” Kaye dropped the lawsuit against New Line.

The two men drew close. According to Kaye, Brando opened up to Kaye about his pain over his daughter Cheyenne, who’d committed suicide five years after her brother, Christian Brando, had been sentenced for the murder of her boyfriend, Dag Drollet. Brando even wept in front of Kaye. He also reached out to help his new friend financially, as Kaye was in the hole after having spent at least a million dollars on American History X. With money problems of his own, Brando had a plan that could help bail them both out. He decided to teach a free acting class to the public entitled “Lying for a Living.” Kaye would film it, and Brando would sell the tapes on his personal (now defunct) Web site, giving Kaye a commission. “He told me I was going to make millions and millions of dollars,” says Kaye. “In fact, he would spend hours with a pocket calculator, telling me how much money I was going to make.”

It seemed like an opportunity for Kaye to make right, and possibly take his first step out of Hollywood jail. Not only had the disgraced director been given a public nod of approval by Marlon Brando, he was getting to direct a Marlon Brando project. It wasn’t a feature film, but it was something—at the very least, an infomercial that would be hard to forget. Furthermore, cool friends of Brando’s were in attendance— Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jon Voight, and Michael Jackson—to learn from and show their respect for the master. But Tony Kaye could not resist turning Brando’s lessons into the Tony Kaye show. To demonstrate how to transform into a character, Brando was planning on teaching the class in semi-drag. So Kaye decided to come in the first day dressed as Osama bin Laden. “I was getting into the mind-set of what an actor would do, and an actor is, you know, I mean, I’m a needy person, I need a lot of attention, but an actor is really a very needy person and needs a lot of attention,” explains Kaye. “And so therefore I thought, I’ll get more attention if I dress up like Osama bin Laden.” On another occasion, he puts it more simply: “I was trying to outdo him.” It was November 2001, less than two months after the terror attacks, and the bin Laden outfit wasn’t exactly a hit, especially with Jon Voight. “Wouldn’t any sane person be upset at that time?” asks Voight, who nearly walked out over Kaye’s stunt. “I thought it was way out of line. . . . It was no joke.” The next morning, Brando, according to Kaye, phoned him and said, “Look, Tony, this is my show, this is not yours. And what are you going to wear today?”

Temporarily chastened, Kaye showed up for the next class in a suit and tie, and Brando took back the limelight. Brando meandered, from vaguely recalled professional anecdotes to bits and pieces from the Adler method, which he had been taught as a young man. But it didn’t matter what he said—his presence was overwhelming. In his pink scarf and black kimono, sitting on the stage in his armchair throne, feet propped on an ottoman, Brando had the class in rapt attention. “I was too fascinated with what was going on to learn anything, if that makes any sense,” says AlexSol, an actor friend of Kaye’s who had a small role in American History X and is the lead in Kaye’s ever changing Lobby Lobster. “ Fascinated by Marlon being in a muumuu, by Marlon putting on lipstick to start the class, by the way he spoke, by his presence, which is incredible.” Helena Kallianiotes recalls, “You see the maestro sitting up there on his chair, with a fabulous robe. He looked like an ancient Greek coin. . . . Every emotion went through his face.”

For whatever reason, Kaye could neither learn from nor fulfill his duty of documenting the master at work. On the third day, he decided to make his move. As Kaye’s tapes show, two African-American women are performing a rather lifeless scene from The Color Purple. Kaye pushes the camera just inches away from their faces and suddenly shouts, “Cut! This is terrible! I find this really awful. . . . Who was bored? Who was bored here? Who was bored with that shit?” The two women tear into Kaye, telling the “director” to “direct his ass back down.” Kaye fights back, hollering desperately. As the confrontation reaches Jerry Springer fever pitch, one of the students from the scene lunges into Kaye’s camera lens, shaking with rage, on the verge of tears. “You don’t know nothing about me, but you’re getting ready to learn,” she says. “You need to be taught. Don’t ask me to be a goddamned ghetto bunny. It works for him and it works for him. . . . And if you don’t like it you can kiss my ass!”

Brando, in silence, watches the circus from his grande-dame perch for about 20 minutes. Finally, he speaks up, anger in cool check. “I did not ask him, nor did I anticipate that he was going to do this,” says Brando, the pink of his scarf picking up the color of his painted lips. “Does anybody think that this was useful to these actors to be told that they’re boring and unreal, and dull? Would you please raise your hand if you think so.” A surlylooking hipster with a goatee raises his hand in support of Kaye. It’s another Lobby Lobster star, Tony Ward, an actor known mainly for dating Madonna, whom Kaye had wanted to cast—as the lead— in American History X. Sounding like a 16-year-old stoner, Ward argues that Kaye was coming from an “organic place,” that Kaye “fucking sparked . . . that’s what the man’s all about.” Brando ridicules his inar-ticulateness and then asks, “May I ask who invited you?”
“I was invited by Tony,” Ward replies.

“I disinvite you now. . . . I would ask you to leave this class. And would you make another promise to me if you could? Could you promise me that you won’t come back?”

Kaye tries to re-insert himself. “I have to speak, actually.”

“You are going to be silent until I finish!” says Brando, losing his cool for the first time.

“O.K., fair enough, fair enough,” says Kaye, suddenly reverting to the frightened child.

