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.”

It was seven P.M., and Dinesh D’Souza—political pundit, writer, documentary-film maker, and onetime wunderkind of the intellectual elite—was dining in his new haunt: the Subway sandwich shop in National City, San Diego, a downtrodden Latino neighborhood about 20 miles from the Mexican border. He ordered his usual: six-inch whole-wheat sub with tuna salad and provolone. The girl making it was one step ahead of him. “He’s one of my randoms,” she said affectionately. Indeed, in his glasses, striped sweater over a polo shirt, and clean sneakers, D’Souza looked as if he were heading for a start-up rollout event instead of a community confinement center a few minutes away, where he is serving an eight-month sentence during nighttime hours.

The rest of his evening would look something like this: He would check in to the confinement center at 7:57 P.M., three minutes before his 8 P.M. curfew. Certain that the Obama administration is waiting for him to slip up, he wouldn’t risk being late, which is why he eats near the facility and not at his home, 20 miles away in La Jolla, where he is free to spend the day (though he may not leave the confines of San Diego County). Upon entering the center’s fluorescent-lit, low-ceilinged building, situated across from a pungent recycling dump, he would be given a Breathalyzer test and patted down. He would join about 90 other residents, mostly Latino. After using one of the stalls of his communal bathroom, he would enter the open-plan sleeping quarters and climb onto a top bunk, above a 400-pound guy who, “when he moves, the whole bunk bed shakes.” He would do his best to focus on his book and to block out the conversation. “I’ll be on my bed. I’ll hear four guys discussing the tits on the woman at Los Tacos. It will go on and on and on. I’m just powerless to move.”

D’Souza reports on his new living situation with high energy and a matter-of-fact bemusement punctuated by an eager, slightly dorky laugh—which is odd, given his grim circumstances. Last May, he pleaded guilty to a campaign-finance violation after he was caught getting two straw donors to contribute to the campaign of his old friend Wendy Long, who was running against Kirsten Gillibrand in the U.S. Senate race in New York. At one point, he was facing up to two years in prison, though he ultimately got eight months in a halfway house, plus community service, and a $30,000 fine. Still, it’s no small price to pay given that most people who commit the same crime don’t get caught. So, why is he so animated? According to D’Souza, there’s a conspiracy afoot: he’s a victim of Obama’s anti-colonialist rage.

It makes perfect sense, right? In the past five years, he has turned Obama’s alleged rage into a fortune with three books—The Roots of Obama’s Rage, Obama’s America, and America: Imagine a World Without Her—and companion documentaries for the last two, one of which grossed $33 million, making it the highest-grossing political documentary after Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.

After the charges came down in January 2014, he cried “selective prosecution,” a serious offense in which the government unfairly targets an individual—in this case, for political retribution. Alas, D’Souza didn’t have evidence that the president, or Attorney General Eric Holder, or anyone else in the Justice Department, was out to get him. When he couldn’t get the case thrown out on that basis, he pleaded guilty and claimed to take responsibility for his actions. The act might have earned him points with the judge, who had the discretion to ignore the sentencing guidelines (from 10 to 16 months of incarceration), but D’Souza seemed to squander the judge’s goodwill by publicly and repeatedly announcing that he was a victim of political persecution. The judge seemed perplexed. Why was D’Souza engaging in self-sabotage? Did he have some kind of psychological affliction? Why, in the first place, did a man who had achieved so much success so carelessly flout the law when there was so little to gain? In short, how could such a smart man be so stupid?

Indeed, D’Souza may be the most maddening, bewildering figure in the punditry world. He is eminently likable in person: courteous, avuncular, chatty, quick to laugh, and willing to lay himself open to ridicule. He’s also a doting father to an intelligent, polite 20-year-old daughter, who utterly reveres him. But in his public life he’s pathologically drawn to pushing the bounds of civil discourse, often with a disinterest in backing up his assertions with facts. While this approach has won him hundreds of thousands of fans of the Joe the Plumber variety, it has eaten away at his respectability in intellectual circles. Few members of the media elite, he complains, have been willing to publicly defend him.

Immigrant Narrative

Even as a kid, D’Souza demonstrated versions of these two sides—the hopeful immigrant, determined to excel, and the attention-seeking pest. One of his aspirations as a middle-class boy growing up in Mumbai was to memorize the entire English dictionary. Through a Rotary exchange program he ended up, at age 17, in a small town in Arizona. After “crushing the S.A.T.’s,” he landed at Dartmouth. The ways of the Northeast elite were totally alien to him, but he quickly found a group of students that would become his “surrogate family” and unleash his inner frat-boy knucklehead. With support from a charismatic professor, Jeffrey Hart, who was a senior editor at William F. Buckley Jr.’s The National Review, the group founded The Dartmouth Review, with the aim of challenging in the most offensive ways possible what they saw as liberal campus claptrap. Under D’Souza’s editorship, the paper published a “lighthearted interview” with a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, accompanied by a staged photo of a black man hanging from a tree; an article about affirmative action entitled “Dis Sho’ Ain’t No Jive, Bro,” written in Ebonics; and the names of members of the Gay Student Alliance. In his memoir, Stress Test, former Treasury secretary Tim Geithner, who attended Dartmouth at the same time as D’Souza, recalls running into him at a coffee shop and asking him “how it felt to be such a dick.”

D’Souza allows that some of his behavior may have been “sophomoric.” But, as the leader of the young conservative counter-Establishment, he got national attention. “Here I am. I’m 20 years old, 21, and I find myself being written about in The New York Times and Newsweek,” D’Souza recalls. Soon after graduation, he parlayed his young fame into a stint as managing editor of a right-wing quarterly, Policy Review, before landing a job in the Reagan White House as a domestic-policy analyst. Seeing a career in government as a slog, in 1989 he accepted a job offer from the American Enterprise Institute, the pre-eminent conservative think tank.

He could easily have spent the next couple of years churning out dry policy pieces. Indeed, his first few books went nowhere. But in 1991, his Illiberal Education was a smash hit: an exhaustively researched takedown of the political correctness that was sweeping college campuses and that he believed was undermining academic standards and chilling freedom of thought. His editor, Adam Bellow (son of novelist Saul Bellow), had urged D’Souza to aim to engage even liberals, and D’Souza did just that. The book put on the map a conversation that was necessary at the time, and it became a best-seller, getting rave reviews and prominent cover placement in The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and The New Republic. “Illiberal Education was terrific,” recalls Andrew Sullivan, then the editor of The New Republic. “He had a sharp intellect and a gift for provocation, in a good way.”

“Suddenly, I just became a huge mainstream celebrity in the intellectual world,” says D’Souza, who was inundated with speaking invitations. He also became a hot commodity among blonde conservatives. After dating Laura Ingraham and then Ann Coulter, he found the ultimate prize in Dixie Brubaker, a beautiful blonde from a conservative California family, whom he had met while working in the White House; they married in 1992. D’Souza admits, “It was my mission to marry the all-American girl.”

He had the plum job, the perfect wife, and a provocative tack that seemed to work. Emboldened by the success of Illiberal Education, he pushed his argument further, in 1995, with The End of Racism. His being brown himself, he believed, put him in a privileged position to comment on race and would inoculate him against criticism. Among his assertions: slavery in this country was not actually based on race. That if we’re going to discuss America owing blacks reparations for slavery, then what do blacks owe America for the abolition of slavery? He riffed on “widely different personalities” developed during slavery—“the playful Sambo, the sullen ‘field nigger,’ the dependable Mammy, the sly and inscrutable trickster”—that, he claimed, were “still recognizable.” It was another best-seller, but this time the press denounced it as insensitive. Sullivan, who had planned to run an excerpt in The New Republic, declined to publish it. Eventually, recalls Sullivan, “in the office, he was called by his nickname, ‘Distort Denewsa.’ ” Glenn Loury and Bob Woodson, two African-American colleagues at A.E.I., resigned in protest. As Loury wrote, “It violated the canons of civility and commonality.”

But, D’Souza says, “I didn’t believe that sensitivity had a legitimate place in the debate. Sensitivity was the reason why the debate had the artificiality it did. Everyone has to walk on eggshells…. And I’m like, ‘I’m not going to do that…. I didn’t do any of this to you. So I don’t owe you anything.’ ” He ditched Washington for his wife’s hometown of San Diego and got a job at the Hoover Institution, Stanford’s conservative think tank.

