Excl u s

i v e!
big-time poker
c o n f e s s i o n s o f a s h ow b i z
with
leo, ben & tobey !
gambling queen By molly bloom p . 78

special
issue!


The 20 th
Century’s Hollywood’s
greatest
adventuress next
wave!
(Not Another
Jackie Kennedy Story,
We Promise)

By sylvia jukes
m o r r i s p. 98

The 21 st
Century’s
greatest
Shailene
airport (Not New York’s
woodley
By
La Guardia, We Promise)

graham boynton Fresh Face,

p.68
Open Heart,
Bold Choices—A New
Kind of Stardom

plus:
23
more kids
turning the
movie business
on its ear
By krista smith p . 52
Photos by
miguel reveriego

“A moment of strength,
of romance, of glamour—of youth!”
{

—Joseph Conrad

michael kinsley on the thomas

J U LY 201 4
piketty craze p . 40

evgenia peretz on donna tartt ’s

‘ g o l d f i n c h’ backl ash p.44

ingrid sischy on
j e f f k o o n s and his
$177 million spl ash p . 8 6
 78

JULY 2014 No. 647 VANI T Y FAIR .COM

FEATURES
52 THE NEXT WAVE By K R IS TA SMI T H
Since The Descendants, Shailene Woodley has been
on Hollywood’s fast track—from the Divergent franchise
to this month’s The Fault in Our Stars—yet she remains
completely herself. Plus: 23 youngsters headed for fame
on their own terms. Photographs by Miguel Reveriego.

66 V.F. PORTRAIT: DAVID BOIES

& THEODORE OLSON By L IONE L B A R BE R
Two superlawyers bridged a political chasm to fght
California’s ban on same-sex marriage. A year after
their Supreme Court win, a book and HBO special
tell their story. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

98 68 THE NEW JET AGE By GR A H A M BO Y N T ON

A B O V E : Clare Boothe Luce on Majorca, of the coast of Spain, 1962.
B E L O W : Jef Koons on a Balloon Dog, in his studio, 1997.
76
As Dubai International Airport increases its capacity to
75 million passengers a year—making it the world’s busiest
international hub—three Gulf-state airlines are putting
glamour back in the skies. Photographs by Stephen Wilkes.
TO THE BANNER BORN Spotlight on Ralph Lauren,
the quintessentially American designer, as the Smithsonian
honors him. By Brian Williams. Photograph by Mark Seliger.

B OTTO M , BY EL L EN VO N UNW ERTH /TR UN K A RCHI VE . PH OTO I L L USTR ATI O N , TO P RI G HT, BY DA R ROW; FOR C RE DI TS, TURN TO PAGE 80
PH OTO GRA P HS : TO P L EF T, BY A L FR E D E I SE NSTA E DT/ TI ME & L I F E PI CT UR E S/G ET T Y I MAG ES , DI GI TA L CO L ORI ZATI ON BY LO RNA C L ARK ;
86
78 HER HOUSE OF CARDS By MOL LY BL OOM
In her 20s, the author ran Hollywood’s most exclusive poker
game, luring A-list names—Tobey, Ben, Leo—and their
millions to her table. In an adaptation from her memoir,
Bloom deals the dish on the biggest winners and losers.
Photo illustration by Darrow. Photograph by John Russo.

83 GoPRO, YOUNG MAN Spotlight on Nick Woodman,

surfer-dude-soon-to-turn-billionaire, thanks to his
GoPro mini video camera. By William Langewiesche.
Photograph by Jimmy Chin.

84 THE RIOT ACT Spotlight on Pussy Riot’s Nadya

Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina, determined to
bring down Vladimir Putin. By Masha Gessen. Photograph
by Mark Seliger.

86 JEFF KOONS IS BACK! By INGR ID SISC H Y

With the Whitney Museum unveiling a massive Jeff
Koons retrospective, it’s hard to remember how the artist’s
life unraveled in the 90s. But from the depths to the
heights, Koons knows only one way to create: high-risk.
Photographs by Annie Leibovitz.

95 A PERFORMANCE WITH LEGS Spotlight on

Diane Kruger, as her FX series, The Bridge, starts a second
season. By Matt Tyrnauer. Photograph by Norman Jean Roy.

96 VALLI GUYS Spotlight on Clint Eastwood’s movie of

Jersey Boys. By Krista Smith. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

10 VA NI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com CONTINUED ON PAGE 14 JU LY 2014

 116

JULY 2014 No. 647 VANI T Y FAIR .COM

CON TI NUED FROM PAGE 10

98 CLARE, IN LOVE AND WAR

By S Y LV I A JUK E S MOR R IS Clare Boothe Luce had
always
seemed unstoppable, winning literary fame and political
power. But, as an excerpt from volume two of her authorized
biography reveals, when Clare’s marriage to Time-Life
founder Henry Luce began to fall apart, in 1959, so did she.

109 ROMA CONQUEST Spotlight on Third Person’s Moran

Atias. By Tamasin Day-Lewis. Photograph by Jan Welters.

111 PURE DYNAMITE Spotlight on the James Brown biopic,

Get On Up. By David Kamp. Photograph by Gasper Tringale.

109
FANFAIR &
FAIRGROUND
A B O V E : Third Person star Moran Atias, in Los Angeles. 27 31 DAYS IN THE LIFE OF THE CULTURE
B E L O W : Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize–winning best-seller, The Goldfnch. The Greenwich Hotel’s lofty getaway. Hot Type. The best
plastic-surgery alternatives.

37 AROUND THE WORLD, ONE PARTY AT

44 A TIME Inside V.F.’s White House Correspondents’
Association dinner; Tribeca Film Festival party; and
N.Y.C. celebration for Lisa Robinson’s There Goes Gravity.

COLUMNS

PH OTO GRA P HS : TO P, BY J A N WE LTE RS ; BUST I ER BY GUE SS ; S HO RTS BY DSQ UA RE D2; E A R RI NGS BY CA RTIE R; B RACE LE T
40

BY GU CCI . BOTTO M, BY J O HN M A NN O. I L LUST RATI O N BY RI S KO . F OR DE TA I LS , GO TO VF.CO M/C RE DI TS

THE IMPROBABLE DREAM By MIC H A E L K INSL E Y
With everyone talking about Thomas Piketty’s Capital
in the Twenty-First Century—a 696-page treatise on income
inequality—it’s time to see how his ideas add up.

44 IT’S TARTT—BUT IS IT ART? By E V GE NI A P E R E T Z

A runaway best-seller and Pulitzer Prize winner, Donna
Tartt’s The Goldfinch is indisputably the novel of the year.
But some highest-brow critics are appalled by its success.

ET CETERA
20 EDITOR’S LETTER CIVIL RIGHTS AND CIVIL FLIGHTS
22 IN THE DETAILS JASON SEGEL
24 60 MINUTES POLL
115 ON THE COVER
116 PROUST QUESTIONNAIRE WILLEM DAFOE
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Editor GRAYDON CARTER

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18 VA NI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com JU LY 2014
 EDITOR’S LETTER
CIVIL RIGHTS and CIVIL FLIGHTS
I t’s a courtroom saga that restores
your faith in the American judi-
cial system: two of the country’s
fnest lawyers, epitomizing opposing phi-
losophies—David Boies, the supremely
accomplished trial lawyer and ardent
Democrat, and Theodore Olson, solici-
tor general under President George W.
Bush—forgoing partisanship in the name
of civil rights. Boies and Olson joined
forces in the legal battle to overturn
Proposition 8, California’s 2008 ban on
same-sex marriage—ultimately prevail-
ing last year in a landmark Supreme
Court case, Hollingsworth v. Perry. My
esteemed colleague Financial Times edi-
tor Lionel Barber pays homage to their
fght for marriage equality in this month’s V.F. Portrait, on page
66. The unlikely allies recently teamed up again to write an account of
the case, Redeeming the Dream: The Case for Marriage Equality.
They are also featured in a new HBO documentary, The Case
Against 8, directed by Ben Cotner and Ryan White. To put the col-
laboration of Boies and Olson into stark perspective, these were
the two men whose last appearance before the Supreme Court was
on opposite sides of the infamous Bush v. Gore decision, in 2000,
when the court awarded the presidency to Bush. Their common
fght—one that began decades ago with the eforts of countless oth-
ers—is, as Barber writes, “not a liberal or conservative issue” but “a
basic human-rights issue.” The fght is far from over, but thanks to
these two valiant advocates, we are one very signifcant step closer.
I
n the jet age of the 50s and 60s, before commercial air travel
became the cattle-car ordeal it is today, fying was fashionable.
Passengers dressed for transatlantic fights. Men wore suits and
ties. Women wore dresses and heels and carried hatboxes onto the
airplane. And as frequent fiers strode across the high-gloss traver-
tine foors of international air terminals, the assertive click-clack of
their bufed oxfords and high heels seemed a perfect complement
to the strains of Henry Mancini or André Kostelanetz that would
flter over the airport sound system.
Today, fashionable fying is back, a renaissance that has been
ushered in largely by the Gulf states, fush with petro-dollars and
keen to dominate this coveted high-end market. For his article
“The New Jet Age,” on page 68, Graham Boynton spent several
weeks on the prowl—and devoted one continuous, 24-hour stretch
to observing the ebb and flow of passengers moving through
the magnifcent Dubai International Airport. “There wasn’t one
period when it stopped pulsating with people,” he recalls. The
busiest hours at the airport, says photographer Stephen Wilkes,
who spent days on the assignment, “are between 11 p.m. and 3
a.m.” The temperature outside on one of those August days? One
hundred eleven degrees Fahrenheit. That is, until a gust of even
more scorching air overtook Wilkes and his crew, who soon real-
ized that they’d set up their equipment directly atop the terminal’s
main air-conditioning exhaust system.
20 VA NI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com
Overall, Boynton traveled upwards of
NIG EL PARRY
25,000 miles as he reported the article,
shuttling among New York, London, and
the Gulf. He took a shower 36,000 feet
over Germany. He spent half of one
Emirates-airline flight propping up the
curved, well-stocked cocktail bar during
the 131⁄2-hour haul between Dubai and
New York. On such trips, Boynton notes,
“one meets loads of interesting people,
as you do in bars in the city, only these
people are all real highfiers”—investment
bankers, international wheeler-dealers,
veteran diplomats. And, as Wilkes adds,
“singles fock to the bar in the business-
class area for strong drinks. They’re all
looking for that high-altitude hookup. The
bartender sees and hears all. And he told me things that left me pon-
dering the idea of a reality-TV series—set in the Emirates bar.”
I
t’s hard to think of a group that has burst onto the scene faster—or
with greater global impact—than the Russian protest-art collective
known as Pussy Riot. You sometimes hear them referred to in
shorthand as a punk-rock group—but they’re not. Better to think of
them as performance artists who have brought political theater—di-
rected mainly against Vladimir Putin and his increasingly repressive
and aggressive neo-Stalinist regime—to a high pitch of media-savviness.
Most of the collective’s members are anonymous, identifable by the
neon balaclavas they wear when engaged in brazen and courageous
acts of public protest. Two of them, Masha Alyokhina and Nadya
Tolokonnikova, became the group’s public face, and have paid dearly.
Two and a half years ago, Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova, then
aged 23 and 22, were arrested by Russian authorities for perform-
ing an anti-Putin “punk prayer” in a Moscow cathedral. They were
sentenced, after a Kafka-esque trial, to two years in Gulag-like penal
colonies. The history of the group, and a detailed account of the
trial and imprisonment of these two young women, has been haunt-
ingly told by V.F. contributor Masha Gessen in her book Words Will
Break Cement, published earlier this year. Alyokhina and Tolokon-
nikova were released from prison weeks before the Sochi Olympics—
part of Putin’s short-lived (but rather successful) goodwill campaign
to buy a respite from criticism during the Games, before returning to
business as usual by annexing Crimea. Not that Alyokhina or Tolo-
konnikova experienced much of that goodwill frsthand: they were
attacked and beaten in Sochi by Cossack thugs (captured on video),
in all likelihood with the Kremlin’s tacit or explicit approval. But
this has not deterred them in the least.
Pussy Riot is still in business, and as Masha Gessen explains in
her Spotlight “The Riot Act,” on page 84, Alyokhina and Tolokon-
nikova have taken the show on the road, now as prisoners’-rights
activists, to the United States. But they are not expatriates. Russia
is their home and where they belong—and it is where they are re-
turning. Vladimir Putin would love to be able to say that he doesn’t
have Pussy Riot to kick around any longer. But he does. More to
the point, they have him. —GR AY DON C A R T ER
JU LY 2014
 IN THE DETAILS

What You Should Know About

JASON SEGEL
A PA N O P LY O F E C C E N T R I C B I O G R A P H I C A L DATA R E : H O L LY WO O D ’ S FAVO R I T E F U N N Y G U Y

J
ason Segel is the afable Judd-
Apatow-comedy-troupe alum
who has gone on to headline
nine seasons of How I Met
Your Mother, reboot the Muppets,
and co-star with Cameron Diaz in
this July’s Sex Tape comedy. Despite
his Hollywood successes as a writer,
producer, and actor—and his dramatic
departure as David Foster Wallace in
the upcoming biopic The End of the
Tour—Segel seems to identify most
with the awkward, adolescent iteration
of himself that inspired his frst liter-
ary efort, Nightmares!: a young-adult
trilogy co-authored by Kirsten Miller,
the first installment of which arrives
in bookstores in September. Here, a
compendium of the 34-year-old’s noc-
turnal memories, everyday preferences,
and endearing peculiarities.
HE BEGINS each day with fve or six cups
of black coffee and only switches to
water once he starts feeling ill. WE LOVE YOU, MAN
Actor and author
HE IS right-handed when it comes to all activities except
eating. At the table, he mysteriously becomes a lefty. in Los Angeles.
HIS FAVORITE meal is steak, which he’s been eating less of
since becoming more health-conscious around his 30th birthday.
UNTIL THE age of 10, he wore a Superman cape tied around his neck
and covertly tucked underneath his clothes—just in case anything
went awry in his Pacifc Palisades, California, neighborhood.
AS A pre-teen, Segel had recurring nightmares during which he al-
ways fought Dracula inside the vampire’s house, becoming very fa-
miliar with his nocturnal nemesis’s foor plan: “I created this very
cushy living-room environment [in my mind] where I could hide
from Dracula and play video games.”
HE HAS no regrets about having worn a mustard-colored jacket and
purple pants to his Bar Mitzvah, in the early 90s, “when that was
totally acceptable to wear.”
HE IS in no rush to have any pets, especially after growing up with
two dogs and six cats.
EVER SINCE watching the Muppets on television as a child, Segel
has had a deep and abiding love for puppets. His frst was “an
housing his puppet collection—compris-
ing between 15 and 30 fgurines. “I used
to live in there,” Segel says of the house,
“and then I realized that it was incred-
ibly creepy to have visitors over, because
I just looked like a total weirdo.”
HIS BEST friend is Brian, a medical doc-
tor living in New Haven, Connecticut,
whom Segel has known since he was 13.
HIS FATHER recently retired as a corpo-
rate lawyer.
HE HAS two siblings, a brother named
Adam, who is a money manager, and a
sister named Alison, whom Segel calls
a “relentlessly hilarious writer.”
HE DID not warn his mother that he ap-
peared fully naked in the 2008 breakup
comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall,
which he wrote, before she saw the flm.
Her reaction: “She cried,” he recalls.
SHE THEN sent out a mass e-mail to fam-
ily members with the following warn-
ing: “I would like to inform you all that
Jason has chosen to do full-frontal nudity, however, it
Jason Segel,
is not gratuitous and is essential to the plot.”
HIS MOTHER has not needed to send out mass e-mail
warnings about his flms since.
HIS LIFELINE is an iPhone, which displays a Karl Kwasny illustration
from Segel’s forthcoming novel on the home screen.
WHEN IT comes to interior décor, Segel has “a real affinity for
things that are, by any account, an old man’s taste—a lot of dusty
brown and corduroy.”
HE RETIRED his D.V.R. a couple of years ago upon realizing that TV
prevented him from seeing classic flms: “I just got around to see-
ing Citizen Kane, which blew my mind, and Singin’ in the Rain.”
TO OFFICIATE a wedding on The Tonight Show in 2010 between
two fans, he became an ordained minister by completing a two-
minute Internet transaction.
HE PLAYS the piano, toys with a ukulele, and can teach himself a
song on the guitar if you give him two weeks’ notice. While he’s
never been in a band, he has performed onstage with Maroon 5
and the folk group the Swell Season.
HE DOES a lot of thinking between midnight and four a.m. and fg-
PH OTO GRA P H BY MI CHA E L MUL L ER /C PI SYN DI CAT I ON

old man named Walter,” which Segel recalls purchasing outside ures that he probably annoys his assistant most with furries of
Faneuil Hall, in Boston. random early-morning e-mails.
HIS NICKNAME in high school was “Dr. Dunk”—because he was a “lean, HE KEEPS in touch with Ted Walch, his high-school performing-arts in-
mean” basketball-playing machine. After inheriting his parents’ black structor at Harvard-Westlake, to whom Segel says he owes his career.
Jeep Grand Cherokee, he briefy consid- HE CARRIES a framed photo of the late
ered getting a “Dr. Dunk” vanity license
plate but settled for a custom-embroidered
HIS HIGH-SCHOOL Oscar-nominated actor Peter Sellers to
every flm set to remind himself of his
“Dr. Dunk” baseball hat instead. NICKNAME WAS acting inspiration—a man whose dual

“DR. DUNK.”
BORN AND raised in Los Angeles, he still ability to bring audiences to laughter
lives there and keeps a second home in and tears makes him indefinable in
town strictly for writing, working, and Segel’s book. —julie miller
22 VA NI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com JU LY 2014
 THE 60 MINUTES/ VANITY FAIR POLL

AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL

How would you feel

{
about an overweight
10 president? 2 @vf.com
SEE THE
IT HAS COMPLETE
. . . MORE NOTHING TO Could you be POLL
At the gym, LIKELY TO DO WITH attracted to RESULTS.
GETTING THE
APPEARANCE DOESN’T MATTER / 15%

HIT ON IT SENDS THE WRONG MESSAGE ABOUT HEALTH / 10%

PRESIDENT’S HEALTH COULD BE AT RISK / 9%
are you . . . someone who is
SOMEONE? JOB DONE
6% 64% out of shape?

. . . MORE
LIKELY TO
GET HIT ON?
15%
25%
9 3
If you knew
it would work and
remain secret,
what would you
change with plastic
NEITHER
IS LIKELY
77%
YES, POSSIBLE / 74%
NO, NOT POSSIBLE / 24%
P90X Which fitness
trend won’t last?

ZUMBA
STOMACH / 31%

E VE RE TT CO LL E CT IO N ( 9 ) ; BY A . W. E VA N S ( 7) , L IS E GAG NE ( 10) , F ROM P I XH OO K ( 5) , BY J O HN P RAT T (6), M. S WE E T (4), FRO M UNDE RWO O D

surgery? 8%

PHOTOGRAPHS © GERRY YARDY/AL AMY (1); FROM MARY EVANS/EMBASSY INTERNATIONAL PICTURES/UNIVERSAL PICTURES/RONALD GRANT/
NOSE / 9%
CHIN / 8%
BREASTS / 6%
CROSSFIT 8%
21%

Fat presidents?

A RCH IVE S ( 2 ) , BY F RE DE RI C CI ROU/ ZE N SHU I ( 8) , A L L F RO M GE T T Y I MAGE S. DI GI TA L CO L O RI ZAT I O N BY L ORNA CL ARK (2, 6, 9)

EYES / 6%
THIGHS / 5% Plastic surgery? YOGA SOULCYCLE 15%

Locker-room nudity?
We are a nation ALWAYS / 20%
YES, COMFORTABLE / 44% INTEND TO, BUT RARELY DO / 23%
of multitudes.
DON’T WORK OUT / 44%
8 NO, NOT COMFORTABLE / 54% 4
5 %
/8

NO
%

CH
11

Are you MU
%

T
TI
E/

How often do you

Y/3

comfortable with U
LIN

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CIP

INK
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nudity in the
DIS

TH on vacation?
EEL G

gym locker room?

N’ T
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DO
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IH

15%
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YES
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7 NOT EXERCISE, 84% 5

LIVE TO 80 / 33%
When you EXERCISE, If steroids were
see a trim person
LIVE TO 90 / 65% safe, would
in spandex juice-
cleansing, what 6 you allow them
in pro sports?
do you think?

Which would
you prefer? This poll was conducted on behalf of CBS News by Social Science Research Solutions
of Media, Pennsylvania, among a random sample of 1,015 adults nationwide, interviewed by
telephone April 9–13, 2014. Some low-percentage answer choices have been omitted.

24 VA NI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com JU LY 2014
 3 1 DAY S i n t h e L I F E o f t h e C U LT U R E JULY 2014

➸ T HE GREENWICH HO T EL’ S NE W PEN T HOUSE p. 27 MOCKINGBIRD MEMOIR p. 30 T HE DOC T OR IS IN p. 32 A ND MORE …

SK Y-HIGH
The inspiring talent of Belgian designer
Axel Vervoordt is on display inside this 6,800-square-
foot penthouse atop the Greenwich Hotel—owned
by Robert De Niro, Ira Drukier, and other partners—in
Tribeca, New York City. Vervoordt’s signature
palette of earthy tones, refined taste, and flair for
assembling a mélange of antiques and art make
the recently opened suite one of the most
desirable properties in town. Problem is: you’ll never
want to check out. (thegreenwichhotel.com)
—PUNCH HUT TON

The Greenwich Hotel’s “TriBeCa

Penthouse,” clockwise from top left: the
living room; the lower-level terrace;
the bathroom; the master bedroom; the
drawing room; the kids’ room.

JU LY 2 014 P H OTO G RA PHS BY DAVID PRINCE VAN IT Y FAI R 27

 Elliott Erwitt’s
California, 1955, from
Blow Me a Kiss
(Powerhouse), by
The
Alice Harris. Mockingbird
Sings
or 50 years,
Harper Lee,
author of To Kill
a Mockingbird—one
of the most influential
novels of the 20th
century for its depiction
of racism, provincialism,
and the American justice
system—has evaded
curiosity seekers. Had
the famously sharp-
tongued Lee a form
response to interview
requests, she has said, it
would be “Hell no.”
he traumatized heroine of Tom Rach- Curious (McSweeney’s) captures the dizzying absurdity In 2004, however, she
man’s ingeniously orchestrated novel The Rise & Fall of of contemporary America. Bruce Allen Murphy profles said yes to Marja
Great Powers (Dial) will travel hither and yon to solve the the Supreme Court’s dark lord, Scalia: A Court of One Mills’s request to
mystery of why a motley band of misfts abducted her (Simon & Schuster). One of the handsomest, most elu- become her neighbor in
from her home as a girl, only to sive creatures on earth and its frst The Mockingbird Next

PH OTO GRA P HS © E LL I OTT E RWITT/ MAGNUM PHOTOS ( CA LIFOR NI A, 195 5), BY JOH N MANNO (B O OK S)
heartlessly abandon her years lat- photographer get their close-up in Door (Penguin Press).
er. The sinister side of privilege, Matthew Gavin Frank’s marvel- The former Chicago
female friendship, and desire ous Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Tribune reporter relives
feeds Katie Crouch’s mesmeriz- Concerning the Giant Squid and the year and a half she
ing, torn-from-the-tabloids novel, Its First Photographer (Liveright). spent in Monroeville,
Abroad (Sarah Crichton). Brando Colorful Russian folklore infuses Alabama, riding shotgun
Skyhorse survives being raised by an audaciously dys- Josh Weil’s speculative novel, The Great Glass Sea with Lee, then 78, and
functional grandmother, mother, and fve stepdads, in (Grove). V.F. reporter-researcher Mike Sacks talks shop her sparky 93-year-old
his miraculous Take This Man (Simon & Schuster). John with top comedy writers in Poking a Dead Frog (Penguin). sister, Alice, through
Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge target inefective Renegade journalist Andrei Netto joins with Libyan reb- the Deep South, hitting
government as the catalyst for The Fourth Revolution: els in Bringing Down Gaddaf (Palgrave Macmillan). Ian exercise class and
The Global Race to Reinvent the State (Penguin Press). A Falloon and James Mann’s The Art of Ducati (Motor- McDonald’s for coffee,
screwball author vanishes in Alessandro Baricco’s high- books) is a masterwork of Italian motorcycle history. as well as conversing
minded literary mystery novel Mr. Gwyn (McSweeney’s), Novel debuts: Stan Parish transports readers Down about the effect To Kill a
translated by Ann Goldstein. Jeffery Renard Allen’s the Shore (Viking); Lauren Owen sinks her teeth into Mockingbird had on
Song of the Shank (Graywolf) powerfully evokes the life Victorian London’s gothic vein in The Quick (Random their lives, Lee’s
of the 19th-century slave and enigmatic House); Tiphanie Yanique’s Land of Love and Drowning childhood chum Truman
musical savant, Blind Tom. (Riverhead) is a feat of tropical magical realism; Lisa Capote, and whether
From sea to sea, essayist Howorth’s Flying Shoes (Bloomsbury) is the author will write
Sean Wilsey’s haunted by the unsolved murder again. More important
More of her nine-year-old stepbroth- than these answers,
er; and journalist Michael however, is the voice
Hastings’s novel, The Last of Lee
Magazine (Blue Rider), will be herself—
published a year after his death. and her
The storied tradition of the Soviet writer- message,
dissident took a dramatic turn with Boris which
Pasternak and Doctor Zhivago; in The Zhivago we still
Afair (Pantheon), Peter Finn and Petra Couvée need to
reveal that the C.I.A. (which knows the power of a hear.
great story) was secretly behind its publication and —E.S.
dissemination in Russia. Ahhh … — e l i s s a s ch a ppe l l
in short
Dave Eggers sticks to dialogue in Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? (Knopf/McSweeney’s).
Elizabeth Mitchell raises Liberty’s Torch (Atlantic Monthly Press). Sarah Payne Stuart grows up Wasp in Perfectly Miserable: Guilt, God and Real Estate in a Small Town
(Riverhead). Laurence Gonzales reconstructs the crash of Flight 232 (Norton). ABCDCS: David Collins Studio (Assouline) catalogues his influences. Lee Grant battles
the blacklist in I Said Yes to Everything (Blue Rider). J. K. Rowling, under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, spins The Silkworm (Little, Brown). The late C. David Heymann’s Joe
and Marilyn (Atria/Emily Bestler) hits a homer. Florence Muller styles Dior: The Legendary Images (Rizzoli). Megan Abbott spreads The Fever (Little, Brown).
Jojo Moyes entertains in One Plus One (Pamela Dorman).