Ward heads for the door. “I don’t have a career, so you can’t fuck it up anyway,” he mumbles.

Just then, something inside Kaye decides he’s going to be the kind of crazy genius he wants to be, and not the kind Brando is. Kaye follows Ward out, and all the other Lobby Lobster cast members Kaye has invited to the class follow, too. It is the last time Kaye and Brando speak to each other or are even in the same room.
‘I was disgusted with Marlon,” Kaye says, explaining his actions. “Because he had said the previous day, ‘I want you all to be a part of it.’” Kallianiotes sees it differently. “Obviously, Tony Kaye didn’t hear what Marlon said [to the actors] earlier: ‘Fall on your butt. You’re not here to do anything but get rid of intimidation,’” she says, adding that what Kaye really is is a frustrated, frightened actor. “Even Marlon asked him, ‘You ready? You want to come up?’ He didn’t have nothin’. He couldn’t do it. . . . That’s who Tony Kaye is,” she says. “Can’t hold up on his own. Trying to piggyback on Marlon, and trying to knock him. . . . The only thing on Marlon’s mind was, How the fuck am I going to fire this guy?”

Kaye seized the opportunity to create another Tony-centric spectacle. He and the Lobby Lobster gang staged and filmed a “mock trial,” with Tony Ward as himself versus Marlon Brando, portrayed, in an attempt at humor, by an obese black woman in a white wig. Kaye, dressed as bin Laden, plays the electric guitar and does some square dancing. The rest of the gang watch and bang unpleasantly on instruments. Kaye was finally free to be his old self.

Kaye took that footage—and the footage he had shot of Brando at his home and Brando in the classroom—and began editing it into a film, which, he explains, he will turn into a chapter of Epicomedy, or show at festivals, or sell. But over the past several months Kaye has been getting calls from Brando’s lawyers, indicating that Brando is onto his plans and will resort to legal action to stop them if necessary. Kaye isn’t rolling over. “I left a message on his answering machine at his house, saying I can sell this thing for a few million pounds,” says Kaye. “I know he’ll respond to that.”

It’s unlikely. One of the messages that appears on Kaye’s future Marlon Brando dance hit (which Brando is still unaware of) says, “I trust you. I trust you to be a man of honor and discretion, and if you ever break that, then it’s not remakable and you’ve lost yourself to me. Or, rather, you’ve lost me to yourself .” Trust has long been Brando’s bête noire—ever since having been cajoled by Truman Capote into spilling his guts on everything from his bisexuality to his mother’s alcoholism for a 12,000 -word 1957 New Yorker article. “That’s what’s weird about Marlon,” says Jod Kaftan, a 33-year-old writer who has been friends with Brando and some of his kids since Kaftan was a teenager. “He has this thing about trust in his inner circle, but he lets the wrong people in his circle sometimes. The worst of the worst. There’s something kind of naïve about Marlon in that way.”

Kaye alleges that the lawyers and appeals to honor are not Brando’s only tactics to prevent Kaye’s footage from being shown. Last summer, Kaye claims, he received a number of strange phone calls from someone purporting to be the Devil. “I’m in your house and I’m going to kill you,” the caller said in one. In another the voice pleaded in a falsetto, “Help me, help me.” “It was definitely [Brando],” says Kaye. “I knew immediately. I could hear his voice. It had gone through a coding machine.” Kaye was terrified, and stayed out of his house for two weeks. Brando has nothing to say about whether or not he made the calls, or anything else about Kaye, for that matter. People who know Brando think it’s possible Kaye is right. “That sounds like something he would do,” says Kaftan. “If Tony escalated things and made it clear that he was breaking the rules, Marlon would definitely call someone, probably at about three in the morning.” But Kaye does not seem particularly depressed or contemplative about having lost a friend. After all, this is a man who once told John Morrissey, “There’s no such thing as friends. I don’t have any friends. I don’t want any friends. Friends is a meaningless concept.”

Still, Kaye can’t help but admire and envy Brando. “I don’t think there’s one person on the planet who can really say, ‘I have lived, I have lived a full life,’ and could die with a smile on his face,” says Kaye. “That guy could really and truly say it.” And, from his experiences, Kaye claims to have learned some of what his former friend calls discretion. “It was a preposterous thing to do,” says Kaye, looking back at his American History X campaign. “I was in a state of delirious shock. . . . I just had a very misguided and inappropriate vision of the way the world worked, which I’ve since learned the hard way. . . . Deep down I thought they would really like me for it.” Hoping that Hollywood will accept him again, he says, “Someone said to me this fantastic thing, that if you want to work you’ve got to keep the muzzle on. Now before I walk through any door, you know, glass, metal, or wood, I have that, ‘Keep the muzzle on.’”

Even those who qualify as Tony champions are skeptical about his mea culpa and his claim that he’s a reformed man. “Tony is as talented a person in filmmaking as is alive,” says Morrissey. “But I don’t care what kind of campaign he launches to re-integrate himself into the Hollywood community, the damage he has suffered psychologically is part of what maybe gives him a certain flair, but it absolutely is what prevents him from functioning as a moviemaker. And it’s a tragic story, because I don’t think he ever will.” This comes after Morrissey gave him a second chance. In June the producer approached Kaye about directing a script called Havoc, by Academy Award–winning screenwriter Stephen Gaghan. Kaye had problems with the script and made a series of demands that essentially would have given him full control of its rewriting and its ultimate destiny. “Never mind that this is unconventional,” says Morrissey, “it’s ludicrous. . . . I don’t think there are very many people who’d do that f or anyone. Maybe for Marty Scorsese. Maybe. Maybe for Coppola.”