After making wild arguments about race, he would make even wilder arguments about 9/11, in the 2007 book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11—whose title summed up its thesis. The real reason terrorists destroyed the Twin Towers, he wrote, was anger stirred by the left—Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Planned Parenthood, Brokeback Mountain, and The Vagina Monologues. He placed special blame on divorce and adultery, inventions, he wrote, of the left. The logic was as tortuous as it needed to be: the Abu Ghraib scandal, for example, was actually the fault of liberals because the soldiers who enacted the despicable acts, Lynddie England and Charles Graner, were divorced, sex-crazed partiers who were therefore “act[ing] out the fantasies of blue America.” As a remedy to terrorism, he advocated that God-fearing right-wing Americans should join forces with their natural ally, traditional Muslims, including those who agree with Sharia law. Many right-wing critics, including some at the Hoover Institution, hadn’t encountered such creative hypothesizing, and they were nearly unanimous in their appraisal—calling his arguments “dishonest,” “intellectually obtuse,” and “suicidal.”

He recognizes that he may have gone overboard with his thesis. “Look, I may be wrong about it,” he says today. “I am attracted to arguments that have a certain plausible originality to them.” But he ascribes the criticism coming from his Hoover colleagues to jealousy. “There was a simmering resentment against me at Hoover,” he says. “They all sit around and have coffee once a week. I live in San Diego. I’m not at Hoover. And so they have these very chic events, and I literally parachute in. I’m the celebrity over there. And then I parachute out and I’m gone.” Whether it was their resentment over his stardom or simply that they hated the book, the rift was untenable, and he resigned. His intellectual allies were dwindling.

On a Wing and a Prayer

But as that world appeared to be closing on D’Souza, another, larger world was opening to him. D’Souza’s other beat had been Christianity (with such books as What’s So Great About Christianity and Life After Death), and he eventually gained entrée to the mega-church speaking circuit. In venues such as Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, in Orange County, which claims to have more than 20,000 congregants, D’Souza says he was selling 800 books in a day. He’d never encountered the American masses before, but they seemed to love him.

As passionate as these folks were about God, they were as fearful of Barack Obama, who had just taken office. Where did this guy come from? Was he African? Muslim? What was the deal with his name? In The Roots of Obama’s Rage (2010), D’Souza answered those questions for them. Obama was born in Hawaii, he admitted, and he wasn’t, to anyone’s knowledge, Muslim. But he had a single goal: to avenge the injustices inflicted by colonialism upon his father’s Kenyan homeland, by intentionally weakening America’s economy and power in the world. The book was written in two months, he boasted in the introduction. And with sentences like these, it showed: “The most powerful country in the world is being governed according to the dream of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s—a polygamist who abandoned his wives, drank himself into a stupor, and bounced around on two iron legs … raging against the world for denying him the realization of his anti-colonial ambitions. This philandering, inebriated, African socialist is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.”

The conservative Weekly Standard called the book “lunacy,” but to thousands of Americans—among them Newt Gingrich—D’Souza’s theory sounded about right; the book was an instant best-seller. But D’Souza knew there were millions more out there who needed to hear this message. “The battlefield is much bigger. To reach that battlefield, you have to go beyond books.” Inspired by the success of Fahrenheit 9/11, D’Souza partnered with Gerald Molen, the right-wing co-producer of Schindler’s List, raised $2.5 million from private individuals, and made the 2012 documentary 2016: Obama’s America. It received a 26 percent score from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, but what did he care? He was a rock star again, this time doing large arenas. He found in his new fans “foot soldiers that are looking for leadership, intellectual leadership, cultural leadership…. Some of them regard me as a hero.”

But in typical Hollywood fashion, just as he was lapping up his newfound glory, the wheels began to come off his private life. Back in 2010, D’Souza had been asked to be president of the King’s College, a small evangelical college in Manhattan. D’Souza wasn’t strictly evangelical—he was raised Catholic—but says he was leaning in that direction. And he had the name recognition King’s was looking for in its quest to raise money. The offer came with a reported seven-figure salary, and he accepted. While he was packing his bags for New York, “I discovered, to my horror, irrefutable evidence that my wife was involved with someone else.” D’Souza says that Dixie had grown bored with his political life and had no interest in repairing their marriage, so he went to New York without her, traumatized. (Dixie says this is “simply untrue…. I signed us up for a marriage-counseling retreat … and attended marriage-counseling sessions.”)

Given his leadership role at a Christian college, he might have handled the situation with as much grace and care as possible. Instead, his old recklessness took hold. In the summer of 2012, before any divorce papers were filed, he began secretly seeing Denise Odie Joseph II, a D’Souza groupie, married and 22 years his junior. She kept a blog called “I, Denise, Lust After … ” on which she called D’Souza “one of our favorite conservative activist philosophers.” He admits, “I was completely blown away.”

It was too dizzying a time to deal with the mundane obligations he’d taken on, like helping to fund-raise for Wendy Long, his old Dartmouth Review compatriot, in her Senate race. The campaign was hopeless, “a joke,” according to D’Souza, and she kept asking him to do tedious tasks, like meeting with groups of wealthy Indian doctors in Westchester to ask for their support. He completely blew it off but was starting to feel guilty.

He’d already reached the legal donation limit by giving $10,000, on behalf of himself and his estranged wife. But there was a lot more needed. So he asked his new lover and her husband to contribute $10,000 and said he’d reimburse them. He asked the same of his young assistant, Tyler Vawser, and Vawser’s wife. Vawser was concerned; according to court documents, D’Souza assured him it was fine. If anyone should ask about it, D’Souza said, Vawser should say that he knew Long and that he supported her candidacy. When Long later asked D’Souza about these unusually large contributions, D’Souza assured her that the individuals had the means. Despite the trail of untruths, D’Souza casts the act as one of generosity of spirit and misguided friendship. “All of my friends supported Wendy Long, but none of them supported her like this. Why? They were too smart to do it…. I felt inwardly that I should do more. I felt an obligation to do more.” Not so obligated, it should be said, that it was worth fund-raising the legal way—like traveling to Westchester to meet with a group of Indian doctors.

D ’Souza felt indestructible, and he was on a roll. Weeks after orchestrating the illegal contributions, he brought Joseph along to a conference in South Carolina. The subject was how to apply a Christian worldview to one’s life, and D’Souza was the keynote speaker. He introduced Joseph as his fiancée to several people, even though both of them were still married to others. Alas, a reporter named Warren Cole Smith from the Christian publication World Magazine discovered that he and Joseph were sharing a room. Six days later, Smith called D’Souza to ask how he could be engaged when he was still married. D’Souza replied that he had filed for divorce “recently.” When Smith checked, it turned out that D’Souza had filed for divorce that very day.

D’Souza maintains that he was the victim of a vendetta: Marvin Olasky, the editor of World Magazine, who had been provost at the King’s College, had fought against D’Souza’s appointment. The reporter, Smith, had been a consultant to the King’s College until D’Souza ended his contract. In addition, says D’Souza, the suggestion that he was committing adultery and lying about it to his employers was disingenuous; he says that he’d already told then King’s College board chairman Andy Mills that his marriage was effectively over before taking the job. Mills, however, disputes D’Souza’s account. “I had no sense that the marriage was over, no sense that he’d separated,” says Mills. “On the contrary, it was, ‘We’re having difficulties, but we’re working on it.’ In fact over the next year, the reports [about their marriage] were quite positive…. So it was a great shock to me when we found out about the ‘separation from his wife’ and this girlfriend. That was completely out of left field.” D’Souza was promptly asked to resign. As for Joseph, “here she is, emblazoned all over the Internet, and people are discussing her breasts…. It put a strain on our relationship,” recalls D’Souza. They broke up soon after. Things were about to get worse.

At some point in 2013, after conducting what the government called a routine review of Long’s campaign filings, the F.B.I. reported to the Justice Department a couple of red flags—two contributions totaling $10,000 each from individuals not known to Long, in a sea of smaller contributions. In January 2014, after investigators questioned Joseph and Vawser, neither of whom were prosecuted, Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, charged D’Souza with two counts: violating federal campaign-finance laws and causing a false statement to be made to the Federal Election Commission. The two charges could bring up to seven years’ jail time. D’Souza hired Benjamin Brafman, whose clients have included Michael Jackson and Dominique Strauss-Kahn. For four months D’Souza refused to plead guilty. Instead, Brafman sought to have the charges thrown out on the grounds that D’Souza was the victim of selective prosecution. According to the motion, D’Souza was being targeted because he was “a sharp critic of the Obama presidency who has incurred the president’s wrath.”