30 VA NI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com JU LY 2014
 Dr. Amy
Wechsler
he best quick fix is
still Botox. It can open up one’s eyes
and give a rested, relaxed look within
days. Thermage is an excellent, non-invasive skin
tightener in lieu of plastic surgery. There’s also
Voluma, a hyaluronic-acid filler that lifts as it fills
and re-volumizes cheeks, giving an instantly
more youthful appearance. I like fragrance-free,
hypoallergenic Cetaphil lotion following in-office
procedures, since the skin is more sensitive,
as well as Chanel Hydra Beauty Sérum, which
is deeply hydrating and also offers antioxidant
protection. (dramywechsler.com)
Dr. Macrene
Alexiades-Armenakas
he best treatment option rivaling
plastic surgery today is the ePrime,
a fractional radio-frequency device, which has been shown
to yield one-third the result of a lower face-lift. The device employs
hair-like needles that are inserted directly into the deeper layer of skin
and that release the radio-frequency energy, well known to induce
skin tightening. It is currently the best option for those
who wish to tighten and turn back time naturally,
without the scars and potential for alteration
of their natural appearance that may occur with
surgical face-lifting. For wound healing, I would
recommend Lancôme Absolue L’Extrait, as
it contains rose native-cell factors. (nyderm.org)

Dr. David Colbert Dr. Ava

lthera, the ultrasound non-surgical
Shamban
face-lift, is a very efficient and deploy a
natural way to tighten and lift facial combination of
and neck muscles. There is no downtime, and injectables,
results can be dramatic. It is more popular such as Voluma,
than Botox. I recommend applying ultra-rich and lasers and
Colbert M.D. Heal & Soothe Night cream peels. These
with shea butter afterward to minimize treatments address
soreness. (colbertmd.com) The Doctor Is In signs of aging, from
volume loss in the
The best procedures, treatments, deepest layers of
and healing products the skin to the fine
lines, wrinkles, and
in lieu of plastic surgery.
brown spots that
Experts weigh in . . . appear in the top
layers. I recommend
SOS Post-Procedure
Recovery Kit
by Avène.
(avamd.com)

Dr. Gervaise Gerstner Dr. Fredric Brandt

raxel is the gold otox and
standard for fillers are
re-surfacing one’s the best
skin. If you have a face-lift options in lieu of
without addressing the texture, surgery because you
the surgeon is cutting and re-draping can actually lift the face,
“dirty” skin; Fraxel will address both re-contour, and restore volume with minimal
the texture and tightness prior to opting to no recovery time. When I administer
PH OTO GRA P H BY PE TE K A RI CI / GE TT Y I MAGES
( R X) ; F OR DETA I L S, GO TO V F.CO M /CR E DI TS

for surgery. The Fraxel Dual Laser my Can-Ulift procedure, a combination of

1550/1927 is best: the 1550 fillers, I recommend an Arnica cream for
wavelength targets wrinkles, scars, and bruising and Dr. Brandt Skincare BB cream
pores; the 1927 wavelength targets or CC glow to conceal any redness or

{
brown spots. The best healing product irritation and to protect the
post-Fraxel is SkinMedica TNS Essential skin from the sun. After @vf.com
Serum and/or SkinMedica TNS a treatment, skin can FO R MO R E
D O CTO RS ’ T IP S ,
Recovery Complex. (gerstnermd.com) be at its most sensitive. VI SIT VF. C O M/
(drfredricbrandt.com) B E AUT Y.

32 VA NI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com JU LY 2014
 A R O U N D t h e WO R L D, O N E PA RT Y a t a T I M E JULY 2014

PARTY CAPITAL
Following the White
House Correspondents’ Members of
Association Dinner, the Italian
Questlove Vanity Fair and Bloomberg guard.
and Attorney held a swanky soirée
General at the residence of
Eric Holder the Italian ambassador in
Sofía
Washington, D.C. Vergara

Ronan
Farrow
and
Christine
Lagarde

Joe
Scarborough
Tim Tebow, and Arianna
Robin Richard Sherman, Huffington
Wright Tony Romo, and
Eric Stonestreet

Lindsey
Vonn

Keith
Lieberthal
Nancy and Julianna
Pelosi Margulies Sheherazade
Goldsmith
Tony and Alfonso
PH OTO GRA P HS BY J UST I N BI S HO P ( PE LO SI , Q UEST L OVE , T EB OW,

Cuarón
WI R E IM AGE ( B I SO GN I E RO ) , HA N NA H TH OM SO N ( A L L OT HE RS )

Goldwyn
VE RGA RA , VO N N, WI N KL EVOS S ), DI MI T RI O S KA MB O URI S /

Italian
ambassador
Claudio
Bisogniero
and Governor
Frank Rich Tyler and Chris Christie
and Maureen Cameron
Dowd Winklevoss
Steve
McQueen
JU LY 2 014 VAN IT Y FAIR 37
 Questlove,
Lisa Robinson, John
and John Clive Sykes,
McEnroe Davis Irving Tony Debbie
Azoff, Bennett Harry
and Tom
Toni
Freston
Morrison

Annie
Leibovitz
MUSICAL CHAIRS and Lisa
Robinson

Graydon Carter and Ed Burns and

David Fran Lebowitz co-hosted a book Jill Abramson,
Christy
Johansen party in honor of Lisa Robinson and Michael K. Williams,
Turlington
and Richard and Fran Lebowitz
her new memoir, There Goes
Robinson
Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll, at the
Monkey Bar, in N.Y.C.

Christine
Lake Baranski
Bell

PH OTO GRA P HS BY H ANNAH T HO MSO N

Tom
Freston,
Allen
Grubman,
and Ron
Meyer
Harvey
Weinstein, Jane Eric
Ron Rosenthal, and Schmidt
Howard Robert De Niro
COURT ORDER
Ronald Perelman, Robert De Niro,
and Graydon Carter hosted a confluence
of writers, movie stars, politicians,
musicians, and moguls in the rotunda of
the State Supreme Courthouse in
N.Y.C. in celebration of the 13th annual
Tribeca Film Festival.

Ronald Perelman
and Ray Kelly

Griffin
Dunne

Fran Lebowitz,
Bill de Blasio, and
Hannah
Chirlane McCray
Stoudemire,
Governor David Ajala,
Andrew and Jada
38 VA NI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com Cuomo Stoudemire
 ‘
W
MICHAEL KINSLEY

hen a govern­
ment taxes a certain level of income or in­
heritance at a rate of 70 or 80 percent, the pri­
mary goal is obviously not to raise additional
revenue᠁ It is rather to put an end to such
incomes and large estates, which lawmakers
have for one reason or another come to regard
as socially unacceptable and economically un­
productive.”
Reading Thomas Piketty’s famous book,
Capital in the Twenty-First Century, after all
the fuss about it, is a bit of a shock. It’s both
much more radical and much less radical
than its reputation. The above quotation,
one of many I could have chosen, makes it
sound as if he favors the expropriation
through high taxes on all large fortunes.
ENOUGH ALRE ADY I can’t believe that many of his en­
In politics, thusiasts, some of whom have actu­
“re-distribution” is ally read the book, agree with that.
a toxic word. I was anticipating a left­wing rant,
But what if . . . ?
but Piketty’s tone is modest and po­
lite—not at all what you expect from a
rock­star French intellectual. He modestly
describes his own brainstorm—a 10 percent
global tax on capital—as “a utopian idea.”
He is always qualifying his pronouncements

THE
with the caveat that he could be completely
wrong. (Admittedly, there may be some Gal­
lic condescension lurking in passages like
the one where he concedes that “there are a

IMPROBABLE
thousand and one ways to do social science,”
though he happens to prefer using data.)
Piketty and his book remind me of my fa­

DREAM
vorite economist, the 19th­century American
PH OTO GRA P H BY H. A RM STRO NG ROB E RTS/ © CL A S SI CSTO CK /

Henry George, and his best­selling book, Prog-

ress and Poverty (1879). Both men’s books of­
fer a comprehensive explanation of the world,
A L A MY, DI GI TA L COL O RI Z ATI O N BY L O RN A CL A R K

in particular the problem of poverty. Both men

Amid rising concern about income inequality,
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century tives
has become an unlikely best-seller—and its
French author an economic rock star. Is his proposal without giving up the benefts of capitalism.
for wealth re-distribution too radical, or not
radical enough? Let’s do the math . . .
40 VA NIT Y FA IR www.vanityfair.com
acknowledge the importance of market incen­
and entrepreneurship and the evils of pro­
tectionism and all of that good conservative
stuf, even as they rail against the plutocrats.
Both think we can end or reduce inequality
And both see the answer in a new tax on capi­
tal. Henry George advocated a land tax that
would supposedly eliminate the need for any
JU LY 2014
 KINSLEY
other revenue source. That’s why members of
his briefy infuential movement were called
“single-taxers.” There are still a few of them
around.
Piketty expands that notion to a global tax
on all assets, not just land. It would start at
0.1 percent and top out at 10 percent on as-
sets over several hundred million dollars. He
notes correctly that even the growing income-
inequality figures we see today are wild un-
derestimates of the problem. Capital—that is,
wealth—is larger and even more concentrated
EVEN THE GROWING INCOME-INEQUALITY
FIGURES WE SEE TODAY ARE WILD
UNDERESTIMATES OF
THE PROBLEM.
than annual income is, and most of it grows
completely untaxed, year after year, because
you don’t pay taxes on an investment until you
sell it, which the very richest people never need
to do. They live of the interest.
Growing fnancial inequality can be seen
as two separate problems: “The rich get
rich and the poor get poorer,” to quote the
famous song. Or it can be seen as only one
problem, either because less for me means
more for you or because you think “the rich
get rich” is not a problem at all. In fact, it’s
what American-style capitalism, which has
served most of us pretty well, is supposed to
be all about. Piketty doesn’t buy it. He sees
a dynamic in which the return on capital ex-
ceeds the rate of economic growth as an in-
evitable part of capitalism, one that means the
poor can never catch up.
S
o, what of Piketty’s idea of taxing the
world’s biggest fortunes 10 percent
every year? It is easy to be in favor of
something if it’s completely impossible to
achieve—to dream the impossible dream costs
you nothing. Your mettle is tested when a goal
is almost impossible. Which category—almost
impossible or completely impossible—does
Piketty’s Utopian idea fall into?
From the remarkable reaction in this coun-
try to Piketty’s fairly dense book of translated
French philosophy, it is evident that many
people believe that a “reset” in the distribution
of income or wealth would be no bad thing.
Even more people, who have never heard of
Piketty (because they’ve been trapped in an
elevator for the past few months), believe that
inequality has widened too much. They’re
right, but what to do? At one point Piketty says
that more government services for all, paid for
by taxing the rich, is in efect re-distribution,
but let’s think of re-distribution, for now, as
42 VA NI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com
a matter of taking cash from your pocket and
putting it in mine (or, of course, vice versa).
Would-be populist politicians encourage
people to believe that any re-distribution of
income to make the economy fairer would
put them on the receiving end. President
Obama says he will make fnancial inequality
his primary domestic focus for the rest of his
term. But through two election campaigns
Obama insisted that, concerned as he was
about growing inequality, he would never
raise the taxes of anyone making less than
$200,000 (single) or $250,000 (married
couple). The so-called Bufett Rule, named
after the genial multi-billionaire who noted
that he pays a lower tax rate than his secre-
tary, would have raised taxes on anyone mak-
ing more than a million dollars a year, if it had
passed Congress, which it didn’t.
I’m all for raising taxes on people mak-
ing $250,000 or $1 million. But the median
household income in this country is about
$50,000. You can’t achieve serious income re-
distribution if you exempt anyone making less
than $250,000 or $1 million. One percent?
Forget it. Forget 20 percent (which would be
all households above about $100,000). You’re
not serious about income re-distribution unless
you’re prepared to raise taxes on incomes down
to somewhere near the $50,000 (per house-
hold) national median. Any higher cutof and
you’re re-distributing from the rich to the above
average and even the merely afuent, which is a
dubious accomplishment for economic justice.
(Arianna agrees with me about this. “Dar-
ling,” she didn’t say in an exclusive interview
with Vanity Fair, “I just adore paying taxes.
Give me all your taxes and I will pay them.
Who said, ‘Taxes are the price we pay for civi-
lization’? Perhaps I said it. No? Then it must
be one of the ancient Greeks, who were so
wise. Well, who is this Oliver Wendell Holmes
person? Do I know him? Where does he work
out? Ring him up and ofer him a blog.”)
L
et’s forget about the entire world and
just do some back-of-the-envelope cal-
culations on what the Piketty tax would
look like in the United States. And I begin this
exercise with no idea how it will come out.
A 10 percent tax on all capital is essentially
slow-motion expropriation, since the average
investor makes less than 10 percent on his or
her investments. Suppose—with extreme opti-
mism—that the average investor earns income
of 5 percent a year, after inflation; if that’s
the case, then even a 1 percent tax on capital
amounts to a 20 percent tax on income. This
is on top of all the taxes we now have, including
the income tax.
Using Census Bureau figures (which di-
vide the population into ffths based on in-
come, then give you data for the top 5 percent
as a bonus), you can play what-if games. In
1970, the average household income of the
poorest fifth of American households was
$10,512 (in 2012 dollars). The income of the
most afuent ffth was $114,421. The income
of the best-of 5 percent was $175,624. The
equivalent figures for 2012 were $11,490,
$181,905, and $318,052. The poorest ffth, as
you can see, has barely budged. The most af-
fuent ffth has gained 60 percent.
Suppose that you are unpersuaded by assur-
ances that many of the rich are perfectly nice
people and you still have it in for the 1 percent.
Suppose you decide that you are going to really
nail them and take away their entire incomes.
That would be about $1.5 million each. Then
you’re going to transfer all the money in equal
amounts to everyone else in the economy—the
99 percent. How much money would each
household in the 99 percent get?
The answer is: about $15,000. That’s
enough to more than double the incomes of
those at the bottom of the heap. We might de-
cide to target the money at people who need it
more—say, the 47 percent of Americans who,
according to Mitt Romney in the last election,
are wards of the government anyway. We could
give each of them $32,000. If we focus on the
real poor—the bottom 20 percent of income
distribution—we could give each household
$75,000.
And suppose we don’t want to destroy the
afuent classes (which we at Vanity Fair cer-
tainly do not want) and therefore propose a
mere 10-percent-of-income surcharge on the
top 20 percent of family incomes, to be spread
among the bottom 40 percent (households
with incomes up to about $40,000). Answer (I
think)? About $4,000 per household.
This is beginning to sound sort of reason-
able, both in its demands on people at the top
and its generosity to those on the bottom. After
all, the mean income of the top ffth back in
1970 was 11 times that of the bottom ffth. To-
day it is more like 16 times as much. To restore
that ratio to where it was in 1970 would require
… lemme see here … carry the seven … oh
hell. It would require a lot. Not, I suppose, an
impossible amount. But improbable for sure. �
FROM THE ARCHIVE
For these related stories, visit VF.COM/ARCHIVE
• The 1 percent vs. the rest of us
(Joseph E. Stiglitz, May 2011)
• American-style capitalism in twilight?
(Joseph E. Stiglitz, July 2009)
JU LY 2014
 BOOKS

BIRD IN HAND
Clockwise from far
left: The Goldfnch, 1654,
by Carel Fabritius;
Donna Tartt in New York,
April 2013; Tartt’s novel
The Goldfnch.

IT’S TARTT—
BUT IS IT ART?
No one denies that Donna Tartt has written the “It novel” of the year, a runaway

H
best-seller that won her the Pulitzer Prize. But some of the self-appointed high priests
of literary criticism—at The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books,

Ô
and The Paris Review—are deeply dismayed by The Goldfinch and its success

By E V G E N I A P E R E T Z
PH OTO GRA P HS : CL O CK WI SE F RO M L EF T, BY MA RCO SE CCH I/ GE TT Y
I MAG ES , © BE OW ULF SHE E HA N /COR B I S, BY J O HN MA N NO

ave you read The Goldfnch 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 Goldfnch came out, last fall, recipients of advance cop-
ies promptly showed of 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 trafc 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 mil-
lion 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 fction, the judges of which praised it as “a book that
44 VA NI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com JU LY 2014
 BOOKS
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 vio-
lently turned upside down when, on a trip to
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a terror-
ist bomb goes of, killing his mother, among
other bystanders. At the behest of a dying old
man, he makes of with a painting—the 1654
Carel Fabritius masterpiece, The Goldfinch.
For the next 14 years and 700 pages, the paint-
ing becomes both his burden and the only
connection to his lost mother, while he’s fung
from New York to Las Vegas to Amsterdam,
encountering an array of eccentric characters,
from the hard-living but soulful Russian teen-
ager Boris to the cultured and kindly furniture
restorer Hobie, who becomes a stand-in father,
to the mysterious, waif-like Pippa, plus assort-
ed 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 seam-
lessly she can combine the immediate and
tactile with more wide-angled concerns.” Ac-
cording to best-selling phenomenon Stephen
King, who reviewed it for The New York Times
Book Review, “ ‘The Goldfnch’ is a rarity that
“TARTT CREATED
A SERIOUS NOVEL...
AND MADE IT INTO A CULTURAL
PHENOMENON,Ó SAYS LEON WIESELTIER.
comes along perhaps half a dozen times per
decade, a smartly written literary novel that
connects with the heart as well as the mind.”
Reading Like a Critic
B
ut, in the literary world, there are
those who profess to be higher brows
still than The New York Times—the
secret rooms behind the frst inner sanctum,
consisting, in part, of The New Yorker, The
New York Review of Books, and The Paris Re-
view, three institutions that are considered, at
least among their readers, the last bastions of
true discernment in a world where book sales
46 VA NI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com
are king and real book reviewing has all but
vanished. The Goldfnch a “rapturous” sym-
phony? 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 stufed
with relentless, far-fetched plotting; cloying
stock characters; and an overwrought mes-
sage tacked on at the end as a plea for serious-
ness. “Tartt’s consoling message, blared in the
book’s fnal pages, is that what will survive of
us is great art, but this seems an anxious com-
pensation, as if Tartt were unconsciously ac-
knowledging that the 2013 ‘Goldfnch’ might
not survive the way the 1654 ‘Goldfinch’
has.” Days after she was awarded the Pulitzer,
Wood told Vanity Fair, “I think that the rap-
ture with which this novel has been received is
further proof of the infantilization of our liter-
ary culture: a world in which adults go around
reading Harry Potter.”
In The New York Review of Books, novel-
ist 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 descrip-
tion 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 bafing
turns of phrase.” “Reading The Goldfnch,”
Prose concluded, “I found myself wondering,
‘Doesn’t anyone care how something is writ-
ten 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 dis-
guise the fact that The Goldfnch is a turkey.”
“A book like The Goldfnch 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 ‘liter-
ary’ gentility.” Who cares that Kakutani or
King gave it the stamp of approval: “Nowa-
days, even The New York Times Book Re-
view is afraid to say when a popular book is
crap,” Stein says.
No novel gets uniformly enthusiastic re-
views, but the polarized responses to The Gold-
fnch lead to the long-debated questions: What
makes a work literature, and who gets to decide?
The questions are as old as fction itself.
The history of literature is flled 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 superf-
cial novelists … “We are aware that this def-
nition confnes 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 ofence against hu-
manity to place Mr. Dickens among the great-
est novelists. He has added nothing to our
understanding of human character.” Many
future ofenses against humanity would follow:
“It isn’t worth any adult reader’s atten-
tion,” The New York Times pronounced con-
cerning 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 Satur-
day Review of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great
Gatsby, while the New York Herald Tribune
declared it “a book of the season only.”
T
hat said, for all the snooty pans of
books now considered classics, there
have been, conversely, plenty of au-
thors who were once revered as literary mira-
cles 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 Ameri-
can 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. Har-
old Bloom, the most fnicky of fnicky literary
critics, went into a tizzy, calling the founda-
tion’s decision to give the award to King “an-
other low in the process of dumbing down our
JU LY 2014
 BOOKS
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 gar-
bage: James Patterson. “I don’t like him,” King
said after accepting a lifetime-achievement
award from the Canadian Booksellers As-
sociation in 2007. “I don’t respect his books,
because every one is the same.” To which Pat-
terson 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
I CLICHÉS—
n 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 be-
came a call to arms for three literary lions:
Norman Mailer, John Updike, and John Ir-
ving. As the English newspaper The Guard-
ian 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 entertain-
ment, not literature, even literature in a mod-
est 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
Tartt in Paris, 1993,
her breakout debut
with The Secret
48 VA NI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com
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
“A BOOK LIKE THE GOLDFINCH
DOESN’T UNDO ANY
IT DEALS IN THEM,” SAYS
THE PARIS REVIEW’S LORIN STEIN.
tantrum,” he said. “A Man in Full panicked
[Irving] the same way it frightened John Up-
dike and Norman. Frightened them. Panicked
them.” Updike and Mailer were “two old piles
of bones.” As for Irving, “Irving is a great ad-
mirer 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
HOMICIDIUM, something that almost
SHE WROTE never happens: she
has created a serious
the year after novel—whether you
like the book or not, it
History. 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 difcul-
ties.” Curtis Sittenfeld, the best-selling and
acclaimed author of Prep and American Wife,
similarly observes that critics derive “a satisfac-
tion in knocking a book of 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, theo-
rizes that Wood’s review may have been a re-
sponse 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 ft. 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 Goldfnch. But not many people read that
book. The world doesn’t think what she’s
doing is as worthy as what Tartt is doing.”
F
rom the beginning, Tartt’s work con-
fused critics. When The Secret His-
tory, 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 writ-
ers, 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 Gross-
man, 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 fction. 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 com-
pelling.” Jay McInerney, who’d had a splashy
debut similar to Tartt’s a few years earlier with
PH OTO GRA P H © A DI N E SAGA LY N
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
JU LY 2014
 BOOKS
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 fction
should be considered literature. “The narra-
tive thread is one you just can’t gather up fast
enough,” he explains.
How Fiction Works
‘T
here seems to be universal agreement
that the book is a ‘good read,’ ” says
Wood. “But you can be a good sto-
ryteller, which in some ways Tartt clearly is,
and still not be a serious storyteller—where,
of course, ‘serious’ does not mean the exclu-
sion of the comic, or the joyful, or the excit-
ing. 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 pos-
CRITICS DERIVE “A SATISFACTION IN
KNOCKING A BOOK
OFF ITS PEDESTAL,”
SAYS AUTHOR CURTIS SITTENFELD.
sible 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 fc-
tion 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 ed-
its, among others, Jonathan Franzen, Jefrey
50 VA NI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com
Eugenides, Marilynne Robinson, Michael
Cunningham, and Lydia Davis.) Determin-
ing what’s serious literature isn’t a science,
says Galassi, who hasn’t yet read The Gold-
finch. 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 re-
ality 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 work-
ing—doesn’t have the critical language you
need to praise a book like The Goldfnch.
The kinds of things that the book does par-
ticularly 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 simplifed 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 fnds it sad and preposterous. “This is
something peculiar to fction: imagine a lit-
erary world in which most people didn’t
care how a poem was written!” (Tartt was
not available to comment, but Jay Mc-
Inerney says she doesn’t read reviews, and
isn’t “losing any sleep” over the negative ones.)
Wieseltier has come to a rather more ex-
pansive defnition 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 Goldfnch 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.”
I
ndeed, 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 can-
not, say the stalwarts. Francine Prose, who
took on the high-school canon—Maya An-
gelou, Harper Lee, Ray Bradbury—in a con-
troversial Harper’s essay, “I Know Why the
Caged Bird Cannot Read,” argued that hold-
ing up weak books as examples of excellence
promotes mediocrity and turns young readers
of forever. With The Goldfnch she felt duty-
bound in the same way. “Everyone was say-
ing 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 Gold-
fnch 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 Gold- @vf.com
T H E B E ST BAD
finch standing in the R EV IEW S OF
way. “What worries GR E AT B O O KS .
me is that people who GO TO V F.C O M/
JU LY2 0 14 .
read only one or two
books a year will plunk down their money for
The Goldfnch, 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, fction—realistic fction, 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 fght that
will be settled only on some new version of
the Kindle, yet to be designed. �
FROM THE ARCHIVE
For these related stories, visit VF.COM/ARCHIVE
• Donna Tartt’s The Secret History
(James Kaplan, September 1992)
•A portrait of Donna Tartt
(David Gilbert, November 2013)
• The art of publishing The Art of Fielding
(Keith Gessen, October 2011)
JU LY 2014
 Shailene Woodley belongs to a new breed of
Hollywood star for whom the only
sane reaction to 24-7 scrutiny is being completely
themselves. With Woodley carrying this
month’s much-anticipated The Fault in Our Stars
and filming the second Divergent movie,
KRISTA SMITH learns how she deals
(George Clooney helps), while MIGUEL REVERIEGO
photographs her and a posse of her peers

The
52
NEXT
VA NI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com JU LY 2014
 SHAILENE WOODLEY
Hometown: Simi Valley, California. Age: 22.
Up next: The Fault in Our Stars, with
Ansel Elgort. Favorite sneakers: Vibram FiveFingers.
Favorite movie to watch with
parents: “Y Tu Mamá También or FernGully.”
Favorite jeans: Overalls.
Last TV binge watch: Top Chef.
F OR C RE DI TS, TU RN TO PAGE 113