It is possible that Tony Kaye will join that pantheon yet. There are a couple of Hollywood projects that Kaye has been toying with, including one called Snowblind, based on Robert Sabbag’s legendary book about the cocaine trade. There are his personal-statement projects such as Lobby Lobster, which he believes “will work out in the end when I figure out what it’s about,” and the abortion documentary, which he’s preparing to send to festivals. And then there are the multi-media creations based on Marlon, which Kaye seems determined to get out by hook or by crook. “Certain European people view American things with great admiration and awe. . . . That’s my regard,” he says, referring to his feelings for the actor. “That’s not going to stop me from taking this stuff and exploiting him to hell, and not giving a damn.”

In New Yorkers’ imagination, the Plaza is so hopelessly enchanting that even Eloise’s “bawth” that flooded the entire hotel on the night of the Venetian Masked Ball could turn into something fabulous—a night in Venice itself, riding around in gondolas. Four years ago, the hotel, at the southeast corner of Central Park, was purchased by the Israeli company El-Ad Properties, owned by billionaire Isaac Tshuva, which turned as much of the building into condominiums as it was allowed to by the city. Some of the world’s wealthiest people, including a good number of New Yorkers, lined up to buy, sight unseen, their magical slices of New York history. Today, the Plaza is far from the glamorous urban fantasy depicted in Kay Thompson and Hilary Knight’s Eloise books. It’s a place that’s plagued by lawsuits, a place where fiberglass moldings and other standard materials are passed off as “true opulence,” a place where one resident got stuck overnight in a garbage room, with no one to hear her cries.

While El-Ad has improved the Plaza in a few ways for which it hasn’t gotten credit, the improvements have been drowned out by the complaints—about small windows, low ceilings, obstructed views, buckling floors, trashed carpets, glacially slow elevators, and frequent interruptions of running water. Though the downsized hotel portion that was allowed to remain had its opening in March, it’s still a “work in progress,” says El-Ad. Indeed, as of mid-November, toilets hadn’t been delivered to the fifth floor. In the new retail section, which occupies 39,000 square feet of the lower level, only half the stores had opened, forcing such shops as the handbag designer MCM and the cell-phone maker Vertu to try to attract business not only in the middle of a market crash but also amid hammering and scaffolding. The celebrated Palm Court, where Eloise went for tea, is hemorrhaging $125,000 a month.

“I was distraught when I saw [the redesign],” says a person who lived there in the 60s. “It’s neither wonderful old nor brilliant modern.”
One rival hotelier says, “It’s a shame a beautiful landmark has been messed with like this and taken away from New Yorkers and even visitors.” If it were the Essex House or the InterContinental, no one would care—but this is the Plaza.

Since its opening, in 1907, the hotel, designed by Henry Hardenbergh, has been one of the few places in the city where the ordinary citizen could come in off the street and step into a glittering, sophisticated playground. Its history is filled with the most glamorous characters of the 20th century: Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marlene Dietrich, Frank Lloyd Wright, Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor, Jacqueline Onassis, the Beatles, and, especially, Eloise—the mischievous little six-year-old—who has represented the Plaza’s soul more than any actual human being; you might say she created its soul. Forty movies have been filmed in the Plaza, including Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park and Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (Cary Grant was kidnapped from the Oak Bar). Fitzgerald set a scene of The Great Gatsby there. Truman Capote threw his Black and White Ball—perhaps the most famous party in American history—in the Grand Ballroom. But it was also a place where a grandmother from Yonkers could take her granddaughter for tea in the Palm Court, where a couple of hansom-cab drivers could come in for a beer at the Oak Bar after a day of driving tourists through Central Park. When New York had a rigid caste system, the Plaza cut across religion and class. Its ballroom has been the venue for thousands of debutantes, Bar Mitzvah boys, and brides and grooms. The Plaza belonged to everybody.

But Tshuva, who made his fortune from an Israeli oil-and-gas company called Delek before branching internationally into residential real estate, and his C.E.O., Miki Naftali, did not buy the Plaza due to any emotional or romantic attachments. Rather, El-Ad had just come off the disappointment of losing its bid on another Manhattan hotel, the Mayflower, which would be turned into the iconic new condominium 15 Central Park West. “I was walking around and looking what else can I buy,” recalls Naftali, 45, a slight, extremely excitable man, sitting at a conference table at El-Ad’s New York headquarters, beside publicist Lloyd Kaplan, whose P.R. firm specializes in problem solving and crisis management. “Just by coincidence, I was walking next to the Plaza, and I said, ‘What about the Plaza?’” He soon discovered that it was co-owned by Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, of Saudi Arabia, and Mr. Kwek Leng Beng, of Singapore, and that it wasn’t for sale. Given the choice between trying to cajole an Arab prince and a guy he’d never heard of from Singapore, the Israeli went for the latter. His voice rising and falling for dramatic effect, Naftali takes you through every twist and turn along the way to the deal’s being signed—which included an immovable antagonist (Mr. Kwek), a formidable challenger (Vornado’s Steve Roth, who was ready to offer $725 million, but didn’t move fast enough), an irritated wife back home (Mrs. Naftali), and lots of sprinting through airports. But several months after setting his sights on it, Naftali emerged with his prize, for $675 million. He would put in another $400 million to refurbish and convert it.

