T H E D Y N A S T Y I S S U E

M AY 2 0 2 2

PETER
THIEL’S
RED-PILL
ARMY

CONFESSIONS
OF A
MOB CHEF

COUNTRY
MUSIC’S
BLACK
VANGUARD
PALACE GROWING UP
Confidential GETTY
Inside
the Monarchy’s
Fight for
the Future
Plus

TINA BROWN
on Diana’s
Dangerous Game
Artwork by
ANDY WARHOL
 The Dynasty Issue / No. 738

Vanities

21
PAGE 66

21 / Opening Act Actor

“Coming to
Quincy Isaiah on becoming the South has
Magic Johnson.
27 / The Gallery Garden-
been like,
inspired luxury sparkle. holy shit, I’m
30 / Trending Lavender, not alone.”
indigo, and purple abound. —ALLISON RUSSELL

33 / My Stuff Inside the

colorful world of Talita von
Furstenberg.
34 / Beautiful Dark
Twisted Galaxy The many
connections of Kanye West.
36 / Books Inside two coastal
art meccas.
37 / Beauty Rose scents that
go beyond grandmotherly.

Columns

38

A L L I S O N R U S S E L L’ S E A R R I N G S B Y J E N N I F E R F I S H E R . F O R D E TA I L S , G O T O V F. C O M / C R E D I T S .
Language Barrier
BY MICHAEL IDOV
ILLUSTRATION BY
PETER OUMANSKI

The creator of Londongrad

on rethinking his lifelong
dream of connecting Russia
and the West.

40
Mr. Dylan’s
Dream House
BY DOUGLAS BRINKLEY

The author and historian on

Bob Dylan’s new museum.

HEAVY METAL On the Andy Warhol, Reigning Queens: Queen Elizabeth II

$39,000,000,000
Cover of the United Kingdom, 1985, screen print on
Lenox Museum Board, 391⁄ 2 inches by 311⁄ 2 inches.

Value of unmined cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the © 2022 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the
Congo’s KOV mine. The metal has increased from $29,000 per metric Visual Arts/Licensed by Artists Rights Society
ton in July 2020 to $82,000 as of late March. [P. 74] (ARS), New York.

6 VA N I T Y FA I R PHOTOGRAPH BY M I R A N DA BARNES M AY 2 0 2 2
New Streaming
Episodes Now
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 The Dynasty Issue / No. 738

Features
21

60
Free Radicals
BY JAMES POGUE
ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN STAUFFER

They’re not MAGA. They’re

not Q. They’re the intellectual
New Right. And they’re
ready to burn it all down.

66
Modern Folklore
BY TRESSIE M c MILLAN COTTOM
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
MIRANDA BARNES

Meet the young Black

women remaking country
music, in sound and style.

Features 74
42 54
Green Gold

46 / Diana’s Last Dance
A former V.F. editor in
chief—and expert on all
things Diana—on the
The Monarchy
princess’s complicated
at a Crossroads
relationship with the press.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY
BY TINA BROWN
DEWEY SAUNDERS
42 / The Queen of Hearts 50 / The Incredible
As the Windsors navigate Shrinking House of Windsor
All in the Family
BY JAMES REGINATO
Checking in with the
fourth generation
of one of America’s most
fraught and fabulous
Q U I N C Y I S A I A H ’ S C LO T H I N G B Y B A L E N C I A G A ; WAT C H B Y A U D E M A R S P I G U E T. F O R D E TA I L S , G O T O V F. C O M / C R E D I T S .
BY WILLEM MARX
PHOTOGRAPHS BY RICHARD MOSSE
Inside the dirty business
of cobalt mining, where
billionaires are aiming for
savior status—from Africa
to the Arctic.

an uncertain future, perhaps
no one is better positioned
than Camilla Parker Bowles.
BY KATIE NICHOLL
84
How an effort to reduce dynasties: the Gettys.
the official cast of palace
players has upended
millennial royal-dom.
BY ERIN VANDERHOOF Confessions
of a Mob Chef
BY GABE SHERMAN
PHOTOGRAPHS BY GILLIAN LAUB

“To really, truly be in the streets, 16 Editor’s Letter

The once-lauded chef David
Ruggerio comes clean about
you gotta have a black heart.” 18
102
Contributors
Proust Questionnaire his double life in the Mob—
— DAVID RUGGERIO [P. 84] and what it cost him.

8 VA N I T Y FA I R PHOTOGRAPH BY N I C K RILEY BENTHAM M AY 2 0 2 2

New Streaming
Episodes Now
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 ®

Editor in Chief Radhika Jones

Creative Director Kira Pollack Deputy Editor Daniel Kile Executive Digital Director Michael Hogan

Director of Editorial Operations Caryn Prime

Executive Editors Claire Howorth, Matthew Lynch Executive Editor, The Hive Miriam Elder Executive Hollywood Editor Jeff Giles
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Managing Editor, VF.com Kelly Butler Awards and Audio Editor Katey Rich Editor, Creative Development David Friend
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Entertainment Director Caitlin Brody E-Commerce Editor Morgan M. Evans
Senior Media Correspondent Joe Pompeo National Correspondent Emily Jane Fox Politics Correspondent Bess Levin
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Staff Writers Dan Adler, Kenzie Bryant, David Canfield, Yohana Desta, Charlotte Klein, Chris Murphy, Erin Vanderhoof
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Design & Photography

Design Director Justin Patrick Long Visuals Director Tara Johnson Art Director Emily Crawford
Senior Visuals Editors Lauren Margit Jones, Cate Sturgess Senior Designer Khoa Tran
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Fashion & Beauty

Fashion Director Nicole Chapoteau
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10 VA N I T Y FA I R M AY 2 0 2 2
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Editor’s Letter
This year marks 70 years since Queen Elizabeth
ascended to the throne—her platinum jubilee. She has
served in her official role alongside 14 British prime
ministers, from Winston Churchill to Boris Johnson,
and her reign spans 14 U.S. presidents and counting.
Her image circulates as currency—actual currency
and the Andy Warhol variety—and the length of her
tenure is now an indelible part of her legacy. Who
in this day and age holds the same job for seven
decades? That said, her dominion has indisputably
contracted since 1952; just last year Barbados threw
off its affiliation with the crown, and in March a roy-
al visit from the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to
Jamaica drew calls for reparations alongside a reaf-
firmation of the island’s 60 years of independence.
Monarchist sentiment—or sentimentality—in
England is sufficiently strong that Elizabeth II won’t
be the last Windsor to sit on the throne. But with
Charles in the wings and a grandson and great-
grandson in line, she will be Great Britain’s last
sovereign queen for a good long while—and given
the shrinking royal footprint, possibly forever.
These themes emerge in our pages this month
and will also shape our new podcast series called
Dynasty, a delightful audio expression of our obses-
sion with powerful families. The first season takes
on the House of Windsor and is cohosted by con-
tributing editor Katie Nicholl and staff writer Erin
Vanderhoof, who also wrote stories for our cover
package on the platinum jubilee and all it signi-
fies. Subsequent seasons will tackle other notable
and notorious clans and the ways they shape our
world. In this issue, we interpret the idea of family
both literally (see James Reginato’s chronicle of the
16 VA N I T Y FA I R
A N DY WA R H O L , R E I G N I N G Q U E E N S : Q U E E N E L I Z A B E T H I I O F T H E U N I T E D K I N G D O M , 1 9 8 5 , S C R E E N P R I N T O N L E N O X M U S E U M B O A R D , 3 9. 5 X 3 1 . 5 . © 2 0 2 2 T H E A N DY WA R H O L F O U N D AT I O N F O R T H E V I S U A L A R T S . L I C E N S E D B Y A R T I S T S R I G H T S S O C I E T Y ( A R S ) , N E W YO R K .
fortunes and misfortunes of J. Paul Getty’s great-
grandchildren) and loosely, as a way of thinking
about the ties that bind. Tressie McMillan Cottom
paints a vivid group portrait of a new vanguard of
country singers in Nashville, for example, and
James Pogue forays into the heart of darkness—
excuse me, Orlando—with a rising group of cultur-
ally savvy conservative thinkers whose ideological
intentions trace to Peter Thiel. And Michael Idov,
one of Hollywood’s few bilingual English-Russian
screenwriters, writes eloquently of giving up writ-
ing in Russian in the face of Putin’s invasion of
Ukraine. “I don’t know how to speak to a country
that’s busy destroying its neighbor and itself,” he
says, “so I won’t.” n
radhika jones, Editor in Chief
Queen Elizabeth II
gets the V.F. cover
treatment times
three, courtesy of
Andy Warhol. Listen
to our new royals
podcast, hosted by
Katie Nicholl and
Erin Vanderhoof,
at VF.com/dynasty.
M AY 2 0 2 2
Contributors
Clockwise
from top
left: Tressie
McMillan
Cottom, James
Pogue, Richard
Mosse, Willem
Marx, Tina
Brown, James
Reginato.
Tressie McMILLAN COTTOM
“MODERN FOLKLORE,” P. 66
“These women are making some of the
most moving music out right now,”
says the sociologist and cultural critic on
her time with country music’s Black
vanguard. They also, McMillan Cottom
says, know how to have a good time:
“What happens in Nash-Vegas, stays
in Nash-Vegas.”
James REGINATO
“ALL IN THE FAMILY,” P. 54
“The Gettys are one of the most fascinat-
ing and unconventional dynasties of our
time,” says the Vanity Fair writer-at-large.
In his upcoming book, Growing Up Getty
(Gallery Books), Reginato tells the story
of J. Paul Getty and his heirs, including
his surprisingly close-knit great-
grandchildren, debunking the myths
that have grown around the family.
18 VA N I T Y FA I R
James POGUE
“FREE RADICALS,” P. 60
The author of Chosen Country: A
Rebellion in the West has written about
rural politics for years, but entering into
this “intra-elite war of ideas” was a wild
experience, where people “use complex
intellectual analysis to explain why many
conservatives now feel so deeply alien-
ated by mainstream politics and media.”
Tina BROWN
“DIANA’S LAST DANCE,” P. 46
Vanity Fair’s former editor in chief,
author of the best-selling The Diana
Chronicles and its forthcoming
incendiary follow-up, The Palace
Papers (Crown), wanted to “question
the framing of Diana as a mere
vulnerable victim and show how her
sons have not yet confronted the
unsettling complexity of her legacy.”
M C M I L L A N C O T T O M : TA U S H A D I C K I N S O N . P O G U E : C O U R T E S Y O F J A M E S P O G U E . M O S S E : VA L E N T I N A V I T E L L I . R E G I N AT O : G A S P E R T R I N G A L E . B R O W N : B R I G I T T E L A C O M B E . M A R X : J O N A S S C H O E N S T E I N / N B C N E W S .
Richard MOSSE
“GREEN GOLD,” P. 74
“Flying at dawn in the helicopter bound
for Disko Island was one of the more
sublime experiences I’ve ever had,”
says the documentary photographer,
who currently has a retrospective
survey exhibition on show at Kunsthalle
Bremen in Germany. “It was one of the
most beautiful journeys I’ve ever taken.”
Willem MARX
“GREEN GOLD,” P. 74
“We wanted to tell the story of this
unfathomably vast global energy
transition,” says the London-based
journalist. Marx has followed the
Congolese mining sector for nearly
15 years, but discovering the truth
about cobalt required unearthing
memories many witnesses had
chosen to leave behind.
M AY 2 0 2 2
VA N I T I E S VA N I TA S VA N I TAT U M

PAGE 33

TALITA VON
FURSTENBERG’S
FAVORITE THINGS

PAGE 34

THE TANGLED WEB

OF KANYE WEST

PAGE 37

REINVENTING
THE ROSE
H A I R , D A R O N N C A R R ; G R O O M I N G , K AT H Y S A N T I A G O ; TA I LO R , H A S M I K KO U R I N I A N . P R O D U C E D O N LO C AT I O N B Y J N P R O D U C T I O N . F O R D E TA I L S , G O T O V F. C O M / C R E D I T S .