To back up this claim, Brafman cited several similar straw-donor cases that were settled by fines, not criminal prosecution. The cases that resulted in jail time, he argued, involved either larger sums of money or larger schemes of corruption. The prosecution countered that D’Souza’s case had distinguishing characteristics that made it egregious enough: he had involved a person in his employ, Vawser, whom he encouraged to lie, and he had repeatedly lied to Long. In the end, U.S. District Court judge Richard M. Berman determined that D’Souza’s claim of selective prosecution was “all hat and no cattle.” The case would not be dismissed.

Jolly Good Felon

On May 20, 2014, the day the trial was to begin, D’Souza pleaded guilty to the illegal campaign contribution charge (taking the second charge off the table) and professed to take responsibility for his actions. The next few months would be critical, as the judge would be deliberating on the appropriate sentence. The moment called for humility. D’Souza enlisted 27 people—colleagues, friends, and family members in India—to write to the judge on his behalf. While they got busy attesting to his remorse, he began publicly conveying just the opposite. Brafman begged his client to keep his mouth shut, but D’Souza couldn’t resist. He was finishing up his second documentary, America: Imagine a World Without Her, which was to be released imminently, and had to insert one last scene: Dinesh himself in handcuffs, rubbing his eyes, accompanied by a treacly voice-over: “I’m not above the law. No one is. But we don’t want to live in a society where Lady Justice has one eye open and winks at her friends, and casts the evil eye at her adversaries. When will it stop?” He repeated a similar line in interviews with Megyn Kelly on Fox and elsewhere. On September 3, as his sentencing day approached, he wrote to the judge that he was “ashamed and contrite.” Two days later, he posted on Twitter: “The Obama campaign to shut me up: is it working?” Although Brafman has come to “grudgingly respect” D’Souza’s decision to speak out, he admits that “Dinesh was trying to do everything possible to alienate the government and the court while I was working my ass off trying to develop arguments to support a very lenient sentence.”

Judge Berman could only wonder. “I’m not sure, Mr. D’Souza, that you get it,” he told him on September 23, the day of the sentencing hearing. “The defense says it has accepted the court’s rulings in this case, yet Mr. D’Souza … continues to deflect and minimize the significance of the crime and of his behavior.” D’Souza’s public pronouncements, he went on, were “totally thoughtless and not self-reflective and not self aware…. I’m totally confident that Lady Justice is doing her job and that she’s not taking off her blindfold to target Dinesh D’Souza.” D’Souza’s trail of bluster had finally caught up with him in court. The judge sentenced him to five years’ probation, a full day of community service each week for those five years, eight months in a confinement center, and therapeutic counseling. A week later, D’Souza reportedly had a request. Could he delay the sentence? Because he really wanted to, among other things, promote his new movie. The judge wrote, “Respectfully denied.”

In October, D’Souza entered the confinement center, joining the kind of people he had publicly referred to as “parasitic.” Luckily, none seemed to be familiar with his work. Those first days had their Orange Is the New Black moments. The first night, he slept “with one eye open.” While he was lying there, his 400-pound bunkmate struck up a conversation: “He goes, ‘Hey, man, what are you in for?’ I go, ‘Campaign-finance violation.’ He goes, ‘What the fuck does that mean?’ I go, ‘Well, my friend was running for the Senate, and I gave her too much money. I raised money for her in the wrong way.’ So he goes, ‘Shit! Can you raise money for me?’ I go, ‘No.’ Then there was the mandatory rape class, which was about ‘establishing that all of us have a right not to be raped.’ Very reassuring.”

But D’Souza also shows flashes of self-reflection. Looking back on the recent events in his life, he says, “Part of what you learn about life is that a wrecking ball can come out of nowhere, and it isn’t just going to take out your left toe. It can hit you right in the middle and take you down.” His personal experience has made him re-assess some of his public stances. His community service, teaching English to Mexican immigrants, some of whom are undocumented, has softened his stance on immigration. He once had a credo that “the quality of the immigrant is directly proportional to the distance traveled to get here…. But I now see that the adults in my class are incredibly industrious, determined, and hardworking, and no less strenuous in their pursuit of the American Dream than any other immigrant group.” Likewise, his own divorce has “sobered and humbled me and made me a lot more tentative about things I was sure about.” It seems he’s no longer convinced that the country’s acceptance of divorce led to the destruction of the World Trade Center. And he is as productive as ever. His future plans include starting a PAC, to pay for getting his America documentary shown on hundreds of campuses, and writing a new book with a companion film about the “secret history” of the left. He is also trying his hand at Christian-themed feature films and, to that end, is busy writing screenplays for a thriller and a family film.

Still, old addictions are hard to break. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, he tweeted, “An interesting parallel: MLK was targeted by J. Edgar Hoover, an unsavory character. I was targeted by the equally unsavory B. Hussein Obama.” You’d think he’d made his point already. But in his view, it was working—since his sentencing, he says he has raised $10 million toward his new film—so why stop? “This whole episode,” he says, “far from denting my career, has actually brought me to the attention of a wider audience.”

She didn’t exactly set the stage on fire, but she was still, it seemed, the highlight of everyone’s day. In June, in Manhattan, 35-year-old Chelsea Clinton, vice-chair of the Clinton Foundation, looking understated-chic in a silk blouse, held court at the United Nations about the global problem of fathers’ being disengaged from their children. She used no notes and moved her gaze back and forth across a room full of rapt nonprofit leaders and policymakers as she shared her passion for numbers and data. “We often say at the foundation that data helps measure progress, but it also helps drive progress. And that’s why I think this report [State of the World’s Fathers] is so tremendously important.” She rattled off facts about the benefits of engaged fathers and introduced the audience to “Abenomics,” a recent Japanese theory for stimulating economic growth. In what has become customary in her public addresses, she brought the issue around to the personal, mentioning her then eight-month-old daughter, Charlotte, and her husband, 37-year-old hedge-fund manager Marc Mezvinsky: “I’m so grateful for his dedication, his support, his love, and the investments that he makes in our daughter every single day.”

The U.N. speech was no big deal for Chelsea, mind you. In the past few months she has accompanied her father and 20 wealthy foundation donors to Africa, capped off by a Clinton Global Initiative conference in Marrakech; visited Haiti; and hit the TV talk shows to tout the foundation’s “No Ceilings” project, an online report that gathered more than “a million data points” about the state of girls and women in the world. With Jimmy Kimmel she demonstrated not only her impressive grasp of the issue but also her new breezy rapport with friendly interviewers.

In addition, she spoke at a June tribute to the late fashion great Oscar de la Renta, referring to him “as my friend and as the man I would have chosen for my grandfather had God granted me such a gift.” In 2014 she received Glamour’s Woman of the Year award. During an interview with her following the ceremony, a beaming Katie Couric concluded that Chelsea was also, “I think it’s safe to say, probably a Mom of the Year.”

Gone is the Chelsea who tried to blend in as just another Stanford-educated grind. She has fully embraced being a Clinton and is now deliberately, willfully, on the road to greatness. She recently admitted that running for office one day is “absolutely” a possibility. Like every aspiring political-office holder, she found time in the busiest possible moment in life (in her case the first year of motherhood) to write a book: It’s Your World: Get Informed, Get Inspired & Get Going! And, most important, two and a half years ago she put her name alongside those of her parents at their foundation, which has raised some $2 billion since its inception and is now called the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

This was no vanity move. Those who work with her at the foundation attest to her almost daunting intelligence, her diligence, and her genuine dedication to the job. But the question of whether Chelsea can lead remains to be seen, and if ever there were a moment to show some creative vision, it would be now. Never before has the Clinton Foundation come under such scrutiny—for the donations from foreign governments it received while Hillary was secretary of state; for those it continues to receive as she runs for president; and for the extremely large speaking fees that both Bill (up to $1 million) and Hillary (up to $500,000) have been collecting from foreign governments, corporations, colleges, and even small charities. Whether or not our global policies have been shaped by who gave what to the Clinton Foundation is nearly impossible to prove, but nevertheless there’s a perception problem, and scrutiny of the foundation’s fund-raising practices will grow only more intense should Hillary become president.