WAVE JU LY 2 014
ST Y L E D BY JESSICA DIEHL 53
 I
f you ever lose your way
in the hills above Los Angeles, or elsewhere, you’ll want Shailene
Woodley by your side. “See all of that beautiful stuf?” the 22-year-
old actress says, pointing at a patch of green vegetation just of the
hiking trail in Fryman Canyon Park. “It’s called miner’s lettuce. If
you’re ever stranded in the wild, you can eat all of that.”
Dressed in a white T-shirt and high-waisted skinny jeans, with a
cell phone tucked into her back pocket, Woodley would look like
any other millennial were it not for her perfectly lithe fgure, her
increasingly famous face, and, perhaps, her choice of water con-
tainer. In lieu of a designer bottle, Woodley clutches a glass Mason
jar. She stops to admire the vistas and picks up bits of trash left
behind by other hikers—a plastic cap, a wrapper—and squeezes
them into the pockets of her jeans.
Woodley isn’t your average twentysomething starlet. She’s part
of a new breed, epitomized by Jennifer Lawrence, who pride them-
selves on, well, being themselves. But whereas Lawrence is the en-
dearingly clumsy southern gal, Woodley is like a forest sprite who
might be doing something more wholesome with her life if flmmak-
ers weren’t so eager to give her one starring role after another.
Hollywood was built on the backs of young actresses, from Shir-
ley Temple to Judy Garland to Elizabeth Taylor and beyond, but
today’s generation has to contend with a media environment that
is far more complicated—and precarious—than the ones the studio
chiefs of the 20th century manipulated for their own purposes. In
an era when any false move can be broadcast by one fan to millions
of others in the blink of an eye, authenticity isn’t just a pose—it’s a
requirement.
Like Lawrence, whose frst two Hunger Games movies have
grossed a combined $800 million, Woodley has her own post-
apocalyptic  young-adult franchise, Divergent, based on the best-
selling series of novels by the 25-year-old writer Veronica Roth.
The first installment, which came out in March, has already
54 VA NI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com
earned $145 million and will spin of three more. This month,
Woodley will carry another much-anticipated flm, The Fault in
Our StarsÑbased on John Green’s beloved young-adult novel,
which has been on the New York Times best-seller list for more
than 120 weeks—into cineplexes worldwide. The preview is the
most-liked trailer in the history of YouTube.
“Shai,” as she is called by her friends and family, grew up in
Simi Valley, California (home of the Ronald Reagan Presidential
Library), and started acting at around age fve. “But it took a long
time,” she remembers. “I had 500 nos before I had one yes—and it
was a Honda commercial.” She went on to star in about 40 com-
mercials before landing her frst lead role, in the ABC Family televi-
sion series The Secret Life of the American Teenager, in 2008. (In the
meantime, Woodley was diagnosed with scoliosis. “I wore a back
brace 18 hours a day for two years straight,” she says.)
An even bigger break came when, after an exhaustive search, di-
rector Alexander Payne cast her as George Clooney’s daughter in
the Oscar-winning The Descendants. The part earned Woodley a
Film Independent Spirit Award and a Golden Globe nomination
for best supporting actress. At frst, Woodley wasn’t sure she was
ready for her newfound success and mused aloud about quitting
acting to become an herbalist, exploring her interest in medicinal
plants. “Somebody came to me and said, ‘I can’t wait to see what
you do next.’ I took that as pressure—that I had to live up to some-
body else’s expectations,” she recalls. “There were a few months
where I was like, ‘I don’t want to act anymore.’ And then I got
over it and realized it’s none of my business what other people
think of me.”
The other big takeaway Woodley got from her frst flm was Cloo-
ney himself. “He has been an angel in my life for many reasons,”
she says of Hollywood’s perennial Everyman. She credits the actor
for reafrming everything she was taught to believe in. “He knew
everyone’s name on set,” she says. “He treated everyone as an equal
and everyone got his warmth.”
The admiration is mutual. “Shailene can do whatever she
wants,” Clooney says. “If she wants to be a movie star, she has it.
If she wants to change the world, she will. Her talent and kindness
go hand in hand.”
D
espite her chosen profession, Woodley didn’t
grow up in front of the television or watching
movies. “My parents were like, ‘Great, we have
a free weekend. Let’s go camping!’ So I grew up
outdoors, not really ever sitting on the couch.”
Woodley’s parents are psychologists who work
in education, and she credits them with giving her perspective on
the constant disappointment that comes with being an actor. “I
never saw it as rejection,” she says. “I saw it as an opportunity to
get better. Also, I learned over time that it obviously has to do with
your acting, but it has a lot to do with luck.” Her parents divorced
when she was 15; she remains close to them and to her brother, Tan-
ner, 20, who briefy dabbled in acting and is now in college.
Woodley’s grandmother, a practitioner of alternative medicine,
provided another kind of perspective: it was she who initiated her
granddaughter’s commitment to Mother Earth and health. “She
kind of opened my mind to it,” Woodley says. “And then when I
was 14, it was a really windy Southern California day, and I looked
up and the pine needles were swirling in the air and it was gorgeous.
I looked down and there was all this trash swirling around. I was
like, ‘Do I want to be a part of that beautiful pine-needle world or
this really tragic trash scene on the foor?’ ”
JU LY 2014
 “If Clooney
she wants to change the world,”
says, “she will. Her talent
and kindness go hand in hand.
”
However committed Woodley is to saving the world one pine
needle at a time, and she is very committed, she realizes that not
everyone wants to hear about it. “As much as this industry is a
platform for talking about big issues, there’s also so many fuckin’
issues. You could talk about Russia, or Argentina, or fracking, or
G.M.O.’s. Maybe the only thing that I’m supposed to do is just
show up and be me in every moment. Because I do feel like one
of my gifts is to be open and lovely—simple things like smiling at
strangers and having kind, small interactions. I think that is what’s
going to ultimately shift things.”
I
t has been a fast ride since The Descendants. There was
last year’s Sundance-award-winning hit The Spectacular
Now. There was flming the action-packed Divergent, in
which Woodley appears in every scene. There was another
Sundance Film Festival appearance in January, in Gregg
Araki’s dramatic thriller White Bird in a Blizzard, which
Magnolia Pictures will release later this year.
Then there was The Amazing Spiderman 2. Woodley played
Mary Jane Watson (Spiderman’s romantic interest, played by
Kirsten Dunst in the frst Spiderman trilogy), but the character was
ultimately cut from the sprawling flm. “For a few hours it was liter-
ally like, ‘Oh, my God, was I awful? Why did they cut me? What
are people going to think?’ I woke up the next morning and I was
like, ‘O.K., it makes total sense.’ I’m a pretty spiritual person, so
I can just sit back and trust that everything happens for a reason,
even if my ego doesn’t like it.”
She also didn’t have time to obsess about it. During a recent
break from filming Insurgent—the second installment of the Di-
vergent series, due out in 2015—she found herself couch-surfng at
friends’ homes. “I’ve been in this place in life where I don’t want to
own anything,” she says. “I got rid of almost everything except what
would ft into a carry-on suitcase.”
The Fault in Our Stars, which took Woodley to Amsterdam
(where she had gone backpacking at 18) and to Pittsburgh, is a
beautiful modern love story about two teenagers, Hazel and Gus,
with a heartbreaking twist. Director Josh Boone says, “I told the
studio it’s like Titanic, except the iceberg is cancer.”
Woodley was so moved by Green’s novel—which has sold
seven million copies worldwide and has been translated into 46
languages—that she reached out to the author directly. “She wrote
me a long—very long—e-mail before the movie rights even sold,”
Green says. “I remember being sort of overwhelmed by it, be-
cause it was so long and so positive, and she was so relentless in
her certainty that she should play Hazel.”
Woodley also made an unusual impression on the director. “She
was such a strange, interesting person,” Boone says of his frst en-
counter with the actress. “She talks about health and is really pas-
sionate about what she believes; I wasn’t sure what to make of her.”
JU LY 2 014
At her audition the next morning, the director says, “she was the
character Hazel. She wasn’t at all the girl I had met the night before,
but over the course of getting to know her she is exactly who she is.
I had forgotten how idealistic you can be in your 20s. I’m cynical,
and she is really inspiring because she is so not.”
Anybody who has ever come into contact with Shai knows that
she is a hugger. A friend honked and stopped as we were coming
down the trail, and she leaned into the car and gave him a hug. Af-
ter our hike she was recognized by a teenage boy skateboarding in
the parking lot—she gave him a hug. Before she met me she was at
Walt Disney Studios having a meeting, and I’m sure she gave every-
body there hugs, too. That’s who she is.
I ask John Green, who spent a lot of time with Woodley dur-
ing the flming of The Fault in Our Stars, if he is concerned about
her openness. “I think everyone who cares about her can’t imag-
ine her not being that person,” he says. “But so far she seems to
handle it all with great grace.”
“She has a calmness to her that I would have paid to have at her
age and an air of stability,” says her Divergent co-star Kate Winslet.
“This is a woman who can cope. She is quietly prepared and un-
complaining. She can navigate rough waters if there are any, and
she will come out the other side smiling, hugging everyone, which
is genuine, too, by the way. And most importantly, she will be ex-
actly the same girl—acting up a storm, taking risks, and giving the
next generation a great new role model to be inspired by.”
As for her male co-stars, Woodley considers herself lucky not to
have had to work with any, as she puts it, “dicks.” “You can just
really relate to her, and you can see somebody you know in that
girl,” says Miles Teller, Woodley’s co-star in both The Spectacular
Now and Divergent. “That’s why Shailene’s so good. She’s just like
a positive energy force that’s very infectious.” Ansel Elgort, in a
role certain to make teenage girls swoon, co-stars as her amputee
boyfriend in The Fault in Our Stars, and he was also, in a tricky hur-
dle for the producers, her brother in Divergent. Nonetheless, faintly
echoing the pairings of the Old Hollywood star system, their chem-
istry is electric and undeniable. “She’s just so present and there and
just real,” Elgort says. “So it’s pretty easy to just work of of her.”
I ask Woodley, who is single, if she ever would date a fellow ac-
tor. “I’m never going to say never. I love acting, but I also really
love nature and most actors don’t want to get dirty.” Although
Woodley isn’t frequently out and about with other actors her
age, she does share a special camaraderie with Teller. “I look at
Miles and, like, I’m sort of Julia Roberts in the same way she is to
George. Their relationship I could see being our relationship in 20
years, and that really is special.”
The last word on Woodley comes from the male co-star who
perhaps knows her best. “We’ll be talking about Shailene 40 years
from now,” Clooney says. “I’ve never seen anyone so young that
has so much together.”
www.vanityfair.com VA NIT Y FAIR 55
 } }
THE
N EXT
WAVE

BELLA
THORNE
Hometown:
Pembroke Pines, Florida.
Age: 16. Up next:
Alexander and the Terrible,
ODEYA RUSH Horrible, No Good,
Hometown: Haifa, Very Bad Day. Twitter or
Israel. Age: 17. Instagram: “Ooh,
Up next: The Giver, that’s difficult. I can’t choose
with Meryl Streep. between my babies.”
iPhone or Samsung: Last concert: Jay Z and
“iPhone. Samsungs Kanye West. First
are huge and don’t fit headshot: Age three.
in girls’ pockets.” Secret talent:
Favorite movie to “Tongue tricks.” Miley
watch with parents: or Taylor: Miley.
Apocalypse Now.
Dream car: Ford
Escape. Siblings:
Six brothers (including
two sets of boy twins).
Miley Cyrus
or Taylor Swift:
Taylor.
F O R CR ED ITS , T URN TO PAG E 113

56
 JOSH WIGGINS
Hometown: Houston. Age: 15. Up next:
Lost in the Sun, with Josh Duhamel.
WhatsApp or SMS: ÒMy brother is
in South Korea, in the military,
so I use WhatsApp.Ó Last album
downloaded: Mechanical Bull,
by Kings of Leon.
DAYO OKENIYI
Hometown: Lagos, Nigeria. Age: 25.
Up next: Terminator: Genesis, with
Arnold Schwarzenegger. Favorite app:
Twitter. Last album downloaded:
Mastermind, by Rick Ross.
Favorite movie to watch with
parents: The Sound of Music.

TYE SHERIDAN
Hometown:
Palestine, Texas. Age:
17. Up next: Dark
Places, with Charlize
Theron. iPhone
or Samsung: iPhone.
Last concert:
ÒI went to see Snoop
Dogg with Nicolas
Cage.Ó Favorite jeans:
LeviÕs. Justin
Bieber or Harry
Styles: Bieber.
Guilty-pleasure
song: ÒWe,Ó
by the Roches.

DYLAN O’BRIEN
Hometown: Springfield,
New Jersey.
Age: 22. Up next: The
Maze Runner,

“
with Will Poulter. Last

Mamma Mia!
TV binge watch:
Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
Last concert: Coldplay

is really fire. My
at the Hollywood
Bowl. Favorite
sneakers: Old-school

parents are big

90s Adidas.
Favorite movie to

”
watch with parents:

Abba people.
Nymphomaniac:
Vol. I. Guilty-
pleasure song:
ÒWrecking Ball,Ó
by Miley Cyrus. — DAYO O K E N I Y I

JU LY 2 014 www.vanityfair.com VA NIT Y FAIR 57

}
THE
N EXT
WAVE } “
I’ve got a man
David Beckham; I’m
to admit it.
”
— W I L L P O U LT E R

JADEN SMITH
Hometown: Calabasas,
California. Age: 16.
Up next: The Karate Kid 2, with
Jackie Chan. Twitter or
Instagram: “If I can stay off
of both, I will.” Favorite movie
to watch with parents:
Mr. Peabody & Sherman. Last
song downloaded:
“Cool Water,” by Jaden Smith.
Favorite jeans: “I don’t
like jeans. I like drop-crotch
pants because jeans
are restricting to my legs.”

F O R CR EDI TS , T URN TO PAGE 113

WILLOW SMITH
Hometown: Calabasas, California. Age: 13.
Big break: I Am Legend. Twitter or Instagram:
Twitter. Favorite shoes: Dr. Martens.
Favorite movie to watch with parents: “Feminist
documentaries.” Starbucks order:
Cotton-candy Frappuccino with extra whipped cream.
Dream car: Matte forest-green Jeep.

58 VANIT Y FA I R JU LY 2014
crush on
not afraid

BEN SCHNETZER
Hometown:
New York City. Age: 24.
Up next: Warcraft,
with Paula Patton.
Favorite reality show:
Dog the Bounty Hunter.
Last TV binge
watch: Six Feet Under.
Favorite movie
to watch with parents:
Dances with Wolves.
Miley Cyrus or Taylor
Swift: “Oh,
God. Joanna Newsom.”
Justin Bieber or Harry
MAIKA MONROE Styles: “Um,
Eddie Vedder?”
Hometown: Santa Barbara, California. Age: 20.
Up next: The Guest, with Dan Stevens.
Last song downloaded: Anything by
Blood Orange. Twitter or Instagram: Instagram.
Secret talent: Kiteboarding. Person she’d
like to meet: Jack Nicholson. Justin Bieber W ILL PO U LTER
or Harry Styles: “Harry Styles. Duh.” Hometown: London.
Age: 21. Up next:
The Maze Runner, with OLIVIA COOKE
Dylan O’Brien. Hometown: Manchester, England.
Last selfie: “Just now. Age: 20. Up next: Ouija, a thriller from
I was wearing a do-rag.” Universal. Last TV binge watch:
Favorite jeans: Top of the Lake. Favorite jeans: Rag &
Givenchy. Favorite Bone. Starbucks order: “Vanilla
sneakers: “Retro Jordan latte—full fat.” Person she’d like to
5s in varsity red meet: Kate Winslet. Favorite reality show:
and black.” Dream car: The Real Housewives of New Jersey.
Aston Martin DB9.
Person he’d like to
meet: Jay Z.

J ULY 2014 www.vanityfair.com VA NIT Y FAI R 59

“I’d reallyEngland.
like to meet the Queen of
That would be cool.
Or Mick Jagger.
” — JAC K K I L M E R

LILY J AMES
Hometown: London. Age: 25. Up next: The lead in
Cinderella, with Cate Blanchett. Favorite app:
Cycle Planner. Last TV binge watch: Breaking Bad.
Starbucks order: Black coffee. Favorite
sneakers: Converse. Miley Cyrus or Taylor Swift:
Miley. Can’t live without on set: A book.

JU LY 2014
 } }
THE
N EXT
WAVE

JACK KILMER
Hometown: Los Angeles. Age: 18. Big break:
Gia Coppola’s Palo Alto. Favorite app:
“Touchgrind. You get to skateboard with your fingers.”
Last TV binge watch: Twin Peaks. Person
he’d like to meet: Queen Elizabeth II.
Favorite sneakers: Superga. Favorite reality-TV
star: “Bret Michaels. No question.”
F O R CR ED ITS , T URN TO PAG E 113

JU LY 2 014 www.vanityfair.com VAN IT Y FAIR 61

} }
THE BRITT
ROBERTSON
N EXT Hometown: Greenville,
WAVE South Carolina.
Age: 24. Up next:
Tomorrowland, with George
Clooney. Favorite
app: Uber. Starbucks order:
White-chocolate
Frappuccino, with a
Marshmallow Dream Bar.
Favorite reality-TV
star: NeNe, from The Real
Housewives of Atlanta.
Can’t live without
on set: Mountain
Dew. Justin Bieber or
Harry Styles: Harry.

EVE HEWSON
Hometown: Dublin, Ireland. Age: 22.
Up next: The Knick, on Cinemax. Pets: “I have
a roommate. He’s kind of like a pet.” iPhone
or Samsung: iPhone. Beauty secret: Coconut oil.
Favorite reality-TV star: Khloé Kardashian.
Favorite candy: Skittles. Last song downloaded:
“Stay with Me,” by Sam Smith.

{
@vf.com
FO R V I D EO O F
SH A IL EN E ,
W ILLOW, J A D EN ,
A ND T HE GA N G
GO TO V F. CO M /
JU LY2 0 1 4 .

62 VA NI T Y FA I R JU LY 2014
 ZOEY DEUTCH
Hometown: Studio City, California. Age: 19.
Big break: Ringer, on the CW.
Last selfie: “Right now, to check if I had red lipstick on
my teeth.” Last song downloaded:
“Fancy,” by Iggy Azalea. Favorite movie to watch
with parents: Anchorman. Starbucks order:
Tall iced two-pump hazelnut latte.
Person she’d like to meet: Hillary Clinton.

“I dress
pretty much
like a nine-
year-old boy. ”
F O R CR ED ITS , T URN TO PAG E 113

—EVE HEWSON

JU LY 2 014 www.vanityfair.com VAN IT Y FAIR 63

 } }
THE
N EXT
WAVE

JACK REYNOR
Hometown: Dublin, Ireland. Age: 22. Up
next: Transformers: Age of Extinction,
with Mark Wahlberg. Favorite app: Sleep Cycle.
Last TV binge watch: Life’s Too Short. Favorite
sneakers: Nike Air Max. Dream car:
Classic Rolls-Royce Phantom. Favorite jeans: Levi’s.
Can’t live without on set: “My fiancée.”

“ Seeing
Die Hard
when I was six
was a kick up
the arse.
— JAC K R E Y N O R
” DOUGLAS BOOTH
Hometown: London. Age: 21. Up next: Jupiter
Ascending, with Mila Kunis. Twitter or
F O R CR EDI TS , T URN TO PAGE 113

Instagram: Twitter. Childhood pets: “I had, like,

17 pets.” Last TV binge watch: House
of Cards. Person he’d like to meet: Barack Obama.
Starbucks order: “Something
naughty, like a double chocolate-chip cappuccino.”
Secret talent: Trumpet.

64 VAN IT Y FA IR J ULY 2014

 KATIE CHANG
Hometown: Chicago.
Age: 19. Up next:
Anesthesia, with Kristen
Stewart. Twitter or
Instagram: Neither.
Favorite reality-TV star:
Monte, from Say Yes
to the Dress: Atlanta.
Favorite movie to watch
with family: “Miracle,
the hockey movie.
My brothers can recite it.”
Starbucks order:
Green tea. Can’t
live without on set:
“My mom.”

ZOË KRAVITZ SAMI GAYLE

Hometown: Los Angeles. Hometown: Weston,
Age: 25. Up next: Florida. Age: 18.
Mad Max: Fury Road. Up next: The Congress,
Last album downloaded: with Harvey Keitel.
Beck’s Morning Phase. LIANA LIBERATO Pet: “I have a little
Last TV binge watch: Hometown: Galveston, Texas. Age: 18. Up Yorkie named Licorice
Portlandia. Person next: Dear Eleanor, with Jessica Alba. Banana.” Last TV
she’d like to meet: Robert First headshot: “When I was nine, or eight binge watch: Sex and the
Plant. Dream car: “One maybe.” Person she’d like to meet: City. Last concert:
of those Volkswagen buses, Michelle Williams. Favorite reality-TV star: New Kids on the Block.
like the old ones.” “Got this one. Abby Lee Miller, Dance Secret talent: Tap
J ULY 2 014 Miley or Taylor: Miley. Moms. Obsessed.” dancing. 65
 V. F. P O RT RA I T

David Boies &

Theodore Olson
In one of the most unlikely partnerships in
civil-rights history, David Boies and Ted Olson teamed up
to fight California’s ban on same-sex marriage—
all the way to the Supreme Court. A year after their victory,
which the superlawyers have chronicled in a
new book, LIONEL BARBER recalls what brought the
political opposites (and onetime combatants) together.
Photograph by ANNIE LEIBOVITZ

T
hey are America’s
odd couple: two superlawyers, one Demo-
cratic, the other Republican, who teamed up
to overturn Proposition 8, California’s ban
on same-sex marriage, in a Supreme Court
ruling which made civil-rights history.
David Boies and Theodore B. “Ted”
Olson are living proof that bipartisanship
is not (yet) dead and buried in Washing-
ton. Back in 2000, they faced of in Bush
v. Gore, which decided the election. Nine
years later, they set aside their party al-
legiances in favor of a common principle:
that equal rights for gays and lesbians to
marry was not a liberal or conservative is-
sue. It was a basic human-rights issue.
Last summer, I heard frsthand the story
of their unlikely partnership. A group of us
solicitor general under George W. Bush. His
journey in defense of same-sex marriage was
never going to be straightforward.
Ted spoke in a rich baritone which com-
manded attention. Republican friends found
his decision hard to swallow. He himself
had been initially wary—until he met one
same-sex couple in particular and felt their
pain in the face of discrimination. He used
that word, “pain,” several times. I remem-
ber, too, his closing argument: “These are
people who want to participate in life as
citizens the way the rest of us do.”
David’s account was more matter-of-
fact: dispassionate analysis mixed with
remorseless logic and a famed iron will.
This is the man who overcame dyslexia to
become one of the top trial lawyers in the
country, the successful defender of CBS in
the Westmoreland libel case, the scourge
of Microsoft, and a noted philanthropist,
who has endowed nine chairs at universi-
ties from N.Y.U. to Yale.
Somehow David and Ted have found
time in their packed schedules to write
their story in a new book—Redeeming the
Dream: The Case for Marriage Equality.
(HBO’s documentary on the trial, The Case
F O R DE TA I L S, GO TO VF.CO M/C RE DI TS

were cruising off the Amalfi coast, one of
the most stunning seascapes in the Mediter-
ranean. Good wine (another common Boies-
Olson cause) fowed; so did the post-lunch
conversation. A fellow passenger prodded
Against 8, is also out this month.)
Lawyers often get a hard time in Ameri-
ca. But in the case of same-sex marriage, so
long a taboo, two distinguished attorneys
turned out to be way ahead of the politicians.
CR E DI TS HE RE

Ted to tell his story. Why Ted, not David? That’s a tribute to David and Ted—and to
Because Ted is a true conservative, a former the vibrancy of American democracy. �

66 VA NI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com JULY 2 014

 THEY FOUGHT
THE L AW
David Boies and Theodore
Olson in the lawyers’ waiting
room at the New York State
Supreme Court’s Appellate
Division, First Department,
in New York City.

www.vanityfair.com VA N IT Y FAI R 67
THE NEW Dubai International Airport has surpassed Heathrow as the
world’s busiest global hub, while three Gulf airlines—Emirates, Qatar Airways,
and Etihad—are scooping up passengers. Boarding a lavishly
appointed Airbus A380 at Dubai’s $4.5 billion Terminal 3, GRAHAM BOYNTON
examines the tectonic shift in aviation that threatens
to leave the West’s cramped, bare-bones carriers in the dust

LUXURY
L AYOVER
Perched atop the
terminal, the Emirates
lounge at Dubai
International
serves well-heeled
68 fiers in style.
W JET AGE

J ULY 2 014 P H OTO GR AP H S BY STEPHEN WILKES www.vanityfair.com VA NIT Y FAI R 69

 moving it past London’s Heathrow as the world’s busiest interna-
tional airport. By 2018 that number is expected to pass 90 million,
overtaking vast domestic hubs such as Atlanta and Beijing.
And yet this is just the beginning. A few miles across the tiny
emirate another enormous, fve-runway airport is under construc-
tion. For now, Dubai World Central serves partly as a cargo air-
port. But late in the next decade Emirates airline plans to transfer
its operations there. The result: by 2025 more than 220 million
travelers will be passing through the city’s airports annually. For
Dubai, world domination is literally on the horizon.