PAGE 22

As Magic Johnson in the

Lakers dramedy Winning Time,
QUINCY ISAIAH shoots
Jacket and sweater by
and scores
Bottega Veneta.
Throughout: beard
products by Tom Ford;
grooming products by
Onå New York. Styled
by Jason Rembert.

VA N I T Y FA I R PHOTOGRAPHS BY N I C K RILEY BENTHAM M AY 2 0 2 2 21


Winner’s CIRCLE
QUINCY ISAIAH ’s magic moment
happened slowly, then all at once
Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers
Dynasty—a love letter to the team’s 1980s
“showtime” era—stars heavyweights like
John C. Reilly, Adrien Brody, and Gaby
Hoffmann, but needed an actor with epic
charisma to embody colead Earvin “Magic”
Johnson. That part went to Quincy Isaiah, a
Michigander like Johnson and the youngest
of seven in a Brady Bunch–esque blended
family. (“Instead of getting Alice, they got
me,” he laughs.) Here, he reflects on turning
his first professional role into a career layup.
HOOP DREAMS : “I played basketball all my
life, all summer long. I would go to football
practice, come home, and then play
basketball the rest of the day…then video
games. It was lovely. Take me back!”
A PRODUCTION of A Raisin in the Sun at
Kalamazoo College gave him the confidence
to audition for the American Academy
of Dramatic Arts. A professor encouraged
22 VA N I T Y FA I R
leading man.’ That was all I needed to hear.”
AFTER A CALLBACK and some advice from
his agent (“Get better at basketball”), Isaiah
was asked to show off his court skills with
series consultant Rick Fox. An hour later,
producer Adam McKay called and gave him
the part. “I had to hit mute and just start
screaming. I called my mom and she did the
same, her Pomeranian running in circles
around her. My life changed, you know?”
BETWEEN LONG DAYS filming and frequent
basketball practice, Winning Time was a crash
course. Reilly “still gives it the same on the
14th hour as the first, and it’s a trickle-down
effect. No ego on this set.”
HE HASN’T MET Johnson yet, but he hopes
their paths cross soon. “To be able to do
what he did during that time period with that
diagnosis—it’s legendary.”
LOOKING FORWARD, he dreams of sharing
sets with Ryan Coogler and Quentin
Tarantino and wants “to play Mansa Musa,
the richest man to ever live.”
WILL WINNING TIME get a second season?
“We’re hoping for it,” Isaiah says. “We’ve only
covered the first year of Magic’s career. So it
can keep going.” — brit t hennem u th
Home Cooking
In these new recipe
books, three famous foodies
return to their roots.
NOURISH YOUR SOUL
Named after a term for mother,
Asma Khan’s book pairs lush
recipes—saag baadam, chicken
pakoras, chutney—with memories
of monsoons in Kolkata, family
celebrations, and homesick
BLACK CHEF
Shrimp étouffée, dirty rice,
garlic aioli: Braiding culinary
influences from a childhood
in the Bronx, Nigeria, and Baton
Rouge—along with his classical
French training at the Culinary
Institute of America—chef
Kwame Onwuachi presents a
B O O K S : C O U R T E S Y O F T H E P U B L I S H E R S . F O R D E TA I L S , G O T O V F. C O M / C R E D I T S .
Lori Zabar’s grandparents, Louis
and Lilly Zabar, fled an area
of czarist Russia, now Ukraine,
and established a deli on
NYC’s Upper West Side. Each of
the family history’s 10 chapters
closes with a recipe: gefilte fish,
blintzes with blueberries,
the store’s beloved Nova cream
cheese spread. (Schocken)
M AY 2 0 2 2
 Vanities /The Gallery

Blue CRUSH
A number of settings have housed the world-renowned Tiffany Diamond—of
Audrey Hepburn, Lady Gaga, and Beyoncé fame—but these flowers and petite
leaves wrought in diamond and yellow gold were one of its earliest imagined
iterations. The Fleurage bracelet, which Jean Schlumberger sketched in 1958 but
never fully realized, has come to life with a gleaming 48-carat aquamarine
at its center, in a size and cut similar to that famous pale yellow friend. Nothing
but blue skies ahead for this gemstone garden. —Daisy Shaw-Ellis
S E T D E S I G N , S H A R O N R YA N . F O R D E TA I L S , G O T O V F. C O M / C R E D I T S .

Tiffany & Co.

Schlumberger
Fleurage bracelet,
price upon request.
(selected Tiffany
& Co. locations)

VA N I T Y FA I R PHOTOGRAPH BY I N A JANG M AY 2 0 2 2 27
© 2022 Paramount Pictures.
Vanities /Trending

2. 3. 4. HUE TUBE
1. Swarovski necklace,
$700. (swarovski.com)
7. 2. Lanvin jacket, $6,990.
(lanvin.com) 3. Baum und
Pferdgarten skirt, $229.
6. (Saks Fifth Avenue stores)
4. Kuboraum sunglasses,

P R I N C E : R I C H A R D E . A A R O N / G E T T Y I M A G E S . S WA R O V S K I , L A N V I N , K E N N E T H N I C H O L S O N , F L A M I N G O , C N D , LO U I S V U I T T O N , KO LO R , G I V E N C H Y : J O S E P H I N E S C H I E L E . A L L O T H E R S : C O U R T E S Y O F T H E B R A N D S . F O R D E TA I L S , G O T O V F. C O M / C R E D I T S .
$370. (framedewe.com)
5. Roger Vivier mules,
1. $1,750. (rogervivier.com)
6. Régime des Fleurs
Himitsu eau de parfum,
$225. (regimedesfleurs
.com) 7. Kenneth
Nicholson dress, $1,100.
(kennethnicholson.us)
8. Flamingo tweezers,
$12. (shopflamingo.com)
8.
9. Fendi Men’s bag,
$4,200. (fendi.com)
10. Glossier Lavender
Balm Dotcom (available in
May), $12. (glossier.com)
11. CND Vinylux nail
polish in Artisan Bazaar,
$11. (amazon.com)
12. Louis Vuitton Men’s
pants, $5,400. (louisvuitton
.com) 13. Kolor sweater,
$429. (onlinestore.kolor.jp)
14. Givenchy cross bra,
price upon request.
(givenchy.com) 15. Tatcha
The Silk sunscreen SPF 50,
$60. (tatcha.com)

Purple REIGN
Take a dip in these violet delights, 10.
from lilac cat-eye shades to indigo
kitten-heel sandals to ruffles that
evoke rolling floral hills

12.

13.

Party like it’s the Prince and the Revolution 1984–85

Purple Rain tour. 14. 15.

30 VA N I T Y FA I R M AY 2 0 2 2
 2.
3.
Bright SIDE
From her pink furniture to floral frocks,
DVF cochairwoman TALITA VON
FURSTENBERG creates candy-hued worlds
■ Style File
DAILY UNIFORM: Nothing
makes me feel more
confident and powerful
than wearing DVF (9)!
WORKOUT WEAR: Splits59
6.
leggings are the softest
P O R T R A I T : M A R C I G B I N A D O LO R . G LO B E : C O U R T E S Y O F TA L I TA V O N F U R S T E N B E R G . F R O Z E N YO G U R T : E S T H E R H I L D E B R A N DT/A L A M Y. T H E G R E AT : H U L U .
and most flattering.
TO SLEEP: A comfy and
colorful sweater from the
Elder Statesman (3).
A P P L E S N E V E R FA L L : C O U R T E S Y O F T H E P U B L I S H E R . A L L O T H E R S : C O U R T E S Y O F T H E B R A N D S . F O R D E TA I L S , G O T O V F. C O M / C R E D I T S .
■ On Beauty
MAKEUP ESSENTIALS:
Chanel Le Correcteur
concealer (2), Ilia mascara
(8), Charlotte Tilbury
highlighter wand, Makeup
by Mario cream blush
stick (10), and Anastasia
Beverly Hills contour
11. kit for cheeks and eyes.
SKIN CARE: Biologique
Recherche. HAIR CARE:
14.
Olaplex shampoo and
BRUSH:
13.
STYLING:
■ The Menu
SWEET TREAT: Frozen
yogurt, or really any
dessert…. I have the biggest
VA N I T Y FA I R
sweet tooth (5). COCKTAIL
HOUR: Laúd tequila
passion fruit margarita.
■ At Home
DISHWARE: Murano
glassware. LagunaB
glasses make the cutest
gift (1). VINTAGE
TREASURE: A bronze
globe that secretly opens
and holds cigarettes.
I don’t smoke, but I love
finding fun pieces on
1stDibs (4). RECENT
ADDITION: My pink India
Mahdavi Bishop side
table (6), Svenskt Tenn
pillows for accent prints,
and my AVF Home
yellow circle mirror.
AROMA: Giant Diptyque
candles are great (11).
FLOWERS ON THE TABLE:
I love fresh flowers so
much, but I have a fake
bouquet from Afloral
(15) and always get
compliments on them
rather than my real ones
(and they last forever).
■ For Pleasure
WATCHING: The Great (13).
READING: Apples Never
Fall, by Liane Moriarty
(14). INSPIRED BY: Nature!
M AY 2 0 2 2 33
Vanities /Beautiful Dark Twisted Galaxy

The Wide WORLD OF KANYE

“They say people in your life are seasons, and anything that
happen is for a reason.” So quoth Ye, né Kanye Omari West,
whose tangled web of pals, foes, lovers, and influences
is an all-weather wonder By Kia D. Goosby

TAYLOR

GLADYS
KNIGHT
RAY DAME
WEST DASH

RICHIE

DONDA
WEST RIHANNA
KIM
KARDASHIAN
GORDY
RICHIE

GAYE

KARDASHIAN FOX
ELLIS

ROCKY

RICHIE DOGG

ROSS
BARKER KARDASHIAN
ANNA
SOROKIN
MARY
VIRGIL WILSON
ABLOH
DAVIDSON
WOODS JENNER

THE QUEEN
ODOM MOTHER

DONALD
THOMPSON TRUMP KOOLHAAS
ARIANA
GRANDE

ROSS

WILL ANDY
WARHOL PRADA

KYLIE TOMMY
JENNER KENDALL MOTTOLA
JENNER

MICHAELA
AL L : G E T T Y I MAG E S .