The problem is now Chelsea’s too. And yet, despite her vaunted position, she has been shielded from having to answer. Her spokesman, Kamyl Bazbaz, guided Vanity Fair to sources for this article, but Chelsea declined to be interviewed. Questions put to the foundation about her position on the fund-raising issue were redirected. Her television appearances have been strictly in friendly venues. Interviews with print media have been limited to discreet, non-controversial topics, such as her initiative to stop elephant poaching. Recently, when ABC News anchor Juju Chang found a moment to ask her about the fund-raising allegations, she did so apologetically (“I would be remiss if I didn’t ask … ”) and allowed Chelsea to sidestep the question.

Except among members of right-wing media, the idea of making Chelsea Clinton uncomfortable feels wrong. Our national instinct is to protect and revere her—to treat her more like royal progeny than an adult who has taken on a position of global consequence. The coddling is not simply because she’s the daughter of two political superstars who are loved and feared and protected by their own omertà—although that’s certainly part of it. It’s also because we witnessed the public humiliation she went through as a teenager by virtue of being President Clinton’s daughter, and because, in spite of all that, she appears to have emerged as a decent, serious young woman. The resilience was moving. As Anne Hubert, a friend from Stanford and now a Viacom executive, puts it, “People are rooting for Chelsea. They want her to be doing well.”

Our national sympathy for Chelsea is rooted in our image of her as a kid who exuded natural decency and earnestness. She was inculcated at an early age with the importance of world engagement. Before she could read, her parents read to her from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. At the age of five, she wrote a letter to Ronald Reagan questioning his planned, much-disputed visit to a German military cemetery that contained some Nazi graves. Todd S. Purdum, who then covered President Clinton for The New York Times (and is now a Vanity Fair contributing editor), recalls Bill’s mother, Virginia Kelley, showing Chelsea’s letter to him. “Dear President Reagan, I have seen The Sound of Music. The Nazis don’t look very nice to me. Please don’t go to their cemetary [sic].”

Despite the Clintons’ wish for their daughter to have a normal childhood, their will to change the world superseded everything. They sought to prepare her for the ugly realities that would come with that. As Hillary revealed in her 1996 book, It Takes a Village, when Bill was running for his second term as governor of Arkansas, the family did role-playing exercises at dinner. Six-year-old Chelsea played Bill, and he hurled insults in her face about what a terrible person he was. She ended up in tears the first night, but “she gradually gained mastery over her emotions,” recalled Hillary. She would need that skill. When Bill Clinton won the White House in 1992, he requested that Chelsea remain off limits to the media. Most respected his wish, but she endured cruel barbs from Rush Limbaugh, Saturday Night Live, and John McCain that targeted her awkward teenage looks. Throughout, she remained a model of perfect manners. Purdum recalls a dinner in 1995 in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to celebrate the birthday of one of Hillary’s aides. “Someone from the Park Service gave Chelsea a commemorative Smokey Bear doll, and she was not going to leave that restaurant until she got the name and address of the person to whom she should send a thank-you note,” he recalls. “She also asked me what she owed for the pizza.”

But who could ever have imagined a more daunting challenge to filial steadfastness than her father’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky? Rumors about the president’s affair were brewing at the tail end of 1997, during Chelsea’s freshman year at Stanford. An observer recalls that Chelsea’s demeanor drastically changed—“from that friendly girl to being shut down and frozen.” After learning the truth, Chelsea was “confused and hurt,” wrote Hillary in Living History, and froze her father out for a time. Bill was tortured by the effect it had on her, and cried when he learned that she had read the Starr Report, which included sexual details of his dalliance. She relied on family friends and those at Stanford for support. Among them was her future husband, Marc Mezvinsky, a popular self-described “nerdy Jewish boy from Philly.” He, too, understood something about personal sacrifice for the Clintons’ greater good: His mother, Marjorie Margolies, had been a congresswoman when President Clinton’s controversial 1993 tax bill came up for a vote. The president made a personal plea to her, and she voted yes—going against promises made to her constituents and knowing it would likely cause her to lose her seat. Marc “was always someone Chelsea really turned to and leaned on,” recalls Hubert.

In the wake of the scandal, Chelsea did exactly what her parents had conditioned her to do: swallow the pain and soldier on. “She’s one of the strongest people I know,” says Elsa Collins, another Stanford friend, who is married to former N.B.A. player Jarron Collins. In the summer of that year, when the world wondered whether Bill and Hillary were headed for divorce, Chelsea played a key role in showing they would pull through. As they crossed the lawn to Marine One for the cameras, Bill walked with his head bowed; Hillary, wearing sunglasses, was erect and expressionless; Chelsea was in the middle holding their hands. She was the glue holding the family together and keeping the higher purpose alive. Her father’s gratitude was boundless. As a longtime Clinton associate puts it, “When you have an affair with the intern, you end up paying for it for the rest of your life.”

The first thing Chelsea wanted to do, understandably, was to get as far away from her parents’ psychodrama as possible. She “deliberately tried to lead a private life,” she recalled in a 2012 interview with Vogue. She headed to Oxford, where she earned a master’s degree in international relations. When her father first tried to get her involved in his fledgling foundation, even in small ways—to put her name on invitations or show up at events—she rebuffed him, according to foundation sources. After graduating, in what she has described as an act of “rebellion,” she chose the least do-gooder job possible: management consultant at McKinsey & Company, infamous for advising corporations to fire large numbers of people. When that didn’t satisfy her, she tried out Wall Street, getting a job as an analyst at Avenue Capital Group, a hedge fund owned by Marc Lasry, who is worth $1.9 billion and has been a major financial backer of both President Clinton’s and Hillary’s. Ultimately, she left that too, explaining later that “[money] wasn’t the metric I wanted to judge my life by in a professional sense.” She went back to school—this time to get a master’s degree in public health from Columbia. Unlike most twentysomethings, she seemed not to be hamstrung by indecisiveness or self-doubt. “She never had any real angst about it,” says Elsa Collins. “I think she wanted to make sure that she explored all the avenues that were of interest to her.” At Columbia, she impressed Michael Sparer, the head of the department, who made her an adjunct professor. “She was extremely available to the students,” he says, “very unpretentious, very low-key.”

In late 2007, when Hillary was preparing for the primaries, 27-year-old Chelsea stepped into the national spotlight, speaking at campuses and town halls as a surrogate for her mother. Though she could hold her own onstage, those inside Clintonworld were insistent on protecting her, as if she were still a teenager in the White House: her mother’s campaign sent out the message to the press that they were not to talk to her. Those who defied it learned there were consequences.

In early 2008, David Shuster, then an MSNBC reporter, found himself near her at an event and tried to ask a few questions. He wasn’t surprised that she declined to speak with him—that was her prerogative. What did surprise him was getting warning calls 24 hours later from the campaign telling him Chelsea was off limits. Shuster recalls saying, “Look, she handled herself just fine. I respected her desire not to talk. But what’s wrong with you guys, feeling like you need to protect her or beat me up for asking questions?” The campaign responded that she was still the daughter of the president, and that was that.

But soon Shuster would find his job in peril. A few nights later he engaged in a typical breezy on-air exchange about Chelsea’s role in the campaign, and remarked that it seemed she’d been “pimped out” by the campaign. It was a terrible choice of words, to be sure. The campaign called for his head, making calls to Steve Capus, the head of NBC News, and to executives at General Electric (then NBC’s parent company), accusing Shuster of having called Chelsea a prostitute. Hillary issued a statement essentially demanding that Shuster be fired, and the campaign threatened to boycott an upcoming debate that was to air live on NBC. Under pressure from his bosses, Shuster wrote an e-mail apology and sent it to Howard Wolfson, Hillary’s communications director, to pass on to Chelsea. Shuster says he followed up with a call, in which Wolfson informed him that he had received the apology, but wouldn’t be forwarding it to Chelsea—no reason given. (Wolfson says he has no recollection of the call.) NBC suspended Shuster for two weeks and denied him any future Clinton stories. It was a warning to journalists: Chelsea needed to be handled with kid gloves.