As it happened, this foreign developer, hoping to cash in on the condominium-conversion craze, had almost unwittingly landed a sacred cow. El-Ad’s cluelessness might have been summed up at the 100th-anniversary party for the Plaza, held in Grand Army Plaza, just outside the hotel. Tshuva enlisted his favorite singer, Paul Anka, to perform. Onstage with Tshuva, before a crowd of 1,200, Anka sang a version of “My Way,” the song he wrote for Frank Sinatra, its lyrics retooled for the occasion: “No portraits, please, of Eloise, only Miki Naftali.”

The first thing Naftali underestimated was the New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council, the scrappy but powerful hotel workers’ union, led by Peter Ward, a handsome 50-year-old working-class hero from central casting, who was married in the ballroom of the Plaza (or as he pronounces it, “Plaazer”). To this day, the union claims that El-Ad’s original scheme was to get rid of all food-service venues—the Oak Room, the ballroom, and the Palm Court—and to convert the entire building to condominiums. Naftali’s first step, says a union spokesperson, was to try to fire the Plaza’s 900 hotel workers. In line with the union’s collective-bargaining agreement, El-Ad offered the workers severance of one week’s pay for every year that an employee had been with the hotel. Ward pointed out to Naftali that many of the workers had been there for 30 or 40 years, and pushed for the more traditional two weeks’ pay for each year. Naftali refused. At which point an indignant Ward helped launch a $2 million “Save the Plaza” campaign, which lasted throughout the spring of 2005.

It was a born winner. Celebrities like Matthew Broderick, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Liza Minnelli got on board. Soon hundreds of room attendants, doormen, and bellhops were marching down Sixth Avenue. At Radio City Music Hall, before a crowd of over 6,000 members of the union, Mayor Michael Bloomberg swore he’d do everything he could to help Plaza employees keep their jobs. Everyone from director Peter Bogdanovich to Jesse Jackson made speeches outside the Plaza extolling its sacredness. The Post, the Daily News, and The New York Times covered each and every move of the heart-tugging New York drama. Eloise was pictured in one paper as living out on the street; Skipperdee, her beloved turtle, had died. The Landmarks Preservation Commission was enlisted to declare that not only was the façade a landmark (as had been the case since 1969) but so were eight public spaces, including the Oak Room, the Palm Court, and the Grand Ballroom. The union even sent a couple of Plaza employees, including a doorman, Neil Johnson, to Israel to help sway public opinion about Tshuva, who commanded great respect in his native country because he was entirely self-made and lived modestly. As Johnson recalls, reporters asked him, “‘Why shouldn’t Mr. Tshuva be able to do whatever he wants?’ … [I said], ‘How would you like it if Donald Trump came over, purchased the King David Hotel, and wanted to turn it into a department store with a bunch of Zabar’s and McDonald’s? Would you appreciate that?’” By the end of his trip, Johnson claims, “we ended up winning over the people of Israel.”

According to the union, when El-Ad saw that it was losing the public-relations battle, Naftali came back to Ward and said he’d be willing to relent on the severance issue and cough up double. By this point, it was not enough. Thanks to “Save the Plaza,” the union now had the upper hand. After three months, with the involvement of Bloomberg, El-Ad agreed to make drastic changes to its plans. It agreed to limit the number of residences to 150. Around 350 hotel rooms would remain. (The number of hotel rooms was subsequently decreased to 282 and the residences increased to 181.) Three hundred fifty jobs were saved. The union savored what felt like a huge victory. As one member puts it, “Here was this Israeli billionaire swaggering into town hoping to make more billions. He was beat out by a bunch of room attendants and doormen.”

“It was a good slogan,” Naftali says a little disdainfully: “We are going to destroy the Plaza and the union are going to ‘Save the Plaza.’” He denies that he and Tshuva ever had any intention of turning the whole building into condominiums or getting rid of the cherished public spaces. “Even from day one, I did not want to convert the entire building to residential. If I convert everything to condominium, I’m losing the value of the brand.” According to Naftali, from the very start, he told Ward that he had planned to keep 150 hotel rooms, an exchange the union does not recall. “Maybe he didn’t believe me,” Naftali says. “I don’t know. Because, look, I’m an outsider, right?”

Whatever the dimensions of Naftali’s disappointment, he could take solace in seeing that the condominiums that were allowed to be built sold like hotcakes. From the moment the floor plans became available through Stribling & Associates, in December 2005, it attracted such billionaires as Russian gambling magnate Boris Belotserkovsky; Russian energy tycoon Andrey Vavilov; Italian real-estate mogul Luigi Zunino; Pier Luigi Loro Piana, founder of the luxury-clothing company Loro Piana; as well as Esprit founder Jurgen Friedrich; art dealer Guy Wildenstein; a smattering of celebrities, including Suze Orman, Tommy Hilfiger, Italian businessman Flavio Briatore, and American Idol creator Simon Fuller; and a number of very wealthy Americans, including New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, embattled real-estate developer Harry Macklowe, and James Cayne, C.E.O. of Bear Stearns until he was forced out in January 2008. Many bought not just one unit but two or three or four or five to combine, and they paid between $4,000 and $6,000 a square foot, then top dollar for Manhattan. It didn’t seem to matter that buyers couldn’t actually view their apartments in the flesh. The rush was so mad that brokers—even powerhouses like Douglas Elliman’s Dolly Lenz—couldn’t get their calls returned by Stribling. According to another top broker, pesky questions such as “How high are the ceilings?” were met with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude, forcing brokers to stand outside and try to figure it out for themselves. “Some brokers probably felt that given their status in the community their calls should have received a priority response,” says Stribling president Elizabeth Stribling. “But to us, ‘first come, first served’ was the fairest way to handle the overwhelming demand.” She adds that so many ceiling heights had been modified over the years that it would have been inappropriate to guarantee any until demolition of interior spaces had been completed. But what was there to worry about—this was the Plaza. How could the apartments not be fabulous?