COCHRAN DUCHAMP CAREY ANGELA DAVIS HILL

Family Dated Married/partnered Feuded Collaborated

KEYS
Friends “Dated” Separated/divorced Inspired by Photo-opped

34 VA N I T Y FA I R M AY 2 0 2 2
QVC.COM HSN.COM
 Unscripted
Three actors pen evocative,
intimate personal histories.

VIOLA DAVIS

Having grown up a “spunky,

TAKE A TRIP to the beaches of Wellfleet on the
spiraling hook of Cape Cod, Massachusetts:
The year is 1910, and an enclave of artists
and writers is forming. John Taylor Williams’s
The Shores of Bohemia: A Cape Cod Story,
1910–1960, from FSG, traces the “flawed,
rowdy, careless bohemians” who left Manhat-
tan’s Greenwich Village for the cheaper
coastal towns up east—or bounced between
the two. From Charles Webster Hawthorne’s
Provincetown Art Association; to socialist
leanings turned communist sympathies; to
Bauhaus houses spread with Anni Albers
sassy mess,” in Finding Me:
A Memoir, from HarperOne,
the triple crown–winning actor
describes racism, poverty, her
mother’s love, and a life guided
by her constant question:
“What did I learn from this?”
Her first trip to Africa is
a highlight; in The Gambia,
she feels a sense of home.
Pick up the temporal thread across the
country with V.F. contributor Mark Rozzo’s
Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis
out from Ecco. The book, which began as
a 2018 article for this magazine, serves as a
portrait not only of a marriage but of a critical
American artistic awakening during the years
that Hayward once called “the most wonder-
SIMU LIU
ful and awful of my life.” Rozzo paints a neon
picture of the pair’s milieu: their 1963 West In We Were Dreamers: An
Immigrant Superhero Origin
Coast coming-out house party for Andy War- Story, from William Morrow,
hol, replete with circus posters and a chili dog the Marvel actor describes his

rugs; to the 1950s softball games staffed by
Edwin O’Connor, Norman Mailer, and
Edmund Wilson (who batted but “refused
to run”), Williams captures half a century
of creative thought lashed with salty sea air.
B O O K S : C O U R T E S Y O F T H E P U B L I S H E R S . DAV I S : B + D M . L I U : J A S O N M E N D E Z / G E T T Y I M A G E S . B L A I R : R A U L R O M O .
stand (and Hayward’s later “screen tests” with complex and at times abusive
the artist); Hopper photographing the Selma parents; immigrating from
China to Canada; xenophobia;
march; substance abuse battles; the couple’s teen rebellions; escape through
friendships with Ed Ruscha and Jane Fonda—a acting—and weaves humor, raw
life and time in Technicolor. —keziah weir detail, and empathy throughout.

SIX-PACK High raunch, Afrofuturism, and more new fiction

THE MEMORY LIARMOUTH HERE GOES
LIBRARIAN This “feel-bad NOTHING
With contributors who romance” about the Steve Toltz’s newest finds
include Eve L. Ewing and escapades of a a droll Angus Mooney
Danny Lore, Janelle vainglorious, self- watching from the
Monáe explores abuse of proclaimed tease of afterlife (he works in a SELMA BLAIR
power, love, and race through five a scammer named Marsha is factory) as his murderer seduces
futuristic stories. (HarperVoyager) peak John Waters camp. (FSG) his pregnant wife. (Melville House) Named simply “Baby Girl
Beitner” at birth, in Mean Baby:
THE IMMORTAL WE DO WHAT WE ONE DAY A Memoir of Growing Up,
KING RAO DO IN THE DARK I SHALL ASTONISH from Knopf, Blair describes her
In Vauhini Vara’s debut, Michelle Hart’s first THE WORLD path from moody infant
Athena’s father, a tech novel follows lonely Susan and Norma meet to activist. Along the way: tarot
mogul nonpareil, has college freshman while working at
readings, fighting alcoholism,
died, and she is accused Mallory through her a haberdashery; they
of conspiring to kill him. But she’s relationship with a professor; disagree about literature, but an M.S. diagnosis, a custody
also armed with his memories, and the woman reunites with her they’re pals anyway. Nina Stibbe’s battle, love and heartbreak,
sour truths about his company absentee husband, but reemerges novel puts fresh eyes on a lifetime auditions and triumphs—
board. (W.W. Norton) seven years later. (Riverhead) of friendship. (Scribner) —K.W. onscreen and off. —K.W.

36 VA N I T Y FA I R I L L U S T R AT I O N BY D A M I E N CUYPERS

Rosalita candle, $44.
Coming Up ROSES
Can perfumery’s archetypal flower outstep
its grandmotherly reputation? A new crop of
M I C A E L A M C L U C A S / T R U N K A R C H I V E . A L L O T H E R S : C O U R T E S Y O F T H E B R A N D S . F O R D E TA I L S , G O T O V F. C O M / C R E D I T S .
scents shakes things up By Laura Regensdorf
WHEN GERTRUDE STEIN tucked that waltzing line—“Rose is a
rose is a rose is a rose”—into a 1913 poem, she knew she had
landed on something universal. She recycled the phrase again
Raving Rose fragrance,
and again, tapping into the flower’s sense of beauty, ubiquity,
and foreverness. “Civilization begins with a rose,” she later
wrote, establishing it as a matriarch of sorts; ditto the genesis
of fragrance. But for all the ancient trivia—Romans scented
doves’ wings with rosewater like animated Febreze; Cleopatra
used rose petals to lure Mark Antony in a proto–honeymoon
suite gesture—the prevailing association is not millennia old
but two generations. The rose belongs to grandma.
Courteney Cox brings this up in a Zoom conversation about
Steeped Rose surface
Homecourt, her line of home-care products that showcases the
work of master perfumers. Steeped Rose is one of four scents
delivered via room mist, dish soap, and counter spray (like her
Friends character, Monica, Cox is a fingerprint freak). Neither
powdery nor sweet, it doesn’t register as “what you would
imagine a grandmother’s house to smell like,” she says, prais-
ing the fragrance’s dimensionality. “It’s the stem, it’s the leaves,
it’s the petals—everything that you think real roses smell like.”
Whence comes this musty reputation? One thinks of
potpourri in cut-crystal bowls and soaps shaped into rosettes,
Vanities /Beauty
too pretty to use. A 1935 photograph
of a future Elizabeth II, wearing a frilly
dress and ankle socks with a rose bou-
quet, captures the vintage pomp. Harold
McGee, the wizard behind Nose Dive: A
D.S. & Durga Field Guide to the World’s Smells, notes
Salt Marsh Rose
candle, $65. that damascenone, a molecule found
in the prized damask rose, is “one of the
dominant aromas in cooked apples”—a
cross-wiring, maybe, between grand-
ma’s perfume and pie. But David Moltz,
the Brooklyn-based nose of D.S. &
Durga, shrugs off the anti-granny stance
as a kind of posturing, a learned distaste.
Chanel Paris-Paris
fragrance, $140. His Salt Marsh Rose candle—“pretty
symphonic,” Moltz says of its “swampy,
mossy” notes—is an example of what
he means when arguing for a “mod-
ern-restraint usage of classic, beautiful
perfume materials. To throw the baby
Boy Smells out with the bathwater makes no sense.”
Judging by the proliferation of next-
gen roses, it’s a growing opinion. Boy
Smells’ Rosalita candle draws on saffron
and cedar for an earthy riff. Raving Rose,
from Dries Van Noten’s debut fragrance
range, goes rogue with a double dash
Henry Rose Sheep’s
Clothing fragrance,
of pepper (black, pink)—a rose scent that
would give you a metaphorical “kick in
$120. the face,” says the designer of his origi-
nal brief to perfumers. Tom Ford looked
to his Los Angeles rose garden—planted
in a color gradient, with his least
favorite, red, at the back—for a trio of
scents, including Rose d’Amalfi with its
marzipan-like note of heliotrope. Mean-
Dries Van Noten while, perfumer Olivier Polge teased
$280.
out the “fresh, citrusy, slightly metal-
lic” qualities of Rosa damascena for
Paris-Paris, this month’s latest entry in
Les Eaux de Chanel. Polge doesn’t have
any hang-ups with rose; since his father
worked as Chanel’s nose for 37 years, the
grandmothers in Polge’s family simply
wore the fashion house’s perfumes.
Homecourt For actor Michelle Pfeiffer, who runs
cleaner, $20. the clean fragrance brand Henry Rose,
her dad’s Old Spice is an olfactive muse.
But the new Sheep’s Clothing is a musky
departure, with a “dusting of pink
peppercorn on top of the naive rose.”
If it should trigger a whiff of nostalgia,
all the better, says Sable Yong, cohost
of the perfume podcast Smell Ya Later:
Tom Ford
Rose d’Amalfi “Our digital age is moving so quickly.”
fragrance, $270. A proverbial slowdown is in order. n
M AY 2 0 2 2 37
Vanities /Letter From L.A.
Move Fast and
BREAK BAD
How would-be tech
visionaries became TV’s
antihero obsession
By David Canfield
J
JUST BEFORE WALTER WHITE calls him-
self Heisenberg for the first time in
Breaking Bad, he shaves his head. It’s
a dramatic change in surprising ways:
Walter’s voice gets harsher; his fami-
ly man warmth goes ice-cold; he kills.
And he leaves a legacy, not only in
television’s ongoing fascination with
people breaking bad but in how they
present themselves to the world.
In episode two of Showtime’s
Super Pumped, Uber cofounder Travis
I L L U S T R AT I O N BY Q U I N T O N
Kalanick (played by Joseph Gordon-
Levitt) slicks his unkempt hair back
with a glob of gel, transforming almost
instantly from scrappy tech bro to Sil-
icon Valley tyrant. In episode three of
Hulu’s The Dropout, disgraced Ther-
anos CEO Elizabeth Holmes (Amanda
Seyfried) dons her signature black tur-
tleneck for the first time—the turning
point for a con woman realizing she’s
in too deep. Amy Winehouse’s “Back to
Black” plays on the soundtrack, like a
bat signal to prestige TV savants: This is
her Heisenberg shift.
Breaking Bad introduced a quintes-
sential antihero: a man crawling out
of the despair of a recession-ravaged
America to reclaim a sense of agency.
This was in the late 2000s, at the apex of
scripted dramas—once a medium fixat-
ed on maintaining likability—learning to
embrace deeply flawed protagonists like
Tony Soprano and Don Draper. The new
explosion of rise-and-fall tales about
tech moguls and entrepreneurs, which
also includes Apple TV+’s WeCrashed,
speaks just as powerfully to our own
moment in time—the gig economy, the
start-up fantasies, and the virtual world
in which new kings and queens are
crowned, only to be taken down.
Super Pumped is executive-produced
by the team behind Billions—talk about
knowing your way around repellent,
powerful people—and will change shape
in subsequent years as an anthology of
American business scandals. (Season
two will explore the tumult of Facebook.)
M c
This first installment, The Battle for
Uber, follows revolutionary-minded
Kalanick from the rideshare company’s
astronomical growth to his ouster—
and $2.5 billion payout. Cocreator Brian
Koppelman says the show is driven by
a simple question: “What happens when
the revolutionaries become the fascists,
as seems to happen over and over in
these tech-disruptive companies?”
Tech is fertile ground for antihero
stories, a Wild West of screens and apps.
“There’s a cult around the CEO, and
a lack of boundaries where it’s not just
a company—you’re expected to make
it your entire world,” says The Dropout
creator Liz Meriwether. “That culture
can lead to people in a kind of haze of
not asking questions, not thinking. It
really narrows your field of vision.”
Meriwether’s subject, Holmes,
dropped out of Stanford in her late
teens to build a billion-dollar company
that promised to democratize blood
testing via an industry-changing “Edi-
son” machine. The thing simply never
worked, though, and as Theranos
grew it possibly endangered people’s
lives. (Sick people were tested on Ther-
anos devices, only to receive incorrect
results.) Holmes was featured on mag-
azine covers and celebrated as the
world’s youngest female self-made
In The Dropout, Super Pumped, and WeCrashed,
Amanda Seyfried, Joseph Gordon-Levitt,
Jared Leto, and Anne Hathaway reimagine
the recent past.
T H E D RO P O U T : H U LU . S U P E R P U M P E D : S H OW T I M E .
MILLAN M AY 2 0 2 2
F O R YO U R EMMY® CO N S I D E R AT I O N
Vanities /Letter From L.A.
billionaire. Now she’s awaiting a prison
sentence of up to 80 years, having been
found guilty of defrauding investors.
Holmes’s inner life has been exam-
ined across documentaries, books,
and podcasts without definitive con-
clusions. “Her motivations are hard to
pin down, but I took that as a reason
to make the show,” Meriwether says.
“I made a commitment early on to start
at the beginning of her story and try to
get inside her head as much as I could,
to go on that journey with her.” Before
Seyfried’s Holmes evolves into a tech
imposter, she’s introduced as a teenager
with a stifling home environment, a
brilliantly ambitious college student,
and an aspiring entrepreneur idolizing
the unicorns who made it big.
Think of how Walter White’s arc
began with a cancer diagnosis, or the
way Mad Men slowly unpeeled Don
Draper’s mysteriously tragic roots.
These “difficult men,” as author Brett
Martin dubbed them in 2013, were not
without sympathetic backstories, and
the formula adapts seamlessly to the
aspirations of start-up culture. “Whether
we’ve had that idea that we think could
go on Shark Tank or we’re gunning for
a promotion at work, we’ve all been in
those moments of struggle,” says Lee
Eisenberg, cocreator of WeCrashed,
which centers on the founding of
WeWork. “Seeing someone take that
and turn it into a $47 billion valuation—
people are fascinated by both the rise
and then ultimately the demise.”
VA N I T Y FA I R
TV HAS GOTTEN increasingly schaden-
freudian of late. A few years ago, viewers
streamed Fyre Festival documentaries
back-to-back, relishing Instagram’s finest
getting duped into a weekend of FEMA
tents and sad sandwiches. Now we can’t
get enough of Succession and the one-
upping awfulness of its cast. That’s to say
nothing of the glossy true-crime craze
vaunted by Ryan Murphy’s American
Crime Story. Bad behavior is everywhere:
Socialite scammer Anna Delvey recently
got the Shonda Rhimes treatment in
Netflix’s Inventing Anna, while a grisly
case of texting-influenced suicide
was adapted into Hulu’s The Girl From
Plainville. These shows vary widely as to
how interested they are in backstories
and motivations—some of them are cap-
tivating precisely because they simply
throw con artists and criminals onscreen
and let us watch the havoc they wreak.
The characters’ terribleness is assumed
from the jump; there is no “before.” By
contrast, The Dropout, Super Pumped,
and WeCrashed are more nuanced and
character-driven. It’s the “Mr. Chips to
Scarface” journey, as Breaking Bad cre-
ator Vince Gilligan once called it, for the
era of endless millennial scams.
The new shows also make a tangible
effort to redefine what an antihero can
look like. The conversation around lik-
ability has historically focused on women
in pop culture—which is exactly what fas-
cinated Meriwether about dramatizing
Holmes’s story. She considered Holmes’s
rise a parallel to her own, since she got
her first showrunning gig on the sitcom
New Girl while still in her 20s. “That story
doesn’t get told a lot,” Meriwether says.
“What it is to be a young woman with
power—and the absurdity and also con-
fusion that comes with that.”
WeCrashed also finds fresh mean-
ing and emotion in the familiar story of
a hustler gone rogue by expanding the
main point of view to include an eccen-
tric love story. WeWork’s cofounder
Adam Neumann (played by Jared Leto)
was a serial entrepreneur, an immi-
grant from Israel desperate for that big
idea. “There is something so human and
relatable about Adam when he’s strug-
gling,” says cocreator Drew Crevello.
“He’s in a new city, and he’s floundering
a bit to find something to make his own.”
WeWork appears to be Adam’s dream
come true—until his relentless drive for
growth eats him alive. (The gussied-
up shared-office-space company was
valued in the billions until reality pre-
sented itself in the form of enormous
mounting losses.) But Eisenberg and
Crevello don’t tell that standard sto-
ry, not exactly. The “lone visionary”
angle, which past tellings of WeWork
have succumbed to, is discarded here
in favor of a thorny portrait of the mar-
riage between Adam and Rebekah
(Anne Hathaway), a wealthy onetime
aspiring actor, and cousin to Gwyneth
Paltrow. “We saw it as this fascinating,
flawed, utterly captivating love story,”
says Crevello. “That’s a strange term to
use for a business rise-and-fall story, but
without Rebekah, there is no WeWork.
Without the very particular and peculiar
way these two people reinforced each
other, there is no rise and fall.”
WeCrashed examines two extreme
personalities as they go from under-
dogs to superpowers—their cultish
methods loom large, their profound
mistakes unfurl in tragicomic fashion.
They lose touch with reality and ulti-
mately get what’s coming, but you may
find yourself rooting for two outsiders
determined to make it to the top. “It’s a
WECRASHED: APPLE T V+.
dynamic that we certainly hadn’t seen
before,” says Crevello. “It’s two people
bringing out the very best and worst in
each other.” A dual antihero story—who
says a trope can’t find new tricks? n
M AY 2 0 2 2
F O R Y O U R E M M Y ®
C O N S I D E R A T I O N