N
On the Wing
ow follow these passengers onto one of the
Emirates Airbus A380s. Emirates, owned
by the government of Dubai, is one of the
world’s fastest-growing international airlines
and is a game changer in global travel. Together
with the two other nouveau Gulf carriers, Qatar
wo o’clock in the morning and I am Airways and Abu Dhabi’s Etihad, the national airline of the United
standing at the crossroads of the modern world. Like a pinball Arab Emirates, it has already made the European and North Ameri-
machine, the arrivals-and-departures board clicks of the names can warhorses of aviation seem down-at-heel and out of date. There
of international cities—Dhaka, Colombo, Damascus, Male, Perth, are many reasons for their unlikely emergence out of these arid des-
Manchester, New York, Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City—and wave ert communities—oil frst and foremost. But beyond this, there is the
after wave of citizens of the 21st century move this way and that allure of the voyage. A passenger’s trip through the airport inspires a
through this massive marble-and-glass terminal. measure of wonder. And the magic-carpet experience on one of these
One can’t help staring in wonder. Denim-clad construction work- aircraft is rather like checking into a small luxury hotel on the wing.
ers from the Indian subcontinent are slumped over seats waiting I join the stream of travelers transferring from the concourse
for their fights to be called; Armani-draped businessmen carry- to a shining new aircraft, around 400 boarding on the lower level
ing Gucci leather briefcases head for the frst-class lounges; young, into economy class and some 90 on the upper foor to business
loving couples sleep entwined on the sofas that line the walkways. and frst. On both tiers the passengers are greeted by a phalanx
The fnal call for the Emirates fight to Jidda summons a posse of of attractive young air hostesses recruited from all over the world.
women in burkas, who scurry to the gate. Walking in strict forma- (Though Emirates employs male stewards, none is in evidence to-
tion in the opposite direction, behind a young man hoisting a yellow day.) The cabin announcements reveal that the crew on this fight
fag, is a group of neatly dressed, middle-aged Japanese women. can speak English, French, German, Arabic, Spanish, Swahili,
The only near-stationary beings in this enormous cavern of activ- Mandarin, Italian, and Xhosa.
ity are the shoppers poring over items in 100 or so stores that run Although this is not my frst A380 fight, I am still somewhat awe-
the length of the terminal, stacked with everything from the usual struck at how this 550-ton aircraft, after an almost silent and appar-
electronic gizmos and perfumes to $11,000 bottles of 1947 Cheval ently efortless surge of its four Engine Alliance GP7200 engines,
Blanc. (At Le Clos fne wines, the salesperson tells me she has al- seems to foat into the air after what appears to be a rather sedate
ready taken in $100,000—in a single sale—that evening.) rumble down the runway. Previously, my most vivid aviation experi-
And so the well-oiled people-moving machine keeps turning, ence had been on the Concorde, which, by dramatic contrast, rock-
10 gigantic elevators shifting travelers up and down the termi- eted across the tarmac at breathtaking speed and tinnitus-inducing
nal’s 11 foors, a subterranean train shuttling them between con- decibels and scythed its way into inner space with all the roman-
courses, 82 moving walkways. Perpetual motion, 24-7, 365 days tic, devil-may-care optimism that defned life in the booming late-
a year. 20th century. But this is commercial air travel in the credit-crunch
This is Dubai International Airport’s $4.5 billion Terminal 3, the 21st, and the A380 is a high-tech piece of aerospace pragmatism.
exclusive province of Emirates airline. Covering nearly 18.5 million Carrying 525 passengers up to 8,500 nautical miles nonstop (the
square feet, it is the largest air terminal on the planet. Dubai Inter- Dubai–New York leg takes about 131⁄2 hours), the plane hums along
national also ranks alongside Singapore’s Changi, Hong Kong In- in relative quiet—with astounding eco-correctness. Airbus claims
ternational, and Beijing Capital International as the most passenger- that the A380 uses 20 percent less fuel than the Boeing 747, and that
friendly. Every week from this airport’s Jetways, 130 international when fully laden and fying long-haul it is more fuel-efcient per pas-
airlines operate more than 6,000 fights to some 260 destinations on senger than a Toyota Prius.
every continent except Antarctica. The A380 is not a particularly pretty aircraft by the
In January 2013, Dubai International opened Con- Concorde’s aesthetically pleasing standards; some air-
course A—aviation’s frst facility dedicated entirely to MAKING AN EXIT line bufs say it looks as if one bus has been squashed
Airbus A380 superjumbos. Located in Terminal 3, Opposite, underneath on top of another. But the space inside—the interior
it is a magnifcent building. Huge frst- and business- swooping arches, volume—is very impressive. The frst-class cabin com-
class lounges connect directly to the A380 upper an Emirates prises 14 suites that are equipped with sliding doors
pilot and two fight
decks; economy-class passengers board from the attendants stride for complete privacy as well as a vanity table, personal
lower level. The new concourse has already increased through the carrier’s mini-bar, wardrobe, desk, 23-inch television screen,
Dubai’s traffic to 75 million passengers a year, Dubai terminal. and what is efectively an armchair that converts into
70 VA NI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com JU LY 2014
JU LY 2 014 71
EVERY WEEK 130 INTERNATIONAL

72 VAN IT Y FAIR www.vanityfair.com JULY 2 014

AIRLINES OPERATE 6,000 FLIGHTS TO 260 DESTINATIONS.

FIRST-CL ASS
CACHET
In an Emirates A380,
seats recline into beds.
Opposite: top, a
day-to-night view of the
exterior of Dubai
International
Concourses B and C;
bottom, palms
adorn the baggage-
J ULY 2014 claim area. 73
74 VAN IT Y FA IR www.vanityfair.com JULY 2 014
 MILE HIGH
a bed. And if you want to take a shower at 40,000 Opposite: The second shift came with the arrival of the jet
feet, there are two of those on board. The food-and- top, Emirates fight age, in 1958, the introduction of the Boeing 747 a
wine menu is also appropriately lavish, with caviar, attendants aboard little over a decade later, and then the 1978 deregu-
Dom Pérignon, Cakebread chardonnay, and 1989 a roomy A380; bottom, lation of the U.S. airline industry. In the early days
the well-stocked
Gruaud-Larose all standard fare. bar in business class of mass air travel, national airlines such as Pan Am
At the back of the upper-deck cabin, directly be- is the aircraft’s and TWA and fag-carrying European airlines (Brit-
hind business class, is the pièce de résistance: a fully most popular amenity. ish Airways, Air France, Lufthansa) ruled the world
operative stand-up bar that has been the social hub through government-protected colonial-route net-
on every Emirates A380 fight I have taken. To make works. But as the colonies evaporated and new busi-
space for this in-fight lounge, Emirates president Tim Clark says, he ness models challenged regulation, the legacy U.S. behemoths be-
has had to sacrifce six premium seats, but declares, “It’s the most gan to fall. First Eastern, then Pan Am, then TWA.
popular thing we’ve ever done. They have a real party down there.” Southeast Asia then heralded the third tectonic shift. Introducing
On this fight a group of Italian contractors join two British couples high-quality, service-led air travel, airlines such as Cathay Pacifc, Sin-
around the bar soon after takeof. And they’re all still there six hours gapore Airlines, Thai, and the rest all fourished as the international
later as the plane starts its descent. It is, indeed, some party. business-travel market grew, and as the old-world airlines struggled to
Even the humble masses in coach are able to partake of the survive. These feets provided more comfortable seating, particularly
A380’s in-fight video-and-audio system, which ofers more than at the front of the cabins, and a level of in-fight service that Western
1,500 channels featuring movies, television shows, news, games, airlines had failed to ofer with any conviction since the 50s.
and music from around the world, all delivered through high-end, Now we are in the fourth age. U.S. airlines are merging and
13-inch seatback monitors. morphing into giant entities with large domestic networks and rela-
For anyone who has endured the post-deregulation austerity tively small international reach, ofering only passable amenities on
of U.S. airlines over the past few decades—uncomfortable, over- rather old equipment. Meanwhile, the Gulf airlines feature quality
crowded, bare-bones bus journeys in the sky—the experience of service at a competitive price. Peter Morris, chief economist at the
fying on Emirates, Etihad, or Qatar comes close to recapturing aviation consultancy frm Ascend, says that these carriers have now
the joy of jet travel from Pan Am’s heyday. There is a sense of fun “built enough critical mass to be a genuine threat to the traditional
on board, and that has come down from the top. Tim Clark says European airlines and in the near future to the Americans.”
he wants to bring a bit of glamour back into fying.

‘T
The sudden ascendancy of the Gulf airlines and their hub air-
ports is partially a result of geological fortune but mainly due to
good planning by the Emirati leaders. Emirates was founded in 1985
after Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum hired a British
Airways executive, Sir Maurice Flanagan, gave him $10 million, and
told him to build an airline. (Many start-up aviation frms begin by
leasing most of their feet.) Aware that Dubai’s oil reserves would
run out in the early 21st century, Sheikh Mohammed had decided
to transform his country from a petro-dependent mini-state to a di-
verse business powerhouse with tourism and aviation at its center.
Today the airline has some 218 aircraft, with another 374 on
order. What Flanagan and Clark, another exile from the British
aviation industry, have created is an airline that links the emerging
countries in Asia and Africa to Europe and the Americas. As Clark
points out, the U.A.E. is within eight hours’ fying time for half the
world’s population. And just as Emirates was connecting Africa and
the East to the rest of the world, so Emirates was joined by Qatar
Airways in 1997 and then by Etihad in 2003 in its bid to shuttle this
new generation of business and leisure travelers around the globe.
Four Tectonic Shifts
he emergence of these carriers marks the
fourth tectonic shift in international aviation
since Pan Am’s founder, Juan Trippe, democ-
ratized the industry in the early 1950s. Prior to
Trippe’s intervention, air travel was the domain
of the ruling classes, and fares between the U.S.
and Europe were fxed by the stodgy International Air Transport
Association. However, in 1952, Trippe decided to introduce a
tourist-class fare between New York and London and thus began
a decades-long battle between free-market fying and cartel-led
regulation that would see the rise and fall of carriers such as Sir
Freddie Laker’s Skytrain in the 70s and People Express in the 80s,
along with the breakout success of Virgin Atlantic.
JU LY 2 014
Shanghai on Steroids
hey say that Dubai is Shanghai on steroids,”
notes Clark as he stares out of his ofce win-
dow in the terminal, admiring a row of gleaming
Emirates A380s. A neat, dapper man in his 60s,
Clark reveals that his first job (after graduating
with an economics degree from the University of
London) was as a bus conductor. That humble beginning, he says,
taught him the basics of the transport trade “because right from
the start I was intrigued at the pricing structure and the type of bus
feet, and saw great similarities when I joined the airline industry.”
He subsequently spent 14 years in aviation before moving to Dubai.
Emirates has 47 A380s in service and another 93 ordered, but the
challenge of flling these giant aircraft as the world slowly emerges
from the global recession doesn’t faze Clark at all. He says 93 is no-
where near enough for Emirates’ needs, and then his eyes light up
at the thought of all the potential customers out there in the modern
world. “Look at China,” he exclaims. “The Chinese market is big
enough for all of us. There are cities we haven’t heard of—with popu-
lations half the size of Britain—and they’ve got three international
fights a week.”
The only time that Clark seems to lose his air of afability is when
criticism of Emirates is raised by the “legacy” airlines. He says that
for years the leaders of these European and North American car-
riers have benefted from subsidies and tax advantages on fuel and
had received export aid for new aircraft from Boeing and Airbus for
which their domestic counterparts were ineligible. In any case, pleas
to keep the trio of Gulf airlines out of Europe and North America
have failed, and all three, over the past few years, have signifcantly
increased service to European cities.
“The Europeans accuse us of stealing their market,” Clark says,
fairly agitated. “But it wasn’t theirs in the frst place. What right have
they to take passengers from Africa to Asia or vice versa over Euro-
pean hubs? So a passenger who wants to go C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 1 4
www.vanityfair.com VAN IT Y FAI R 75
 Spotlight

S E T D E S IG N BY ROB ST R AUSS ST UD I O; P ROD UC E D ON LOC AT IO N BY RU TH LE V Y

Designer Ralph Lauren is this

year’s recipient of the Smithsonian’s
James Smithson Bicentennial
Medal, honoring his contributions
to the preservation of the flag
known as the Star-Spangled Banner;
photographed in New York City.

07
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 TO the BANNER BORN
H
ad Ralph Lauren not left his native Bronx, let’s go ahead
and assume, he would not be as closely identified as he
is today with a polo pony. Taken to its Capra-esque hy-
pothetical extreme, let’s try to imagine a world without
Ralph Lauren: no ponies, no picnics or casual beach gatherings at-
tended by sun-kissed kids and the well-turned-out adults who produced
them. No sweaters with American flags on them (they made us feel
better, warmer, and more patriotic during that first winter after 9/11),
no purple labels, red pants, or golden retrievers. If it’s true that clothes
make the man, it’s worth celebrating the man who makes the clothes.
This month, Ralph Lauren is being awarded the James Smithson Bicen-
tennial Medal, recognizing his lifetime contributions to American entre-
preneurship, artistry, creativity, and vision—and especially his leadership
role in the preservation of the Star-Spangled Banner, the flag that dates
back to the War of 1812 and inspired the national anthem. It’s the latest
of many honors for Ralph Lauren. Then again, it’s been a wonderful life.
Ralph Lauren was born of equal parts aspiration and inspiration;
the latter can be found in every frame of The Thomas Crown Affair, with
Steve McQueen, who once said his character in the film—a proper but
bored banker who takes an improper turn into robbing banks—was the
man he longed to be in real life. Perhaps young Ralph felt the same way.
JU LY 2014 P H OTOG R A P H BY
He knew the look he wanted. As a fledgling designer, he started off sell-
ing ties out of a small office at the Empire State Building. He believed in
his ability to sell us all an aspirational lifestyle. It was an idealized and
accessorized version of America, where collars were popped, hair was
tousled, and men seldom needed socks. Ralph even showed us how he
lived, what he wore, and the cars he drove. It hadn’t been labeled yet,
but we now know it as a kind of casual chic. We were offered pieces of
it, à la carte, and we couldn’t believe our good fortune.
The iconic pony, as recognizable as any logo on the planet, has
grown larger with age, and so has the company Ralph founded.
Wherever I have traveled, in some of the remotest places on earth,
“Polo” is often the only word displayed in English—emblazoned on
knockoff garments the world over. For the founder, it must be the ulti-
mate test of that old expression about imitation and flattery.
Beyond the lapels and cuffs and studs and shades, Ralph’s proud-
est achievement cannot be found in any product line. It’s his family.
Ralph and Ricky, married nearly 50 years, have produced three stun-
ning children. The Lauren Five are as thick as thieves. They finish one
another’s sentences and love one another madly. When seen togeth-
er, they are the embodiment of the patriarch’s American ideal, and a
large part of what makes him the ideal American. — BRIAN WILLIA MS
{
@vf.com
E X P LO R E T HE
E VO LU T IO N O F
RAL P H LAU R EN ’ S
GR E AT ES T A D S .
GO TO V F. CO M /
JU LY 20 1 4 .
MARK SELIGER www.vanityfair.com
www.vanityfair.com VV A
ANN II TT Y F A I R 7
0700
 LUCK BE A L ADY
Hollywood big shots
and assorted
billionaires could
win or lose
millions in a night at
one of Molly Bloom’s
poker games.

HER HOUS How did a 26-year-old cocktail waitress end up running a private weekly
the likes of Leo, Ben, and Tobey? In an adaptation from her new memoir, MOLLY
break, at the infamous Viper Room; the millions that crossed her

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www.vanityfair.com JULY 2 014
E of CARDS
poker game for some of Hollywood’s highest rollers, including
BLOOM, who has since gained notoriety as “the Poker Princess,” recalls her lucky
table; and the biggest winners—who could also be the worst losers
P H OTO IL LUSTR AT IO N BY DARROW VV A
ANN II TT Y F A I R 79
A
t he seemed very friendly. I didn’t have any
6:45 p.m. I stood by the front door and
waited. I fdgeted with my dress. I started to
feel insecure about how to greet the players.
I knew their names, but did that mean that I
should introduce myself?
Stop it, I said in my head. I closed my eyes
and tried to calm down by imagining myself as
I wanted to be—not the Colorado girl scraping
by as a cocktail waitress. My boss, Reardon,
a real-estate investor, had decided I would
be the hostess of a poker game he had orga-
nized at Hollywood’s infamous Viper Room.
“Molly Bloom, you are wearing the dress
of your dreams. You are confdent and fear-
less and you will be perfect.” None of this
was true, of course, but I wanted it to be. I
opened my eyes, lifted my chin, and relaxed
my shoulders. It was showtime.
The frst person to arrive was Todd, the
famous writer and director.
“Hello,” I said, warmly reaching out my
hand. “I’m Molly Bloom.” I gave him a
genuine smile.
“Hi, gorgeous, I’m Todd—nice to meet
you in person.
“Do I give the buy-in to you?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said, eyeing the giant stack of
hundred-dollar bills.
“Can I get you a drink?” I asked.
He ordered a Diet Coke. I went behind
the bar and set the enormous amount of
money down.
After I served him his drink, I started
counting the stack. It was $10,000, all right.
I put it in the cash register with Todd’s name
on it. I felt cool, edgy, and dangerous counting
that much money. The others started to arrive.
Bruce introduced himself and handed me
Adapted from Molly’s Game: From Hollywood’s
Elite to Wall Street’s Billionaire Boys Club, My
High-Stakes Adventure in the World of Underground
Poker, by Molly Bloom, to be published this
month by It Books, an imprint of HarperCollins
Publishers; © 2014 by the author.
80 VA NI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com
his buy-in as well. I knew from my research
that he had been an executive at of one of
the most prestigious golf companies in the
world. Bob was a real-estate magnate, and
Phillip came from a long line of European
aristocrats. His mother had been a glamor-
ous supermodel and his father was one of
the most famous playboys in Manhattan.
Reardon came blasting in with his typical
“Oh yeah!” greeting. The rumpled Houston
showed up next, followed by Tobey and Leo. I
straightened my shoulders and smiled as natu-
rally as I could. They are just people, I told
myself as butterflies flew manically around
in my stomach. I introduced myself, took
their buy-ins, and asked for their drink orders.
When I shook Leo’s hand and he gave me a
crooked smile from under his hat, my heart
raced a little faster. Tobey was cute, too, and
backstory on Houston except that he was
somehow involved in the movie business. He
had kind eyes, but there was something difer-
ent about him. He didn’t seem to belong with
this crowd. Steve, a major Hollywood direc-
tor, and Dylan, a producer, showed up next.
The energy in the room was palpable. It
felt more like a sports arena than the base-
ment of the Viper Room.
Reardon fnished ripping into a sandwich
and shouted, “Let’s play.”
I watched, fascinated. It was all incredibly
surreal. I was standing in the corner of the
Viper Room counting one hundred thou-
sand dollars in cash! I was in the compa-
ny of movie stars, important directors, and
powerful business tycoons. I felt like Alice
tumbling down the rabbit hole.
As the players fled out, they thanked me,
some kissed my cheek, but they all pressed bills
into my hand. I smiled warmly and thanked
them in return, trying not to let my hands shake.
When they were all gone, I sat down in
a daze, and with trembling hands I counted
$3,000.
F
Hollywooding
or the second game, a week lat-
er, I showed up in a sexy new
dress.
“Whoa, look at you,” the
dealer Diego said. “Your tips
are going to be good tonight.”
When Tobey and Leo walked in, the guys
became a little shy and awkward, except for
Reardon, who fst-bumped Leo with a gruf
“What’s happening, player?” While the guys
clustered around Leo, Tobey went over to
Diego and handed him his Shufe Master.
The Shufe Master is a $17,000 machine that
is supposed to deliver a fair, random shufe
every time and increases the speed of each
game. Last week, Tobey had told the guys he
wouldn’t play without it.
“Hi, honey,” Bob said now as I took his
coat. I saw his eyes fick around the room; even
he got a little giddy when he saw that Leo was
there. Phillip walked in with his friend Mark.
Mark was friends with Pete, a tennis legend,
who allegedly played high-stakes poker, too.
When he saw me, Phillip let out a low
whistle and kissed my hand.
I blushed and looked at the foor, enjoying
every surreal moment of being the only girl
among such handsome, accomplished men.
And then above the buzz of voices came
Reardon’s ringing voice.
“Let’s play!!”
They settled into their seats, and the air
flled with the smooth sounds of my Frank
Sinatra playlist, the whirring of the Shufe
Master, the shufing of chips, and the hap-
py, playful banter of the players.
When it was time for dinner, I ordered Mr.
Chow’s. The guys weren’t thrilled about the
idea of stopping the game to eat, and I made
a mental note to get side tables and, in the fu-
ture, let them eat their food at the poker table.
The game resumed after dinner at full
speed. I sat in the corner, watching Diego’s
hands fly around the table pushing chips
and fipping cards—it was impossibly hard
to keep up with. Suddenly the noise dimmed
and Mark stood up. He walked around the
table with his hands in his pockets.
There was a giant stack of chips in the
center. My eyes traced the perimeter of
the table to see who still had cards.
Tobey.
Tobey just sat there eating the vegan
snack he had brought from home. His round
eyes were fxed on Mark.
Mark deliberated while the rest of us held
PAGE S 78– 79 : P HOTO GR A PH S, FRO M LE F T, BY DAVE J . HO GA N /G ET T Y I MAG ES ( HE A D) ; © KA BI K /R ET NA LTD. /COR BI S; BY
our breath. I had no idea what was happen-
J O E KO HE N /F I L MM AGI C ( LE F T A RM A N D TO R SO ) , LO UI S L A NZ A NO / A .P. I M AGE S ( HE A D) ; BY DO N E MM ERT/ AFP/ GE TT Y
I MAG ES ( H EA D ) , DUN CA N N I CHO L LS A N D SI MO N W EB B /O J O I M AGE S/ GE TT Y I M AGE S ( B O DY ) ; BY L ESTE R CO HE N/
ing, but I could feel the suspense.
“Call!” he announced.
Tobey looked at him in shock.
“Call?” he asked.
“Yes,” Mark said. “Do I have you?”
I tried to add the chips up in my head, but
there were so many and they were everywhere.
“You got me,” Tobey said, and pushed
his cards to Diego.
Tobey smiled at Mark. “Nice hand, man.”
And then he looked directly at me, his
eyes fxed in a hard stare.
“Who is this guy?” Tobey texted me.
“Mark—he’s an attorney.”
“I see” was all he wrote back.
I had a sinking sensation that I was now
in trouble.
The game picked up again, and I held my
breath whenever Reardon was in a hand and
now Tobey too. I knew Reardon well enough
to be certain that the thrill of the game
wouldn’t last long if he lost every time. Clear-
ly, I had to keep Tobey happy, too. They both
came out ahead, but every second leading up
JU LY 2014
 WITH A $50,000 BUY-IN, THERE WAS
$500,000 ON THE TABLE BEFORE THE
CARDS WERE DEALT.
to the last hand of the game was so full of
anticipation that by the end of the night
I was completely emotionally exhausted.
But I loved every minute of it. The game
lasted until three a.m.
As the guys fled out, I helped them
with their coats and valet tickets, air-kissed
and/or hugged good-bye, and was hand-
somely rewarded by each of them with
cash or chips. I was immensely apprecia-
tive; I felt like it was so much more than I
deserved. The biggest tippers were Phillip,
Houston, and Bruce, who gave me espe-
cially large sums, but I made sure to thank
each of them with the same amount of en-
thusiasm. Tobey, despite being the biggest
winner, gave me the smallest tip.
Once they were gone, Diego and I sat
down at the table. We combined our tips
and then counted it out: $15,000. Seventy-
fve hundred each.
T
he follow-up to the games
was always the same: Orga-
nize the players. Pay anyone
who had won. Collect from
anyone who had lost.
At first, the money part
stressed me out. I felt bad asking the losers
HAIR BY GUY ROMEO; MAKEUP BY LIZA ZARETSKY; MANICURE BY L ALY ZAMBRANA; FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS
TOMMY HILFIGER COLLECTION; HAIR PRODUCTS BY ORIBE; MAKEUP PRODUCTS BY NARS; NAIL ENAMEL BY JOHN RUSSO;
for money, and it took a lot of time to drive
WIREIMAGE (HEAD); BY DANNY MARTINDALE/FILMMAGIC (HEAD). THIS PAGE: ST YLED BY NATALIE TOREN; GOWN BY
all over the city chasing and paying. But I
soon came to realize that those one-on-one
meet-ups were great opportunities to really
get to know the men at the table.
On this particular Wednesday, I was
scheduled to see Tobey and Phillip.
I went to Tobey’s frst. I was getting used
to dropping by there: Tobey won every week.
I drove slowly up the steep drive, buzzed
the security bell, and announced myself.
“It’s Molly, dropping of a check.”
The long tone indicated that I had clear-
ance. The gates opened slowly and I drove
in. At the end of the driveway was Tobey’s
palatial house.
He was already at the door when I got
there. “Heyyyy, how are you?”
“Hey,” I said, handing him the heavy and
awkward Shufe Master. “Thanks for letting
us use this for the game.”
“No problem,” he said, taking the machine.
“I wanted to chat with you about something.”
“What’s up?”
His eyes squinted for a moment. “I think
JU LY 2 014
A
Full House
fter several months I
went behind Reardon’s
back and plotted with
Phillip and Tobey to
make the game my
own. I thought Reardon
would be furious with me, but instead he
said, “I’m proud of you᠁ The game is
yours. You earned it.”
Part of the fun each week was to bring
in a new face. It was kind of interesting
to watch the dynamics. The new guy al-
ways felt awkward at frst, and I tried my
best to make him more comfortable. The
regulars, especially Todd and Reardon,
tried to make him feel uncomfortable.
It was like watching a cliquish group of
adolescent girls. If the guy started win-
ning of the bat once he sat down,
IN THE CHIPS he was picked on even more. If he
Bloom at the was losing or playing badly, the
Montage guys were much friendlier. If the
I’m going to start charging Beverly Hills. new player was a celebrity or a bil-
rent for the Shufe Master.” lionaire, then all bets were of and
I looked past him to the expansive foyer he was treated like royalty.
of his mansion in the hills. You could see You can tell a lot about a man’s character
straight through to the ocean. by watching him win or lose money. Money
I laughed. Surely he was joking. He couldn’t is the great equalizer.
possibly be serious about charging rent for a With the addition of Ben, Derek, and
machine he insisted that we use, from the guys Rick, I had more than enough players for
whose money he was taking every week. the big game, and I started planning for the
But he was as serious as death, and I following Tuesday at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
quickly stopped laughing. I asked for Bungalow No. 1 because it was
“O.K.,” I squeaked. “Um, how much?” separate from the hotel, impressively ap-
“Two hundred dollars.” pointed, and had a circular foyer that would
I smiled to conceal my surprise. be useful for keeping the food deliveries and
“I’m sure that will be fne. No problem,” room service separate from the game.
I said. More celebrities and higher stakes meant
“Greeaaat,” he said. “Thanks, Molly. And that ensuring privacy was becoming more
there’s one other thing. I’d like to know who’s and more important. The higher the stakes,
playing every week. If there’s going to be some- the greater the paranoia.
one new, I would defnitely like to know who I decided to drop Ben’s name in an efort
it is. In advance.” His words came out slowly, to land Arthur, the ultimate whale.
sounding soft on the outside but with a sharp- I had been doing some checking around
edged threat at the center. I fgured this was about Arthur, who was known for his love
probably about the hand he had lost to Mark. of women and his mysterious but ample for-
“No problem,” I repeated, wanting out of tune. I knew that he had more than enough
there before I promised him my frstborn and billions to cover his buy-in. I also knew that
my soul. he loved celebrity and that a superstar ac-
“All righty, talk to you later,” he said, and tor like Ben was a perfect line to dangle.
waved a cheerful good-bye. I shook my head “Hey, Arthur. I’m doing a game for Ben,
as I drove away. I would never understand and we would love it if you played,” I texted.
rich people. Word was out now about the big game,
P H OTO GRA PH BY JOHN RUSSO www.vanityfair.com VAN IT Y FAI R 81
 and I had received a few calls from profes-
sional poker players practically begging me
for a seat. Some ofered me straight cash, and
some a “free roll,” which means if they won
I would get a percentage, and if they lost I
wouldn’t have any liability. I knew that letting
pros into this game would be a surefre way to
lose it. The pros would win all the money, and
part of what made my game so special was
the chemistry at the table and the fact that no-
body there played poker for a living.
And it wasn’t just that every cardplayer
in Hollywood wanted to come to the games;
everyone’s friends and their friends wanted to
come to watch. I felt that a huge part of this
enterprise depended on discretion, so I tried
to discourage spectators when I could, but
I couldn’t stop the guys from bringing girl-
friends along to show of in front of, or the
occasional celebrity from stopping by. Some-
times the rap producer Irv would bring Nelly
along. Celebrities were always allowed, to be
honest. Like when the Olsen twins showed up
with a billionaire I was trying to land for the
game. They were in, no questions asked.
The fnal list for the big game was Tobey;
Ben; my new whales, Derek and Rick; Bob;
Houston; and some new faces: Bosko, a dap-
per gentleman in his 60s; Mike, a finance
whiz who loved to gamble; and Gabe, who
back in the day was a television star. All the
players except Tobey and Houston were huge
action. The going-all-in-blind kind of action.
And the initial buy-in was $50,000, which
meant there would be half a million dollars
on the table before the frst cards were dealt.
It was going to be a big night.
I
chose my outft carefully: a black dress
that was just clingy enough to be sexy
but not enough to be vulgar. Black
Louboutins, Chanel pearls, and a light
jacket, which was important because
I liked to keep the game room cool.
Colder temperatures kept players awake, and
there was nothing worse than a tableful of tired,
lethargic poker players. I wanted the table ex-
ploding with action, energy, and conversation.
The chemistry at a table is so important.
You must start with a carefully balanced mix
of personalities. If the balance is of and the
stakes are too big for some of the players, it
kills the game. Too small and everybody gets
bored. The $50,000 buy-in had attracted these
“C’MON,” TOBEY SAID, HOLDING
THE $1,000 CHIP
ABOVE MY HEAD. “BARK.”
82 VA NI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com
guys, and so I knew they could handle it; I
also knew that it would create pots big enough
to make even the richest guys sweat a little.
I re-applied my lipstick and waited. I had
invited Tiffany and Lauren, new friends I
had made during a recent trip to Vegas. The
two of them showed up to serve drinks and
act as decoration. They looked breathtaking.
I knew the guys in the room tonight would
have a lot that made them want to stay—on
and of the table.
The frst player to arrive was Derek, who
was playing for the frst time and had come
recommended to me by Blake, a friend in
Vegas. “He’s young, rich, and a true degener-
ate,” Blake had told me. “He’s difcult, but he
loses $10 to $20 million a year. You want his
number.”
Tobey showed up with Houston. Mike
showed next. He was a very successful trader
who seemed a little ditsy but was a genius with
numbers. I’d heard he was an absolute animal
at the table, as I found most traders were. He
had the same routine of arriving and empty-
ing out his pockets, which always contained
a shocking number of items: golf tees, pens,
receipts, lip balm. He handed me his blank,
signed check, and I clipped it to my board. Ev-
ery player that night had done the same—given
me a signed check, with the amount left blank
to cover his buy-in and his losses if things didn’t
go his way. For the moment the holding com-
pany of Molly Bloom Inc. was ofcially rich.
M
ike went to join the other
guys, and I motioned
Derek over.
He picked up his back-
pack and followed me
into the bedroom, open-
ing the bag as soon as I shut the door. He
knew what I wanted: he had $250,000 in cash
and another $500,000 in Bellagio chips. As I
had explained to him when we met earlier,
I couldn’t extend him credit his frst time at
the game, so by bringing $750,000 he would
be able to buy in 15 times that night.
Even though I was tripping on the
amount of money I was being given, I smiled
as if I did this every day. I didn’t want Derek
to start to wonder about the fact that he had
just handed three-quarters of a million dol-
lars to a virtual stranger. “Great, I’ll just put
it in the safe for now.”
“Don’t run of with it,” he said.
We rejoined the others just in time to see
Bosko and Gabe walk in. They gave me a cool
hello; they were old-school and I knew it would
take some time before they would show me any
respect. I didn’t care. My game spoke for itself.
Bob showed up next, and Mike asked me
if we could begin.
“Guys, do you want to start?” I asked
above the excited banter.
Of course they did.
They drew for seats, and the game was of
and running.
In the very frst hand, Bob, Bosko, Mike,
and Derek were all in. I got the chips and the
buy-in board ready. That hand went to Bob,
which made both Bob and Diego, whom
Bob punished when he lost, very happy.
The guys reloaded, laughing and joking.
“I’ll take 200,” said Mike.
I looked around the room for objections.
Mike wanted to make sure he had enough
chips to take Bob down.
“Actually,” Mike said, “make it 500.”
I looked at him and he nodded, so I count-
ed $500,000 in chips and gave them to him.
“I’ll take 500, too,” said Derek.
I looked at Tobey at the same moment he
looked at me, and nodded to indicate that I
had the money in cash. His eyebrows few
up and he looked impressed.
I counted out Derek’s chips.
“Give me 300 more,” Bob said.
Talk about a testosterone contest, I thought,
counting out the chips. The cards hadn’t even
been dealt for the second hand. As I counted
the chips I looked around the table to see if any-
one else wanted to play Richest Guy at the Pok-
er Table. With no takers, the action continued.
Just then I got a text from Ben.
“Here,” it said.
A surge of excitement coursed through my
body—and in that moment I realized how
much I had changed. Ben showing up for my
poker game was undeniably monumental, but
the butterfies I was feeling now were excite-
ment that he was playing at my table, that he
was a part of my game.
I greeted Ben at the door. He was tall and
handsome, with a relaxed charisma that not
all icons have in person.
He looked surprised when I told him who
I was.
“You’re so young,” he said.
JU LY 2014
 Spotlight
“Not that young.” I winked. I was 27, but
I looked even younger. GoPRO, YOUNG MAN
I took his coat and showed
him the buy-in sheet. Nick Woodman,
His eyes flew open and he founder of GoPro,
looked at his watch. photographed
“Two million on the table al- at San Gregorio
ready?” State Beach,
in Northern
“Yep,” I said.
California.
“O.K., give me 50K.”
By now I had learned some-
thing about the psychology
behind the way a guy asks for
chips. Wanting to be overstocked
or short-stacked at a table is a
clear indication of playing style
and ego. Whereas some guys
want the tallest piles they can
manage, the better to bully the
table and scare people, Ben’s
buy-in choice told me that he
was a smart player who liked to
limit his downside, especially at
a table with a bunch of guys he
wasn’t used to playing with.

