What kind of woman spends $900 on a pair of four-inch Jimmy Choo stilettos with Swarovskicrystal straps? Is she a role model—accomplished, sexy, and independent, with an unapologetic appreciation for the finer things in life? Or is she a princess—a vain social climber who craves the spotlight and needs a rich man to buy them for her? The same questions might be asked about Tamara Mellon, the 37-year-old founder and president of the Jimmy Choo company and one of the most successful businesswomen in Britain. Consider how she got here. Once there was a humble Malaysian cobbler named Jimmy Choo, with a tiny, yet prestigious, operation in London’s East End until she—of the waist-length straight dark hair and zero body fat—came along, equipped with Daddy’s money, took Choo’s name, and turned it into a $200 million international glamour powerhouse that’s been given plugs on Sex and the City and in a Beyoncé Knowles song and whose shoes are now worn by many of the young leading ladies on the red carpet—a feat, incidentally, that was accomplished only with Choo out of the picture. Tamara would eventually pocket almost $100 million for herself from the sale of her majority shareholding.

The princess interpretation was given fresh life when she picked a husband, Matthew Mellon II, scion of the famed American banking family, who came along with 13 trust funds. They were married in 2000 in what tabloids invariably call a “fairy-tale wedding”—before 300 glittering guests, including Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley, and 50 white doves.

The union turned into the most colossal fiasco since AOL and Time Warner. With the exception of an adorable daughter, all Tamara got from her American prince was trouble: coke binges, week-long disappearances, and a divorce lawyer nicknamed “Jaws,” determined to take a major bite out of her fortune. By the end of the ordeal, Tamara had proved what kind of Jimmy Choo woman she was.

To look at Tamara Mellon today you might think none of this had ever happened. She glides through London society as a kind of Henry James heroine for the bling generation. At her favorite restaurant, Cipriani, the maître d’ comes embarrassingly close to bowing when she clip-clops in, wearing her skintight jeans and revealing chiffon blouse. A few fellow diners stand, hoping she will remember their names. She is occasionally asked for her autograph. She has lately been sought after by four of the world’s raciest men—Girls Gone Wild producer Joe Francis, notorious international playboy Flavio Briatore, Europop sensation Robbie Williams, and hip-hop artist Pharrell Williams.

Her Chelsea town house—a temple to the color cream—is immaculate, thanks not only to a housekeeper in uniform but also to Elika Gibbs, whom Tamara calls her “housewife.” “She organizes my clean linen. She’ll go buy new towels,” explains Tamara, her voice posh but without airs. Gibbs also color-coordinates her closet and neatly arranges her 500 pairs of Jimmy Choos into “Closet A,” the one in her bedroom, and “Closet B,” a transformed guest room. There are corners of hero worship—a Warhol Grace Kelly lithograph and a photograph of herself flanked by Valentino and his partner, Giancarlo Giammetti—as well as bohemian touches, like a pair of Moroccan “pouf” seats picked up on a recent jaunt, and a single instance of the ordinary: a regular old bath mat inside the front door, which is getting wet and dirty from the London weather.

There is nary a frizz in her hair, which she straightens using the thousand-dollar Japanese process. Also requiring maintenance are her plumped-up complexion and lips—work expected with a woman in her position. She rarely strays from her morning schedule. After waking up at seven, she has breakfast with her three-year-old daughter, Araminta—“Minty”—with whom she employs a special self-esteem parenting method. “Never attack somebody personally,” she says, explaining its tenets. “Never make ‘you’ statements to a child, like ‘You are very bad.’ You say, ‘I love you very much, but your behavior is not appropriate.’” Breakfast is followed by a session with a fitness trainer.

Her business sense is just as honed. At a meeting at Jimmy Choo headquarters, near Sloane Square, with a team of fragrance branders who are trying to woo her, she gently peppers them with such questions as “What went wrong with Patrick Cox?” (a shoe designer who tried to branch into fragrance) and “How do you feel about duty-free?”—not so much to get information as to conduct a subtle quiz. On a trip to Vogue House to meet with fashion director Lucinda Chambers, who’s styling tomorrow’s ad-campaign shoot by Mario Testino, she oversees the wardrobe choices to get the Kate-Moss-at-a-party look, and explains to Chambers that she’ll also need to be there. “I just don’t want the hairdresser to curl the model’s hair up,” she tells her, shuddering at the memory of a past ad shoot. Tamara has been known to personally feather-dust the display cases in Jimmy Choo stores.

Disarmingly, the discipline and the polish often seem completely at odds with her personality, which is unassuming, friendly, and patient in the company of tedious individuals. She often seems shy, and even insecure—which makes her all the more charming to those who meet her. If such a perfect creature accepts me, so the dynamic goes, then I must not be such a slob; I like her!

And so, despite the fact that she is now speaking to VANITY FAIR, she treads lightly when conversation comes around to her problematic husband.

“How’s Minty?” asks Mara, the tiny, elderly Italian proprietor of the fashionable Knightsbridge lunch spot San Lorenzo, settling in beside her. “Does she see her father?”

“Yes,” says Tamara, beaming and trying to sound positive.

Mara stares at her with pity.

The daughter of Thomas Yeardye, a self-made businessman, and Anne Davies, a Chanel No. 5 model, Tamara spent the first years of her life in a 500-year-old Tudor farmhouse, in the very English countryside of Berkshire. Always, she was obsessed with fabulous shoes. At age four, on a trip to Paris with her convent school, she begged one of the nuns to buy her a pair of cowboy boots. When Yeardye became the C.E.O. of the Vidal Sassoon designer hair-styling company, the family moved to Beverly Hills, where young Tamara thrived. She hung out at such snazzy clothing stores as Camp Beverly Hills and Fiorucci, drove around with older boys, and enjoyed the expensive grooming habits of Beverly Hills ladies. In 1983, after Vidal Sassoon was sold for $80 million, the family returned to England and sent Tamara, coiffed like a veritable Morgan Fairchild, off to Heathfield, the sister school of Eton. “They looked at me like this alien,” Mellon recalls of her classmates.

But the materialistic little rich girl was given a role model in her father, who was her best friend and hero until he died, in April 2004, never having gone a day without speaking with his daughter. As a young man, he possessed rugged looks, which landed him a job as stunt double for Rock Hudson, and he was briefly engaged to Diana Dors, the Marilyn Monroe of England. As much as his quasi-glamorous beginnings, what impressed Tamara were his tough, anti-Labour politics and unforgiving work ethic. “My father would say to me, ‘If you get a job, I will match what you earn,’” Tamara recalls. “‘If you don’t work, I’m not giving you anything.’” With that in mind, teenage Tamara set up shop in the Portobello market and began selling, at an impressive markup, old designer clothes her father had bought for her at a flea market.

When it came time to consider university, she did as many other wealthy English girls did: opted out and went to a finishing school, called Institut Alpin Videmanette, in Rougemont, Switzerland. For Tamara, it was a rigorous year of French lessons, skiing, and sneaking out to the local nightclub. As was the case with its most famous alumna, Princess Diana, Rougemont did not build a particularly confident young woman. “Everything about me I hated,” Mellon recalls of that period. “I thought I was ugly. I thought I was stupid.”

And whatever she learned about place settings at Rougemont was not readily apparent after she graduated. “We used to lie in the basement of her parents’ Chester Square house, one on each sofa, wrapped up in duvets, eating dips,” recalls her best friend, Vassi Chamberlain, now senior editor at Tatler, the British society magazine. “That was the only thing she ate until a couple of years ago. Salsa and guacamole. We would lie there watching TV, and her mother would come down and say, ‘Don’t worry, one day things will be all right for you two.’ We were slightly desperate.”

Like many well-off girls who love clothes but have self-esteem issues, Mellon got a job at British Vogue, where she worked as the assistant to fashion director Sarajane Hoare (a contributing stylist for VANITY FAIR). Though Tamara was shy, Hoare quickly saw that this quiet young thing had an obsession with shoes that was extraordinary even by fashion-magazine standards. On a trip to Nepal with photographer Peter Lindbergh, which required hiking for miles, Tamara was positively neurotic, says Hoare, over what boot would be best to wear. When it came to making pictures, her eye was exquisite. “She did have that wonderful attention to detail that a lot of people don’t.” To find the perfect gold Greek sandal, say, for a fashion layout, Tamara, like a few other in-the-know fashionistas, would visit a cobbler, Jimmy Choo, now 56, who worked out of a small garage in London’s East End and who had a few A-list clients, such as Princess Diana. He wasn’t a designer per se, but he could make anything and make it beautifully. Over the next couple of years, Tamara developed a close relationship with Choo. “He came across as a very sweet cobbler,” Tamara says. She eventually became British Vogue’s accessories editor, and she and Choo practically worked in tandem.

Just as the two were hitting their stride, Tamara was throwing herself into the role of “It girl,” nightclubbing alongside some of England’s most notorious rich party girls, including Tamara Beckwith and Tara Palmer-Tomkinson. She agreed to pose with them in an ad campaign for Pretty Polly, an accessories company, wearing nothing but stockings and strategically placed handbags. Perhaps the once shy young lady had lost her inhibitions because she was either drunk or high, or both. By May 1995, Tamara realized that alcohol and cocaine had become addictions and that she was nursing three or four hangovers a week. “I hated what I was doing,” she says, attributing her addictions to “a family illness.” “I couldn’t bear it anymore. I thought it was disgusting.”

No self-respecting daughter of Thomas Yeardye was willing to watch herself crumble; that month she left Vogue and soon checked herself into rehab. “When I went in, they said they’d never seen anybody with as much determination to get well,” says Tamara. Once drug-free, six weeks later, she wanted to strike out on her own. The natural thing to pursue—the thing that was hers—was this unique collaboration with Choo, and she saw a gap in the luxury shoe market, as Manolo Blahnik had virtually no competition. She went to her father, whose business track record spoke for itself, and showed him her plan. She would run the company. Choo, assisted by his niece, Sandra Choi, who’d studied fashion design at London’s Central Saint Martins, would design and make the shoes. Impressed, Yeardye invested about $250,000 and agreed to be chairman.

The business had the scrappy beginnings of many other future success stories. They worked out of a basement. There was no computer. But one problem was more serious. “[Jimmy] was totally incapable of designing a collection,” Tamara says. “He never produced one sketch.” Tamara and Choi panicked. “We’d sit there and suddenly realize, Oh my God, I’ve taken a lease on a shop—I have no collection. What am I going to do?” Tamara recalls. “So I said to Sandra, ‘You and I are going to sit down and design the collection.’” Unfortunately, neither had any experience. “I didn’t know how a collection should exist,” says Choi, her accent distinctly less upper-crust than Tamara’s. “I didn’t know if there’s a balance of different heel heights. We didn’t know whether we had to do a proportion in leather and a proportion for evening.” They decided to capitalize on the one thing they had that Manolo Blahnik and Christian Louboutin and every other great shoe designer out there didn’t: a woman at the top—one with many occasions to wear high heels.

“I just did the shoes I wanted to wear myself … I am the customer,” Tamara says. “I know exactly what she wants to wear, what her lifestyle is, when she wants to wear it.” Quickly, they settled into their respective roles (which they still play today). Tamara came to Choi with ideas, big and small, gathered from her fabulous life. The less fabulous Choi designed and executed. The first collection, sold from their store in Knightsbridge, was a hit.

Tamara and her father were dreaming big—Gucci-big. “I remember that the late Mr. Yeardye told all of us, ‘In five years’ time, I promise you, we’ll own 35 stores in the world,’” Choi recalls. With this in mind, Yeardye infused the business with another $1.2 million; in three years, there were four Jimmy Choo stores, in London, New York, Beverly Hills, and Las Vegas. Choi was up for the challenge of fast growth, but her uncle Jimmy, who owned half the company, was reluctant, which she attributes to his working-class situation. “[Jimmy and I] were just trying to be sure that, whatever we’re investing in, we’re not going backwards,” Choi says. “To be fair, on Jimmy’s side, he’s got responsibility. He’s got family that he needs to bring up…. Whereas, on the other side, the Yeardye family, they’re all set up. To them, it’s a gamble, and it could go sky-high and everything could be wonderful, or it could be in shambles. But it doesn’t quite affect them.”

Tamara wasn’t as sympathetic. “I never really understood what was going on with him,” she admits, explaining that she’d often have seemingly agreeable meetings with Choo, which were then followed up by letters from his lawyer. “It’s very difficult to do business that way,” she points out.

Meanwhile, the press was beginning its affair with Tamara. The first story on her appeared in Tatler in September 1996.

“I remember you wore that white lace Gucci dress,” Chamberlain tells Tamara over lunch at San Lorenzo, recalling the photo shoot, “and I remember this is where Tamara started her long career with that camera face…. In those days it was the low chin.” A dozen or so articles followed over the next couple of years.

Tamara had perfected her public persona by 1998, in time to meet the next man who’d change the course of her life. Matthew Mellon, then 34, was the great-great-grandnephew of Andrew W. Mellon, a founder of the Union Trust Company, an owner of Gulf Oil, and one of the heads of the Mellon banking firm. But Matthew’s road to his vast fortune had not been a typical one. His parents, Karl and Anne Stokes, divorced when he was young, and he grew up with his mother, who told him that, although he was a Mellon, his side of the family was not to inherit a cent. There was no one to dispute this; his father, an avid fisherman, pianist, and manic-depressive, was absent from his life and committed suicide when Matthew was 18. However, when Matthew was turning 21 he received a call from his uncle, Jay Mellon, the family patriarch, who invited him to Pittsburgh to celebrate his coming-of-age. There, Jay brought him to the boardroom of the Mellon bank and informed him that, on that very day, he would be receiving $25 million, the first of 13 trust funds. His mother, Matthew then learned, had kept the truth from him so that he wouldn’t grow up a spoiled brat.

As it turned out, it was not too late for that. He managed to attend four colleges, landing eventually at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, in Philadelphia. During that time he became a member of St. Anthony’s Hall, an exclusive “literary” fraternity reputed to be less about Tolstoy and more about partying. For good measure, he bought a 10-bedroom house up the street for after-parties. His single proudest achievement in college was buying the first BMW M5 in America. When not enjoying campus life, he could be found at the back of his speedboat, taking his frat buddies waterskiing. Following college, he moved to Los Angeles, where he bought a fleet of Ferraris and two gigantic houses in Beverly Hills and Malibu. Heidi Fleiss and her girls were regular visitors. As he told Tatler in 2003, “Eventually it got rough—people were showing up with handguns and drug stuff and it was just total madness.” His drug use was so out of control that he became the inspiration for the obnoxious “Julian” in Less than Zero, Bret Easton Ellis’s novel about rich kids and drugs in 1980s Los Angeles (Robert Downey Jr. played him in the movie). He was in and out of rehab several times, and he came close to dying twice.

When Tamara met him, in July 1998, at the wedding of Henry Dent-Brocklehurst (a fellow heir whom Matthew had met in rehab), all this appeared to be ancient history. Matthew was three years clean, but sobriety had not dulled his charm. The distinct gleam in his eye, which might look to some as slightly crazed, Tamara found exciting. “He will have you on the floor in stitches, laughing,” Tamara says of the initial attraction. “He should have been a Jay Leno or a David Letterman. And I thought he was one of the most handsome men I’d ever seen.” After the Dent-Brocklehurst wedding, to go back to London, he jumped into her car as it was pulling away. “I had two and a half hours to close the deal,” he said. “I knew that car journey would be the most important trip of my life.” He proposed seven months later, in a helicopter hovering above the Mellon mansions in Philadelphia, after reciting his own poetry, which had her in tears. However princess-y her image, friends claim the attraction to Matthew went beyond the money and the pedigree. “She saw a wounded bird that she wanted to love,” says Chamberlain, “because she had once been one herself.” According to Tamara, he promised he would never go back to using. If he did, she warned, she would leave him.

No expense was spared at the white-tie wedding, held at Blenheim Palace, home of the 11th Duke of Marlborough and birthplace of Winston Churchill. Her dress was by Valentino; 41 carats of Harry Winston diamonds hung around her neck. “Oh, Such a Perfect Day,” read the headline of the eight-page spread in Tatler, written by Chamberlain. (The wedding was also given a spread in American Vogue.) Privately, though, her friends were worried about the union. “We saw the whole thing very clearly,” says her friend Arabella Spiro. “There was no ‘Oh, maybe it will work out.’ It was ‘Oh, what are you doing?’ But you couldn’t say that to Tamara, because she looked really happy with him and wanted it so much. You’re kind of hoping that maybe you’re the one who’s seeing things not correctly.”

Matthew moved from Los Angeles to London, and the two settled into a beautiful Belgravia apartment, which was promptly photographed for House & Garden. As her friends expected, the problems started right away, stemming, initially, from a kind of culture clash. With the exception of stints in Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s press office and in Los Angeles as a “rap producer,” Matthew had never held a real job, nor was he seeking to find one in any serious way. And so, while he was accepted into London society, he had trouble talking to people, especially the men. “London is really a working city,” says Tamara. “You go out to dinner, and all the guys are in banking or doing the same thing you do…. Who knows what anybody does in L.A.? You could be a producer, and everyone is hanging out at a coffee shop.” Matthew often had nothing better to do but follow her around, like a bored child at a museum, to the shoe factories in Italy.

Regardless of his thin résumé, those around him found him increasingly pompous. He routinely mentioned that he was “American royalty.” On one occasion he told Glenn Spiro, Arabella’s husband, that he was “six-generations Ivy League.” (Glenn, who wishes Matthew only the best, places the blame for Matthew’s arrogance squarely on his family.)

The most important person in Tamara’s life—her father—grew to dislike his son-in-law. “He was not impressed,” Tamara says. Eventually, Matthew, having picked up a few things while at the shoe factories, worked on his own line of shoes, called Harry’s of London, named after his maternal grandfather, a rich dandy. It was not particularly time-consuming work, however; the shoes, appropriately, were rich-guy loafers, emblazoned with the image of a stork, the Mellon-family crest.

By the time Matthew hosted a yacht holiday, in December 2000, he was raw with vulnerability and primed to blow. The group included Tamara’s closest friends, and the plan was to sail from Nassau to Harbour Island, in the Bahamas. But partway into their journey, they saw a storm approaching. It was too late to turn back; the sea was churning.

“It was a catalyst, that storm,” Chamberlain recalls. “I remember I was very scared and nearly everyone was throwing up.” Matthew was running from deck to deck in an excitable, agitated state, asking why everyone was so scared. “I think he felt responsible because he was our host, and he had let us down,” Chamberlain says, “which of course he hadn’t; it was just a storm.”

They arrived safely on Harbour Island, but by that time his demons had gotten the better of him. All the girls stayed on board that night, and the boys went out to nightclubs. There, after more than four years of sobriety, Matthew lost control and gave in to his old habits. When he returned to the boat that night, he became paranoid and disappeared into the guest bathroom for two hours.

From that moment on, life with Matthew became unpredictable and terrifying. He’d shut himself in the kitchen, curtains drawn. He would go out for a carton of milk and not return for a week—he’d be in one of any number of cities, having hooked up with his local coke “fixer.” Her mornings at work were frequently spent placing calls to his family members, hotels, and various car services, trying to track him down. On at least one occasion, he used a pseudonym—Goldstein—to prevent her from finding him. Hotels would call her, saying that her husband had left without paying the bill, and she’d pick up the tab. It seems Matthew had run out of money. So “he’d spend all of Tamara’s,” says the feisty Arabella Spiro.

His fantasies were chilling. “It started as ‘I was up for four days straight on whatever,’” says a friend, recalling a sober conversation with Matthew about the images that would appear before him when high. “And I said, ‘You’re hallucinating,’ and he got very upset. He said, ‘If that’s what you want to believe.’ After that I said, ‘Fine, I’m going to bed. I can’t argue. There’s no point.’”

While Matthew continued his downward spiral, Tamara’s success was skyrocketing. In 2001, Equinox Luxury Holdings came along and bought Choo out for $25 million, relieving her of the other difficult man in her life. “Some people see him as the underdog,” Tamara says of Choo. “‘She came in and stole his name and did this and did that.’ He was very happy. He went away with a lot of money, and he was very happy. I made him wealthy.” (Choo is back to his bespoke business.) Liberated from Choo, Tamara was on her way to opening 30 Jimmy Choo stores worldwide and putting Jimmy Choos in 50 department stores.

As Tamara’s business got bigger, so did the emotional gap between her and Matthew. Nothing could compel him to take serious steps to get better—not even the upcoming birth of his daughter, due in April 2002. In March, her parents, who were staying at the Peninsula Beverly Hills, saw him there, and Mr. Yeardye pleaded with him to return to his wife in London. Matthew checked himself out of the hotel—and disappeared for eight days, landing, eventually, in a crack den. It took three attempts to get him onto the plane back to London.

“She’s in bed,” Arabella Spiro says. “This poor thing out of her mind with worry that her husband is in a crack den about to drop dead, and they don’t know where he is, and she’s not going, like you’re going, ‘I’m going to kill him! I’m going to kill him!’”

Instead, forgetting the warning she says she had given him when they got married, Tamara stood by him and did her best to drill into his head what she had learned from her own experience with recovery—about the importance of going to meetings, of hanging out with other people who are in the programs, and of going to therapy, but she had little effect. “I wanted to support him,” says Tamara. “He was my daughter’s father, and I wanted her to have a dad, and have a dad that’s well and sober and is in her life.” She rarely even uttered a negative word to friends. On the rare occasion when she did speak to friends, says one confidant, she’d empathize with him. “If you’re an addict, you’re an addict,” she’d say, “and it doesn’t matter how shiny your life is.” In spite of the steps she did take to help him get better, looking back now, she sees herself as having been an enabler.

But after he went on a drug binge on Ibiza in August 2003, Tamara decided she could no longer make excuses for him. She and Matthew had rented a villa from fashion designer and international socialite Jacqueline de Ribes; guests included Elle Macpherson and fiancé Arki Busson, Jade Jagger, and Simon and Yasmin Le Bon, as well as a number of people in Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous whom Tamara had asked to come, in order to keep Matthew from going off the rails. The day was gorgeous, 90 degrees, and the group was sunbathing by the pool, a few of them in close reach of the “Big Book,” the Alcoholics Anonymous bible, in case they got the urge to fall off the wagon in drug-drenched Ibiza. Matthew, however, could not sit still.

“He wanted to go check out a club called Space,” recalls one of the houseguests. “That night, he was obsessed with Valentino. ‘We have to have dinner there. We have to do this. We have to do that.’ You could see the buildup…. It was like a volcano about to explode.” Matthew insisted on going out, so Tamara sent along Glenn Spiro, to baby-sit him. “They walk in. Everyone says, ‘Yeah!,’” recalls a source.

There was no controlling him; he tracked down his Ibiza fixer and scored his drugs. He disappeared from the house for two days. When he returned, in the morning, he was staggering about, drink in hand. “He was wired for sound, that one,” recalls Glenn. With Minty there, Tamara snapped into action. She promptly kicked him out of the Ibiza house, told him it was over between them, and called her father. “I said, ‘I’m leaving Matthew—find me a house. I’m back in 10 days.’” Matthew grabbed a wad of cash from the drawer. “There was a whole lump of it,” says Glenn. “He took it and he was gone.”

“She was such a lady,” says Arabella Spiro. “If you saw her behavior … That your husband’s behaving like that throughout the entire holiday, she just behaved like such a lady. My God, if my husband says one word to me that I don’t like, I’m on him like a feisty old cow!”

Truth be told, Tamara wasn’t a perfect lady. During Matthew’s Ibiza relapse, she gave in to her own physical impulses. The object was one of the N.A.-A.A. houseguests—a 22-year-old onetime party boy named Oscar Humphries (a former intern at VANITY FAIR), who is also the son of the cross-dressing performer Barry Humphries, better known as Dame Edna. Tortured, romantic, and smart, Humphries had been keenly tuned in to what everybody was going through.

“It’s been my experience that when I’m not sober,” Humphries says, “the things in my life that I value, my friendships and my relationships, they deteriorate because we put our addiction before everything else.” He became something of a confidant for Tamara. She also found him incredibly sexy.

For the next few weeks, the young blond boy with the jeans worn in just so remained the distraction she craved. But, for Humphries, it appeared the relationship meant more. In late September 2003, he wrote an article for The Daily Telegraph about his romance with an older, successful woman. He didn’t use her name and changed some of the details—the object of his love was a 40-year-old divorcée with two sons—but otherwise he was describing Tamara, and it was heartfelt. “I love the fact that she is a good mother,” he wrote. “I love the fact that she is humble and wise and has been successful at nearly everything she’s done.” With a touching, youthful glow, he wrote about “the wonderful trips we take together, the nights in bed and the wasted Sunday afternoons.” The phone started ringing. Tabloid reports soon outed the couple and suggested that the affair was the cause of her breakup from her husband. “It was out of control,” says Tamara, who’d had her share of drama. She ended the relationship almost immediately.

“Perhaps it was a slightly naïve decision to publish that article,” Humphries says now. “If it has caused her any problems, then I’m deeply sorry. That was not my intention.” Disappointed after the split, Humphries nursed his wounds in Australia for a year. But Tamara had to return to reality.

Since Ibiza, Matthew had continued his debaucheries, having chartered a private plane for himself and a bunch of fringe celebrities to go to Corfu for a week of hardcore partying. Once he had returned to London, she drove him to an addiction-therapy clinic and told him that she needed time to figure things out. Later, he flew to Los Angeles to check into Promises Clinic, in Malibu, and checked out a few hours later, telling friends that he was “misbehaving.” One of them demanded that he go to Arizona to see a specialist in childhood trauma and sexual addiction. He traveled by stretch limo, a six-hour journey, doing cocaine most of the way. The detox regime there, he said later, was “brutal.” In the middle of his stay, Tamara came to visit, and Mathew begged her to give him one more chance, offering to pay her a significant sum of money if he ever relapsed again. She refused.

When Matthew got out of the program, in November 2003, in time for the launch of his shoe line at Harvey Nichols, Tamara was by his side. While they were not living together, he still hoped they would work things out; that night, he told a reporter that “our marriage remains very much on.”

“He was not understanding,” says Tamara. “I went to the launch of Harry’s to be supportive, not with any intention of getting back together.” That same day, the Evening Standard ran a mea culpa interview he had given to his friend William Cash in an attempt to win her back. “I was crying every day,” he told Cash about his months in rehab. “Tears about what I had done…. What I did was a horrible thing to put one’s wife through. That is a guilt I’ll have to carry around for the rest of my life.”

Sitting in her kitchen, Tamara looks at the newspaper article, which she keeps in a beaded box, along with other press clippings. She is grateful, she explains, that Matthew corrected the misconception that it was Humphries who had broken up the marriage. But that’s all. “It’s quite sad,” she sighs, putting it away.

But worse was yet to come. In February, 10 months after the sudden death of her father, which was followed by what Tamara says was a flagrantly erroneous tabloid article claiming that he had been an associate of the gangster brothers known as the Krays, she was in for another shock. A couple of cops ended up at her apartment. They said they wanted to check the computers. Matthew was promptly arrested on suspicion of phone-tapping and computer-hacking offenses as part of an ongoing Scotland Yard investigation into a detective agency. He has denied any involvement. As for Tamara, she no longer uses her landline.

The crowning blow came when she received a letter saying that he was planning to sue her for joint custody and an unspecified sum of money, claiming that Jimmy Choo was built on the Mellon name.

“I was floored by that,” Tamara says. “He believes the Mellon name made Jimmy Choo…. People buy the shoes because of his name?” she says, shaking her head in disbelief. “It’s quite polluted.” She picks up another clipping from her box. There’s a picture of a rangy divorce attorney named Raymond Tooth, who has represented the underdog wives in the Eric Clapton—Patti Boyd and Jude Law—Sadie Frost divorces and who is nicknamed “Jaws.”

“That’s his lawyer,” says Tamara. “So it’s a fight.”

The trial is set for October. In one corner is Matthew, who’s been keeping company with Noelle Reno, a 23-year-old aspiring actress, who is said to have a thing for men with Learjets. He’s still got Harry’s of London shoes, but the Mellon name has not worked its magic with his own business in the way he believes it did with Jimmy Choo. The line is being sold at Harrods and Saks, but Harvey Nichols and Selfridges have discontinued it after one season. Recently, he mounted a photo exhibition, at his friend Tim Jefferies’s Hamiltons Gallery, of the feet of famous pals—Val Kilmer and Lionel Richie—wearing Harry’s shoes. This came a number of months after word got out about Tamara’s new book, Four Inches, featuring such famous women as Kate Moss and Sarah Ferguson in the nude wearing just Jimmy Choos, the proceeds of which will go to the Elton John AIDS Foundation. As Matthew waits to learn whether he will be charged in the bugging investigation, his entire computer system has reportedly been confiscated. As for his drug use, Tamara says that she believes he is clean, but almost everyone else sounds less convinced.

Tamara, meanwhile, has put to rest the princess image for good. In spite of her rage, she still wants her daughter to see her father; she allows him to see her twice a week, in the presence of a nanny. One still even sees her instinct to protect him.

“She has behaved in an incredibly dignified way, given the extraordinary situation that has arisen,” says Nat Rothschild, a banking heir and a highly regarded member of the international jet set.

Arabella Spiro spells it out. “I don’t know one woman who’d say, ‘I don’t want anything. You have the house—I’m going to rent myself a place. I’m going to take care of our daughter. You don’t have to worry about anything.’ She doesn’t get anything. And then a few months later, the guy turns around and is suing her for her money.”

“She had a tough time, and it’s not like she sailed through it,” says another friend. “But imagine, many, many girls in her position would have made a huge meal of it.”

To this day, many insiders see her as overly forgiving, overly naïve, when it comes to Matthew. “She feels sorry for him,” says one who believes Tamara has underestimated how intense his response will be.

Whatever the case, she has never stood taller. Within the next two years, she estimates, there will be 50 Jimmy Choo stores worldwide as they break into the Asian market. She has just dropped a rumored $11 million on a house in Los Angeles. In her personal life, she has never been more sought after. Chamberlain recalls that last Christmas holiday in St. Barth’s, on Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen’s yacht, two famous men were pursuing her. Chamberlain and Spiro spent their time manning port and starboard, to give her a chance to talk to each. “It was like someone had sprinkled something on her,” Chamberlain says. “They were queuing up.”

Another of her suitors is Flavio Briatore, the 55-year-old managing director of the Renault Formula One team. “I adore him,” says Tamara, who claims that she is not dating him. She has also been hanging out with Joe Francis, the man we have to thank for the Girls Gone Wild videos, in which drunken American co-eds flash their breasts. “I adore him,” she says, explaining how “misunderstood” he is. With the possible exception of hip-hop artist Pharrell Williams and Brad Pitt, a crush she has yet to actually meet, the Matthew saga has clearly not tempered her attraction to racy, potentially bad-news guys. “My mother always said if there’s someone inappropriate within a hundred-mile radius, I will date him,” says Mellon. “That’s the chink in my armor.”

But a Matthew Mellon—type saga is not likely to happen again. “I’ve never been happier than I am today,” says Mellon. “Sometimes you don’t realize what you’re going through until you’re out of it. You don’t realize what you’re doing. You don’t realize where you find the strength to carry on. I feel now that I don’t want to get married again. I have the most gorgeous little daughter. I’d love to have another child, but I’m not really worried about having children. I’m completely financially independent. I don’t need anybody. It’s what I’ve always wanted. I feel very liberated and I’m having a ball.” And why not? Doesn’t every role model deserve to act like a princess once in a while?

Riding up an elevator in a no-frills office building at an unremarkable address, a short, middle-aged man looks up at the young guy in the backward baseball cap. “Haven’t I seen you somewhere?” the man asks, squinting his eyes. Bingo. “You’re that kid from Titanic.”

“Yeah,” says Leonardo DiCaprio, smiling awkwardly.

“Listen, I got a line of apparel. How’d you like to be the face
of the company?”

“Thanks,” says DiCaprio as the doors open and he heads toward his six-person production company, “but I really don’t do that kind of stuff.”

“Really? Why not?” the man asks, hands out, apparently mystified.

It’s little surprise that some people think of DiCaprio as the “kid from Titanic.” It’s been seven years since Titanic, the biggest blockbuster of all time, but DiCaprio, who is just turning 30 this month, has done only four films in the interim, not counting a cameo in Woody Allen’s Celebrity. The first two—The Beach and The Man in the Iron Mask—were critically skewered. The second two, Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York and Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me if You Can, strong as they were, didn’t amount to a one-two-punch comeback.

Who can forget that foremost trend of the late 90s, Leomania? On posters and Web sites, and in teen magazines and paperbacks throughout the land, Leo’s dreamy blue eyes came piercing out from beneath a floppy blond forelock. Wherever he set foot, Leo induced the kind of insane shrieking not heard since the days of the young Paul McCartney. Celine Dion’s epic crescendo—“Near, far, wher-ever you are . . . ”—wafted through every public space. “It was like a surreal Fellini film,” says DiCaprio with a sigh, this afternoon in the lush gardens of the Hotel Bel-Air. Then, inevitably, the backlash set in, and the New York Post gleefully reported that kids could be found logging on to www.LeonardoDiCaprioFullyBites.com. Dion retired, before taking up residence at Caesars Palace, in Las Vegas. DiCaprio was sharing an office building with apparel salesmen who didn’t know his name. The memory among film people of the great potential suggested by his films from 1993, This Boy’s Life and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, was beginning to fade.

No longer. With Scorsese’s The Aviator, a thrilling film about the early years of Howard Hughes, and Scorsese’s best since GoodFellas, DiCaprio has fulfilled the promise of 11 years ago and become the most compelling actor of the aging Hughes many people envision—“the hairy wolfman that sat up in his suite and overlooked the lights of Vegas,” as DiCaprio puts it—the film focuses on the young Hughes, a self-made, brash visionary, driven by the need to break all boundaries in his path, in aviation, filmmaking, and collecting the world’s most beautiful women. Which is not to say that we are denied a peek at the hairy wolfman. Throughout the film, Hughes’s obsessive compulsive disorder (not yet a recognized condition) increasingly takes hold, causing him, for example, to repeat phrases over and over and break down at the sight of a spot on another person’s suit. Toward the end, a buck-naked Hughes holes up for weeks in his screening room, where he conducts what amounts to a deranged art-and-science experiment with bottles of his own urine.

In scene after scene, DiCaprio balances the swashbuckling genius who seduces Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, and Jean Harlow with the freakish paranoiac, too frightened of germs to open the bathroom door, radiating such charisma it is impossible to take one’s eyes off him. “The young Howard Hughes played by the young Leonardo DiCaprio is very strong and attractive,” Scorsese says, in an understatement, recalling his gut feeling about the role. But the director becomes mystical when talking about DiCaprio’s performance. “There are ‘shape changers,’” says Scorsese. “People who can change shape. This comes from ancient folklore or sagas from the North where men change shape in battle. They’d become ferocious animals or something. . . . We found ourselves surprised at certain points of the picture when Leo would walk on the set. It was Howard, or at least it was our version of Howard . . . I hadn’t seen that happen for a long time in pictures.” For Scorsese, working with DiCaprio reminds him of his early days with another young Italian-American actor, Robert De Niro. “It is reminiscent of that process,” Scorsese says. “It’s an unrelenting process of probing and asking questions and trying things out.” He adds, “It makes me feel good. It makes me feel sort of complete, working as a director with an actor.”

DiCaprio has been working on this movie, in a certain way, since he was 21, almost a third of his life. “I read a book about Howard Hughes, by Peter Harry Brown, and I’d never known anything about the guy,” says DiCaprio, who is affable and easygoing but speaks with intensity, often locking eyes to indicate how important a topic is to him. Fascinated—and driven to read every book about Hughes out there—DiCaprio quickly realized there were two big hurdles in bringing Hughes’s life to the screen: first, in Hollywood, pictures about Howard Hughes were perpetually in the works; second, DiCaprio was too young to play him. Too young, at least, to play the old loon, entwined by his own fingernails. Then a notion dawned on him: there was a younger Hughes who hadn’t been explored. “He symbolized the changing of our country, the industrial-revolution pioneers who took amazing chances,” says DiCaprio. “He romanced all the women that there were to possibly romance. He had the balls to really finance films that were really groundbreaking. He made the first not just million-dollar movie but first $4 million movie in Hell’s Angels [a 1930 Jean Harlow film]. And he put his own money into it! That’s like one man financing, you know, Titanic or something!”

 

Equipped with this notion, DiCaprio went around to several
producers, landing, after some time, with Michael
Mann. Mann got John Logan (Gladiator, The Last Samurai)
to develop the script. Fresh off Ali, Mann felt that he couldn’t
do another major biopic for five years and made the difficult
decision to drop out as director, while remaining attached as
a producer. But he would part with directing the project only
if it ended up in the right hands. That meant one person.

 

Scorsese remembers the call from Rick Yorn, his and DiCaprio’s
manager: “He said, ‘I think I’ve got something I want
you to read.’ I said, ‘What? What is it?,’ ’cause I was busy on
Gangs. He said, ‘I’m not going to tell you what it is.’ I said, ‘All
right, don’t tell me—just send it.’ So he sent it, and I didn’t know
anything about it. It was in my lap and it said The Aviator. Now,
I’ve been on record many times saying how much I’m not a fan
of flying. I’m fascinated by flying, but I have a serious problem
with it. So I opened the cover and I looked and it said, ‘John
Logan.’ I said, ‘O.K., I know him.’ So I started reading . . . ”
Logan’s script was remarkably complete, the narrative and details
so fully fleshed out that Scorsese could see that relatively
little needed to be reworked to take the project from page to
screen. In fact, the making of the film, which cost more than
$100 million and was mostly financed by Graham King, was
free of any big-budget-production nightmares.

 

DiCaprio is on an almost Hughes-ian mission to analyze the
film from every angle. He talks about a Django Reinhardt
tune he got in there by begging Scorsese. “You wouldn’t even
know what I’m talking about, but it’s my secret treasure,” DiCaprio
says. “It’s the most tense piece of music you’ve ever
heard.” He praises his co-stars, such as Alan Alda, who plays
Senator Ralph Owen Brewster, the man intent on bringing
Hughes down. “He’s more of a slimeball than anybody [who]
could play that role. He was perfect. . . . His giant hands that he
flips around like flippers.” He talks about his favorite scene, in
which Hughes, falling in love with Katharine Hepburn (played
by Cate Blanchett), offers her a sip from his milk bottle. “Nobody
could touch the rim of the milk that he drinks. And then
the one moment—he’s sitting there looking at the milk, staring
at it and wondering, Am I going to give over this part of myself?
And he pours it into her mouth.” He wants to know your
favorite scene. Name it and he needs to know why, and what
other scenes you liked. His Hotel Bel-Air surroundings send him
into an Aviator reverie. “Why don’t you dig up one of your bungalow
girls?” he says—a couple of times, actually—out of the
blue, quoting Ava Gardner, played by Kate Beckinsale in the
film. “There are 20 stashed in the Bel-Air.”

 

It’s not narcissism that has DiCaprio going on about his
new movie. He is as passionate, as curious and analytical,
when it comes to just about everything, particularly about
subjects that your average young movie star rarely considers.
His political activism, for example, far from being standard
Hollywood Bush-hate, is rooted in a genuine feeling for the
environment that he has had since he was a kid watching nature
shows. He is fascinated by history—not just the history
of human beings, but the history of the earth and its creatures.
He will talk about extinct lizards, brachiosaurs, Pompeii,
or a recent exhibition of human body parts in such long
stretches that you begin to feel you’re hanging out with an incredibly
precocious 11-year-old. In fact, the longer he talks,
the more DiCaprio emerges as a deeply sensitive and wildly
imaginative nerd-boy, whose massive fame and ability to get
laid as often as he wants seem like bonuses that he never
sought but that just happened.

 

As Meryl Streep, his co-star in the 1996 movie Marvin’s
Room, puts it, “Leo is possessed of the wild gene—unpredictability—which
makes his career seem
to defy categorization,
his life careen along the cliff edge,
and his work vivid and bright and exciting.”
Indeed, in a town obsessed with classifying
its young as either “movie star” or
“actor,” DiCaprio is the wonderful anomaly—both.
His trappings, certainly, are all
very “Hollywood.” He’s got the $20 million
price tag, the supermodel (Gisele Bündchen),
and the tight group of “homeys,”
who include actors Tobey Maguire and
Kevin Connolly (who plays the beleaguered
best friend–script picker to the Leo-esque
heartthrob movie star in the HBO show
Entourage), and he routinely calls people
“dawg.” But his mind is anything but.

 

You would be hard-pressed, for example,
to meet a Hollywood actor as eager as
DiCaprio to talk about his grandmother.
“Oma,” says DiCaprio, smiling broadly, referring
to Grandma Helene, who was the wife
of a coal miner and lives in the German
town of . . . “Ör-Er-ken-schwick,” Leo says,
savoring each syllable. “I love spending as
much time as I can with her because she is
literally gangsta. And I mean that with an
a.” Consider the private tour of the Musée
Picasso, in Paris, that she and Leo were given
by Picasso’s grandson Olivier. Though
thoroughly unimpressed by the Cubist’s
work, Oma heeded her grandson’s wish that
she not say anything negative in front of Picasso’s
relative. “She was being very good
up until he asked her opinion,” recalls DiCaprio.
“‘So what do you think of this
painting?’ She goes, ‘You could tell me that
was a snake, a flower, or a dog, and I would
say, “O.K.” You know why? Because it looks
like nothing.’” DiCaprio laughs proudly. “She
will tell people exactly what she thinks to
their face and look them in the eye. And
she knows you ain’t going to do shit, ’cause
she’s 89 years old.”

 

Oma is dear to DiCaprio also because
she saved the life of his mother, Irmelin,
during World War II, when she was a toddler,
after a broken leg had landed her in a
German hospital. “All these refugees from
the war and all the soldiers came into the
hospital,” he says. “She ended up contracting
five or six major illnesses and stayed for
two and a half, three years. My grandmother
basically came every day and nursed her
back to health because the nurses didn’t
have time. They basically left her for dead.
When you see a picture of my mother, it’s
heartbreaking. It brings tears to my eyes
knowing what she’s been through in her
life. I have a picture of her, her first photograph,
with this tiny little skirt, and she’s
emaciated, with a belly like this,” he says,
gesturing to indicate the size of a beach ball.
“She had a belly full of worms.” DiCaprio is
so over the moon about his mom and Oma
that he insists they appear as extras in almost
all of his movies.

 

Life significantly improved for Irmelin
when she moved to New York in the early
1960s and attended City College, where she
met an Italian-American hippie asbestos installer
and comic-book dealer named George
DiCaprio. “He’s probably one of the most
intelligent people I’ve ever met,” says Leo of
his father, who’s one of his chief guides in
picking projects and still has the same long
hair. After Irmelin became pregnant with
Leo, the couple decided to move to Los Angeles
“in hopes of the great western ideals of
a better life.” They ended up in Hollywood,
near the Waterbed Hotel and a major heroindistribution
area, and George and Irmelin
split up a year after their son was born.

 

It would seem an unlikely beginning for a
successful life, but thanks to his parents
DiCaprio received a remarkable education in
both mainstream art and the underground,
anti-Establishment variety. There were always
neat guys hanging around Dad’s house, such
as the iconoclastic cartoonists
R. Crumb and Harvey Pekar,
and a lot of “dressing up like
mud men—you know.” As for
Mom, DiCaprio routinely emphasizes
the sacrifices she
made to get him the best education,
at the specialized magnet
school called the Center for
Enriched Studies. “She drove
45 minutes there every day and
back. So she spent, you know,
every day, every weekday of
her life, three hours a day, to
make sure that I didn’t go to
just any normal school.” According
to Steven Spielberg,
“Leo’s humanity in all the
characters he’s thus far played
can be traced directly back to
how close he is to every single
member of his family.”