NOW STREAMING
Vanities /Letter From L.A.

The Joy of GOOPING have three best-selling cookbooks to

her name, after all. In 2019, she and her
team started plans for a restaurant in the
Gwyneth Paltrow is taking her lifestyle imprimatur Westside of L.A. But a pandemic led to
to the kitchen By Emily Jane Fox a pivot, as everybody’s story goes, and

C
they brought on chef Kim Floresca—
who trained at Per Se and El Bulli before
she was executive sous-chef at the
and celebrity. In Goop Kitchen’s first three-Michelin-starred Restaurant at
year, sales are up 526 percent versus Meadowood in Napa Valley—to oversee
its own projections, according to a the food on the go.
spokesperson, who adds that sales per “We have a tasting panel, and
square foot are better than at an Apple obviously Gwyneth has final say, but
store, with more than half coming from we have a group of people in our R&D
frequent customers (those who order at department, and we literally devote
least one or two times per week). There weeks to just one dressing,” Floresca
are plans to expand to more locations in told me. To test the packaging, she
Los Angeles and around the country. added, “We take these salads and we’ll
It wasn’t supposed to happen quite drive them around and spin them
like this. For years, Paltrow had dreamed like a driver would do.” They spent
about opening a restaurant—she does a year nailing the gluten-free pizza
CHRISTINA NAJJAR, BETTER known dough, which she said typically tastes
as Tinx on Instagram and TikTok, like soggy cardboard. “We wanted
where she has nearly 2 million to create pizza that was just pizza. If
followers combined, has a litmus test. you knew it was gluten-free, cool.
“I always think it’s a testament, If you didn’t, even better, and you just
especially in L.A., how far you’ll drive ate it and you liked it, perfect. That,
for something,” she told me early this for us, is a huge win.”
March. She lives in West Hollywood, Paltrow often pops in for the weekly
literally over hills and far away from tasting to give her feedback. (On
both of the two Goop Kitchen Floresca’s fifth day on the job, she
locations, in Santa Monica and Studio served Paltrow a salad with a mound
City. Yet, she said, “I drive 20 minutes of dill sprinkled on top. Paltrow,
to get this fricking food because I love who is not a fan of the herb, implored
it so much.” her to “please tell me that’s fennel.”
Goop Kitchen, a takeout chain run They were testing a healthy spin on
out of ghost kitchens, is an extension of a ranch dressing. The dill, Floresca
Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle brand—one explained, was essential.)
that her team says they had hoped to do They launched rotisserie meals in
for years, with a signature hybrid of March, with a pizza concept to follow,
restrictive indulgence, a monk living la which doesn’t inherently scream Goop.
dolce vita. Everything is Goop Certified But it is all in the sell—the promise
Clean: free of refined sugars, processed that consuming anything with Paltrow’s
ingredients, gluten, soy, dairy, peanuts, stamp could lead you toward physical
and preservatives. And everything—if lightness or spiritual enlightenment.
you trust the hundreds of online reviews It’s why a sex toy or workout class
and the dozens of actors and influenc- or powder concoction flies off shelves
ers, from Rachel Zoe and Kristin when she recommends one. Or why
Davis to Shay Mitchell and Sara Foster, Tinx, after she picked up a teriyaki
who have posted about their Brentwood bowl as a treat, posted that if Goop
Chinese chicken salads and miso Kitchen doesn’t open a location closer
salmons—tastes good, travels well, to her, she will shave her head and
and appears Instagrammable. start running naked down Santa Monica
For years, that has been Goop’s brand Boulevard until they do. If you don’t
trinity. Now it’s married to the Los belong in Paltrow’s world, you want
Angeles holy trinity of traffic, salads, to belong there right now. n

VA N I T Y FA I R I L L U S T R AT I O N BY J O R G E A R É VA LO M AY 2 0 2 2
Vanities /Culture Clash

Language BARRIER older colleagues. Leto, a film I cowrote

with my wife, Lily, worked the other
way, exposing the West to the Russian
A bilingual screenwriter tried to build a bridge between indie rock of my childhood. When it
Russia and the West. Vladimir Putin burned it down screened at Cannes, with the black-tie
Palais de Festivals crowd grooving,
By Michael Idov
then sobbing, to the songs of Viktor