More special privileges were in store—courtesy of a father who, some say, was still trying to make up for his sins. Her 2010 wedding to Mezvinsky (since graduation he had worked at Goldman Sachs and then at 3G Capital hedge fund) took place in upstate New York, in front of some 400 guests in a ceremony that reportedly cost $3 million. The next year Mezvinsky, along with two of his former Goldman Sachs colleagues, raised $400 million for their own hedge fund, Eaglevale, with significant investments coming from several longtime Clinton friends and supporters, including Lasry, British investment banker Jacob Rothschild, and Goldman Sachs C.E.O. Lloyd Blankfein. According to a longtime Clinton associate, Mezvinsky has made the most of the events sponsored by the family’s foundation, such as “celebrity poker nights,” which are prime hunting ground for potential clients. In 2013, Bill and Hillary helped the couple buy a 5,000-square-foot apartment for $9.25 million in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, says a Clinton associate. (Chelsea Clinton’s publicist denies this.)

Under the circumstances it must have been easy not to care about money, as Chelsea claims not to. According to Anne Hubert, Chelsea and Marc’s social circle is “as broad and diverse as New York is a place” in that it includes people in finance, tech, media, law, the arts, and global health. Among the boldfaced names are Burberry designer Christopher Bailey, chef David Chang, and Ivanka Trump and her husband, New York Observer owner Jared Kushner. When Hubert is asked if the couple is friends with anyone poor or unemployed, she laughs as if the question must be a joke. “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

In the view of the family matriarch—Chelsea’s late grandmother Dorothy Rodham, a spitfire from hardscrabble beginnings, whom Chelsea adored—having the last name and the perks weren’t enough, however. The family had a “responsibility gene” and it was time for Chelsea to take a seat at the table. Chelsea got to work, methodically trying to figure out how to become a public person with a purpose. She consulted with Hubert, whose Viacom division is aimed at millennials, about potential “platforms.”

Chelsea set her sights on two jobs that seemed totally at odds with what she’d wanted fresh out of college: board member of one of the Clinton Foundation’s initiatives, and network news correspondent. For the latter she landed, of all places, at NBC, where she was hired to do segments for NBC News and Brian Williams’s new television newsmagazine show, Rock Center. She would enter this public arena armed with personnel: a chief of staff, an assistant, and an outside P.R. team to craft her image and manage her social media. “She’s the most deliberate human being I know,” says a former colleague at the foundation. “Nothing is by accident”—not surprising, perhaps, when one recalls her family did polling about the name of their new dog. Those tasked with managing her public persona would face an uphill battle in making her sound less programmed and more authentic.

Her stint at NBC was a disaster, perhaps because it ran so contrary to her instincts. “Most of us were baffled [by the hire], because she never even spoke to the press,” says an NBC veteran. “She’d walk by with the imperial stare, looking forward, and interacted not at all.” The feeling inside NBC was that she had been hired to maintain access to and curry favor with the Clintons. When news broke that she had been getting paid $600,000—for a part-time job—NBC staffers were appalled. Most full-time correspondents were being paid far less. The big salary was predicated on the idea that she was already a star, and according to an insider, she started acting like one. Colleagues felt they couldn’t communicate with her directly. Instead, they had to go through her people. And she was hardly present in the office. “There was a joke inside the building that she was the ‘highest-paid ghost’ at NBC,” says a network source. It all might have been excused had she been any good. In the span of nearly three years, however, she filed only a handful of segments—all painfully stiff reports on global do-gooders, plus an attempted comic interview with the Geico Gecko. As the insider puts it, “NBC has made a lot of bad decisions in the last few years, but hiring Chelsea has to be very near the top.”

Getting the big title at the Clinton Foundation was viewed by many, naturally, as yet another unearned opportunity handed to Chelsea by virtue of her last name. But it was also a place where she could prove her grit. When she arrived, in 2011, her father’s prayers were answered. It was a sign, perhaps, that all was forgiven and that his legacy would be secured through his daughter. Says a former foundation employee, “People were very excited to see a succession plan take hold.” Like all things involving Bill Clinton, the foundation was both awe-inspiring and messy. What began at the end of his presidency as a modest nonprofit founded in Little Rock, Arkansas, was now a fund-raising juggernaut, thanks to the Clintons’ star power and ability to get heads of state, C.E.O.’s, leaders in philanthropy, and rock and movie stars to donate large sums to his foundation. Today there are nine initiatives (plus two associated projects) that target some of the most difficult problems around the globe. Among its most important has been providing affordable H.I.V. drugs to 9.9 million people in Africa.

But its very success created problems. The foundation grew so quickly it could hardly contain itself. By the time Chelsea arrived, there were more than 2,000 employees. There was no working infrastructure, no endowment or investment plan. Despite the large sums coming in, the foundation had reported an on-paper deficit of $40 million for 2007 and 2008, which Clinton later explained was a misleading accounting illusion. It was still being run by Clinton’s chief advisers from the White House days: Bruce Lindsey (the C.E.O.) and Ira Magaziner, and to some it still felt like the White House, with egos running amok and, according to a former colleague of Chelsea’s, “regular staffers who were not in the habit of challenging them.” There was intense concern about Doug Band, Clinton’s longtime “body man” and surrogate son, who’d come up with the idea for the Clinton Global Initiative (C.G.I.), the glamorous conference that became the centerpiece of the foundation. While still running C.G.I., Band co-founded Teneo, a corporate-consulting business, which came to be seen as too intertwined with and reliant on the president and his connections. The foundation was tarnished by some of the less attractive characters Band was bringing into its orbit, such as Raffaello Follieri—the Italian con man who was then dating Anne Hathaway.

Some control was clearly needed. And Chelsea started off with a McKinsey-esque bang—by helping to initiate an outside audit. “It was a very authoritarian action for someone who came in at day one,” says the former foundation employee. “The feeling was: we’re being audited—never a good word—because we’re doing something wrong. We wondered, Are our jobs at risk? That’s not a comfortable feeling for many people who’ve been dedicating their lives to the foundation.” The audit called for better management and budgeting policies. Lindsey was replaced as C.E.O. by Chelsea’s pick—Eric Braverman, with whom she had worked at McKinsey, and Magaziner’s job was greatly reduced. (Braverman left the foundation in January of this year over reported power struggles within the organization; Donna Shalala, Clinton’s secretary of health and human services, is now C.E.O.) Of the 13 financial-advisory firms that applied, the job of investing the foundation’s money went to Summit Rock, where Chelsea’s close friend Nicole Davison Fox is a managing director. (Her husband works with Mezvinsky.) It was felt in some quarters that Chelsea, who hadn’t paid her dues—by, say, spending real time in Africa, or cutting her teeth at one of the programs—was coming in and throwing her weight around. Lindsey and others complained to President Clinton but to no avail. “He has no ability to say no to her,” says a source familiar with the shake-ups.

For all the grumblings about nepotism, others believe that Chelsea is just the enforcer the foundation needed. Under her leadership, the various branches, once physically separated, were consolidated under one roof, and systems were put in place for the once disparate initiatives to communicate more effectively. The foundation rebuilt the board and started using data for measuring success. “We are now very conscientious about ensuring that we incorporate data, [that] we’re measuring, and that we’re actually making course adjustments based on that,” says Maura Pally, senior V.P. of programs. “The ethos that Chelsea has really helped instill here is that, as you evaluate, if the answer isn’t ‘This is a perfect program’ that’s not a failure but rather a learning opportunity.” Around the office, teeming with people in their 20s and 30s, Chelsea’s mastery of information spurs people to keep on their toes. Pally says, “I would spend tons of time trying to get myself up to speed on certain things, and Chelsea’s doing so many different things and yet would blow me out of the water with what she had read about somewhere and analyzed and synthesized and spit back out in a completely compelling, accessible way.” Julianne Guariglia, who works across all of the initiatives, attests to Chelsea’s compassion when she talks with victims and survivors.

While the reports about her leadership are mixed, the more pertinent questions, as her mother runs for president, concern the foundation’s fund-raising practices, which have come under intense scrutiny in the past few months. In 2008, when Hillary was offered the position of secretary of state, an agreement was reached between the Clintons and the Obama transition team that C.G.I. would cease accepting new donations from foreign governments and that the Clinton Foundation would report all donors on an annual basis. We now know that the latter term was not honored: for example, the Health Access Initiative failed to disclose its contributors. Making things murkier, the foundation continued accepting donations from foreign individuals, their foundations, and companies, including a member of the Saudi royal family and a Ukrainian oligarch—more than a dozen in total, which added up to between $34 million and $68 million during the years when Hillary was secretary of state, according to The Wall Street Journal. After Hillary stepped down, the board, which includes Chelsea, voted to resume accepting all foreign-government donations. (Now that Hillary has announced her candidacy, the foundation has limited the number of foreign governments from which it will accept money to six: Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and the U.K., though all governments can participate in C.G.I.)