 

Still, young Leo spent a
good deal of time getting beaten
up by neighborhood bullies.
“I was small, and I was a
smart-ass. That’s a deadly combination,”
says DiCaprio, who spent the mid-
80s in silver pants, leather gloves, and a
punky haircut. He got his first performance
experience break-dancing. “I don’t want to
toot my own horn, but I was second place
in the Ör-Erkenschwick break-dance competition,
in Germany,” says DiCaprio. “One
out of 16 German children.” A couple of acting
gigs on Battlestar Galactica and Eight Is
Enough done by his stepbrother, Adam Farrar
(son of his father’s second wife), inspired
him to delve into the dangerous world of
child acting.

 

DiCaprio’s early experiences with the cutthroat
world of Hollywood seem indelibly
marked in his psyche, and he talks about
them so earnestly, it’s hard at first to know
whether he’s joking. He’s not. First, there
was his painful meeting with the casting
agent at age 11. “I remember them lining
us up like cattle. There were eight boys. A
woman comes up and says, ‘O.K., no, no,
yes, yes, no, no, no, yes. Thank you.’” Little
Leo was a “no,” and he was traumatized. “I
thought that that was my one chance into
the business and that the community was
now against me.” It took three years for the
wound to heal. At age 14, he picked up the
pieces and tried again, landing an agent and
a Matchbox-car commercial. But then the
offers dried up. “I hadn’t gotten a job in a
year and a half,” he says. “That’s like over a
hundred auditions. You get pretty disillusioned.
. . . One day I just decided I hated
everyone. I hated all these casting directors.
I hated them all. . . . I was ready to quit.”
Along came the chance to do a television
show called Parenthood, based on the 1989
Steve Martin movie. DiCaprio was up for the
role that Joaquin Phoenix had had in the
movie. He analyzed Phoenix’s performance
as if he were studying Olivier to play Richard
III, and landed the part. This led to no less
a role than Josh in Critters 3, a no-budget
science-fiction movie made in a warehouse,
and finally a recurring role on the television
show Growing Pains, as a homeless kid who
lives in a closet at Kirk Cameron’s school.

 

For many a child actor, the next step
might have been a coke addiction or
Laundromat robberies. DiCaprio, instead,
was led to Robert De Niro. He was up for
This Boy’s Life, about a kid abused by his
mom’s volatile boyfriend, who’s obsessed with
making a man out of him. All DiCaprio knew,
prior to the audition, was that De Niro was
really good in this movie Midnight Run,
and what his dad had told him when they
went to see it: “See this guy? Now, this guy
is cool. His name is Robert De Niro, O.K.?
You remember that name. He’s cool.” Seeing
how nervous the other kids were before
their audition with De Niro (among them
was Tobey Maguire), 18-year-old DiCaprio
understood he had to do something special
to stand out. “I just got up and screamed,
‘Nooooo!’ . . . I was right in front of his
face and, like, veins pumping. I’ll never forget
his face. He burst into hysterical laughter
. . . I thought I had bombed that ship.”
De Niro, who’d been inclined
to go with another boy, was
swayed.

 

For DiCaprio, the experience
of making the film was
a baptism of fire. “When [De
Niro] showed up on the set,
it was like the Pope showed
up,” recalls DiCaprio. “Everything
is on lockdown. ‘Shh,
shh, quiet.’” But Leo, meanwhile,
couldn’t help trying
to provoke his co-star Ellen
Barkin with wiseass little
barbs. “It was good for the
part,” recalls De Niro, who
looked on with amusement.
When it came time for the
two to do scenes together,
DiCaprio found himself totally
perplexed when his older
co-star, say, strayed from
the script. “I don’t know what
the hell is going on,” he says,
remembering his mind-set.
“If he says something that’s
not on the page, do I say,
‘O.K., that was wrong’? ‘Oh, Bob, you said
the wrong line’? See, no, I was supposed to
come back and say something. I had no
idea how it worked.” But De Niro was impressed
enough to let Scorsese know that
this was a kid to look out for. DiCaprio,
meanwhile, credits the film’s director, Michael
Caton-Jones, for guiding him through
every step and paving the way for him to
have “the ultimate trust [in directors], because
that’s how I was brought into this
movie world, by Michael Caton-Jones literally
taking me under his wing.”

 

By the time DiCaprio was working on his
next film, Lasse Hallström’s What’s Eating
Gilbert Grape (1993), a subtle, moving drama
about a family burdened by a piano-size,
immobile mother, he was left to his own devices.
“Lasse didn’t really tell me anything
about actually what he thought I should do.
He just said, ‘Do what you think.’” So Di-
Caprio embarked on his first experience with
research—what he refers to as “doing your
homework.” He spent time at a home for
mentally challenged children and compiled a
list of “a couple of hundred little attributes.”
He dutifully went to Hallström to go through
the ones he wanted to try, and Hallström essentially
waved him off—fine, fine, fine. “It
was the most freedom I had ever had with
anything I’d ever done,” DiCaprio says.
Viewing the movie, many, including Scorsese,
couldn’t believe this kid wasn’t really mentally
challenged. But his performance was far
more than a really good imitation of a retarded
boy. Anybody who remembers Arnie’s
hopeless reliance on his brother, played by
Johnny Depp, or his heartbreaking realization
that his mother was not going to wake up
from her nap saw that here was an actor with
extraordinary vulnerability, serious chops,
and a face every bit as cute as Depp’s.

 

DiCaprio vividly remembers the actor
Brendan Fraser telling him that he was really
good in the movie, and how taken aback
he was at the compliment. The praise snowballed.
He earned an Oscar nomination for
best supporting actor. Magazines started
putting him on their covers. Suddenly, he
was the next Brando—and DiCaprio started
to believe it, too. “As soon as enough people
give you enough compliments, and you’re
wielding more power than you’ve ever had
in your life, it’s not that you . . . become an
arrogant little prick, or become rude to people
. . . but you get a false sense of your own
importance and what you’ve accomplished,”
says DiCaprio. “You actually think you’ve altered
the course of history.” (He notes that
he sees the same phenomenon happening
with some of today’s young actors. A pure
professional, he won’t name names.)

 

His father helped keep him in line and
reminded him that it was all about the
work. For his countercultural dad, that meant
work that was unusual. He guided him to
two projects, both about anti-Establishment
writers, The Basketball Diaries, based on
the junkie memoirs of Jim Carroll, and Total
Eclipse, about the tumultuous affair between
French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine.
While The Basketball Diaries had a
kind of built-in cool that appealed to a young
actor, the latter required more convincing.
“Let me explain to you who this guy [Rimbaud]
was,” DiCaprio’s father said to him.
“He was a rebel of his time, he was the
James Dean of the poet world. . . . He was
a radical artist, and you need to pay attention
to this.” DiCaprio was sold by the antibourgeoisie
pitch. “It’s like, who wouldn’t
want to play Louis Armstrong?” says DiCaprio.
“Someone who came in when most
music in America was stepdancing and foxtrot
and ‘Grab your partner.’” He was less
enthusiastic about the make-out scenes with
Verlaine, played by David Thewlis, the somewhat
ostrich-like actor from Mike Leigh’s
Naked. “[It’s] one thing I have to pat myself
on the back for. I did not want to do that,”
DiCaprio says. “I’m not going to sit here and
be the artist who says, I pushed it—I grabbed
Thewlis by the back of the hair . . . ”

 

Playing a gay man, however, seemed to
do nothing to hurt his appeal to the girls.
His next film was Baz Luhrmann’s William
Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, and at the
premiere DiCaprio’s manager, Rick Yorn,
saw the seeds of Leo-mania. “Leo and I were
walking in and . . . there were all these young
girls, kids, behind a barricade, and they broke
through,” recalls Yorn, an enthusiastic, excitable
sort. “He was like a Beatle. They’re
screaming and it was like, ‘Whoa . . . ’ That
hadn’t happened before. I had seen that
happen with other people, but not at that
level. . . . I called back to L.A. and talked to
some people, and I was like, ‘God, this is going
to be just a taste.’”

 

Yorn, wanting a major hit for his client,
brought him Titanic. “I was resisting it for a
long, long, long time,” DiCaprio says of the
movie. “He laughed at me and it’s like, ‘No
chance,’” Yorn recalls of DiCaprio’s reaction
to the script. There was no heroin, no angry
poetry writing, no mental retardation—nothing!
Except, that is, for Kate Winslet, whose
acting cred, like DiCaprio’s, was top-drawer.
“We were both having the same reservations,”
DiCaprio says. They finally decided,
If you jump, I jump, and made the movie.

 

There has been much speculation that DiCaprio
thought director James Cameron was
an arrogant jackass on the set and that they
often came to blows. But the actor deconstructs
the persona of Jim “King of the
World” Cameron with relative charity. “It
takes somebody with a general-like attitude
to storm the beaches of Normandy, to start
an epic battle, which is what this film was to
me,” he says. Reliving the details of the shoot
is exhausting for him. “You’re sitting in a fivestory
ship that has been re-created to scale
that’s on hydraulics. And the hydraulics are
pushing the bow of the ship into the ocean.
And a crew of 400 is sitting there as a wall
of water is shooting itself through one of the
floors directly at you. And there’s lights on
20 different cranes that are blasting down on
you, and the director coming in on another
crane through the window. I mean it, it was,
I mean it was—I can’t even describe it.”

 

But the real craziness came after the
movie’s release. The surreality of the
Leo-mania crystallized one day when he
was traveling in Europe and a 14-year-old
girl grabbed his leg and held on for dear
life. “I looked at her and she just pressed
her head against my leg,” DiCaprio recalls.
“And I said, ‘Hi . . . What are you doing,
sweetheart?’ And she kept clutching. There
was just a sort of obsessed look in her eye.
She wasn’t looking at me, though, [ just] my
leg, I guess. And I looked at her and I sort
of grabbed her face and said, ‘Hi, it’s O.K.,
no, you can, you can get off my leg. It’s fine.’
She kept saying, ‘No, no, no, no!’ I said,
‘No, no.’ I had to gently pry her hands off.”

 

Some girls got considerably luckier. According
to press accounts, he went through
a slew of models (Kate Moss, Helena Christensen,
Eva Herzigova, Amber Valetta, Bridget
Hall) and actresses, including Demi
Moore. (Bruce Willis’s reaction was, reportedly,
“He’ll be Leonardo DeCapitated when
I get home.”) DiCaprio won’t comment on
any specifics, but he’s not a total dodger. “I
had fun,” he says with a twinkle in his eye.
He is quick to point out, however, that he
couldn’t sleep with every woman he wanted,
and that actually liking people is important
to swordsmen, too. “You always ask
yourself, [Could I be in love with this one?]
You’re always yearning for a partner in life.”

 

Perhaps. But, for the tabloids, 23-yearold
Leo’s night-crawling with a posse—that
then included Dana Giacchetto, the financial
manager who went to prison for embezzling
from his clients (including DiCaprio),
and David Blaine, the magician prone to
death-defying but annoying stunts—was an
irresistible opportunity to snark. They reveled
in the alleged episode in which Leo’s
pals beat up screenwriter Roger Wilson, the
boyfriend of Elizabeth Berkley, apparently
because Berkley had refused Leo’s advances.
(Charges were dismissed.) They informed
us that Leo was sighted drinking out of a paper
bag.

 

Even reputable magazines jumped on the
bandwagon, culminating in an inane piece
in Time headlined WHAT’S EATING LEONARDO
DICAPRIO?, in which writer Joel Stein, who’d
begged DiCaprio to let him tag along while
he bought groceries, decided to focus his
profile on what DiCaprio gets at Ralphs.
“He prints my grocery list. . . . It’s like,
‘Chuck steak, and deodorant, and broccoli,’”
recalls DiCaprio. “I seemed like the
most immature, juvenile punk in all of
these articles that were written about me.”
In spite of the great sex with models, the
whole post-Titanic chapter seems to make
him shiver. Today, he admits that he wishes
he had done Boogie Nights, which he turned
down for Titanic.

 

It didn’t help his public image that DiCaprio
took two years to choose his next
project. “Some people say to me, ‘Oh, you
were basking in the glory of being famous.’”
Instead, DiCaprio claims, “I wanted
to make sure that I was being chosen
for a movie for the right reasons. . . . [You]
wait for the ashes to settle, and regroup.”

 

After being sent thousands of scripts, and
reportedly turning down everything from
Spider-Man to American Psycho, DiCaprio
picked The Beach, based on the novel by
Alex Garland, about an American backpacker
in Thailand who falls in with a secret
Utopian community on an island
Shangri-la. While DiCaprio still considers
the work an important commentary on
such issues as globalization and the destruction
of primitive cultures, the film was
generally panned. “Empty-headed,” “seriously
confused,” a “Benetton take on Lord
of the Flies,” the critics said. DiCaprio was
disappointed. “I don’t think people really
gave it a chance . . . but I totally expected
whatever might follow up [Titanic] was going
to be looked [at] under a microscope.”
As if that weren’t bad enough, Asian environmentalists
accused DiCaprio and the
crew, quite ridiculously, of tearing up the
beach on which they had filmed.

 

All this was significantly softened by the
entrance into DiCaprio’s life of Martin
Scorsese. A die-hard fan of the director’s,
DiCaprio had been hearing of Scorsese’s
famed dream project about New York’s
Five Points district in the mid–19th century,
Gangs of New York, since he was 18. He
changed agencies just to get close to him—
and closer to the project. As it turns out,
Scorsese had been quietly staking out DiCaprio,
too, ever since De Niro had given
him the heads-up back in ’93. The call came
while DiCaprio was shooting The Beach. “I
remember eating my pad Thai and being
overjoyed.”

 

DiCaprio approached the role of Amsterdam,
a young apprentice thug, with the
kind of all-transforming intensity that Robert
De Niro brought to playing Jake La
Motta in Raging Bull. “I came in that
movie looking like a billy goat,” says DiCaprio,
who recalls the mangy mop of hair
growing under his chin and the fact that he
was bench-pressing 250 pounds. “I was
Johnny Protein Shake.” It served him well
for the fight scenes he had with Daniel
Day-Lewis, who played Bill the Butcher, the
man whom DiCaprio kills to avenge the
murder of his father. “We’d want to really
get into it, so we’d wrestle for five minutes
before,” DiCaprio recalls. “We’d beat the
crap out of each other and then really, like,
try to make these hits look real. And we’d
have tons of leather on, and straps, and
makeup. Blood bursting . . . blood caked
on our face and then the dirt getting in the
blood, and then our eyes. Doing this all
day.” In spite of some impressed reviews
for DiCaprio, it was Day-Lewis who stole
the movie and walked off with the bestactor
Oscar nomination. Scorsese lost out in
the best-director category to Roman Polanski
for The Pianist.

 

Like most serious movie fans, that Scorsese
has never received an Oscar—that his
direction of GoodFellas lost to Kevin Costner’s
for Dances with Wolves—DiCaprio believes
is a travesty of justice on a par with
Florida 2000. “He doesn’t care at this
point,” says DiCaprio, “but I want to see
him up there accepting an Oscar. I want
the film community to recognize him. I
really, really do.” The odds are good with
The Aviator. Unlike Gangs of New York, in
which New York of the mid–19th century
became a third character in the movie, the
new collaboration between Scorsese and
DiCaprio—two masters of their respective
fields—has a single, laserlike focus. “I wanted
to express . . . the obsession with speed,”
says Scorsese, who has been awed by the
World War I aviation fight scenes in
Hughes’s Hell’s Angels ever since he first
saw the film, in William K. Everson’s class
at N.Y.U. in the 1960s. “Speed, speed,
speed, always being faster, faster, doing five
films at once . . . seeing a thousand women
at once. This voracious appetite for speed,
this is what interested me in the picture, because
the bottom line, underneath it all he’s
destroying himself ultimately.”

 

Recalling the main sequence of Hughes’s
breakdown in the screening room, Scorsese
reveals the grueling, exacting, almost scientific
approach he and DiCaprio followed
during filming. “[The sequence] took about
two weeks of shooting, and Leo had to go
through seven hours of makeup a day. . . .
Every gesture you see there, every move of
his body, even the blinking of his eyes, was
worked on way in advance and ultimately on
the set.” He might do as many as 20 takes,
“each one slightly different in terms of the
intensity of the disorder—including with a
nervous cough, twitches, touching his knee,
as I say, eye blinking. Soft version, soft readings,
stronger readings, stranger readings.”

 

Cate Blanchett describes just how immersed
DiCaprio had become in Hughes’s
madness. “It was through the voice that
you hear the history, the pain, the psychology
of the character,” she says, recalling the
scene in which her Hepburn speaks with
Leo’s Hughes from the other side of the
screening-room door, without laying eyes
on him. “Just hearing his voice through the
door, I found it heartbreaking. That’s when
I really knew that he’d been transported or
that he’d journeyed somewhere that he had
never been before, because there was no
trace of Leo at all.”

 

DiCaprio, a major basketball fan, and
not one to dwell on craft, compares it to being
“in the zone.” “There’s moments when
you’re acting wherein something comes over
you where you all of a sudden feel as if the
entire set and the director aren’t there. . . .
It’s almost like a weird, trance-like state you
get in. . . . Everything is a hundred percent
eliminated.” To the point where DiCaprio at
times felt he was nearly going mad himself.
In one scene, for example, Hughes goes on
an obsessive-compulsive roll, frantically repeating,
“Show me all the blueprints, show
me all the blueprints, show me all the blueprints,
show me all the blueprints, show
me all the blueprints . . . ” “After the 24th
take, I just stopped and said, ‘I am losing
my fucking mind.’” He confesses that the
making of the film has re-awakened in him
a mild form of O.C.D. that he had as a
child.

 

DiCaprio’s next project is The Good Shepherd,
about James Jesus Angleton, one
of the original officers in the O.S.S., the
World War II–era spy agency, which became
the C.I.A. It will be directed by Robert De
Niro, whose choice of DiCaprio as a star
was a given—even a necessity. “He’s an intelligent
person,” De Niro says, “and, especially
for this part, I need somebody who
doesn’t have to do much in certain ways in
order to convey that. I think with certain
people in the movie, I might not even have
wanted to do the movie.”

 

Meanwhile, DiCaprio has formed his
own production company, Appian Way.
While he could have chosen any of Hollywood’s
hottest young producers to head it,
instead he plucked 30-year-old Brad Simpson
from Killer Films, a tiny, boutique operation that is widely seen as the smartest,
edgiest production company in New York,
responsible for Boys Don’t Cry, Happiness,
and Far from Heaven. Following the trajectory
of DiCaprio taking on muscular roles
based on real people, Appian Way is developing
the new book Public Enemies, about
the crime wave that launched the F.B.I.,
with director Michael Mann (the book is by
Vanity Fair special correspondent Bryan Burrough),
and a film about the life and death
of bear expert Timothy Treadwell, whom
DiCaprio knew (based on a Vanity Fair
story by contributing editor Ned Zeman).
Appian Way’s first project after The Aviator
(in no way connected to Vanity Fair) is a
low-budget movie called The Gardener of
Eden, which will be directed by Kevin Connolly
and will star another actor friend of
DiCaprio’s, Ethan Suplee. “It’s a dark comedy,”
DiCaprio explains. “Taxi Driver–esque.”
Should there be any further doubt that.

 

DiCaprio has totally fallen for Scorsese’s
film-nerd cool, one might take a look around
the Appian Way office, which is covered
with dozens of old movie posters that DiCaprio
has collected over the years: a German
Apocalypse Now poster, a French Buster
Keaton, a Polish Midnight Cowboy. As Brad
Simpson says, “He’ll go over to the stinky,
funky New Beverly and watch a double feature
of The Parallax View, 3 Days of the Condor,
or The Leopard and another Italian film
back-to-back with just the people from the
office.” In a scene that could be straight out
of Entourage, a 25-year-old junior agent saw
DiCaprio at the Golden Globes and boldly
called out, “Hey, Leo, when are you going to
sign with me?” Leo laid into him with a list
of movie questions—“Who directed The Leopard?
Who directed The Bicycle Thief ?”—
all of which had the poor guy stumped.
Well, that answered that. (Correct answers:
Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica.)

 

It remains to be seen whether a film
made by, starring, and about obsessive compulsives
will become the Christmas
blockbuster. In any case, no one besides
Scorsese and DiCaprio is making films that
aim higher artistically and have all the
resources of Hollywood at their disposal.
And with a third collaboration in the
pipeline, DiCaprio has become, for all intents
and purposes, Scorsese’s new De
Niro. He begs off addressing the comparison
himself—“I have no comment, nor
could I”—with reference to the work. “It’s
a really obvious thing to say, but the more
people know too much who you really
are—and it’s a fundamental thing—the more
the mystery is taken away from the artist,
and the harder it is for people to believe
that person in a particular role.”

Shortly after the presidential vote in November 2000, two law clerks at the United States Supreme Court were joking about the photo finish in Florida. Wouldn’t it be funny, one mused, if the matter landed before them? And how, if it did, the Court would split five to four, as it so often did in big cases, with the conservative majority installing George W. Bush in the White House? The two just laughed. It all seemed too preposterous.

Sure, friends and relatives predicted that the case would eventually land in their laps, but that was ignorant, naïve talk—typical of people without sophisticated legal backgrounds. A majority of the justices were conservatives, but they weren’t partisan; mindful of the Court’s fragile authority, the justices had always steered clear of messy political spats. Moreover, the very jurists who’d normally side with Bush were the ones most solicitous of states’ rights, most deferential to state courts, most devoted to the Constitution’s “original intent”—and the Founding Fathers had specifically provided that the Congress, not the judiciary, would resolve close elections. To top it off, the Court rarely took cases before they were ripe, and the political process in Florida was still unfolding. “It was just inconceivable to us that the Court would want to lose its credibility in such a patently political way,” one of the clerks recalls. “That would be the end of the Court.”

The commentators agreed. The New York Times predicted that the Court would never enter the Florida thicket. A law professor at the University of Miami pegged Bush’s chances before the tribunal at “between slim and none, and a lot closer to none.” As Thanksgiving 2000 approached, the justices and their clerks planned their vacations and scattered, leaving a skeletal staff—generally only one of the three or four clerks assigned to each chamber—behind in case the impossible happened. There was just no way, Justice Stephen Breyer remarked over the holiday, that the Court would ever get involved.

It all turned out very differently, of course, and the Court, by the very margin that the incredulous clerk envisaged, put George W. Bush in the White House. Now out in the working world, the two clerks, along with most of their colleagues who worked for the four liberal justices and the occasional conservative justice, remain angered, haunted, shaken, and disillusioned by what they saw. After all, they were idealists. They’d learned in their elite law schools that the law was just and that judges resolved legal disputes by nonpartisan analysis of neutral principles. But Bush v. Gore, as seen from the inside, convinced them they’d been sold a bill of goods. They’d left their clerkships disheartened and disgusted.

The 2000 election in Florida shook Americans from all walks of life and of all political persuasions. Many were left wondering about the viability of America’s democratic system. Much has changed since the election’s frenzied aftermath, in which hordes of reporters jammed the streets of Tallahassee, Palm Beach, and Miami, chasing ballots and lawyers for 36 days before the presidency was called by a margin of 537 votes out of the six million cast in Florida. But Florida is a state with a history of disenfranchising blacks—a legacy that seemed all too current in 2000. And the president’s brother is still governor.

Could it happen again? “Butterfly ballots” are gone, so there will be no more accidental votes for fringe candidates such as Pat Buchanan. Chads—dimpled, hanging, pregnant—are history, for the punch-card machines that used them have been decertified. In their place are sleek, new electronic voting machines, known as D.R.E.’s (direct-recording electronic voting machines). An estimated half of the state’s voters will be using them this November—including those in the three largest Democratic counties.

The D.R.E.’s look and work reassuringly like A.T.M.’s. Yet unlike A.T.M.’s, touch-screens provide no paper receipt—no proof at all that a vote has been cast as the voter intended. Touch-screens have been plagued around the country by serious questions about their security and their accuracy in registering votes. In Florida, however, the story is more disturbing than in most states. The company that sewed up most of the key counties with raw political clout has installed machines that have confounded poll workers and voters alike and led to problems that the state, in its embarrassment, has tried to minimize again and again.
The state has been equally disingenuous in its attempt to bar ex-felons from voting. For the 2000 election, a notorious ex-felon list, composed of more than 50,000 names, was compiled and the appropriate sections were sent by the state to the elections supervisors of Florida’s 67 counties, along with a directive to purge those confirmed as felons from the rolls. It turned out, though, that the list had been swollen with an estimated 20,000 names of possible innocents, wrongly included. Roughly 54 percent of those on the list were black, while blacks make up just under 15 percent of the statewide population. In Florida, some 90 percent of blacks vote Democratic. Surely, the embarrassment would prevent the state from attempting another high-tech felon hunt in 2004. But no. In May, the local elections supervisors learned that there was a new list. Only in July, when flaws were again revealed by journalists—flaws that would once more favor Republicans—did the state throw out the list. While there will no longer be an electronic list used to keep former felons from voting, the recent events have led to disturbing new questions. What did the state know about the flaws? How was mass disenfranchisement almost caused again?

Florida 2000 was so bizarre, so surreal, and, for a large number of Americans, so patently illegitimate that they can’t imagine the likes of it ever happening again. They may be wrong. Should the election come down to another statistical tie—and to date the polls suggest the state is still a toss-up—an all too similar kind of chaos seems likely to shroud Florida, with its 27 electoral votes, this November.

I.
At 2:16 A.M., November 8, 2000, six hours after the networks projected that Florida would go to Gore, based on shoddy reporting done by the Voter News Service (V.N.S.), a young hotshot at Fox News named John Ellis, who happened to be George W. Bush’s cousin, called the state—and the election—for Bush. Within four minutes, ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN followed suit. “It was just the three of us guys handing the phone back and forth,” Ellis would later say to The New Yorker. “Me with the numbers, one of them a governor, the other the president-elect. Now, that was cool.”

Gore phoned Bush to offer his congratulations, but as he made his way from campaign headquarters at his Nashville hotel to the War Memorial to give his concession speech, Nick Baldick, his chief operative in Florida, saw that something was seriously amiss. V.N.S. had guessed that 180,000 votes were still outstanding. In fact, there were 360,000 votes that hadn’t been counted—from precincts in Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade Counties, which were largely Gore country. And what was this? Negative 16,000 votes for Gore in Volusia County? A computer glitch, it turned out. Baldick watched the Bush lead wither with each new report.

As the rain poured down on Gore’s motorcade, Baldick made a frantic call to Michael Whouley, Gore’s field strategist. Whouley passed the word on to Mike Feldman, Gore’s chief of staff. Feldman called campaign chairman Bill Daley. This thing was not over yet.

By the time Gore pulled up to the memorial, he was trailing statewide by fewer than 2,000 votes. But he didn’t know that. Speechwriter Eli Attie, who had been with Daley, fought his way through the crowd to get to him. “I stopped him from going out onstage,” recalls Attie, “and said, ‘With 99 percent of the vote counted, you’re only 600 votes behind.’”

Gore called Bush again, and the conversation went something like this:

“Circumstances have changed dramatically since I first called you,” Gore told him. “The state of Florida is too close to call.”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Bush asked. “Let me make sure I understand. You’re calling back to retract your concession?”

“You don’t have to be snippy about it,” said Gore.

Bush responded that the networks had already called the result and that the numbers were correct—his brother Jeb had told him.

“Your little brother,” Gore replied, “is not the ultimate authority on this.”

Americans, some of whom went to bed thinking Gore had won, others that Bush had won, all woke up to find out that no one had won, in spite of Gore’s half-million vote edge in the U.S. popular vote. Since the margin of error in Florida was within 0.5 percent of the votes cast, a machine recount there would be conducted. While Gore retreated home to Washington, where he would try to remain above the fray, Ron Klain, a Democratic lawyer who had once been his chief of staff, descended with a planeload of volunteers on Florida by six the next morning.

Information came pouring in faster than anyone could digest it—about polling places that had been understaffed, about voters who had been sent on wild-goose chases to find their polling places, about blacks barred from voting, and about police roadblocks to keep people from the polls. So far, these were rumors. The one obvious, indisputable problem was Palm Beach County’s butterfly ballot (designed by a Democratic supervisor of elections), in which the names of candidates appeared on facing pages with a set of holes down the center for voters to punch. Bush’s name appeared first, on the left-hand page, with Gore’s name directly below. The second hole, however, was for Pat Buchanan, whose name was first on the right-hand page. Buchanan won 3,407 votes in Palm Beach—around 2,600 more than he received in any other county in Florida. The irony was rich. Many of those voters were elderly Jews, thrilled to be voting for Joe Lieberman, the first Jew ever on a presidential ticket; instead, the confusing design had led them to cast their vote for a Holocaust trivializer. While Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer maintained, with trademark certitude in the face of all reason, that Palm Beach was a “Buchanan stronghold,” Buchanan himself admitted that many of the votes cast for him had been cast in error.

Klain and Baldick soon learned of other irregularities. In Palm Beach, 10,000 ballots had been set aside because the voting machines had recorded “undervotes”—that is, no vote for president. According to former Gore lawyer Mitchell Berger, 4 percent of voters in Palm Beach voted for senator, but not president—an odd twist, to say the least. A similar situation occurred in Miami-Dade. As for Broward, third of the big three southern counties, in which Fort Lauderdale is located, it was beset by rumors of missing ballot boxes and unexpected totals from certain precincts. And what about that “computer error” in Volusia that initially cost Gore 16,000 votes? Was there more to this story?

None of these irregularities would be addressed by the automatic recount, which at best would merely check the totals of successfully cast votes. Manual recounts would be needed to judge the more questionable votes. Desperate for legal advice, Klain reached out to prominent firms in the capital of Tallahassee. He found little help. “All the establishment firms knew they couldn’t cross Governor Bush and do business in Florida,” recalls Klain. And so he improvised, pulling together a team headed by former secretary of state Warren Christopher, now a Los Angeles-based lawyer in private practice. Christopher, Gore felt, would imbue the team with an image of decorous, law-abiding, above-the-fray respectability. Instead, Christopher set a different tone, one that would characterize the Democrats’ efforts over the next 35 days: hesitancy and trepidation.

By contrast, Christopher’s Republican counterpart, James Baker, another ex-secretary of state, dug in like a pit bull. Unlike Christopher and company, Baker spoke to the press loudly and often, and his message was Bush had won on November 7. Any further inspection would result only in “mischief.” Privately, however, he knew that at the start he was on shaky political ground. “We’re getting killed on ‘count all the votes,’” he told his team. “Who the hell could be against that?”

Baker saw his chance that Thursday, November 9, when the Gore team made a formal request for a manual recount in four counties: Volusia, Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade. Asking for a recount in these large, Democrat-dominated counties left the Gore team fatally vulnerable to the charge that they wanted not all votes counted, as Gore kept claiming in his stentorian tones, but only all Gore votes. Yet the Bush team knew full well that Gore could not have asked for a statewide recount, because there was no provision for it in Florida law. A losing candidate had 72 hours to request a manual recount on a county-by-county basis or wait until the election was certified to pursue a statewide recount. The requests had to be based on perceived errors, not just the candidate’s wish to see recounts done. Certainly, Gore chose counties that seemed likely to yield Gore votes. But he chose them because that’s where the problems were. Proper as this was by Florida election law, the Democrats’ strategy gave Baker the sound bite he’d been seeking: Gore was just cherry-picking Democratic strongholds. It was a charge the Bush team wielded to devastating effect in the media, stunning the Gore team, which thought its strategy would be viewed as modest and fair.
The automatic recount was finished on November 9, and for the Bush team the news was sobering. Though many of Florida’s 67 counties “recounted” merely by looking at their previous tallies, Bush’s lead had shrunk from 1,784 votes to 327. Gore votes, it seemed, were everywhere. Who knew how many more a manual recount would uncover? From then on, the Republican strategy was simple: stop the counting. That Saturday, Baker filed suit in federal court to stop all manual recounts—the first legal shot across the bow, though Republicans would later accuse Gore of taking the election to court.

While all this was going on, Katherine Harris, Florida’s elected secretary of state, managed to make herself into a lightning rod for both sides’ feelings about the election. She had worked in her spare time as an ardent partisan for the Bush campaign and had served as a delegate to the Republican convention that summer. She remained one of George W.’s eight campaign co-chairs for Florida right up until Election Day.

According to Jeffrey Toobin in his 2001 book, Too Close to Call, Harris, having gone to sleep thinking her candidate had won, was awakened at 3:30 A.M. the morning after Election Day by a phone call from George W.’s campaign chairman, Don Evans, who put Jeb on the line. “Who is Ed Kast,” the governor asked icily, “and why is he giving an interview on national television?”

In her sleep-befuddled state, Harris had to ponder that a moment. Who was Ed Kast? Chances were she’d barely met the assistant director of elections, whose division reported to her. Kast at that moment was nattering on about the fine points of Florida election law. Under that law, manual recounts were called for in very close races, and voter intent was the litmus test for whether disputed votes counted or not. Recounts and voter intent were almost certainly not subjects the governor wanted aired—already, his general counsel had made a call to get Kast yanked off the air, as brusquely as if with a cane.

In the white-hot media glare that first post-election day, Harris appeared overwhelmed and underinformed. She seemed to have no idea what the county supervisors had been doing, much less that one had drawn up a butterfly ballot, another a “caterpillar,” both sure to cause chaos at the polls. Sensing trouble, the Bush camp gave her a “minder”: Mac Stipanovich, a coolly efficient Republican lobbyist who worked in Tallahassee. Stipanovich had served as a campaign adviser for Jeb in his first, unsuccessful run for governor, in 1994, and he had remained closely aligned with him ever since. Stipanovich appealed to Harris’s grandiosity. (Her e-mails replying to Bush supporters later revealed that she had begun identifying with Queen Esther, who, in the Old Testament, saved the Jews from genocide. “My sister and I prayed for full armour this morning,” she wrote. “Queen Esther has been a wonderful role model.”) He told her that nothing less than the course of history rested on her shoulders. “You have to bring this election in for a landing,” he repeated again and again.

Later, Stipanovich, in an interview with documentary-film maker Fred Silverman, would proudly describe his routine, which began two days after the election and continued throughout the aftermath. “I would arrive in the morning through the garage and come up on the elevators,” he said, “and come in through the cabinet-office door, which is downstairs, and then in the evening when I left, you know, sometimes it’d be late, depending on what was going on, I would go the same way. I would go down the elevators and out through the garage and be driven—driven to my car from the garage, just because there were a lot of people out front on the main floor, and, at least in this small pond, knowledge of my presence would have been provocative, because I have a political background.”
On Friday, November 10, three of Gore’s four target counties—Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach—which all used punch-card voting machines, started to weigh whether to conduct manual recounts of, at first, 1 percent of their ballots, and then, if the results were dramatic, the other 99 percent. At issue were “undervotes,” meaning blank or incompletely filled-out ballots. While totally blank ballots could hardly be counted, what about, in the case of the punch-card machines, ballots where the puncher, or stylus, hadn’t quite gone through?

In those counties using optiscan machines, manual recounts also had to consider “overvotes,” where voters appeared to have cast more than one vote in a contest. (In 2000, a majority of Florida’s counties—41 of 67—had optiscans. A voter filled in ovals next to his candidates of choice on a paper ballot and then fed it into the optiscan, which looked rather like a street-corner mailbox. The ballot was then recorded electronically.) No one would dispute that some overvotes had to be put aside—when, for example, a voter had filled in the ovals next to Bush’s name as well as Gore’s. But some voters had filled in the Gore oval and then written “Al Gore” next to it. Should those ballots be nixed? For that matter, a stray pencil mark on an otherwise properly filled-in ballot would cause the ballot to be rejected as an overvote by an optiscan voting machine. Shouldn’t these all be examined, since the gold standard of Florida election law was voter intent? There were, in all, 175,000 overvotes and undervotes.

Harris and Stipanovich couldn’t tell the four target counties how to do their l percent recounts—at least, not directly. But they could, and did, send a young, strawberry-blonde lawyer named Kerey Carpenter to offer help to Palm Beach County’s three-person canvassing board. According to the board’s chairman, Judge Charles Burton, Carpenter mentioned she was a lawyer, but not that she was working for Katherine Harris.

At one point, when the recount had produced 50 new Gore votes, Burton, after talking to Carpenter, declared the counting would have to start again with a more stringent standard—the punched-out paper chad had to be hanging by one or two of its four corners. By this stricter standard, Gore’s vote gain dropped to half a dozen. Carpenter also encouraged Burton to seek a formal opinion from Harris as to what grounds would justify going to a full manual recount. Burton happily complied.

That Monday, November 13, Harris supplied the opinion. No manual recount should take place unless the voting machines in question were broken. Within hours, a judge overruled her, declaring the recounts could proceed as planned. Harris countered by saying she would stop the clock on recounts the next day, November 14, at 5 P.M.—before –Palm Beach and Miami-Dade had even decided whether to recount, and before Broward had finished the recount it had embarked upon. (Only Volusia, far smaller than the other three counties, was due to finish its recount by November 14, in time to be counted on Harris’s schedule.)

Circuit-court judge Terry Lewis, then 48, a widely respected jurist who in his leisure time played pickup basketball and wrote legal thrillers, rendered a fairly gentle ruling on Harris’s decision to certify those results. She could do this, he suggested, but only if she came up with a sensible reason. So Harris asked the remaining three Gore-targeted counties to explain why they wished to continue their recounts. Palm Beach cited the discrepancies between the results of its limited manual recount and its machine recount. Broward told of its large voter turnout and accompanying logistical problems. Miami-Dade argued that the votes it had recounted so far would provide a different total result. As soon as she received the responses, Harris rejected them all. On Friday, November 17, with the last of the absentee ballots ostensibly in, Harris announced that she would certify the election by the next morning. The Florida Supreme Court intervened this time, declaring she could not do that, and deciding, with a weekend to think about it, that the three target counties could take until Sunday, November 26, to finish counting—or, if Harris so deigned, until Monday, November 27.

James Baker, the Bush team’s consigliere, issued a public threat after the Florida Supreme Court’s maddening decision. If necessary, he implied, Florida’s leading Republican legislator, incoming House Speaker Tom Feeney, would take matters into his own hands. What Feeney proposed, on Tuesday, November 21, was to vote in a slate of electors pledged to George W. Bush—no matter what. Since both the state House and Senate were Republican-dominated, he could pass a bill to do that.

In Miami-Dade that week, a manual recount of undervotes began to produce a striking number of new votes for Gore. There, as in Palm Beach and Broward, fractious Democratic and Republican lawyers were challenging every vote the canvassing board decided. In Miami-Dade, Kendall Coffey, tall and gaunt, was the Democrats’ eyes and ears. As the Gore votes accumulated, he recalls, “panic buttons were being pushed.”

On Wednesday, November 22, the canvassing board made an ill-fated decision to move the counting up from the 18th floor of the Clark Center, where a large number of partisan observers had been able to view it, to the more cloistered 19th floor. Angry shouts rang out, and so began the “Brooks Brothers riot.”
Several dozen people, ostensibly local citizens, began banging on the doors and windows of the room where the tallying was taking place, shouting, “Stop the count! Stop the fraud!” They tried to force themselves into the room and accosted the county Democratic Party chairman, accusing him of stealing a ballot. A subsequent report by The Washington Post would note that most of the rioters were Republican operatives, many of them congressional staffers.

Elections supervisor David Leahy would say that the decision to stop counting undervotes had nothing to do with the protest, only with the realization that the job could not be completed by the Florida Supreme Court’s deadline of November 26. Yet the board had seemed confident, earlier, that it could meet the deadline, and the decision to stop counting occurred within hours of the protest.

For all the tumult in Miami-Dade, both sides had realized that the presidency might well be determined not by hanging chads or overvotes but by absentee ballots. Republicans seethed with rumors of ballots by the bagful coming in from Israel—all, presumably, from Jewish Democrats. Democrats envisioned thousands of ballots coming in from military bases abroad—all, presumably, from Bush fans in uniform.

Katherine Harris sowed confusion by issuing her own modification of the Florida law that specified absentee ballots could be accepted up to 10 days after a general election—in this case November 17—as long as they were sent from abroad and postmarked by Election Day. “They are not required,” Harris declared, “to be postmarked on or prior” to Election Day. Apparently, Stipanovich had decided there were more Bush votes than Gore votes to be harvested among the absentees, especially in the military.

Mark Herron, a Gore-team lawyer in Tallahassee, inadvertently made matters worse for his own side. On November 15, he sent out a long memo on rules governing absentee ballots to the Democratic lawyers positioned at each of the 67 county canvassing boards. A copy of the memo somehow found its way to a Republican law firm across the street from Herron’s office. Next thing he knew, the Republicans were quoting his careful recitation of Florida election law to support their claim that Democrats wanted to disenfranchise brave Americans in uniform.

Panicked, the Gore team put Joe Lieberman on the Sunday television talk shows to declare that the Democrats would never do that, and that he, for one, thought the most liberal standard should be applied to all incoming absentee ballots. Herron was appalled when he heard that: he knew that the western Panhandle counties were thick with U.S. military bases. By letting any post-election absentee votes count, including those with late—or no—postmarks, the presidency might well be lost.

For Pat Hollarn, the elections supervisor of Okaloosa County, the next days brought a kind of bedlam she couldn’t believe. A deep-green Panhandle county, Okaloosa has no fewer than six military bases, including Eglin and Hurlburt Air Force bases and an Army Ranger camp. And so the county’s four-story government building, nestled within a highway strip of stores such as Mr. Cheap Butts, became ground zero for the lawyers on both sides assigned to the fight over absentee ballots.

Both parties were pushy, obnoxious, and sometimes almost hysterical. The Bush lawyers argued passionately that the rules should be eased and all absentee ballots included. “I told them not only no but hell no,” says Hollarn, a centrist Republican, who prides herself on being a nonpartisan supervisor. (At the same time, in the more Democratic counties, Bush lawyers were arguing just as passionately that rules should be strictly adhered to and any questionable ballots put aside.)

In Santa Rosa County, next to Okaloosa, elections supervisor Doug Wilkes did his best to restrain the vying partisans as they fought over some 20 late absentee ballots. He held the line on postmarks until a Florida Supreme Court ruling said absentee ballots should not be rejected for minor “hypertechnical” reasons. Then he gave up. “I said, Hey! If the Supreme Court tells me I’m supposed to take this if it has a minor technical problem, and I can’t read this smudge [of a postmark], and it may have been dated [before the election], then O.K., I feel now that I can say we’re going to count Seaman Jones’s ballot.”
In all, the Republicans gained a net increase of 123 votes from this last-minute push.

II.
The day before Thanksgiving, the Bush campaign turned to the United States Supreme Court. Claiming that the situation in Florida had degenerated into a “circus,” it asked the high court to stop everything, and cited two highly technical federal issues for it to consider. The first, based on an obscure law from 1887, prohibited states from changing the rules after the date of that election. The second, a jurisdictional issue, was that by stepping into the case the Florida Supreme Court had usurped the Florida legislature’s exclusive powers to set the procedures for selecting electors, as provided for by Article II of the United States Constitution. The Bush lawyers claimed, too, that the selective recounts violated constitutional guarantees of due process and equal protection—meaning the different criteria for recounting the ballots did not give equal rights to all voters.

Bush’s petition for certiorari—that is, for the Court to take the case—went initially to Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose task it was to consider all emergency motions from Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. For Kennedy, then 64, a man known to relish the pomp and circumstance of the Supreme Court and his own, often crucial role in close cases, weighing such a momentous matter must have been glorious indeed. Batting aside a Thanksgiving Day plea from the Gore campaign to pass on the case, Kennedy urged his colleagues to take it on, suggesting that the Court was absolutely the essential arbiter of such weighty matters. He conceded, though, that Bush faced an uphill struggle on the law.