T
THERE ARE TWO or three screenwriters
in Hollywood who can switch between
English and Russian at will, and
I am one of them. This is not a self-
aggrandizing statement—no evidence
suggests I’m a genius in either. Still,
I have been writing in both for 30 years,
and these are the hardest words
I have ever had to write, because they
feel like lopping off half of my brain
in public.
As long as Vladimir Putin remains
in power, I will not write in Russian
anymore.
In doing this, I am neither assigning
collective responsibility nor weaseling
out of it. People and their government
are different things even in a democ-
racy, to say nothing of a dictatorship.
Using the famed Soviet “salami tactics”
of reducing freedom one slice at a time,
Putin’s regime cut off all avenues for
electoral reform, then peaceful protest,
then any dissent at all. Even calling his
war a war is now punishable by prison.
Only extralegal means of change are
left, and one cannot demand of Russian
people that they go that route. Certainly
not from Los Angeles.
Nor am I exiling Russian from my
daily life. My household is and will stay
bilingual. I remain sensitive to the
moments when anti-Putinism shades
into Russophobia: I smile at Stephen
Colbert’s barbs about Putin but not at
the comic accent he adopts to deliver
them. I feel a bit sick when The New
York Times uncritically quotes a former
U.S. official calling Russians “organi-
cally ruthless.” And yes, it was just as
offensive to me when Ukraine curbed
public use of Russian as part of its
national policy. Because language is
never the enemy.
So why am I doing this? Because
Russia doesn’t want me right now, and
I don’t want it.
MY IDENTITY AS a Russian American is
an accident of history: I am an Ameri-
can Jew born in the Soviet-occupied
Baltics. In the words of Hannah Arendt,
“What remains? The language
remains.” I grew up on Russian litera-
ture, Russian movies, and Russian
underground rock music. I felt that
I was put on this planet to build a
bridge between the two great cultures.
I couldn’t write like Nabokov or dance
like Baryshnikov—who could?—but, in
2012, when I found myself working
in Moscow after 20 years in the U.S.,
I finally got a chance to try to build
that bridge.
All my Russian film and TV work
was dedicated to one crushingly
simple idea: Russia is part of the
world. Londongrad, my first series,
was a lighthearted adventure with a
subversive feature: Its characters,
bilingual Russians in the U.K., didn’t
see themselves as exiles, making it
perhaps the first piece of Russian pop
culture to present emigration as a
casual choice. The Optimists, set in
1960, revolved around a group of
young Soviet diplomats with interna-
tional backgrounds tasked with
explaining “the Western mind” to
Tsoi, I thought: Here was that bridge
I’ve dreamed of building all my life.
Even as the screws tightened in the
wake of the 2012 protests against
Putin’s return to the presidency and the
2014 annexation of Crimea, I got away
with a lot. None of my scripts were
trimmed beyond the global broadcast
standards, and perhaps less (The
Optimists’ characters smoked like
chimneys). At times, the absence of
censorship was so glaring I became
paranoid that the state was using me
as a kind of human Potemkin village.
But something else broke. Slowly.
Imperceptibly. While I was crafting
my little bits of cosmopolitan enter-
tainment, the ruling regime was hard
at work choking off oxygen to its own
country’s mind. Over time I stopped
understanding my own audience, or
how I could or should address it. Pop
culture, which once had an exciting
amateurishness about it, now felt
slick but stagnant. Everything looked
great—the technical side of filmmak-
ing now routinely bested Western
European standards and was closing
in on Hollywood—but it only served
to show how outmoded the interper-
sonal relationships were, how timid
the satire, how backward the values.
The more I rifled through the media
landscape, the less tethered I felt to
the common cultural baseline without
which there can be no dialogue
between the author and the audience.
Men were soulful alcoholics. Women
were sex kittens or man-eaters or
moms. LGBTQ+ representation was
next to nonexistent, but at least there
was the excuse of the noxious “gay
propaganda” law behind that. The
rest was a choice.
And it was all so fucking white. A
gloriously multinational country with a
massive Muslim population, Putin’s
Russia had zero interest in addressing
huge swaths of itself, rarely exploring

38 VA N I T Y FA I R

locations beyond its two largest cities
and shoving all non-Slavic actors into
caricatured bit parts.
In my bridge-building fervor, what
I wanted to do most was make things
whose appeal would be based on the
characters’ own individual, quirky
humanity. It proved futile. It felt like
every good new Russian film or series
(and there were many fantastic ones)
was primarily about the grand condi-
tion of being Russian in the world.
Here was a country that was spending
almost the entirety of its creative
energy relitigating its own image.
There would be no Russian Worst
Person in the World, no Russian Drive
My Car. Everything was either
“our answer to [a specific Hollywood
title]” or the author’s statement
on Russianness.
Londongrad was marketed with the
tagline “This is how our guys do it!,”
I L L U S T R AT I O N BY P E T E R
the promo campaign implying that it
was about the Russians not just living
in the U.K. but somehow triumphing
over it. The vehemently anti-totalitarian
The Optimists was sold to the public
SCRUB POLITICS
out of everything,
and EVERYTHING
becomes politics.
as a hymn to the strength of Soviet
diplomacy. (In a surreal P.R. coup,
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov,
now on international sanctions lists,
commented approvingly on it.)
OUMANSKI
My latest feature, Jetlag, came out in
the summer of 2021. It was meant to be
a Noah Baumbach–esque romantic
comedy about a middle-class Moscow
couple who split up en route to the
airport and end up in two separate
far-flung love triangles, a pointedly
cosmopolitan movie about dislocation,
with the action taking place in Berlin,
Thailand, Portugal, Detroit, and Cannes.
This time the reaction of the Russian
audience was rage: The main characters
(who lived in a tiny apartment and flew
on low-cost airlines) were seen as part
of an amoral, unpatriotic elite. More
charitable readings described the film
as a satirical indictment of the creative
class. Nary a review considered the
characters as…characters. When you
live in a society that devalues individual
experience, the individual becomes
a symbol, a marker, a statement. Scrub
politics out of everything, and every-
thing becomes politics.
I AM NOT megalomaniacal enough to
think that my exit from the Russian
scene constitutes some sort of loss for
Russia. It is, if anything, a form of ego-
tistical self-care. I don’t know how to
speak to a country that’s busy destroy-
ing its neighbor and itself, so I won’t.
I thought I’d built a bridge. But when
they’re sending tanks over it, it’s easier
to burn it and start again elsewhere.
A voice in my head reasonably notes
that I didn’t give up writing in English,
or move to Europe, when the United
States attacked Iraq in a similarly cruel
war of choice under a similarly flimsy
pretext. The difference is that, as citi-
zens of a democracy, we had recourse
in elections. With Putin’s unending
rule, the link between the culture and
the state is now existential. One must
not blame the Russian people for it;
it’s the only possible outcome of liv-
ing under a madman’s boot for 20-odd
years. I would love nothing more
than to get back to writing in Russian
for the people of free Russia. For
now, there’s enough work left at
home—not least of all to make sure
that the same reactionary ebb of
culture that always follows tyrants
does not reach here. n
M AY 2 0 2 2 39
Vanities /The Arts

Mr. Dylan’s
DREAM
HOUSE
A first peek at Tulsa’s
treasure-packed Bob Dylan
museum By Douglas Brinkley

W
WHEN NEWS BROKE in 2016 that Bob
Dylan had given his vast archive of
recordings and artifacts to the George
Kaiser Family Foundation of Tulsa,
people were taken aback. Why was this
cultural trove going there, of all places?
Now we know the answer. That ini-
tial cache of Dylanalia has become the
cornerstone of an entire museum: the
Bob Dylan Center. Recently I asked the his music, actually went on to win the A pensive Bob Dylan during a 1963 recording
singer-songwriter, who is 80, why he’d Nobel Prize in literature “for having session. Opposite: a 1981 concert poster.

chosen Tulsa. “There’s more vibrations
on the coasts, for sure,” he explained.
“But I’m from Minnesota and I like the
casual hum of the heartland.”
The BDC will certainly hum. When
it opens in May, Dylan’s visage—on
the building’s three-story facade—will
gaze down on downtown Tulsa’s popu-
lar Gathering Place, sometimes called
Guthrie Green (for Oklahoman Woody
Guthrie). But that isn’t to suggest the
museum is a vanity project. It’s indic-
ative, instead, of the cultural moment,
a time when our storytellers and ren-
egade visionaries deserve recognition
and respect. It’s a time to marvel at the
fact that a footloose Midwesterner with
a guitar, who spent 60 years changing
minds and changing the culture with
created new poetic expressions within
the great American song tradition.”
Yes, there’s the Louis Armstrong
House in Queens, which is impressive
but modest. The Museum of Pop
Culture in Seattle is partly a shrine to
Jimi Hendrix, yet it’s fueled not by
scholarship as much as pizzazz. Elvis
Presley’s Graceland draws over half a
million visitors a year, though it’s more
spangle than substance. Now comes
an institution—a 29,000-square-foot
edifice designed by Olson Kundig—
devoted to a living musician. And it is
a living monument: an entrancing,
immersive, take-you-by-the-lapels des-
tination that doubles as a campus
for learning and exploring. The BDC
doesn’t just enshrine the artist; it
celebrates the formational figures who
made him what he is.
The center—a high-tech vessel
holding the man’s oeuvre and an over-
view of the man—will be the spiritual
home of Dylan, a relentless performer
who is forever on the road. When
I mentioned that his tour bus was both
man cave and tree house, Dylan’s
response was typically cryptic: “Man
cave, woman cave, a cave is a cave. Dark
as a dungeon. They don’t travel well,
no wheels. And the tree house, that’s not
it either. Neither one can move my bus.
I try to leave it where we can get it quick.
Sometimes we use it when I’m not
on tour.” Someday, perhaps, that magic
bus may be parked in Tulsa.

40 VA N I T Y FA I R
 THE DYLAN CENTER isn’t open yet. So
let me give you a taste. The spine of the
place is the first-floor gallery, which
will transport museumgoers through
the bard’s life and career. Visitors will
feel swaddled in a cinematic Dylan
“experience.” They will linger in a vir-
tual recording studio. They will be
dazzled by galaxies of ephemera. A lis-
tening booth will resonate with the
sounds of Chuck Berry, Ella Fitzgerald,
Buddy Holly, and others who infused
the imagination of Robert Zimmerman
while he was a student at Minnesota’s
Hibbing High. There will be a jolting
audiovisual trip back to the 1965
Newport Folk Festival—when Dylan
blasphemously “went electric.”
The archive reading room (full dis-
closure: It’s named after my wife, Anne,
and me; we helped as advisers and
patrons) is where historians can pore
over, say, manuscripts of Dylan’s novel
Tarantula or the dime-store scrawl-
laden notebooks that became the basis
for Blood on the Tracks. The archive itself
is the center’s beating heart. Inside are
countless Dylan drawings and paint-
ings, once mere keepsakes, that are now
being curated as if they were Rauschen-
bergs or Basquiats. Archive director
Mark Davidson and his team are busy
DY L A N : D O N H U N S T E I N / C O U R T E S Y O F S O N Y M U S I C E N T E R TA I N M E N T. P O S T E R : C O U R T E S Y O F T H E B O B DY L A N C E N T E R .
digitizing all of Dylan’s music, from stu-
dio outtakes to every live performance.
The files here brim with bits of audio
heaven: reels from a cold Wisconsin
winter when Dylan, 19, recorded him-
self singing folk ditties; vintage tapes
of Cynthia Gooding, the radio personal-
ity and Beat generation chronicler
who interviewed Dylan just before his
first album was released in 1962.
Shelves bear thousands of books and
records from the estate of folk music
anthologist Harry Smith and the storied
Izzy Young Library. (Young’s Folk-
lore Center, which opened in 1957 near
NYU, was the vortex of the folk revival
launched by budding musicians
Joan Baez, Dave Van Ronk, and Eric
Von Schmidt, and its cluttered offices
served as Dylan’s private university.)
TULSA WAS ALREADY undergoing a cul-
tural renaissance, thanks in large
part to the civic and arts largesse of
philanthropist Kaiser—an entrepreneur
and lifelong Tulsan—when he acquired
Dylan’s papers and the idea of the
BDC took seed. Cain’s Ballroom had
become the Carnegie Hall of Americana
music. The Woody Guthrie Center,
the Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa
Art Center, LowDown jazz club, and
other venues helped make the city an
economic engine. Last year, the Green-
wood Rising Museum was inaugurated,
commemorating the 1921 Tulsa Race
Massacre, in which Black-owned busi-
nesses were savagely torched, killing
scores and hospitalizing hundreds.
Tulsa has an authenticity that has
somehow dissipated in other Amer-
ican music towns. Country legends
Garth Brooks, Carrie Underwood, and
Vince Gill (Oklahomans all) might con-
duct business in Nashville, but that city
has gone corporate; their musical souls
remain in the Sooner State. Likewise,
I grew up in Ohio and am a proud Buck-
eye, yet Cleveland’s Rock & Roll Hall
of Fame doesn’t capture the excite-
ment of the music it represents. Austin
has lost its weirdness. New Orleans
has balked at building a truly serious
National Jazz Museum. Which leaves
Tulsa as the double-cheeseburger,
jukebox-kicking Americana mecca.
The Native American collection
at Gilcrease Museum, where Dylan’s
archive first lived, is a pivotal reason
why Dylan, deeply knowledgeable
about the saga of Indigenous peoples,
chose Tulsa. (U.S. poet laureate Joy
Harjo, of the Muscogee Nation, will be
the BDC’s first artist in residence.) The
Guthrie, too, was clearly a lure: Dylan,
a close student of Guthrie, had learned
along the way about everything from
World War I’s Green Corn Rebellion to
the exodus of “Okies” during the Great
Depression. And Dylan, a musicologist,
has long absorbed himself in the Tulsa
Sound, collaborating with Leon Rus-
sell and Jesse Ed Davis, who played on
“Watching the River Flow.”
The deeper answer to why Tulsa?
Dylan embodies the individualistic
Tulsa Way ethos. He’s a vagabond, a
troubadour, the soulful drifter who
closes ballrooms after encores with
a “See yo’ next time” farewell. It
makes sense that the Dylan Center is
located off of Route 66, whose lore he
enshrined in his epic song “Brownsville
Girl,” written with Sam Shepard.
DYLAN HAS STAYED mostly hands off
about the BDC. True, he designed and
welded a 16-foot ironwork structure for
the entryway. But he won’t be attending
the opening. Even so, the giant oak
tree that is Bob Dylan will reside here,
along with the massive roots system
of artists that influenced him, nearly
100 of whom are represented, from
blues icon Robert Johnson to country-
and-western star Hank Williams to
comedian Lenny Bruce, who, at Village
nightclubs in the ’60s, helped prompt
Dylan to become an outlaw figure.
A final muse who gets his due
in Tulsa: English poet William Blake.
Whether Dylan is songwriting,
sketching, or engaging with religious
texts, Blake’s spirit is ever present.
“Blake was an evangelizing poet,”
Dylan told me. “You can see it in his
paintings and drawings as well. A Blake
poem is the writing on the wall. It’s
the moving finger. He had the dread
of life simplified and down pat. So, yeah,
his work is inspiring in a way that
tells you that whatever strange and
out-of-the-way thoughts you have are
not so strange after all, and that he
put it all down before you did.” n
M AY 2 0 2 2 41
 THE THE MONARCHY AT A CROSSROADS