R I
ick showed up
next. Rick, the
videographer,
director, and
co-star of an infamous sex
n October 2012, when the Austrian stuntman Felix
tape, was crass and dirty, but
Baumgartner jumped from a balloon at nearly 128,000
he was still hot in a caveman kind of way.
I pulled him aside to show him the board. feet and exceeded the speed of sound during a free fall,
“Wow, they are swinging, huh?” he said, five little GoPro cameras were strapped to his suit to re-
looking down at me. “Want to fuck?” cord high-definition views of his heroics. At around the
I looked back at him, praying my face same time, GoPro became the best-selling video camera in the Unit-
wasn’t as red as it felt. ed States, and its inventor and chief promoter, a Northern California
“No thanks,” I said as casually as if he surfer named Nicholas Woodman, became a billionaire. Woodman
had asked me if I wanted a Tic Tac. is now 39 but seems younger. His success is due in part to his authen-
He laughed. ticity—he is a genuine member of the extreme-sports crowd, given to
HA I R PRO DUC TS BY A ME R IC A N CRE W; GRO O MI NG PRO DUC TS BY C L IN I QUE F O R M E N; GRO OM I NG BY TAMAR A
B ROWN ; P RO DUC ED O N L OC ATI O N BY CHRI ST IE EV ERY P RO DUC TI O NS ; F OR DE TA I LS , GO TO VF.CO M/C RE DI TS

“Give me 200K.”
Holy shit. I had a humongous poker game.
As Rick took a seat, I saw him focus on
Ben. I saw the wheels turning. Oh God, I
thought, don’t let Rick say anything embar-
rassing. He had no flter.
“Hey, yo, did Jennifer’s ass have cellulite
on it, or was it nice?”
The table went silent.
Ben looked at Rick.
“It was nice,” he said, and pushed into a
huge pot.
The table laughed and the ice was broken.
These may have been larger-than-life char-
acters playing with larger-than-life numbers,
but at the end of the day, guys are guys—and
strangers quickly became familiar friends at a
poker table.
After that uncomfortable moment the
game took on a life of its own. It was one of
those perfect nights where the conversation
was lively, the action was fast and furious,
and each one of C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 1 3
whooping and exclaiming “Awesome!” without irony. But he is also
an unusually focused businessman. Woodman started with the idea
of inventing a wrist strap to which surfers could attach a camera to
show themselves in action. He soon realized that, for lack of suitable
devices in the marketplace, he had to invent the camera too—some-
thing inexpensive, waterproof, mountable every which way, and
providing an ultra-wide-angle view. In a world awash in polished
videos of professional surfers, he sympathized with the urge that or-
dinary surfers have to look like that, too. He called the camera the
Hero, and began to sell it to surf shops in 2004. It took off right away,
with sales that grew from about 1,500 units the first year to at least
three million annually today. So it wasn’t just the surfing culture that
he tapped into. It turned out that all sorts of people doing all sorts
of things wanted to mount a camera to film themselves and their ac-
tivities. The camera also caught on with scientists, soldiers, athletic
coaches, journalists, surgeons, and probably jihadists too. But it’s
the amateurs who count the most. Their output is astonishing—a video
time capsule of our era. Woodman thought he’d be selling mainly to
fellow surfers, but as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have shown,
the interest of people in themselves is boundless. Woodman’s market
niche turned out to be humanity. Now his company is going public.
No wonder he says he’s stoked. —WILLIA M L ANGE WIESC HE

JU LY 2 014 PH OTOGRA PH BY JIMMY CHIN 83

84
photographed
Tolokonnikova and

in New York City.

Masha Alyokhina,
Pussy Riot’s Nadya

VAN IT Y
FA IR
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Spotlight

JULY
2 014
ST YLE D BY HE ATHE R MA RY JACK SON ; H AI R P RODU C TS BY WE L L A PROF E S SIO NA L S; MA KE U P PROD UCTS BY MAC; HAIR BY PET ER G R AY; MAK EUP
BY F R AN C E L LE ; SE T D E SI G N BY ROB STR AUS S STU D IO; PROD UC E D ON L OC ATI ON BY R U TH LE VY; F OR DETAILS, G O TO VF.COM/ CR ED ITS
 The RIOT ACT

‘H
ow do you pronounce this word? En-door?
Endure. Endure.” Masha Alyokhina repeated
the word several more times. She and Nadya
Tolokonnikova were getting ready to give their
first speech in English, to an audience of more than 2,000
women at New York’s Lincoln Center. Their biggest ap-
plause line was “Be Pussy Riot! Anyone can be Pussy Riot!”
Though often called a punk-rock group, Pussy Riot is actu-
ally a Russian protest-art collective started by non-musicians
a little less than three years ago. By the rules of the group
as devised by Tolokonnikova, members are always anony-
mous: they are Pussy Riot only when wearing their trademark
neon-colored balaclavas. Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova are
two exceptions: they were unmasked and arrested two and
a half years ago after performing what they called a “punk
prayer” inside Moscow’s biggest cathedral. The song ap-
pealed to the Virgin Mary to “chase Putin out.” Alyokhina
and Tolokonnikova were sentenced to two years in penal
colonies and served 22 months in Gulag-like conditions.
It is these conditions—the slave labor, the system of pun-
ishment and control that involves holding women outside
in the cold for hours and days and at times denying them
even the right to wash—that they have been working to
publicize ever since they got out of prison, at the end of
2013. As Pussy Riot, they have recorded a clip called “Putin
Will Teach You to Love the Motherland,” its centerpiece a
real-life scene, captured on video, in which Tolokonnikova,
Alyokhina, and several others are attacked and horse-
whipped by Cossacks in Sochi. (The Cossacks, a paramili-
tary force, have long been menacing Russian artists and
L.G.B.T. activists with the Kremlin’s explicit encouragement.)
As prisoners’-rights advocates, Alyokhina and Tolokon-
nikova have traveled to various Russian regions to docu-
ment human-rights abuses. In Nizhny Novgorod, they were
attacked by self-identified Russian-patriot thugs, who sent
Alyokhina to the hospital with a lacerated forehead and left
Tolokonnikova with acid in her eyes.
After all they’ve had to endure, it is their stubborn belief in
the power of information and their insistent hope for a bright-
er future for Russia that strike one most about Tolokonnikova
and Alyokhina. That, and the fact that when they are outside
of Russia they feel nothing so strongly as the need to get
back to work in their own country—where, they’ve realized,
they will now have to hire bodyguards. — M ASHA GESSEN

J ULY 2014 P H OTO GR APH BY MARK SELIGER www.vanityfair.com VA N IT Y FAI R 85

 BODY OF WORK
Jef Koons in the gym of
his studio, in New York
City’s Chelsea neighborhood.
He works out every
day around noon, then eats
a lean lunch.

Jeff Koon Getting a massive retrospective this month

at the Whitney, preparing to install his balloon sculptures at
the Louvre, lecturing at the Frick—has Jeff Koons, taboo-
busting rebel, become a pillar of the art establishment? With a
look back at the simultaneous implosion of Koons’s
career and personal life in the 1990s, INGRID SISCHY examines
the creative risks that power his record-
breaking prices and pop-culture supremacy

86 VA N I T Y FA
A II RR P HOTOGR A P HS BY ANNIE LEIBOVITZ JU N E 2014
 S E T D E S IG N BY M ARY HOWA R D STU DI O;
F OR D E TAI LS , G O TO VF. COM/ C R E D ITS

J ULY
2014
www.vanityfair.com
s Is Back!

VA N IT Y
FAI R
87
 I f the walls at Manhattan’s Frick Collection
could talk, they would have been uttering tiny gasps of shock and
awe this spring at a lecture given by Jef Koons for a small, mostly
professional-art-world crowd. Koons was sharing his ruminations on
the Renaissance and Baroque bronzes from the Hill Collection then
on view in the galleries, and it was one of the artist’s classic perfor-
mances: no opportunity was missed to point out breasts, testicles, and
phalluses, both in the bronzes and in his own work. This way of seeing
and talking about art is his specialty, and the crowd ate it up, many of
them getting the droll underlying humor of the situation as a deadpan
Koons busted taboos in snootsville. But not everyone was happy about
it. The very idea of Koons’s being invited to speak at this old-world in-
stitution apparently put someone’s nose out of joint enough that he or
she had sent the museum postcards featuring drawings of poop.
The Frick isn’t the only important institution to embrace Koons.
The Whitney Museum plans a retrospective, curated by Scott Roth-
kopf, opening to the public on June 27. It will be historic in many
ways. Spreading out just over 27,000 square feet—in all the museum’s
88 VA NI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com
exhibition spaces save the ffth foor, which holds selections from the
permanent collection—it will be the biggest show devoted to a single
artist that the Whitney has ever done. Furthermore, it will be the
last show, for now at least, that the Whitney will put on in its cur-
rent home—Marcel Breuer’s bold, unconventional, gray granite-and-
concrete modernist structure at 75th Street and Madison Avenue.
After the Koons exhibition, the museum will reopen downtown, in
spring 2015, in a much larger space designed by Renzo Piano, smack
at the southern end of the High Line, in the Meatpacking District.
The museum, which can’t aford to erect a new building and keep
the old one operating at full throttle, has leased the Breuer building
for eight years, with an option to extend, to the Metropolitan Mu-
seum of Art, which has never had a sympathetic exhibition space for
its collection of 20th- and 21st-century works. Now it does.
First, though, the prospect of the Koons show is revving things
up in the art world. “Jef is the Warhol of his time,” proclaims
Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s director. The exhibition’s organizer,
Rothkopf, adds, “We didn’t want to leave the building looking back-
wards and being nostalgic, but we wanted something very bold that
was new for the Whitney and Jef and New York.”
It is a banner year for Koons in general. Split-Rocker, 2000, the art-
ist’s second live-fower sculpture, will be shown in New York for the frst
time, at Rockefeller Center, under the auspices of the Gagosian Gallery
and the Public Art Fund, to coincide with the Whitney show. With its
references to Picasso’s Cubism, to my eyes it is even more multi-layered
and pleasurable than Koons’s other mega-hit Puppy—which also has its
own soil and internal irrigation system to take care of the fowers. Mean-
JU LY 2014

while, at the Louvre, in January 2015, Koons will install a selection of
his large-scale balloon sculptures, including Balloon Rabbit, Balloon
Swan, and Balloon Monkey, in the 19th-century galleries.
T
he last time I wrote about Koons for this magazine,
in 2001, he was in a very diferent place, having just
gone to hell and back, not only in the efort to pull
of a fercely ambitious project, “Celebration,” which
he had begun in 1993, but in his personal life as well.
He’d basically lost everything except his faith in his
art. At the time, I thought how unrufed Koons was, how most peo-
ple would have been hysterical in his situation. But as Gary McCraw,
Koons’s loyal right-hand man, says, “Jef does not like being stuck—
he fgures out what needs to change.” Koons’s cool paid of. He ex-
tricated himself from a number of business relationships that clearly
weren’t working and returned to his original home at the Sonnabend
Gallery. He took a detour from the struggle to complete his “Cel-
ebration” sculptures and paintings, and created several new series,
including a couple of painting shows and animal-shaped refecting
wall reliefs (“Easyfun” and “Easyfun-Ethereal”). Skip ahead a dozen
or so years, to today, and the change in Koons’s circumstances is
almost beyond belief. He is a superstar for a consortium of three
powerful galleries—Gagosian, David Zwirner, and Sonnabend—each
of which works with him independently, and, astonishing as it may
sound, his earlier high prices now sound like fat-out bargains. A few
examples of his auction sales prices, totaling $177 million over the
past year: $28.2 million for the mirror-polished stainless-steel Popeye,
JU LY 2 014
S TUDIO SYS TEM
The painting section of Koons’s studio, where assistants
work on canvases for his “Antiquity” series. Paintings are stippled
in sections and then hand-painted. To achieve his vision, Koons
employs 128 people at his studio: 64 in the painting department, 44 in
the sculpture department, 10 in the digital department, and 10 in
administration. That’s to say nothing of the specialists, fabricators,
and institutions he consults, including most recently M.I.T.’s
Center for Bits and Atoms, led by Neil Gershenfeld.
2009–11; $33.8 million for the stainless-steel Jim Beam–J.B. Turner
Train, 1986; $58.4 million for Balloon Dog (Orange), 1994–2000, the
highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist.
How Koons managed to go from obscurity to white-hot to near
ruin and then back again to the pinnacle is a classic American tale
of self-invention, ingenuity, and unbreakable will, not to mention a
genius for salesmanship and spin.
The artist comes by his talent for salesmanship honestly. When
I visited him this spring at his farm, in south-central Pennsylvania
(which had once been owned by his maternal grandparents, Nell
and Ralph Sitler, and which he bought back in 2005, as a country
place for his family), Koons took me to the cemetery in nearby East
Prospect, where his mother’s side of the family is buried. Parked
in front of a row of headstones with the name “Sitler” carved into
them, Koons read the frst names and told me what each of his male
relatives had done. Most were merchants. His uncle Carl Sitler had a
cigar business; his uncle Roy Sitler owned the general store; and on
it went. The artist’s father, Henry Koons, was an interior decorator
whose business catered to the most afuent citizens of York, which
back then was thriving as a small industrial hub.
The young Koons ft right in. In addition to helping his dad—even
making paintings that would end up in his furniture store—he loved
selling ribbons and bows and gift wrap door-to-door and also Cokes
at the local golf course. “Everyone else would sell Kool-Aid, but I
would sell Coca-Cola in a really nice jug,” Koons recalls. “I would
www.vanityfair.com VA NIT Y FAIR 89
 VEILED REFERENCE
Koons alongside
an unfnished sculpture,
Gazing Ball (Farnese
Hercules), 2013.

“HE HAS TO CONVINCE

90 VAN IT Y FA IR JULY 2 014
lay out a towel and stack up all my cups, and really try to make it a
nice, hygienic experience.” (The artist has a sensitivity to hygiene and
odors that is almost comical.)
Koons’s early art heroes were those who had personal meaning
to him, such as Salvador Dalí, whose work he knew from a book
his parents had given him, his frst art book. While at art school in
Baltimore, Koons tracked down Dalí at the St. Regis hotel, in New
York, and the next thing you know they had a memorable date—the
boy who looked like he had popped of the back of a cereal box (he
still does) and the man who defned Euro-decadence. The subsequent
nods in his work to Dalí’s famous mustache are fun to pick out.
Similarly, Koons was so knocked out by a show of Jim Nutt’s
paintings at the Whitney in 1974 that he decided to spend his senior
year at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in the city where
Nutt belonged to a loosely connected collective of artists known as
the Chicago Imagists. There, Koons ended up working as a studio
assistant for one of the key Imagists, Ed Paschke, whose nightmare
palette and netherworld iconography still pack a punch. Paschke
recalled how Koons was such a dedicated assistant that his hands
would bleed from trying to stretch the canvases to be perfectly taut.
Once he made it to New York, Koons landed the perfect, for
him, position at the Museum of Modern Art, manning the mem-
bership desk. I was working at MoMA back then, too, on a Nation-
al Endowment for the Arts fellowship in photography, and I often
spied him in the lobby in his eye-catching outfts and attention-
getting accessories, such as paper bibs, double ties, and store-bought
infatable fowers around his neck. These shenanigans made for
some hilarious anecdotes, such as when the museum’s then direc-
tor, Richard Oldenburg, politely asked Koons to pull a Houdini
and disappear till the coast was clear. Oldenburg was acting at the
behest of William Rubin, the humorless head of the painting-and-
sculpture department, who was bringing a delegation from Russia,
as Koons remembers it; Rubin was hoping they would help fund
an exhibition or two, and he worried that Koons’s antics might be
a turnof. (I recounted this story to the architect Annabelle Selldorf,
who has worked with Koons, and she observed, laughing, that those
collectors are now the ones buying his work.)
K
Striving Artist
oons’s job at MoMA gave him the opportunity
to immerse himself in the history of modernism,
in particular the ideas of Marcel Duchamp, who
changed art history by showing how everyday ob-
jects, or “readymades,” could be elevated into the
realm of art, depending on context. Duchamp’s
theories were a revelation to Koons. While at MoMA he started to fool
around with a bunch of cheap infatables, blowups of fowers and bun-
nies, rifng on Duchamp’s idea of readymades and propping them
against mirrors in his apartment. “The sexual power of the imagery
was so intoxicating to me visually that I had to have a drink,” he re-
members. “I went to Slugger Ann’s, Jackie Curtis’s grandmother’s bar.”
The reference to Curtis ties Koons to the last true avant-garde—a
pedigree the artist likes. Curtis, who refused to be called a drag queen,
was a pioneer of the L.G.B.T. movement and, like Candy Darling, was
made famous by Warhol. Koons clearly relishes the fact that he and
Warhol are often discussed in the same breath these days, but in fact,
as artists and personalities, they couldn’t be more diferent. Warhol
EXTREMELY WEALTHY PEOPLE . . . TO BUY INTO THE DREAM.”
JU LY 2 014
had a double whammy of an outsider perspective: the American son
of Slovak immigrants, he was gay at a time when it was a very diferent
proposition from what it is today. Koons, on the other hand, grew up in
the embrace of community, with a secure sense of belonging. Warhol
liked to have young folks around him at the Factory, but he didn’t want
to actually spawn any. Koons has enough kids of his own (eight) to start
a touring company of The Sound of Music. Warhol was almost Zen in
his grasp of the light touch in making his artworks and getting them
out into the world. Koons goes through a ring of fre for each work, so
much so that his fnished output is actually quite slim. “We average 6.75
paintings and 15 to 20 sculptures a year,” he told me. (He is always very
exact.) Warhol was practically monosyllabic with art critics, dealers, and
collectors. Koons is the opposite.
Actually, if there is anyone the artist seems to be inspired by at this
point in his life, it is Picasso, whom Koons refers to a lot. Koons, at
59, has already begun a strict exercise-and-diet regimen so that he will
have a shot at working undiminished into his 80s, as Picasso did. He
hits his upstairs gym every day at around noon when he is in the stu-
dio, then eats a lean lunch. For the rest of the afternoon he dips into
an assortment of nuts, cereals, fresh vegetables, and Zone bars. Once
in a while he’ll apologize for an odor if he’s eating broccoli.
What Warhol and Koons do have in common, though, is an
uncanny ability to nail an image or an object so that it catches the
Zeitgeist. The frst time Koons landed on such an idea was in 1979,
around the time he left MoMA. He had been experimenting with
kitchen appliances, such as toasters, refrigerators, and deep fryers,
attaching them to fuorescent-light tubes. These gave way to the
artist’s frst fully realized series, “The New,” which included never
used vacuum cleaners and rug shampooers, often presented in clear
Plexiglas vitrines and illuminated by fuorescent lights. “I thought of
them as eternal-virgin-type situations,” says Koons.
By then he was selling mutual funds to get by. The artworks got
some buzz in the downtown art community, and for a minute Koons
was taken on by the dealer of the moment, Mary Boone. As he whis-
pered to trusted fellow artists, he was excited to become a “Booney,”
but it didn’t work out in the end. Another dealer returned a vacuum-
cleaner piece. Broke and heartbroken, Koons called a time-out and
spent six months or so with his parents, who had moved to Florida,
where he saved money from a job as a political canvasser.
W
hat came next, upon his return to New York,
was the game changer: his “Equilibrium” se-
ries. He was working once again in the high-
pressure world of fnance, this time trading
commodities, but by night he was cooking
up what would turn out to be his frst coup.
Involving a dark, Nietzschean worldview, it was almost the opposite of
the cheerful Koonsian iconography people have grown accustomed
to. Take two works from 1985: a cast-bronze scuba apparatus, which he
called Aqualung, and a bronze Lifeboat. It’s immediately obvious they
aren’t going to save anyone. Instead they’ll take you down.
The “Equilibrium” works were exhibited in 1985 in Koons’s frst
solo show, at International with Monument, a short-lived, artist-run
gallery in the East Village. Dakis Joannou, a Greek collector, who
would become an important champion of the artist’s, was stunned
when he saw the show. “I was so intrigued with the basketball piece,
One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank,” he remembers. “I wanted to buy
www.vanityfair.com VAN IT Y FAI R 91
 “A FRIEND TOLD ME, ‘JEFF . . .