While the would-be residents spent the next year lining up personal designers and fantasizing about their spreads in Architectural Digest, El-Ad tackled part two of the conversion: building a 39,000-square-foot mall in the basement. As it happened, in this arena the Plaza name didn’t have the same magic as it did for the residential side. Sources involved say that El-Ad believed that all the big guns—Gucci, Prada, Louis Vuitton, Ralph Lauren—would come running, just like those Russian oligarchs. What they didn’t realize was that the brands’ established presences at Bergdorf Goodman, Barneys, and elsewhere nearby, on Madison and Fifth Avenues, made opening new locations at the Plaza seem superfluous. In the face of this difficulty, El-Ad developed a signature strategy of implying big names had signed on in order to attract others. Naftali first got into trouble when he mentioned in the press that the plan was to do a Harrods department store, which was news to Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed. “It angers me,” Al Fayed wrote in a letter to Bloomberg, “that there are unscrupulous brokers and the developer who appear to be touting my name and the Harrods brand name in order to drum up interest in the project.” “I meant it as an example,” an exasperated Naftali says today.

The scolding didn’t stop El-Ad from continuing the practice. According to a source involved in the retail space, “They kept saying, ‘We’ve talked to Gucci—Gucci is committed.’ And I would think to myself, Why would Gucci be committed if they’re right on Fifth Avenue?” When an El-Ad representative was asked about their optimistic marketing technique, the response was “This is how you sell a product.” When asked if El-Ad was ever misleading, El-Ad’s head of retail, Anthony Nicola, replied, “Absolutely not. We have throughout sought to dispel, not encourage, any rumors about leasing commitments.”

According to other sources, it was the same for those restaurateurs looking to take over the Oak Room and the Oak Bar. (The editor of this magazine was approached by El-Ad about the two spaces, but nothing came of the discussions.) Frederick Lesort, of Frederick’s on Madison, claims he was told by El-Ad that there was a bidding war and it needed an offer on the table—now! Lesort was skeptical. “How many restaurants were truly bidding for that? I’m not sure,” he says. According to another restaurateur who considered the space, “They said, Well, if you don’t take it, Danny Meyer [owner of Manhattan’s Union Square Café and Gramercy Tavern] is going to take it. And then I’d call Danny Meyer and he’d be like, I don’t want that place. I told them I might look at it, but there’s no way I’ll take it.… And then they’d say, O.K., [renowned chef] Jean-Georges [Vongerichten] is going to take it. So I’d call Jean-Georges. It’s like they’re too stupid to realize that it’s a small community of restaurateurs. And I can just pick up the phone and ask them!” (Anthony Nicola denies they ever pursued such big names or mischaracterized anyone’s interest.)

Some top-drawer names came close to getting signed—including the chic French pastry store Ladurée, Vera Wang, Fortnum and Mason—deals that might have given the retail mall some added cachet and attracted other boldfaced retail names to the mix. But they collapsed when El-Ad tried to push for more money at the last minute, a source with knowledge of the information says. Lesort, who’d been in talks with El-Ad for six months before his deal for the Oak Room fell apart, said it came down to what he felt was a ludicrous stipulation El-Ad wanted in his contract. Determined to have the Oak Room opened by October 1, 2007, in time for the 100th anniversary, El-Ad insisted that Lesort pay a penalty of $5,000 a day for each day past that if the restaurant wasn’t ready to open, Lesort says. “[They had] no flexibility whatsoever,” he adds. “Imagine [my having] a restaurant with scaffolding all around it and an empty building!” (Nicola says that late fees are standard and claims it was Lesort who wanted to renegotiate at the last minute.)

That was another thing Lesort found disturbing—the construction didn’t seem to be going well. In meetings, he asked basic questions about venting, sprinklers, and air-conditioning. “I could never get a straight answer,” he claims, not even with the “army of architects and engineers from the building sitting with us.” (An El-Ad representative denies that such information was an issue.)

For the interiors, Tshuva might have chosen someone like I. M. Pei, who designed the Four Seasons Hotel in Manhattan, or Thierry Despont, who did the Hôtel de Crillon, in Paris. Instead, he picked his own daughter Gal Nauer, 35, who had never worked on such a large project before, nor on a single hotel. She would work in conjunction with the firm Costas Kandylis, which specializes in residential towers. Though the collaboration between the two went smoothly, Kandylis’s partner Zoltan Saro calls the project “my two-year nightmare.” With every hole they opened, ancient concrete came crumbling down. Steel beams were discovered in the most unexpected places. It wasn’t long before the project devolved into a change-order maelstrom. The walkouts, the lawsuits, and the finger-pointing began.