QUEEN
OF
HEARTS
As QUEEN
ELIZABETH II
celebrates her platinum
jubilee, the ROYAL
FAMILY struggles
to control fractures while
redefining the Firm
for a new era. Perhaps
no one has better
footing—to everyone’s
surprise—than
CAMILLA, DUCHESS
OF CORNWALL

By KATIE NICHOLL

42 VA N I T Y FA I R
 CAMILLA’S MOMENT
From blending Prince Charles’s
family with her own—children Tom
and Laura from her first marriage,
to Andrew Parker Bowles—to
forming a lasting personal bond with
her mother-in-law, the queen, the
duchess has secured a beloved place
in the bosom of the royal family.

M AY 2 0 2 2 43

THERE WAS A time not so long ago when
the greatest threat to King Charles was
Camilla Parker Bowles.
Yet with Her Majesty’s blessing for
Camilla to become queen consort when
Charles is crowned king, you could now
say that the Duchess of Cornwall is one of
the monarchy’s greatest success stories—
and a vital pillar of strength for its future.
The monarchy looks very different from
how it did just 10 years ago at the diamond
jubilee. Following the death of Prince Phil-
ip, the Sussexes standing down, and the
spectacular fall of the Duke of York, the
royal lineup is somewhat depleted.
Yet here’s Camilla, whose metamor-
phosis from mistress to “my darling wife,”
as Charles calls her, has been remarkable—
a triumph matched perhaps only by Queen
Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, who
transformed himself from mistrusted
German outsider to revered royal.
Today, Camilla is the second most
senior woman in the royal family after the
queen, who once referred to Camilla as
that “wicked woman.” Now the monarch
enjoys a warm and close relationship with
her daughter-in-law and a bond forged
over their mutual love of dogs and horses.
Her Majesty’s announcement that it was
her “sincere wish” for Camilla to become
queen laid to rest years of endless specu-
lation about Camilla’s title when Charles
accedes. It was the queen’s way of not
only securing a smooth transition for her
son’s reign but of showing her support for
Camilla, who has been a devoted family
member since her wedding to the Prince
of Wales in 2005.
Back then, the question of Camilla’s
title was more inflammatory. Through
marriage she was technically the Prin-
cess of Wales, but amid fears of a public
backlash, Clarence House announced
she would be known as the Duchess of
Cornwall and, once Charles became king,
princess consort.
44 VA N I T Y FA I R
“There was no inevitability about the
duchess becoming queen consort,” says
Patrick Harrison, who worked in the press
office at Clarence House for 14 years and
coordinated media plans for Charles
and Camilla’s wedding. “I’m personally
thrilled for her because she has worked so
hard and really hasn’t put a foot wrong.
She would say, ‘I do it because I love the
boss, it’s my job to be there by his side,’
but she has done so much more than that.
She is absolutely devoted to the Prince
of Wales and to the institution and takes
her royal role and duties incredibly seri-
ously. She understands the benefits and
the challenges that go with that.”
----------
O
VER THE YEARS there have been
many challenges. Charles and
Camilla’s love affair—which Prin-
cess Diana blamed for the breakdown of
her marriage—seemed doomed. Despite
a palace spin campaign to pave the way
for Charles and Camilla, there was resis-
tance to their union, and the campaign
took a long time to claim success. To
many Britons, Camilla would long be the
“third person” in the Waleses’ marriage,
as Diana called her in the infamous BBC
interview. Meanwhile, Camilla was also
a mother trying to shelter two teenage
children from ruinous tabloid headlines.
Her family is her nucleus—she is
extremely close to her son, Tom, daughter,
Laura, and five grandchildren. She remains
on good terms with her ex-husband,
Andrew Parker Bowles, and counts her
sister, Annabel, as her best friend. “She
has a very close and supportive family
and a close group of old friends,” says her
nephew Ben Elliot. “She adores her hus-
band, children, and grandchildren.”
Her “family first” motto has rubbed
off on Charles, who speaks to Prince Wil-
liam almost every day on the phone and
is closer than ever to his mother. Behind
palace doors, sources say, the duchess
has also been instrumental in trying to
heal the fractured relationship between
Charles and Prince Harry.
“The situation with Harry was upset-
ting for all the family, and we mustn’t
forget that they are a family,” says a friend.
“I know that Camilla did her best and was
a tremendous sounding post and support
for Charles, who was deeply troubled.”
This friend points out what a difficult
road Camilla has had with the press,
and how she was ostracized by the fam-
ily. “She threw a hand of friendship out
to Harry and Meghan at various points.
When Meghan was going through a dif-
ficult time with her own father, Camilla
helped navigate things. It was Camilla who
told Charles that walking Meghan up the
aisle was the right thing to do. She’s a very
family-oriented woman, and she really
wanted to help.”
Camilla’s close friend and Gloucester-
shire neighbor Jilly Cooper, an author,
says the duchess has an “incredible”
capacity to take on duties. “She always
did a lot for charity, but now people are
P R I N C E C H A R L E S A N D C A M I L L A : P E T E R N I C H O L L S . C H A R L E S A N D C A M I L L A I N C A R R I A G E : DA N I E L B E R E H U L A K . YO U N G C H A R L E S A N D C A M I L L A : T I M G R A H A M . C H A R L E S A N D C A M I L L A AT H I G H L A N D G A M E S : J U L I A N PA R K E R / U K P R E S S .
appreciating just how much she does. I
think Camilla has climbed Everest in the
way she has turned things around. People
Q U E E N E L I Z A B E T H I I A N D C A M I L L A , D U C H E S S O F C O R N WA L L : PA U L E L L I S . C A M I L L A , T O M , A N D L A U R A PA R K E R B O W L E S : T I M G R A H A M P H O T O L I B R A R Y. C A M I L L A W I T H A N D R E W PA R K E R B O W L E S : F R A N K B A R R AT T/ K E Y S T O N E .
are now seeing her for who she is. A kind,
caring, and fun person.”
And then there is the support of the
queen. At the diamond jubilee celebra-
tions in 2012, the two women rode side by
C H A R L E S A N D C A M I L L A W I T H B O U Q U E T : H U G O B U R N A N D . C A M I L L A I N T I A R A : DA N K I T W O O D . A L L F R O M G E T T Y I M A G E S . P R I N C E S S D I A N A A N D C A M I L L A : E X P R E S S N E W S PA P E R S /A R C H I V E P H O T O S .
side in a royal carriage procession, which
reflected both Camilla’s seniority and her
closeness to the monarch. The two have
only grown closer.
“I think the queen has always been
very fond of Camilla,” says Penny Junor,
author of The Duchess. “There was a
great misconception before Charles and
Camilla married that the queen didn’t like
her and wanted her out of sight and out
of the prince’s life. She did want Camilla
out of the prince’s life—not because she
didn’t like her personally but because
she could see huge damage being done
to the monarchy. But they have, on a per-
sonal level, always liked one another and
have a great deal in common. Now she
sees that Camilla has been a loyal and
faithful support to Charles, and she’s very
grateful to her for that.”
Publicly, the queen has bestowed
every honor on Camilla, from the Royal
Family Order, given at the queen’s dis-
cretion as a reward for service, to the
Dame Grand Cross of the Royal Victo-
rian Order. The Duchess of Cornwall is
also now a member of the Privy Coun-
cil, the Queen’s most senior advisory
body and which plays an important part
in the accession ceremonies of a new
sovereign. In 2021 it was announced
that Camilla was to be invested into the
Order of the Garter, the greatest accolade
of all. According to another friend of the
duchess, the garter was “the one thing
she really wanted, because it is such an
enormous privilege. Camilla was abso-
lutely thrilled about it.” Says historian
Hugo Vickers: “Everybody wants the
garter. It was the Princess of Wales’s executive of the cancer charity Maggie’s, Camilla has decided she will keep Ray
secret wish too.” of which Camilla is patron. Mill, her Wiltshire home, when she is
According to her friend Jude Kelly, ---------- queen, so that she has a bolt-hole to escape