FERTILE MIND
Koons and his wife,
J UST IN E KOO NS ’ S MA K E UP BY E L A IN E MA DE L ON;

Justine, with
their children at their
Pennsylvania
F OR D E TAI LS , G O TO VF. COM/ C R E D ITS

farmhouse, which once

belonged to his
grandparents. When
discussing his art
and his life, a favorite
word of Koons’s is
“biology.”

92 VAN IT Y FA IR
PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER AND GET ON WITH YOUR LIFE.’ ”

J ULY 2014 www.vanityfair.com VA N IT Y FAI R 93

 that piece.” The now iconic works of single or multiple basketballs
in fshtanks had taken countless experiments and many phone calls
to scientists, including Nobel Prize winner Dr. Richard P. Feynman,
who encouraged Koons to work out the right proportion of distilled
and saline water so that the basketballs would neither rise nor sink.
Joannou asked to meet the artist. “He was serious,” says Joannou.
“He had depth. He had vision. He had an enormous world of his
own that he had not even started exploring yet.” (Joannou scooped
up the work for $2,700.)
The Whitney exhibition will have prime examples from the Koons
hit parade, from his earliest works to his most recent, including
stainless-steel objects from both the “Luxury and Degradation” series
(a Travel Bar, the Jim Beam–J.B. Turner Train, etc.) and the “Statuary”
series, which featured Koons’s most critically admired work, Rabbit,
1986. This mirror-polished, enigmatic, silver stainless-steel bunny is the
piece that won over previously unconvinced curators, art historians, and
critics, who saw it as a dazzling contemporary update of a broad range
of iconography, from Playboy bunnies to Brancusi’s soaring forms.
But Koons aspires to appeal not just to the cognoscenti. Nowhere
was this more obvious than in his “Banality” series, created mostly in
traditional porcelain and wood in workshops in Italy and Germany
in the late 80s. The works are a virtual populist paradise that runs
the gamut from St. John the Baptist to an all-gold-and-white Michael
Jackson, cradling his pet monkey. The springboard for the work was
found common objects and popular souvenirs, to which Koons then
brought his art wand. Plenty of people checked out these artworks at
the Sonnabend Gallery, where the artist had fnally found a home.
Soon there would be even more signs that he might one day reach his
goal, which he once described rather immodestly as wanting to create
the art equivalent of what the Beatles had done.
K
Heaven Couldn’t Wait
oons always captures the Zeitgeist, for better or
for worse, so there is a perfect logic to the “Made
in Heaven” series, which he exhibited at Son-
nabend in the fall of 1991, a period in which sex
went from under the counter to center stage be-
cause of aids. What Koons did was the hetero-
sexual equivalent of Robert Mapplethorpe’s taboo-busting images of
men having sex together—in fact, Koons’s paintings and sculptures,
created out of wood, marble, glass, and canvases photomechani-
cally printed with oil inks, include some of the most graphic sexual
imagery ever produced in Western art that went public. It’s impos-
sible to imagine this work without its leading lady, Ilona Staller, bet-
ter known as La Cicciolina (translated as the “little dumpling”), an
only-in-Italy personage, whom Koons met after he saw her picture
in a magazine as a model. Almost immediately they got up close
and personal. The Hungarian-born Staller—a former porn star/
erotic-video icon/politician—has so far been Koons’s only human
readymade, and, being human, she had issues.
The paintings Koons created of the two of them feature penetra-
tion, both anal and vaginal, and liberal amounts of semen. Discuss-
ing one of the most no-holes-barred pictures, Koons says, “What I
really like about it are the pimples on Ilona’s ass. The confdence to
reveal one’s ass like that. That’s like my reference to Courbet’s The
Origin of the World.” And he’s not kidding.
“WHAT KOONS DID IS BEYOND
94 VA NI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com
For a while their life imitated art, and vice versa. The couple fell
in love and, after a wedding in Budapest and about a year in Mu-
nich, where Koons oversaw production of his “Made in Heaven”
project, they came back to New York. “My dad said that he thought
it was crazy, but he was very accepting,” recalls Koons. Dad wasn’t
the only one who thought it was loony.
Not surprisingly, the “Made in Heaven” exhibition was extremely
popular with a curious public and hungry media, but it was basically
a bomb with the art establishment, many of whose members thought
that Koons had committed career suicide. Selldorf remembers how
shocking the work seemed at the time. “One time I was all alone
in the studio and three of the gigantic ‘penetration’ paintings were
there,” she says. “I was staring at these paintings thinking, Holy
Mother of God!” It was no picnic to sell the work, which had been
expensive to produce, and it didn’t help that the recession of the early
90s had people in a panic. Sonnabend was having trouble keeping up
with Koons’s needs, and something which had previously seemed un-
imaginable happened: Koons and Sonnabend parted ways. Antonio
Homem, who ran the gallery with Ileana Sonnabend for some 40
years until Sonnabend’s death and who now owns it, remembers, “It
was a very difcult moment. Even though Ileana and [her husband]
Michael had a huge collection, they always lived from one day
to the other᠁ The great fnancial problem for us was to fabricate
all the ‘Made in Heaven’ pieces beforehand, which were very expen-
sive to produce. Jef wanted all of the editions to be made right from
the beginning. I explained to him that we were unable to continue. He
felt that this was a betrayal and that we didn’t believe in him, and
therefore didn’t want to fnance his work. He took it very badly. We
had no wish to betray him. It was very sad for all of us.”
T
oday this work is fnally getting its due. Happily, Koons
couldn’t destroy as much of it as he tried to—because
it was so well constructed. (The Whitney will include
some of it—with the usual not-for-minors warning.)
“‘Made in Heaven’ is just mind-blowing,” says
Dan Colen, one of the most talented artists of the
generation that came after Koons. “It was a border-less, boundary-
less body of work. There was no separation between the artist’s life
and his work. What he did is beyond Duchamp, beyond Warhol, be-
yond the readymade.” Some might say it was also beyond reason and
beyond the market, but this is not a guy who compromises his art,
ever. Homem sums it up: “Jef would throw me out of the window for
his art, but he would throw himself out the window with me, as well,
without a second thought. He is the most romantic artist I ever met.”
By now the head-spinning details of the Koons-Staller afair are
art-world legend. In a nutshell, Staller wanted to keep her X-rated
porn-star job, and Koons wanted her to stick to their marriage vows.
To make matters more complicated, the couple had a son, Ludwig,
in October 1992. After Maria Callas–worthy drama, Staller blindsided
Koons by outsmarting one of the bodyguards whom Koons had hired
to watch her, and she left for Rome with Ludwig. Koons spent more
than a decade and millions of dollars trying to get his son back, to no
avail. He would fy to Rome to see Ludwig, but once he was there the
visits would usually fall through. He was basically shut out of his son’s
life. So he poured his emotions into his “Celebration” series, begun
in 1993, as a way to tell his son just how much his father was miss-
JU LY 2014
 Spotlight
ing him. A massive sculpture of a wide-eyed Cat on a Clothesline. A
painting of Building Blocks. A sculpture of a giant stainless-steel gold
A PERFORMANCE
Hanging Heart suspended by magenta stainless-steel ribbons. A monu-
mental stainless-steel Balloon Dog, or modern-day Trojan horse. The
with LEGS
simplicity of these works,
and others like them, belies Diane Kruger,
the complexity of executing photographed
them according to Koons’s in the Upper
Las Virgenes
high expectations and un- Canyon Open
compromising standards. Space Preserve,
The production costs of the in Calabasas,
art and the legal costs of try- California.
ing to bring back Ludwig KRUGER WEARS
A SWEATER BY
nearly bankrupted the artist. MICHAEL KORS; BRIEF
BY ERES; SHOES
Eventually Koons started BY TOD’S; EARRINGS
to rebuild his life. “A friend AND RING BY
HARRY WINSTON;
told me, ‘Jeff, look, it’s BRACELET BY
GUCCI.
over,’ ” he recalls. “ ‘You did
everything you can. Stop
this, and pull yourself to-
gether and get on with your
life.’ I lost everything.” He
never gave up on Ludwig,
who is now 21, and to try to
M c A DA MS ; M A NI CU RE BY A SHL I E J O HN SO N; SE T DE S IGN BY A LI GA L L AGHE R; P ROD U CE D ON L O CAT ION BY PO RTFO LI O O NE ; FO R DE TAI LS, GO TO VF.CO M/C RE DI TS
ST Y LE D BY DE B O RA H A F SHA N I ; H A IR P RODU CTS BY L ’O R ÉA L PA R IS ; M A KE UP P ROD U CTS AND N AIL ENAMEL BY CHANE L; HAI R BY MARA RO SZAK ; MAKE UP BY KAYLE E N

help other children, he got

involved with the Interna-
tional Centre for Missing &
Exploited Children, and to-
gether they later formed the
Koons Family Institute on International Law & Policy. At a certain
point Koons was re-united with his daughter Shannon, who’d been
born when Koons was in college and put up for adoption; they now
have a close relationship. In 2002 he married Justine Wheeler, an art-
ist and former assistant in his studio. Today pictures of their own kids
along with those of Ludwig and Shannon dot the Koons households.
I
n The Better Angels, a film about the very young Abe
Lincoln, Diane Kruger plays the part of Sarah Lincoln,
the 16th president’s stepmother, a frontierswoman
whose homespun good sense is said to have been
formative in his pre-log-splitting days. It was a tough
role, says Kruger, with a lot of “improvisation, hanging out in the

A
t the height of his crisis Koons’s funding was de-
pleted, and over time he had to let go of more than
70 assistants. Furthermore, in 1999, the I.R.S. fled
a $3 million tax lien. On many days Koons, his
studio manager McCraw, and Wheeler, who was
then becoming closer to the artist, had the studio to
themselves. Their strategy for saving “Celebration” ultimately worked.
“One big problem at the beginning was that Jef would start making a
work without really having a clear idea of how he could complete it,”
explains Homem. “Problems would occur in which everything would
woods, and scenes playing against amateur-actor children who
did not know what the film is about.” The German-born actress
(Diane Heidkrüger, originally) was not the obvious choice for
such a role. “Actually, it’s one of the reasons they cast me,” she
says. “Americans way back then were early settlers with more
European looks.” Euro or otherwise, Kruger says that her looks
(she’s a former runway model) have been an issue in her career.
A New York Times review in the wake of her portrayal of Helen
in the 2004 Brad Pitt epic Troy noted that she “looks too beau-
tiful to play a role of any substance.” After that, Kruger took on
a diverse series of higher-brow, differently accented roles (nota-

{
stop. Although his pieces still take years bly the Dietrich-esque Bridget von Hammersmark in Inglourious
to make, fortunately there is less of that.” @vf.com Basterds; a Bosnian immigrant in Unknown, opposite Liam Nee-
Eventually, thanks to dogged belief, a new WATCH BE H IN D - son; and Marie Antoinette in Farewell, My Queen). Now, with her
THE -S CENES VID E O
model of working (not to mention forces of FROM THE KOO N S credentials unquestioned and her versatility almost unmatched—
nature like Gagosian and Sonnabend), and S TUD IO. she is perhaps the only Hollywood star who loops her own parts
GO TO VF.CO M/
a lot of problem solving, the “Celebration” JULY2014.
in French, German, and English—Kruger has added a steely TV
works slowly began to see the light of day. detective to her repertoire, as Sonya Cross, an icy cop with As-
A fundamental problem with the “Celebration” series was perger’s syndrome, in the FX series The Bridge, returning next
that the fabricating processes and the technology had not month for a second season. Kruger says the heroine she plays
caught up with Koons’s visions. These C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 1 5 gives her plenty of dramatic challenges, but just when she was
getting used to working with auteurs, such as Tarantino, she had
to adjust to “the pace of episodic TV,” she says. “I enjoy it,” she
adds. “It’s like a long movie. It has its advantages, but the change
DUCHAMP, BEYOND WARHOL.” of director each week is still something I have to get used to. It
has not been an easy adjustment for me.” — M AT T T Y R N AU E R
JU LY 2 014 PH OTOGRA PH BY NORMAN JEAN ROY 95
 Spotlight

VALLI GUYS

R
ock ’n’ roll was never really Clint Eastwood’s jam. “I
went through the 50s and 60s,” the 84-year-old Oscar-
winning director says, “but I never really dug it. I was
always a rhythm-and-blues guy. I was a jazz freak. But it
seemed like the Four Seasons’ songs were a cut above.”
Now Eastwood is giving Jersey Boys, the Tony-winning musical
based on the 1960s vocal group that vaulted to stardom on Frankie
Valli’s stratospheric falsettos, the Hollywood treatment. Featuring many
of the Four Seasons’ chart toppers—“Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,”
96 VAN IT Y FA IR www.vanityfair.com JULY 2 014
PRO DU C E D ON LOC ATI ON BY P ORT FOL IO ON E ; F OR D E TA IL S, G O TO V F. COM/ C R E D ITS
COSTUME S DE S IG N E D BY D E BOR A H HOPP E R; HA IR BY TE R RY BA L IE L A N D C A ROL A .
O’ CONN E L L; MAK E U P BY MICHE LL E V IT TON E -M c N E IL ; S E T DE S I GN BY PE TE R K LE IN ;

Erich Bergen,
Clint Eastwood, John
Lloyd Young, Vincent
Piazza, and Michael
Lomenda, photographed
on the back lot at
Warner Bros. Studio, in
Burbank, California.

“Walk Like a Man,” “December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night)”—the
show opened on Broadway in 2005 and is still running Stateside and
in London’s West End, while various productions tour the globe. (On
Broadway alone, the show has made nearly $500 million in revenue.)
Eastwood hadn’t yet seen the play when he was approached
to direct the movie version. “The fact that I didn’t know too much
about it made me want to delve into it,” he says. The film, out June
20, adheres to the structure of the stage show; it is divided into four
segments representing the four seasons, with each member of the
band telling his version of events. John Lloyd Young, who originated
the role of Valli on Broadway, plays him again in the film. Michael
Lomenda and Erich Bergen, touring-company vets, portray original
members Nick Massi and Bob Gaudio (the group’s principal song-
writer), and Boardwalk Empire alum Vincent Piazza is Tommy De-
Vito, the streetwise group founder. (Christopher Walken appears as
a Jersey mobster.)
“It’s just a lot of good songs,” Eastwood says. “You go home
humming a different one every night.” — KRISTA SMITH

J ULY 2014 P H OTO GR APH BY ANNIE LEIBOVITZ VA N IT Y FAI R 97

Clare, in Lo

MR. AND MRS.

U.S.A.
Clare and Henry
Luce in 1942, the
year she was elected
to the House
of Representatives.
Opposite, Clare at
their home in
Phoenix in 1959,
the year she
resigned the post
of ambassador
to Brazil.

98 VANI T Y FA IR JULY 2 014

ve and War What Clare Boothe Luce wanted,
Clare Boothe Luce got: a man, a
seat in Congress, an ambassadorship.
A literary star in her own right,
she had become half of America’s
premier power couple when the
Time-empire founder Henry Luce left
his wife to marry her in 1935.
But, reveals SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS,
in an excerpt from volume two
of her biography, the woman who
jousted with presidents and
experimented with LSD wasn’t
prepared, in 1959, to find herself
the one betrayed
IM AGE S , D I GI TA L CO LOR IZ ATIO N BY LOR N A C L A RK ; R IG HT, F ROM CORB IS
PHOTOG R AP HS : LE F T, BY G E ORG E KA RG E R / TI ME & LI FE PIC TUR E S/ G E TT Y

www.vanityfair.com VA NIT Y FAI R 99

WA
hen Clare Boothe
married Henry “Harry” Luce, the 37-year-old
founder of Time and Fortune, she was 32
and already well known, as a former manag-
ing editor of Vanity Fair. Born illegitimate
to poor parents, Clare was a pretty enough
child actress to understudy Mary Pickford
on Broadway and to act in a silent movie. In
her teens she had also briefy campaigned for
equal rights with the National Woman’s Par-
ty. Then she allowed her socially ambitious
mother to steer her into a loveless marriage
to the Fifth Avenue millionaire George Bro-
kaw, who was more than twice her age. Six
years later, in 1929, now a well-of divorcée
with a fve-year-old daughter, Clare launched
a lifelong series of male conquests, starting
with the Wall Street speculator Bernard Ba-
ruch. Condé Nast, who was infatuated with
her, employed her at Vogue and later Vanity
Fair. An early writing assignment at the lat-
ter was a 1930 “Hall of Fame” profle
of Luce, who in 1935 left his wife and
two sons for her. The following year,
Clare became even more celebrated as
the writer of the all-female Broadway
play The Women. She would eventually
write eight plays, three books, and several
movie scripts. For almost three decades,
the Luces were indisputably America’s
foremost power couple. Clare covered the
early days of World War II in the Far
East and Europe as a correspondent for
Life, her husband’s picture magazine, then
served in Congress as a two-term Repub-
lican representative from Connecticut. As
the only female member of the House Mili-
tary Affairs Committee, she twice toured
the Italian and French battlefronts and had
Adapted from Price of Fame: The Honorable
Clare Boothe Luce, by Sylvia Jukes Morris,
to be published this month by Random House;
© 2014 by the author.
“THERE IS NO JOB
SO TOUGH YOU COULDN’T DO IT,” IKE SAID.
100 VAN IT Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com
liaisons with at least two generals. The dev-
astating death of her only child, Ann, in an
auto accident at age 19, drove Clare to con-
vert to Roman Catholicism (with the help of
Reverend Fulton J. Sheen) and later to experi-
ment with psychedelic drugs. As a formidable
television campaigner, she helped Dwight D.
Eisenhower win a landslide victory over Ad-
lai E. Stevenson in the presidential election of
1952. Shortly afterward, a summons came for
Clare to meet the president-elect at his transi-
tion headquarters in New York’s Commodore
Hotel, a meeting she carefully recorded.
Presidential Favor
t the hotel, she found a war-
ren of offices swarming with
job seekers. Then Eisen-
hower emerged and strode
toward her, smiling broadly
with outstretched hands. He
ushered her into his suite and closed the door.
She was struck, as often before, by the “sheer
vitality of the man, and his essential simplic-
ity and goodness … with that warmth and
cheerful heartedness and self-possession that
inspire love and confidence in everyone.”
Their conversation began with pleasant-
ries about her infuential husband’s role in
the campaign. Eisenhower then changed the
subject, saying he would like to appoint a
Catholic as his secretary of labor. What did
she think about that? Clare said he would
need someone of “tremendous capacity” for
such a demanding job.
“There is no job so tough you couldn’t do
it,” Ike said.
While she digested this compliment, he re-
marked that she was “certainly smarter and
abler” than Frances Perkins, the first woman
to hold any Cabinet post. Clare was even
more fattered but, knowing from congressio-
nal experience that she had no propensity for
dealing with unions, said she felt unqualified.
Eisenhower asked if there was another
job she would prefer. Clare suggested ten-
tatively that she could be a successor to El-
eanor Roosevelt as chairman of the United
Nations Commission on Human Rights. He
looked surprised and said that would not be
“much of a thing.” In any case, the post
was filled.
Edging closer to candor, Clare said she
“fit nowhere except into the field of foreign
afairs.” Before Ike could reply, she added,
“And with London gone to Aldrich—”
“Who told you that?” he snapped.
“Everyone in New York knows, because
the Aldriches have leaked it.”
He laughed and said Winthrop Aldrich
was “the brainiest man with the least wis-
dom” he had ever encountered. It was true,
however, that the former banker had been
appointed to the Court of St. James’s.
Continuing to press, Eisenhower asked,
“What would you like best?”
Clare knew there was only one answer.
Mysteriously and often over the years, Italy
had summoned her, first when she had
been a correspondent for Life in 1940, then
twice more, when she visited American and
British troops in 1944 and 1945, and had
repeatedly met Pope Pius XII. Since the
PH OTO GRA P H © B E TT MA N N/ CO R BI S , DI GI TA L CO L OR I ZAT I ON BY LO RNA C L ARK
end of the war, she and Harry had been as
concerned over the threat of Communist
expansion in Italy as in China. They had
helped orchestrate the successful fund-
raising visit to the United States of Alcide
De Gasperi, Italy’s postwar architect of
Christian capitalist democracy. He was
still in power and deeply grateful to them.
Eisenhower was waiting to hear what re-
ward she wanted, so Clare took the plunge.
“Naturally, what I can’t get. Rome.”
“Who told you you can’t get it and
why?”
“There are so many others to whom
you are obligated.”
At this point, she cast aside false mod-
JU LY 2014
 ON THE TOWN
The Luces at a
Broadway opening
in 1935, the
year they married.
Opposite, Clare
by Vanity Fair
artist Miguel
Covarrubias. 101
 2

ALF RED EISEN STAEDT /T IME & LIF E PI CTU RES/ G ETT Y IMAG ES (5 ) , A NDRÉ KÉRTÉSZ/
COND É N AST ARCHIVE (4 ), F ROM T HE LOND ON EVENI NG STA N DA RD/SO L O
SY N DICAT ION /Z UMA PR ESS (2), © UPPA/ PHOTOSH OT (7 ), © USIS-DITE/
1

PHOTOG R APHS F ROM A .P. IMAG ES (6 ), © BETT MA NN / COR BI S ( 3 ) , BY

LEEMAG E (1); D IG ITAL COLO RIZ ATI ON BY LOR NA CL A R K (4, 6)

4

LIFE ON TOP
(1) General
Dwight Eisenhower
and Clare, 1944.
(2) Lady Jeanne
Campbell, Henry’s other
love, in London, 1963.
(3) Clare at the house
in Phoenix,
1959. (4) Sugar Hill,
the Luces’ house in
Ridgefield, Connecticut.
(5) Henry and Clare
playing croquet, 1936.
(6) Clare with
Henry and Greek
shipping magnate
Stavros Niarchos, 1956.
(7) Clare, with
Henry, arrives as
ambassador to
Italy on the Andrea
Doria, 1953.

102 VA N I T Y FAIR 6 JULY 2014

 3

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www.vanityfair.com VV A
ANN II TT Y F A I R 1
003
0
esty and cited three benefits he might gain
in choosing her. First, he would gratify the
millions of Catholics who had voted for him;
second, her appointment would save him from
having to send another of her faith to the Vat-
ican; and, third, every female in the electorate
“would be pleased that a woman had finally
got a number one diplomatic post.” Left un-
spoken was her dismay at the growing pres-
ence of Communists in Italy’s government
and industries.

E
isenhower hedged. He won-
dered if she might have a
second choice, such as Mexi-
co. “You could do a splendid
job for me there.” Clare said
lamely that it might be an
easier commute. Still probing, Ike asked how
her husband would feel about her going to
Italy. She admitted that they had discussed
it, and Harry liked the idea. Time Inc. had
a bureau in the Eternal City, so he could
visit her and run his business from there.
She did not have to remind Eisenhower that
with their combined wealth they had ample
means to finance the entertaining expected
in a prime ambassadorial spot.
He brought the discussion to an end
without committing himself, but gave her a
caution that sounded like encouragement.
“Please don’t discuss this with Foster.” John
Foster Dulles, as Clare knew, was his choice
as secretary of state, and, as a staunch Pres-
byterian, was unlikely to favor a Catholic
woman in the Rome embassy.
“Let me wangle it, and be
patient,” Ike said. FRIEND OF
As if on cue, Dulles entered.
PRESIDENTS
Clare in the Luces’
After a brief chat, she left Fifth Avenue
with the impression that if he apartment, 1964.
agreed to have her in his diplo- Inset, a 1942 letter
from Clare to
naval ensign
John F. Kennedy.