While these donations raise questions about foreign influence, the Clintons’ lucrative speaking careers have raised questions of simple good taste. Since 2001 the family has made more than $130 million in speaking engagements. Bill puts roughly a tenth of his fees into the foundation; Hillary, somewhat more. More than $11 million in speaking and appearance engagements have come from relatively small charities—the Happy Hearts Foundation, the Boys and Girls Club of Long Beach, among others—which have discovered that having a Clinton in the house comes at a hefty price. Consider the case of model Petra Nemcova’s Happy Hearts Foundation, which rebuilds schools hit by natural disasters. Sue Veres Royal, the former executive director, recalls trying, at Nemcova’s behest, to book the president for the annual gala—it took more than a year. “Petra was told by the foundation that they don’t look at anything unless there’s money involved,” recalls Royal. The cost was $500,000 in the form of a donation to the Clinton Foundation for use in Haiti—a big chunk of Happy Hearts’ overall net assets of $3.9 million. But in this case the bet didn’t pay off—in part, says Royal, because “no attempt was made from anyone at the Clinton Foundation to invite anyone,” and she was asked to comp Clinton friends, such as billionaire Marc Lasry, who, according to Royal, never made a donation. (Lasry declined to comment.)

Fund-raising, Clinton-style, has always been a seamy subject, and it seems Chelsea’s team has tried to keep her out of dirty waters. When it comes to her speaking fees—which have spiked to the low six figures—she’s taken the high road and arranges for 100 percent to go to the foundation. (Neither she nor her father receives a salary from the foundation.) The larger question concerns the future: What happens if Hillary wins the presidency? Would the potential for conflicts of interest simply be too great for the foundation to sustain itself? According to foundation spokesman Craig Minassian, “We’re very focused on what we’re doing today and implementing the work.” In the opinion of Fred Wertheimer, a prominent activist for government integrity and head of the watchdog group Democracy 21, “If Hillary Clinton is elected president, all three Clintons should cut their ties with the foundation for as long as she’s president.”

It sounds Draconian. Then again, it’s almost impossible to imagine Chelsea forgoing the chance to have a major hand in her mother’s administration. As a source close to the Clintons points out, “The ultimate foundation is the U.S. government, so why would you toil with a foundation on the side?”

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated what degree Chelsea Clinton received from Oxford. It was a master’s degree in international relations, not philosophy. Ira Magaziner was identified as a vice-chair of the Clinton Foundation. He was not. While the Clinton Foundation did not honor the terms of an ethics agreement made with the Obama transition team in 2008, the Clinton Global Initiative did honor the terms.

It’s 8:50 P.M. at the Kelly File studio. The crew dudes finish shining her glass desk, through which viewers can see her shapely legs. Two makeup women, armed with blow-dryer and hair spray, put the finishing touches on her glistening tresses. And Megyn Kelly, Fox News’s breakout prime-time star, girded in a snug black dress and four-inch strappy heels, is champing at the bit to make another presidential contender—this time Jeb Bush—squirm in his seat.

“If it’s fair to question Mrs. Clinton for failures leading up to [Benghazi],” she says, looking into the camera at her 2.7 million viewers, “why is it unfair to question Jeb about his brother’s failures leading up to September 11, 2001,” as Donald Trump had just done. She turns the question to Jeb, speaking via satellite video hookup. “Is it a double standard?”

“Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” replies Bush.

She points out that Jeb’s in fifth place in the polls, and she wants to know, “What would it take to make you get out [of the race]?” Bush, looking as if he were wearing a scratchy, too tight suit, replies that he’s going nowhere.

In the face of Donald Trump’s taunts, what’s his plan? “To me,” says Kelly, “it seems like you don’t know what to do. You’re like, ‘How am I supposed to respond to this?’ ”

He smiles forcibly and tries for a joke. “We’re in the same boat, Megyn,” he says, referring to Trump’s recent attacks on Kelly.

She beams appreciatively but refuses the bait. “Well, but I’m not running for president.”

The moment the interview is over, Bush bolts from his chair, grim and grouchy. The control room, alight with numerous monitors, is buzzing with excitement. “He’s not happy. I didn’t even get to thank him,” says a young associate.

“You can tell he’s on edge,” calls out another. “All through the interview, fake smile, fake smile. Soon as it’s done, no smile.”

Unnerving would-be leaders, blowhards, and didacts from both parties has become Kelly’s specialty, as the world learned in August. The first television journalist to call Trump out face-to-face on his obnoxiousness, she kicked off the first Republican debate by calmly cataloguing Trump’s sexism in a single question. To recall: “You’ve called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals…. You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president, and how will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton … that you are part of the war on women?” Trump tried to laugh it off mid-question, saying that those insults were directed only at Rosie O’Donnell, but Kelly wouldn’t let him off. He then complained, “Honestly, Megyn, if you don’t like it, I’m sorry. I’ve been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be based on the way you’ve treated me.” The following night, he suggested to Fox News’s rival network CNN that the reason she was so hostile was that she was probably menstruating: “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” When that didn’t rattle her, Trump lashed out on Twitter, calling her a “lightweight,” re-tweeting that she was a “bimbo,” and stoking his supporters to boycott her show. Kelly took the high road and said on-air that she had no reason to apologize to Trump, and that she would “continue doing my job without fear or favor.”

Kelly’s Trump episode was one in a string of satisfying male-ego deflations that have helped her surpass cable’s biggest news star, Bill O’Reilly, in the key demographic of 25–54 for three months in 2015. Her occasional, yet highly entertaining, bucking of the conservative party line has attracted more independent-minded viewers and has even earned praise from liberals such as Chris Matthews, Joy Behar, and Gayle King. As of late, passersby have been calling out versions of “It’s not too late to come to the other side!” Still, some media types warn against getting too excited over Kelly. As Bill Maher put it, “We think of Megyn Kelly as the sane one over there at Fox News. It’s just because she’s surrounded by Hannity and Bill O’Reilly. She’s like the blonde dragon girl on Game of Thrones. Everyone else is a zombie or a dwarf or fucking their sister, so she looks normal.”

Whatever the case, Kelly has become a feminist icon of sorts—the sort who won’t actually call herself a feminist. Perhaps this is because Kelly works at Fox News, where “feminists” are in the same scary category as “liberals” who wage war on Christmas each year. Perhaps, as she claims, it’s because her accomplishments speak for themselves and have nothing to do with her gender.

Steve Martin said, ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you.’ I love that,” says Kelly, kicking back in her no-frills office at Fox headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. She’s in skinny jeans, hair pulled back, her wide eyes rimmed with dark eyeliner, looking more the take-charge hot New York mama than glossy Fox News anchor. Consider, she says, her own role model, Oprah Winfrey. “In all her years coming up … she never wallowed in any sort of victimhood…. She didn’t play the gender card and she didn’t play the race card. She was just so good we couldn’t ignore her. That’s my example…. Just get to the table and then do better than everybody else.” She adds with a laugh, “But every so often, as all [women] know, you have to stop and slap somebody around a little bit who doesn’t understand that we are actually equals and not second-class citizens.”

It’s tempting to dismiss her “Just do it” motto as simplistic. Easy for her to say—she has obvious genetic good fortune, plus a husband, Doug Brunt, who is straight out of central casting for the Perfect Guy: a handsome, successful novelist, who is on call with their three young children (sons Thatcher and Yates and daughter Yardley) when she’s working. (Her normal workday stretches from the mid-afternoon until about 11 P.M.) But, in fact, her ascent has been marked by taking risks and obsessive preparation—the kind she did when she was a successful trial lawyer, her first career, until age 33. Perhaps more relevant, at a network whose on-air women seem to fit a certain mold, Kelly hasn’t sacrificed much of who she really is; she’s even cut her hair and started occasionally wearing pants on-air.