S
who founded the women empower- INCE COVID RESTRICTIONS were the rigidity and scrutiny of palace life. At
ment organization Women of the World, lifted, the duchess has been keen to her home she can potter around in a dress-
Camilla “is not someone trying to push resume royal duties. She and Charles ing gown, cook for her family, and relax.
herself forward, but it has become clear- were the first senior royals to go overseas, She makes a point of factoring in time for
er and clearer that because she sits in a on an official tour to Jordan and Egypt. herself in order to maintain a healthy work-
place of power where the limelight is on Hairdresser Geraldine Mancini gave the life balance—walking, reading, holidaying
her, she is using that to speak about other duchess a feathery new cut, and alongside in Scotland, and being with her family. She
people’s situations.” the Queen of Jordan, she dazzled in pretty loves swimming, especially in the sea in
“She’s great at putting people at ease, day dresses and tailored coats. Cornwall, where she and Charles vacation.
particularly when they think, Well, who “The duchess has really found her And she loves to cook and makes a mean
am I to meet HRH? They’re the people style,” says Fiona Clare, Camilla’s dresser, roast chicken, according to Tom.
she seeks out and asks them about them- who has been designing for her nearly 10 A 70-something queen consort talking
selves,” says Kelly. “She’s very inclusive years. “I wouldn’t say she is into clothes, about difficult issues like domestic vio-
in that way. Of course, she’s not an ‘ordi- but she has found her niche. She is very lence, rape, and female genital mutilation
nary’ woman, in the sense that she is going elegant and she knows what works. Her is, some might say, a queen for the mod-
to be the queen consort, but she is totally staples are dresses, frock coats, and great ern world. And while Charles and Camilla
in touch with the ordinary.” hats. She’s got a wonderful core team may not represent youth and glamour like
Amid the dire straits of the pandemic, around her with people she trusts and the Cambridges, together with William
some of Camilla’s most important work knows will make her look good.” and Kate, they’ve formed a new sort of Fab
came to light, including her commitment While she makes the job look fun and Four. At an age where retirement should
to improving literacy and helping the breezy, Camilla finds the overseas travel be on the horizon, Camilla is in for the long
elderly through her work with the charity hard work. She is low-maintenance, trav- haul, something her family say she is fully
Silver Stories. She also put the spotlight eling with a small entourage that includes willing to embrace. “She is very strong,
on domestic violence as patron of the a private secretary, personal assistant, resilient, and patient,” says Elliot. “She
charity SafeLives, which supports wom- dresser, and hairdresser. She often does is also very committed to supporting her
en who have been abused. Elisabeth her own makeup and travels lighter than husband in all he does and very forthright
Carney-Haworth, cofounder of Silver her husband, but she doesn’t enjoy flying in supporting the causes she believes in.”
Stories and Operation Encompass, which and can’t bear the heat. She sometimes When I meet the duchess at a busy
advocates for children who experience struggles to keep up with the workaholic reception at Clarence House on Interna-
domestic abuse, says the future queen prince, who doesn’t break for lunch. tional Women’s Day, she is in sparkling
consort has made sure not to be silent “From very early on she clearly said, form in an emerald Bruce Oldfield coat-
around the stigma. ‘I am not going to go at the same pace as dress and sensible black suede boots.
“I can only imagine that being asked the boss,’ ” says Harrison. “ ‘I’m not going “She’s practical and very determined,”
to stay there could feel very isolating and to do five engagements a day without any says Kelly. “I think as queen that will be
frightening for you and your family. It may lunch and then do two engagements in very important. And she’s clearly a great
mean spending more
time with the person
who is harming you,” Charles and Camilla may not represent YOUTH and
Camilla wrote in one
Instagram message
GLAMOUR like the Cambridges, but together with
that shared resources William and Kate, they’ve formed a
and a help line for vic-
tims. “If this is your
NEW SORT OF FAB FOUR .
situation, or you are
worried about someone else, I want you the evening. It’s just…you know, the boss supporter of Charles. They are a great
to know that you are not alone.” can do that. I can’t.’ ” couple, and I think together they will
She also shared reading lists with Charles is keen to make sure that his build a platform for getting society to care
the nation (The Remains of the Day and wife doesn’t burn out. Their marriage is about vulnerability.”
A Gentleman in Moscow ranked) and set very much an equal partnership founded Perhaps Camilla’s greatest success
up a book club on Instagram called the on a deep love and a mutual understand- is that she has never tried to upstage
Reading Room. Camilla wanted to actu- ing. “They love and respect each other Charles, nor has she tried to shape the role
ally help people. “She knew that people and laugh at the same things,” says Elliot. to her advantage. “I think that she proves
living with cancer were really being “She will always see the absurd in many the power of silence,” says Clare. “She’s
affected during that first lockdown. She things and does not take herself too seri- found her place, and I think that’s partly
wanted to understand how we were able ously and is very witty.” As she approaches down to knowing she has been accepted.
to help them and how we as a charity her 75th birthday and ever more respon- It’s like a ship sailing across the ocean,
were coping,” says Dame Laura Lee, chief sibility, the future surely seems daunting. she’s finally got to her destination.” ■

M AY 2 0 2 2 45
 DIANA’S
LAST
DANCE
In this excerpt from her new book, The Palace Papers,
about the
describes the impact the PRINCESS’S
press strategy had on her sons

F
FROM THEIR EARLIEST childhood, Wil-
liam and Harry were collateral damage
in a cold war between their parents, one
that could turn hot in front of them in
alarming ways. The two-year age gap
between them was critical in forging their
distinctive worldviews and, equally so, in
shaping their perceptions of their mother.
Prince Harry idolized Diana more and
understood her less. He would always be
her baby, a scamp who was “thick” at his
lessons and “naughty, just like me.” His
emotions, like hers, were always simmer-
ing near the surface.
William understood Diana more but
idealized her less. He was privy to her
volatile love life. He knew the tabloids
made her life hell, but he also knew she
colluded with them. By his early teens,
he was his mother’s most trusted confi-
dant. She used to describe him as “my
little wise old man.”
Like many women whose relationships
with their husbands have become dysfunc-
tional, Diana used her elder son as both a
stand-in and a buffer, toting him along
for meetings with journalists. Then Daily
Mirror editor Piers Morgan describes in his
diary a startlingly revealing background
lunch with Diana and the 13-year-old
William at Kensington Palace in 1996 at
which, he says, the princess allowed him to
ask “literally anything.” William insisted
on a glass of wine even when Diana said
no, and he seemed thoroughly up-to-date
on all the tabloid rumors about her lovers.
“He is clearly in the loop on most of her
bizarre world and, in particular, the vari-
ous men who come into it from time to
time,” the astonished Morgan noted.
Diana’s most recent romantic adven-
ture at that time was with the sturdy hunk
Will Carling, captain of the England
rugby team, whom she had met in 1995
working out at the Chelsea Harbor Club
gym. William hero-worshipped Carling
and met him several times with Diana.
When Carling visited Kensington Palace
for a romantic rendezvous, he gave both
the boys a rugby shirt. It is unclear when
William came to realize that his idol was
a sporting visitor in more ways than one.
Carling’s wife, the television personality
Julia Carling, conclusively enlightened

46 VA N I T Y FA I R
THE MONARCHY AT A CROSSROADS

Diana was livid about Julia Carling’s

The exchange reveals much about

Time and again, Diana chose to invade

chested Dodi Fayed, her play-

Nicholas Coleridge, former president

M AY 2 0 2 2 47
 “Nicholas, can I ask you something?
Please be truthful. Did you see the pho-
tograph of me in the Daily Mirror? The
topless one.” “Um, Your Royal High-
ness, yes, we get all the newspapers in
my office. I think I did glance at it…not
that it was very clear.” “William rang me
from Eton. Poor boy, he’s only 14.
He was upset. He said some of the
other boys were teasing him, saying my
tits are too small.” She held on to my
elbow. “Nicholas, please be frank, I want
to know your real view. Are my breasts
too small, do you think?”
I became breathless, I needed oxy-
gen. I went as red as a guardsman’s tunic.
I stuttered, “Er, Your Royal Highness,
in as much as I can see under your suit,
they seem, um…perfect to me. I wouldn’t
worry.”
“Thank you, Nicholas. I knew you’d
tell me the truth. Thank you, I feel bet-
ter now.”
At the end of the lunch, Coleridge
walked her to her car outside Vogue House,
where she was besieged by paparazzi.
Afterward, Coleridge rang a newspa-
per friend to see if he could find out who’d
leaked Diana’s visit. The friend rang back
in five minutes. Coleridge writes that his
source told him, “ ‘I just spoke to our pic-
ture desk. Diana rang herself from her
car, on her way to lunch. She often tips
them off about where she’ll be.’ ”
This is classic, authentic Diana—tricky,
seductive, playing a double game. Gulu
Lalvani, the wealthy Pakistani-born Brit-
ish entrepreneur who
briefly dated Diana in
the last year of her life, For Diana to include the
More unsettling was the origin story
of the infamous tell-all book Princess in
Love. Diana claimed to be outraged in
1994 when Daily Express journalist Anna
Pasternak spilled the beans of her affair
with former army officer James Hewitt— a
dimmer, buffer version of Prince Charles
with the diction of a man who seemed to
have swallowed a mothball—in a pal-
pitating account based on his cache of
Diana’s love letters. “He’s sold me out!”
she sobbed to her psychic, Simone Sim-
mons. “Men aren’t supposed to do that
to women. I hope his cock shrivels up!”
Hewitt paid dearly and so did the author.
The tabloids branded him forevermore as
the “love rat,” and Pasternak was excori-
ated for peddling mawkish fantasy.
In 2019, however, Pasternak made a
startling disclosure in the Daily Mail that
Diana had encouraged, indeed urged,
Hewitt to cooperate with the writing of the
book to get ahead of a more salacious ver-
sion of their affair coming in another book
by Andrew Morton. Pasternak told me that
she and Hewitt “met halfway between
Devon and London in a field, and he said,
‘Diana wants the story told but with two
conditions. One, it has to come out before
Morton’s second book, and two, it has to
be a love story.’ ” To oblige her, Pasternak
says she crashed it out in five weeks.
Once Princess in Love was published,
Diana threw both Hewitt and Pasternak
under the bus. Besotted to the end, her
cashiered toy soldier never revealed
whether or not he had done her bidding.
It’s hard to understand how a mother
FUTURE HEIR
In May 2021, Lord Dyson, one of
England’s most senior retired judges,
issued a searing report unmasking
the full extent of the BBC cover-up of
Bashir’s trickery in securing the notori-
ous interview with Diana. He confirmed
that Bashir successfully manipulated
Diana’s paranoia by showing her broth-
er, Earl Spencer, forged documents
that “proved” her closest advisers had
betrayed her to the palace, inflaming her
desire to speak out for herself. Bashir lied
his way to the biggest TV scoop of the
20th century. Dyson’s censure at least
gave her two sons some rationale for why
Diana did something so destructive to
their happiness.
William, who had watched the inter-
view in his Eton housemaster’s study,
told a classmate that as soon as he saw
his mother’s face appear on the screen
for the interview, he was overcome with a
feeling of dread. Harry, still at Ludgrove,
declined to watch the broadcast but later
was angry with Bashir for his invasive
questions, not with his mother’s decision
to answer them.
By the time the housemaster, Andrew
Gailey, returned to his study to collect Wil-
liam, he found him, Robert Lacey records,
“slumped on the sofa, his eyes red with
tears.” He pulled himself together to rush
back to his room. But when, an hour later,
Diana telephoned on the house phone,
William refused to take the call. Diana
was convinced he would never forgive
her. She kept asking Simone Simmons,
“What have I done to my children?”
to the throne