JULY 2 014
 L ARGE PHOTOG R AP H BY N E A L BOE N ZI /T HE N EW YO R K TIM ES/
R E D UX ; I N SET F ROM THE JOHN F. KENNEDY PERSONAL PAPERS/
JOHN F. KENNEDY PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

HARRY

www.vanityfair.com
GRANDDAUGHTER OF LORD BEAVERBROOK.
CONFESSED
HE HAD BEEN SLEEPING WITH JEANNE CAMPBELL,

VA NIT Y FAI R
105
 HARRY CAME HOME TO FIND THAT CLARE HAD
TAKENOFAN OVERDOSE
SODIUM AMYTAL.
matic corps she would get her heart’s desire.
In a letter that night, Clare shared every
detail with Harry, who was on a business
trip to Asia. Seeking to assuage whatever
disappointment he might feel at not having
been favored himself, she told him that she
disliked the prospect of their having to pur-
sue separate careers on diferent sides of the
Atlantic. “The awful apartness … fills me
with panic, vertigo, anguish beyond reason
when I contemplate it.” They must thrash it
out as soon as he returned—the implication
being that she hoped Harry would reassure
her that their marriage could stand the
strain. In the meantime, “my poor, thirsty
little (no, big) ego has had the healing
draught it needed most᠁ I am so very
happy because I feel recognized, appreciat-
ed, wanted … by the one man whose recog-
nition and appreciation matter most in poli-
tics.” In a dozen ways, she added, Ike had
made it clear that “in honoring the wife, he
sought to honor and please the husband!”
She reminded Harry, in a postscript, of his
importance around the globe. “Gosh dar-
ling, in the tragic environs of Korea and For-
mosa, does all this sound—trivial and selfish?
And irrelevant?”
After years of marital crises and exhaust-
ing reconciliations, their mutual support of
Eisenhower and shared interest in Cold War
politics boded salvation for them both. They
were now in a position to try to infuence
policy as well as comment on it.
Her true excitement showed in a note to a
friend at Vogue: “Maggie, I want Italy more
than anything in my entire life.”
On December 17, 1952, Clare heard that
she had been nominated Ambassador Extraor-
dinary and Plenipotentiary to the Republic of
Italy. As the frst woman ever to hold such an
important diplomatic post, she spent three
and a half years in Rome and distinguished
herself there despite opposition from chauvin-
ists in her own embassy as well as Commu-
nists in Italian industry and the government.
Her major achievement was to help settle the
intractable Trieste crisis, which threatened to
bring about war between Italy and Marxist
Yugoslavia. In 1959, Eisenhower appointed
her ambassador to Brazil, but in the congres-
sional hearing to approve her, she crossed
swords with the truculent senator Wayne
Morse, of Oregon, who opposed her so aggres-
sively that, although confrmed by a large ma-
106 VAN IT Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com
jority, Clare felt compelled to resign the post.
Far from being cast down, she embarked at
age 56 on an exhilarating new experience.
A
Sex, Lies, and Hallucinogens
t 11:25 a.m. on May 16, 1959,
at Sugar Hill, the Luces’ 20-
room, Georgian-style house
in Ridgefield, Connecticut,
Clare took 100 micrograms
of lysergic acid diethylam-
ide. Two friends from California, the writer-
philosopher Gerald Heard and his musician
partner, Jay Michael Barrie, supervised the
dose. It was her third experience in three
months with LSD, as the new hallucinatory
drug was known.
By 11:55 she was gazing out the window
“with great stillness and intensity,” Barrie noted
as recorder. They had been listening to Sibelius’s
Symphony No. 2, and when it ended, Clare
said, still staring at her lawns and fowering dog-
wood trees, “It’s hard to tell whether the music
was accompanying that out there, or that out
there was accompanying the music.”
At 12:10 she protested that Stravinsky’s
Renard was “a vast intrusion” on her con-
templation and should be turned of. “The
trees, if they knew what they were doing,
would be making their own music᠁ The
colors are beginning to separate themselves
into all their exquisite subtleties.”
Soon her mood changed again, and she
requested that a bowl of lilacs be brought to
her. She focused closely on the blossoms and
said, “Now I’m beginning to see the fowers
breathe. It makes one yearn to see God.”
The sound of an automobile horn outside
announced the arrival of Harry for lunch. “I
shall leave you three to wrestle with the spa-
ghetti,” Clare said. While the men ate, she
remained on the porch, drinking a cup of
broth. Then she went out, spread a blanket
on the lawn, and lay down.
By 6:15 the efects of her trip had worn of.
She joined her husband and guests for dinner
and the kind of cerebral conversation with Ger-
ald that she relished. She had met him in 1947,
while working on a screenplay in Hollywood,
and had been captivated by his Anglo-Irish
charm, erudition, and spirituality. The author
of more than 30 books on science, religion,
philosophy, and Eastern mysticism, Heard had
immigrated to America with Aldous Huxley in
1937. He had become a devotee of the Hindu
guru Swami Prabhavananda, and after World
War II had emerged as something of a guru
himself, founding the monastery-like Trabuco
College of Prayer, in the Santa Ana Mountains.
His interest in liberating “the inner man”
had led him in 1954 to experiment with Hux-
ley in taking mescaline, a psychedelic deriva-
tive of cactus plants. The following year he had
moved on to experiment with LSD. Not being
an accredited scientist or physician, Heard
had to obtain his supplies from a friend, Dr.
Sidney Cohen, chief of psychosomatic medi-
cine at the Veterans Administration Hospital
in Los Angeles. The doctor was administering
a federal program to investigate the drug’s po-
tential in treating psychotics and criminals but
was also interested in its efect on creative and
highly intelligent people, such as Clare Luce.
F
eeling revitalized after three
mostly pleasant acid trips, Clare
began a three-month literary so-
journ on the Caribbean island
of St. John. Her intent was to
work on her memoirs, but she
found introspection into her painful past daunt-
ing and got no further than a brief outline. She
gave up in favor of writing a detective novel set
in Brazil, and at first the prose fowed efort-
lessly. She told Heard that her facility must be
due to the prolonged efects of LSD.
Letters arrived at the island from Father
John Courtney Murray, professor of Catho-
lic Trinitarian theology at Woodstock Col-
lege, a Jesuit seminary in Maryland. He was
Clare’s spiritual adviser. During her time in
Italy, he had also become a golfing buddy
and confidant of Harry’s, and now wrote to
say that her husband was experiencing an
unspecified emotional crisis.
On September 19, on the first of what
Clare described as several “agonized nights”
of marital confrontation, Harry confessed
that for the past three years he had been see-
ing and sleeping with Lady Jeanne Campbell,
granddaughter of the British press mogul
Lord Beaverbrook.
Now 30, Jeanne was a more mature version
of the tall, peachy-cheeked 20-year-old Clare
remembered from staying with Beaverbrook
in Jamaica in 1949. Since the young woman’s
parents had divorced early, she had seldom
lived at Inveraray Castle, the ancestral home
of her father, Ian Campbell, Duke of Argyll,
in Scotland’s Western Highlands. Instead, she
JU LY 2014
 WORLD DIPLOMAT
Clare in 1956,
when she was the
U.S. ambassador
in Rome.

JU LY 2 014 www.vanityfair.com VA NIT Y FAIR 107

 had stayed at her grandfather’s multiple estab-
lishments, dabbling in acting and having a fing
with the Fascist Sir Oswald Mosley. Harry had
met Jeanne again at Beaverbrook’s villa on the
French Riviera and become besotted with her.
But it was not until September 1956, while
Clare was winding up her ambassadorship in
Rome and Jeanne was working as a photo re-
searcher in New York at Life, that Harry had
seized the chance to make his fantasy a reality.
He had dined with her a couple of times in his
Waldorf Towers apartment and made a tenta-
tive pass. Then, in early January 1957, after he
had spent several weeks in Italy with Clare, they
had what Jeanne characterized as “an explosive
coming together,” declaring and consummat-
ing their love. He was the “cuddlyist” man in
the world, Jeanne told an office colleague, “but
it took him six months to get it up!”
When they were apart, which was often,
because the Luces now had a winter home in
Phoenix, Arizona, Harry wrote, telephoned,
and sent so many dozens of roses that Jeanne
ran out of vases.
On March 15, 1959, afraid Harry might
be happy to continue indefinitely with their
irregular, clandestine couplings, Jeanne pro-
posed marriage. She felt an urgent need to
have children, and asked that he try to allevi-
ate what he called his sexual “inadequacy”
by having his prostate fixed. She then left for
Europe, setting a deadline of July 15 for him
to accept or reject her proposal. If the former,
she expected him to begin at least separation
proceedings. Harry agreed to her proposal in
writing and went ahead with the operation.
C
lare now discovered that he
had been dallying with his
“girl” during a business trip
to Paris, on the assumption
that the Luces could agree to
a separation pending divorce.
In a further blow, Harry announced that
he had not really loved her for 20 years and
had stuck with her primarily because he was
“sorry” for her. But since she had seemed “so
well, so happy, so confident” lately, he felt that
he too “had the right to happiness.”
His betrayal and condescension were bad
enough, but as Clare absorbed the longevity
of his deceit, her fury grew. For two decades
the man standing before her had feigned impo-
tence, when all along it had been his revulsion
“MOST MEN DO NOT KNOW WHAT LOVE IS,
BECAUSE THEY DON’T EVER
LOVE AS EQUALS.”
108 VAN IT Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com
to her body that caused his incapacity. He had
a nerve assuming she would accommodate his
current wish to dump her. This was a moment
to take a cue from The Women, written 23 years
earlier: “What has any woman got to gain by a
divorce? No matter how much he gives her, she
won’t have what they have together.”
She put this to Harry, but it left him un-
moved. “My girl,” he informed her, “will
fight for me.” Evidently “the Lady Jeanne,”
as society columns called her, was a deter-
mined young woman. Clare bounced an ash-
tray of Harry’s balding head and followed
up with a torrent of gutter language. His pen-
chant for Jeanne, she said, was “all sex,” in
contrast with their own 20-year lack of it.
Harry denied that his relationship with
Jeanne was one-dimensional, and claimed
that it was “the last great love” he could
expect. Yet he admitted in the same breath
to sufering from “post coitus triste.” Clare
attributed this sadness not only to Calvinist
guilt but also to egotistic regret that the pos-
session of his partner had been rushed or in-
complete. “Orgasm,” she told him, was not
“the sole and final end of sex᠁ There can
be in one gentle kiss, one generous caress,
one entwining of fingers more sexuality than
in a whole whorehouse.”
As the confrontation wore on, Clare sus-
pected that Harry saw her as his jailer and
wanted her dead. He intuited her misery
and, in a conciliatory gesture, took her in his
arms. He said “a love deeper than love” ex-
isted between them. “I can never leave you,
if you cannot bear it.”
The following night, Harry had a collo-
quy with Father Murray. He said he could
not forsake “this pitiful woman,” and might
have to “sacrifice” Jeanne for his wife’s
“greater need.”
On Saturday, September 26, in a state of ex-
hausted armistice, the Luces were having din-
ner à deux at Sugar Hill when Harry was sum-
moned to the telephone. The caller was Igor
Cassini, alias the gossip columnist “Cholly
Knickerbocker,” of the New York Journal-
American—William Randolph Hearst’s big-
gest scandal sheet. Cassini asked Harry to
comment on reports that he and his wife were
separating.
Taken aback, Harry said, “Clare and I are
here together. It is all very premature, to say
the least.” After a short pause, during which
he realized he had given credence to the ru-
mor, he blustered, “There is nothing to it at
all.” The result was a headline story on Sun-
day morning, illustrated with a photograph of
a bravely smiling Clare.
The Big Topic in the Intelligentsia Set as well
as in the Smart Set these days is that Henry
Luce, publisher of Life, Time and Fortune,
and his talented wife Clare, onetime playwright,
Congresswoman and U.S. Ambassadress to
Italy, are planning a separation—or a divorce.
Reports reaching this reporter from London
and Paris, where Luce visited recently, say that
the powerful publisher has admitted to intimate
friends that he and his wife intend to separate.
Luce has been often seen in the company of
the lovely Lady Jean [sic] Campbell, daughter
of the Duke of Argyll and granddaughter of a
fellow-publisher, England’s omnipotent and vo-
ciferous Lord Beaverbrook.
O
n the weekend of October
10, as Harry discussed his
marital options with his sis-
ter Beth and brother-in-law
Tex Moore, an attorney, the
two women vying for his af-
fection addressed urgent appeals to him.
Jeanne Campbell cabled from London: “Lots
of anyway [sic] love and thoughts for my be-
loved grumpy growly friend᠁ Think and
think hard. Your Jay.”
Clare wrote him from San Francisco,
where she was making a Columbus Day
speech. She ofered a significant concession.
Though she had “a legal hold” on him, she
did not wish to exercise it. “You are free to
marry Jeanne or not—as you choose. If this
is the only way for me to prove that under-
neath it all I bear you more goodwill and love
than I have ever borne anyone—you have that
proof. I could not face the declining years of
my life with you, knowing that you shared
them with me only as a prisoner.”
She knew Jeanne was due back in New
York and said that, since Harry would prob-
ably want to see the young woman, she
would await his decision in Phoenix.
Clare next heard that Harry had “capitu-
lated” to his family’s insistence that a divorce
was far too drastic a solution. It would threat-
en his children’s inheritance and damage his
reputation as a person of probity. The ensu-
ing scandal might alienate millions of Catho-
lics sympathetic to Clare and adversely af-
JU LY 2014
 Spotlight
fect the value of Time Inc. stock. His lawyer
therefore recommended a legal separation.
ROMA CONQUEST
Logistically, the moment for such a move
was ripe, because the Luces had sold their
52nd Street duplex and were about to take an-
other apartment at the Waldorf Towers. How-
ever they resolved the question of who might
occupy it, Harry would have legal freedom
to be with his mistress whenever he wanted,
while his wife could depend on financial
support to continue in her customary style.
Although Clare had promised to accept
any decision Harry made, the prospect of his
fying to Arizona with actual documents for her
to sign was apparently too much to bear. While
he was en route, she swallowed a large quantity
of sleeping pills. As fate—or her own survival in-
stinct—would have it, Father Murray was stay-
ing with her and called for emergency help.
By the time Harry arrived, she was recu-
perating. He now had to face the possibility
of a recurrence, should he go ahead with the
separation plan. So when a newsman called
on October 19, asking about reports that he
was in Phoenix to break with his wife, he said,
“There’s nothing to it, this report of divorce.”
Later that morning, when he returned to
the Phoenix airport, Clare was at his side.
Harry called Jeanne and told her to leave
New York at once. He was afraid of his wife’s
fragile emotional condition. “I don’t care
where you go, but get out of town.”
On November 6, the Luces left for a week in
Hawaii, where Harry was opening a Time Inc.
ST Y LE D BY DE B OR A H A F SHA N I ; H A IR P RO DUC TS BY R EN E F URT E RE R ; M A KE UP P RO DUC TS A ND NA I L E N AME L BY CHANE L; HAI R BY CHRI STI AN MARC ;

Moran Atias,
office. Before the war, they had been enchant- photographed in
MA K EU P BY F IO N A ST IL E S; MA N I CUR E BY N ET TI E DAVI S ; P RO DU CE D O N L O CAT I ON BY VI EW F IN DE RS ; FOR D ETAI L S, GO TO VF.CO M/C RE DI TS

ed by Oahu, and he had promised to look for Los Angeles.

“a little palace by the waters,” where Clare

S
ATIAS WEARS A DRESS BY

‘
could swim and surf. His search had been un- PRABAL GURUNG; EARRINGS
BY TIFFANY & CO.;
successful. They agreed to look again, seeing NECKLACE BY BULGARI;
RING BY CARTIER.
it as a fresh venture for them both. Before they
headed for the mainland, Harry told Clare
that he “no longer wanted a divorce” and pre- ometimes you start believing the way society treats you. Gypsies are
ferred to “go down the long road” with her. treated like dirt, so you believe you’re dirt,” Israeli-born actress Moran

I
n February 1960, Gerald Heard
and Jay Michael Barrie joined
Clare in Phoenix for what
Heard described as a “wonder-
ful week” of LSD. This time the
experiments were scientifically
administered by Sidney Cohen himself.
Harry too took a dose—his first. He
was slow to “gain orbit,” but when he did,
he sauntered out into the garden, where he
claimed to hear beautiful music. Standing
among cactus plants, he began conducting an
orchestra visible and audible only to himself.
For once, Clare did not have a happy expe-
rience with the drug. She imagined that Co-
hen had “held up a mirror” to her, and she
so disliked what she saw—“a rejected, jailed
woman”—that she cried in front of him.
Before returning to New York, Harry swore
on the Bible that it was his “solemn intention”
JU LY 2 014
Atias declares boldly. To prepare for her role as Monika in this sum-
mer’s romantic drama Third Person (written and directed by Paul Hag-
gis, and co-starring Liam Neeson and Olivia Wilde), Atias begged on
the streets of Rome and didn’t change or wash her clothes for weeks, experiencing
firsthand rejection and disgust as a result.
It was while filming a small role in The Next Three Days with Haggis that Atias knew
she wanted to be cast in another of the director’s projects. “I hung out on the set of The
Next Three Days and just followed Paul around,” she says. “I thought, I have to work
with this filmmaker again.”
“Moran started pitching ideas at me,” he recalls, adding, “At the end of filming we
sat down and talked very specifically and honestly about relationships, and I began to
think, What if two totally wrong people could actually be right for each other?”
Haggis admits he took a chance casting her. “I like finding roles where actors can
surprise you,” he says. “Moran’s an extremely beautiful woman; she oozes sexuality.
But she was untested, and this was a huge role. I thought, Maybe she can pull it off—an
Albanian Gypsy who survives by her wits, speaks three languages, uses men.”
Three different cities. Three love stories that intertwine in a way you don’t expect. Third Per-
son is, Atias says, “profoundly personal and revealing about who we are in regard to love.”
Haggis says choosing Atias to play Monika certainly paid off: “I’m very happy that this is go-
ing to be Moran’s breakout performance. She’s a force of nature.” —TA M ASIN DAY- LE WIS
PH OTOGRA PH BY JAN WELTERS 109
 KENNEDY SAID HE DISLIKED HAVING
CLARE LUCE TELL HIM “HOW TO
RUN THE WORLD.”
to stay married to Clare for life. Then, on Feb-
ruary 29, he surprised her by phoning to say he
was coming to Arizona again the following day.
Despite his biblical vow, he now said that he
did not love her, still loved Jeanne, and wanted
to negotiate a “concordat” that would enable
him to have his “last chance” to “dominate”
someone. He said he needed to see Jeanne
again so that he could make up his mind.
On or about May 16, Clare got a letter from
Harry assuring her that “the Final Encoun-
ter” had taken place in Paris, and he had told
Jeanne that he was staying married. Surprising-
ly, she had shed few tears. Clare wrote at once
to congratulate him on his “astonishing abili-
ty to get everyone … to see things your way.”
At the end of a nine-day Caribbean vaca-
tion, Clare re-united with Harry in New York
for the Memorial Day weekend. She soon
found out that he had been lying to her about
breaking off completely with Jeanne Camp-
bell. In fact, he had taken her from Paris for a
week-long car tour of Switzerland. This revela-
tion, plus another—that he had told Jeanne he
“would marry her” if he ever got a divorce—
led to long hours of acrimonious argument,
with Clare yet again trying to get Harry to say
what he wanted, and he, as was his habit, ask-
ing her to decide what he should do. By late
Monday night, both of them were exhausted,
and she went to bed. Around 12 o’clock, he
came into her room and said portentously, “It
is God’s will. You are the cross I have to bear.”
At the end of her tether, Clare picked up
the telephone. She dialed the Waldorf’s
Western Union office and dictated a telegram:
jeanne campbell, inveraray castle, ar-
gyll, scotland. harry says that he wishes
to marry you and that he will soon be in
the position to do so. congratulations.
clare luce.
Harry, outwitted and furious, called the op-
erator back and asked her to cancel the wire.
He was told that only the sender could do
that, so he fired of one of his own: disre-
gard telegram from clare.
A month later Jeanne, trying to stay opti-
mistic, looked for a house in Jamaica where
she and Harry might live. She was therefore
fabbergasted to receive a letter from him,
telling her yet again they could not marry.
He gave no explanation except to say that
Clare had made an “unserious” threat to
jump from their 41st-foor apartment.
110 VAN IT Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com
J
eanne was in New York by early
July, as was Winston Churchill’s
tempestuous son, Randolph, a
close friend of hers and Clare’s
former lover. He had been sent
to America by the New States-
man to cover the two presidential conven-
tions being held that month. While the En-
glishman was in Manhattan, Jeanne let him
stay with her in a small rental apartment.
The Democrats convened in Los Angeles
on July 11, and four nights later Joe Ken-
nedy arrived at the Luces’ suite to watch
his son John accept the nomination, after a
last-minute challenge by Senator Lyndon B.
Johnson. “We stand today on the edge of a
New Frontier,” the charismatic young candi-
date said, “the frontier of the 1960s.”
A week after that, Randolph boozily invei-
gled himself into a dinner Clare was attending
with the former heavyweight boxing cham-
pion Gene Tunney, at the new Four Seasons
restaurant, on Park Avenue. She managed
to have him seated far from her, because of
his habit of loudly proposing marriage every
time they met. To avoid having him escort her
home, she slipped out early, on the pretext of
going to the ladies’ room. But in the street, as
she hailed a taxi, Randolph came fying out,
pursued by Tunney, and jumped into the cab
with her. It moved of, and Tunney ran along-
side, shouting to the driver, “I am Gene Tun-
ney. You get this lady back to the Waldorf at
once, safely, or you will be hearing from me!”
As Tunney fell behind, Clare became
aware that Randolph was moaning. “What’s
the matter with you?” she asked. “I’m going
to sue,” he said. In the chase out of the res-
taurant, Tunney had apparently given him a
kidney punch.
She shot out at the Waldorf and, leaving
Randolph to pay, headed upstairs, telling the
desk clerk not to admit Mr. Churchill under
any circumstances. Randolph was reduced
to phoning her and begging her to side with
him in the event that he brought suit against
Tunney. She assured him that, on the con-
trary, she would be a witness for Gene.
Farce quickly turned to near tragedy later
that night when Harry came home to find that
Clare had taken an overdose of sodium amytal.
In all likelihood, Randolph had told her with
his usual blunt honesty that he was staying
with Lady Jeanne Campbell. The shocking
news that Jeanne was back in town—no doubt
at Harry’s urging—made Clare realize that her
husband had betrayed her yet again.
She was rushed to Doctors Hospital, on
East 87th Street, to be pumped out. Harry is-
sued a statement that his wife had sufered “a
digestive disturbance.” In an agony of contri-
tion, he sent her a handwritten apology. “I
want to go on with you because I have loved
you very deeply and I do love you.”
Lady Jeanne Campbell eventually married
the novelist Norman Mailer, who fathered her
long-desired first child, Kate. But the mar-
riage ended after a year.
I
Clare at Camelot
n early October 1960, John Kenne-
dy’s Catholicism became a potential-
ly serious liability in his election cam-
paign against Richard Nixon. Clare
received a call from an agitated Joe
Kennedy, asking her “to do Jack a
big favor.” He complained that, everywhere his
son held a rally, swarms of nuns were settling in
the front seats, “clicking their rosaries and their
dentures” in excitement. Joe thought Cardinal
Spellman might be able to do something
about it, but he could not approach His Emi-
nence. “The S.O.B. hates me. I beat him out
of some real estate,” he said, chuckling. “But
you could tell him, tactfully, that if he wants a
Catholic in the White House, he’d better keep
those goddam nuns from hogging all the front
rows. This isn’t an ordination—it’s an election!”
Nixon, too, was concerned about the reli-
gious question and asked Clare for advice on
how to “keep it out of the campaign as much
as possible.” He had read that 25 percent of
the voters in Akron, Ohio, were for him be-
cause they were anti-Catholic. It followed that
others might be against him because he was
a Quaker.
As a friend and co-religionist of the Ken-
nedys’, Clare was rumored to be a J.F.K.
supporter. She did favor him, feeling that, al-
though he had less experience than Nixon, he
had “more capacity for growth in office and
would probably win.” However, on October 4
she issued a statement saying that as a veteran
of Republican politics she intended to vote for
the vice president.
Choosing a candidate was not so easy for
Henry Luce. As editor in chief of a hugely
infuential news empire, he knew that his en-
dorsement was coveted by both candidates.
They vied with each other in professing strident
JU LY 2014
 Spotlight
anti-Communist views, knowing Harry’s obses-
sion with the Cold War. He felt that Kennedy
PURE DYNAMITE
was more “imaginative” on for-
eign policy, and was tempted to
back him for that reason. He also
admired the young man’s social
sophistication and literary bent,
going as far as to write a new
foreword to Kennedy’s book
about appeasement in the 1930s,
Why England Slept. But having
given Nixon five favorable cover
stories in four years, he found it
hard to reject him now. So, in
mid-month, Life came out for the
Republican, but so halfheartedly
as not to spoil Kennedy’s chances
in November.
Clare went to Washington on
January 18, 1961, to attend the
inauguration of John Fitzgerald
Kennedy. Two days later she
climbed into an inaugural-ball
bus in a white satin Lanvin gown
and found herself sitting next to Chadwick Boseman

‘I
Vice President Johnson. She re- channels James Brown
minded him that when they had on the set of Get On Up
last met, just before the Demo- in Natchez, Mississippi.
cratic convention, he had been
confident of getting the presidential nomi-
wanna get . . . under your skin-uh; if I get there, I
nation and had profanely vowed that even if
got to win-uh.” As a statement of intent, this cou-
he lost there was “no way” he would take the
plet, from James Brown’s 1971 hit “Soul Power
second spot under J.F.K.
“Come clean, Lyndon,” she teased him. Pt. 1,” sums up the Godfather of Soul’s philoso-
He leaned close and whispered, “Clare, phy as well as any. No musician insinuated the
I looked it up. One out of every four presi- funk into American pelvises more deeply and comprehen-
dents has died in office. I’m a gamblin’ man, sively than Brown, who first charted in the 1950s and kept
darlin’, and this is the only chance I got.” performing nearly right up until his death, in 2006.