It helps that she’s a woman of preternatural charisma, with star power closer to that of Julia Roberts than to, say, Norah O’Donnell or Erin Burnett—two other beautiful TV newswomen who have made it big but have never exactly exploded. Now pulling down a reported annual pay package of $6-$9 million, she’s the alpha girl at the dinner party, the one telling the stories, cracking the jokes, the one who is nice to everyone but leaves people wanting more. Her ego is robust—in her mind it’s obvious why she’s a star—yet she enjoys taking the piss out of herself for a laugh. Witness just a few minutes of interaction with her husband, who has joined us for breakfast near their apartment on the Upper West Side: “I was just telling her that I was actually voted most popular in the eighth grade. It’s come to that.”

When Brunt remarks that she excels in every area of her life, even cooking—“There’s three or four things she cooks that are awesome … that chicken thing you do?”—she shoots back, “I just want you to know that that was complete and total bullshit.”

Gentle ribbing seems to be Kelly’s go-to mode. When Brunt apologizes to me for giving me his novels in a crumpled brown grocery bag, she doesn’t miss a beat: “It would have been a little much if you’d gift-wrapped them.”

Brunt is hopelessly enamored. In his opinion, “she’s like a combination of Walter Cronkite, Barbara Walters, Oprah Winfrey, and then a Grisham character who’s a scrappy guy from the other side of the tracks who has a rare gift for the law, in a Grace Kelly package, with a little Larry the Cable Guy sprinkled on top.”

Walter Cronkite might be a stretch. The Kelly File, which Kelly bills as a “news” show as opposed to an opinion show, like Hannity or The O’Reilly Factor, is made up largely of the kind of stories you’d find on many other Fox News shows at any other time. Some recurring themes are political correctness run amok, the left-wing slant of the mainstream media, and the question of Hillary Clinton’s trustworthiness. (Hint: “She’s lying! She’s absolutely lying!,” says the mother of one of the Benghazi victims in a teaser.) Not so infrequently, the right-of-center axis roams into Hannity territory, like a recurring bit on “Ahmed, the clock boy,” who was mistakenly arrested after school officials thought he might be building a bomb—and then got invited to the White House. Not only was the clock really lame, The Kelly File told us, “just wait until you see what we found on his father’s Facebook page.” (Supposedly it called 9/11 an American hoax to encourage a war against Islam.) A go-to guest on the subject of race and law enforcement is Mark Fuhrman, the disgraced race-baiting policeman from the O. J. Simpson trial.

FAIR ENOUGH?

And yet … it’s not uncommon for the casual left-of-center viewer to say, in spite of himself, I kind of like her. In Kelly’s hands, these right-wing red-meat stories are presented with a varying degree of balance and often treated with humanity and wit. She’ll muster outrage at political correctness, but it feels rooted in common sense, not just derived from talking points. When, for example, a Muslim activist takes issue with Somalian writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s being given a public forum for views that are critical of Islam, Kelly shoots him down: “When you undergo genital mutilation, you may have a thing or two to say about it!” On the other side of the political spectrum, she can demonstrate reason and sympathy when encountering vicious, right-wing small-mindedness. “There’s so much hate for gays and lesbians and transgendered people,” she tells a Fox News contributor who thinks the transgender Chaz Bono is a danger to America. “You seem to be adding to the hate.”

She has no patience for talk that’s above the audience’s head. When a general talks about rebels “putting pressure on Assad, particularly Jabat al-Nusra, from Aleppo to Damascus,” she interrupts: “Hold on—nobody understood what you just said. Say that in plain English.” She won’t sell her soul for a ratings bonanza. When Trump made the shocking suggestion that Muslims should be banned from entering the U.S., Kelly rightfully blasted the television media for giving him 18 hours of airtime over the course of 24 hours. Trump had played them, she said, and they were “marching like lemmings.”

And she owns her sexuality in a way that feels real and lighthearted. When Facebook C.O.O. Sheryl Sandberg recently came on the show to talk about how men who helped more with the housework had happier family lives and more sex, Kelly (who has talked about her breasts on the Howard Stern show and posed for racy shoots in men’s magazines) cheered. “We have been selling it all wrong in the past! More action, all right? That’s all you need to know, guys,” she said to the camera, giving a thumbs-up. “Do some laundry.”

Prominent female journalists from rival networks can’t help but praise her uncanny charm. “She doesn’t talk down to her audience,” says Campbell Brown, who hosted her own prime-time show on CNN and now leads a nonprofit in education. “There is none of the sanctimonious, condescending attitude. And, frankly, none of the hate. I think people are sick of these prime-time chest thumpers characterizing the other side as evil.” Jessica Yellin, a former chief White House correspondent for CNN, says, “She defies all the pigeonholing that usually happens to women on TV. She’s smart, strong, sexy, fierce, sympathetic all at once.”

Veteran newswoman Katie Couric praises her dogged interviewing skills, crucial when interrogating dodging politicians. “She takes no prisoners and takes no BS,” says Couric. “And I’ve noticed that she’s a really good listener. Sometimes the tendency is to go down a laundry list of questions and to not say, ‘Wait a minute.’ It requires you to think on your feet and to take the conversation in a totally different direction.”

IN THE ZONE

Kelly, who was raised in Syracuse and a suburb of Albany, the third child of a nurse and an education professor, fairly arrived on this earth the Queen Bee. “I distinctly remember being very young,” she recalls, “sixth grade maybe, and being at a party and hearing the mothers discuss the children. And the mothers said, ‘Well, it’s very clear who’s the leader in the group.’ And they were talking about me!” In high school, she took public speaking and found she got a rush from presenting in public. She felt bound for a career in journalism, but when she applied to Syracuse University’s communications program, it turned her down, so she majored in political science there instead. “Now they tell people I went there,” says Kelly, who delights in recalling past instances when people stupidly underestimated her. “I’m like, ‘Oh, I did not!’ ” She then went on to Albany Law School, after which she was $100,000 in the hole with student loans.

By age 33 she was married to a doctor (her first husband), was working at the prestigious law firm Jones Day, had paid back her loans, and was on her way to making partner (“And you can check me on that”) when she realized she wasn’t fulfilled. “I had this little voice in me saying, ‘I am more interesting than this. I am more interested than this.’ ” With the help of a friend, she cut a demo tape and started cold-calling local stations in the larger markets. She landed a freelance job at WJLA, the ABC affiliate in Washington. While WJLA was stalling in negotiating the full-time deal she wanted, she’d sent her tape to Fox News Washington-bureau chief Kim Hume, wife of Fox News anchorman Brit Hume. The couple became her champions. She told Brit that she believed in Fox News’s mission and that the mainstream media weren’t balanced. He passed her tape along to Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, who scooped her up to be a reporter. “I could have kept doing [law], and I think I was in what my sister-in-law calls my ‘zone of excellence,’ ” Kelly says, with characteristic self-assurance. “But I chose a different path, and I made a big financial sacrifice when I first started, and wound up getting into what she calls my ‘zone of genius.’ ”

“Genius,” admittedly, took some time. “This is me on day one,” she says, handing over her Fox identification card. In the photo, she looks like a nervous co-ed. “Picture that woman. I don’t want to say I was scared shitless, because I knew I could do it. But I also knew I wasn’t very good yet.” In her early reports, delivered from Washington to Hume, Kelly is stiff, as if doing an imitation of what a perfect news correspondent sounds like. (“Now watch the poise and confidence here,” she would joke on her show seven years later, airing her very first clip.) In 2006, thanks to her legal background, Hume put her on the Duke lacrosse-team rape case, sensing that the story wasn’t what it seemed.

Her reporting got the attention of two men who would change her life, personally and professionally. Brunt, who’d gone to Duke, developed a crush on this whip-smart looker. Through a mutual friend, he concocted a fake business meeting as an excuse to go to Washington and meet her. They clicked immediately. While they were falling in love, he told her, “By the way, if you don’t want children, you should tell me soon.” As it happened, Kelly had long believed that she didn’t want kids, but she had recently experienced an epiphany: “I’ll never forget being in my own bed and thinking to myself, Oh my God! It’s not that I don’t want children. It’s that I didn’t want to have children with my first husband.” Thirty-seven when she married Brunt, Kelly got right to work on that front.