When Kennedy’s memo circulated, one flabbergasted clerk had to track down Justice John Paul Stevens on the golf course in Florida and read it to him over the phone. Under the Court’s rules, Kennedy needed only three votes beside his own for the Court to hear the matter. Quickly, the four others who make up the Court’s conservative block signed on: Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Sandra Day O’Connor. In an unsigned order the day after Thanksgiving, the Court agreed to consider the two more technical arguments, spurning the equal-protection claim, and set down an extraordinarily expedited calendar. Normally, arguments are scheduled many months in advance. Now briefs were due the following Tuesday, with oral arguments set for December 1—only a week away. Clerks and justices scotched their vacations and stuck close to the Court; Scalia’s clerks ended up having Thanksgiving dinner together. The clerks for the liberal justices watched the events unfold with dismay. To them, the only hopeful sign was Kennedy’s skepticism about Bush’s chances. “We changed our minds every five minutes about whether the fix was in,” one clerk remembers.

As was customary, the Court did not detail how many justices had voted to hear the case, or who they were, and Gore’s lawyers didn’t really want to know. At that point, they felt a certain faith in the institution and in the law: it was inconceivable to them that the Court would intercede, much less decide the presidency by a vote of five to four. But the liberal clerks were more pessimistic. Why, they asked, would a majority of the Court agree to consider the Florida ruling unless they wanted it overturned and the recount shut down?*

Certainly, that was what the justices who’d opposed taking the case believed. Convinced the majority would reverse the Florida court, they began drafting a dissent even before the case was argued in court. It was long—about 30 pages—and elaborate, written principally by Justice Stevens, then 80, the most senior of the would-be dissenters and, largely by default, the Court’s most liberal member, even though a Republican, President Gerald R. Ford, had appointed him. With the assistance of Justices Stephen Breyer, David Souter, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stevens laid out why the Court should never have accepted the case.
Meanwhile, events in Florida took their own course. On Sunday, November 26, the Palm Beach canvassing board sent an urgent request to Katherine Harris, saying that in order to complete its manual recount it needed two additional hours beyond the five P.M. deadline she had chosen to enforce, rather than the Monday deadline the Florida Supreme Court had offered her as an option. Harris conferred with Stipanovich and answered no. As a result the county’s entire recount effort was deemed null and void. That afternoon Harris certified the election, claiming that Bush had won by 537 votes, a total that appeared to include Bush’s net gain in absentee ballots, but none of the recounted votes from Palm Beach or Miami-Dade. Gore’s lawyers promptly contested the certification.
At the Supreme Court, the liberal clerks handicapped the case pretty much as the Gore camp did. At issue, as they often were in crucial cases, were Justices Kennedy and O’Connor. But were both really in play? At a dinner on November 29, attended by clerks from several chambers, an O’Connor clerk said that O’Connor was determined to overturn the Florida decision and was merely looking for the grounds. O’Connor was known to decide cases on gut feelings and facts rather than grand theories, then stick doggedly with whatever she decided. In this instance, one clerk recalls, “she thought the Florida court was trying to steal the election and that they had to stop it.” Blithely ignorant of what view she actually held, the Gore campaign acted as if she were up for grabs. In fact, the case would come down to Kennedy.

At this point, the clerks had been at the Court only two months, but, for many of them, Justice Kennedy, appointed by President Reagan after the Senate had spurned the arch-conservative Robert Bork, was already a figure of ridicule and scorn. It was not a matter of his generally conservative politics—despite Clarence Thomas’s public image of smoldering rage, most of the liberal clerks had found him quite personable. But Kennedy, they felt, was pompous and grandiloquent. His inner office was filled with the trappings of power—an elaborate chandelier and a carpet with a giant red star—and his writing, too, was loaded with grandstanding flourishes. The clerks saw his public persona—the very public way in which he boasted of often agonizing over decisions—as a kind of shtick, a very conspicuous attempt to exude fairness and appear moderate, even when he’d already made up his mind.

Conservatives, however, were not always happy with Kennedy, either. They had never forgiven him for his votes to uphold abortion and gay rights, and doubted both his intelligence and his commitment to the cause. Convinced he’d strayed on abortion under the pernicious influence of a liberal law clerk—a former student of the notoriously liberal Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School, who was representing Gore in this case—they took steps to prevent any reoccurrences. Applicants for Kennedy clerkships were now screened by a panel of right-wing stalwarts. “The premise is that he can’t think by himself, and that he can be manipulated by someone in his second year of law school,” one liberal clerk explains. In 2000, as in most years, that system surrounded Kennedy with true believers, all belonging to the Federalist Society, the farm team of the legal right. “He had four very conservative, Federalist Society white guys, and if you look at the portraits of law clerks on his wall, that’s true 9 times out of 10,” another liberal law clerk recalls. “They were by far the least diverse group of clerks.”
For all their philosophical differences, the nine justices had learned to live together; they have, after all, served together since 1994. For their clerks, though, a chasm ran through the Court even before Bush v. Gore. The conservative clerks read different newspapers, went to different movies, ate different kinds of food. Their hair was shorter, their suits more solemn and sincere. Far more of them were white men, screened rigorously for political reliability. Apart from a few group activities—the basketball games in the Court’s top-floor gymnasium, the aerobics and yoga classes Justice O’Connor had arranged—the two groups rarely interacted. Rather than sit with the conservatives in the same lunchroom, the liberals dined outside, in the area reserved for staff.

It was unusual, then, for a conservative clerk to visit the chambers of a justice on the other side. But that is what Kevin Martin, a clerk for Scalia, did on November 30 when he stopped by Stevens’s chambers. Martin had gone to Columbia Law School with a Stevens clerk named Anne Voigts; he thought that connection could help him to bridge the political divide and to explain that the conservative justices had legitimate constitutional concerns about the recount. But to two of Voigts’s co-clerks, Eduardo Penalver and Andrew Siegel, Martin was on a reconnaissance mission, trying to learn which grounds for reversing the Florida court Stevens would consider the most palatable. They felt they were being manipulated, and things quickly turned nasty. “Fuck off!” Martin finally told them before storming out of the room. (O’Connor clerks paid similar exploratory visits to various chambers, but those ended more amicably.)

On December 1, lawyers for the two sides argued their cases before the Court. Laurence Tribe, an experienced and highly respected Supreme Court advocate, seemed flat that day and off his game; the justices appeared to chafe under what they considered his condescending professorial style. Bush’s lawyer, Theodore Olson, who later became solicitor general in John Ashcroft’s Justice Department, was more impressive, but then again, he was playing to a friendlier audience. Rehnquist and Scalia hinted that they favored the claim that the Florida Supreme Court had encroached upon the Florida legislature’s exclusive turf. Both O’Connor and Kennedy also voiced irritation with the Florida court. It did not augur well for Gore.

Once the arguments were over, the justices met for their usual conference. At the poles were Stevens and Scalia—the one wanting to butt out of the case altogether and let the political process unfold, the other wanting to overturn the Florida Supreme Court and, effectively, to call the election for Bush. But neither had the votes. Eager to step back from a constitutional abyss, convinced the matter could be resolved in Florida, the Court punted. Rehnquist began drafting a ruling simply asking the Florida Supreme Court to clarify its decision: whether it had based its ruling on the state constitution, which the Bush team had said was improper, or had acted under state statute, which was arguably permissible.

By December 4, all nine justices had signed on to the chief justice’s opinion. The unanimity was, in fact, a charade; four of the justices had no beef at all with the Florida Supreme Court, while at least four others were determined to overturn it. But this way each side could claim victory: the liberal-to-moderate justices had spared the Court a divisive and embarrassing vote on the merits, one they’d probably have lost anyway. As for the conservatives, by eating up Gore’s clock—Gore’s lawyers had conceded that everything had to be resolved by December 12—they had all but killed his chances to prevail, and without looking needlessly partisan in the process. With the chastened Florida court unlikely to intervene again, the election could now stagger to a close, with the Court’s reputation intact, and with Bush all but certain to win.

On Friday, December 8, however, the Florida Supreme Court confounded everyone by jumping back into the fray. By a vote of four to three, it ordered a statewide recount of all undervotes: the more than 61,000 ballots that the voting machines, for one reason or another, had missed. The court was silent on what standard would be used—hanging vs. pregnant chads—and so each county, by inference, would set its own. As they watched televised images of bug-eyed Florida officials inspecting punch-card ballots for hanging, dimpled, or pregnant chads, the Supreme Court clerks knew the case was certain to head back their way.
Sure enough, the Bush campaign asked the Court to stay the decision and halt the recount. In a highly unusual move, Scalia urged his colleagues to grant the stay immediately, even before receiving Gore’s response. Gore had been narrowing Bush’s lead, and his campaign expected that by Monday he would pull ahead. But Scalia was convinced that all the manual recounts were illegitimate. He told his colleagues such recounts would cast “a needless and unjustified cloud” over Bush’s legitimacy. It was essential, he said, to shut down the process immediately. The clerks were amazed at how baldly Scalia was pushing what they considered his own partisan agenda.

Scalia’s wish was not granted. But at his urging, Rehnquist moved up the conference he’d scheduled for the next day from 1 in the afternoon to 10 that morning. In the meantime, the conservative justices began sending around memos to their colleagues, each of them offering a different rationale for ruling in Bush’s favor; to the liberal clerks, it was apparent that the conservatives had already decided the case and were merely auditioning arguments.

This time, there would be no papering over the divisions. Arrayed against the five conservative justices wishing to stop the recount were their four colleagues, who’d voted initially not to hear the case. Justice Stevens would write for them; so eager was the majority to stop the recount, one clerk recalls, that Stevens had to plead for more time to complete his dissent. What he wrote—that “counting every legally cast vote cannot constitute irreparable harm”—so provoked Scalia that, as eager as he was to halt the recount, he delayed things by dashing off an angry rejoinder, largely reiterating what he’d told the justices the previous night. “Count first, and rule upon legality afterwards, is not a recipe for producing election results that have the public acceptance democratic stability requires,” he argued, forecasting that a majority of the Court would ultimately rule in Bush’s favor on the merits.

Even some of the justices voting with Scalia squirmed at how publicly he’d acknowledged the divisions within the Court. To the liberal clerks, what he had written was at least refreshing in its candor. “The Court had worked hard to claim a moral high ground, but at that moment he pissed it away,” one recalls. “And there was a certain amount of glee. He’d made our case for us to the public about how crassly partisan the whole thing was.” Scalia’s opinion held up release of the order for an hour. Finally, shortly before three o’clock, the Court granted the stay. No more votes would be counted. Oral arguments were set for the following Monday, December 11.

Gore and his team were crushed, but neither he nor his lawyers had given up. Even at this late date, Gore naïvely defended the good faith of the justices. “Please be sure that no one trashes the Court,” he instructed his minions. His lawyers still hoped that Kennedy or O’Connor or both could be won over; perhaps they could be peeled away from the conservative bloc as they had been several years earlier to preserve Roe v. Wade. At a meeting that Saturday, Gore decreed that David Boies, and not Tribe, would argue the case on Monday, partly for fear that the more publicly liberal Tribe might antagonize those two swing justices, partly because Boies, the famed New York litigator who was the government’s chief lawyer during the Microsoft anti-trust case, had been representing Gore in Florida and was, therefore, better able to assure O’Connor of the fundamental fairness of what was happening there.

But to the liberal clerks it was all over. They placed their dwindling hopes not on anything that would happen in the Court on Monday, but on the press. The brother of a Ginsburg clerk, who covered legal affairs for The Wall Street Journal, had learned that the paper would soon report how, at a party on Election Night, O’Connor was overheard expressing her dismay over Gore’s apparent victory. Once that information became public, the liberal clerks felt, O’Connor would have to step aside. When, on the night before the Court convened, she sent out a sealed memo to each of her colleagues, those clerks hoped this had actually come to pass. In fact, she was merely stating that she, too, felt the Florida Supreme Court had improperly usurped the state legislature’s power. Gore’s lawyers, who also knew about O’Connor’s election-night outburst, toyed briefly with asking her to step aside. But they demurred, hoping instead that she would now lean toward them to prove her fairness. Things were that bleak.

When Gore’s lawyers came to the Supreme Court for oral arguments on the morning of December 11, they felt that the Bush team’s jurisdictional argument, that the Florida Supreme Court had overstepped its bounds, was a loser because it emasculated one appellate court more than any other appellate court would ever want to condone. And, though they didn’t know it, Justice Kennedy agreed with them. In a memo circulated shortly before he took the bench, he endorsed what O’Connor had written the night before, but declared that it would not be enough: to carry the day, he argued, the conservative justices needed to assert that evaluating ballots under different standards in the various counties violated the equal-protection clause.

Up to now, this argument had received scant attention from the clerks, the litigants, or even the justices—and understandably so. Even in the best of circumstances, voting procedures were riddled with inconsistencies, beginning with the use of systems of wildly varying reliability, such as punch cards and optiscan machines, in different jurisdictions. Voters, often poor or black, in counties with older machines were far less likely to have their votes counted than those in wealthier jurisdictions, and nobody ever heard a peep from the Supreme Court about unconstitutionality. Moreover, the Rehnquist Court had always stingily construed the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment, enacted after the Civil War to protect freed slaves, applying it only when discrimination was systematic, blatant, intentional, incontrovertible. It was not surprising, then, that the Court had originally declined to hear arguments on the point, or that, when they returned to the Court, Bush’s lawyers had given those arguments only 5 pages in a 50-page brief.

But here was Kennedy dusting it off. And not as some academic exercise, but as the very basis of the Court’s decision. “We read the memo and thought, Oh, we’ve lost Kennedy,” one liberal clerk recalls. In the star-studded audience awaiting the arguments that morning, someone spotted Al Gore’s daughter Karenna—praying, he thought. It wouldn’t help. The Court already had its majority. Now it had its rationale.

As the lawyers prepared to argue, the clerks pondered Kennedy’s motives. Perhaps, they speculated, he found an appeal to fairness, even when it was inapt or unpersuasive, more winning than a hypertechnical argument about jurisdiction; perhaps it offered him a chance to sound moderate and wax eloquent. The oral arguments began, with a question to Theodore Olson from . . . Justice Kennedy. “Where is the federal question here?” he asked, sounding almost baffled, as if still genuinely wondering why the Court was hearing the case at all. In the corner of the courtroom where the liberal clerks sat, there were snickers, rolled eyeballs, nudges in the ribs. “What a joke,” one said to another. Kennedy went on to denigrate the argument about the Florida court’s jurisdiction, then cued Olson to what really mattered. “I thought your point was that the process is being conducted in violation of the equal-protection clause, and it is standardless,” he told Olson. Olson, a keen student of the Court and canny reader of its moods, naturally agreed.

O’Connor railed against what she suggested was the stupidity of Florida’s voters, who were too dumb or too clumsy to puncture their ballots properly. “Well, why isn’t the standard the one that voters are instructed to follow, for goodness’ sake?” she asked. “I mean, it couldn’t be clearer.” Boies tried to explain that for more than 80 years Florida’s courts had in fact focused on the intent of the voter rather than the condition of his ballot, but this was one instance for the Rehnquist Court in which deference to the states, and precedent, didn’t matter.

Breyer and Souter saw Kennedy’s new focus on equal protection as an opportunity, suggesting during oral argument that if there were problems with the fairness of the recount the solution was simple: send the case back once more to the Florida Supreme Court and ask it to set a uniform standard. Breyer, whose chambers were next door to Kennedy’s, went to work on him personally. An affable and engaging man, Breyer has long been the moderates’ most effective emissary to the Court’s right wing. But the politicking went both ways; at one point, Kennedy stopped by Breyer’s chambers and said he hoped Breyer would join his opinion. “We just kind of looked at him like he was crazy—‘We don’t know what you’re smoking, but leave us alone’—and he went away,” a clerk recalls.
The encounters between the two men must have been extraordinary: with the presidency of the United States hanging in the balance, two ambitious jurists—each surely fancying himself a future chief justice—working on each other. And for a brief moment Breyer appeared to have succeeded. At the conference following the oral argument, Kennedy joined the dissenters and, at least temporarily, turned them into the majority. The case would be sent back to the Florida court for fixing; the recount would continue. But the liberal clerks never believed that Kennedy had really switched, and predicted that, having created the desired image of agonizing, he would quickly switch back. “He probably wanted to think of himself as having wavered,” one clerk speculates. And, sure enough, within a half-hour or so, he did switch back.

Who or what sent him back isn’t clear, but during that time, Kennedy conferred both with Scalia and with his own clerks. “We assumed that his clerks were coordinating with Scalia’s clerks and trying to push him to stay with the majority,” one liberal clerk says. “I think his clerks were horrified, and the idea that he would even blink for a moment here scared them,” says another. “They knew the presidency would be decided in their chambers,” a third clerk—working for one of the majority justices—recalls. “They would have fought tooth and nail—they would have put chains across the door—to keep him from changing his vote.” Another clerk for another conservative justice puts it a bit differently. “Kennedy would not have voted the other way,” this clerk says, “but had he been tempted, the clerks could have dissuaded him.” Breyer lamented that he had Kennedy convinced, only to have his clerks work him over and pull him back in the other direction.

Given the approaching deadline, Rehnquist decreed after oral arguments that any decision to send the case back to Florida had to be handed down immediately; were the Court to reverse, time would cease to matter, and the decision could wait a day. Stevens banged out a one-paragraph opinion, remanding the case to Florida, and sent it around. “It seemed like a Hail Mary to me,” recalls a clerk in one of the conservative chambers. There were no takers. The Court was going to reverse, and throughout Monday evening and into Tuesday morning the two sides drafted and circulated their proposed opinions. Rehnquist was writing what he thought would be the majority opinion, reversing the Florida court on both the jurisdictional and equal-protection grounds. Stevens was drafting the principal dissent; it would reiterate what he’d written in the unused dissent from the first round, but shorn of all legalese, in order to be easily understood by ordinary people. It chastised the Court for holding the justices of the Florida Supreme Court up to ridicule. “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear,” it stated. “It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”

The other dissenters would join Stevens, but had their own points to make. Because they, too, believed the case would hinge primarily on the autonomy of the Florida legislature, they dealt only secondarily, and peripherally, with the equal-protection argument. Stevens and Ginsburg denied that it applied at all. For better or worse, Ginsburg wrote, disparities were a part of all elections; if there were any equal-protection concerns at all, she wrote, they surely applied more to black voters, noting a New York Times report that a disproportionate number of blacks had encountered problems voting. Though racial questions already hung over the Florida vote, hers was to be the only reference to race in any of the opinions, and it was relegated to a footnote. But to the liberal clerks, these issues needed to be acknowledged, and a footnote was better than nothing at all.

Neither Breyer nor Souter had suggested initially that the recount had triggered any equal-protection questions. But each of their draft opinions voiced such concerns; whether they’d come to believe that judging ballots under different criteria was really unconstitutional, or were still chasing after Kennedy, was never clear. Ultimately, Breyer conceded that the lack of a uniform standard “implicate[d] principles of fundamental fairness,” while Souter wrote something a bit stronger—that they raised “a meritorious argument for relief.” But for both the remedy was clear: send the case back to Florida. It was not to stop the recount altogether.

Late Tuesday morning, it became apparent that Kennedy and O’Connor would not join Rehnquist’s opinion on jurisdiction, and would decide the case strictly on equal-protection grounds. Nowhere did O’Connor explain why she had abandoned what she had written on the jurisdictional matter in her memo the night before. To clerks on both sides of the case, what appealed both to her and to Kennedy about invoking equal protection was that it looked fair. “It was kind of a ‘Keep it simple, stupid’ kind of thing,” one liberal clerk theorizes. Or, as a conservative clerk puts it, “they thought it looked better to invoke these grand principles rather than Article II, perhaps because it makes them look better in the press and makes them look like heroes.” Their opinion, written by Kennedy, was joined by the other three conservative justices. And it would go largely uncontradicted: with time running out and the dissents nearly complete, the losers had no chance to explain, in any coherent way, why equal-protection concerns should not be allowed to stop the recount.

As the drafts began circulating, tempers began to fray. In an unusual sealed memo—an unsuccessful attempt to avoid the clerks’ prying eyes—Scalia complained about the tone of some of the dissents. He was, he confessed, the last person to criticize hard-hitting language, but never had he, as the dissenters were now doing, urged the majority to change its decision based on its impact on the Supreme Court’s credibility. He charged that his opponents in the case were inflicting the very wounds to the Court that they had supposedly decried. As Jeffrey Toobin first reported, he objected in particular to what he called the “Al Sharpton footnote” in Ginsburg’s dissent: her comment on Florida’s disenfranchised black voters. Whether out of timidity, collegiality, or affection—Scalia was her closest friend on the Court—Ginsburg promptly took it out. “It was the most classic example of what kind of bully Scalia is,” says one clerk, who called Scalia’s complaint “an attempt to stifle legitimate discourse worthy of Joe McCarthy.” As for Ginsburg, this clerk says her response “showed a lack of courage.”

Kennedy, too, sent around a memo, accusing the dissenters of “trashing the Court.” Eager to suggest to the outside world that the Court was less divided than it appeared, he charged that the dissenters agreed with the equal-protection argument more than they were willing to admit. Shortly before his opinion went to the printers, he inserted a new line making substantially the same point. “Eight Justices of the Court agree that there are constitutional problems with the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court that demand a remedy,” he wrote. Souter and Breyer had said so explicitly, he reasoned, while Stevens had done so implicitly by signing on to Breyer’s opinion.

Stevens’s clerks, who stumbled over the new phrase, reacted apoplectically. Shouting over the telephone, they told Kennedy’s clerks that they had deliberately misrepresented Stevens’s position and demanded that they change the language. When the Kennedy clerks refused, Stevens promptly uncoupled himself from that portion of Breyer’s opinion, and Kennedy no longer had a choice: “eight Justices” became “seven.” Later, as they handed in their respective decisions, Eduardo Penalver, the Stevens clerk, ran into a Kennedy clerk named Grant Dixton and told him that what the Kennedy chambers had done was disgusting and unprofessional.

In the Breyer chambers, too, there was unhappiness over Kennedy’s addendum. But it was too late to take issue with it. Thus, Kennedy’s point stood uncontradicted and would be picked up in the next day’s press, including The New York Times, which printed a graphic illustrating how the justices had voted. On the equal-protection claim, it had seven voting for, and only two against. Breyer, a member of the Gore team later lamented, had been “naïve”; in his efforts to win over Kennedy, he’d “been taken to the cleaners.”

Despite their loyalty to their justices—a striking, filial-like phenomenon among most clerks—several concede that the dissenters in Bush v. Gore were simply outmaneuvered. Never did the four of them have the votes to prevail. But first by endorsing a decision suggesting that the Florida Supreme Court had overstepped its bounds, then by appearing to buttress the majority’s equal-protection claims, the dissenters had aided and abetted the enemy. “They gave just enough cover to the five justices and their defenders in the press and academia so that it was impossible to rile up the American people about these five conservative ideologues stealing the election,” one clerk complains. The tone and multiplicity of the dissents didn’t help. While Stevens’s rhetoric was impassioned, even enraged, the other dissents were pallid.

The Court’s opinions were issued at roughly 10 o’clock that night. The only one that mattered, the short majority opinion, was unsigned, but it bore Kennedy’s distinctive stamp. There was the usual ringing rhetoric, like the “equal dignity owed to each voter,” even though, as a practical matter, the ruling meant that the ballots of 60,000 of them would not even be examined. The varying standards of the recount, Kennedy wrote, did not satisfy even the rudimentary requirements of equal protection. Although six more days would pass before the electors met in their states, he insisted there was too little time for the Florida courts to fix things.

There were two more extraordinary passages: first, that the ruling applied to Bush and Bush alone, lest anyone think the Court was expanding the reach of the equal-protection clause; and, second, that the Court had taken the case only very reluctantly and out of necessity. “That infuriated us,” one liberal clerk recalls. “It was typical Kennedy bullshit, aggrandizing the power of the Court while ostensibly wringing his hands about it.”

Rehnquist, along with Scalia and Thomas, joined in the decision, but Scalia, for one, was unimpressed. Whether or not one agrees with him, Scalia is a rigorous thinker; while the claim that the Florida Supreme Court overstepped its bounds had some superficial heft to it, the opinion on equal-protection was mediocre and flaccid. “Like we used to say in Brooklyn,” he is said to have told a colleague, “it’s a piece of shit.” (Scalia and the other justices would not comment for this article.)

Sharing little but a common sense of exhaustion and Thai takeout, the clerks came together briefly to watch the news. As reporters fumbled with the opinions—the final line of Kennedy’s opinion, sending the case back to Florida even though there was really nothing more the Florida court could do, confused many of them—the clerks shouted imprecations at the screen. The liberal ones slumped in their chairs; some left the room, overcome by their own irrelevance. “We had a desire to get out already and see if journalists and politicians could stop what we couldn’t stop,” says one. They contemplated a variety of options—holding a press conference, perhaps, or leaking incriminating documents. There was just one problem: there were none. “If there’d been a memo saying, ‘I know this is total garbage but I want Bush to be president,’ I think it would have found its way into the public domain,” one clerk recalls.

Gore’s lawyers read him the ruling. At last he concluded that the Court had never really given him a shot, and he congratulated his legal team for making it so hard for the Court to justify its decision. Kevin Martin, the Scalia clerk who’d tangled earlier with Stevens’s clerks, informed his colleagues by e-mail that Gore was about to concede. To some, it seemed like gloating; Eduardo Penalver asked him to stop. “Life sucks,” Martin replied. “Life may suck now,” Penalver responded, “but life is long.”

There were reports that for some time afterward Souter was depressed over the decision. According to David Kaplan of Newsweek, Breyer told a group of Russian judges that the decision was “the most outrageous, indefensible thing” the Court had ever done, while Souter complained to some prep-school students that had he had “one more day—one more day,” he could have won over Kennedy. But such comments were quickly disavowed, were out of character for each man, and appeared inconsistent with the facts. The clerks, for instance, believed Souter had spent most of the last few crucial days in his chambers brooding over the case rather than working any back channels.

Fearful, perhaps, of the appearance of a quid pro quo, neither of the two justices most frequently rumored to be leaving, Rehnquist and O’Connor, has in fact left during Bush’s presidency—perhaps, some theorize, because of how it would look to let the man they anointed select their replacements. “The justices who ruled for President Bush gave themselves, in effect, a four-year sentence,” said Ron Klain.

O’Connor confessed surprise at the anger that greeted the decision, but that seemed to reflect naïveté more than any sober second thoughts. On her 71st birthday, in March 2001, she was sitting in the Kennedy Center when Arthur Miller, the playwright, denounced what the Court had done. Around Washington, a few people stopped shaking her hand, and Justice Scalia’s too; the consensus has since grown that because of Bush v. Gore, he can never be named chief justice.
The experience left scars on those who lived through it. “I went through a lawyer’s existential crisis,” one of the clerks recalls. “People afterwards said, ‘It must have been very exciting,’” says another. “It was not that exciting. What I felt was beyond anger. It was really a profound sense of loss.” But a conservative clerk insists that when the records are opened and the histories written, the architects of Bush v. Gore will be vindicated. “When everybody’s dead and they read it all, it won’t be embarrassing,” he predicts.

Ultimately, only the five justices in the majority know how and why they decided the case as they did and whether they did it in good or bad faith. Perhaps even they don’t know the answer. An insider was asked if the five would pass a lie-detector test on the subject. “I honestly don’t know,” this insider replies. “People are amazing self-kidders.”

While the Supreme Court was pondering the case, a calm settled over the canvassing boards around Florida, as the manual recount continued. Judge Terry Lewis, assigned by the Florida Supreme Court to put its order into action, had called on the counties not to announce any results until the work was done. In the meantime, Bush’s lead had diminished to 154 votes.

In midafternoon on Saturday, December 9, one of the few still-partisan observers in Pat Hollarn’s Okaloosa warehouse of vote counters got a call on his cell phone. “He slams it down and says, ‘Stop! Stop!’” Hollarn recalls. “And I said, ‘Excuse me, what’s your problem?’ He said, ‘I just found out that the United States Supreme Court says you’re supposed to stop.’ I said, ‘We’ll have to have something more definitive than your phone call.’”

After several hard hours of sorting, Hollarn’s staffers had nearly finished separating the undervotes from the rest of the ballots and were about to start counting them. Now Hollarn’s own phone rang. On the line was Clay Roberts, Katherine Harris’s director of elections. “He says, ‘I’m calling to tell you that you have to stop your process right now.’” Minutes later, a fax from Roberts’s office confirmed the news. So much time had been put into counting by what seemed a fair method at last. And now, with stunning suddenness, it was stopped.

“Everybody was hugging each other and taking each other’s phone numbers and addresses,” Hollarn recalls. “They helped me clean up all the stuff. We put everything away and everybody went home and that was the end of it.”

A year after the election, a consortium of newspapers examined the ballots and reported that had the Supreme Court not intervened in the recount, Bush still would have won the election by the slimmest of margins, a headline that gave comfort to Democrats and Republicans alike. There was only one problem. The newspapers had looked at only the undervotes, which the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to be examined for the recount. But there were also more than 113,000 overvotes. Later examination by the same papers of the overvotes—which Judge Lewis says he would have been inclined to consider—determined that Gore would have edged out Bush had they been considered.

III.
Amid the media frenzy after the election, one story went untold—the one in the footnote that Scalia had asked Ginsburg to delete from her dissent. In fact, thousands of African-Americans in Florida had been stripped of their right to vote.

Adora Obi Nweze, the president of the Florida State Conference of the N.A.A.C.P., went to her polling place and was told she couldn’t vote because she had voted absentee—even though she hadn’t. Cathy Jackson of Broward, who’d been a registered voter since 1996, showed up at the polls and was told she was not on the rolls. After seeing a white woman casting an affidavit ballot, she asked if she could do the same. She was turned down. Donnise DeSouza of Miami was also told that she wasn’t on the rolls. She was moved to the “problem line”; soon thereafter, the polls closed, and she was sent home. Lavonna Lewis was on the rolls. But after waiting in line for hours, the polls closed. She was told to leave, while a white man was allowed to get in line, she says.

U.S. congresswoman Corrine Brown, who was followed into her polling place by a local television crew, was told her ballot had been sent to Washington, D.C., and so she couldn’t vote in Florida. Only after two and a half hours was she allowed to cast her ballot. Brown had registered thousands of students from 10 Florida colleges in the months prior to the election. “We put them on buses,” she says, “took them down to the supervisor’s office. Had them register. When it came time to vote, they were not on the rolls!” Wallace McDonald of Hillsborough County went to the polls and was told he couldn’t vote because he was a felon—even though he wasn’t. The phone lines at the N.A.A.C.P. offices were ringing off the hook with stories like these. “What happened that day—I can’t even put it in words anymore,” says Donna Brazile, Gore’s campaign manager, whose sister was asked for three forms of identification in Seminole County before she was allowed to vote. “It was the most painful, dehumanizing, demoralizing thing I’ve ever experienced in my years of organizing.”

For African-Americans it was the latest outrage perpetrated by Jeb Bush’s government. During his unsuccessful bid for governor in ’94, Jeb was asked what he would do for the African-American community. “Probably nothing,” he answered. In November 1999, he announced his One Florida Initiative, in which, with the stroke of a pen, he ended mandatory affirmative-action quotas by cutting off preferential treatment in the awarding of state contracts, university admissions, and government hiring. Tom Hill, then a state representative, and U.S. congressman Kendrick Meek, then a 33-year-old state senator, staged a 25-hour sit-in outside Jeb’s office. “[The initiative was done] without any consultation from the legislators, students, teachers, the people who were going to be affected,” says Meek. Jeb wasn’t moved by their presence. “Kick their asses out,” he told an aide. (He later claimed to be referring to reporters stationed near the sit-in.) Energized, African-Americans marched through Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale. They also registered to vote. By Election Day 2000, 934,261 blacks were registered, up by nearly 100,000 since 1996
Election Day itself felt like payback. Jesse Jackson immediately took up the cause in the streets of Florida, but at that point the facts were simply too sketchy, too anecdotal, too mixed up with simple bureaucratic ineptness to prove any kind of conspiracy. Anyone wanting to get Gore into the White House believed that hitching the cause to Jackson was madness; they wanted the middle, not the lefty fringe. Through a request from Brazile, Gore asked Jackson to get out of the way.
In retrospect, the claims of disenfranchisement were hardly phony. In January and February 2001, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the highly divided, highly partisan government-appointed group formed in 1957, heard more than 30 hours of damning testimony from more than 100 witnesses. The report, which came out in June of that year, made a strong case that the election violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The commissioners duly passed their report up to newly installed attorney general Ashcroft. Little was done.

Strong as the report from the Commission was, it did not yet have the full story. The disenfranchisement of African-Americans in Florida was embedded in many facets of the election—from the equipment used to the actions of key local election officials, to the politically motivated manipulation of arcane Florida law, to the knowing passivity of Jeb Bush himself. Nowhere was that more obvious than in Gadsden County.

Twenty minutes west of Tallahassee, Gadsden is one of Florida’s poorest counties. African-Americans make up 57 percent of the population, the largest percentage of any county in the state. Even so, the 2000 election was run by a white conservative supervisor, in this case the late Denny Hutchinson.
“He thought things were ‘fine as they were,’” says the extra-large and jolly Ed Dixon, Gadsden County commissioner, strolling down the town’s nearly empty main drag in an enormous basketball jersey. “He never advocated for anything.” Hutchinson’s uncle had been supervisor before him. Denny, though he was a Democrat—a virtual prerequisite for election in Gadsden—spoke openly about giving money to George Bush, according to a source. When the commissioners wanted to put in more polling places to accommodate the increase in registration, Hutchinson wouldn’t budge. “He never advocated for any increased precincts, even though some of our people had to drive 30 miles to get to a poll,” says Dixon. “In the only county that’s a majority African-American,” he adds, “you want a decreased turnout.”
In November 2000, Shirley Green Knight, Hutchinson’s deputy, a soft-spoken African-American, had recently defeated him for the office of elections supervisor, though she had yet to assume the office. After the votes had been tallied, she noticed something strange: more than 2,000 ballots, out of 14,727 cast, had not been included in the registered count.

How had this happened? Because of a very technical but profoundly important detail. The central optiscan machine used in Gadsden had a sorting switch which when put in the “on” position would cause the machine to record overvotes or undervotes in a separate category for possible review. After the election, Knight says, she learned that Hutchinson had demanded that the switch be kept off. “I have no idea why he would do that,” says Knight. Seeing how many ballots never got counted, she urged him to run them through the machine again—this time with the sorting switch on—but he resisted. Hutchinson was finally overruled by the Gadsden canvassing board. They looked at the rejected ballots. Sure enough, they were overvotes—and for good reason.

Gadsden had used a variant of the caterpillar ballot, in which the candidates’ names appeared in two columns. One column listed Bush, Gore, and six others. The next column listed two more candidates—Monica Moorehead and Howard Phillips—as well as a line that said, “Write-In Candidate.” Thinking they were voting in different races, hundreds of voters had filled in a circle for one candidate in each column, thereby voting twice for president. Others filled in the circle for Gore and then, wanting to be extra clear, wrote “Gore” in the write-in space. All these votes were tossed.

In some optiscan counties, such overvotes would have been spit right back at the voter, giving him a chance to correct his mistake on the spot. But Gadsden, like many other poor counties, used a cheaper system, in which overvotes would only register at the central optical-scanner machine, denying the voter a chance to correct his mistake. Roberts and Harris should have been aware of this crucial discrepancy. Neighboring Leon County used the more expensive machinery, and technicians there had warned the Division of Elections well before Election Day of the disparate impact these two different systems would have. They had even set up a demonstration of the superior machines across the street from the division offices in Tallahassee.

Some of the faulty ballots in Gadsden were counted in those first days after the election as part of the county’s “automatic recount,” giving Gore a net gain of 153. Those votes, at least, were included in the certified state count. Three hours east in Duval County, however, voters weren’t as lucky.

Here, in a county that includes Jacksonville, which is 29 percent black, 21,000 votes were thrown out for being overvotes, and here, an overvote was even more likely than in Gadsden. Prior to the election, the elections supervisor, John Stafford, had placed a sample-ballot insert in the local papers instructing citizens to vote every page. Any voter who followed this instruction invalidated his or her ballot in the process.

During the critical 72-hour period in which manual recounts could be requested, Mike Langton, chairman of the northeast Florida region for the Gore campaign, spent hours with Stafford, a white Republican. “I asked John Stafford how many under- and overvotes there were, and he said, ‘Oh, just a few,’” recalls Langton. Then, shortly after the deadline to ask for a recount had passed, Stafford revealed that the number of overvotes was actually 21,000. Nearly half of those were from four black precincts that normally vote over 90 percent Democratic.

Today, Stafford remains silent about what happened four years ago. His assistant, Dick Carlberg, will speak, but only in the presence of his attorney. He claims he sent an e-mail to the state’s Division of Elections two days after the election—before the deadline to ask for a manual recount—informing the Division of Elections of the thousands of overvotes. “I was told, ‘O.K.,’ and that was about it,” Carlberg says.

If the Gadsden and Duval stories might be characterized as a kind of disenfranchisement by conscious neglect, a much more sinister story began to emerge in the months following the election. Throughout Florida, people—many of them black men, such as Willie Steen, a decorated Gulf War veteran—went to the polls and were informed that they couldn’t vote, because they were convicted felons—even though they weren’t.

“The poll worker looked at the computer and said that there was something about me being a felon,” says Steen, who showed up at his polling place in Hillsborough County, young son in tow. Florida is one of just seven states that deny former felons the right to vote, but Steen wasn’t a felon.
“I’ve never been arrested before in my life,” Steen told the woman. A neighbor on line behind him heard the whole exchange. Steen tried to hide his embarrassment and quietly pleaded with the poll worker, How could I have ended up on the list? She couldn’t give him an answer. As the line lengthened, she grew impatient. “She brushed me off and said, ‘Hey, get to the side,’” recalls Steen. The alleged felony, Steen later learned, took place between 1991 and 1993—when he was stationed in the Persian Gulf.

Steen wasn’t the only upstanding black citizen named Willie on the list. So was Willie Dixon, a Tampa youth leader and pastor, and Willie Whiting, a pastor in Tallahassee. In Jacksonville, Roosevelt Cobbs learned through the mail that he, too, was a felon, though he wasn’t. The same thing happened to Roosevelt Lawrence. Throughout the state, scores of innocent people found themselves on the purge list.

The story got little attention at the time. Only Greg Palast, a fringe, old-school investigator, complete with fedora, was on its trail. With a background in racketeering investigation for the government, Palast broke part of the story while the recount was still going on, but he did it in England, in The Observer. None of the mainstream media in the U.S. would touch it. “Stories of black people losing rights is passé, it’s not discussed, no one cares,” says Palast, whose reporting on the subject appears in his 2002 book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. “A black person accused of being a felon is always guilty.”

How the state ended up with the “felon list” in the first place has its roots in one of the uglier chapters in American history. In 1868, Florida, as a way of keeping former slaves away from the polls, put in its constitution that prisoners would permanently be denied the right to vote unless they were granted clemency by the governor. In those days, and for nearly a hundred years after, a black man looking at a white woman was cause for arrest. The felony clause was just one of many measures taken to keep blacks off the rolls, including literacy tests, poll taxes, and “grandfather clauses,” by which a man could vote only if his grandfather had. All these other methods were effectively ended. But the constitutional provision about former felons remained.

In Florida, there are an estimated 700,000 ex-felons, and 1 in 4 is a black male. Six years ago, Florida state representative Chris Smith, of Fort Lauderdale, sat outside a local Winn-Dixie grocery store trying to get people to register. “A lot of black men that looked like me, around my age, would just walk past me and say, ‘Felony,’ ‘Felony,’ and not even attempt to register to vote,” Smith recalls. Why so many? In the past few years the majority-Republican legislature has upgraded certain misdemeanors to felonies and also created dozens of new felonies that disproportionately affect the urban poor. Intercepting police communications with a ham radio is a felony. So is the cashing of two unemployment checks after the recipient has gotten a new job. State senator Frederica Wilson, like other black lawmakers in Florida, believes these felonies are “aimed at African-American people.”

Meanwhile, black lawmakers have tried in vain to legislate rights restoration to some offenders who have served their sentences. Wilson recalls one such proposal that was smacked down by Republican state senator Anna Cowin, head of the Ethics and Elections Committee. “I literally begged her, ‘Please just agenda it,’” says Wilson. “She would not agenda it.”

“I philosophically did not believe that felons should automatically get their rights restored,” says Cowin, “and neither did the governor nor the leadership.” She adds, “It makes elections very expensive too, because you have all these thousands and thousands of people—I mean tens of thousands of people—to send literature to. . . . The people don’t come to vote, anyway. So I think people need to go through a hoop.”

James Klinakis, who, like many ex-felons in Florida, is a recovering drug addict, has had some experience with what Cowin calls “a hoop.” For the past five years, Klinakis, the operations director for a drug-rehab program called Better Way of Miami, has been invited by Governor Bush to the annual drug summit, where he advises Bush on drug issues. For 10 years he has been applying to have his voting rights restored, a process that has included everything from a one-page form to a college-application-size package, complete with references, letters, and soul-searching essays. Like thousands of others, Klinakis has seen no movement on his case whatsoever. While some governors, such as Reubin Askew and Bob Graham, restored the rights of tens of thousands of felons who’d served their time, Jeb Bush allowed the backlog of applicants to grow to as many as 62,000 in 2002.

The law that disenfranchises felons took on a new life after the 1997 Miami mayoral race, in which a number of dead people “voted,” as did 105 felons. Seventy-one percent of those felons found on voter rolls were registered Democrats. Weeks later, the state legislature went to work on a sweeping anti-fraud bill. It called for stricter enforcement of the constitutional provision and stated that “the division shall annually contract with a private entity” to maintain a list of deceased individuals still on the rolls, those adjudicated “mentally incompetent” to vote, and, most important, felons. The appropriations committee allocated $4 million to the project; no money was appropriated from the state for voter education in 1998, 1999, or 2000.

When the state started soliciting bids for the high-tech felon hunt, at least three companies stepped up. One was Computer Business Services; another, Professional Analytical Systems & Software, bid under $10,000. After three rounds of bidding, Database Technologies, a Boca Raton company (since merged with ChoicePoint), emerged the winner. In its proposal, DBT estimated the cost at $4 million, knowing somehow that this was the exact amount the state had provided for the job. “There has been four million dollars allocated by the state for this project,” DBT senior vice president of operations George Bruder wrote to his boss, C.E.O. Chuck Lieppe, in an e-mail. “The bid we are constructing will have three different levels for price (a little bird told me this will help).” The little bird was correct.

Exactly what kind of company was hired to clean up Florida’s rolls of felons, or “dirtbags,” as one DBT employee referred to them? DBT supported—and was highly praised by—a now defunct conservative advocacy group called the Voting Integrity Project (V.I.P.). Touting “voting rights,” V.I.P. sprang into action in 1996 in response to the national “motor voter” law, which passed in 1993. The law had increased voter registration nationwide by an estimated seven million, with minorities constituting a disproportionate number of those new voters.

While some members of the Division of Elections were appalled by the price tag, Secretary of State Sandra Mortham, according to a source formerly inside the division, nursed the felon list along as her pet project. Ethel Baxter, the director of the division under Mortham and a civil servant for 30 years, working under both Republicans and Democrats, was reportedly skeptical of the idea. But Mortham, according to this source, instructed her to sign on to it. (Mortham says that she had no investment in the project, and that, regardless of how Baxter felt, they were obligated to fulfill a legislative action.)

From the start, there were questions about the felon list. “We were sent this purge list in August of 1998,” says Leon County elections supervisor Ion Sancho, moving feverishly through his cluttered office. “We started sending letters and contacting voters, [saying] that we had evidence that they were potential felons and that they contact us or they were going to be removed from the rolls. Boy, did that cause a firestorm.” One of those letters was sent to Sancho’s friend Rick Johnson, a civil-rights attorney, who was no felon. “Very few felons,” Sancho points out, “are members of the Florida bar.”