I
n a February 1962 column for Mc-
Call’s magazine, Clare answered a
reader’s question: “Do you think Mrs.
Kennedy should be censured for buy-
ing some of her clothes from Paris?”
Her reply began innocuously
enough. “The personal activities of the Presi-
dent’s wife cannot be dissociated from her
role as First Lady.” But then she could not
resist parodying J.F.K.’s inaugural rhetoric.
“She must not ask herself, ‘What can these
clothes do for me?’ but ‘What do these clothes
I wear do for America?’ ”
Her remarks caused a nationwide furor,
with headlines such as clare boothe luce
dresses down jackie kennedy and jackie
censured? luce fur flying. The White
House announced that the First Lady’s
clothes were all American-made, except for
a Givenchy gown she had worn in Paris “as a
tribute to the French people.”
Clare dismissed the uproar, saying, “Mrs.
Kennedy would look gorgeous in a gunnysack.”
The president, at any rate, was not ofend-
ed. He wrote in March to invite Clare to sit
But how to get under James Brown’s skin-uh? That’s
the challenge that director Tate Taylor (The Help) has
undertaken with Get On Up, the long-aborning biopic
(whose producers include Mick Jagger) about the famil-
iar yet enigmatic singer, which opens in August. Taylor,
a Mississippian, tapped actor Chadwick Boseman, a
native South Carolinian, to play Brown, who was born
in South Carolina and raised just over the border in Au-
gusta, Georgia. The shared geographic roots were use-
ful, Boseman says, in grasping the influences that shaped
Brown: “the blues culture, the rich southern griot vernacu-
lar,” as he puts it.
Still, Boseman had to dig deeper to summon the quick-
silver James Brown spirit, especially given that Boseman
is neither physically nor temperamentally like Brown, a
spark plug who topped out at around five feet six inches
in stacked heels. Six feet tall and dulcet of voice—traits
that served him well when he played Jackie Robinson in
last year’s 42—Boseman is satisfied that the work he’s put
in (the thinking, the voice training, the practice splits) has
resulted in a convincing portrayal.
“It’s like pouring a glass of water. Whether you pour it
into a tall glass or a short glass, it’s still the same water,”
he says. “If you pour the spirit of James Brown inside me,
it’s still gonna flow out.” — DAVID K A MP

JU LY 2 014 PH OTOG R APH BY GASPER TRINGALE 111

 on his proposed Advisory Council on the
Arts, whose job would be to develop a pro-
gram for the National Cultural Center in
Washington, adding that he hoped they would
“meet soon.” Two weeks later, on her 59th
birthday, Clare accepted the appointment.
In early September, Letitia Baldrige, the
White House social secretary, called Clare to say,
“The President wants you to come down here.”
“What about?”
“I think he’s unhappy about some of the
things Time has been publishing.”
Clare said she had no influence at her hus-
band’s magazines, but obeyed the summons.
On Wednesday the 26th, according to her
detailed notes, Clare was ushered into J.F.K.’s
small dining room on the second floor of the
White House. Jack Kennedy had dated Ann
Brokaw years earlier, and Clare found her dead
daughter’s former beau still “slim, handsome,
courteous, [his] graciousness concealing a great
inner reserve.”
The president’s first remark took her aback:
“Gather you have something on your mind.”
Clare had expected him to tell her what
was on his. But since he’d asked, she said,
“Yes, I have.”
There was a long pause, so she continued. “I
woke this morning with a thought᠁ The greater
a man is, the easier it is to describe his great-
ness in a single sentence.” She gave him some
examples. “Does anyone need to tell you the
name of these men: He died to save us᠁ He
discovered America᠁ He preserved the Union
and freed the slaves᠁ He lifted us out of a De-
pression and won a great World War … ? What
is on my mind, Mr. President, is what sentence
will describe you when you leave here.”
“I am not interested in my place in history,”
Kennedy said. He changed the subject to Cuba.
L ess than a month before, U.S. aerial sur-
veillance had confirmed the existence of
eight Soviet missile sites on Fidel Castro’s Com-
munist island. Kennedy had announced that
the United States would consider it provocation
if offensive weapons were installed in Cuba.
The Senate had voted 86–1 to authorize the use
of force if he deemed it necessary, in the face of
a warning by the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei
Gromyko, that any U.S. attack on Cuba or
Cuba-bound shipping would mean war.
In view of these escalations, Clare was sur-
prised to hear Kennedy say he did not think
Cuba was “at present” dangerous compared
with other flash points in the world.
“I cannot quite understand, Mr. President,
why the presence of Communist power in
Vietnam is a threat to our security 9,000 miles
away, and the presence of it in Cuba is not.”
“Would you have us give up our commit-
ment in Vietnam? As I remember it, Time
magazine urged us to take action there. Cuba
was around at that time.”
“I don’t speak for or edit Time,” she said.
“You surely have some influence.”
112 VAN IT Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com
“Such as I have—very little—I am urging
them to keep their eye on Cuba now.”
Kennedy asked, “Assuming Cuba is a
threat, what is your policy?”
Clare said only that she feared the island
would become a base for Communism to
spread into Latin America.
“If we take action in Cuba,” the president
said, “it may be used as a pretext for the Rus-
sians to take Berlin.”
He was clearly still nervous about the previ-
ous year’s near nuclear confrontation between
the Allies and the Soviets over the multi-
national occupation of Berlin. Just a month
earlier, an East German youth had been
gunned down trying to escape over the wall
that now divided the city.
Clare said that his argument meant that
Cuba had placed the United States in a “glob-
al double bind,” and asked which danger spot
he thought was easier to break out of—Cuba
or Berlin.
Kennedy’s response was dismissive. “We
can get ready in three weeks for the invasion
of Cuba. We could win there, obviously.”
Waiting even that long, she warned, would
“be more costly in American lives.”
“There are some situations you have to live
with,” he said.
Clare again asked if Americans should tol-
erate the presence of Russian military power
90 miles from Florida. “Why is the extrusion
of Communism in Vietnam and the Near East
more important to us than in our own sea of
our own shores?”
“Your policy, then, is war with Cuba and
the risk of nuclear war with the U.S.S.R.?”
The Soviets had not risked it over Vietnam
or Korea, Clare reminded him. She felt the
United States should “call their bluf” in its
own hemisphere.
Kennedy was dubious. “ ‘Calling their bluf,’
as you put it, could lead to nuclear war.”
“Nuclear war will settle nothing for any-
body. But if Khrushchev really believes it will,
now is the time to find out.”
“You would rather take Cuba than hold
Vietnam or Berlin.”
“We are holding Vietnam alone,” she said.
“Berlin is a multilateral commitment. If our
Allies want to hold it at the risk of nuclear war,
we will be in better shape to honor that commit-
ment without Russia at our back door.”
K ennedy rejected her brinkmanship. “I do
not wish or intend to be the President
who goes down in history as having unleashed
nuclear war.”
“Nobody—not you or Khrushchev—will go
down in history in the event of nuclear war. A
veil will be drawn over the history of the West.
No one can benefit but China. Khrushchev
knows that too.”
“You have not yet said what your Cuban
policy is—except that regardless of what our
Allies think, we should invade.”
It was up to him, Clare conceded, whether
to invade or impose a naval blockade. “Mili-
tarily Cuba is more important to us than the
city of Berlin᠁ Maybe the sentence by which
you will go down in history will be: He kept this
hemisphere free and did not yield in Berlin.”
“It looks easier when you are on the out-
side,” the president said.
When Hugh Sidey, Time’s presidential cor-
respondent, came to pick Clare up after lunch,
he found her and J.F.K. standing impatiently
on the White House steps. Evidently the meet-
ing had not gone well. Clare had no word to
say about her encounter, but Kennedy let Sidey
know that he disliked having Clare Luce tell
him “how to run the world.”
Cuba was not the president’s only major
problem that day. A black man named James
Meredith had just tried to enroll as a student in
the all-white University of Mississippi and was
being denied admission by state officials. Vio-
lence began to flare around the Oxford cam-
pus on Saturday night, after Kennedy signed
an order sending federal troops to safeguard
Meredith’s registration. But there was a delay
in deployment, and the rioting turned bloody
on Sunday night, just as J.F.K. was premature-
ly announcing on television that the crisis was
being resolved. Order was restored by Monday
morning, and Meredith attended his first class
under armed protection.
In a letter thanking the president for lunch,
Clare reminded him of her “single sentence”
theory of historic eminence, and could not
resist adding that the recent events in Missis-
sippi had proved it.
He upheld and enforced the law of the land
against segregation in Mississippi. A noble sen-
tence! A sentence for all the world to read and
applaud. A sentence which describes not only
the act, but the actor. We know him, not because
of what he said but because of what he did.
Although Clare remained an outspoken
critic of Kennedy’s policies after the peaceful
resolution of the Cuban missile crisis—she
was particularly vocal in her disapproval of his
costly space program, at the expense of ocean-
ographic research—their relations remained
cordial, and she cried over his assassination,
in 1963.
C lare grew steadily more conservative in
her widowhood, yet embraced and was
embraced by the emerging feminist move-
ment. On October 16, 1971, she appeared
in Westchester, New York, for a weekend of
“film, food and talk” centering on a screen-
ing of the 1939 movie version of her play The
Women. It was hosted by New York maga-
zine’s movie critic, Judith Crist, at the Tarry-
town Conference Center. After the Saturday-
night show, Clare, Crist, and Gloria Steinem
had a panel discussion of George Cukor’s di-
rection. Steinem said that it was such a parody
of femininity that it should have been played
JU LY 2014
 “THE NEXT WAVE” CREDITS
Hair products by Oribe (males) and
Sunsilk (females). Makeup products by
Chanel. Nail enamel by Deborah
Lippmann. Grooming products by Koh
Gen Do, La Mer, and Peter Thomas Roth.
Hair by Teddy Charles (females) and
Ramsell Martinez (males). Makeup by
Serge Hodonou (Deutch, Gayle, Kravitz,
Monroe, Willow Smith, Thorne) and
Tyron Machhausen (all other females).
Manicures by Deborah Lippmann.
Grooming by Ramsell Martinez. Set
design by Thomas Thurnauer. Production
support by Portfolio One.
PAGES 52–53: Shailene Woodley
wears a dress by Dior; shoes by Tabitha
Simmons; earrings by Eva Fehren; rings
by Vita Fede.
PAGES 54–55: Odeya Rush and Bella
Thorne wear dresses by Bottega Veneta.
Josh Wiggins wears a suit and tie by
Calvin Klein Collection; shirt by Thomas
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OÕBrien wears clothing by Rag & Bone;
shoes by the Frye Company. Dayo
Okeniyi wears a suit by Ami Alexandre
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Edward Green. Tye Sheridan wears
clothing by Burberry London; shoes by
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Chang wears a dress by Gucci; shoes by
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in drag. Clare responded that, although the
cast was female, her script was really about
heterosexual men, because women of that
era saw fulfillment in looking after them. All
the panelists favored the three characters she
portrayed as amoral go-getters: Crystal (Joan
Crawford), the husband stealer; Countess de
Lave (Mary Boland), who used younger men
for sex; and Miriam (Paulette Goddard), the
seducer of the spouse of catty Sylvia (Rosa-
lind Russell).
It was not surprising that Steinem, at 37
a glamorous icon of the new “women’s lib”
movement, should have such opinions. But
she could be openly tolerant of free sex and Clare Boothe Luce died in 1987, four years
adultery. “After a long life and a long night,” after she was awarded the Presidential Medal of
she told the audience, “I think most men do Freedom by Ronald Reagan. �
not know what love is, because they don’t ever
love as equals, and the master never really loves
the slave.” She seemed to have in mind the FROM THE ARCHIVE
For these related stories, visit VF.COM/ARCHIVE
theme of Slam the Door Softly, her parody of
Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. “To love an equal—it • Tales of Clare Boothe Luce
takes big men and big women.” (Marie Brenner, March 1988; Sylvia Jukes
Morris, May 1997)
The crowd enjoyed the debate so much that
• “The Great Garbo”
it lasted until 1:30 a.m. Clare had the last word: (Clare Boothe Brokaw, February 1932)
“I think Gloria and I would agree on most • The founding of Henry Luce’s empire
things. But if we didn’t, we still could not air (Isaiah Wilner, October 2006; Alan Brinkley,
them publicly᠁ It would be announced that May 2010)

Clare, at 68, had evolved to the point where we had had a hair-pulling contest.”

Poker Princess company that made a billion dollars a year.

C O N T I N U E D F R O M P A G E 8 3 my usually
impossible-to-please players had a look on
his face that said he would rather be here, at
this table, than anywhere in the world. My tips
that night reflected the enormous success of
the game. I think I walked away with close to
$50,000. I had discovered an incredible niche,
and I had learned the formula to make it suc-
cessful and keep it legal.
Ace in the Hole
Tobey was losing, so he was back to dis-
approving of me, my tips, and the game in
general. Now he was in for $250,000, down
to his last $50,000, and trying to dig his way
out. Jamie was once again playing like it was
his last day on earth, and Tobey knew his best
shot at getting out of the hole was Jamie. Pale
and thin, Jamie had won $12 million in the
World Series of Poker Main Event, the largest
sum in the history of the tournament. Usually,
I wouldn’t have considered allowing a World
Series champion into the game, but Jamie was
no pro; he had simply been running hot and
playing fearlessly.
Jamie and Tobey were all in, and I wasn’t
sure which one I was rooting for. Jamie had
almost lost his bankroll, and once he did, I
wouldn’t be able to let him play anymore.
I liked Jamie—he was kind and generous. To-
bey was the worst tipper, the best player, and
the absolute worst loser, but I had to worry
about my job security if he lost. I held my
breath and watched Diego turn over the cards.
“Whew, you’re lucky I won that hand,” he
said, crinkling his eyes and using his usual half-
kidding/half-serious/you-guess-which tone.
I nodded.
“You have to cut Jamie of, you know.”
“I know,” I said, counting Tobey’s chips.
He held a thousand-dollar chip in his hand.
He flipped it over a couple times in his fingers.
“This is yours,” he said, holding it out.
“Thanks, Tobey,” I said, reaching my hand
out.
He yanked the chip back at the last second.
“If … ” he said. “If you do something to
earn these thousand dollars.” His voice was
loud enough that some of the guys looked up
to see what was happening.
I laughed, trying not to show my nerves.
“What do I want you to do?” he said, as if
he were pondering.
The whole table was watching us now.
“I know!” he said. “Get up on that desk
and bark like a seal.”
I looked at him. His face was lit up like it
was Christmas Eve.

W e were at another insane game, and I

was watching Guy persuade another
player to fold a winning hand. Guy was a huge
gambler, aggressive and ruthless at the table.
He ran a circus-themed live-performance
JU LY 2 014
Tobey won.
Predictably, Tobey stood up immediately
after the hand that made him whole. “Well,
that’s it for me.” He came over to me and set
his stacks on my clipboard.
“Bark like a seal who wants a fish,” he said.
I laughed again, stalling, hoping he would
play the joke out by himself and leave.
“I’m not kidding. What’s wrong? You’re
too rich now? You won’t bark for a thousand
www.vanityfair.com VAN IT Y FAI R 113
 Poker Princess
dollars? Wowwww … you must be really rich.”
My face was burning. The room was silent.
“C’mon,” he said, holding the chip above
my head. “bark.”
“No,” I said quietly.
“No?” he asked.
“Tobey,” I said, “I’m not going to bark like
a seal. Keep your chip.”
My face was on fire. I knew he would be an-
gry, especially because he had now engaged the
whole audience, and I wasn’t playing his game.
I was embarrassed, but I was also angry. After
all I had done to accommodate this guy, I was
also shocked. I had made sure I ran every de-
tail of every game by him, changed the stakes
for him, structured tournaments around him,
memorized every ingredient in every vegan dish
in town for him. He had won millions and mil-
lions of dollars at my table, and I had catered
to his every need along the way—and now he
seemed to want to humiliate me.
He kept pushing it, his voice growing loud-
er and louder. The other guys were starting to
look uncomfortable.
“No,” I said, again, willing him to drop it.
Dubai Airport
C ON T I N U E D F ROM PAGE 75from Abidjan, the
Ivory Coast, to Shanghai belongs to the Euro-
pean airlines? How can they claim that? The
point here is that the number of people traveling
between Shanghai and Côte d’Ivoire in the old
days was probably five a week. Now it’s 5,000.
“The Americans,” he continues, “are simi-
lar to the Europeans in their archaic labor
practices and processes and in the way com-
panies are engineered internally. Some are
trying to pull themselves into the 21st century.
But we got there first.”
Bridging the Gulf
E ighty miles across the barren desert in Abu
Dhabi is Clark’s opposite number, James
Hogan, an Australian who for the past seven
years has been the president and C.E.O. of
Etihad. He oversees a kind of boutique version
of the Dubai airline, with similarly excellent in-
flight service, food and drink, and touch-screen
digital entertainment. Etihad also has serious
designs on the American market. The airline
114 VAN IT Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com
He gave me an icy look, dropped the chip
on the table, and tried to laugh it of, but he
was visibly angry.
When he left, the room was buzzing.
“What was that?”
“So weird.”
“Glad you didn’t do it, Molly.”
I knew it was more than a childish tantrum.
It had been a challenge because Tobey
wanted to show that he was the alpha. I knew
I hadn’t made the most strategic decision by
refusing to submit, but I also needed to retain
the respect of the other players.
For the first time since the game began, I
realized that it could end. So, in all likelihood,
did Tobey. He had anticipated everything except
how much money Diego and I were making,
and our take-home seemed to be eating him up.
He began bringing up how much I was
making even more frequently, not even trying
to hide his dissatisfaction.
“I think the game needs re-structuring,” he
said one night.
“How so?”
“Well, you make too much and it takes too
long to get paid.”
already runs daily flights between Abu Dhabi
and New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.
It has just started a similar L.A. service, and
plans a Dallas route later this year.
Hogan is a more abrasive version of Emir-
ates’ Clark, although his start in the travel in-
dustry was as humble as his rival’s: he was a
check-in clerk working for Ansett Airlines in
his native Australia and, like Clark, learned
something about dealing with difcult airline
passengers. He says he sees the future as the
battle of the hubs—the Asian hubs, the Euro-
pean hubs, and, in the near future, the Chi-
nese and Indian hubs. “One could call it the
Old Silk Road being re-invented,” he says.
“Just look at India. There are some 300
million middle-class people there who are
traveling, and the links, say, between India
and America are strong. A lot of kids in these
regions go to American universities, there are
more American multi-nationals in the region,
and the next opportunity is leisure travel.”
A number of frequent fliers I’ve spoken to
say they prefer Etihad to Emirates because it
has a more personal, intimate feel. As I board
an Etihad Boeing 777 on the Abu Dhabi–
London route I can barely tell the diference.
Their flight crews, according to Hogan, come
from 120 nations. Their average age is 26. The
comfortable seats—all with digital entertain-
ment systems—have 34-inch pitch in economy,
73 inches in business, and 80 inches in first,
the latter classes offering lie-flat beds. The
mood, even as we prepare for takeof, is one
of glamour and buoyancy. In a way, it reminds
me of Virgin Atlantic in its youthful heyday,
I raised my eyebrows. In what other universe
do you show up, play a game, win a million dol-
lars, and get the check within a week? The only
reason this game was still running was that I had
searched far and wide to recruit new blood and
maintain relationships so that Tobey could take
their money. Now he had the balls to suggest
that I figure out a way to cap my own salary.
I smiled at him.
“I’ll look into it,” I murmured.
“Thanks,” he said. �
Author’s note: In some places, I’ve changed the
names, identities, and other specifcs of individu-
als in order to protect their privacy and integrity.
The conversations I re-create come from my clear
recollections of them, though they are not written
to represent word-for-word transcripts. Instead,
I’ve retold them in a way that evokes the real
feeling and meaning of what was said.
FROM THE ARCHIVE
For these related stories, visit VF.COM/ARCHIVE
• Poker in Hollywood
(David Kamp, April 1996; Duff McDonald,
March 2005)
when the journey was an exhilarating part of
the experience rather than a dread necessity.
There are many reasons for this spectacu-
lar rise of the Middle East airlines, but the
impetus, above all, comes from the region’s
political leaders’ putting their oil wealth to
good use. Willie Walsh, C.E.O. of Europe’s
International Airlines Group, looks on envi-
ously from his ofces at London’s Heathrow
and says with barely concealed anger that
“their governments recognize that airlines are
a facilitator of economic development and
growth. Whereas here [in the West], govern-
ments, through lack of commitment, vision,
or policy, have seen air transport stagnate.”
And when the oil dries up? That really is the
point of this supercharged growth spurt. While
Dubai, in 2001, ranked 99th in international
air trafc, it now ranks first. Whereas Emirati
aviation, in the 90s, was a fledgling industry,
today it represents 30 percent of Dubai’s
G.D.P. This is a business that was certainly
founded on a tidal wave of petrodollars. But
now it has a life of its own. And, for the time
being, all those flush travelers filling all those
plush cabins seem increasingly grateful. �
FROM THE ARCHIVE
For these related stories, visit VF.COM/ARCHIVE
• The age of the Concorde
(David Kamp, October 2003)
• When flight attendants soared
(Bruce Handy, October 2002)
• Dubai,a tale of two cities (Nick Tosches,
June 2006; A. A. Gill, April 2011)
JU LY 2014
Jeff Koons
CON T I N U ED F ROM PAGE 95 evolving tech-
nologies are so sophisticated and so much a
part of the work that the Whitney devotes an
entire chapter to them, written by Michelle
Kuo, the editor of Artforum, in the catalogue
for the show. Reading about the CT scans,
structured-light scanning, volumetric data, cus-
tomized software, and personalization of fab-
rication technologies, I started to understand
why all those people are needed in Koons’s
studio. Most days there are 128 of them going
at it, some doing just what Michelangelo’s as-
sistants did, such as mixing colors, while oth-
ers seem to be doing lab work for advanced
degrees in radiology.
Such a huge operation, combined with the
achievement of perfection in the work, helps to
explain why Koons’s art costs so much to pro-
duce, and also what Koons has to do to pull it
of. Barbara Kruger, the artist whose unsenti-
mental pronouncements have been cutting to
the chase about the art world for decades, says
“Oh boy” when I call to discuss Koons, whom
she has known since they both were starting
out in New York. She needed to think about it
and later wrote me: “Jef is like the man who fell
to earth, who, in this grotesque time of art fip-
page and speculative mania, is either the icing
on the cake or some kind of Piketty-esque
harbinger of the return of Brecht’s ‘making
strange.’ Or a glitteringly bent version of that
alienated vision. He brings the cake and lets
them eat it.” Kruger’s reference to Thomas
Piketty, the French economist whose book on
the current chasm between the very rich and the
very poor has become a cultural touchstone,
is part of the whole picture; this social reality is
what one can’t help thinking about when one
hears about the prices of contemporary art to-
day, especially the sums that Koons’s works are
fetching. The odd thing, as many who know
Koons, including Kruger, will say, is that mon-
ey doesn’t interest him. He has three very per-
sonal luxuries: his home in New York City, the
ON THE
farm, and his collection of older art, which in- COVER
cludes Magrittes, Courbets, and Manets. The Shailene Woodley
farm, now expanded from 40 acres to approxi- wears a dress and shoes
by Saint Laurent by
mately 800, is almost a Koonsian artwork. The Hedi Slimane; earrings
buildings are painted in heritage red, yellow, by Eva Fehren. Hair
and white in the full-on tradition of the area. In products by Sunsilk.
Makeup products
the main house, historic wallpapers, the pat- by Chanel. Nail enamel
terns shifting from room to room, give the feel- by Deborah Lippmann. Hair by Teddy Charles.
ing of a kaleidoscope. But this farm is very Makeup by Tyron Machhausen. Manicure by
Deborah Lippmann. Set design by Thomas
much a private retreat for the family. Thurnauer. Styled by Jessica Diehl. Photographed
In Koons’s public life there is no showy “I exclusively for V.F. by Miguel Reveriego in
am rich” stuf. Money is mostly a means to an New York City. For details, go to VF.com/credits.
end for him to create his art. What he does
need is wealthy patrons. Rothkopf, whose ret- a painter paints a painting or a sculptor makes
rospective is blessedly clear-eyed, puts it this a sculpture it is not complete unless a behold-
way: “If it is going to cost several million dol- er, a viewer, responds to it.”
lars to produce new work, he has got to mar- Kandel adds, “When you looked at the
tial the resources from wealthy patrons to pro- sculptures you saw yourself embedded in
duce this thing. He has to convince extremely the gazing balls. Artists sometimes put mir-
wealthy people, via art dealers, to buy into the rors in works, but they don’t design the work
dream of this perfect object.” so that you fnd yourself in the arms or chest
of a statue, which is what Jef did.”
W hile Koons has continued to explore
popular imagery—such as the Hulk
and Popeye (whose spinach he equates with
When I was visiting the artist and his fam-
ily at their farm, and all of us—Jef, Justine,
and the kids—jumped into his Koonsmobile, a
art’s transformative power)—he has also been stretch van with a captain’s chair for every
producing other work in the last few years, child, he was the happiest I’d seen him in the
both paintings and sculptures, that obviously 30 years since we frst met. He told me, “One
draw on his love of antiquity and classical art. of the things that I’m most proud of is making
For last year’s knockout show, “Gazing Ball,” work that lets viewers not feel intimidated by
at the David Zwirner gallery—the announce- art, but feel that they can emotionally partici-
ment of which temporarily caused the art- pate in it through their senses and their intel-
world gossips to venture that he was leaving lect and be fully engaged. And feel that they
Gagosian, which wasn’t true—he collaborated can get a foothold in it, to push themselves of
with the Louvre’s plaster workshop, outside of of, and lift themselves up on.” As we drove
Paris, the Staatliche Museen’s Gipsformerei, through small industrial communities that had
in Berlin, and others. An expert in stone and defnitely seen better days, Koons pointed out
casting at the Metropolitan Museum helped the ubiquitous garden ornaments in so many
formulate the custom plaster which Koons used front yards—the gazing balls, the inflatable
for the sculptures—a modern plaster as durable bunnies. It’s a Jef Koons world. �
as marble. Each work had an electric-blue gaz-
ing ball—those glass globes that were a Venetian
staple in the 13th century and re-popularized in FROM THE ARCHIVE
For these related stories, visit VF.COM/ARCHIVE
Victorian times—placed at a strategic spot.
Dr. Eric R. Kandel, a Nobel Prize–winning • Jeff Koons, kitsch connoisseur
neuroscientist, was so impressed with the (Mark Stevens, December 1989;
Anthony Haden-Guest, November 1991)
show that he e-mailed Koons afterward. I
• Jeff Koons, Pop’s heir
asked Kandel why. He explained, “I have (Ingrid Sischy, March 2001)
been interested in the ‘beholder’s share,’ an • Jeff Koons, super-yacht designer
idea that came from the Viennese art historian (Mark Seal, November 2010)
Alois Riegl. It involves the concept that when

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JU LY 2 014 www.vanityfair.com VAN IT Y FAI R 115

 PROUST QUESTIONNAIRE
Willem
DAFOE
The prolific, Oscar-nominated actorÑwhose career has spanned films from
The English Patient to Finding Nemo, and now roles in this summer’s The Fault
in Our Stars and A Most Wanted ManÑadmits he thinks ambition is overrated
W hat is your idea
of perfect hap-
piness? Present-
mindedness. What is your
greatest fear? A crippling accident.
Which historical figure do you most
identify with? Harry Houdini—we
both escaped the “favelas” of Apple-
ton, Wisconsin. Which living person
do you most admire? Bob Dylan: his
great gift as a poet and musician, his
long, incorruptible career—and he con-
tinues to tour constantly. What is the
trait you most deplore in yourself?
Punctuality (outside of work, of course).
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Selfshness. What is your greatest extrava-
gance? Long afternoon naps with my wife.
What is your favorite journey? No matter
how much I travel—I’m like a kid—I love a
plane ride: looking at the cloud formations,
down at the land and water, the cities …
What do you consider the most overrated
virtue? Ambitiousness. On what occasion
do you lie? When I go backstage after a
friend’s show that I didn’t love—I try to be en-
couraging more than critical. They instinctively
know when it’s not good. They don’t need my
truth. What do you dislike most about your
appearance? I love how I look! Which words
or phrases do you most overuse? “Beautiful.”
What is your greatest regret? Not learning
foreign languages when I was young, when
116 VA NI T Y FA I R www.vanityfair.com I LL U STR AT IO N
it’s easier. What or who is the great-
est love of your life? My family.
When and where were you happi-
est? Discovering Rome on my
scooter with my wife when we frst
met. Which talent would you most
like to have? African drumming.
What is your current state of mind?
Curious, if a little anxious, about where
society/culture is going after the impact of
the revolution of new technologies. What do
you consider your greatest achievement?
I’m never bored. If you were to die and
come back as a person or thing, what do
you think it would be? A garden hose or a jack-
rabbit. If you could choose what to come
back as, what would it be? A woman.
What is your most treasured possession?
My thin, engraved Victorian wedding
band, which I found in a pawnshop. It’s
the only jewelry I’ve ever worn. What do
you regard as the lowest depth of mis-
ery? Envy. Where would you like to live?
A warm, tropical island where I can walk
around all day in boxer shorts and a “wife
beater.” What is your favorite occupation?
Vegetable gardening. Who are your heroes in
real life? People who are dedicated in their
work to truly helping others. What is it that
you most dislike? English weather. How would
you like to die? How doesn’t matter—it’s
when that matters. When I’m ready! What
is your motto? “Never say never.”
BY RISKO JU LY 2014