Meanwhile, Ailes saw that he had a star on his hands—if only she weren’t so determined to be perfect. As she recalls, he called her into his office and said, “Go out there and make some mistakes…. And don’t be afraid of taking risks. You’re trying too hard. And I have news for you. You don’t need to be perfect. No one will like you if you are, by the way.” Kelly concluded that, for her, taking risks chiefly meant using humor at her own expense. “Or even humor at all,” she says, “telling a stupid joke and maybe they won’t find it funny. Which happens a lot, by the way.” An on-air colleague, whom she doesn’t name, told her that trying to be funny was too risky, and attempted to talk her out of it. Kelly listened to Ailes instead, and it unlocked her voice. It was their Up Close & Personal moment—without the romance and all the mushy liberal ideals.

The star-in-the-making was groomed by appearing weekly on The O’Reilly Factor, during which she and O’Reilly developed a bit of shtick: sassy daughter takes on cranky old Dad. (He would, and still does, call her “Miss Megyn” and has sometimes referred to her as an “anchorette.”) Over the years, she has challenged him on everything from the number of opportunities given to African-Americans to how to talk to women more respectfully: “You have a penchant for that term ‘Calm down’ [to women]…. It’s patronizing.” Her ammo has been simply to have facts at the ready. “I’ve told him many times on the air, ‘You’re arguing with your heart and not with your head.’ ” She was given her own daytime show, America Live, in 2010.

Defeating the male blowhard by being fully prepared became a Kelly specialty. The rest of her career ascent would be littered with the bruised bodies of guys who had it coming—all while she continued to have babies. In 2011, when right-wing radio host Mike Gallagher remarked on his show, in reference to Kelly’s maternity leave for her second child, that maternity leave was a “racket,” Kelly, upon her return, invited him on her show. “Maternity leave? It’s a ‘racket’? … What a moronic thing to say! … What is it about getting pregnant and carrying a baby nine months that you don’t think deserves a few months off so bonding and recovery can take place?”

Gallagher tried to double down. “Do men get maternity leave, Megyn?”

“Guess what, honey—they do. It’s called Family Medical Leave Act.”

Next up was Karl Rove, Republican strategist and Fox News’s chief political analyst. It was Election Night 2012, and the election desk at Fox News had reported that Ohio—and the presidency—had gone to Obama. But Rove, sitting at the desk with Kelly and co-anchor Bret Baier, knew better. He spat out a whole bunch of numbers about the Ohio vote he was hearing about—in this county and that—which he was confident would lead to a Romney victory. “Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better or is this real?” Kelly asked. The clip of this humiliating moment made the rounds; even Jon Stewart celebrated her moxie. Less than a year—and another baby—later, she was given her own show in prime time.

The hits kept coming. In May 2013, she gave the Megyn treatment to Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs and contributor Erick Erickson, head of RedState.com, after they’d bemoaned a report that in 40 percent of households a woman was the breadwinner. To Dobbs, it was a sign of the end of civilization; to Erickson, a perversion of the natural world’s order in which male animals are dominant and female animals are submissive.

“I’ll start with you, Erick,” she said. “What makes you dominant and me submissive, and who died and made you scientist in chief?! … I’ve got a list of studies here that say your science is wrong.” Erickson scrambled, while Dobbs, getting rattled, tried the patronizing approach. “Excuse me. Let me just finish what I’m saying, O Dominant One.” Sheryl Sandberg, who didn’t know her, immediately saw a woman who leaned in hard, and promptly invited her to Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit. “Megyn speaks truth to power,” says Sandberg, who has become a friend. “She’s tough, fair, and relentlessly brave.”

Today, Erickson admits, “She definitely got the better of me. It was a wake-up call. You’ve got to be more responsible about what you say. Particularly when you have a daughter and a wife.”

THE DONALD DUCKS

Trump probably didn’t imagine he’d be next. After all, in his mind, what beautiful woman didn’t want to go to bed with him, right? When I remark to Kelly and her husband that Trump sounded like a jilted suitor after she asked her now famous sexism question, they share a knowing look, and Kelly proceeds cautiously. In the past, she says, “he would send me press clippings about me that he would just sign ‘Donald Trump.’ And he called from time to time to compliment a segment. I didn’t know why he was doing that. And then when he announced that he was running for president, it became more clear. But I can’t be wooed. I was never going to love him, and I was never going to hate him.”

In preparation for moderating her first presidential debate, Fox News research assistants put together massive binders on the candidates, on everything they’d ever said on every topic. As she read Trump’s, a couple of themes began to emerge. The one that hadn’t been explored was his sexism. Knowing that if Hillary were to be the nominee she’d hit him with that issue, Kelly had her first question. “I wrote it. I researched each line item myself. It was interesting to me after the debate when people started fact-checking my question. My own reaction was ‘Bring it on.’ You think I’d go out there and ask a question like that at the first G.O.P. debate without making sure I was bulletproof on every single word?” She drafted and re-drafted it, and showed it to her fellow moderators, Chris Wallace and Bret Baier, whose initial reaction, Baier recalls, was “Wow, let’s think about this … there clearly was going to be pushback.”

Kelly almost didn’t get a chance to ask it. The morning of the debate, while doing debate prep, she got violently ill. But, she says, “I would have crawled over a pile of hot coals to make it to that debate. No one was going to be sitting in for me, reading my questions. And I can say with confidence that neither Bret nor Chris wanted to read my questions—for many reasons!” She did the debate with a blanket over her legs and a bucket to throw up in by her side.

The Kelly-Trump exchange made headlines worldwide, and Kelly, much to her alarm, had become the news. “I felt like Alice Through the Looking Glass,” she says. To casual viewers, it seemed an obvious win for Kelly. But Trump supporters unloaded a truckload of venom, reportedly sending her death threats, tweeting that she was a “c–t” and a “hag.” The candidate was intent on taking her down, with his top deputy re-tweeting, “gut her.” For the folks at Fox News, it wasn’t immediately obvious how to respond. Trump’s supporters made up a good chunk of the Fox News viewership, and Trump was a “friend” to a number of on-air personalities, who seemed terrified to lose his favor. Hannity, Geraldo Rivera, and Brian Kilmeade tweeted rather limp pleas for him to stick to the issues. A few days after the debate, Steve Doocy began an interview with Trump with the hopeful and slightly tragic words “Glad we’re friends again.” According to a report in New York magazine by Gabriel Sherman (author of the recent book about Fox News, The Loudest Voice in the Room), Ailes wavered in his support for his anchor. Kelly says this is “complete nonsense.”

“I talked to her on the phone every day,” says Ailes. “Whenever there is a crisis Megyn is a cool customer.” According to Kelly, “We were eye to eye on what we both wanted. Which was to move forward.” Immediately following the debate, her viewership climbed by 9 percent.

What with all the male bullies she’s put in their place, Kelly would be perfectly positioned to become a leader in women’s issues such as equal pay and reproductive rights. But Kelly, whose position on abortion, she says, is known only to her husband and herself, claims these issues actually divide women. “Why can’t there be an acknowledgment that, in some instances, women remove themselves from the workforce for a long time and when they come back of course they’re not going to get exactly equal pay?” she asks. “It’s like some of these things are anathema—if you say them, you get booted out of the feminist club…. Gloria Steinem doesn’t get to kick those other women out of the feminist club, or the female-empowerment club, because she says so!” Sensing herself getting uppity, she laughs and does a sassy snap across her face for emphasis.

In the smaller political arena within Fox News itself, Kelly, it seems, has taken the same, rather delicate tack in pursuing women’s empowerment: to fiercely pursue one’s needs while rejecting anything that sounds like lefty dogma. Her team is made up mainly of women, many of whom are pregnant or have just had a baby. “I’ve said to all of them, ‘If you feel overwhelmed, please come and talk to me and let’s try to find a solution.’ I don’t want all the young mothers to be driven off the show because they feel they have to choose between devotion to the show and devotion to their child.” According to a Fox News colleague, Happening Now host Jenna Lee, who has sought out Kelly’s advice on balancing children and work, “Megyn really owns who she is. When you see someone who really owns who they are, it inspires you to own who you are.”

In keeping with owning who she is, Kelly isn’t reticent about what she wants next: to do longer, more in-depth interviews, in the vein of Charlie Rose or Winfrey, which would be “less immersed in angry political exchanges.” She reports that some prime-time specials, featuring longer interviews, are coming down the pike at Fox News, but one senses that she’s already thinking one step ahead of this development, and restlessly pushing at the constraints. “Charlie Rose does it, and he does it very well. But that doesn’t mean nobody else can do it,” says Kelly. “I think that there’s a spiritual component to my personality that is completely unutilized in my current job.” Note to television executives everywhere.