Sancho decided to get to the bottom of it. Early in 2000 he sat down with Emmett “Bucky” Mitchell, the Division of Elections’ assistant general counsel, and demanded to know why the list contained so many names of innocent people. “Bucky told me face-to-face that the Division of Elections was working on the problem,” recalls Sancho, “that it was the vendor’s [DBT’s] problem, and that they were telling the vendor to correct it.”

James Lee, chief marketing officer of ChoicePoint, the company that acquired DBT in the spring of 2000, says that the state did just the opposite. “Between the 1998 run and the 1999 run, the office of elections relaxed the criteria from 80 percent to 70 percent name match,” says Lee. “Because after the first year they weren’t getting enough names.”

And so, equipped with a database of felons supplied by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (F.D.L.E.), DBT programmers crouched at their computers and started scooping up names, many of which were only partial matches, from the Florida voter rolls and various other databases. Middle initials didn’t need to be the same; suffixes, such as Jr. and Sr., were ignored. Willie D. Whiting Jr., pastor, was caught because Willie J. Whiting was a felon. First and middle names could be switched around: Deborah Ann, Ann Deborah—same thing. Nicknames were fine—Robert, Bob, Bobby. The spelling of the last name didn’t have to be exact, either. The only thing Willie Steen was guilty of was having a name similar to that of a felon named Willie O’Steen.

DBT project manager Marlene Thorogood expressed concern in a March 1999 e-mail to the Division of Elections that the new parameters might result in “false positives” (i.e., wrongly included people). Bucky Mitchell wrote back, explaining the state’s position: “Obviously, we want to capture more names that possibly aren’t matches and let the [elections] supervisors make a final determination rather than exclude certain matches altogether.” Guilty until proved innocent, in other words.

In May 2000, supervisors got a new list, for the upcoming election, and discovered that it included 8,000 names from Texas. But the Texans, now living in Florida, weren’t guilty of felonies, only misdemeanors. DBT took the blame, claiming a computer glitch, and hastily corrected the problem. How, though, had Texans gotten on the list in the first place? Texas was a state that automatically restored the rights of felons who had served their time.

According to two separate Florida court rulings rendered before the 2000 election, prisoners who’d had their rights restored in other states retained them when they moved across state lines to Florida. Instead, the Division of Elections was advised by the Office of Executive Clemency to have DBT include out-of-state ex-felons residing in Florida, even those from so-called automatic-restoration states. In order to vote, these ex-felons would have to show written proof of clemency from their former state, or re-apply for it in Florida. Janet Modrow, the state’s liaison with DBT, wrote to Mitchell, “On the good side, we can add all the [states] that do have automatic restoration because they will have to get Florida Clemency. On the bad side, you will still have to check with those [states] that formally give clemency for each hit as before.”

Not that the clemency data was complete. Some of the clemency information had not been computerized, and existed only on three-by-five note cards in what looked like shoeboxes, says Sancho. This included the thousands of Florida ex-felons who’d had their rights automatically restored under Governor Askew, between 1975 and 1978.

Information from the F.D.L.E.—the starting point for DBT’s “data mining”—was even less reliable. This was a database of arrests, not convictions. Thousands were designated as “adjudication withheld”—meaning no conviction. Others were only misdemeanors. In sum, says Sancho, “they pulled up the entire universe of all potential felons that they found in everybody’s database.”

When the “corrected” list went out to all 67 supervisors in late May 2000, many were stunned. Linda Howell, elections supervisor of Madison County, found her own name on it. In Monroe County, the supervisor, Harry Sawyer, found his dad on the list, as well as one of his seven employees and the husband of another; none of them were felons. As a result of the mistakes, a couple of counties, including Broward and Palm Beach, decided not to use the list. Sancho, whose list had 697 names on it, went through them one by one, scrupulously checking. “We went for a five-for-five match,” says Sancho. “Those were criteria such as name, birth date, race, sex, Social Security number. When we applied that to this list of 697 that we got in 2000, I could verify only 33.”

Other elections supervisors did no such investigation. In Bay County, where the list contained approximately 1,000 names, elections officials essentially took it at face value. Once he got the list, says Larry Roxby, deputy elections supervisor, “it was pretty much a done deal.” In Miami-Dade, whose lists contained about 7,000 people, Supervisor David Leahy sent out letters, informing people of their felony status and advising that they could come in for a hearing if they wanted to appeal. If he didn’t hear back from them, these names were simply struck. Throughout the state, many of these letters came back “undeliverable.” Small wonder: the addresses provided by DBT were often out-of-date.

A few of the more dutiful supervisors found themselves taking on the extra role of citizens’ advocates. In Hillsborough County, Supervisor of Elections Pam Iorio, now the mayor of Tampa, sent out letters to all 3,258 people on her list. If they appealed, she worked with them to try to keep them on the rolls. Roosevelt Lawrence was one such person. “We were going back to the state and saying, ‘This gentleman has the following facts: here are the facts, this is what he is saying,’” Iorio recalls. “‘He lived a lawful life for over 40 years and he’s been employed here and done this.’ Twice they said, ‘No, that’s incorrect.’ In writing. . . . And he never voted in the 2000 election.” Lawrence continued to protest; finally, the F.D.L.E. realized its record on Roosevelt was wrong.

Why was the state prepared to pay $4 million for such shoddy work? A class-action suit brought by the N.A.A.C.P. and a number of African-American voters in 2001 accused DBT, Harris, and several individual supervisors of disenfranchising black voters. Beyond the unreliable matching criteria the state had demanded, beyond the flawed data it had provided from the Office of Executive Clemency and the F.D.L.E., evidence and testimony from the suit suggests that the state had failed to properly monitor whether DBT was fulfilling its contract. For example, the 1998 contract stipulated “manual verification using telephone calls and statistical sampling.” But DBT vice president George Bruder testified, “I am not aware of any telephone calls that were made.”

The suit ended in settlement agreements, in September 2002, that appeared to rectify the problem for the future. The state agreed to restore to its rolls the out-of-state felons from “automatic restoration” states. DBT agreed to run the names from the 1999 and 2000 purge lists using stricter criteria, and to provide to Florida’s elections supervisors the names of people who most likely shouldn’t have been on the list. The list of potentially wrongly targeted voters came to 20,000—more than a third of DBT’s May 2000 list. The supervisors, in turn, were supposed to restore these names to their voting rolls, had they been wrongly purged.

More than two years later, with the election of 2004 looming, Jeb Bush’s government has utterly failed to uphold its end of the bargain. Virtually none of the 20,000 people erroneously purged from Florida’s rolls have been reinstated in any formalized way. In September 2003, DBT and the state did manage to finish vetting the list and to send out a so-called filtered list to the elections supervisors to “re-evaluate.” No deadline was imposed for restoring the innocents, and little direction on the subject came from the state. If supervisors wanted to restore the names, they could; if they wanted to ignore the task, they could do that too.

Some supervisors have worked with the filtered list to restore names. But others have put it aside; as of June, more than a few had no recollection of ever receiving it. (After prodding from advocacy groups, the state re-sent the list.) In Miami-Dade, the filtered list had more than 17,000 names. Of those, to date, only 14 voters wrongly identified as felons have been restored to the voting rolls.

These are just the snarls of the old ex-felon list. But in Florida, it seems, there’s always another angle. Last May the Division of Elections attempted a new purge, with a brand-new felon list. This list came to 48,000 names. Accompanying it was a memo to the supervisors from Ed Kast, director of the Division of Elections, informing them to start the purging process. For Ion Sancho it started another firestorm. “I asked my staff, ‘Look through [the list] and do a cursory exam. Nothing detailed. What can you tell me?’ They identified a dozen people who they recognized right off the bat weren’t felons,” Sancho says, storming about his office.

At least the list hadn’t been generated by DBT. But, incredibly, despite a mandate from the embarrassed legislature that no private company should ever again undertake such work for the state, the new list had been prepared with the help of Accenture. Formerly known as Andersen Consulting, once the consulting arm of Andersen Worldwide, the former parent company of Arthur Andersen, Accenture has contributed $25,000 to Republicans in Florida. The company is currently the subject of a Department of Justice investigation for possible violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bans bribing foreign officials. Its address in Bermuda has prompted some members of Congress to question if the company is dodging taxes. (An Accenture spokesman says that the company pays taxes in the U.S.)

In 2001, in the wake of the DBT debacle, the legislature, with the support of elections supervisors, passed a law making the association of court clerks responsible for the database used for any and all felon information. After all, the clerks of the courts were independent officers and the only source with actual conviction data. But the state ended up ignoring the law, claiming their services were too expensive. According to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, a recently uncovered e-mail showed that, in fact, the clerks of the courts had agreed to meet the price the state wanted. “The Division of Elections wanted control,” concludes Sancho. So it farmed out work to Accenture—for at least $1.6 million. Jenny Nash, spokeswoman for Secretary of State Glenda Hood, defends the state’s action in hiring Accenture. “Accenture was brought in to help develop the database,” she says. “They do not operate it, own it, or maintain it.”

This time, Sancho wasn’t the only elections supervisor fed up. “Why did we wait until the presidential year for this?” Linda Howell, of Madison County, asks. “I don’t think it’s our place to have to clean up the state’s problem,” says Bob Sweat, of Manatee County. And so, in mid-June, the supervisors, many of them grandmothers with colorful pantsuits and orangey hairdos, gathered in the Key West Hilton hotel for the twice-yearly supervisors’ conference to give Ed Kast a piece of their collective mind. Beverly Hill, of Alachua County, stood up to announce she had found a half-dozen people on the new list who had erroneously appeared in 2000. “They’re back on the list!” Kay Clem, of Indian River County, reported that among the first 20 names examined “one has no record! The other has a pending disposition!” As if the supervisors weren’t already alarmed enough, they had just been advised by Cathy Lannon, of the attorney general’s office, not to speak to any of the potential felons on the telephone, in order to avoid off-the-record interactions.

Kast seemed to let the chaos wash right over him. What did he care? He had resigned as head of the Division of Elections 24 hours earlier to “pursue other interests.”

For weeks, liberal advocacy groups such as the A.C.L.U. and People for the American Way urged the supervisors to let them see the list so they could help vet it for accuracy, and avoid a repeat of the debacle of 2000. On May 12, in one of Kast’s last moves in his post, he sent a memo to the supervisors, detailing how to thwart the request, citing statutes about the privacy of voter-registration information and the will of the legislature—even though nothing in the law prevents the same information from going to political candidates to further their campaigns. “This is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to an intimidation letter to come out of the Division of Elections,” says Sancho. (Kast could not be reached for comment.)

As with many things concerning the Florida government, it would take a lawsuit to get any traction. In late May, CNN, with the support of Senator Bill Nelson, filed suit against the state for access to the list. Judge Nikki Clark ordered it released to the public.

It took The Miami Herald just a day to discover that the list, which the state had tried hard to keep under wraps, contained the names of at least 2,119 ex-felons who had been granted clemency in Florida, and thus had had their voting rights restored. Like the 2000 list, the new one turned out to be disproportionately Democrat.

Then, on July 7, an investigation by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune revealed a startling, new twist. Of the 48,000 names on the list, only 61 were Hispanics—that’s one-tenth of 1 percent. In Florida, Hispanics make up 11 percent of the prison population, 17 percent of the population at large, and mostly vote Republican. Why were so few Hispanics on the felon list? Because the voter-registration application identified Hispanics as such; the F.D.L.E. database did not, so when the two failed to match, the Hispanic ex-felons were excluded from the purge list. Given the snowballing problems, the state understood it couldn’t possibly get away with using the list. On July 10, it was scrapped.

The Department of State spokeswoman, Nicole de Lara, has claimed that the glitch was “unforeseen” and “unintentional.” But according to Jeff Long, a veteran F.D.L.E. official, starting in 1999 with the preparation of the 2000 purge list, his office informed the secretary of state’s office how the F.D.L.E. matched for race. “We provided an extract of what’s in our criminal databases, which included the categories for race,” says Long. “The extract listed five categories for race. Those codes do not include an ‘H’ [for “Hispanic”].” Asked who was in receipt of this information, he cites Janet Modrow and voting-systems chief Paul Craft, both of whom are still working in the secretary of state’s office. James Lee of ChoicePoint told Vanity Fair that DBT and state elections officials had actually discussed the glitch. He, too, cites Modrow as well as Bucky Mitchell. (Modrow, Craft, and Mitchell could not be reached for comment.) The matching flaw was discussed yet again, in 2001, at state voter-file meetings, according to Chuck Smith, elections-supervisor employee in Hillsborough County, who attended them. As for Accenture, whatever flaws emerged were not their problem, claims Meg McLaughlin, president of Accenture’s “eDemocracy Services.” “Accenture’s contract in no way says that we are to validate the data,” McLaughlin said at a recent hearing before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “The only thing Accenture was asked and contracted to do was to build the tool.”

In spite of the scrapping of the list, the state has informed the elections supervisors that it is still their legal obligation to bar ex-felons from voting in November.
No one is more frustrated than the ex-felons seeking a restoration of their voting and other civil rights. About 15 percent of the thousands of clemency applicants in the backlog can have their rights restored without a hearing. The majority must wait to stand before Governor Bush and his cabinet, and plead with him to exercise his “Executive Grace.” These clemency hearings take place just four times a year, and the governor invites between 60 and 130 applicants each time.
On a steamy June day in Tallahassee, one of the lucky few invited to plead her case at the courthouse is Beverly Brown, a black Miamian, who has been applying for seven years.

“Thank you, Governor and Cabinet,” she says, her voice trembling as she looks up at Jeb Bush, in a beige suit, and three of his cabinet members, seated above her on the dais. “I’m a graduate patient-care technician, and there’s nothing more I’d like to do than to utilize my skills to help others.” She has been lucky enough to have had some private health-care jobs; recently she cared for a young quadriplegic. But what she’d really like is to get a state license—something she can’t do unless her civil rights are restored. Her convictions, all drug-related and nonviolent, date back almost 20 years, except for a more recent conviction for having been caught with pot.

“Since when have you been drug- and alcohol-free?” Jeb asks flatly, looking up from her file.

“About nine years,” says Brown.

“O.K., in 2001 there—you were convicted of marijuana possession?”

“I had—yes, it was in my possession, but it didn’t belong to me. Someone left it in my car.”

“I have another question,” Chief Financial Officer Tom Gallagher later asks, looking at her file. “What is ‘wailing rock cocaine’?”

Brown shifts nervously. “O.K., sir, that is not my charge.”

“I just want to know what is ‘wailing rock cocaine’?” he asks.

Brown’s face flushes with panic and confusion. “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

Bush gives her file another once-over and delivers his verdict. “I’d like to take this case under advisement.” It’s not a no, but it’s not a yes either. Over the next couple of weeks, Brown will try to find out why the case has been on hold, but she’ll get no answers; Bush is not required to give any.
Nonetheless, to prove his magnanimousness, Bush announces that same day that since June 2003, when the backlog was 38,606 ex-felons, the clemency office has gone through more than 30,000 names and restored the rights of 20,861. Why the sudden progress? Could it be that he has recently been overcome by the idea of redemption?

The figure, civil-rights advocates believe, is deceptive. Bush failed to say that the backlog contained an additional 124,000 names. According to a legal challenge led by the Florida Caucus of Black State Legislators, between 1992 and 2001, 124,000 people had been denied their rights-restoration paperwork and assistance upon leaving prison. Ordered by a judge, finally, to take a look at these cases, the Executive Clemency Board restored the rights of 22,000 of them. The figure is similar to the 20,861 Bush claimed he restored from the “backlog.” When pressed, his press secretary, Alia Faraj, admits, “Some of those may cross over. Absolutely.”

Meanwhile, people like James Klinakis, who have paid their debt to society, who have gone on to serve in society, but who have no say in society, have feelings that go far beyond Bush v. Gore and what happened in 2000 and what might happen in November. “I believe the president of the United States would have been different, some years ago, if some people were allowed to vote. I don’t know—that’s only an opinion,” says Klinakis. “But I do know this, that I would like the opportunity to be able to vote—for county commissioners, for mayors, and the governor and the presidency. Whether it’s going to change something or not, I don’t know, but, at least, I know I had the opportunity to do it.”

IV.
Even if no voters are turned away at the polls in November, will everyone’s votes actually be counted? Floridians who use the new, electronic touch-screen voting machines will have good reason to wonder.

How Florida’s largest counties have lurched from hanging chads to paperless voting machines after the 2000 election, and what consequences this change will bring, is an extraordinary story of well-meaning government officials—from state legislators to county commissioners—courted by local lobbyists and out-of-state salesmen. It’s a story of machines too complex for poll workers to operate reliably, resulting in unrecorded ballots, of touch-screens with no paper trail that stir fears of vote manipulation, of systems far more expensive to purchase and maintain than previous ones. It’s a story, most disturbingly, of machines billed as infallible that turned out to be flawed.

The irony is that after the 2000-election mess, Jeb Bush himself had expressed confidence in optiscans as a worthy system to replace punch-card machines. On a plane from Atlanta to Tallahassee, Bush ran into Mark Pritchett, who was about to oversee a blue-ribbon panel for the governor on electoral reforms. “He said those optical scans seem pretty good, and reasonably priced,” recalls Pritchett, executive vice president of the nonprofit Collins Center for Public Policy. But a power greater than the governor’s own would soon prevail: the power of the marketplace.

On March 1, 2001, Jeb’s bipartisan blue-ribbon panel submitted a report with 35 recommendations. Many were adopted in the state’s sweeping Election Reform Act that spring. But not all. The reform act, which sailed through Florida’s House and Senate, did set clear new rules for recounts. If a margin was one-half of l percent or less, an automatic recount would be done; if the resulting margin was one-quarter of l percent or less, then a manual recount would be done of the undervotes and overvotes.

Other changes were just as specific. For a would-be voter who could not be found in the register or, say, who was deemed an ex-felon when he said he wasn’t, provisional ballots would be provided. If the board found the voter was eligible, that ballot would be counted—assuming the Election Day margin was close enough to make the exercise worthwhile. Absentee voting would be easier: Florida would embrace convenience voting, by which anyone could vote by absentee ballot. For overseas ballots, postmarks would no longer be an issue: any ballots received within 10 days of a general election would be accepted.

Most dramatically, the act prohibited punch-card voting machines. No more hanging chads! Out, too, were “central” optiscans: the ones hooked up to a central county server. So many of the overvotes in 2000 had gone unnoticed because the optiscans in those mostly poor, black precincts failed to spit back an overvote ballot for a voter to revise; instead, the overvotes were silently rejected on the central server. Now the 24 punch-card counties and 15 central-optiscan counties would have a choice: join the bunch that had precinct-based optiscans, or try touch-screens, which had just been certified in the state as an alternative, thanks in part to a huge lobbying push by vendors, and because the large counties never wanted to deal with paper ballots again.

The blue-ribbon panel made clear its own preference. Though touch-screens were said to be reliable, it observed, they had a higher error rate than optiscans. With a nod to the U.S. Supreme Court’s equal-protection logic in Bush v. Gore, the panel suggested Florida voters would not be treated equally if some used a system that had a higher error rate than one used by the rest. Perhaps because touch-screen technology was evolving so quickly, the panel overlooked a more glaring inequity. The fine new standard for manual recounts could be applied to optiscans, because they produced paper ballots that could be inspected for over- and undervotes. But how would it work with touch-screens, which produced no paper receipts?

All of the big counties up for grabs, however, would soon go with touch-screens, and most of those would go with a machine made by an Omaha-based company called Election Systems & Software, or E.S.&S., which had the good political sense to hire Sandra Mortham, former Florida secretary of state and implementer of the ex-felon-purge campaign by DBT, as its chief lobbyist in the state.

Big money was at stake—tens of millions of dollars—and so, tragically, the push for clean elections with new voting machines became a classic exercise in murky politics. Shortly before signing on with E.S.&S., Mortham signed on as a lobbyist for the Florida Association of Counties (FAC). On June 21, 2001, the association formally endorsed E.S.&S.’s iVotronic and began urging the state’s undecided counties to buy it.

In return, E.S.&S. promised the association a commission on sales. By year’s end, E.S.&S. would win 12 counties, including Miami-Dade and Broward, for overall sales of about $70.6 million. According to the agreement, FAC would earn about $300,000 in commissions. If the association looked bad, Mortham looked worse. She was taking commissions from E.S.&S. while on contract with the association that endorsed E.S.&S. In at least one county—Broward—Mortham received a 1 percent “success fee” of $172,000 for the county’s $17.2 million purchase of E.S.&S. touch-screens. If that rate applied across the state, noted the Sun-Sentinel, then Mortham would have earned $706,000 in all from E.S.&S.’s total sale of $70.6 million.

That summer of 2001, Mortham set up a network of lobbyists for each county in contention. If she did anything else, the county commissioners of Miami-Dade and Broward, her two biggest prospective customers, are unable to recall what that was. They never saw her. (Mortham declined to elaborate to Vanity Fair on her arrangement with E.S.&S.)

Miami-Dade was a key county for E.S.&S. to win: more populous than several states, it had about 912,000 registered voters. Also, a bit disconcertingly, it was a county with 64 languages, 3 of which—Spanish and Creole, in addition to English—are spoken widely enough to require representation on all precinct ballots. The company advised elections commissioners that it was applying for certification of a “minor enhancement” to meet the requirement.

“There was no mention by E.S.&S. [in their presentation] of any delays in boot-up time to accommodate multiple languages,” recalls Theodore Lucas, the county’s procurement-management director. Or, he might have added, any intimation that disaster lay ahead. On January 29, 2002, the Miami-Dade County Commission voted to spend $24.5 million on 7,200 E.S.&S. iVotronic touch-screens. A new era had begun.

For E.S.&S., Miami-Dade was a cakewalk. But in neighboring Broward, nearly as large and important a prize, it had a problem: the county’s first-ever black elections supervisor, Miriam Oliphant, had come out early on for Sequoia, one of only two other touch-screen vendors certified to sell in Florida at that time. She’d gone to Riverside, California, to see how Sequoia machines worked in a big metropolitan area, and liked what she saw. So E.S.&S. did what it felt it had to do. It hired lobbyists who were very, very close to Broward’s commissioners. The head lobbyist had served on the finance committee of one commissioner’s last campaign and had held fund-raisers for a number of the other commissioners. Another lobbyist had been finance chairman for another commissioner’s campaign.

Not surprisingly, Broward’s commissioners went with E.S.&S. Forty-eight hours before doing so, E.S.&S. fulfilled a county goal to steer l0 percent of the $17.2 million contract to minority businesses by bringing in Dorsey Miller, an African-American former school-board administrator who’d started a company, D. C. Miller & Associates, to win minority contracts for distributing custodial supplies—to his own school district.

First, as The New Times Broward—Palm Beach reported, Miller tried to steer $908,000 of the $l.7 million earmarked for minority contractors to D. C. Miller & Associates by arranging for it to supply voting booths and voter education. Unfortunately, Miller had no means of manufacturing the booths and no warehouse space to store them. This, as county staffers could see, would make Miller, in the argot of municipal contracts, a “pass-through” for the white business that did the real work. (Miller declined to comment to Vanity Fair.)

Instead, Miller steered the business to an Asian-owned company called American Medical Depot, from which he received a monthly stipend, and bonus checks, to help it drum up business. Usually with E.S.&S., the booths were assembled in Kansas and sent directly to E.S.&S., which combined them with its voting machines before sending them on to its clients. This time, the booths would be sent to A.M.D., which would earn its $878,000 by buying, storing, and testing them. A.M.D. won approval for the minority contract, in part by claiming to be an independent entity, not a pass-through, but, as Broward’s assistant state attorney John Hanlon later determined, E.S.&S. sent checks regularly to A.M.D. A day or two later, A.M.D. would send a check for exactly the same amount to the Kansas manufacturer of the booths. The maneuver was slippery but not illegal. “We have the money movement,” says one person involved with the investigation, “but we didn’t have a crime.”

If Miller had lost the big prize, his company still managed to receive a reported $175,000 to $225,000 of the E.S.&S. minority-contract money for “voter outreach,” which meant staging 93 demonstrations of E.S.&S.’s iVotronic, for, he estimated, 4,000 to 5,000 people in all—which comes to about $35 to $45 per person.

So E.S.&S. had the business, but could it deliver on its promises? Going from two to three languages on its machines, E.S.&S. soon discovered, demanded the addition of a memory chip, which led to a longer boot-up time, about six minutes for each machine. Unfortunately, multiple machines at one polling place couldn’t be started at the same time. A special supervisor cartridge had to be placed in each machine for six minutes, then transferred to the next machine. Some polling places had as many as 28 machines.

The disastrous implications of that became all too clear on September 10, 2002. This was the primary in which former attorney general Janet Reno was pitted against fellow Democrat Bill McBride for the privilege of taking on Jeb Bush in his bid for re-election that November. In Miami-Dade that morning, many polling places opened late. Workers were flummoxed by the machines. Some never did get them operating correctly: after a whole day of voters’ going in and out, the touch-screens at Precinct 519 recorded no votes cast. Some polling places had no electrical outlets, so workers had to run the machines on their backup batteries, which soon died. At the end of the day, some of the county’s iVotronics were shut down incorrectly, leaving their votes uncounted. “It was a perfect storm,” rued Miami-Dade’s elections supervisor, David Leahy, who had pushed hard for E.S.&S.

In Broward the night before, dozens of poll workers had quit, overwhelmed by the prospect of dealing with the new machines, so Oliphant herself had raced around the county distributing the bags of tools that polling supervisors needed in each precinct. Yet two dozen polling places opened late, one after noon. At least 34 of Broward’s polling places turned away voters before the polls were due to close. Results, as in Miami-Dade, were scrambled or lost.

Early results showed that McBride had won by a margin of about 8,000 votes out of more than l.3 million cast. As reports of irregularities began coming in, Janet Reno called for a statewide recount. Tallahassee told her she was too late. Though final tallies in Miami-Dade and Broward shaved the margin by nearly half, Reno grudgingly conceded.

For that November’s election, Miami-Dade and Broward pledged to spend whatever it took to thwart another crisis. This time, the machines were booted up the night before—and guarded all night by police on overtime. More than a thousand county employees were commandeered to help, too, and so in both Miami-Dade and Broward the election came off with hardly a hitch—at a cost, in the two big southern counties, of well over $l0 million.

Jeb Bush won re-election by far too large a margin for any talk of voting-machine irregularities. Another winner that day was Katherine Harris, who ran for U.S. Congress in her home district in central-west Florida. From her first day in office as secretary of state, in 1999, Harris had known she would have just one term. A state rule change enacted by the preceding Democratic administration had decreed that Harris would be the last elected secretary of state. Thereafter, the position would be an appointed one.

So Jeb Bush now had the luxury of appointing a secretary of state to oversee the challenge of getting Florida’s new touch-screens to work as promised. The governor formed a transition team, which included Miguel De Grandy as chief counsel. De Grandy, a Republican lawyer who had done all he could to block Miami-Dade’s recount in 2000, had been recommended by Sandra Mortham to be hired as E.S.&S.’s lawyer-lobbyist in his county. Now this same E.S.&S. lobbyist was chief counsel of the governor’s transition team. The next secretary of state and her director of elections would oversee the certification process for all upgrades to E.S.&S. machines. De Grandy sees nothing untoward about the arrangement because, he says, he did not advise the governor personally on whom to choose for secretary of state.

Bush’s choice was Glenda Hood, a centrist Republican and then mayor of Orlando. Hood vowed that there would be smooth and fair elections in Florida, and felt fully confident in E.S.&S.’s iVotronic machines to help make that happen.
She would find the electoral waters a bit choppier than expected.

E.S.&S. had promised to shorten the long boot-up time for Miami-Dade’s iVotronics created by the trilingual ballot. But when the company submitted a new and improved Version 7.5, the state informed E.S.&S. on May 7, 2003, that it would not be certified, because of numerous “anomalies and deficiencies.” E.S.&S. says these were minor, and that the following month, when Version 7.5.1 was certified, it included a fix for the trilingual ballot. No longer would the machines have to be booted up serially. Yet even now, as one Miami-Dade County insider observes, each machine “takes just as long to boot up.”

As E.S.&S. was struggling to resolve those “anomalies and deficiencies,” Miami-Dade’s inspector general issued a blistering report. After listening to tapes of E.S.&S.’s presentation to the county the previous year, he wrote that E.S.&S. had deceived the commissioners outright. The company had said nothing about the longer boot-up time. The I.G. cautioned the county not to believe E.S.&S.’s promises, and wrote that “if this situation does not improve, the County should consider scrapping the current system.” (An E.S.&S. spokesperson says the company did not mislead the county about its products or services.)
At 54, Florida secretary of state Glenda Hood has the handsome, weathered look of a woman who has spent a lot of time in the Florida sun and doesn’t mind that at all. In person, she projects an odd mix of authority and detachment, perhaps fitting in a job that puts her in charge of Florida’s elections but gives her limited power to affect them.

Hood’s message to the out-of-state reporters tramping through her Tallahassee office in ever growing numbers is how much has changed. “Everything has changed,” she says. “And everything needed to change.” Since the primary calamity of 2002, Hood stresses, scores of local elections have gone off without a hitch. “I think it does a huge disservice to live in the past, to say ‘what if?’ You could go through these ‘what if?’ conspiracy theories from now until the end of time.”

Much has been done, and so Hood’s frustration with skeptics is understandable. Still, a series of problems through the spring and early summer have been troubling. In a January runoff among Republicans in Broward and Palm Beach Counties, touch-screens produced 137 blank ballots while recording a 12-vote margin of victory for the winner. As a result, U.S. Congressman Robert Wexler, a Democrat, stepped up his call for the state to require printers for touch-screen voting machines. The printers could generate paper “receipts,” much as A.T.M.’s do. When a voter confirmed that the touch-screen had registered his vote as he cast it, he could put the paper receipt in a box; in a close race, the voter-verified paper ballots could be used for manual recounts. In his home county of Palm Beach, Wexler filed two lawsuits—one in state court, one in federal court—declaring, among other things, that touch-screens violated the state’s own election laws because they don’t allow for manual recounts. The state suit was dismissed on appeal in August. The federal case was due to be heard late that month.
Such lawsuits, Hood says, are so much fearmongering. “I think there are a lot of individuals who are trying to erode voter confidence,” she declares. “The fact is that we haven’t had malfunctions with any of our equipment.” The blank ballots in Broward and Palm Beach’s runoff, election officials said, were easily explained. Voters had simply gone into the voting booth and chosen not to vote. As for Wexler’s call for a paper trail, Hood says, “not one of [the vendors] have fully developed any type of paper printer. And the reason they haven’t . . . is because there are no standards.”

To further discourage the paper-ballot movement, Hood turned to Republican senator Anna Cowin, the legislator who had blocked attempts to have ex-felons’ rights automatically restored. Hood gave Cowin a bill to file, which would render Wexler’s lawsuits moot. “A manual recount may not be conducted of undervotes on touch-screen machines,” the bill declared.

The point, Hood explains, was that no recount is needed, because touch-screens don’t allow overvotes: if a voter tries to select a second candidate, the second choice replaces the first. Nor do they allow undervotes: if a ballot is left blank, the machines notify a voter two or three times that he has not made a selection. Yet, as activist Sandy Wayland of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition points out, “If you say recounts are illegal with touch-screens, that would make it difficult for any future generation of machine that did have a paper trail to get certified.”

When a young, first-time Democratic state senator named Dave Aronberg succeeded in thwarting the bill last Easter, Hood quietly enacted the ban as a new state rule. By the time most legislators learned of this stealth move, a 20-day public comment period had ended, and the rule acquired the force of law. Late last spring, Hood was still grumbling over the calls for a voter-verified paper ballot to accompany touch-screens: “Some of the advocates . . . I’m not sure that they’re aware that there actually is a paper audit record that is one of the backup systems.”

The audit record is intended to be used only after votes are tallied, as a kind of backup check to see that the machines have worked as intended. But it could be used for manual recounts, Hood suggested, on a statewide basis, if needed. Ed Kast, then the director of Florida’s Elections Division, had said more specifically in state hearings of May 2003 that the audit record generated “actual paper records as well as ballot images,” thus rendering any other paper trail superfluous.
Unfortunately, as Constance Kaplan was about to learn, the audit-record system was flawed.

Kaplan, 55, the new Miami-Dade elections supervisor, has big blond hair and likes to drape herself in lots of southwestern turquoise jewelry. A 33-year veteran of Chicago’s elections system, she came to Miami in July 2003 because she thought the job would be fun.

Shortly before her arrival, Orlando Suarez, a Miami-Dade technology specialist, reported in a memo that when the audit report was downloaded from the various voting machines of a polling place, the serial numbers of the respective machines could be garbled or lost. As a result, the votes taken from machines A, B, and C might all appear on the audit record to have come from an unknown machine D. No votes were lost, Suarez observed, but, as an auditing device, he said, this was unacceptable.

“Initially, E.S.&S. denied that a problem existed,” Kaplan wrote to Aldo Tesi, the president and C.E.O. of E.S.&S. Then, as Kaplan explained, the E.S.&S. project manager for Miami-Dade suggested a temporary solution, which proved to be time-consuming and expensive. E.S.&S. assured Kaplan that the company’s upcoming, new and improved version would soon be finished and certified, solving that problem and others. But months passed, and no solution appeared. An E.S.&S. spokesperson says the company did come up with a fix by mid-2003, but Florida declined to certify it. A county insider has a different view: “Basically they . . . didn’t do a thing about it until their feet were held to the fire and they were being trashed by the media.”

In mid-July, at last, E.S.&S. won state certification for a fix of the audit glitch. The company would pay all costs associated with the fix. So the problem, as Hood declared, was solved. The company’s new Version 8.0 was still nowhere in sight, but an E.S.&S. spokesperson says its timing “is not relevant” because the fix was done. Yet the fact remained that E.S.&S. had been promising for nearly two years that a cure-all version would be arriving soon.

No sooner had the fix been announced than another embarrassment emerged. Twice in 2003, Miami-Dade’s computer system had crashed, apparently destroying the county’s electronic records of a number of 2002 and 2003 elections. The loss of some of these voting-machine records was actually a violation of Florida law, which requires counties to keep race returns for set periods of time.

The crash had occurred on county computers, not on iVotronic voting machines. But the county could not find backup records. A frantic search ensued for random copies of the results that might exist on one hard drive or another. Finally, copies were found. Governor Bush himself professed to be “pleased” at the retrieval. But again the state’s Division of Elections was left seeming ham-handed.

Even if no further flaw emerges before November, Florida voters will be left to wonder just how accurate their touch-screens are, thanks to a jarring report in early July from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Reporters sifted the results from last March’s Democratic presidential primary in Florida. They looked only at precincts where the primary was the sole race on the ballot. Here was as pure a sample group as one could hope to find: only Democrats could vote in that primary, and they knew before they walked into the voting booth who the choices were. How many such voters would go into the voting booth and then fail to vote? Yet the Sun-Sentinel found that of the 200,836 votes cast on touch-screens in those precincts, 1,648—or about 0.8 percent—were recorded as undervotes. That was about six times as many undervotes as recorded on optiscans in other one-race precincts for that same primary.

“That one line has been repeated, but it’s not true,” says Hood’s press secretary, Jenny Nash, of the six-times-greater rate of undervotes on touch-screens. “On touch-screens, the undervote rate is a slight bit higher because if you don’t make a decision in a specific race the touch-screen prompts you two or three times, but eventually you can cast your ballot that way. On an optiscan, if a voter decides to do that, a blank ballot, when it’s fed into the tabulator, is spit back out. Because the poll worker can’t look at how the voter voted, he would say, ‘Go fix it.’ That can be intimidating.”

Unpersuaded, one of Miami-Dade’s commissioners has begun to ask if the county should just admit it erred and get rid of its touch-screens altogether. “The issue is not the paper trail,” says Jimmy Morales, a Cuban-American who is running for mayor of Miami-Dade county this fall. “The issue is these machines don’t work.”

Yes, Morales says, a paper trail would be reassuring. But at what cost, added to all these other costs? “For the cost of re-doing the software, adding the printers, not to mention the ongoing supplies—paper, ink, all that stuff—it’s more expensive to do that than to scrap them and buy the optiscan system.”

Governor Bush, asked recently what’s changed from 2000 about his state’s demographics, said, “Everything.” Overall, the state’s population has grown by more than 1 million—to 17 million—since the last presidential election. “We have the largest number of people moving in, the third-highest number of people moving out,” said Bush of how his state compares with the other 49. “We have a pretty high birthrate. We have a lot of young people who are becoming first-time voters. And we have a lot of people going on to see their Creator.”

Yet, of the state’s 9.4 million voters registered in 2003, the party-line split is still right up the middle: 42 percent Democrats, 39 percent Republicans, with 17 percent claiming no party affiliation and 3 percent members of minor parties. Nick Baldick, who was John Edwards’s presidential-campaign manager, says even that small majority of Democrats is deceptive. “Florida has a registration majority of Democrats, but not a presidential voting majority of Democrats. A lot of registered Democrats in the South may vote Democratic for state representative or governor, but may not vote Democratic for Senate or president.”

In the crazy quilt of Florida demographic groups, Cuban-Americans have been staunchly—passionately—Republican since John F. Kennedy’s bungled Bay of Pigs. This time, believes Florida Democratic Party chairman Scott Maddox, the bloc may not be so monolithic. “George Bush has broken promises,” he says. “He promised to end the wet-foot, dry-foot immigration rule—that if you’re a Cuban and you’re caught in the water, on a raft, they send you back to Cuba, whereas if you get a foot on land, then you stay in America. He has not fulfilled that promise.” And Cuban-Americans are dubious, he suggests, about all the American lives spent to remove Saddam Hussein from power when “we have a dictator that has just as bad human-rights violations within 90 miles off our coast.”

Ultimately, says Baldick, Kerry will need to win by the same formula Clinton won by in 1996. In the big southern counties—Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach—he’ll have to win big. Then, Baldick explains, he’ll have to break even, or come close, in the I-4 corridor: the now fabled mid-state region, the spine of which is Interstate 4, between St. Petersburg and Daytona, whose voters are the state’s major swing factor. Clinton did carry the I-4 corridor—just barely, but that was enough. “Then, in North Florida,” Baldick observes of the state’s most conservative counties, especially in the Panhandle, “a Democrat has to not get blown out of the water.”

That’s the theory. But more than one new variable this year may yet confound it.

Convenience voting, suggests former Gore lawyer Kendall Coffey, could be a killer for Democrats. “Just as Democrats have historically done better with recounts, Republicans have always been favored by absentees,” he says, and convenience voting is simply absentee voting made easy. “The funny thing is that it was packaged in with all the touch-screen voting reforms in 2001, and the Democrats never saw it coming.” But Scott Maddox sees an upside there. Convenience voting, he says, “is going to be a major push of the Florida Democratic Party because that is the one place now [where] we can have a paper trail.”

Earlier this year, minority voters in Orlando’s mayoral election showed strong interest in absentee ballots—apparently enough for Democrat Buddy Dyer to avoid a runoff. Now the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which ultimately reports to Jeb Bush, has begun an investigation into those ballots that has, as New York Times columnist Bob Herbert put it, “the vile smell of voter suppression.” Dressed in plain clothes, gun-toting investigators showed up at the homes of elderly black citizens in Orlando and told them that they’re part of an investigation into Mayor Dyer’s campaign workers, including Ezzie Thomas, 73, president of the Orange County Voters League. Many of those confronted were members of the mostly volunteer organization which encourages minority voting. Thomas sees the investigation as nothing less than an attempt to intimidate Florida’s black voters. “It’s because of the presidential election coming down the pike,” he told the Orlando Sentinel.

Military absentee ballots will be even more of a factor this year than in 2000 because of the obvious: 135,000 American troops in Iraq, not to mention those in Afghanistan. And now that any overseas ballots can be received without a postmark up until 10 days after the election, who can say what schemes might be hatched in that grace period after a close election? Mark Herron, the Gore lawyer whose memo about absentee ballots backfired so badly in 2000, adds that “there’s also a provision in here that’s probably going to come into play that says that the Elections Canvassing Commission can extend overseas absentee ballot receipts if the armed forces of the United States are engaged. So the 10-day thing may not be 10 days.” It may be more than 10 days.

The greatest new variable this year, to be sure, is the voting machines themselves. Will they perform without mishap after all? Will the presidential election in Florida be the anticlimax that members of both parties should fervently hope it will be: a clean election with a winner undisputed by all? In dozens of local elections across the state, there is indeed cause for that hope. In poor, black Gadsden, the county with the highest spoilage of votes (12 percent) in 2000, the error rate in 2002 dropped to less than 1 percent. Shirley Knight, the elections supervisor since 2001, credits new, precinct-based optiscans for that success—along with her own emphasis on stringent, relentless voter education.

Yet even if the machines appear to work, who’s to say they won’t have been hacked? While elections officials in Florida seem to take on faith the security of their E.S.&S. machines, the state of Ohio isn’t so sanguine. In 2003, Ohio secretary of state J. Kenneth Blackwell commissioned a Detroit-based computer company to test his state’s voting machines. The results were not encouraging. In the E.S.&S. machines, the review discovered one potential high-risk area, three medium-risk, and 13 low-risk areas. Instead of multiple passwords that could be set at each polling place to enhance security, E.S.&S. had made two of its three passwords for each machine “hard-coded,” or immutable, so that the same two passwords were used for every machine manufactured. The review also concluded: “There is no use of encryption on the iVotronic or on the data transferred to and from the iVotronic. There is a risk that an unauthorized person could gain access to the data.” An E.S.&S. spokesperson says the iVotronic does have its own form of encryption, and adds that the study’s programmers were assigned to hack into each system, and proved unable to breach the iVotronic, proof the iVotronic is secure. But Blackwell was unpersuaded. Speaking about all the touch-screen systems tested, he said, “I will not place these voting devices before Ohio’s voters until identified risks are corrected and system security is bolstered.” (E.S.&S. says it’s in the process of enacting design or programmatic changes to comply with Ohio’s requests.)

Heeding critics’ concern over touch-screens’ lack of a paper trail, the G.O.P. issued a glossy flyer in July urging Republicans to shun them in favor of absentee ballots. An embarrassed Governor Bush quickly disavowed the flyer, but the point was made: for all his own secretary of state had done to talk up touch-screens, the problems of the last months had stirred doubts in both parties that Florida’s election of 2004 would be any cleaner, or clearer, or more conclusive than the nightmare of 2000.

“Having spent lots of money, passed lots of laws, made lots of speeches, held commission hearings and the like, if anything, we’re worse off than we were four years ago,” says Gore lawyer Kendall Coffey, “in that [in] some of the key counties that could hold not only the key to Florida but the key to the nation’s future you do not have a legitimate recount vehicle. Because they have touch-screens without a paper trail. It’s hard to imagine a scenario that makes hanging chads the good old days, but that’s the reality of the 2004 elections in Florida.”

The Court’s proceedings are shrouded in secrecy, and the law clerks, who research precedents, review petitions, and draft opinions, are normally notoriously, maddeningly discreet. In addition, Rehnquist makes them all sign confidentiality agreements, then reiterates the point to them in person. A surprising number of clerks talked to Vanity Fair for this article, however. They all drew clear limits on what they would say. They would not discuss conversations with their respective justices, nor disclose any documents they might have retained. “In this administration, the F.B.I. is likely to come after us,” one explains. To the inevitable charges that they broke their vows of confidentiality, the clerks have a ready response: by taking on Bush v. Gore and deciding the case as it did, the Court broke its promise to them. “We feel that something illegitimate was done with the Court’s power, and such an extraordinary situation justifies breaking an obligation we’d otherwise honor,” one clerk says. “Our secrecy was helping to shield some of those actions.” Furthermore, the clerks’ story is admittedly skewed. Even under normal circumstances, they see only a fraction of what goes on at the Court. The justices always discuss and decide cases behind closed doors, without anyone else around; their clerks learn only what their bosses care to tell them. That was particularly true in Bush v. Gore,* whose momentousness and haste ensured shorter paper and gossip trails than usual.