The first to walk was F. W. Sims Inc., a Long Island air-conditioning company, which is now suing El-Ad, claiming it is owed $3.7 million for original contract work and change orders. “They didn’t finish the job!” says Naftali. “They claim that they will not finish the job unless we will pay them extra money.… So now you’re looking at yourself and you say, ‘O.K.—excuse my French—I’m in deep shit. He’s blackmailing me!’” An attorney for F. W. Sims says, “The only extra money F. W. Sims has sought is for the extra work that [El-Ad] directed it to perform.”

Next to go was the architectural firm the Philips Group, which had been hired to work on the retail space, and which has essentially charged the same thing as Sims. “They put people that didn’t know what they were doing!” counters Naftali. “And then, all of a sudden, they started to ask for change orders, O.K.? Hundreds of thousands of dollars when—hello?! You need to design for me. You didn’t design the space. This is not a kindergarten.… We have to pay millions of dollars to fix their mistakes? It doesn’t make sense.” El-Ad is now suing them, claiming it had to re-do TPG’s railings, badly installed lighting, “unsightly” ceiling drop, and a koi pond that was not properly waterproofed. TPG answers that the heap of unforeseen problems with the building was the responsibility of no one but El-Ad.

Recently another suit landed on the desk of El-Ad’s lawyers, this one from the contracting company R. P. Brennan, which was hired to do the hotel rooms and the lobby. According to the suit, “Brennan had no method of determining or anticipating the levels of ineptitude exhibited by [CPS 1 Realty],” the Plaza subsidiary of El-Ad. “CPS, by deception or otherwise, sought to have built a project for half the cost that it should have been.” Brennan, the suit alleges, had to pick up the slack and still hasn’t been paid in full. (El-Ad wouldn’t comment on the suit.)

Did El-Ad lowball the Plaza? You’d never know it from the Web site and sales pitch, which are sheathed in luxury jargon. (“As a luxury lifestyle destination,” says a representative from Fairmont, the upscale hotel company in charge of management, “the Plaza strives to exceed luxury service standards.”) On a guided tour of the 58th Street side, where hotel rooms go for about $700 to $20,000 a night, manager Shane Krige talks about the “arrival experience,” the “technology experience,” and how the Plaza “will take hotels to a new level.” Walking through the rooms of a hotel suite, he points out the “guest-services touch panel,” which controls climate and lighting, and calls the on-floor butler; the leather-bound guest directory (“I wanted it to look like a library book”); the Mascioni linens; “Once again, the flat-panel TV”; and, at last, the “24-karat-gold-plated fixtures” in the bathroom, which, as it turns out, were Tshuva’s touch. The bathroom is so exquisite, he insists, that he’s seen only one like it, in Dubai. This is “true opulence,” he assures you. Really?

According to an inside source with knowledge of the materials used in the hotel rooms, instead of Italian marble for the bathroom floors and walls, El-Ad used low-density marble from China (about 50 cents a square foot). The crown moldings in the rooms aren’t actually wood or plaster; they’re fiberglass and run from $2 to $7 a foot. (High-end crown molding can cost $70 a foot, and real plaster molding many multiples of that.) The so-called mahogany closet is in fact just a thin layer of mahogany veneer over industrial particleboard. “The developer was looking for ways to save,” admits a designer with Gal Nauer Architects. The carpet in the hallway on the penthouse level was cut and cobbled together—a practice known as “patch-n-match.” (The interior designer of the renovation and hotel representatives stand by the materials used in the project.)

Some of El-Ad’s other residential condominiums haven’t gotten high marks, either. According to Michael Chaney, the board president of 224 West 18th Street, an El-Ad condominium known as Campiellos, the residents have discovered sewage pipes held up by a stack of bricks, unprotected live electrical wires within walls, buckling oak floors, and guardrails too short and not up to New York City’s building code. (El-Ad says it is reviewing the problems at Campiellos.)
And so, when some of the new Plaza residents first laid eyes on their apartments, the reactions were like Extreme Makeover, Home Edition—only the total opposite.

A New York lawyer and his wife moved into their $4.75 million two-bedroom apartment, on the ninth floor, only to discover there were no carpets in the hallway and no knobs on the doors. “It was disappointing on every level,” she says. “We just wanted out.”

Barbara Girard and her disabled mother, Rose Gutmacher, closed on their two apartments—which they expected to be connected—only to discover that they were not connected and couldn’t be without a massive undertaking. There was another surprise feature: one of the building’s staircases went through Gutmacher’s bedroom. Again, Stribling responds, “Buyers were advised that finished units may not correspond precisely to the initial floor plans.” She adds that Stribling never promised that the two apartments would be connected, or could be connected.

Maryana Tsaregradskaya, the actress wife of Russian energy magnate Andrey Vavilov, reportedly broke down and sobbed when she first saw the two penthouses they’d bought for $53.5 million. One was an “attic-like” space with small windows, massive columns in the middle of the entertaining space, and a “hideous drainage grate” outside their windows. Vavilov claims it was not what they’d expected based on the architectural model in the sales office Stribling had set up in the Plaza’s Edwardian Room: that had shown high ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows. He decided he couldn’t possibly close, and demanded that El-Ad return the $10.7 million deposit. El-Ad refused, prompting him to sue for more than $30 million.