The clerks’ attention was not distributed evenly. Unfairly perhaps, their accounts, and their vitriol, focus more on the “swing” justices purportedly in play—Kennedy and O’Connor—than on those who were seemingly more partisan, but managed to be unobtrusive: Rehnquist and Thomas. But if this account may at times be lopsided, partisan, speculative, and incomplete, it’s by far the best and most informative we have. Journalists and academics who follow the Court rarely venture beyond its written opinions, as if there is almost something impertinent about doing so. Eventually—one scholar put it at around 2019—historians will dip into the papers of the justices, but until then it’s unclear how much of what they did they committed to print.

It’s the perfect Edith Wharton morning at Miss Porter’s School, in Farmington, Connecticut—brisk and snow-covered, with icicles hanging from the porticoes of the white clapboard 19th-century dormitories. Freshly scrubbed teenagers, weighed down by backpacks, are rushing to morning meeting and just counting the days until spring vacation. With no boys around to look hot for, they’re dressed in jeans—not the skinny kind, but ones that are comfortable—sweatshirts, and either high-tops or Uggs. They hug and link arms and no one’s going to make fun of them for it. All is good with the world, and every facet of life at Miss Porter’s a cause for celebration.

“Remember, we’re going to Tanzania in June,” announces one girl, standing on the stage, kicking off assembly, “so please bring back supplies from the break.” Applause. Woo-hoo! Hooray!

Another girl stands to speak. “Don’t forget about coffeehouse this week. We’ll even have a belly dancer!”

“Yeow!” calls out a male teacher, adding quickly, “That wasn’t me.” More applause. Lots of giggles.

And, finally, it’s time to hand out the awards to the “Girls of the Week”: Alana, who sacrificed so much time to help her classmates in chemistry; Sam, for doing such a great job organizing senior kitchen; and Lillian, for having such a positive attitude and cheering so much in gym. The honored girls approach the stage to take their certificates. The rafters are thundering. Meeting concludes with a small a cappella group singing “Here Comes the Sun.” You’d have to be Scrooge not to smile a little. Or paranoid about cults.

But last fall at least one student, a senior named Tatum Bass, wasn’t feeling the love. Miss Porter’s made her so unhappy, in fact, that her parents hit the school with a lawsuit, alleging that a group of girls had verbally abused Tatum for weeks. The family claims that despite its efforts to stop the abuse Kate Windsor, who’d been installed as the new headmistress just weeks before, did nothing to intercede. Eventually, Tatum claims, the harassment caused her so much emotional distress that she ended up cheating on a test and missing some school, which resulted in her getting suspended and then expelled—something the family says was unfair in light of the circumstances. The school informed her college of choice, Vanderbilt, of the cheating and suspension, without, the family says, giving her the proper opportunity to defend herself—and Tatum was rejected.

Ordinary “mean girl” accusations maybe, but Miss Porter’s is no ordinary school. It’s where Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis went, in addition to many other famous debutantes and beauties, such as Gloria Vanderbilt, Lilly Pulitzer, Brenda Frazier, Barbara Hutton, Edith Beale (the “Little Edie” of Grey Gardens), and actress Gene Tierney, as well as numerous young ladies with the last names Rockefeller, Auchincloss, Bouvier, Biddle, Bush, Havemeyer, Forbes, and Van Rensselaer, not to mention heiresses to the fortunes generated by a supermarket-aisleful of iconic American products, including one brand of breakfast cereal (Kellogg’s), three meats (the Raths of Iowa and the Swifts and Armours of Chicago), and the world’s most famous dough (Pillsbury). (Full disclosure: my mother, Anne Peretz, was class of ’56.) Now, all of a sudden, these Bass people—not the Basses of Texas—seemed to be turning Miss Porter’s good name into something out of a Lindsay Lohan movie. The shell-shocked school discouraged students from discussing the matter with the press and announced that it was determined to fight the suit “vigorously.” Students and loyal alums, who call themselves “Ancients,” were beside themselves—not because they doubted Bass was hurt by her classmates but because she had the audacity to whine about it, and to use it as an excuse for cheating.

“I was outraged,” says Lauren Goldfarb (’98). “Look, she cheated. She lied. And guess what? It’s a top academic environment.”

A source closely involved in the school, who does not know the Basses, explains, “If a kid has any disciplinary action and has applied early-decision to college, the colleges have to be notified. As soon as that happened, Mommy back in South Carolina said, ‘Wait a minute—my darling isn’t going to get into Vanderbilt!’”

Nina Auchincloss Straight, Jackie Kennedy’s stepsister, whose family has produced several Miss Porter’s girls, can only laugh at the girl’s sensitivity. “In this day and age, someone claiming that would have to be a lobotomy [case].” (The Basses decline to comment.)

Bass cheated, which was bad enough, but in the eyes of the school community she was guilty of something worse: weakness. From its very start, in 1843, Miss Porter’s has been committed not just to the old-fashioned values of charm, grace, and loyalty but to another, unspoken value as well: the ability to tough it out. Deeply ingrained in the school’s DNA, it makes the school a kind of upper-class, social Outward Bound. Throughout its history, Miss Porter’s has tested girls’ personal fortitude in a variety of ways: through academic rigor, strict rules, and rituals designed to produce anxiety and intimidate. Whatever their problems, Miss Porter’s girls were expected to buck up, not to go crying home to Daddy. Think Jackie—charming, poised, cultured, and able to smile through her husband’s many infidelities. Much has changed. Farmington—anyone over 50 who went there calls it Farmington; today’s girls say simply “Porter’s”—has gone from a sheltered, almost entirely Wasp institution to one that’s impressively diverse. But this connection to its past, this remarkable stoicism, is what makes Miss Porter’s Miss Porter’s in the eyes of students and alumnae, and they wear it as a badge of honor.

The school was founded by Sarah Porter, the daughter of a minister and the sister of Yale president Noah Porter, when young women had few educational opportunities. Though it would become known as a “finishing school,” a term you might associate with wearing Mummy’s pearls and knowing how to set a table, its roots were puritanical and morally rigorous. Porter’s goal was to make her charges good Christians and good wives and mothers. There were only a handful of girls in those first years, most of them, like Sarah herself, the daughters of educators and religious leaders, who might go on to become missionaries. While they worked on their “accomplishments,” such as embroidery and needlework, Porter read to them, schooling them in literature, fine arts, and history—topics that would make them more interesting people, and more pleasing to their husbands and the company he kept. In the process, she released the intellectual powers of some extraordinary women, including Edith Hamilton (1886), the classics scholar, and her sister Alice (1888), who would become the first female faculty member of Harvard University and who founded the field of industrial medicine.

With its success, the school was flooded with the daughters of the newly wealthy, such as railroad executives Perry Smith and James Walker. As Barbara Donahue and Nancy Davis explain in their 1992 book, Miss Porter’s School: A History, the new rich, unlike the earlier students, believed that the whole point of having money was not to work, and to exhibit their wealth, which meant wearing fancy clothes, such as dresses with long trains. Porter, still dreaming of educating missionaries, delicately expressed to parents her horror over this development in an 1873 bulletin: “I have … observed more spirit of display in dress.… Our simple mode of life makes no demands for any other than a simple toilet, and hardly furnishes occasion for any other.”

Porter died in 1900, and the swells eventually won out. From the 1920s until midcentury, Farmington’s reputation as a finishing school would become unparalleled. Its students came chiefly from New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and the Main Line, outside Philadelphia, and they were often called by such nicknames as Bunky, Flossie, Hiho, A-Bee, B-Zee, Wheezie, Tug, and Poo. Women’s colleges were now available, but Farmington, according to Farmington, was all that a girl needed. Once the school had given her a good education in the liberal arts and smoothed out her rough edges and made her shine, she was “finished” and ready for the proper husband, ideally a Princeton or Yale investment banker or businessman from a “good” family. To this end RoseAnne and Robert Keep, who reigned as heads of the school from 1917 to 1943, imposed a strict routine.

Girls were awoken each day at the crack of dawn with a cheerful “Good morning” from maids, who would raise the shades. The girls would dress behind screens for the sake of modesty, be at breakfast by 7 and ready for morning prayers at 7:55. Naturally, there was no smoking or drinking. There was also no cardplaying, no gumchewing, no reading of the popular novels of the day, and, eventually, no smoothing of the hair during meals, and no crumbling of cookies into ice cream. Miss Porter’s was an island of correctness, and human contact beyond the school gates was practically prohibited. During term time, girls could rarely leave the grounds. They could not walk into town without special permission, and they were discouraged from talking to anyone once there. They could not receive phone calls except in emergencies.

 

For the right kind of Wasp, this convent-like rigor was heaven. “I just loved it. Absolutely loved it,” says fashion editor Polly Mellen, who attended Farmington from 1938 to 1942. The school required no uniform per se, but Farmington girls had a distinctive look. As Mellen recalls, “You wore the Brooks Brothers polo coat, and you wore black-and-white saddle shoes or the brown-and-white saddle shoes, and the Brooks Brothers shetland sweater in all those different wonderful colors, over a little perfect white shirt, and a gray flannel skirt And the pageboy was very much a part of it. My husband would say we were kind of snooty.”

Mellen, the youngest of four sisters who went to Miss Porter’s, hit the target perfectly; she even became a fashion trailblazer by wearing her cardigan backward. But for less assured girls it was easy to get the rules wrong in the watchful eyes of classmates and be punished for it—for instance, if any part of the wardrobe was from the wrong store. “There was the gold round pin,” recalls Pema Chödrön, a Catholic from a middle-class family in rural New Jersey, who is now a well-known Buddhist nun. “Their gold pin was always just slightly—more than slightly—classier than mine. You were always aware of it.” Alternatively, a girl could screw up by being too showy. According to C. David Heymann’s 1983 biography of Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, Poor Little Rich Girl, to the displeasure of the school and the disdain of her classmates, Hutton, who inherited $26 million from her grandfather and had a $60,000 debutante ball, wore tweed skirts from Chanel, frilly jabot blouses, and angora sweaters with lynx collars and cuffs. “It was as though she wanted to show us up,” one of her classmates recalled.

It didn’t matter that the Miss Porter’s outfit might be inappropriate for the weather. Discomfort was part of the point. As Nina Straight recalls, even in September, when the temperature could reach the 80s, girls had to keep their collars and sleeves buttoned and their wool socks on. And in the dead of winter, neither pants nor stockings were allowed unless the temperature dipped below 10 degrees.

In addition to being able to tolerate physical discomfort, Farmington girls were expected to tolerate loneliness and emotional distress. The actress Barbara Babcock, who attended Miss Porter’s in the mid-50s and went on to star in television’s Hill Street Blues, cried every night because she was homesick at first. Her housemother saw that she needed a talking-to and brought her into the office of the headmaster. “I still remember him saying to me in a very severe tone, ‘You are the daughter of a general, now just snap to,’” recalls Babcock. “And I remember standing bolt upright, thinking that I’ve got to do what he said and behave like I was in the army.” An army, that is, of Jackie Bouviers.

It was the school’s prerogative to make girls aware of their shortcomings, be they related to background or appearance. Omaha-raised Letitia Baldrige (1943) recalls that she was the first student ever on scholarship, which she immediately learned was a dirty word: “Bob Keep called my father [an Air Corps major, who had gone to Andover with Keep] and said, ‘Mac,’ as he called him, ‘I just want you to know we’ll take care of Tish’s tuition and we’ll keep it a deep, dark secret, so she won’t be discriminated against.’” Her teachers were determined to beat the Nebraska out of her. “My English teacher, Miss Watson, said to me, ‘You come from the Middle West, and it’s going to take you a year or two to get over that.’ She really gave it to me.” (Those with southern accents didn’t fare much better.)

If a girl was too fat or too thin, that had to be fixed, too. As Babcock recalls, “I was supposedly 25 pounds underweight or 20 pounds underweight, which seemed horrendous, and they put all of us [skinny girls] at a table where we had to eat what was put in front of us.” Of course, the thin table wasn’t as mortifying as the fat table. No wonder the girls were obsessed with dieting tricks. Barbara Hutton subsisted on coffee and biscuits, and every morning lay on top of two wooden weight-reduction rollers, a popular fitness tool of the day. Brenda Frazier, the world’s most famous debutante in the late 1930s, was considered one of the most beautiful girls in the country. Despite this, everyone focused on her thick legs.

Old Traditions Die Hard

For teenage girls, feeling sorry for someone can be a pure joy. Nowadays, one hardly needs any more documentation that girls’ social dynamics can be complicated and malicious, that fear goes hand in hand with admiration, and that with deftly delivered cruelty comes power. Rather than attempting to ameliorate such dynamics, Miss Porter’s, like other boarding schools, to be sure, effectively institutionalized them. The starting point was to separate the Old Girls (who’d been at Farmington at least a year) from the New Girls (who’d just arrived). Though the Old Girls were supposed to serve as guides to the New Girls (and in many cases they did), the New Girls were constantly reminded that the Old Girls were better. New Girls were expected to rise whenever Old Girls came into the room, to hold the door open for them, to step aside when passing them on the walkways or sidewalk. New Girls weren’t allowed to wear the school color combination of gray and yellow, weren’t allowed to sing songs that the senior a cappella group, the Perilhettes, sang, and weren’t allowed to step on one special patch of Old Girl grass.

The hierarchy devolved into ritual hazing over Thanksgiving week, when all the girls remained on campus because they were prohibited from returning home to their families. It started on Monday, when the Old Girls would suddenly stop talking to the unsuspecting New Girls, no explanation given. A few days later, the New Girls, studying in their dorm rooms, would hear Gestapo-like stomping of Old Girls marching up the stairs, coming to get them. The Old Girls would march them out of the dorms and line them up. Sometimes, the Old Girls might do this all while shouting at the New Girls to count to 100 in German or perform random chores. “It was like the Nazis,” says an Ancient, who, in violation of Farmington spirit, warned the next class of New Girls what they were in for.

It was hugely intimidating, says Straight, and some people cracked. “There was a girl from Chicago. She became anorexic and just got thinner and thinner. That kind of thing put pressure on you: ‘I’m away from my mother. This person has just threatened me with a hockey stick and says I’m going to have to go out and stand until sunset!’” Some Ancients, on the other hand, claim it was all in good fun. Lest anyone balk at the status quo or question one of the rules, a group of tradition keepers, calling themselves “the Oprichniki,” eventually sprang up. They named themselves after Ivan the Terrible’s secret police, who destroyed anyone disloyal to him, something the girls learned about in a course called “Communist Societies.” At the end of each school year, the departing Oprichniki would tap next year’s Oprichniki. It became Miss Porter’s very own Skull and Bones.

But in the spring all the intimidation was theoretically washed away with the Wishing on the Rings ritual, in which each New Girl would ask a senior Old Girl to wish on her new school ring. “My God! It was a tidal wave of emotions and romance,” says Straight. “‘Where will so-and-so wish on your ring?’ … And ‘Who will I ask that won’t have hysterics behind some bush to wish on my ring and could I do it in the middle of the highway?’ There were tears and presents and people were madly in love with each other.” (According to her biographer Sarah Bradford, Jackie, poking fun at this tradition, “vowed to find the ugliest girl in the school, who would know that Jackie couldn’t possibly have a crush on her.”) The Old Girls’ approval of the New Girls eventually made up for the suffering they had endured. “Those who put up with being put down got to be the ones who put down the next year,” says one of the more skeptical Ancients. By commencement, younger girls would sob as they watched the Old Girls perform the parting Daisy Chain ritual while singing, “Farmington, Farmington … / There my heart will turn forever, / Be the friendships broken never, / that so lightly were begun.”

The system worked for many. Having to tough it out at Farmington prepared them for the world they were entering, both academically—after Farmington, many Ancients found college to be a breeze—and on a more personal level. An Ancient from one of the country’s most famous families says, “I hate to think of who I would have become if I hadn’t gone there.… I had an image of [myself as] being stupid, lazy, and trouble. I shed that pretty rapidly. By the time I went home the first year I had lost weight, my rash was gone, I was getting A’s.” The school changed Polly Mellen in a similar manner—from a poor student who was plump to a svelte and exacting tastemaker. “It made you feel like you were somebody,” says Mellen. She went on to thrive as a fashion editor at Vogue—an arena not unlike Miss Porter’s in its female rigor and hierarchies. For Letitia Baldrige, suffering through Miss Watson equipped her to become nothing less than Jackie Kennedy’s premier handmaiden. She handled all the First Lady’s social affairs and eventually became an etiquette expert. As for Jackie herself, the perfect Miss Porter’s student in every way, she managed to achieve what she had vowed on her yearbook page: “Never to be a housewife.”

While its star Ancient was helping her husband, President Jack Kennedy, usher in a new world, Miss Porter’s was in many ways stuck in the old one. “They were very much, in the early 60s, preparing us for life in the 1930s,” says Beth Gutcheon, who wrote the 1979 novel The New Girls, based on her time at Miss Porter’s, in the early 60s. “It was a man’s world. And Farmington was making it clear to us that we should learn to survive and learn to be our best selves within those strictures.” Jackie was constantly being held up by teachers and the headmaster, Hollis French, as the Female Ideal. “Miss Watson never ceased rubbing our noses in the fact that Jackie would have gotten it right, that Jackie would have said that correctly,” recalls Victoria Mudd, who attended in the early 60s and went on to make socially conscious documentaries.

As in the early days, Miss Porter’s—thanks to impassioned teachers such as Miss Smedley, who taught European history—was turning out minds whose ambitions and interests were surpassing the gentler expectations the administration had set for them. When Gutcheon decided she wanted to go to Radcliffe, for example, the school discouraged her: “They really wanted us to go to the colleges that were more like finishing schools.” The brightest girls often ended up in high-profile art-world careers, such as Agnes Gund, president of the Museum of Modern Art until 2002; Eliza Rathbone, chief curator of the Phillips Collection, in Washington, D.C.; Jennifer Russell, a director of exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art; and Dede Brooks, chief executive of Sotheby’s until 2000, when she resigned amid a price-fixing scandal.

While the country’s top colleges and prep schools were opening themselves up to women and minorities, Miss Porter’s clung to its ancient attitudes about blacks, Irish, and Jews. According to Gutcheon, a student in her time asked the headmistress, Mary Norris French, why there were no Jews at Farmington, to which she replied, “How do you know there are not?” Whoever they were, says Gutcheon, “they all had to pretend they were Episcopalian.”

“The level of political awareness at that time was pretty much zero,” Mudd says. By the time she got to Stanford, in 1964, she had learned from a senior who had been involved in the Mississippi Freedom Summer, registering voters, about what was going on in the world, with the war in Vietnam and the civil-rights movement. “She had pictures and stories, and I’m like, ‘What? There’s racism? There’s poverty?’”

Seeds of Change

In 1968, under the leadership of Richard Davis, the school dipped its toe into diversity by inviting its first black student, Glenda Newell, to attend. Davis made it clear that she was an experiment. “They told me that they were going to take a chance on me,” recalls Newell, now Glenda Newell-Harris, a doctor in the San Francisco Bay Area, “and that if I did well they would then believe what they had heard, which was that many people of color may not be good test takers but could be good students.… And so, therefore, I had that burden.” For the most part, her classmates were ready for Newell and to learn about something new. They got into the Motown she was listening to; she started liking James Taylor. The parents were trickier. She and a fellow student wanted to become roommates their junior year, but the girl’s parents initially objected. She was continually reminded of the disparity in wealth. At the mail table, she watched other girls opening typed notes from their fathers’ secretaries along with a $300 check, while she got two or three dollars to buy some toothpaste. “People had homes in Eleuthera. I didn’t even know where Eleuthera was.”

But Newell-Harris, the Jackie Robinson of Farmington, toughed it out, eventually serving on the board of trustees. She saw that others were toughing it out in different ways, by quietly enduring troubles back home. A number of Farmington girls had divorced parents, alcoholism in their families, or mothers they weren’t speaking to. But it was not the Farmington way to talk about it or let it send you off course.

Still, stoicism could go too far. In 1976, three years after Roe v. Wade, one girl suffered alone through the most unimaginable horror. A rather stout, seemingly overweight New Girl from the Midwest entered Miss Porter’s several months pregnant, unbeknownst to anyone at the school, her physician father having apparently signed off on her health form. In mid-November, as a former teacher tells it, the girl went to her classes, played soccer, skipped dinner, returned to her dorm, and gave birth to a boy by herself in the bathroom. She cleaned up the mess, wrapped the baby up, stashed him under her bed, and went to study hall. She began to bleed ferociously and was taken to the infirmary. “Dear, you have something you must tell us,” the nurse said. By the time they got to the baby, he had suffocated. Miss Porter’s was left with a sudden shock to the system.

“I think there was sort of a collective sense that we had betrayed her in some way,” says Avery Rimer, who, like her classmates, missed the signs. “That we hadn’t been able to be there for her and help her through something that lonely and scary. In a way, you feel like you’ve borne witness to a murder that you could have helped prevent.”

But the trauma was also a wake-up call. In response to the obvious fact that girls might need help more than they let on, the adviser and counseling systems were ratcheted up. At the same time, the school felt the pressures of the outside world. Rules for dressing were loosened. Now girls could wear the hip fashions of the day: long, wraparound skirts, puffy blouses, and clogs. Church was no longer a requirement, a nod to the fact that some people weren’t Christian. Acknowledging that school should have a real-world component, Miss Porter’s began sending girls off in January for various work projects. One of the most popular, of all things, was interning with Ralph Nader.

Just as Miss Porter’s began catching up with the outside world, the outside world took one more big step forward. All-male schools such as Hotchkiss, Choate, Taft, and Exeter became coed, which meant that fathers who had attended them could now send their daughters to their alma maters. Miss Porter’s turned down offers to join up with nearby all-boys schools. But in doing so it struggled to attract the same caliber of girl. Something had to change. To dispel the notion that Miss Porter’s was only creating future society ladies, it redoubled its efforts to focus on science, math, and technology. Starting slowly, it broadened the diversity of its student body, accepting more people of color and more scholarship students. Today, Miss Porter’s college placement is respectable, given the increasing toughness of the admissions game, but it still lags behind such prep schools as Exeter and Andover, and other top-notch all-girls schools such as Brearley.

With its modernization, many Miss Porter’s traditions had to be re-examined. “Times were changing,” says Burch Ford, Miss Porter’s exceptionally well-regarded headmistress from 1993 until 2008, who brought the school’s endowment up to $104 million, “and so behaviors that were either overlooked or not looked at could no longer be acceptable for any number of reasons.” Some students balked at the hazing of New Girls in the fall. “It was something that no longer could really be defensible,” says Ford. “Theoretically, it was a welcoming tradition. Well, it wasn’t very welcoming.” The word “Oprichniki” came to be associated with traditions that were inappropriate. The school tried to soften the rituals by helping to make sure that the girls tapped were among the nicest in the class, and it attempted to change the name to “the Keepers of Traditions.”

But Miss Porter’s traditions die hard. According to a source long involved in the school, “Children of Ancients would go home and say, Well, we can’t do this, we can’t do that anymore. And the mothers, if not egged them on, said, ‘I think that’s terrible. Without the traditions, it won’t be Miss Porter’s School.’ … The Oprichniki would be squashed, and then four or five years would go by, and then there’d be a critical mass of Ancients’ daughters again, and it would bubble up.” And so, in certain years, if a New Girl wore the forbidden gray-and-yellow combination, for example, she might be forced by an Old Girl to get on all fours and start doing push-ups, or other tasks, says an Ancient from the mid- 80s, that would “make you feel like shit.”

Ancient Regime

Visiting Miss Porter’s today, you’d be hard-pressed to spot the Oprichniki in the crowd. The girls seem friendly, curious about the world, and intellectually fired up. Those I am allowed to meet on my visit there—the school handpicked five of them—bang the drum of sisterhood in a genuine and endearing way. Maggie, a junior from Ohio with adorable ringlets, says that when she arrived at Miss Porter’s she had low self-esteem and was constantly putting herself down, focusing on her bad hair. “The other girls would say, ‘No! How can you say that?’” Many young Ancients recall Miss Porter’s as a bastion of warmth—especially when they were in the most desperate state of need. Imani Brown (2000), who was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer six weeks before commencement, recalls, “I didn’t know that there was that much love in the world. I felt that maybe this was a parting gift.” Brown not only survived but is thriving, and works as an administrator in a San Francisco high school.

In spite of the warmth that permeates the community today, it seems being a member of the Oprichniki has remained for some a badge of honor. Blair Clarke, who graduated in 2007 and who was an Oprichnik, recalls that after enduring the intimidation of the Oprichniki her freshman year—in which she and her classmates wore plastic on certain days for fear of getting pelted with tomatoes and crash-studied basic German just in case—she wanted to become one. “I decided, ‘This is kind of cool.’ A lot of my friends were like, ‘We want to be Oprichniki when we’re seniors.’ And some people were upset if they didn’t get it, so they would make it seem like, ‘Oh, they’re so bad, they’re so bad.’” She maintains that the Oprichniki don’t inflict real pain, just the anticipatory fear of pain.

But Tatum Bass, in her lawsuit, claims they are more powerful than that. An honor student from Beaufort, South Carolina, she loved the school under the leadership of Burch Ford, who was also her adviser. Bass was elected to the student-government position of student-activities coordinator. While planning the prom, she made the suggestion that Miss Porter’s participate in a multi-school prom. According to her, this breach of tradition prompted an onslaught of cruelty, spearheaded by the Oprichniki. Classmates allegedly called her “retarded,” referring to her attention-deficit disorder. The Basses claim a group of girls yelled “Fuck you” at her in front of hundreds of people during a school dance. They taunted her through mean text messages and on Facebook. Tatum’s adviser was “fundamentally and functionally unavailable to offer support and guidance,” according to the lawsuit. Despite the family’s pleas to the administration to intervene, it did not. (Miss Porter’s School has declined to comment on the suit.)

Bass began to fall apart. This led to the cheating, she claims, which she felt so awful about that she immediately confessed to Kate Windsor. After a three-day suspension, she stayed with her parents, Nina, a child psychiatrist, and William, the president of an insurance agency, at a local hotel. Days later, the suit claims, she returned to her dorm to find her belongings thrown into a pile in the corner with a sign that read, for rent. Tatum became fearful of being on campus. Two doctors recommended that she take a medical leave, but the school allegedly denied those requests and instructed its medical director not to communicate with any of her physicians. On November 11, according to the suit, Miss Porter’s disabled Tatum’s school e-mail address and Internet access, and instructed her not to contact her teachers. A week later, the school informed the Basses that it was expelling their daughter, for alleged unexcused absences and violations of school rules. This was done, the family claims, without giving Tatum any opportunity to be heard.

In the opinion of some Ancients, Bass just couldn’t hack it. Not every girl who gets taunted ends up cheating. “You can’t sue a school for girl drama,” says Clarke, the recent Oprichniki member. “She was very insecure. She was kind of, like, I wouldn’t say timid, but she just reminded me of a little girl.” She adds, “If such a place was so horrible to you, why do you still want to go back there?”

Perhaps because Bass, according to a source close to her, still loves the school and has faith that maybe the abuse she experienced was an aberration. The real issue, says this source, is that all of this—the cruelty, the cheating, the lawsuit—could have been prevented had the school’s leadership stepped in. The family sued (for damages and to void the expulsion, among other things) because they believed they were given no other recourse. The clear implication is that Kate Windsor, the new headmistress, either was ill-equipped to handle the matter or believed that it didn’t warrant her attention.

Windsor, 42, is a tall, rather glamorous-looking blonde who stands out from her somewhat earthier, New Englandy colleagues. Her last job was as head of the Sage School, a K–8 school in Foxboro, Massachusetts, for academically gifted children. Her very being exudes an obsession with excellence; you might say she is a modern-day Mrs. Keep. On the day we meet, she’s wearing tan wool trousers, leopard-print pumps, a string of black pearls, and a black cape with a fur collar. Though she won’t comment on the allegations in the suit, she makes her views on coddling perfectly clear. She believes, essentially, we’ve become a nation of politically correct softies, afraid of distinguishing anyone from anyone else lest anyone’s feelings get hurt.

“This idea of a structure of hierarchy or power has been really dismissed in our culture as being not part of the American way or the American Dream: ‘We can all do, we can all be, and we’re all successful,’” says Windsor, who speaks in a matter-of-fact, rather formal manner. “If you have kids and they play soccer, everybody gets the banner. It doesn’t matter if you lose—sometimes you think, Did we even win?”

In her position as headmistress of Miss Porter’s, Windsor is determined to rectify this unfortunate development—at least for the 330 girls who are in her charge. That’s where the traditions come in. “One of the things that is awesome about our traditions, about our Old Girl, New Girl tradition, is that we actually create these rites of passage where girls get anxious. The positive side is that it teaches girls to be prepared. How do you prepare for the unknown?” Windsor believes that, as long as the situation is supervised by adults and no one is doing anything physically harmful, it’s a good thing—they’ll be more prepared and confident when they get to the other side.

Bass feels she never had the chance to make it to the other side. She’s slowly putting her life back together. She’s now enrolled in another private school, in South Carolina, and has received offers with scholarships from two colleges for next year. But in her battle against Miss Porter’s she finds herself alone.

In Burch Ford’s day, when a girl unleashed her meaner instinct, Ford attempted to rein it in. “One of the ways that you can establish you’re cool is to put other people down,” says Ford. “I’m thinking about one girl in particular. She was kind of a bombshell. She had learned one way to be popular, and it just wasn’t working.” Ford sat her down with a bunch of other students and explained, “‘You probably need to take a look at that because you may be coming across the way you didn’t intend.… You don’t have to like [people], but you have to be respectful.’ … That was the end of anything we heard. She actually became a very nice girl.”

Windsor, it seems, is reaching farther back into Miss Porter’s 166-year history, to a time when girls stoically forged ahead through the social minefield of adolescence on their own. Perhaps her tradition-fortified, tough-it-out approach will create an armada of winners, perfectly poised to compete in our increasingly challenging world. Still, one can’t help but wonder at what price this comes to the losers.

It’s one o’clock in the afternoon and the Wolseley, London’s most happening lunch spot, is buzzing. Tucking into his table, 68-year-old Nicky Haslam—wearing slouchy black jeans, a leather jacket, and an Arab scarf wrapped around and around and around (the latest fashion for 19-year-old European hipsters)—wonders whether you would mind terribly giving him the banquette. He does sort of want to look out, if that’s all right with …

“Charlie, Charlie!” he cries out, waving across the restaurant. It’s Charlie Watts, the only Rolling Stone who really appreciates the party Haslam threw for the band in 1964 in New York, immortalized, you know, by Tom Wolfe in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. Watts continues eating, stone-faced. Oh well, perhaps it’s a bit too loud in here.

Anyway, Haslam’s got a good view of gallerist Jay Jopling, who’s having lunch with someone very odd … oh, what’s his name?—you know, the son of the fellow who owns the zoos and gambling clubs. Anyway. “That’s very strange.”

There’s also the young producer Rebecca Green. “Rebecca!” he cries out. “Nicky!” she calls back with a cheery wave.

“She’s a movie producer. She did a sweet movie called Suzie Gold. Really good. Her great love was Guy Ritchie.”

He moves on to the dramatic creature next to us, what with her powdered white face and kohl-rimmed eyes that loom theatrically from beneath her hat. “I’m fascinated by this girl here,” he says, sotto voce. “She’s seen too many Irving Penn photographs. She’s eating like a horse, too!”

But, oh my, what about that funny couple that just walked in the door. “You see that tall girl with the little man? It’s the fashion, I tell you: big tall women going out with tiny, tiny men. Now Sophie [Dahl] has joined the group. He’s tiny, I mean practically a midget.”

He could go on like this until dinner, bouncing from table to table with a dishy tidbit or lacerating observation, but he has to see a lady about a lampshade at 2:30.

Haslam is famous for going to parties, and therefore it might shock some people to know that he actually works. In fact, he works at a ferocious pace, designing singularly whimsical and dramatic interiors for royalty, rock stars, and, as of late, Russian billionaires. But parties are where Haslam has made his stamp. He’s as likely to be seen at Ernst Hanover’s grand ball in Marienburg as he is at the launch of the new Diesel store in Covent Garden. When not attending a party, he might be making a spontaneous visit to Boujis, the nightclub where he was drinking and dancing last night until two a.m., with kids 50 years younger than he. How can you blame him for wanting to blow off some steam? After all, the dinner he’d gone to before was “dreadful,” owing to the “distinct lack of chocolates.”

Ready for His Close-Up

Haslam is certainly the most ubiquitous man in London society, perhaps the most famous man-about-town in London history, at least since Sir Francis Drake. Redeeming Features, Haslam’s memoir, which Knopf will publish next year, is a tour de force romp through high society and the more glamorous chapters in the counterculture of the 20th century and into the 21st. The Wasp Zelig, Haslam pops up from decade to decade alongside some of the most fascinating people in our cultural history. He’s the eager, young acolyte to a group of aristocratic bohemians of the 1950s, including Lady Diana Cooper and photographer and costume designer Cecil Beaton. He’s with photographer David Bailey and model Jean Shrimpton ushering in Swinging 60s London. He’s introducing New York society to a young artist named Andy Warhol. He’s having encounters with one camp icon after another—Tallulah Bankhead, Joan Crawford, Jane Russell. He’s proving, firsthand, that the most rugged of male movie stars like to swing the other way once in a while.

Who wouldn’t expect Nicky Haslam’s memoirs to be dripping with boldfaced names? After all, he’s been called “the star-fucker to end all star-fuckers” … by his best friend (Min Hogg, founder of The World of Interiors magazine). But what might surprise those who know him only by his rather silly party pictures, in which he might be suggestively licking a lollipop in Scarlett Johansson’s face or dressed like a drunk Roman centurion, is the book’s poignant, heartfelt observations. Indeed, one can’t help but feel after spending time with Haslam, both in person and on the page, that he has experienced the world—both its pain and its pleasures—in a heightened way.

For instance, he’s a major-league crier. He’ll cry reading books, watching movies. He’ll cry after accidentally dropping his watch into the sea, says his friend Carol Bamford. As of April, his last sobfest was after reading Barack Obama’s speech about race. “Absolute floods,” he reports, working his morning Bloody Mary at his country retreat, in Hampshire, where he’s dressed in a cardigan, riding pants, and high boots, despite the lack of horses, and is listening to 30s American dance music. He had copies of the speech handed around to the pretty young people in his design office. Alas, no one cried. No one even cared. “They sort of said, ‘Oh, yeah.’ But they don’t see it affects us. They think it only matters that you’re on Facebook and whether you can sell your house.”

Beautiful objects send him into shivering reveries. “I saw you spying that,” he sighs as I notice an antique, open wooden box, protected by some kind of old metal. “Isn’t it romantic?” It’s from the time of the French Revolution, he explains, and inside were personal letters. He lovingly had the interior of the box done up in a floral Mauny wallpaper, the classic French paper that decorates all his cherished spaces, including his own precious bedroom. On his delicate canopy bed—fit for the Princess and the Pea—sit three black stuffed animals, propped up against the fluffed pillows just so, waiting for Nicky to come and snuggle.

His address book is bursting with worldly enchantment, containing entries such as “Boats in Greece.” The utmost loveliness is always to be found around the corner. “You are ravishing, darling,” he tells Lemmy Vaughn, a tall, 17-year-old brunette, upon meeting her at Sophie Dahl’s book party, before embarking into a nostalgic reflection on the lost art of the lady’s compact.

“Evgeny!” he declares next, positively tickled, upon seeing Evgeny Lebedev, the young and bearded Russian who’s London’s latest “It boy.” “Isn’t he adorable?” he gushes later, launching into the backstory about how Lebedev used to have the sweatiest palms, until he hit the pages of Tatler.

Someone else is a “miracle.” Another is “the most beautiful child you’ve ever laid eyes on.” Yet another is “heaven on earth.” Paris Hilton is “absolutely marvelous.”

“He’s a total gentleman,” says Hilary Alexander, an old friend and the fashion director of the The Daily Telegraph. “He opens doors. He lights your cigarettes, but not just lights cigarettes. I mean, if he sees you’re running out, he’ll just go and buy a packet.”

A world-class charmer, he even makes his Vanity Fair interviewer feel as though she were embarking on a romantic tryst. On the day before a rendezvous in the country, an enormous bouquet of flowers arrives in the hotel room, accompanied by a handwritten note: “Longing to See You.”

There are many people he longs to see, apparently. Rupert Everett once took him to a transsexual rave in the East End of London, thinking Haslam might find it just a little bit novel. Fat chance. “This extraordinary figure in a kind of pink bunny outfit was on the door,” recalls Everett. “ ‘Oh, Nicky! How are you?’ As soon as he got into the club, you know, he knew everyone!”

And, as it turns out, there are plenty of stars not worth fucking—ever. British GQ’s best-dressed list is full of them. “It’s that moron, Daniel Craig,” he says, perusing the list from the top down. “So boring. And who is No. 2? I’ve never heard of him. Horrible Daniel Day-Lewis is No. 3. Ridiculous Tom Ford is No. 5 … ” (Haslam comes in at No. 14. Not bad, “considering that three years ago I was on the top of the worst-dressed list.”) He loathes “the worthy.” The Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela? “Frightful frauds,” says Haslam. “I’d rather meet Kim Jong Il. Much more fun.” And he is quick to disabuse anyone of the illusions they may have about their idols. Dirk Bogarde? Nasty man. George Cukor? Unbelievably rude. Gene Tierney? Chronic B.O. Elliott Gould? Ghastly. Fred Astaire? Terrible dancer.

“I don’t want to say ‘cruel,’ but Nicky can be very critical,” says his friend the actor Peter Eyre. His very favorite put-down is to call something “common.” For years, he chronicled all that was relevant in a column called “How Common!” for The Sunday Times and the Evening Standard. “How Common!” included cuff links and nattering on about micro-climates. Tragically, his favorite—loving your parents—never made it past the editors. “People say, ‘Oh, my dad’s my best friend.’ ‘My mother’s like my sister,’ ” he says, disdainfully, by way of explanation. Same-sex marriage is common, too. “Disgusting.… A lot of it because of silly old Elton John. The whole point of being gay is not to get married.” So is food. “That was Diana Cooper. She said that the kitchen was too near the house. In the old days, the kitchen was miles away.”

But what really offends Haslam are people who are out of the loop, people who have given up on going out—something he seems to encounter with increasing frequency. Later, at a book party for the writer John Mortimer, no one seems to “get” the Arab scarf. “Have you joined the P.L.O.?” asks a middle-aged friend. The comment drives him crazy. “It’s the thing for the kids to wear!” he mutters later during dinner at the legendary Scott’s, where Ian Fleming discovered the joys of the shaken-not-stirred dry martini. Haslam’s gimlet arrives. Oh dear, there’s no ice. He snaps his fingers at the waiter in a state of near panic. “Darling, oh, darling. I can’t bear it without rocks.”

Childhood Terrors

Haslam has never let his age deter him from dressing with the fashion—or at least what he has determined to be the fashion. In 1999, at age 60, he worried that he was beginning to look like Angela Lansbury and famously gave himself a head-to-toe makeover that was alarming, to say the least. Hitherto a rather elegant figure with executive-silver hair and Savile Row three-piece suits, Haslam got an extreme face-lift, dyed his hair jet black, and started wearing leather pants and a studded leather collar around his neck. He sometimes showed up at parties with his pants open so guests could see that he had dyed the carpet to match. The goal, he explained unabashedly, was to look like his obsession at that particular moment, Liam Gallagher, lead singer of Oasis. Since then, he’s gone through Justin Timberlake and Pete Doherty, whom Haslam insists is “so intelligent.”

Today, Haslam has let his hair go back to white because the upkeep was too much. (To keep it from yellowing, he uses Simply Silver, an inexpensive shampoo). His face-lift is settling nicely. “It’s just getting to the place where I like it,” he says. And though he no longer dresses as if he might get down on all fours and start asking for lashings, it’s still an entirely different costume drama every 12 hours or so. One day it might be World War II Fabulous in breeches and boots and a military jacket. The next it’s Sherlock Holmes Meets Heathcliff, in a subtle arrangement of tweeds and corduroy in mustards and olive greens. Hours later at dinner, it’s the most dashing man you’ve laid eyes on—in a stately gray flannel suit, his white hair slicked back. So what if some people find it ridiculous—he’s having fun.

“Didn’t Gertrude Stein once say, ‘One must dare to be happy’? Wonderful line, isn’t it?”

Haslam has been taking such dares since as early as he can remember. He was a child of privilege who might have easily been lulled into a kind of self-centered complacency. His mother Diana’s family, the Ponsonbys, were British nobility, cousins of the Spencer family, and Queen Victoria was Diana’s godmother. His father, William, a diplomat, came from a line of industrial tycoons, who found their fortune in spinning cotton and, in particular, a stretchy material called Aertex, which has come to be used in tacky mesh jerseys and which Haslam believes must have been produced by an accident at the loom. Despite the pedigree, the familiar was dull for the beautiful blond boy, and he yearned for the forbidden and exotic. His first childhood memory is of dashing into the fields that surrounded Great Hundridge Manor, the grand William and Mary house where he grew up, and watching from behind the saplings a Gypsy encampment, where the children were racing around fires surrounded by stones. One day, the Gypsy children signaled for him to join, and Haslam, though no more than six, had an epiphany about who he was. “I felt for the first time that I was in some way two people in one,” Haslam says, “that there was a second being within me that would always look longingly at beauty, at an attractive figure, at a different life.”

Whatever dreams Haslam had for adventure were cut short in an instant when at age seven he was suddenly struck with polio. He’d been riding ponies with his nanny at Cairngill estate, in Scotland, where his uncle lived, when the shock went through his body. “I remember feeling something extraordinary, like a thundercrack, going through me,” Haslam recalls over dinner. “It was like I had an electric wire being plucked. And then I remember just feeling completely limp.”

For three years, while other boys climbed trees and rode bikes, Haslam lay immobile within the same four walls of “Blue Room” in Hundridge Manor, in a cast from head to toe. He believed that this was how he would likely live out the rest of his life, and vacillated between panic and dumb acceptance. “It was almost like being a prisoner of war,” Haslam says. “You just sort of make the day work. I mean, you just think about what you’re going to have for supper, and what’s going to be on the radio when you have your supper.”

He didn’t have friends his age to speak of. Instead, his world consisted of adults: visits from doctors and the servants, whom he loved, and, most important, the constant companionship of his mother, who handled the situation with stoic cheer and practicality, never letting her son believe for a moment that he had become a hardship. Diana brought her friends into his room, along with the cocktail shaker and recordings of the latest American musicals: Annie Get Your Gun. He couldn’t join in, but he lay encased in plaster, entranced by the voice of Ethel Merman. Then, when he began to have some use of his hands and arms again, he spent the days redecorating a dollhouse. “[Getting polio] fueled his rich imagination,” says his friend the antiques dealer Christopher Gibbs, who had been struck with polio as a child, too. “I’d like to think he sort of lay in bed enjoying fairy-tale palaces.”

At age 10, Haslam, his body an atrophied white blob, was learning to walk again. Having been imprisoned for so long, he felt a racing desire to experience as much as he possibly could. “I wanted to be grown up the minute I could,” says Haslam. He delighted in accompanying his mother to Millstream, the local dance club that attracted celebrities, or to a shop in Chesham that sold records, where he remembers longingly taking in the “teddy boys” insolently lounging about.

Homosexuality was a serious crime in the 50s. But, for Haslam, there was no “coming to terms” with being gay (though he has dabbled in affairs with women). “I’ve known [I was gay] since I was seduced by the heavenly tutor,” says Haslam, who after two lessons was being gently kissed by the tall, long-haired, erudite young man hired to teach him. “It was the best moment of my life, really.” Though the affair lasted several years and included sleepovers, the physical nature never went past kissing—which is perhaps why Haslam cherishes the memory so.

“The truth is I’m not that interested in sex,” he says breezily. “I’m about love. It’s wonderful once or something. The quickest way to fall out of love is to sleep with somebody. Don’t shatter the crystal.” Pure joy for Haslam is buying clothes for a love object.

By the time he entered Eton, Haslam already had a foot out the door, in search of glamour. At the very bottom of his class, with no particular drive to improve his standing, he spent his time sneaking away to see the latest Marilyn Monroe picture, and listening to show tunes at the local music shop. He wore a cologne called 4711 because he imagined it smelled of Paris. He brought his visual flair to his dorm room, decorating it with fake-ostrich-plume pelmets, and fake grass as a carpet. Personally, he cut a dashing figure. Jane Ormsby-Gore, a friend from that era, recalls, “I remember his arriving at the Eton-Harrow match on the back of his sort of pink scooter or green scooter. And I thought, This is the most glamorous thing that’s ever been.”

There was more to be seen. At the age of 15, Haslam accompanied his mother to New York to visit her daughter, Anne, from a previous marriage, who was by then grown and married to John Loeb, the Brillo heir. There he met a young acting student, Raymond, who invited Haslam to go to the country to see “a friend”—who turned out to be Tallulah Bankhead. “Tallulah took off her dark glasses; the green eyes narrowed … ‘Daaaahling!,’ ” Haslam recalls. Ray also offered him his body—and Haslam was done for. He sobbed on the sail back to England, prompting his mother to say, “Do pull yourself together. He’s only a boy.” Haslam’s love letters went unreturned. “I felt the first tremors of heartbreak,” he recalls.

Fabulous gay strangers continued to find Haslam irresistible. A year later, he was approached on the street by a tall figure in thigh-high leather boots and loud, checked trousers. His name was Simon Fleet and he was a famous homosexual of the demimonde. With boundless enthusiasm for art, beauty, people, and remaking himself (he’d had significant plastic surgery and, once upon a time, a different name), Fleet created a kind of fairyland around himself. At its center was the Gothic Box, his antiques shop chockablock with romantic curios and lovely discarded nothings: uniforms, frames, postcards, programs, glass domes. His collection of people was even more enchanting, and he was eager to give his new young friend entrée: choreographer Frederick Ashton, dandy fashion designer Bunny Rogers, theater designer Oliver Messel, Cecil Beaton, who’d recently designed the costumes for the Broadway hit My Fair Lady, author Violet Wyndam, and Lady Diana Cooper, whose irreverent behavior—she’d drink out of dirty glasses, she had no problem with eating off the floor, and she’d degrade her own casual sex life—had Haslam spellbound.

After he graduated from Eton and moved to London, his life became a nonstop whirlwind of pleasure-seeking with his new, like-minded friends—trips to the countryside and European cities, visits to exquisite buildings, American movies, and the theater—accompanied by a seemingly effortless social ascent. When West Side Story came to town, for example, he found himself backstage. Days later he was having an affair with its writer, Arthur Laurents, then about 40, and “good-looking in this really … I call it ‘eagle-y Jewish’ way,” says Haslam.

‘I promise you I wasn’t working it,” Haslam says, explaining his remarkable ability to social-climb. Rather, he was an innocent, eager vessel. “I wasn’t intimidated. And I wasn’t intimidating, either. I didn’t have terrible strong opinions that the youth have nowadays. We had no education in those days. We learned a bit of Latin and a bit of French and a bit of Greek or something, and all things that I think are nonsense, because it doesn’t help you much in conversation. I mean, I could rattle off Caesar’s Gallic wars. But Arthur talked about Broadway and Cole Porter, you know. Irving Berlin, Irene Dunne, and Marlene Dietrich … ” Of course, it also helped that Haslam was devastatingly handsome, something he only grudgingly admits. “I always rather hated what I looked like and tried to change it.”

Life was thrilling, but Haslam longed for true love. Around this time, he fell for Michael Wishart, a melancholic, intellectual painter who was drawn to tragic landscapes and novels of the 19th and 20th centuries, and whose social world was serious—Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Christian “Bébé” Bérard, and Jean Cocteau. Haslam, 10 years his junior, was eager to be filled up with Wishart’s depth of knowledge about art and poetry. Wishart’s autobiography, High Diver, reveals that the painter believed he had found the perfect companion, a “youth of exceptional beauty” who “possessed the mysterious allure of an insolent child.… I would have sacrificed a limb rather than lose his presence.”

But Wishart also needed to be in the presence of drugs and alcohol, addictions that made him either withdrawn or verbally aggressive. Over the course of their four-year romance, his deeper needs became increasingly crippling for Haslam. Luckily, there was David Bailey, a young photographer from the East End with nothing to his name but a satchel and a scooter. “We were opposite ends of the pole,” says Bailey today of their instant attraction, in the late 1950s. “He was posh and I was a bit rough.” Swept off his feet by Bailey’s cool, Haslam immediately copied his mod look, from the dark hair brushed forward down to the exaggerated points of his “winklepicker” boots. Together, the friends ushered in the style of Swinging 60s London. They went to drag nights at the local pubs and smoked Capstans all night long in clubs, seeing how much female attention they could tease out of the birds with the beehive hairdos. “We had that sort of confidence,” Haslam says. “To not feel that anything we did was going to be frowned upon. Well, it would be, but we didn’t care.”

They inspired the ultimate Swinging 60s film, Antonioni’s Blowup, which was shot in Christopher Gibbs’s apartment, and which featured Haslam and all his friends. “All that bollocks about the Beatles,” says Bailey, upon whom the photographer in that movie was based. “They always say, ‘Oh, the Beatles started the 60s.’ The Beatles didn’t start the 60s. The Beatles were nothing. They were a boy band from up North. It was really Nicky and Jean Shrimpton … and Terence Stamp and Michael Caine.”

America Calling!

Had he known that he was starting a full-fledged cultural movement, Haslam might have stayed in London. Instead, in 1962, he left his city—and Wishart—to conquer fresh ground in New York. He went with Bailey and Shrimpton, with a vague plan to get into the nightclub business. Two days after his arrival, he was already in the social swirl, at a party thrown by art dealer George Dix. He was spotted across the room by architect Philip Johnson. One week later, the two were on their first date at the Oak Room in the Plaza Hotel—with Johnson giving the eager young man a tutorial in the great buildings of the city. The next day, Haslam moved into Johnson’s all-white apartment.

The nightclub plans soon went by the wayside. Through a casual contact, Haslam was set up for an interview with Condé Nast editorial director Alexander Liberman and landed something far more glamorous: a job in the art department of Vogue, then under the editorship of Jessica Daves amid a netherworld of greige interiors, white-gloved assistants, high-society editors such as Babs Simpson and Chessy Rayner, and a would-be novelist on the copydesk, Joan Didion, who, Haslam recalls, spent the mornings crying. His Swinging London exoticism—the pointy boots, and blouses with curtain fringe at the cuffs—and the friendships he had forged in England with such vaunted characters as Cecil Beaton gave the young Brit a glow. He was someone people wanted around. “I think if I had charm then, it was by dint of being English, rather than by dint of being charming,” Haslam says.

Before long, he was celebrating the coming out of Bill and Babe Paley’s daughter in their Long Island house, and tagging along at a Peter Beard photo shoot with Tuesday Weld, with whom he had an affair. Through a friend, he met Jane Holzer—before she was Andy Warhol’s “Baby Jane”—while shopping at Bergdorf Goodman, and was entranced by her mane of blond hair, the Chanel stockings, and the short skirt. He alerted Diana Vreeland (who’d by now replaced Daves as editor of Vogue) to the existence of this extraordinary creature. She was in the next issue. He became friendly with Wallis Simpson and was provided with what many Americans would have killed for: an up-close look at her marriage to the Duke, who’d become impossibly rude in his old age. After a few cocktails, Haslam recalls, the Duke would veer into guttural German, and come close to giving the infamous Nazi salute, prompting exasperated scorn from Simpson. At the time Haslam lived in a studio near Gramercy Park, which he decorated in a look he called “faded Hollywood baroque,” and spent his small trust fund on such frivolities as a Corvette Sting Ray in which he zipped around town.

He became a project for Jean Howard, the beautiful former Ziegfeld Follies dancer, who introduced him to President Kennedy and his hero Cole Porter—a world, says Haslam, “of pinch-yourself reality.” Her friendship allowed him entrée, if even for only a two-week span, into Hollywood’s most glamorous, snobbiest society: David Selznick and Jennifer Jones, Howard Hawks, James Stewart, Cyd Charisse. “She was wonderful,” Haslam pronounces. The young Brit, who streaked his blond hair with lemon juice, proved to be an enticing novelty for Howard’s famous movie-star friends. Haslam makes the surprising claim that Jack Lemmon made out with him, and Joan Crawford, whom he’d never met, asked him to be her date at the premiere of Cleopatra.

Back in New York, there was more to be seen—like the scruffier and seedier sides of life. Through two hustlers in the East Village, Haslam became enchanted by another scene: that of the long-haired, unwashed experimental-film “stars,” such as Taylor Mead, working their crude 8-mm. cameras, and the slight, inscrutable man watching over it all—Andy Warhol. Warhol showed him his odd paintings of Brillo boxes. Haslam, in return, took his odd little friend around to dinner parties. “Nobody knew him, and I used to take him to Park Avenue and introduce him to smart people. And people would say, ‘Where did you get that ugly little farm boy from?’ ” (Lest anyone doubt this fact, Haslam points out that it’s in Warhol’s book Popism, on page 42.) He also introduced Warhol to Holzer, who would become one of the artist’s famous muses. “Nicky changed my life,” she says. Another year, another scene in someone else’s biopic.

Tom Wolfe, pioneer of the era’s New Journalism, captured it in his 1964 New York Herald Tribune article “The Girl of the Year,” about Baby Jane, at the thrilling moment of the Rolling Stones’ U.S. invasion. The climactic scene is Haslam’s welcome party for the Stones—“The Mods and Rockers Ball”— in photographer Jerry Schatzberg’s Park Avenue South apartment. Holzer, wrote Wolfe, celebrating her 24th birthday the same night, was wearing a black velvet jumpsuit with huge bell-bottom pants. Shrimpton was there with her “glorious pout and textured white stockings.” Actress Barbara Steele, from 8½, was wearing black lipstick. Goldie and the Gingerbreads, four girls in gold lamé, who’d been discovered by Haslam at the downtown club the Wagon Wheel, were playing upstairs. “It was amazing,” Holzer recalls today. “The floor shook when you danced.” Rounding out the crowd was a bunch of leather-clad gay motorcyclists, whom Haslam had invited to “crash” the party. “All New York came that night,” says Haslam. The press called it the “party of the year.”

The affairs with boldfaced names continued: choreographer Jerome Robbins, fashion designer Bill Blass, a failed infatuation with director Joel Schumacher, who was actually a window dresser at the time. Haslam started a heated courtship of a New York acquaintance, Jimmy Davison, who was dazzling to Haslam with his combination of rugged good looks and patrician elegance. (He was a Rockefeller on his mother’s side and his father was the head of J. P. Morgan.) Soon began the third first great romance of Haslam’s life. Davison, though rather idle and peripatetic, appeared to have endless reservoirs of generosity and tenderness, slipping expensive gifts into Haslam’s pockets—a Schlumberger cigarette lighter, a small enamel-and-diamond skull. Before long they were living together in a brownstone on the Upper East Side, upstairs from a young comic named Woody Allen, and traveling together to Europe in the utmost style. Going by ship, they brought the Mercedes, the Jaguar, and three dachshunds. They rented out the top suite at the Paris Ritz, and Haslam became the first person ever allowed in the hotel in jeans.

Lost in love, alas, Haslam felt that the dazzling social standing he had achieved was slipping away, a measurement he took by noting how often his name appeared in the papers. He was miffed not to see it, miffed more still that he was miffed. He also no longer had employment. Show, the sophisticated Huntington Hartford culture magazine where he’d been working for a year as the art director, was sold. Slight panic set in. It was time for a new chapter, he decided, a new scene, a new Nicky.

It was 1966 and so Haslam decided to become Robert Redford. He and Davison picked up and moved to the dusty, tumbleweedy town of Black Canyon City, Arizona. They found the perfect setting—a hideous low, red ranch house. Davison’s grandmother, who bred prize Arabians in Scottsdale, gave them a stallion, and they were on their way. “It just seemed too romantic for words,” says Haslam. “I just did it for the clothes. There was a man in Edmonton. He used to do the most incredible bearskin chaps, more fringes on them, more beadwork. I had the whole thing.” He decorated Black Canyon Ranch just like one described in Willa Cather’s novel Death Comes for the Archbishop—with whitewashed walls, sky-blue-painted doors and window frames, and Indian blankets hanging on the walls. Days were spent riding. Evenings spent square dancing. They didn’t want for sophisticated culture, for there was a constant rotation of friends from all over the world coming to visit. They took side trips to Mexico, one of which ended in Haslam’s getting arrested after a small car crash. “Call Diana Vreeland!” he yelled to Davison as he was pulled away in the paddy wagon. “She knows Merle Oberon!” (Oberon’s husband was a powerful businessman in Mexico.)

The gay-cowboy idyll would come to an end when Davison, to Haslam’s utter bafflement, took up with an unpleasant and almost sadistically cruel hitchhiker, who ended up burning many of Haslam’s treasures, including cherished letters from Cole Porter. Haslam packed up his Harley-Davidson and “through a fog of tears” rode to Hollywood, where he sought refuge at the home of actress Hope Lange, then in the throes of a romance with Frank Sinatra. Through her, his circle expanded to Lenny Griffin (Dominick Dunne’s ex-wife), the actress Norma Crane, and Natalie Wood. “He always knew the wives. He was their favorite,” recalls Dunne, who hired him to be a gofer on a movie he was producing, Play It As It Lays, while Wood asked him to decorate her living room for a party. Haslam harbored hopes that he would get back together with Davison. When he saw him again, he burst into tears. Alas, Davison’s heart belonged to the awful hitchhiker.

Love’s Labour’s Lost

In 1972, Haslam returned to London—with no love, no career, and no money. He lived in a one-room Kensington apartment. Dinner parties consisted of bacon and eggs. The flowers were exquisite; the guests were still the smart, beautiful set. But the pinch-yourself reality he had experienced in the U.S. had vanished. “He was at a loss,” says his friend Peter Eyre.

But he did have a certain talent—for transforming spaces into personal fantasies. Having decorated several of his own homes, Haslam believed he could turn his little hobby into something real. More important, so did his many friends, such as Alexander Hesketh, a young aristocrat who had fallen in love with Haslam’s Arizona ranch, and Mark Shand, Camilla Parker Bowles’s brother. In addition to his natural flair for the dramatic, he had been exposed to the looks in New York and Hollywood that would become popular for a time: large sofas, tables made of logs, slipper chairs, white orchids in each room. The problem was that decorating hardly qualified as a career choice.

“In those days it wasn’t fashionable to have a decorator,” says Haslam. “They never said I was doing it. They said, ‘Nicky’s helping me.’ … You don’t remember to say, ‘Every time I come around it’s going to be a hundred pounds.’ You’re so scared of losing the jobs.” As a result, very few clients paid the bills. According to Rupert Everett, he and Haslam had a temporary falling-out after Everett went broke in the middle of Haslam’s doing his very expensive kitchen. Everett decided that the best thing to do would be to skip town for a year. (“He said that?” Haslam asks later. “Sweet of him to admit it.”) Haslam couldn’t appeal to his father for financial help. “He thought I was a wastrel.”

Gradually his jobs got more substantial: he did the house of writer Robert Elegant and that of David Davies, a wealthy English banker, which made it into Vogue. The rock stars came calling next—many of whom were by now friends: Rod Stewart, Ringo Starr, and Bryan Ferry, whose Haslam-decorated house was featured in the first-ever issue of The World of Interiors. And then the really rich—businessmen Charles Saatchi and James Goldsmith—and the royal: Princess Michael of Kent.

By 1978, Haslam had made enough money to spring for the storied Hunting Lodge, the breathtaking Hampshire house, which had belonged to another great decorator—John Fowler, of the fabric powerhouse Colefax and Fowler—and which featured an 800-year-old hedge and charming Jacobean windows and façade. Haslam says, “When it went on the market, I thought every design queen would put a bid on it, so I did nothing.” Months later, he learned that it was still sitting there. He grabbed it the next day. It would become the centerpiece of his social life. His 40th-birthday party, held in 1979 at the Hunting Lodge, was attended by the Old Guard—Beaton and Diana Cooper—and the new: Ferry and Clive James. The theme was hunting—“La Chasse”—and it landed Haslam six pages of Vogue.

Haslam kept up the pace, throwing a party for Warhol with nightclub queen Regine, zipping about St. Tropez with Ferry in hot pursuit of actress Michèle Morgan, escorting Joan Collins to the Royal Ascot, sitting in the Queen’s box at the Badminton horse trials, scoring an invitation to the wedding of Charles and Diana, which to this day Haslam calls the best party in history.

But as the years rolled by, the invitations slowed down. Haslam could no longer be called an “It boy.” It distressed him to the point where Peter Eyre had to sit him down. “I said, ‘Nicky, don’t you realize people don’t want to invite you to their parties because they know you want to come too much,’ ” recalls Eyre. “ ‘You’ve got to be cooler about it. It’s kind of pathetic—your wanting to go so much. They just simply can’t bear to ask you.’ ” Haslam sometimes took the smallest things as personal slights. When planning a large party, for example, he asked his dear friend Janet de Botton for the mailing address of a mutual friend. De Botton’s secretary had the gall to give Haslam the work address of said invitee, not the home address. De Botton was promptly disinvited. She recalls, “He said, ‘This is the greatest outrage in the world! Tear up the invitation.’ ”

His fragility worried some friends. Eyre recalls the dinner party he threw for Frederick Ashton, to which he invited Haslam, knowing how much he admired the choreographer. Then Haslam did something extraordinary. He failed to show up. “I was absolutely amazed that he didn’t turn up,” recalls Eyre. “We were convinced that he had tried to kill himself. And so we went to his flat, and there was a kind of glass door before you got where the flat was, like in the kind of foyer. And we got in. We were like some terrible sleuths, and I said, ‘Oh, my God! I can hear the dog. Obviously he’s dead there with the dog.’ ”

It turned out Haslam was safe and sound at, you guessed it, another party—in Windsor. “The next day Nicky rang me up, and he said, ‘You’re such a marvelous friend. I’m so touched you thought I’d killed myself.’ He had floods of tears.”

He suffered more personal heartaches, too. When his father died, in 1988, it was learned that he had cut Nicky out of his will. “I didn’t get a penny. I was astonished. Completely astonished.” His then boyfriend drank heavily and turned out to be schizophrenic, leaving Haslam with the fear that it was his fault. “Perhaps I treated him badly and he was drinking because of me.” Sobbing, he went to a bar, where he met his next relationship, Paolo Moschino, a tall Italian from the fashion-design family, whom he found both ugly and devastatingly attractive.

Their 11-year-long relationship was fraught. First, Moschino, whose tastes were strictly Italian, had no appreciation for the clothes Haslam bought him in Paris. “He’d just put it in the drawer and never wear it,” says Haslam. The main problem, alas, was Haslam’s obsessive social life. “I think in a way I swamped him. I knew too many people, and it was a bit difficult, always me being the one people knew.” That ended when Moschino, 20 years younger than he, met and fell in love with another. “I was totally upset when he left,” says Haslam, “but I remembered Diana Cooper’s advice: Always make the best friend of your husband’s mistress. I made a best friend of Paolo’s boyfriend, Philip, who I absolutely don’t fancy.” Today, Moschino and Philip both have keys to the Hunting Lodge. “They come whenever they want. I just thought, If I don’t do this, I’ll never see Paolo again. I just think if you loved somebody you can never not love them, regardless of how ghastly they are.”

Present Laughter

Then, about 10 years ago, Haslam did what women only dream of: he turned his life around—by getting a makeover. Charles Saatchi kicked it off. According to Haslam, he told him, “You dress so boringly. Why don’t you go to one of those Japanese designers and get some modern clothes?” And so he did—but now the hair looked silly. He started adding bits of brown. “Then one day I said to my hairdresser Christophe, ‘Come on, let’s be Elvis Presley.’ So he did this absolutely glossy black.” Now was the moment to do the face, an idea he’d been boring his friends with for years. He celebrated the face-lift—and his new life—at his 60th-birthday party, with Mick Jagger, Jerry Hall, Ringo Starr, and Lee Radziwill. The tears flowed that night. He explained it all to Peter Eyre. “He said the moment he had the face-lift he became terribly happy and everyone liked him.”

Nine years later, he is at his peak—invited to everything and busier than ever. He has many projects, including the London apartments of Jagger and of record producer Nellee Hooper, a project for Charles Spencer, a fabulous house for Janet de Botton in Provence, a house in Marrakech originally owned by the late Mark Birley, the restoration of a Ponsonby-family chapel in Ireland, and a number of houses for wealthy Russians, whom he loves because “they have no real set ideas” and let him fly with his own: friezes along the ceilings, walls in gilded leather or camel hair, velvet shutters, dressing rooms with drawers that look like Louis Vuitton cases. He spares no expense—which is something when your client is Peter Aven, a billionaire Putin confidant, who has built himself a 29,000-square-foot house on Surrey’s Wentworth estate (where Pinochet was kept under house arrest), complete with a gallery for his collection of Russian paintings (the largest private collection of Russian art in the world) and a panic room. Courtesy of Haslam, it now features the largest atrium in Europe, poolside urns with smoke coming out, and a fireplace that cost $250,000. Estée Lauder heir Ron Lauder, according to Haslam, wrote in the guest book, “Your house is beyond belief. It’s the most beautiful I’ve ever seen.” With chatter like that, who needs to have a design philosophy? “I just pick up silly old stuff and make it pretty,” he says.

Still, he lives in his own reality. Whisking into an apartment, wearing a military jacket and high boots, where contractors are busily at work, he stares at a green door and says, “I’m wondering if it went too red.” Inspecting a wall onto which have been painted two identical, green colonnades, side by side, he announces, “That one is so much better.” One of his favorite decorating maxims comes from Nancy Lancaster, the partner of John Fowler. Having painted one room pink and one room blue, she explained that it wasn’t the color of the rooms that mattered, but the color of the air between the rooms. Some things send him into a tizzy. Upon entering a newly decorated house of a Russian client, he wonders who in the world did the flowers here—”horrible, twisted bamboo.” That another client has chosen to do her bathroom sink in a “smoked salmon” marble is beyond him. “She loves orange,” he explains, rolling his eyes. Mainly, he’s having the time of his life. “Jolly smart, aren’t they?” he declares, beholding a set of wrought-iron doors. Glancing to the space above the mantel, he says with a mischievous grin, “The $3 million Warhol will be going there.” Illuminating a massive chandelier in a bathroom, he gasps with delight, “Aha! Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.”

Having reached the apex of fabulousness, he is again alone, alas. On this drizzly Saturday in Hampshire, one can’t help but wonder if there aren’t moments when he yearns for that permanent companionship. He still thinks about Jimmy Davison and is back in touch with him. “We always say, ‘Why on earth did we split up?’ ” says Haslam. “He says, ‘I can’t believe I ever gave you up.’ ”

But at this point rekindling things with him, or jumping into a relationship with anyone else, just seems unrealistic. “I’ve done four lots for 10 years with people,” Haslam says. “Ten years is pretty good, but on the other hand you’d think that after 10 years they wouldn’t go, so I must in the end be a nightmare. But now I’m too set in my ways. I don’t want people sharing the flat in London.… I don’t want to come back and find someone sort of striding up and down saying, ‘Where have you been?’ or ‘Why can’t I come with you?’ ”

Anyway, he’s got a party to throw. Set for October 16, it’s officially for the once disinvited Janet de Botton, but really it’s a celebration of Nicky’s 69 fabulous years. Inspired by the Tony Duquette–designed fashion show at the end of the Zsa Zsa Gabor movie Lovely to Look At, the décor will be red, white, and blue. Women will dress in black, violet, and silver because “violet looks extraordinary with red, white, and blue.” It will take place at Parkstead House, which was built by his great-great-great-great-grandfather William Ponsonby, the second Earl of Bessborough, and it will feature a revolving dance floor, which is usually illegal. So far there are 800 on the guest list, but he’s still tinkering with it.

“Do you think I dare ask the Queen?” he muses over the lunch he has made, a very smooth pea soup he’s proud of. His mind starts whirring, and he has a conversation with himself about how he might proceed: “With a note, saying that the party I managed to go to for my cousin Diana’s wedding was so far and away the best night I ever had in my life. I feel I should reciprocate. She can always say no. It would be quite nice to ask, wouldn’t it?”

He thinks again. “The trouble is, if Charles and Camilla come, you’ve got to have the sniffing dogs, and the security. That’s a bore.”

He thinks again. “But it would be fun, wouldn’t it? I think she likes a jolly, the Queen.”

Time was, girls were in short supply at Comic-Con, San Diego’s annual comic-book/science-fiction/fantasy conference. Now they’re packed into Hall H (capacity 6,500), waiting super-patiently through all the dork stuff—the endless Tron Legacy preview and a panel where all the geeks in the audience got worked up about some weird, tricked-out, like, car. Then The Final Destination, in which a bunch of people get impaled, decapitated, and churned up by escalators and cars. Um, that’s mature. Now Astro Boy is zipping around the screen, chirping, “I’ve got machine guns … in my butt?” The girls are so not LOL. After all, they’ve been lined up since five this morning to catch a glimpse of Robert Pattinson, otherwise known as “The Pattz” or “Edward Cullen,” the really hot vampire he played in Twilight, and by now the super-cute outfits they picked out for him—short-shorts and Twilight T-shirts—have gotten sweaty, and their makeup needs to be re-applied.

At last, the moderator’s voice reverberates dramatically throughout the darkened hall, “And now … ” The shrieking begins—deafening, glass-breaking, amusing for about three seconds, until it becomes excruciating. The moderator continues with a joke: “What would you do if I said, ‘That’s it. Thanks for coming’?” Some of the guys, hostile to this new Comic-Con element, roar in approval, “Yeah!”

The moderator relents, however, and introduces the cast members of New Moon—the second installment in the Twilight saga, opening this month—as they take the stage to increasingly loud rounds of applause: Ashley Greene (Edward’s vampire sister, Alice), Kristen Stewart (Bella, Edward’s human girlfriend), and Taylor Lautner (Jacob, Bella’s hunky friend who’s sometimes a werewolf). “I think we have one more backstage … ” he says at last.

Pattinson, in jeans and a well-worn flannel shirt over a T-shirt, ambles onstage with a pleasant but befuddled smile and some friendly waving. The girls are no longer just shrieking. They are hyperventilating, tittering deliriously, grabbing one another by the arms so that they don’t pass out. “Omigod, omigod, Oh my God!!!!!”

Sitting on the panel, the rumpled, unshaven idol starts looking a little ill at ease. He seems to be in a fidget-off with Kristen Stewart, with whom everyone believes he is having a tortured offscreen romance. She’s hugging her knee, pulling at strands of her new, black, rock ‘n’ roll shag. He’s rubbing his neck, moving his malleable hair from left to right, and tugging at his eyebrows. But his every odd tic, his every self-effacing, British, fumbling answer to the questions thrown his way, is merely a new reason to be charmed.

Q: I love your music. Would you consider doing any more open-mike nights?

Pattinson: “Uh, um, yeah, I mean, I would. I’m just too, I’m kind of, uh, a pussy, I guess.”

Aaaahhh!

Not since Leo, circa Titanic, has a young actor been so aggressively beloved by 13-year-old girls worldwide. But rather than working his way through supermodels, Pattinson, who’s been living out of three suitcases for the past year, has been feeling overwhelmed, self-conscious, and guilty. “I’m trying not to drown,” he says in his hotel room at the San Diego Hard Rock Hotel, which is littered today with beer bottles, old scrambled eggs, a half-eaten Twix bar, and a dirty pair of jeans on the living-room floor. And he notices his unmade bed. “Oh, God. Sorry about that.”

It’s early August, and though he’s been in New York filming Remember Me, a romantic melodrama in which he plays a privileged N.Y.U. student coping with a family tragedy, he hasn’t really seen any of New York, he explains. His social life has been limited to the bland Waldorf Towers, in Midtown, and to the two people staying with him in his suite: his sister Lizzy, who’s been sleeping on the foldout sofa, and his best friend, actor Tom Sturridge, who’s got the cot. He has other friends, but they’re kind of broke, and Pattinson is too self-conscious to fly them in—“Then you feel like a dick.” He’s sure he’s driving people crazy by constantly talking about how he can’t leave his hotel room. And he sees his inability to relish his fans’ reverence as his own shortcoming. “I guess I’m not the type of guy cut out to do a franchise,” he says. “I’m not much of a crowd person.”

What makes the lavish attention more awkward is that he believes he hasn’t done anything to deserve it—or any praise at all, for that matter. He usually doesn’t feel like talking to anyone, but silence makes him so uncomfortable that he ends up filling the air with “a load of rubbish” or just laughing nervously. He is often apologizing—for being boring, for the “douchey” terrace that’s attached to his hotel room, for telling you a story you might have read somewhere else already. When talking about seminal moments in his life, the main emotion he recalls is embarrassment. He’ll dismiss his work in any way he can. When roles have been difficult, he’ll say, “I had no idea what I was doing.” When roles have been easy, he says he didn’t have to do anything. Despite the fact that he is an exquisite beauty—with perfectly formed red, red lips and a face that might have been dreamed by the Romantic poets—he thinks he resembles “a cartoon character.” One of his legs is longer than the other, which makes him look, he assures you, “like an idiot.”

“I’m unbearably self-conscious about stuff,” he admits. To the point where, while filming scenes before the army of New York paparazzi that has been following him around, he is terrified that his “ass crack is showing.”

And the new Leo, it turns out, is also a nerd. He is never without a book in his hand, say his colleagues, or a piece of music on his mind, or a movie he wants to share. He’s so obsessed about delivering a performance he feels happy with that he is constantly watching the dailies, says Remember Me director Allen Coulter. “He’s religious about it.”

“There’s every reason for a young actor to phone it in on a franchise where the first movie has done incredibly well,” says New Moon director Chris Weitz. “But he and Kristen take it really, really seriously and don’t want to phone it in. They want to find some way to make these characters believable, credible to themselves and to the audience.”

None of this would have happened to Pattinson had it not been for Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga, the young-adult blockbuster, the four books of which have sold 70 million copies and been translated into 45 languages. In case you’ve been living in a remote forest, the series tells the story of Bella Swan, a shy newcomer to the town of Forks, Washington, who falls in love with Edward Cullen, a vampire since 1918, when he was bitten, who will be 17 years old for eternity. Though they are hopelessly in love, if they were to really fool around, Edward would lose control and bite her, turning Bella into a vampire as well—all of which puts the two in a permanent state of unquenchable lust, not to mention abstinence. This doubtless plays well with parents and bluenoses, like the author’s fellow Mormons. In fact, the whole setup could be seen as a metaphor for hanging on to your virginity.

Still, no other writer in recent memory has quite tapped into female adolescent yearning and girlhood fantasies about being desired. Edward is the perfect hero: charming, cultured, dangerous, and “the most beautiful creature who has ever been born.” Girls fall so hard for him that even at Meyer’s readings—well before any Twilight movie had been made—they shrieked upon hearing the author simply utter his name: “That was the first night I dreamed of Edward Cullen.”

Aaaaah!

Unlike Edward’s past, which is full of magic and mystery, Pattinson’s, the actor insists, was so unremarkable that he can barely remember a thing. He grew up in Barnes, in southwest London. His father had a car-importing business; his mother worked at a modeling agency. They weren’t stage parents, but they’ve since become way too into the minutiae of his fame, he says. His mother will frequently call to weigh in on pictures of him in the media: “‘I like that new shirt you’re wearing!’ ‘Uh, thanks.’” They couldn’t help but notice they had a good-looking kid on their hands, and briefly got him into modeling. “I was such a terrible model,” he says. “I was really tall but still looked like a six-year-old.”

If there was a creative streak in his family it was for music. Sister Lizzy, a singer, got a recording contract at age 17. Pattinson took up piano as a young boy and started playing guitar at age 15. He fell in love with the music of James Brown, Wilson Pickett, and Van Morrison. But he wasn’t one of those kids always performing for family members and visitors. “I think I liked being by myself quite a bit,” he says. He attended an all-boys school until age 12 and pretty much didn’t speak to any girls until he entered the exclusive (and expensive) Harrodian School, for high school. As his father pointed out, the really cute girls were going to this little local drama club called the Barnes Theatre Club.

It sparked in Pattinson some genuine excitement for acting, particularly when he got to play Alec—“who’s just a vile bastard,” he says—in a theatrical adaptation of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. The role was the first in a line of out-there characters—or “weirdos,” as Pattinson would say—that the actor has made something of a specialty. When you play a weirdo, he explains, “you can always have an excuse.…He’s a weirdo!” The play also got Pattinson an agent and landed him the role of Reese Witherspoon’s son in Mira Nair’s adaptation of Vanity Fair.

“[Tom Sturridge] and I … we had scenes right next to each other and it was both our first jobs.… We went to the screening, and we thought the whole thing was such a joke anyway, because we had no idea what we were doing. We were, like, ‘acting’ or whatever—we had no idea—and we watched [Tom’s] scene and were like, ‘Yeah, that’s pretty good, that’s all right.’” When it came to Pattinson’s scene, it was no longer there. “I’m sitting there going, ‘Ummm … really?’ No one had told me that I had been cut out.”

As Pattinson tells it, the casting director felt so guilty that she hadn’t informed him that she brought him in for another movie she was casting, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. He met with director Mike Newell for 30 minutes and for no good reason, Pattinson says now, he was completely confident and went around telling everyone that he had gotten the part of Cedric Diggory, the golden boy of Hogwarts—which it turns out he had. With a tidy sum of money from Harry Potter, Pattinson eventually moved out of his parents’ house and was cast as a weirdo in a serious play, The Woman Before, in London’s West End. Forsaking college, he was now officially pursuing a career as an actor.

Unfortunately, he was replaced before opening night. “I thought I was doing something interesting, and I ended up getting fired for it,” Pattinson recalls with a sigh. “I think I just got confused, doing random mannerisms, as if that made an interesting performance. [I thought], It’s cool if you go like this,” he says, suddenly contorting his body into a nonsensical pose. Pattinson went through a period of denial after his failure. “I was going to all these auditions and telling everyone how I got fired because I stood up for my principles, and making up all this bullshit.… I kind of went nuts for a while.” He couldn’t land another job, stopped talking to his agent, and threw in the towel, opting to take his music seriously, as all of his friends were now doing. He began performing with a guitar in bars, either solo or with a couple of friends. It was a scene, he recalls a little ruefully, in which “no one gave a shit when you got up onstage.”

Yet as soon as he decided to put acting behind him, another role came his way and changed his mind again: a BBC thriller called The Haunted Airman, in which Pattinson got to be in a wheelchair and act like, yes, “a weirdo. I just changed my whole opinion about everything.” He then played two more weirdos back-to-back—first, eccentric Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí in the rather arch Little Ashes, about the romance between Dalí and poet Federico García Lorca; next, in a winning little comedy called How to Be, about a direction-less, spastic musician so in need of assistance that he pays a self-help guru to move in with him. He was starting to take his eccentric characters a little more seriously in both cases, feeling his way, as he had no real dramatic training.

How to Be director Oliver Irving recalls that, in the casting of the film, Rob “had a uniqueness and unpretentiousness. A lot of people who had come from drama school … were trying to fit into a kind of dramatic mold. He was a lot more relaxed. Just kind of came and was willing to make a mistake and laugh at himself.” In one scene, in which his character is enraged at his parents and storms outside to kick trees and lampposts, Irving recalls, “he’d make his eyes water and get himself all worked up … slapping himself and doing everything he possibly could to make him feel ill,” while passersby wondered what the hell was the matter with this guy.

Neither film exactly catapulted Pattinson to stardom. In 2007 he learned that something called Twilight was being cast in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and London, and he made a tape with one of his apartment-mates to send to the casting directors. “It looked so ridiculous I didn’t even send it,” says Pattinson, who forgot all about it and returned to his music.

Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, the search for Edward wasn’t going so well. Bella was easy—Stewart was at the top of the list and immediately accepted the role. But after auditioning thousands of actors for Edward, director Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen) still couldn’t find the one who met the right criteria: some work experience, otherworldly beauty, and enough depth to make it believable that this kid had been alive since 1901. “Tapes came in from all over, and a lot of guys looked really cute and handsome, but they almost looked like the dudes in my high school,” says Hardwicke. An executive at the studio, Summit Entertainment president of worldwide production Erik Feig, recalls saying to a colleague before going to lunch one day, “‘I know we’ve looked. I just feel there are a couple of rocks that we haven’t checked under.’ I said, ‘There have to be British actors that we don’t know about that are this guy, who can do a great American accent.’ I said, ‘Do me a favor. Go to IMDb and look at every young actor, from age 15 to 25, who was in Harry Potter or anything, even a tiny role, print out their headshots.’ I came back from lunch. She had all these pictures, and she said, as we were going through the pictures, ‘What about this guy?’ And I saw a picture of Cedric Diggory [the character Pattinson played in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire]. I said, ‘He’s great!’ … And the look that jumped out to me at that point, and I know it’s a silly adjective to use, he was Byronic.”

Hardwicke watched Pattinson’s few scenes in Harry Potter over and over and wasn’t entirely convinced. “I’m like, Maybe he could pull it off—who knows?” She called Pattinson’s agent, Stephanie Ritz, to arrange to see him in person. Ritz agreed to fly him out on his own dime and to have him sleep on her couch.

As for Pattinson, he had no idea what he was getting into. He had never read Twilight, and having been “getting drunk for a year,” he felt like a blob and dreaded having to take his shirt off, which the audition required of him. Given his sense that he had nothing to lose, Pattinson went into the audition, he says, “a little more brazen than I would have been in a normal audition.” Recalling one of the scenes he did with Stewart, on Hardwicke’s bed, in which he and Stewart have a passionate but aborted kiss, he says, “I was still in the mode thinking, I’ve got to make this really, really serious. This is not just a sexy thing.… I was slamming my head against the wall and kind of going nuts.” He was sure he had made a complete ass of himself. “I remember calling my parents [afterward] and saying, ‘That’s it. I’m not doing this anymore.’ And then hearing, ‘O.K., fine,’ which was not the answer I wanted to hear at all.”

He might not have felt it, but in those short minutes with Stewart, something had clicked. “When Kris did the scenes with the other three guys, it wasn’t happening,” recalls Hardwicke, who was filming on her digital camera. “But when we did it with Rob and Kristen, it wasn’t perfect, it was still raw and unformed … but you could see that they had this nervous attraction and this pull towards each other. You could see the chemistry, and Kristen was adamant, [saying], ‘I think he is by far the best.’”

But this being Hollywood, there were those at the studio who still had their doubts about Pattinson. “They called me up and they literally said, ‘Catherine, do you think you can make this guy look good?’” Hardwicke recalls. “So I said, ‘Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to get his hair back to a different color, do a different style. He would work with a trainer from now on. My cinematographer is great with lighting. He will study the cheekbones, and I promise you, we’ll make the guy look good.’”

Fans of Twilight—Twilighters, they’re called—were beside themselves with disappointment when they saw pictures of the future Edward Cullen, with unkempt hair and bushy eyebrows, dodging out of bars with his strange friends. “Disgusting!,” “Repulsive!” they pronounced on the Web sites. According to Hardwicke, Pattinson was rattled by the criticism. “I said to Rob, ‘Really, you shouldn’t be reading that stuff. Don’t even read it!’ He goes, ‘Well, my mother forwarded this one to me.’ The ‘Repulsive’ one.”

But the insults made Pattinson determined to bring something exceptional and surprising to Edward. He moved to Portland three months before the shoot and didn’t talk to anyone. Sometimes he wore yellow-brown contact lenses he had been given. “I was like, Yeah, I’m really going to get into it. And I went into this place to get a coffee, and the first thing this girl at the counter says is ‘Nice contacts,’ and I was just like, O.K., I’m not really feeling what I need to feel.”

The shoot got under way and had an impulsive, almost frenetic energy. Pattinson brought in books, films, and pieces of music that might spark some understanding of this character, who is 108 years old, has never found love, doesn’t want to harm people, and is therefore at war with his natural instincts. He and Stewart had endless conversations about what Bella and Edward meant to each other, to the point where they internalized those dynamics.

Shooting could get downright giddy. In the vampire fight scenes, for example, Pattinson would gamely sink his teeth into the grilled chicken or melted cheese that co-star Cam Gigandet had hidden under his collar, and sometimes he had to be restrained from re-using the food once it had fallen onto the floor and was covered in dirt or glass shards.

In the meantime, evenings were spent in Pattinson’s hotel room, with Pattinson “always drunk,” says Hardwicke, and playing the guitar while Stewart and the other cast members watched and sang along. Something personally intense was developing between the young co-stars. “What Rob and Kristen had is a multitude of feelings for each other. Complex feelings for each other,” says Hardwicke. “It was what we needed. Complex, intense fascination.” It’s very likely that their offscreen relationship mirrored their on-screen one: an intense attraction that couldn’t be realized. During the shoot, Stewart was with her long-term boyfriend, actor Michael Angarano.

The movie, which opened in November 2008, hit all the blockbuster marks, earning $70 million in its first three days. (It has since grossed almost $400 million.) Pattinson signed on to do the rest of the franchise for a reported $10 million. The movie cleaned up at the MTV Movie Awards, where Pattinson was mobbed by fans. The once “repulsive” barfly was now the world’s biggest dreamboat.

By the time New Moon, the second in the series, began filming, the frenzy had multiplied. Director Chris Weitz recalls the shoot in Montepulciano, Italy. “Every teenager who could get there from any part of Europe was there, and it was like The Birds,” he says. “You turn the corner and there would be one, two, three, four hundred teenagers standing there. It got to the point where the stand-ins were signing autographs.”

Pattinson was protected from the fans by a throng of beefy Italian bodyguards who formed a perimeter around him—theoretically, at least. At one point, during the middle of shooting in the main square, someone pushed a young woman in a wheelchair through the barrier, right up to Pattinson. The bodyguards didn’t know what to do—tackling a handicapped woman just didn’t seem attractive. Everyone stood there gaping in silence. “It was almost a medieval moment,” says Weitz. “There were a thousand extras and about a thousand onlookers, and it was as though someone had [been] wheeled up to be healed by the King of France.” Thinking little of it, Pattinson spoke with the girl for a few moments and had his picture taken with her. Suddenly the crowd burst into applause.

“Everyone was like, ‘Ahhhh!’” recalls Pattinson, afraid that he might have appeared grandiose. “It was one of the most embarrassing experiences of my life.” Though Pattinson was and remains gracious to his fans, he has no choice but to spend most of his time in his hotel room. “He was forced into becoming a hermit,” says Weitz. “When he can’t go out to buy a soda, it’s kind of a drag.” Kristen Stewart says that the frenzy she’s witnessed over Pattinson “would terrify me. I would probably resent the hell out of it and would probably do something crazy.”