Is Vavilov just a perfectionist with a really hard-to-please wife? Perhaps, but if you compare pictures of the model to interior shots of what he actually got, it’s hard to deny that the model suggests much larger windows. When I point this out to Naftali, he claims that the windows, at least as viewed from the 30th floor of the G.M. Building, across the street from the Plaza, are exactly how they look in the model. (I was unable to get as high as the 30th floor in this private office building, but the windows as seen from the 10th floor bear little resemblance to those on the model.) He shares his personal way of reading models of exteriors, which, though I am no expert, seems to involve some unusual logic. In any case, that’s all beside the point, Naftali says. No one said this model was meant to be precise. “Any marketing material is not going to be the exact representation,” he says. “It cannot be.… I deliver what I was committed to based on the offering plan [a 618-page book that contains basic floor plans, general descriptions, and mountains of legalese], not based on a model.”

Because it was impossible to see the apartment beforehand, Vavilov’s designer had asked if he could at least see architectural drawings and elevations. According to the suit, El-Ad representatives claimed none existed—which would seem strange, given that the penthouses were being built and elevations are necessary for construction. “There is no development around the city that is giving a purchaser elevations or detailed floor plans,” says Naftali. While the practice of giving out elevations is not common, brokers suggest that exceptions can be made, and are made, depending on the circumstances.

What does Naftali make of it all? He thinks Vavilov became unhappy with his apartment only when he learned that it wasn’t the biggest at the Plaza. A few months after he had put down his deposit, the New York Post announced that Harry Macklowe had gone to contract to buy two units for $60 million. “Vavilov was very upset,” says Naftali. “He [then] tried to buy the adjacent penthouse.” The broker informed him that it was too late—they had all sold. (Vavilov’s attorney denies that the news of Macklowe’s purchase had anything to do with his client’s dissatisfaction.) “Fast-forward to the walk-through,” says Naftali. “He came in. They took him upstairs. He was by himself. For half an hour, he didn’t say anything. Then his wife came, after half an hour. She opened the door, and she said, ‘Oh my God! This is too small. I cannot live here!’ … Before they left, they asked again that we will check if one of the adjacent—one if not two—will agree to sell their units!” Naftali wants to know what gives: “Either it’s good for you or it’s not good for you!”

For the other residents of the Plaza, the man now known as “the Russian in the penthouse” has become a lightning rod. On the one hand, many see his complaints as echoing their own, and are sympathetic. One unhappy resident, whose inability to ever see her apartment in advance has left her with what she considers a lemon, says that El-Ad’s behavior has been “diabolical.” “Look what they did to those Russian people.… Why didn’t they just say the penthouse is the [former] servants’ quarters?” The owner of the penthouse next to Vavilov’s, a hedge-fund manager, is suing El-Ad for essentially the same reason.

Was a pattern of concealment emerging? In early November, another lawsuit popped up—this one from the penthouse buyer at another El-Ad building, called the Grand Madison, on Fifth Avenue at Madison Square Park. The case was curiously similar to Vavilov’s, with the buyer claiming that he was led to believe the yet-to-be-built penthouse would have magnificent park views, and that what he got instead was a view of an “ugly and unsafe” eight-foot-eight-inch parapet wall surrounding the terrace. Like Vavilov, he claims he was never allowed to view his apartment, and the parapet did not appear on a floor plan. (El-Ad dismisses the case as “baseless” and copycat, and points out that, even though the buyer might not have been allowed to see the apartment, the parapet was there to begin with and could have been seen from the street.)

But other Plaza residents are livid that Vavilov and his fellow malcontents are giving the Plaza a bad name; they claim that he just didn’t try hard enough to do his due diligence. According to Robert Ira Sahn, a commodities and stock trader, who lives on the eighth floor, “Anybody who’s spending $54 million to buy an apartment and is surprised because there’s a column in the middle of the apartment” is clueless, to paraphrase his characterization in a polite way.

No one is more enraged than Naftali. “Personally, I’m really upset with that because not only that he doesn’t close, he also ruined my reputation, our reputation, and frankly he ruined the value of the penthouse. If you’re looking for a penthouse, and you hear those stories, why would you buy the penthouse at the Plaza, right?” Consequently, El-Ad is countersuing Vavilov for $36 million for defamation. Vavilov’s attorney says the countersuit is without merit and was intended to prevent other Plaza buyers from speaking out or bringing suits of their own.

Now about 30 apartments in the Plaza are back on the market, including Hilfiger’s corner “dome” apartment, Friedrich’s “Astor Suite,” and reportedly Zunino’s 10,000-square-foot third-floor palace, as well as Wildenstein’s five units. It’s hard to ascertain the motives of the sellers—perhaps they are merely hoping to flip for a tidy profit. But the sheer number of resales, a significantly higher percentage than at most other buildings, brokers say, suggests something is awry. And now that there’s no more smoke and mirrors to the viewing experience, the price tags seem almost comical to many brokers. One who recently brought a client to a 2,700-square-foot, $18 million apartment recalls the scene. “We all kept a straight face, because it was like $18 million for, I mean, nothing. And I wasn’t saying anything.”

Not everyone is miserable. Gigi Mahon, who combined two apartments on the fifth floor, says, “I could not be happier.” She was savvy enough to buy on one of the lower floors, where the ceilings are higher and the windows considerably larger. (In the earlier part of the 20th century, when elevators were unreliable, the very rich lived on the lower floors, the servants on the upper floors.) Another lower-floor resident, Peter Vanderslice, who works in real-estate private equity, is also pleased, and gives especially high marks to the staff. “They are all over you. They won’t let you push an elevator button by yourself!” Resident Suna Said praises the Plaza’s “neighborly sense of community” and has started a children’s-aid charity called the Plaza Foundation. “The Plaza has always been on the cutting edge of class,” says Said. “And what’s more classy and avant-garde than finding meaningful ways to give to those less fortunate?”

But another resident assures me, “It’s really a mess. Most of the people who bought there want out.” And certainly, some would argue with the “neighborly” thing. Joanna Cutler, a high-end real-estate agent who lives on 14, says she is still traumatized by her night of terror last winter, which she blames squarely on El-Ad. As she has told it, it was 11 p.m. when she took her trash to the garbage room, just a few steps from her apartment. When she turned to leave, the door was jammed. She banged and called out. Silence. She had neighbors, but they were out of town. She got down on her hands and knees, slipped her fingers under the door, and tried to push what was blocking it. It was a sharp board, meant to protect the carpet, and it sliced into her fingertips. Suddenly, she began to panic. What if there’s a fire and no one finds me and I burn to a crisp? It wasn’t until six a.m. that a building worker passed by, heard her screams, and pried the door open. According to her lawyer, Sue Karten, for her troubles Cutler was given a gift certificate from the Plaza for a facial; now she plans to sue the developer for negligence and is wallowing in disappointment. “She’s a broker,” says Karten. “She wanted to be able to say that the Plaza is a great place to live. It isn’t.” El-Ad believes her complaint is baseless and points out that Cutler reportedly sued Jean-Georges Vongerichten for $500,000 after she allegedly bit into a stone in her dessert, shattering her dental bridge, at one of his restaurants. (She settled for $14,500.)

The lawsuits, the walk-offs, the phone calls from retail real-estate brokers and contractors wanting to know where their checks are, none of it could have happened at a worse time for El-Ad, which, like many real-estate developers, is being hit by the downturn in the economy. Construction of its Plaza Las Vegas casino-condominium-hotel-mall, the property for which El-Ad paid $1.2 billion, is now on hold until the spring of 2010. The Carlyle on Wilshire, El-Ad’s luxury condominium in Los Angeles, has sold only 10 units out of 78. A year ago, El-Ad had a high bond rating with Standard & Poor’s Israeli partner Maalot. Four months ago, the rating was removed from Maalot’s Web site, reportedly at the request of El-Ad after Maalot added the company to its “watch list” for a possible downgrading. (El-Ad claims its rating is still AA.) Delek Group, the backbone of Tshuva’s fortune, has tumbled dramatically on the Israeli stock market. After all this, it seems like Naftali is hurting. “I invested my best three, four years trying to put [the Plaza] together, and believe me, I take it personally,” he says. “I go over there and I see many things that I’m not happy with, either the service or whatever. This is not still good—I take it really personally, because I want it to be perfect.”

Naftali deserves credit for doing some work that may not be so readily visible. The state of the building when El-Ad bought it “was horrible,” he says. “Sixty to 65 rooms were out of order because of water leaks. The Palm Court on a rainy day? They put buckets over there to collect the rain.” The company spent $30 million repairing the roof alone. Stribling calls Naftali the Plaza’s “white knight.” The landmark status secured for some of the interior spaces during the Save the Plaza campaign compelled El-Ad to make them more beautiful. The firm of Walter B. Melvin Architects, which specializes in historical preservation, did an outstanding job of overseeing the restoration of the mosaic floor in the lobby of the Central Park South entrance (now the exclusive entrance for the private residences) and stripping away the layers of paint that had been applied during previous ownerships. (Hotelier Conrad Hilton, in trying to lend a more modern vibe in the 1940s, covered large swaths of stone with white paint. In the 1980s, the Trumps went wild with some yellowy gilding.) Melvin got rid of the low ceiling that Hilton had installed over the Palm Court and painstakingly re-did the glorious, stained-glass domed “laylight” that was there in 1907. Likewise, the Oak Room has been spruced up (the new tenant is Joey Allaham, who owns the kosher steak house Prime Grill), and the Grand Ballroom has never looked better and without doubt should be hailed as the pride of the new Plaza.

And so, in the end, maybe the panic is overstated. Complaining, let’s remember, is probably New Yorkers’ favorite pastime. Hilton and the Trumps were met with skepticism when they bought the Plaza, and they weathered the storms; Trump had to take out a full-page ad in The New York Times assuring the public, “I have purchased a masterpiece—the Mona Lisa.” Maybe someone will come along and buy the Plaza from El-Ad and invest more hundreds of millions to bring it closer to the glamorous playground it once was. Maybe El-Ad will find its footing with the help of some indignant locals showing it the way. New Yorkers have been known to get their way. And if a building really has a soul, it’s not so easy to snuff it out. By the way, there’s still that portrait of a cheeky troublemaker hanging in a corridor near the Palm Court that causes passersby to smile and comment. And it’s not Miki Naftali.