The outside world became even more intrusive when he moved to New York this spring to start shooting Remember Me, which happened to feature another beautiful co-star, Emilie de Ravin, with whom he became friendly.

he’s a cheat!, his messy love life!, rang out the headlines on the covers of the tabloids all summer, which his fans gleefully asked him to sign. The story line was that Pattinson had “gotten cozy” with de Ravin, and that Stewart, who’d been stringing The Pattz along for all this time, was suddenly crazed with jealousy (in addition to being pregnant with his baby). In the run-up to Comic-Con, where Pattinson and Stewart would be re-united after months apart, Stewart was said to be busily picking out “sexy sundresses” and other great outfits so that “he won’t be able to take his eyes off of her.” (As it happened, she wore jeans, red sneakers, and a Minor Threat T-shirt the whole time.)

“It doesn’t make any difference what you say,” Pattinson says about the tabloids. “I’ve literally been across the country [from Kristen], and it’s like ‘Oh, they were on secret dates!’ It’s like ‘Where? I can’t get out of my hotel room!’” Still, it’s hard to take it in stride when his parents tend to believe the tabloids more than they do him, and when random airport greeters ask him, with heartfelt sympathy, if he really feels up for being a father. (As for Stewart, she sounds significantly more fed up about the whole thing: “It’s so retarded. We’re characters in this comic book.”)

For the record, Pattinson insists that he and Stewart are really just “good friends” and that he deeply admires her. “I think she’s the best young actress around,” he says. (Given their ages, it’s very possible that their relationship status will have changed, and changed again, by the time you’re reading this.) Whatever the case, she’s clearly a kindred, low-key spirit. “She’s influenced how I’ve done all the Twilight stuff. It’s quite nice to have someone who is genuinely indifferent to the whole spectacle of everything.” Indeed, as they pose for picture after picture at Comic-Con, Stewart couldn’t look any cooler about the whole thing. She and Pattinson have mastered the not-touching thing. She even throws the crowd a few curveballs by over-flirting with muscle-bound Taylor Lautner.

With the third Twilight installment, Eclipse, now filming and the fourth to be filmed in the not so distant future—there’s only so long Pattinson, who is 23, can look 17—he is beginning to imagine life after the franchise. The idea of a huge-budget action movie—de rigueur for young actors today—holds zero appeal for him. “There’s no point. I mean, I don’t have any material desires at all. I wear the same clothes every single day. I don’t buy anything. And I don’t go out anymore, either!” All that he really wants is a home, so he can get a dog, since the West Highland white terrier he had since the age of five and “who was like my sister” died last Christmas. Instead, he’s choosing to do small-budget, slightly weirdo material: a Western directed by Madeleine Stowe, in which he will speak almost exclusively in Comanche, and an adaptation of a Guy de Maupassant novel, Bel-Ami, in which he plays a guy who “thinks like an animal” and “just rips off and screws over all of his friends.”

Even though Pattinson now has a Barbie action figure (one he thinks looks like Zac Efron), he’s starting to see the faintest hint that his teen-idol days may be on the wane—and that someone else might soon replace him. Since Twilight, when he played Gentle Indian Friend, 17-year-old Taylor Lautner has become markedly more carved and badass-looking. That’s because in New Moon he’s both a viable love option for Bella and a werewolf. By the end of Comic-Con, Taylor’s new physique is all that anyone can talk about, and girls are shouting from their seats, “Take off your shirt!” Lautner seems born for this role. With a dazzling-white smile, he delivers polished, borderline-canned lines to roaring applause. “I worked really hard to transform Jacob’s body so I could portray him correctly for you guys. I hope you guys are pleased when you see the results!”

And now Pattinson is hawking his co-star like a desperate agent. “I don’t know where he got it,” he gushes of Lautner’s charm and knack for connecting with the fans. “He’s much better at doing it [than I am].… He’s completely handling it. I’m just freaking out all the time. I’m going to end up hitting people and stuff and looking like an idiot.” Someone else can be Leo. Pattinson will be Hugh Grant.

It was the week before Christmas, and Laura and Kate Mulleavy, the young women behind the fashion label Rodarte, were going all out fabulous—or at least their version of it. The look? High-waisted jeans and a Clone Wars T-shirt on Kate, 33. Sweatpants on Laura, 31. Blue moccasins on both. The place: the Derby in Arcadia, near their hometown of Pasadena, a horse-racing-themed steak house that goes bonkers for Santa this time of year. The time? Six thirty P.M., prime time for the town’s seniors. Our fast-talking, seventysomething waitress, with a flashy blue tie and over-the-top blue earrings to match, plopped down Kate’s hot toddy and got down to business—hustling the homemade earrings she sells on the side. “We have peppermint, and we have gold and red balls,” she rattled off, hoping to make the transaction as fast and as easy as possible.

But the Mulleavys were conflicted.

“Which ones do you think I should pick, Laura?” wondered Kate, fingering the flimsy baubles as if they were Tiffany diamonds.

“Ooh, I like the red balls,” said Laura.

“What about the snowflakes?”

“Get the snowflakes because I got the red ones.”

“Sorry,” said Kate. “They’re all so cool. I can’t pick.”

I mentioned to the waitress that this was high praise, her new fans being two of the hottest young designers in the world. After all, their avant-garde creations have won them nearly every fashion accolade, and they’ve got a cult following among cool, A-list actresses, including Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Reese Witherspoon, Keira Knightley, Kirsten Dunst, Chloë Sevigny, and Elle and Dakota Fanning.

The waitress gave the girls a skeptical once-over. “Oh. O.K.,” she said, trying to be polite and promptly moving on to the next table.

The girls let out a laugh. “She’s like, ‘Next,’ ” said Kate.

Truth is, no one would peg them as fashion designers. While they’re both striking—the zaftig Kate has a heavy-banged, young-Grace Slick vibe, Laura a more creamy-skinned, angular beauty—they carry themselves like high-school wallflowers. They slouch; they shuffle; both appear a little pigeon-toed. They live far from the fashion swirl—with their parents—and they believe a lot of other people would benefit from living with their parents, too. They greet people with hugs—or not—but never with the kiss-on-either-cheek thing that has spread from Europe to the New York fashion world. “If you double-kissed someone in L.A., they’d be like, What?” says Kate. Their idea of a crazy good time isn’t partying with Kate Moss. It’s raiding the gift shop at the Huntington Library for Christmas ornaments. They’re not interested in who’s up, who’s down, or who’s gotten fat. “They’re not talking fashion gossip,” says Jeffrey Deitch, director of L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), who’s become a friend. “I don’t know if they know any fashion gossip.”

They are, in short, fashion’s outsider nerds. In spite of this—or perhaps because of it—they just so happen to be doing more interesting things with clothing than anyone else these days, pushing its relevance from the racks and runway into the realms of other art forms: film, painting, and now opera. The new direction started with the movie Black Swan, in which their mad, beautiful confections turned the Tchaikovsky ballet Swan Lake on its head. Those costumes were promptly put on view at MOCA. Not to be outdone, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) just exhibited a group of the sisters’ gowns inspired by the frescoes of Fra Angelico at San Marco, in Florence. This spring comes their most prestigious project yet: designing the costumes for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s production of Don Giovanni at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and working in close collaboration with none other than the man who built the building—iconic architect Frank Gehry, who’s doing the sets. The magnitude of Mozart and Gehry—it’s all a little daunting for the sisters right now. “But I’m not going to lie,” said Kate, using a favorite expression. “Designing for character is so exciting.”

The sisters tend not to talk specifics about projects they’re working on. There are too many disparate strands happening at once; everything’s constantly in flux until the last minute. But to grasp how they work, there are a few things to understand, first and foremost that they act as a single unit. They share friends, they share an e-mail address, and, as if they were Siamese twins conjoined at the head, they share fascinations, which is pretty much all things enchanted, child-like, macabre, primordial, nostalgic, wild, or scientific. Ideas, half-ideas, fleeting notions are bubbling in their minds constantly. While their meandering, dotty conversation is endearing and enlightening, following along is an exercise in stamina.

Few adults can get more moved by a birdhouse, for example. “I was waking up,” recalled Laura. “These birds just go zooming in; they go swooping into the chimney of the house [next door]. I got up and I was like, ‘Oh, it’s the most adorable birdhouse on that chimney! … There’s a heart cut out of it! This is where they fly in.’ ”

“It’s like a Snow White little cottage,” added Kate. She whips out her iPhone to show me a picture. “This is the birdhouse. Come on! It’s so cute!”

Don’t even get them started on the natural wonders of Northern California, like redwood trees.

“The oldest ones are 2,200 years old,” Laura called out from behind the wheel, driving down Route 110.

“I mean, can you imagine?” said Kate.

Oh, Kate, but what about the sequoias?

“I’m not going to lie. The sequoias are right up there.” Kate consults her iPhone. “Are you guys ready to have your mind blown? Sequoias are 56 feet in diameter!”

And don’t forget about the California condors, Laura.

“They’re vultures. They feed off deer meat,” Laura answers.

“They were getting lead poisoning from the bullets,” said Kate. “They’re very mystical.”

Laura: “They’re majestic.”

Again, Kate with the iPhone pictures. “I’m showing you this because if you go [to Big Sur] one day you might get lucky and see one!” They can go on like this for hours, analyzing, informing, loudly effusing over the sunspot photos taken by NASA, the night colors of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, a famous photograph of President Lincoln, or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, “one of the greatest movies of all time.”

It all can seem a little Grey Gardens. The girls don’t think about dating, for example, because not only would a guy have to more or less date the other sister as well, “he’d have to date all our obsessions too,” says Laura. It’s hard not to picture them 50 years from now, two spinsters walking down the street trading one odd remark after another and collecting strange looks. But, in fact, these seemingly random topics of conversation are their memories and lifeblood, and the very foundation of their work. Consider that California condor, the bird whose near extinction became a political issue during their youth. Their spring-2010 collection—in which they applied a pastiche of materials with a hands-on, couture method—was all vulture. It featured claw belt buckles, heels with crazy tentacles, cobwebby wool skirts, and fabrics that had been shredded, burned, sandpapered, or painted. The sisters built a story around it: a post-apocalyptic fantasy in which women were burned alive and returned to life as California condors, who clothed themselves in whatever rags were left.

When you wear a dress by Rodarte, says Natalie Portman, an early fan who’s now a close friend, “you get the sense you’re wearing a piece of art. People say that about fashion a lot, and it sounds hollow. But with them it’s true. They’re so aware of art history, and film, and literature, and contemporary art. They really are referencing genuine inspirations … ideas and thoughts and other pieces of art and things in nature. They make pieces you can talk about or think about.”

One of the chief sources is their childhood, spent in Aptos, a small town outside of Santa Cruz, with their Mexican-Italian artist mother and botanist father, who is a fifth-generation Californian of Irish descent. (The two met at Humboldt State University in 1969, and later briefly lived in a cabin without heat.) Santa Cruz provided the girls with a view into the edgy subcultures of skaters, surfers, punks, and Hare Krishnas, while the landscape of Aptos—with its redwood forests, beaches covered in eucalyptus leaves, and mustard fields—fairly soaked into their souls, becoming perhaps their most crucial, emotional touchstone. That and movies. To their mother, nothing was more critical to their education than watching old movies. Their interest in fashion came from the characters in films like Bringing Up Baby and Gone with the Wind. When their mother gave them sketchpads, Laura filled the pages mapping her house, while Kate did fashion sketches.

After attending Berkeley, where Kate studied art history and Laura studied literature, they returned home (by then Pasadena) and spent a year watching horror movies and reading couture books. Kate sold her record collection, and, with the $16,500 in proceeds, they sat down at the kitchen table and started making their first collection: six dresses and one long, slim gown that played with strips of fabric and the bark effects of redwoods. They re-created them in paper miniatures and sent them in a doll’s armoire to the L.A. vintage-clothing store Decades. The owner, Cameron Silver, was floored and alerted the fashion media back East. Cut to February 2005, when the dresses landed on the cover of Women’s Wear Daily. Soon thereafter, the sisters learned they would be receiving a studio visit from Vogue’s Anna Wintour, an event most young women would anticipate with sheer panic, if not a crash diet. The sisters did nothing except prepare the clothes and get themselves a name—Rodarte (pronounced Ro-dar-tay), their mother’s maiden name.

“I look back on it now and think, That’s the first thing we ever made. How did that meeting ever happen?” says Kate. “We were in such a raw state. We didn’t have friends or know people in the industry. We didn’t know how to sell clothes. We didn’t know how clothes went in a store.” Wintour might have said something like: Make the clothes prettier; make them more accessible. The girls wouldn’t have known what to do with such advice and might have thrown in the towel. Instead, Wintour told them that their clothes were personal and they should keep them that way. The sisters were over the moon. “That’s the thing that’s defined us,” says Kate. “If we didn’t have that advice, who knows where we’d be.”

The fairy tale continued. On their first trip to Paris, while at the hip boutique Colette, where they’d installed a pop-up collection, there was Karl Lagerfeld picking out a few of their wild and beautiful creations for his muse, Amanda Harlech. He promptly invited them to a party at his Paris apartment, where they were photographed by legendary fashion editor Suzy Menkes. She said, in effect, that she was witnessing something special and that she would never let this photograph out of her hands.

“It was so surreal,” recalls Laura.

“It was as if I were a film student and I was suddenly hanging around with Martin Scorsese,” says Kate. They went on to win all the important fashion awards, including back-to-back Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards. (The award recognizes the industry’s top creative talent.) Their earliest fans were the edgiest of New York’s beau monde: gallerist Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, Andy Warhol partner and original art-world “It girl” Paige Powell, Visionaire co-founder Cecilia Dean, dermatologist-about-town Dr. Lisa Airan—all of whom could afford to drop $9,000 on a dress. The movie stars followed. And then Michelle Obama began wearing Rodarte, too.

Distinct in the fashion world, they did it on their own terms—no formal training, no financial backing, no compromises—just them and a small group of seamstresses and artisans. More amazing, they did it with no drama and no self-loathing. “I’ve often said they are the healthiest crazy people I know,” says photographer Autumn de Wilde, one of their closest friends, who’s been documenting their work from the beginning. “They’re so accepting of themselves. So confident without being arrogant A lot of female artists in their 20s are so concerned with what’s wrong with them that they miss a good 10 years of holding the reins and racing forward.”

Despite the naïveté and lack of emotional baggage, a savvy streak runs through the sisters as well. “They have a beautiful innocence, but they’re also whip-smart,” says de Wilde. “You can’t predict the one you’re going to get—the wide-eyed child or the leader.” Fast learners, they have been quick to identify who does what best in the business. In 2008, for example, when they felt that their shows needed to be kicked up a notch, they went straight to Alexandre de Betak, known as “the Fellini of fashion” for his over-the-top, beautiful work with Dior. “We begged him,” says Laura. “I admire him so much because he never, never accepts or understands the word ‘no,’ which is the way Kate and I think, which means everything’s possible.” Like having models walk down a runway covered in colored smoke.

It’s the same with the movie stars who wear their clothes and have built a cult following around Rodarte. “I don’t know why, but all these people are very fascinating, interesting people. They’re creative; they’re interested in art. They’re also fun,” says Kate, who insists their illustrious fans are a self-selecting group. “I think the people who like our clothes, more often than not we get along with them in real life. If we’re all in the same room together, we usually have something to talk about.” Indeed, not only Portman but also Dunst and Elle Fanning have become their close friends, leading some fashion people to carp that the sisters are just as star-obsessed as the next narcissistic fashion designer—don’t let the naïve act mislead you. De Wilde insists that’s not the case, explaining, “They’re not fooled by bullshit frivolity, but they have a childhood attraction to meeting great artists.”

So, what if Kim Kardashian calls up and wants to borrow a couple of dresses for her and her sisters? The sisters shift around a little awkwardly and go into P.R. mode. “We have one set of samples, so we want to be careful with how much they go out. Once that’s been worn in a public sense, another person that’s public can’t wear it.” Laura remembers aloud that Britney Spears wore Rodarte on one of her album covers. “But she bought it,” she quickly adds for clarification. “She bought it.”

As it happened, it was Portman who would introduce them to the next chapter of their career: designing costumes—in this case, for Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, a movie that fit their sensibility perfectly. “I’d seen how balletic so many of their dresses were at that time,” recalls Portman. “I showed them to Darren. He was like, This is … yeah, amazing.” There was already a costume designer working on the film, Amy Westcott, but Rodarte would take on the more central theatrical pieces. Appreciating their knack for storytelling and knowledge of horror movies (they’d already built a runway collection around them), Aronofsky trusted the Mulleavy sisters to take “Swan Lake to a new level.” The sisters were intent on maintaining a level of Swan Lake tradition, however. “We wanted to celebrate all the beautiful things about ballet,” says Laura. From there, they focused on Portman’s character, designing the striking pieces that would reflect her emotional breakdown from pristine maiden to possessed, murderous beast.

It was one of the most talked-about movies of 2010. Fox Searchlight, in anticipation of Oscar season, didn’t hesitate to bring attention to Rodarte’s costumes, and the Mulleavy sisters, demonstrating that savvy streak—some might say ambition—weren’t shy about talking to the press about their work. As it happened, Westcott’s name was barely mentioned, to the point where most people assumed that Kate and Laura Mulleavy were the movie’s only costume designers. Westcott struck back, calling the girls “two people using their considerable self-publicizing resources to loudly complain about their credit once they realized how good the film is I tried to put aside my ego while being airbrushed from history in all of their interviews, as I’m just not that kind of person anyway.”

When asked about Westcott’s complaints, the sisters demonstrate tough, knowing diplomacy. “Our work speaks for itself,” says Laura. “I know what we can do as designers, and I know anyone looking at our work understands that there’s a direct link between what we did in that film and what we do and have done in the past. We were brought in to create the world that needed to be created for the film. She [Westcott] was brought in to handle the things she could source.” Translation: We did the interesting stuff.

Jeffrey Deitch, one of the country’s most visible art-world taste-makers, thought so, too. Impressed by their sculptural form, texture, and power to move, he promptly mounted those pieces at the L.A. County Museum of Art, where the lines, he says, went around the block. To him, the sisters are at the forefront of “the freshest thing going on in our culture today, this expanded view of what art is. It’s no longer just pictures on a wall in a gallery.”

Thus it’s no surprise that in December, at LACMA, in front of Christ on the Cross with Saints, by the Master of the Fiesole Epiphany, a collection of 10 gowns by Rodarte was displayed. In candy-colored pastels, they were inspired by Fra Angelico’s frescoes at San Marco, the friary in Florence in which he lived. The project, which was on view through early February, began with a request from the Italian fashion company Pitti Immagine to come to Florence and mount something—anything—that would reflect the city. Obsessed with Fra Angelico since they were teenagers, the Mulleavys visited San Marco and were brought to tears. “Stendhal wrote about this experience in Florence,” says Kate. “Your first time there, you basically experience this weird mania, an extreme high and extreme low.” The Mulleavy sisters had found their inspiration. Painted in the bedrooms of the friars, the frescoes, which feature classically draped figures from the life of Christ, convey an intense solitude, serenity, and austerity. The sisters boldly took the Renaissance figures into the realm of contemporary couture: employing their skewed take on perfect pleating; integrating feathers, Swarovski crystals, sequins, and hand-molded Easter lilies; and adding bold Bernini-esque accessories like breastplates, headpieces, and crazy belts.

With Don Giovanni at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Rodarte will likely give Mozart a similarly modern jolt. In a sense, the matchup is a natural. It is to be performed in May in Gehry’s undulating and majestic Walt Disney Concert Hall, and will be conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, the young Venezuelan heartthrob who is bringing classical music to new audiences. The idea had its genesis one rainy day at a Starbucks in Berlin, when Los Angeles Philharmonic president Deborah Borda, Dudamel, and his wife, Eloísa Knife Maturen, were dreaming up future projects. Dudamel shared his belief that it’s important for symphony orchestras to perform opera, specifically Mozart, and suggested enlisting Gehry to do the sets, or installations, or whatever they would be. Given that the Disney hall is not an opera house—with no curtain or proscenium—it wasn’t obvious. His wife chimed in with the idea of involving fashion designers.

Gehry was immediately on board and the Philharmonic left it to him to choose the designer. He called Anna Wintour for some recommendations. “They were my natural selection for the L.A. Philharmonic when Frank approached me,” says Wintour, recalling the conversation. “They’ve shown that they can create fashion magic on the runway and the movie screen, and their unique blend of quirky individuality, together with their hands-on couture approach and sense of craftsmanship, suggest that they are also the perfect choice to design for the opera.”

The sisters couldn’t believe their good fortune. It turns out they had a strong personal connection. Their maternal grandmother, who’d been sent by her parents in Italy to live with an uncle in New York during the Depression, became an opera singer. “She would have thought this was the coolest thing ever,” says Kate.

An hour into their first meeting with Gehry, which was bubbling with nervous energy, the young women knew he was a kindred spirit. Like Gehry, says Laura, “we have such abstract jobs that you really have to do a lot of pre-visualization. When he says, ‘I have this, but I’m not there yet,’ I get that. A lot of people don’t I think that we’re all more subtle thinkers We don’t need to overly talk about it, to explain it. Like, you see something and then abstract from it, and then that’s it. We could end up talking about something [unrelated] for an hour and then realize, ‘Oh, O.K., well, I feel like we’ve made great progress today.’ And maybe we talked about it for a split second, but then, that was all we needed.” The sense of being simpatico is mutual. “Kate and Laura’s work reminds me of my early days,” says Gehry. “It is free and fearless and not precious.”

So what will the costumes look like? On a late-December day at their studio, in downtown Los Angeles—a cramped, windowless space with a few interns, racks of previous collections, thousands of books, a collection of weird dolls—the Mulleavy sisters stood in front of a big bulletin board, on which they’d mapped out the scenes and characters from Don Giovanni with index cards. They professed to be struggling with the title character, and how to make opera’s most famous seducer fresh. The velvet-and-heels look of the past is out of the question, they explained. Absurdly, I tried to engage them in a brainstorming session. Then what about a really realistic take on what a modern lady-killer would wear? Like jeans and some hipster T-shirt? The girls laughed—Wow, that’s lame. Would it help to think of a real person as a model? (A young Warren Beatty? John Mayer?) “Someone at the Phil asked us the same thing,” said Laura. Then, in unison: “We were like, ‘No.’ ”

A typical creative meeting with the sisters, reports Deborah Borda, goes something like this: “Well, let’s dress the chorus all in white. No, let’s not dress them at all. Yes, let’s dress them, but let’s dress them in paper and we’ll project things onto them.”

It makes sense, in a way, that this is all happening in Los Angeles, a city that many believe has surpassed New York in terms of artistic vibrancy. De Wilde articulates why that might be. “In L.A., there’s no real center. You build your own city. It can be the loneliest place on earth. It can be a party. You can transform it for yourself.” Looking out onto the Sierra Madre, as they made their way back from their studio to Pasadena, Kate said, “Living in L.A., there is this underlying sense of freedom. You can get on the road and find yourself in a different primordial landscape. Joshua Tree National Park or the tallest trees in the world. Even if you don’t do these things, having the knowledge is a liberating thing.”

Clearly, the Mulleavy sisters have tapped into something that resonates with other artists. A new social circle has popped up around them, which includes director Spike Jonze, writer-directors Mike Mills (Beginners) and Miranda July (Me and You and Everyone We Know). “It’s the most exciting new creative circle I’ve seen,” says Deitch. Portman describes a recent Halloween party she went to at their house in Pasadena: “Being part Mexican, they have a big appreciation for skeletons and the dead, a post-graveyard aesthetic. Their mom cooked for everyone. It was the coolest people in L.A., myself not included, people so hip I’m too scared to talk to them. With 5,000 kids around. Hip, but also a family thing.”

And so it seems the nerds have become the cool people—by simply sticking to their guns. That’s a fantasy we can all appreciate.

As he was running for president, Al Gore said he’d invented the Internet; announced that he had personally discovered Love Canal, the most infamous toxic-waste site in the country; and bragged that he and Tipper had been the sole inspiration for the golden couple in Erich Segal’s best-selling novel Love Story (made into a hit movie with Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal). He also invented the dog, joked David Letterman, and gave mankind fire.
Could such an obviously intelligent man have been so megalomaniacal and self-deluded to have actually said such things? Well, that’s what the news media told us, anyway. And on top of his supposed pomposity and elitism, he was a calculating dork: unable to get dressed in the morning without the advice of a prominent feminist (Naomi Wolf).

Today, by contrast, Gore is “the Goreacle,” the elder statesman of global activism, and something of a media darling. He is the Bono of the environment, the Cassandra of Iraq, the star of an Oscar-winning film, and a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. To the amusement of his kids, some people now actually consider him cool. “If you had told me 10 years ago that people were going to be appealing to me for tickets to a hot rock concert through my parents, I would have fallen over,” says his daughter Karenna Gore Schiff, 34, referring to the Live Earth 24-hour extravaganza in July.

What happened to Gore? The story promoted by much of the media today is that we’re looking at a “new Gore,” who has undergone a radical transformation since 2000—he is now passionate and honest and devoted to issues he actually cares about. If only the old Gore could have been the new Gore, the pundits say, history might have been different.
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But is it really possible for a person—even a Goreacle—to transform himself so radically? There’s no doubt that some things have changed about Al Gore since 2000. He has demonstrated inner strength, rising from an excruciating defeat that would have crushed many men. Beyond that, what has changed is that he now speaks directly to the public; he has neither the patience nor the need to go through the media.

Eight years ago, in the bastions of the “liberal media” that were supposed to love Gore—The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, CNN—he was variously described as “repellent,” “delusional,” a vote-rigger, a man who “lies like a rug,” “Pinocchio.” Eric Pooley, who covered him for Time magazine, says, “He brought out the creative-writing student in so many reporters.… Everybody kind of let loose on the guy.”

How did this happen? Was the right-wing attack machine so effective that it overwhelmed all competing messages? Was Gore’s communications team outrageously inept? Were the liberal elite bending over backward to prove they weren’t so liberal?

Eight years later, journalists, at the prompting of Vanity Fair, are engaging in some self-examination over how they treated Gore. As for Gore himself, for the first time, in this article, he talks about the 2000 campaign and the effect the press had on him and the election. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that my father, Martin Peretz, was his teacher at Harvard and is an ardent, vocal Gore backer. I contributed to his campaign in February 1999. Before reporting this article, however, I’d had maybe two passing exchanges with Gore in my life.) Gore wasn’t eager to talk about this. He doesn’t blame the media for his loss in 2000. Yet he does believe that his words were distorted and that certain major reporters and outlets were often unfair.

How does he feel about it all? “I feel fine,” he says, “but, when I say that, I’m reminded of a story that Cousin Minnie Pearl used to tell about a farmer who was involved in an accident and sued for damages.” To paraphrase, at the trial the lawyer for the driver of the other car cross-examined the farmer, saying, “Isn’t it true that right after the accident, you said, ‘I feel fine’?” The farmer said, “Well, it’s not the simple,” before going on to explain that the other car rammed into him, throwing both him and his cow from his car. When a highway patrolman came by and saw the cow struggling, he shot him between the eyes. The farmer continued, “The patrolman then came to my side and said, ‘How do you feel?’… so I said, ‘I feel fine.'”

The Wonk Versus the Frat Boy

The media began the coverage of the 2000 election with an inclination not so different from that demonstrated in other recent elections—they were eager for simple, character-driven narratives that would sell papers and get ratings. “Particularly in presidential elections … we in the press tend to deal in caricatures,” says Dan Rather, who was then anchoring for CBS. “Someone draws a caricature, and it’s funny and at least whimsical. And at first you sort of say, ‘Aw shucks, that’s too simple.’ In the course of the campaign, that becomes accepted wisdom.” He notes, “I do not except myself from this criticism.”

In 2000, the media seemed to focus on a personality contest between Bush, the folksy Texas rogue, and, as The New York Times referred to Gore, “Eddie Haskell,” the insincere brownnoser from Leave It to Beaver. ABC anchor Claire Shipman, who covered the 2000 campaign for NBC, says, “It was almost a drama that was cast before anyone even took a good look at who the candidates were.”

George Bush made it easy—he handed them a character on a plate. He had one slogan—compassionate conservatism—and one promise aimed squarely at denigrating Bill Clinton: to restore honor and integrity to the White House. He was also perceived to be fun to be with. For 18 months, he pinched cheeks, bowled with oranges in the aisles of his campaign plane, and playacted flight attendant. Frank Bruni, now the restaurant critic for The New York Times but then a novice national political-beat reporter for the same newspaper, wrote affectionately of Bush’s “folksy affability,” “distinctive charm,” “effortless banter,” and the feather pillow that he traveled with.

But Gore couldn’t turn on such charm on cue. “He doesn’t pinch cheeks,” says Tipper. “Al’s not that kind of guy.” With Gore still vice president, there was a certain built-in formality and distance that reporters had to endure. Having served the public for nearly 25 years in different roles—from congressman legislating the toxic-waste Superfund to vice president leading the charge to go into Bosnia—Gore could not be reduced to a sound bite. As one reporter put it, they were stuck with “the government nerd.” “The reality is,” says Eli Attie, who was Gore’s chief speechwriter and traveled with him, “very few reporters covering the 2000 campaign had much interest in what really motivated Gore and the way he spent most of his time as vice president: the complexities of government and policy, and not just the raw calculus of the campaign trail.”

Muddying the waters further was the fact that the Gore campaign early on was in a state of disarray—with a revolving door of staffers who didn’t particularly see the value in happy chitchat. “We basically treated the press with a whip and a chair … and made no real effort to schmooze at all,” says Gore strategist Carter Eskew. “I fault myself.” It was plain to the reporters that this was not the tight ship of Bush’s campaign, led by the “iron triangle” of Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, and Joe Allbaugh.

“The campaign went through several official slogans,” says The New York Times’s Katharine Seelye, who would become one of the more critical reporters who covered Gore. “They had a hard time latching onto a clear idea of what the campaign was about. [Democratic strategist] James Carville once said to me that if you want reporters to write about hamburger, you give them hamburger. You don’t give them French fries and ice cream.”

Gore needed to give them hamburger, as Carville put it—a simple, dramatic character; a simple, dramatic story line; a 10-word slogan. If Gore couldn’t provide it, the press would. As the campaign wore on, the media found a groove they could settle into: wonk so desperate to become president he’ll do or say anything, even make stuff up. It complemented perfectly the other son of a politician running for president: irresistible frat boy who, when it came to the presidency, could take it or leave it.

The seeds of Gore’s caricature had been planted in 1997 when he, the presumptive candidate for 2000, made a passing comment about Erich Segal’s Love Story, over the course of a two-hour interview with Time’s Karen Tumulty and The New York Times’s Richard Berke, for profiles they were writing. Tumulty recounts today that, while casually reminiscing about his days at Harvard and his roommate, the future actor Tommy Lee Jones, Gore said, It’s funny—he and Tipper had been models for the couple in his friend Erich Segal’s Love Story, which was Jones’s first film. Tumulty followed up, “Love Story was based on you and Tipper?” Gore responded, “Well, that’s what Erich Segal told reporters down in Tennessee.”

As it turned out, The Nashville Tennessean, the paper Gore was referring to, had said Gore was the model for the character of Oliver Barrett. But the paper made a small mistake. There was some Tommy Lee Jones thrown in, too. “The Tennessean reporter just exaggerated,” Segal has said. And Tipper was not the model for Jenny.

In her story, Tumulty and co-author Eric Pooley treated the anecdote as an offhand comment. But political opinion writers at The New York Times, it seems, interpreted the remark as a calculated political move on Gore’s part. “It’s somewhat suspicious that Mr. Gore has chosen this moment to drop the news—unknown even to many close friends and aides,” wrote Times columnist Maureen Dowd. “Does he think, going into 2000, that this will give him a romantic glow, or a romantic afterglow?” Times columnist Frank Rich followed it up. “What’s bizarre,” he wrote, “if all too revealing … is not that he inflated his past but that he would think that being likened to the insufferable preppy Harvard hockey player Oliver Barrett 4th was something to brag about in the first place.”

Tumulty says she was stunned at seeing Gore’s remark being turned into a “window onto his soul” in the pages of The New York Times and elsewhere: “I’m in the middle of this gigantic media frenzy. It had truly, truly been an offhanded comment by Gore. And it suddenly turns into this big thing that probably continues to dog him for the rest of the campaign.”

Caught in the Web

The Love Story distortion set the stage for the “I Invented the Internet” distortion, a devastating piece of propaganda that damaged Gore at the starting gate of his run. On March 9, 1999, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer conducted an interview with Gore shortly before he officially announced his candidacy. In answer to a question about why Democrats should support him, Gore spoke about his record. “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative”—politico-speak for leadership—”in creating the Internet,” he said, before going on to describe other accomplishments. It was true. In the 1970s, the Internet was a limited tool used by the Pentagon and universities for research. As a senator in the 80s, Gore sponsored two bills that turned this government program into an “information superhighway,” a term Gore popularized, and made it accessible to all. Vinton Cerf, often called the father of the Internet, has claimed that the Internet would not be where it was without Gore’s leadership on the issue. Even former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich has said that “Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet.”

The press didn’t object to Gore’s statement until Texas Republican congressman Dick Armey led the charge, saying, “If the vice president created the Internet, then I created the interstate highway system.” Republican congressman James Sensenbrenner released a statement with the headline, delusions of grandeur: vice president gore takes credit for creating the internet. CNN’s Lou Dobbs was soon calling Gore’s remark “a case study … in delusions of grandeur.” A few days later the word “invented” entered the narrative. On March 15, a USA Today headline about Gore read, inventing the internet; March 16 on Hardball, Chris Matthews derided Gore for his claim that he “invented the Internet.” Soon the distorted assertion was in the pages of the Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe, and on the A.P. wire service. By early June, the word “invented” was actually being put in quotation marks, as though that were Gore’s word of choice. Here’s how Mimi Hall put it in USA Today: “A couple of Gore gaffes, including his assertion that he ‘invented’ the Internet, didn’t help.” And Newsday’s Elaine Povich ridiculed “Gore’s widely mocked assertion that he ‘invented’ the Internet.” (Thanks to the Web site the Daily Howler, the creation of Bob Somerby, a college roommate of Gore’s, we have a chronicle of how the Internet story spiraled out of control.)

Belatedly attempting to defuse the situation, Gore joked about it on Imus in the Morning, saying that he “was up late the night before … inventing the camcorder.” But it was too late—the damage had been done.

The Beat Goes On

As with all campaigns, the coverage of the 2000 election would be driven by a small number of beat reporters. In this case, two women at the most influential newspapers in the country: Seelye from The New York Times and Ceci Connolly from The Washington Post.

A prominent Washington journalist describes them as “edgy, competitive, wanting to make their mark,” and adds that they “reinforced each other’s prejudices.”

“It was like they’d been locked in a room, and they were just pumping each other up,” says Gore strategist Carter Eskew.

“They just wanted to tear Gore apart,” says a major network correspondent on the trail. (Both refute such characterizations of themselves. “Why would reporters [from] major news organizations confer with the competition on such a fiercely competitive story?” asks Connolly.)

Building on the narrative established by the Love Story and Internet episodes, Seelye, her critics charge, repeatedly tinged what should have been straight reporting with attitude or hints at Gore’s insincerity. Describing a stump speech in Tennessee, she wrote, “He also made an appeal based on what he described as his hard work for the state—as if a debt were owed in return for years of service.” Writing how he encouraged an audience to get out and vote at the primary, she said, “Vice President Al Gore may have questioned the effects of the internal combustion engine, but not when it comes to transportation to the polls. Today he exhorted a union audience in Knoxville, Iowa, to pile into vans—not cars, but gas-guzzling vans—and haul friends to the Iowa caucuses on January 24.” She would not just say that he was simply fund-raising. “Vice President Al Gore was back to business as usual today—trolling for money,” she wrote. In another piece, he was “ever on the prowl for money.”

The disparity between her reporting and Bruni’s coverage of Bush for the Times was particularly galling to the Gore camp. “It’s one thing if the coverage is equal—equally tough or equally soft,” says Gore press secretary Chris Lehane. “In 2000, we would get stories where if Gore walked in and said the room was gray we’d be beaten up because in fact the room was an off-white. They would get stories about how George Bush’s wing tips looked as he strode across the stage.” Melinda Henneberger, then a political writer at the Times, says that such attitudes went all the way up to the top of the newspaper. “Some of it was a self-loathing liberal thing,” she says, “disdaining the candidate who would have fit right into the newsroom, and giving all sorts of extra time on tests to the conservative from Texas. Al Gore was a laughline at the paper, while where Bush was concerned we seemed to suffer from the soft bigotry of low expectations.” (Seelye’s and Bruni’s then editors declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Connolly, too, at The Washington Post, wrote about Gore’s “grubbing for dollars inside a monastery,” and “stretching the [fund-raising] rules as far as he can.” Her stories about the distortions extended the life of the distortions themselves. In one article, she knocked Gore for “the hullabaloo over the Internet—from [his] inflated claim to his slowness to tamp out the publicity brush fire.” In another, co-written with David Von Drehle, she claimed, “From conservative talk radio titan Rush Limbaugh and the New York Post (headline: ‘Liar, Liar’) to neutral papers across the country, the attack on Gore’s credibility is resonating.”

When Lehane and his communications partner, Mark Fabiani, selectively granted access, Connolly, for reasons Gore staffers say are obvious, was rarely favored and experienced it as an attack. “The ‘Masters of Disaster,’ as [Lehane and Fabiani] like to be called, spent an inordinate amount of time attacking various reporters and pitting journalists against each other and generally trying to steer the subject away from a troubled campaign,” Connolly says today. (Lehane had no comment.)

But eventually, Gore staffers came to feel that if Connolly was denied the access or information she wanted there would be a price to pay in terms of her coverage. In one of her pieces Carter Eskew, a former tobacco-industry adviser, was described in a quote as being “single-handedly accountable for addicting another whole generation of American kids” to smoking. When asked about the article, Eskew recalls how Connolly had called him the day before for a comment about an environmental group’s endorsement of Bill Bradley. After he gave her something perfunctory, he says, she went after him. “She goes, ‘That’s all you’re going to say?'” recalls Eskew. “And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s all we’re going to say.’ And she goes, ‘Do you know how stupid that is, Carter?’ And then she threatened me, ‘Well, if that’s the kind of relationship you want to have with me, then you’ll find out the kind of relationship we’re going to have’—something to that effect.” (“I never threatened Carter Eskew,” says Connolly. “It’s possible I pressed him for something more than a ‘perfunctory’ answer.… It’s odd that he would think my story was journalistically out of bounds or retribution for something as trivial as a mediocre quote.”)

Toxic Coverage

On December 1, 1999, Connolly—and Seelye—misquoted Gore in a damning way. Their error was picked up elsewhere and repeated, and snowballed into a political nightmare. Gore was speaking to a group of students at Concord High School, in New Hampshire, about how young people could effect change. He described a letter he had received as a congressman in 1978 from a girl in Toone, Tennessee, about how her father and grandfather had gotten mysteriously ill. He had looked into the matter and found that the town was a toxic-waste site. He went on:

“I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I had the first hearing on that issue and Toone, Tennessee. That was the one you didn’t hear of, but that was the one that started it all.… We passed a major national law to clean up hazardous dumpsites, and we had new efforts to stop the practices that ended up poisoning water around the country.… It all happened because one high-school student got involved.”

Jill Hoffman, a high-school senior in the audience who was helping to film the event, says, “I remember thinking, I really, really like what he has to say.” But what Seelye and Connolly zeroed in on was Gore yet again claiming credit for something he didn’t do—”discovering” Love Canal (which was, in fact, discovered by the people who lived there). In addition to mischaracterizing his somewhat ambiguous statement, they misquoted him, claiming he said, “I was the one that started it all,” instead of “that was the one that started it all.” The next day, Seelye offered a friendlier account of Gore’s visit to the school. Connolly repeated the misquote. In an article titled “First ‘Love Story,’ Now Love Canal,” she wrote:

The man who mistakenly claimed to have inspired the movie “Love Story” and to have invented the Internet says he didn’t quite mean to say he discovered a toxic waste site when he said at a high school forum Tuesday in New Hampshire: “I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal.” Gore went on to brag about holding the “first hearing on that issue” and said “I was the one that started it all.”

The story picked up steam. “I was the one that started it all” became a quote featured in U.S. News & World Report and was repeated on the chat shows. On ABC’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos said, “Gore, again, revealed his Pinocchio problem. Says he was the model for Love Story, created the Internet. And this time he sort of discovered Love Canal.” On two consecutive nights of Hardball, Chris Matthews brought up this same trio as examples of Gore’s “delusionary” thinking. “What is it, the Zelig guy who keeps saying, ‘I was the main character in Love Story. I invented the Internet. I invented Love Canal.…’ It reminds me of Snoopy thinking he’s the Red Baron.” “It became part of the vocabulary,” Matthews says today. “I don’t think it had a thunderous impact on the voters.” He concedes, however, that such stories were repeated too many times in the media.

Seelye would later write a story with John Broder under the headline questions of veracity have long dogged gore and provided “familiar and fairly trivial examples,” including his “taking credit for inventing the Internet or being the model for … Love Story.” Asked today why those discredited allegations of misstatements were included, Seelye says, “Probably because they were ones that everyone had heard of. We did write that they were ‘trivial,’ but if that was the case, we should have left them out or debunked them.”

Perhaps reporting in this vein was just too gratifying to the press for it to stop. As Time magazine’s Margaret Carlson admitted to Don Imus at the time, “You can actually disprove some of what Bush is saying if you really get into the weeds and get out your calculator, or look at his record in Texas. But it’s really easy, and it’s fun to disprove Al Gore. As sport, and as our enterprise, Gore coming up with another whopper is greatly entertaining to us.”

A study conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center and the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that 76 percent of stories about Gore in early 2000 focused on either the theme of his alleged lying or that he was marred by scandal, while the most common theme about Bush was that he was “a different kind of Republican.”

At the time, the only people seeming to notice the media’s missteps were journalists at the fringes or out of the mainstream, including Somerby of the Daily Howler, Robert Parry on consortiumnews.com, and Eric Boehlert on Salon, as well as mere citizens who had no outlet but the telephone. These last included the Concord High students, who were trying to correct the record on Love Canal. The footage was reviewed by a teacher, Joanne McGlynn, the day after the initial Love Canal stories ran. McGlynn spotted the discrepancy between Gore’s actual words and what was being reported, and phoned the relevant news outlets to alert them. The Times and the Post printed the correction … about a week later. But by that time the story had been echoed widely and was accepted as fact.

Connolly contends that the misquote “did not dramatically change the point he was trying to make” and that “the Love Canal reference was near the end of a story that ran deep inside the paper.” (Page A-10.)

At least one reporter who either made or repeated the misquote was not thrilled to have been corrected by high-school students and their teacher. Sometime after the Love Canal stories came out, Hoffman, the high-school senior, went to see Gore speak again at an event in New Hampshire. There she was introduced to one of the reporters who’d gotten it wrong. The reporter, Hoffman said, made it clear her help in fixing the misquote was not appreciated, and said that the article was written very fast, while riding in a van. “It’s amazing what one word can do to a person’s integrity,” says Hoffman today.

Gore responded to episodes like these by distancing himself from the beat reporters, which puzzled them. “Some of these reporters would write ruthlessly unfair pieces about him and then come complain to me in private, ‘Gore could’ve been friendlier to me at that cocktail party,'” recalls Gore speechwriter Eli Attie. To this day, Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz, who spent time traveling with both candidates, wonders why Gore remained “secluded in the front cabin [of the plane]” and didn’t engage in chitchat. “Everything is fair game in a presidential campaign,” says Kurtz, “and part of the test of any candidate is how he deals with an often skeptical press corps.… The press sets up a series of obstacle courses … and if you are Al Gore and considered to be super-smart, yet not particularly gregarious, it’s the moments of awkwardness or misstatements that are going to get media attention. If Gore had had a lighter touch, he probably could have overcome that.”

Running the Gauntlet

One obstacle course the press set up was which candidate would lure voters to have a beer with them at the local bar. “Journalists made it seem like that was a legitimate way of choosing a president,” says Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter. “They also wrongly presumed, based on nothing, that somehow Bush was more likable.” Chris Matthews contends that “the likability issue was something decided by the viewers of the debates, not by the commentators,” but adds, “The last six years have been a powerful bit of evidence that we have to judge candidates for president on their preparation for the office with the same relish that we assess their personalities.”

Maureen Dowd boiled the choice between Gore and Bush down to that between the “pious smarty-pants” and the “amiable idler,” and made it perfectly clear which of the presidential candidates had a better chance of getting a date. “Al Gore is desperate to get chicks,” she said in her column. “Married chicks. Single chicks. Old chicks. Young chicks. If he doesn’t stop turning off women, he’ll never be president.”

“I bet he is in a room somewhere right now playing Barry White CDs and struggling to get mellow,” she wrote in another.

Meanwhile, though Dowd certainly questioned Bush’s intellect in some columns, she seemed to be charmed by him—one of the “bad boys,” “rascals,” and a “rapscallion.” She shared with the world a charged moment between them. “‘You’re so much more mature now,’ I remarked to the Texas Governor. ‘So are you,’ he replied saucily.” And in another column: “You don’t often get to see a Presidential candidate bloom right before your eyes.”

As the Daily Howler noted, MSNBC anchor Brian Williams went after Gore’s clothes at least five times in one week. “Here is a guy taking off his suits.… This is the casual sweater look—what’s going on here?” … “He would have been in a suit a month ago.” … “He’s wearing these polo shirts that don’t always look natural on him.” Williams’s frequent guest Newsweek’s Howard Fineman later chimed in: “I covered his last presidential campaign, in 1988. One day he was in the conservative blue suit, the next he was playing lumberjack at the V.F.W. hall in New Hampshire.”

And Gore just kept going on about issues. Alluding to five speeches he made in two months on education, crime, the economy, faith-based organizations, and cancer research, Seelye wrote, “Mr. Gore becomes almost indignant when asked if his avalanche of positions might overwhelm voters.” The Washington Post’s David Broder later found Gore too focused in his convention speech on what he’d do as president. “But, my, how he went on about what he wants to do as president,” wrote Broder. “I almost nodded off.” As for the environment, while Gore was persuaded by his consultants not to talk about it as much as he would have liked, whenever he did, many in the media ignored it or treated it as comedy. Dowd wrote in one column that “Al Gore is so feminized and diversified and ecologically correct, he’s practically lactating.” In another, referring to his consideration of putting a Webcam in the Oval Office, she wrote, “I have zero desire to see President Gore round the clock, putting comely interns to sleep with charts and lectures on gaseous reduction.”

The trivial continued to dominate during the postmortem following Gore and Bush’s first debate, on October 3, 2000. The television media were sure Gore won—at first. But then Republican operatives promptly spliced together a reel of Gore sighing, which was then sent to right-wing radio outlets. Eighteen hours later, the pundits could talk of little else. “They could hear you audibly sighing or sounding exasperated as Governor Bush was answering questions,” Katie Couric scolded him the next day on the Today show. “Do you think that’s presidential behavior?” For the Times’s Frank Bruni, the sighs weren’t as galling as Gore’s familiarity with the names of foreign leaders. “It was not enough for Vice President Al Gore to venture a crisp pronunciation of Milosevic, as in Slobodan,” he wrote. “Mr. Gore had to go a step further, volunteering the name of Mr. Milosevic’s challenger Vojislav Kostunica.”

As Jonathan Alter points out, “Overall, the press was harder on Gore than it was on Bush.… The consequences of [that] in such a close election were terrifying.”

Gore couldn’t believe his eyes when he read distortions about him printed in the country’s most respected newspapers, say those in his inner circle. “It stung to have the political media, the elite political media, buy into this crap,” says Roy Neel, his close friend and adviser of 30 years, about the press coverage. “But I don’t recall him ever blaming the media for the problems he was having.”

Indeed, Gore accepts responsibility for not being able to communicate more clearly with the public. He admits, however, that the tendency of the press to twist his words encumbered his ability to speak freely. “I tried not to let it [affect my behavior],” Gore says. “But if you know that day after day the filter is going to be so distorted, inevitably that has an impact on the kinds of messages that you try and force through the filter. Anything that involves subtlety or involves trusting the reporters in their good sense and sense of fairness in interpretation, you’re just not going to take a risk with something that could be easily distorted and used against you.… You’re reduced to saying, ‘Today, here’s the message: reduce pollution,’ and not necessarily by XYZ out of fear that it will be, well, ‘Today he talked about belching cows!'”

According to Gore, bringing up the Internet again in public was like stepping on a verbal land mine. “If I had tried in the wake of that to put expressions about the Internet in campaign speeches, it would have been difficult,” he says. “I did, of course, from time to time. But I remember many occasions where I would say something about the Internet, and as soon as the word ‘Internet’ came from my lips, the press would be snickering and relishing the mention. Not everybody in the press, but the Zeitgeist was polluted, and it never dissipated, because the stream of pollution coming into it was constant, constant.”

The notion that he was prickly or unpleasant to reporters doesn’t jibe with what Tipper witnessed. From her viewpoint, he remained gracious with the reporters—even at an event during the campaign, when Maureen Dowd sidled up in the middle of a conversation he was having with two other reporters. “He stood up and got her a chair and said, ‘Please, join us.'” After Dowd had written about him “lactating,” he agreed to an interview with her, answering questions about his favorite this, his favorite that. According to his staffers, she was a fact of life that would have to be endured.

The Gores, a famously close-knit family, could laugh at the coverage some. They joked around at the nonstop talk about which president you’d want to have a beer with. The Gore’s middle daughter, Kristin, pointed out, “Gee, I want the designated driver as my president.” But down deep they weren’t laughing. “The sighs, the sighs, the sighs,” says Gore, of the debate coverage. “Within 18 hours, they had turned perception around to where the entire story was about me sighing. And that’s scary. That’s scary.”
The Comeback

After the election the Gores, heartbroken, traveled in Europe for two months. “We were roadkill,” admits Tipper. “It took a long time to pick ourselves up from what happened.” Gore grew a beard while he was there. After he stepped back onto U.S. soil, the press began knocking him around again for his latest “re-invention.” Ceci Connolly, who had become a contributor on Fox News in 2000, said, “Looks like he’s ready to go, but go where? Back to Europe with his backpack?” Later, in the Los Angeles Times, Jack Germond wrote, “He should have shed the beard before coming back. Instead, he continues to wear it in what is being interpreted as a signal of another ‘new’ Gore.”

Over the course of Bush’s early months in office, the Gores watched in profound disappointment as Bush rolled back many important environmental regulations of the Clinton-Gore years. But, as Karenna says, “my father set the tone for our whole family in not dwelling. The way he publicly put his weight behind George Bush in the beginning, did not fan the flames, did not cause division—and there was every opportunity to do that—sent a very strong message to all of us to not be dragged down into anger and sadness about it but just to try to make the best of it.” After September 11, Gore stood by Bush, saying, “George Bush is my commander in chief.”

By September 2002, the country was on the march to war. Against the advice of some confidants, who suggested he might turn out to be on the wrong side of history, Gore spoke out against the invasion—fervently. On September 23, 2002, he articulated all the dangers that have now come to pass. The Washington Post’s Michael Kelly wrote about the speech, “It was wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible.” (Kelly was killed on April 3, 2003, in Iraq when his Humvee crashed while trying to evade enemy fire.) Fineman didn’t hold back in describing how the “Beltway/Broadway clan” now regarded Gore: “as an annoying and ungracious bore who should have the decency to get lost.”

In order to diversify and open up the messages coming out of the news media, Gore helped launch Current TV, an alternative channel that features viewer-generated content, thereby providing a dialogue with the medium. He also taught journalism, began working with Apple, and co-founded a business called Generation Investment Management. And, with the encouragement of Tipper, he dusted off the global-warming slide show in the attic of their Arlington, Virginia, home, the one that he had been delivering for 25 years to audiences as small as 10 and as large as 10,000. The first time he showed it, at Middle Tennessee State University, the slides were in backward and upside down. It would be turned into An Inconvenient Truth, win an Oscar, and help wake up the world to a global crisis.

Over the years since 2000, some journalists have attempted to reach out to the Gores. At a pro-choice event a few years ago, Time’s Karen Tumulty gave Tipper her card and asked her if she would ever want to talk. “When I saw her that night, she looked as though a gigantic weight had been lifted,” recalls Tumulty, who’d recently seen the couple agonizing over Gore’s political future. At the East Coast premiere of An Inconvenient Truth, the Gores bumped into Fineman, who recalls, “I said to [Gore], on a personal level, I want you to know that I admire you for the way you have stayed in the game and taken the mess of a few years ago and turned it around and become such a leader in this debate.” At the time, Tipper just said thanks and moved on, thinking to herself, Too little, too late, buddy. In retrospect, she appreciates the gesture.

Katharine Seelye, who still writes about national politics for The New York Times, has had time to reflect on her work: “I’m sure there were times my phrasing could have been better—you’re doing this on the fly. Sometimes you’re just looking for a different way to describe something that you have to write about over and over again,” she says. “But I think overall my coverage was tough-minded. A presidential campaign is for the most important, hardest job in the world. Shouldn’t the coverage be tough?” Connolly, still a staff writer at the Post but on a leave of absence, maintains that “the Washington Post political team, myself and a dozen other journalists, approached the Gore campaign no differently than any other—with aggressive, thorough, objective reporting.”

As for Dowd, a Democratic operative recalls running into her and having an argument with her about her columns on the 2000 debates, in which, he felt, she devoted as much attention to Gore’s sighing as she did to Bush’s not knowing that Social Security was a federal program. “I basically said, ‘How could you equate the two?'” he recalls. “‘How could Gore’s personal tics deserve as many column inches as the other guy being an idiot?’ And her defense was ‘Well, I voted for Gore.’ I thought, Well, that’s great. But hundreds of thousands of people who read your column probably didn’t.” (A source close to Dowd says that she does not write a partisan column, keeps her votes private, and certainly would not have disclosed that information to a political aide.)

Thanks to his newfound status, speculation about Gore’s entering the presidential race has refused to die down. Alas, he’s not going to announce his candidacy in the last paragraphs of a Vanity Fair article. “Modern politics seems to require and reward some capacities that I don’t think I have in abundance,” says Gore, “such as a tolerance for … spin rather than an honest discussion of substance.… Apparently, it comes easily for some people, but not for me.”

Tipper says he has made zero moves that would suggest a run for the presidency, but adds that if he turned to her one night and said he had to run, she’d get on board, and they’d discuss how to approach it this time around, given what they’ve learned.

The reporters and opinion-makers have eagerly chewed over the possibility. After all, he’s now a star. In step with the new enthusiasm for Gore, Dowd, in a February 2007 column, described him as “a man who was prescient on climate change, the Internet, terrorism, and Iraq,” a sentiment echoed by many. The pundits, however, invariably come around to the same question: “But if he ran, would he revert to the ‘old Gore’?” Another question—in light of countless recent stories about John Edwards’s haircut—might be: Would the media revert to the old media?

“Have you read The Goldfinch yet?” Consider it the cocktail-party conversation starter of 2014, the new “Are you watching Breaking Bad?” Eleven years in the making, 784 pages long, the book has re-ignited the cult of Donna Tartt, which began in 1992 with her sensational debut novel, The Secret History. When The Goldfinch came out, last fall, recipients of advance copies promptly showed off their galleys on Instagram, as if announcing the birth of a child. Her readings sold out instantly. New York’s Frick Collection, which in October began exhibiting the painting for which the book was named, hadn’t seen so much traffic in years. The novel is already on its way to becoming a movie, or a TV series, made by the producers of The Hunger Games. It’s been on the New York Times best-seller list for seven months, sold a million and a half print and digital copies, and drawn a cornucopia of rave reviews, including one in the daily New York Times and another in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. In April it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the judges of which praised it as “a book that stimulates the mind and touches the heart.”

It’s also gotten some of the severest pans in memory from the country’s most important critics and sparked a full-on debate in which the naysayers believe that nothing less is at stake than the future of reading itself.

For the few uninitiated, The Goldfinch is a sprawling bildungsroman centered on 13-year-old Theo Decker, whose world is violently turned upside down when, on a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a terrorist bomb goes off, killing his mother, among other bystanders. At the behest of a dying old man, he makes off with a painting—the 1654 Carel Fabritius masterpiece, The Goldfinch. For the next 14 years and 700 pages, the painting becomes both his burden and the only connection to his lost mother, while he’s flung from New York to Las Vegas to Amsterdam, encountering an array of eccentric characters, from the hard-living but soulful Russian teenager Boris to the cultured and kindly furniture restorer Hobie, who becomes a stand-in father, to the mysterious, waif-like Pippa, plus assorted lowlifes, con men, Park Avenue recluses, and dissolute preppies.

Michiko Kakutani, the chief New York Times book reviewer for 31 years (and herself a Pulitzer winner, in criticism), called it “a glorious Dickensian novel, a novel that pulls together all [Tartt’s] remarkable storytelling talents into a rapturous, symphonic whole. . . . It’s a work that shows us how many emotional octaves Ms. Tartt can now reach, how seamlessly she can combine the immediate and tactile with more wide-angled concerns.” According to best-selling phenomenon Stephen King, who reviewed it for The New York Times Book Review, “ ‘The Goldfinch’ is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind.”
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Reading Like a Critic

But, in the literary world, there are those who profess to be higher brows still than The New York Times—the secret rooms behind the first inner sanctum, consisting, in part, of The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The Paris Review, three institutions that are considered, at least among their readers, the last bastions of true discernment in a world where book sales are king and real book reviewing has all but vanished. The Goldfinch a “rapturous” symphony? Not so fast, they say.

“Its tone, language, and story belong in children’s literature,” wrote critic James Wood, in The New Yorker. He found a book stuffed with relentless, far-fetched plotting; cloying stock characters; and an overwrought message tacked on at the end as a plea for seriousness. “Tartt’s consoling message, blared in the book’s final pages, is that what will survive of us is great art, but this seems an anxious compensation, as if Tartt were unconsciously acknowledging that the 2013 ‘Goldfinch’ might not survive the way the 1654 ‘Goldfinch’ has.” Days after she was awarded the Pulitzer, Wood told Vanity Fair, “I think that the rapture with which this novel has been received is further proof of the infantilization of our literary culture: a world in which adults go around reading Harry Potter.”

In The New York Review of Books, novelist and critic Francine Prose wrote that, for all the frequent descriptions of the book as “Dickensian,” Tartt demonstrates little of Dickens’s remarkable powers of description and graceful language. She culled both what she considered lazy clichés (“Theo’s high school friend Tom’s cigarette is ‘only the tip of the iceberg.’ … The bomb site is a ‘madhouse’ ”) and passages that were “bombastic, overwritten, marred by baffling turns of phrase.” “Reading The Goldfinch,” Prose concluded, “I found myself wondering, ‘Doesn’t anyone care how something is written anymore?’ ” Across the pond, the highly regarded London Review of Books likened it to a “children’s book” for adults. London’s Sunday Times concluded that “no amount of straining for high-flown uplift can disguise the fact that The Goldfinch is a turkey.”

“A book like The Goldfinch doesn’t undo any clichés—it deals in them,” says Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, perhaps the most prestigious literary journal in America. “It coats everything in a cozy patina of ‘literary’ gentility.” Who cares that Kakutani or King gave it the stamp of approval: “Nowadays, even The New York Times Book Review is afraid to say when a popular book is crap,” Stein says.

No novel gets uniformly enthusiastic reviews, but the polarized responses to The Goldfinch lead to the long-debated questions: What makes a work literature, and who gets to decide?

The questions are as old as fiction itself. The history of literature is filled with books now considered masterpieces that were thought hackwork in their time. Take Dickens, the greatest novelist of the Victorian period, whose mantle writers from John Irving to Tom Wolfe to Tartt have sought to inherit. Henry James called Dickens the greatest of superficial novelists … “We are aware that this definition confines him to an inferior rank in the department of letters which he adorns; but we accept this consequence of our proposition. It were, in our opinion, an offence against humanity to place Mr. Dickens among the greatest novelists. . . . He has added nothing to our understanding of human character.” Many future offenses against humanity would follow:

“It isn’t worth any adult reader’s attention,” The New York Times pronounced concerning Nabokov’s Lolita.

“Kind of monotonous,” the same paper said about Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. “He should’ve cut out a lot about these jerks and all at that crumby school.”

“An absurd story,” announced The Saturday Review of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, while the New York Herald Tribune declared it “a book of the season only.”

That said, for all the snooty pans of books now considered classics, there have been, conversely, plenty of authors who were once revered as literary miracles and are now relegated to the trash heap. Sir Walter Scott, for example, was considered perhaps the pre-eminent writer of his time. Now his work, reverential as it is to concepts of rank and chivalry, seems fairly ridiculous. Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War blockbuster, Gone with the Wind, won the Pulitzer and inspired comparisons to Tolstoy, Dickens, and Thomas Hardy. Now it’s considered a schmaltzy relic read by teenage girls, if anyone.

For many best-selling authors, it’s not enough to sell millions of books; they want respectability too. Stephen King, despite his wild commercial success, has nursed a lifelong gripe that he’s been overlooked by the literary-critical establishment. In 2003, King was given a medal by the National Book Foundation for his “distinguished contribution to American letters.” In his acceptance speech, he took the opportunity to chide all the fancy pants in the room—“What do you think? You get social academic Brownie points for deliberately staying out of touch with your own culture?”—and to ask why they made it “a point of pride” never to have read anything by such best-selling authors as John Grisham, Tom Clancy, and Mary Higgins Clark. Harold Bloom, the most finicky of finicky literary critics, went into a tizzy, calling the foundation’s decision to give the award to King “another low in the process of dumbing down our cultural life” and the recipient “an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis.”

Bloom’s fussing had little impact. King was already on his way to the modern canon—his essays and short stories had been published in The New Yorker—and thus he was now in the position to announce who he thought was garbage: James Patterson. “I don’t like him,” King said after accepting a lifetime-achievement award from the Canadian Booksellers Association in 2007. “I don’t respect his books, because every one is the same.” To which Patterson later replied, “Doesn’t make too much sense. I’m a good dad, a nice husband. My only crime is I’ve sold millions of books.”

War of Words

In the long war over membership in the pantheon of literary greatness, no battle had quite the comical swagger of the ambush of Tom Wolfe after the publication of his 1998 novel, A Man in Full, which became a call to arms for three literary lions: Norman Mailer, John Updike, and John Irving. As the English newspaper The Guardian gleefully reported, they were adamant that Wolfe belonged not in the canon but on airport-bookstore shelves (between Danielle Steel and Susan Powter’s Stop the Insanity). Updike, in his New Yorker review, concluded that A Man in Full “still amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form.” Mailer, writing in The New York Review of Books, compared reading the novel to having sex with a 300-pound woman: “Once she gets on top it’s all over. Fall in love or be asphyxiated.” (Mailer and Wolfe had a history: Mailer had once remarked, “There is something silly about a man who wears a white suit all the time, especially in New York,” to which Wolfe replied, “The lead dog is the one they always try to bite in the ass.”) Irving said that reading A Man in Full “is like reading a bad newspaper or a bad piece in a magazine. It makes you wince.” He added that on any given page out of Wolfe he could “read a sentence that would make me gag.” Wolfe later struck back. “It’s a wonderful tantrum,” he said. “A Man in Full panicked [Irving] the same way it frightened John Updike and Norman. Frightened them. Panicked them.” Updike and Mailer were “two old piles of bones.” As for Irving, “Irving is a great admirer of Dickens. But what writer does he see now constantly compared to Dickens? Not John Irving, but Tom Wolfe . . . It must gnaw at him terribly.”

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized

So begins the Australian critic and essayist Clive James’s poem about the writer’s best friends, Schadenfreude and his twin brother, Envy. Leon Wieseltier, the longtime literary editor of The New Republic (where James Wood was a senior editor before moving to The New Yorker), suggests there might just be a smidge of this at work in the criticism leveled against Tartt. “Tartt has managed to do something that almost never happens: she has created a serious novel—whether you like the book or not, it is not frivolous, or tacky or cynical—and made it into a cultural phenomenon. When a serious novel breaks out, some authors of other serious novels have, shall we say, emotional difficulties.” Curtis Sittenfeld, the best-selling and acclaimed author of Prep and American Wife, similarly observes that critics derive “a satisfaction in knocking a book off its pedestal.”

It’s a theory that holds appeal for authors who feel they’ve been unfairly ignored by critics, and it can lead to surprising, some might even say contorted, rationales. Jennifer Weiner, the outspoken mega-selling author of such “women’s books” as In Her Shoes, Good in Bed, and Best Friends Forever, theorizes that Wood’s review may have been a response to the public’s tepid reception of The Woman Upstairs, by his wife, Claire Messud. “[Messud’s] writing was gorgeous. It was like beautiful carpentry. Everything fit. Everything worked. There wasn’t a single metaphor or simile or comparison you could pull out and say, ‘This doesn’t work,’ the way you can with The Goldfinch. But not many people read that book . . . . The world doesn’t think what she’s doing is as worthy as what Tartt is doing.”

From the beginning, Tartt’s work confused critics. When The Secret History, about an erudite group of classics majors who turn to murder at a small New England college, was published, in 1992, it was greeted with a kind of wonder by writers, critics, and readers—not just because its author was a mysterious, tiny package from Greenwood, Mississippi, who dressed in crisp tailored suits and revealed little about herself, but because few could place it on the commercial-literary continuum. Lev Grossman, the book reviewer for Time and author of the best-selling fantasy series The Magicians, recalls, “You couldn’t classify it easily into high literature or genre fiction. It seemed to come from some other literary universe, where those categories didn’t exist. And it made me want to go to that universe because it was so compelling.” Jay McInerney, who’d had a splashy debut similar to Tartt’s a few years earlier with Bright Lights, Big City, and became friends with her early on, recalls, “I loved it on many levels, not least because it’s a literary murder mystery, but also because it initiates the reader from the outset into a secret club, which is probably what every good novel should do.” In recent years it has been discovered by new readers such as Lena Dunham (creator of HBO’s Girls), who found in Tartt not only this cool persona—“She reminded me, style-wise, of my mother’s radical-feminist photographer friends in the 80s”—but a master of the tight-group-of-friends tradition.

It took 10 years for Tartt to come out with her next book, The Little Friend, but it was a disappointment to both critics and readers. Was she a one-hit wonder? To prove otherwise she spent the next 11 years, head down, spinning the adventures of Theo Decker, going down byways for as long as eight months that she would ultimately abandon. After the disappointment of her last book, everything was on the line.

The verdict among her fans? Perhaps too long in parts, but the story was as gripping as ever. She is “the consummate storyteller,” says Grossman, who is a new voice leading the charge that certain works of genre fiction should be considered literature. “The narrative thread is one you just can’t gather up fast enough,” he explains.

How Fiction Works

‘There seems to be universal agreement that the book is a ‘good read,’ ” says Wood. “But you can be a good storyteller, which in some ways Tartt clearly is, and still not be a serious storyteller—where, of course, ‘serious’ does not mean the exclusion of the comic, or the joyful, or the exciting. Tartt’s novel is not a serious one—it tells a fantastical, even ridiculous tale, based on absurd and improbable premises.”

For Wood’s crowd the measuring stick in determining what’s serious literature is a sense of reality, of authenticity—and it’s possible even in books that are experimental. In Lorin Stein’s view, best-sellers such as Mary Gaitskill’s Two Girls, Fat and Thin and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall may stand the test of time “not because a critic says they’re good, but because . . . they’re about real life. . . . I don’t want stage-managing from a novel. I want fiction to deal in the truth.”

It’s a view he may have inherited from his former boss Jonathan Galassi, the president of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which, along with Alfred A. Knopf, is arguably the most prestigious of publishing houses. (Galassi edits, among others, Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Marilynne Robinson, Michael Cunningham, and Lydia Davis.) Determining what’s serious literature isn’t a science, says Galassi, who hasn’t yet read The Goldfinch. The response isn’t fully rationalized, but ultimately a book must be “convincing in some way. It can be emotionally convincing, it can be intellectually convincing, it can be politically convincing. Hopefully it’s all those things. But with someone like Donna Tartt, not everyone is convinced on all levels.”

To Grossman, this slavish devotion to reality is retrograde, and perhaps reviewers like Wood should not be reviewing people like Tartt in the first place. “A critic like Wood—whom I admire probably as much or more than any other book reviewer working—doesn’t have the critical language you need to praise a book like The Goldfinch. The kinds of things that the book does particularly well don’t lend themselves to literary analysis.… Her language is careless in places, and there’s a fairy-tale quality to the book. There’s very little context in the book—it’s happening in some slightly simplified world. Which to me is fine. I find that intensely compelling in a novel. Every novel dispenses with something, and Tartt dispenses with that.” As for Francine Prose’s query “Doesn’t anyone care how a book is written anymore?”: Grossman admits that, with story now king for readers, the answer is no. Wood agrees that that’s the state of things, but finds it sad and preposterous. “This is something peculiar to fiction: imagine a literary world in which most people didn’t care how a poem was written!” (Tartt was not available to comment, but Jay McInerney says she doesn’t read reviews, and isn’t “losing any sleep” over the negative ones.)

Wieseltier has come to a rather more expansive definition of serious literature. “Tartt’s novel, like all novels that purport to be serious, should of course pass before the bar of all the serious critics, and receive all the judgments that they bring forth,” says Wieseltier, who has dipped into the book enough to put it in the serious category. “But if a serious book really catches on, it may be less important that its strictly literary quality is not as great as one might have hoped and more important that it’s touched a nerve, that it is driven by some deep human subject and some true human need.” Ultimately, he thinks, the success of The Goldfinch is a step in the right direction. “When I look at the fiction best-seller list, which is mainly an inventory of junk, and I see a book like this riding high, I think it’s good news, even if it is not The Ambassadors.”

Indeed, we might ask the snobs, What’s the big deal? Can’t we all just agree that it’s great she spent all this time writing a big enjoyable book and move on? No, we cannot, say the stalwarts. Francine Prose, who took on the high-school canon—Maya Angelou, Harper Lee, Ray Bradbury—in a controversial Harper’s essay, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read,” argued that holding up weak books as examples of excellence promotes mediocrity and turns young readers off forever. With The Goldfinch she felt duty-bound in the same way. “Everyone was saying this is such a great book and the language was so amazing. I felt I had to make quite a case against it,” she says. It gave her some satisfaction, she reports, that after her Goldfinch review came out she received one e-mail telling her that the book was a masterpiece and she had missed the point, and about 200 from readers thanking her for telling them that they were not alone. Similarly, Stein, who struggles to keep strong literary voices alive and robust, sees a book like The Goldfinch standing in the way. “What worries me is that people who read only one or two books a year will plunk down their money for The Goldfinch, and read it, and tell themselves they like it, but deep down will be profoundly bored, because they aren’t children, and will quietly give up on the whole enterprise when, in fact, fiction—realistic fiction, old or new—is as alive and gripping as it’s ever been.”

Is Donna Tartt the next Charles Dickens? In the end, the question will be answered not by The New York Times, The New Yorker, or The New York Review of Books—but by whether or not future generations read her. Just as a painter can be castigated by his contemporaries and still wind up the most prized painter at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a writer can sell millions of books, win prizes, and be remembered as no more than a footnote or punch line. It’s a fight that will be settled only on some new version of the Kindle, yet to be designed.

It was the kind of article that might have gone unnoticed. Last summer, Mikaela Gilbert-Lurie, a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, posted a personal essay on the Web site xoJane.com, about a flirtation with a certain, unnamed English teacher at a certain unnamed high school. The relationship had culminated, she wrote, in the teacher’s professing how attracted he was to her and touching her knee. When she complained to school administrators, all they did was require the teacher to undergo counseling. The essay was not long, the details scant, but within a day or two it went viral among graduates of Marlborough School, an elite all-girls private school in Hancock Park, Los Angeles, that for 126 years has been educating the girls of California’s most prominent families—with such last names as Spielberg, Goldwyn, Bloomingdale, Ahmanson, Booth (of the Los Angeles Times), and Munger (of Berkshire Hathaway). To the girls reading the article, there was no doubt about it. She was talking about Dr. Joseph Koetters, now 47, who had been head of the school’s English department.

Eight other girls contacted Mikaela via Facebook with their own stories about Koetters. The basic pattern, according to the girls: he validated as brilliant their insights into human nature while pitting them against one another for his affection, bitching about his wife (a Santa Monica gynecologist) and kids, and finding reasons to have private meetings, which often climaxed with him putting his hand on a girl’s knee. His yearbook photo shows a doughy blond resembling Conan O’Brien sidekick Andy Richter. But in person he evidently oozed charisma.

Buzzfeed broke the story about these girls (who remain anonymous), and the Los Angeles Times followed. Among current Marlborough parents, who came of age mostly in the 70s and 80s, the reaction, says one, “was ‘Big whoop. These are 16- and 17-year-old girls. They’re flirtatious and dramatic.’ ” But with sex abuse on campus dominating the national headlines, the school had a potential crisis on its hands. The board of trustees put together a “special investigative committee,” consisting of five of its own members, that would look into and resolve the crisis.

Instead, everything went wrong. The committee noted that the investigation revealed a “pattern of misconduct by Joe Koetters,” but it pinned the blame for how it was handled on one individual—Barbara Wagner, the beloved head of the school for 26 years. Meanwhile it absolved the board of all responsibility and downplayed the most explosive episode, which was far more damaging than anyone had imagined. The Marlborough community descended into name-calling, accusations of a cover-up, threats to withhold donations, and “gallons of tears. I’ve never been involved in such a firestorm,” says investor and newspaper executive J. P. Guerin, 85, who belongs to one of the families (along with the Mungers and Booths) that are among the most generous donors to the school.

Ask most people who feel a strong connection to Marlborough and they will cite Barbara Wagner as the linchpin of their loyalty. Under her watch, the school became one of the best in the country. Thirty-seven percent of last year’s graduating class was accepted by Ivy League colleges or Stanford, and the school ranked sixth for S.A.T. scores nationwide. By the accounts of her legions of fans, Wagner is awe-inspiring—polished, always on point, and tirelessly supportive of the 530 girls (grades 7 through 12) in her charge, stopping them in the halls to see if they need anything, or making last-minute calls while vacationing in far-flung areas of the globe to help get a student off a college wait list. Among the parents I spoke with, she drew comparisons to Hillary Clinton, “a mix of a Fortune 500 C.E.O. and supportive mother,” and “the Dalai Lama.” She treated the girls like her own daughters, say these sources, instilling in them a sense of empowerment. Integral to this approach was encouraging students to have strong one-on-one relationships with their teachers.

But some of those relationships, it now appears, crossed a line. For Mikaela Gilbert-Lurie, the flirtation with Koetters, she says, began during her junior year in 2011, when she e-mailed him, asking if she could interview him for an article she was writing for the school paper. “It’s a date,” he replied to his star student. According to e-mails obtained by Buzzfeed, he told her to be prepared for “evasive, non-committal answers which will invite gifts and favors that will seek to lure you into complicity in highly questionable endeavors.”

“I’m a journalist,” she wrote back. “I was born ready for that.”

“Ahhh … then this could be quite special … possibly quite spectacular … the anticipation itself is quite tantalizing.”

During one of their meetings, she says, he put his hand on her knee—his signature move. Though it made her uncomfortable, the e-mail exchange got more charged. Mikaela wrote him that she found herself at a “loss of words” in his presence and suggested that “with time and, well something else, I’ll get less self conscious around you.” He replied that “that inscrutable something else lingers in the air.” During their next meeting, he told her that he was usually good at creating boundaries, but with her he just couldn’t. Maybe it was the short skirt of her uniform that drove him so crazy. Alarmed, she told him in an e-mail that perhaps they could be “friends” later, and that she wanted to focus on her studying. He wrote back, “Ugh. Ok.” But it wasn’t O.K. According to Mikaela, Koetters started acting out, kicking her out of class one day and making provocative comments such as “You would never have gotten an A on that paper if it wasn’t for your pretty eyes.” Koetters was suddenly no longer a schoolgirl crush to Mikaela—he was a threat.

Mikaela was afraid to come forward because she felt ashamed by what she viewed as her complicity. But her brother persuaded her to show the e-mails to her parents, Leslie Gilbert-Lurie, a writer and philanthropist, and Cliff Gilbert-Lurie, a prominent entertainment lawyer who has represented, among others, Sandra Bullock. They sent the e-mails to the head of the upper school, Laura Hotchkiss. Wagner soon invited Mikaela and her parents into her office to discuss the situation. Leslie recalls, “She certainly seemed to take the situation seriously. She took notes. She said she would get back to us.”

The Gilbert-Luries asked if any previous complaints had been made about Koetters. Wagner replied that there had not been, neglecting to mention that seven years earlier, in 2005, another girl had made similar complaints. At the time, Wagner hadn’t given credence to them.

Wagner brought the matter to the attention of John Emerson, then the president of the board of trustees and an Obama fundraiser. There was no policy in place about how to handle such allegations, but having worked as Gary Hart’s deputy national campaign manager and Bill Clinton’s California campaign manager in 1992, Emerson probably knew a thing or two about damaging accusations of sexual misconduct. According to Guerin, a Wagner confidant, Barbara’s recollections were that Emerson told her that the board need not be informed, and that the situation should be handled internally. It was decided that Koetters would not be fired. Instead, it was decided, after consulting with Marlborough’s legal counsel, that Koetters would be stripped of his department chairmanship and required to undergo sexual-harassment sensitivity training and to cease interacting with Mikaela, who would be moved to another English class.

Wagner informed Mikaela’s parents of the consequences Koetters would face. But Koetters violated the guidelines by going into Mikaela’s new English classroom and staring at her. Leslie recalls, “At one point I remember saying to Barbara, ‘Mikaela still feels uncomfortable.’ I said, ‘How many conversations have you had with Joe Koetters about this situation to see how he’s doing?,’ and she said, ‘Several.’ And I said, ‘How many have you had with Mikaela?’ And she said, ‘I’m not sure.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s why Mikaela feels that she is not cared about in this situation.’ … We felt like his comfort and well-being were taken into account ahead of our daughter’s.”

Koetters stayed on through the 2013 school year and was allowed to quietly leave to take a job in the English department at Polytechnic, a prep school in Pasadena. Marlborough told Polytechnic that the Mikaela business was an isolated incident.
Placing Blame

The Marlborough board’s investigation into the events, the following summer, was led by two legal powerhouses: Christine Ewell, president of the board and a judge for the Los Angeles County Superior Court, and her friend and former boss, fellow trustee Debra Wong Yang, a partner at the law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Yang’s recent investigations included interviewing her good friend New Jersey governor Chris Christie as part of the internal review of Bridgegate which he himself ordered, and which cleared him and his current staffers of any wrongdoing. Backing them up on the Marlborough committee were more lawyers—Katherine Marik Thompson and Michael Gendler, an entertainment attorney—as well as financial consultant Michael Parks.

After five months, the committee issued its findings in an eight-page letter, signed by Ewell and Yang, to the members of the school community. The letter lauded its transparency. “It is only those institutions that conduct periodic and thorough self-examinations that can learn and improve over time.” It was then announced that Wagner had “requested to resign effective June 30, 2015,” and that the board accepted her resignation, apparently based on how she had handled Mikaela’s case and failed to connect it to the similar complaint made in 2005. In reporting on the events of 2012, the letter acknowledged that Wagner had consulted with the president of the board and that there was no policy in place about how she was supposed to handle the situation. But the authors omitted entirely the name of former board head John Emerson, now the U.S. ambassador to Germany, and his role in handling the Koetters situation and that he chose to keep his own board in the dark. Which seems to leave only one mistake that could legitimately be placed at Wagner’s feet: her neglecting to connect Mikaela’s complaint to the one made in 2005.

The letter was viewed by many as an obfuscating, tone-deaf document. The bit about Wagner’s choosing to resign struck many readers as nonsense—Wagner, they sensed, was pushed out because someone’s head had to roll. Furious letters from parents, alumnae, and former board members poured into the school. “It is so like her [Barbara] to take upon herself all the blame even when there are others who should be held accountable,” wrote past board chair Susie Donnelly. “It is clear to me that this statement was for the sake of distracting your readers from the fact that the Board Chair should have taken the information to the Board or to the Board’s executive committee. Indeed, it is obvious that proper policies were not in place; that is not the fault of the Head of School. It is the fault of the Board! This grievous omission from your letter was a cover-up of your very own Board action …. Your omission of the Board Chair’s name, John Emerson, is cowardly …. Your letter should have called out his inexcusable judgment and delivered his personal apology to the Marlborough community …. Your moral failure as a Board has brought shame upon Marlborough.”

Sarah Gee, an alumna and daughter of a former board member, wrote, “It is unforgivable that you refuse to acknowledge your dysfunction and failure as the Board of Trustees and instead place improper blame on the very individual who has done more for Marlborough than any other single person in its history.”

A recent graduate, who had pledged $75,000, wrote that she was considering sending her money elsewhere. “The real sex scandal here, in my opinion? How the Marlborough Board of Trustees just fucked the Marlborough community.”

The special committee stood by its actions in singling out Wagner, however, and continued to tout its “transparency.” Yet after VANITY FAIR questioned Debra Wong Yang on key issues—such as Wasn’t John Emerson at least partially culpable by advising Wagner how the matter should be handled? Why didn’t he notify the board? Why is his name omitted from the report?—she had no comment.

And for all its talk about self-examination, the committee obfuscated the one story about Koetters and Marlborough that was the most scandalous. Within the eight pages, there’s a passing reference to another girl, who was at Marlborough in the early 2000s, with whom Koetters engaged in “inappropriate physical conduct.” The “inappropriate physical conduct” was, according to a former student, a full-blown sexual affair with her when she was a minor that resulted in her becoming pregnant.

Abuse of Power

Holly, as we’ll call her, kept her story secret for more than a decade. But when she read Mikaela’s story, she thought it was time to deal with the damaging events she’d kept bottled up for so long. The seduction, she says, was incremental. It began in the fall semester of her junior year, with a paper on Hamlet she was struggling over. She was then 16. Koetters suggested they meet in private. One meeting led to another. During one, out on the lawn, he took it to another, thrilling level by putting his hand on her knee. “He made me feel like the smartest, funniest, most beautiful person walking the planet,” says Holly over dinner near her office. Her demeanor is cool and standoffish, but the fragility is right there beneath the surface. By spring semester, she says, she was accepting invitations to hang out at Koetters’s house, while his wife was at work. Soon, she says, they were having sex regularly. She was terrified that they’d be discovered, but he coached her through it, framing the affair, she says, as “fuck society, fuck social norms. This is something special, and we’re entitled to pursue it as human beings. I was like, Sign me up …. I bought into the notion that our relationship was meant to exist in a little unconstrained bubble.”

One day, during her senior year, all that changed. Holly had been late with her period—and, she says, a pregnancy test confirmed her worry. She went to his house to tell Koetters the news. “I remember sitting in his house, at the bottom of the stairs, shaking uncontrollably,” she recalls. Koetters became clinical. He was intent on “handling it” and would make all the arrangements for her to get an abortion. “In the span of an hour, I went from being a cool, confident woman to being a kid. I was like, ‘Fuck. I’m so in over my head. I’ve dug the deepest grave. I’ve never felt so small.’ ” As it happened, she miscarried two and a half months into her pregnancy.

Throughout it all—from the affair to the pregnancy to the miscarriage—Holly told no one. “I thought it was all my fault,” she explains, despite the fact that she was a minor at the time. “The consequences of telling were unbearable.” Though she ended up at a top college, “I came out of Marlborough the most self-loathing, self-destructive person ever.” She has gone on to achieve professional success, but emotionally the last decade of her life has been defined by the damage Koetters caused. “If I have the capacity to bury something of that significance, I’m terrified of myself.”

When she read Mikaela’s article, Holly felt ill. She had e-mailed Koetters back in 2009, after she’d heard a rumor that he was involved with another girl, and he had denied it, writing back, “No … not even close …. I’m sorta flattered you could have heard such a thing about a fat old dude.” Now, in 2014, with Mikaela’s article, she had what she believed was evidence that he was a serial predator. She e-mailed him again: “Figured you were lying,” she wrote. He replied that Mikaela’s article was “full of lies.” She contacted Mikaela, whom she didn’t know, telling her that Koetters’s actions were way worse than Mikaela knew. Mikaela told her about all the other girls she’d heard from. Holly was suddenly hit with an epiphany. “I’m old enough to be disgusted by how young a 16-year-old looks, and holy shit, I’m one of [many]? This is crazy. I was preyed upon and it wasn’t my fault …. They’re kids. I have to do something.” She and Mikaela went to see the new head of Polytechnic to inform him of their respective stories. Holly says he planned to file a police report. Later that day, Koetters resigned.

Holly had only started releasing her rage. She wrote a letter to Barbara Wagner, in which she finally shared her entire Koetters story and castigated Marlborough for failing to protect Mikaela and the other girls like her: “I have been horrified to learn about all of it—how many girls Koetters has targeted, how poorly the school treated those willing to speak up, and—perhaps worst of all—that confronted with the knowledge that Koetters is a severely perverted and dangerous man, Marlborough allowed him to preserve his career and reputation, and sat idly as he transitioned to Poly.” (Koetters declined to comment.)

She added her own mea culpa: “I may never forgive myself—in a way my silence has made me complicit in allowing such a decrepit human being to continue his outrageously criminal behavior. For all Marlborough taught me to stick my neck out, speak my mind, and act as a just and moral leader in my community, I have failed. But I’m no longer going to plow through this with my head down.” Wagner promptly called her, sounding earnest, Holly recalls, and said that she too would need to file a report with the L.A.P.D. But Holly was in no state to feel it was enough. Last September, she sought out David M. Ring, California’s go-to lawyer for victims of sexual abuse.

To Holly, it’s pathetic, yet not surprising, that the committee would characterize her story in its report as “inappropriate physical conduct,” given that they made minimal effort to contact her. “I never got any sense that Marlborough was interested in what she had to say,” says Ring. “The school and its investigators hoped she would just fade away, that the story would dissipate, and things would then return to ‘business as usual’ for the school.” He adds that the board “found a convenient scapegoat in the head of the school and yet intentionally left everyone with the impression that Koetters simply wrote inappropriate e-mails and made inappropriate comments. The school buried the real facts.”

In Holly’s view, this was more of the same. “Marlborough had an endemic problem,” she claims. “As seventh-graders we knew about student-teacher relationships. There’s no way they didn’t know. No one is conditioned to think otherwise.”

The wreckage at Marlborough is fairly devastating. Any day, the school will be hit with a lawsuit from Holly. Fund-raising efforts are believed to be hurting. Due to how the board handled the matter, “some people will never forgive the school and will change what’s in their will or not react positively to the next fund-raising call,” says Guerin. “I know all the major givers. They will stay loyal to the school, but it will be less.”

Wagner is deeply hurt, presumably cognizant that at age 62 she’s considered damaged goods. Finding a major talent to replace her may be tough. “Really competent people [offered the job] would wonder why the board would not support the head more appropriately,” says Guerin. “Why would they put their career in the hands of a board they don’t trust?”

Many of those who care deeply about Marlborough believe that it can power through, even without Wagner as its guiding light; it’s been around for 126 years, after all. A helpful step, some suggest, would be for the chief members of the board to resign. Short of that, a statement acknowledging how badly they mangled things would be welcome. The members might be well served to take a cue from Guerin, Marlborough’s longest-serving trustee, who retired from the board in 2008. “I feel some of the blame,” he says. “I didn’t pay attention to this when I was on the board. We all failed to notice that times were changing.”