P R I N C E S S D I A N A I N B L U E J A C K E T : T O M WA R G A C K I . D I A N A W I T H A R M R A I S E D : A N WA R H U S S E I N .
told me that in the four
at a meeting with one of the royal family’s most RECKLESS
B O T H : W I R E I M A G E . D I A N A H O L D I N G C L U T C H : DAV E H O G A N . A L L O T H E R S : G E T T Y I M A G E S .
months of their rela-
tionship, they always TABLOID TORMENTORS and freely refer to
dined discreetly at
his house or at Kens-
a casual affair was, on its face, AMAZING .
ington Palace. One
evening she suggested they instead dine as devoted as Diana would choose, in After Lord Dyson’s report about the
at Harry’s Bar and have a dance or two 1995, to drag up her affair with Hewitt BBC’s Bashir cover-up, William chose
afterward at Annabel’s. Even though no again in her explosive interview with the to make a grave address on camera that
one had known about the plan in advance, BBC’s Martin Bashir on Panorama. She could not quite hide the fury of a still-
the paparazzi were waiting at the door as knew how devastated her boys had been haunted son. “It is my view that the
they left the nightclub. Lalvani told me, by their father’s on-camera confession deceitful way the interview was obtained
“Whether Harry’s Bar called them or she of infidelity with Camilla Parker Bowles substantially influenced what my mother
tipped them off, I don’t know.” (I think we in Jonathan Dimbleby’s 1994 ITV docu- said,” he told the world. “The interview
do.) He realizes now that she was using mentary, and how truly mortified they was a major contribution to making my
him to inflame the true object of her felt when Princess in Love came out. I am parents’ relationship worse and has since
affections, Hasnat Khan. The pictures of told Diana chose to speak about Hewitt to hurt countless others. It brings indescrib-
Lalvani and Diana that appeared the next Bashir because he was the only one of her able sadness to know that the BBC’s
day were the whole point. ex-lovers who wasn’t married. failures contributed significantly to her

48 VA N I T Y FA I R
fear, paranoia, and isolation that I remem-
ber from those final years with her.”
The words “indescribable sadness”
can only hint at her sons’ private ordeal,
but they also occlude the full picture. I
am told by Lalvani that Diana said she
had no regrets about the interview and
made clear that she had said exactly
what she wanted to say on camera. (She
even co-opted lines such as “There
were three of us in this marriage” from
her writer friend Clive James.) “She was
pleased about it [the interview],” Lalvani
confirmed to me. “She didn’t have a bad
word to say about Martin Bashir. She
realized it served her purpose.” She was
right. Her “purpose” was to frame herself
to the British public as a betrayed woman
before the increasingly inevitable divorce
from Charles. Opinion polls in the wake
of the interview showed support for the
princess at 92 percent. She had the public
in the palm of her hand.
I don’t subscribe to the now pervasive
narrative that Diana was a vulnerable
victim of media manipulation, a mere
marionette tossed about by malign forc-
es beyond her control. While strongly
sympathetic to her sons’ pain, I find it
offensive to present the canny, resource-
ful Diana as a woman of no agency, as
either a foolish, duped child or the hap-
less casualty of malevolent muckrakers.
When Vogue’s Anna Wintour and I, as
editor of The New Yorker, had lunch with
Diana in Manhattan in July 1997—six
weeks before her death—I was bowled
over by the confident, skillful way she
wooed us. Diana was always more beau-
tiful in person than in photographs—the
huge, limpid blue eyes, the soft peach
skin, the supermodel height. She told
us her story of loneliness and hurt at
Charles’s hands with an irresistible
soulful intimacy that sucked us in, then
switched to a startlingly sophisticated
vision of how she planned to leverage her
celebrity for the causes she cared about
with a series of TV specials, 24 years
before Harry and Meghan’s incoherent
multimedia plans.
It’s understandable that her sons have a
less nuanced view of Diana. If your beau-
tiful 36-year-old mother dies in a car crash
and is mourned—canonized, even—by
the whole world, an unblemished picture
is frozen that erases everything else. Wil-
liam, 15, and Harry, 12, believed—and still
believe—that their mother was martyred
by the paparazzi.
That Diana was hounded is undeni-
able. But in her last spiral in Paris, there
were many fatal factors. Dodi Fayed,
unused to being in the eye of the celeb-
rity storm, was overexcited by the thrill
of the chase. It was Diana’s choice—not
the palace’s—to dispense with round-the-
clock Scotland Yard protection. In the
2008 inquest into Diana’s death, former
police commissioner Lord Condon tes-
tified that Diana was adamant that she
did not want protection. She believed
that officers spied on her and hampered
her love life. But they also often acted
as informal go-betweens with photog-
raphers to negotiate safer coverage of
their famous charge. “It’s very tragic to
say this,” paparazzo Mark Saunders spec-
ulated: “Had [her protection officer] Ken
Wharfe or [her regular chauffeur] Colin
Tebbutt been with Diana on the night she
died, it wouldn’t have happened. They
would have spoken to the press, and they
would have given the brief outline of what
was going to happen, which would have
prevented the chasing.”
Saunders continued, “Diana was walk-
ing a tightrope with her relationships with
the press. It wasn’t the press that had an
affair with James Hewitt. It wasn’t the
press that had an affair with [the married]
art dealer Oliver Hoare and sat outside his
house in the middle of the night. She was
a normal person with feelings and emo-
tions. But she was also the most famous
woman in the world, and she was doing
things that made the other side want to
photograph her.”
On the 10th anniversary of Diana’s
death, in 2007, William asked his private
secretary Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton—
without success—to do everything he
could do to stop a Channel Four docu-
mentary showing graphic pictures of
the Paris crash site. Quoting the boys,
Lowther-Pinkerton wrote, “We feel
that, as her sons, we would be failing in
our duty to her now if we did not protect
her—as she once did us.” Did Diana pro-
tect them? It’s not a debate that William
and Harry want to have.
All their mother’s questionable deci-
sions made sense to her at the time. In
her wounded fury she lost all sense of
the impact of her actions. Weeks after
the Bashir interview, as the conflagration
consumed everyone she loved and hated,
the dogged Mark Saunders described in
his 1996 book, Dicing With Di: The Amaz-
ing Adventures of Britain’s Royal Chasers,
an eerie incident as the princess sped
ahead of him down the highway out of
London. His prey knew Saunders’s car
well, and he could see her looking at him
in the rearview mirror:
She indicated left and pulled across to
the middle lane, slowing down consid-
erably and forcing me to pass and then,
in a moment of insanity…she suddenly
increased her speed and lurched back
into the fast lane, coming up directly
behind me. We were traveling at 90
mph when I felt Diana’s bumper touch
the rear of my car. If I had slowed down
or put on the brakes at that point, the
world would no longer have had a Prin-
cess of Wales.
Writing these words in 1995, Saunders
could have no idea what they foreshad-
owed. What was flashing through Diana’s
mind as the car entered that last tragic
chase into the Alma tunnel? Today, it
would be unreasonable to ask that Wil-
liam and Harry forgive the paparazzi who
trained their cameras on their beloved
mother’s dying moments in the Paris tun-
nel, the hungry clicking of their shutters
the last sound she would ever hear. Or to
forget how often in their presence one or
another of that ruffian gang had made
her cry. Or to admit that, even though
her own sons were among the “count-
less others” the Bashir broadcast hurt,
she had shrewd, pragmatic reasons for
undertaking the interview. The camera
was Diana’s fatal attraction and her most
potent weapon—the source of so much
power at the price of so much pain. She
was always gambling with those odds.
Her sons express their lasting contempt
for the press in different ways: William
with a grim, steely obsession with control;
Harry with tortured, vocal, frequently ill-
-judged condemnation, a never-ending
flurry of lawsuits, and, finally, a burn-it-
all-down gesture that his mother—who,
despite her yearning to be free, held tight
to her diadem—might have well under-
stood. But neither of them has yet been
heard to reflect on how much Diana loved
to dance with danger. n
Adapted from the book The Palace Papers:
Inside the House of Windsor—the Truth and
the Turmoil by Tina Brown. Copyright ©
2022 by Tina Brown. To be published by
Crown in the U.S. and Century in the U.K.
All rights reserved.
M AY 2 0 2 2 49
 THE
INCREDIBLE
SHRINKING
HOUSE OF
WINDSOR
A quiet, decades-long effort to PARE DOWN the
official Windsor dramatis personae has UPENDED
THE MILLENNIAL ROYALS—
with irreversible consequences

I
By ERIN VANDERHOOF

IN FEBRUARY 2003, an outstanding In hindsight, Zara Tindall’s career

21-year-old junior equestrian named Zara
Phillips announced that spread-betting
company Cantor Index would sponsor
her first senior season on the riding cir-
cuit. The arrangement wasn’t unusual
for her peers, but it made national news
outside of the trades. At the time, Phillips,
Princess Anne’s second child, happened
to be 10th in line to the throne. By signing
the deal, she became the first British royal
ever with a corporate sponsorship for a
sport. Eventually, Phillips would marry
rugby star Mike Tindall, compete in the
2012 London Olympics, and become a
sports influencer, securing many more
sponsorships along the way.
can be seen as the rumbling that pre-
dicted the seismic identity shift she
and her millennial cousins—including
Prince William and Prince Harry—have
navigated throughout their young adult-
hoods. For the queen and Prince Philip,
the greatest generation incarnate, being
royal meant foregrounding duty, tra-
dition, and sacrifice, while their four
children, the royal baby boomers, have
doggedly pursued individuality under
the dual pressures of the crown and tab-
loid scrutiny. The state of the monarchy
that the elders are leaving behind—as
popular and well resourced as ever, yet
still so scandal-prone—ensured that the

50 VA N I T Y FA I R
THE MONARCHY AT A CROSSROADS
COUSINS CLUB
The royal grands,
from Princess
Beatrice and
Princess Eugenie to
lesser-known littles
like James, Viscount
Severn, and Lady
Louise Windsor,
are an important
aspect of the future
family façade.
next generation of Windsors would have
no choice but to improvise.
Though they differ in title, formal rela-
tionship to the palace, and proximity to
the throne, the millennial royals—five
cousins born between 1981 and 1991—all
grew up in the shadows of their parents’
very public divorces. Tindall, William,
Harry, Princess Beatrice, and Princess
Eugenie all bear the scars of the era but
have responded with their age cohort’s
quintessential can-do attitude and hus-
tle. (The three cousins in their generation
who are not technically millennials, Peter
Phillips, born 1977, Lady Louise Wind-
sor, born 2003, and James, Viscount
Severn, born 2007, aren’t too far away
in age or approach.) With a bit of social
media savvy, the royal millennials have
sought to balance financial stability,
respect for the queen, and desire to wield
their influence.
Their ranks are also, officially at least,
growing smaller. Thanks in part to social
change and the queen’s and Prince
Charles’s own shifting interpretations of
the institution, the monarchy has spent a
generation contracting in ways that prob-
ably will be irreversible. With the mindset
of a neoliberal CEO, Charles has long
been sensitive to the fact that govern-
ment support for his extended family is
an unpopular proposition. “Would it not
be better to sit down and examine how
many members of the family you need to
said. “Harry and Meghan are out of thetheir heir through private wealth, but
the extended family has received fund-
picture.” (She added that Charles will in
fact rely on Anne, Prince Edward, and ing at the discretion of the government
since the 18th century. For generations,
Countess Sophie more than he had origi-
nally intended as the older generation of
the minor royals did play an important
purpose in the family and the country’s
minor royals retires from public life.)
Though the plans for a slimmed- future, because an heir’s siblings func-
down monarchy are often discussed in tioned a bit like diplomatic bargaining
the context of what we can expect whenchips when they were married off to fel-
Charles becomes king, these ideas havelow royal families across the Continent.
already had an effect on the family’s day-They were essentially made redun-
to-day life. Of the eight grandchildren,
dant as the dynasties of Europe fell in the
only William and Harry have ever been 20th century. By the 1920s, the royal chil-
dren were encouraged to marry British
working royals, a far cry from the years
aristocrats instead of foreign royalty. The
when the future monarch’s cousins could
secure a plum position and a grace-and-
minor royals, like the queen’s cousins the
favor living space. Duke of Kent and Princess Alexandra of
During the queen’s reign, the monar-
Kent, instead became charity patrons
chy transformed from an auxiliary unitand people who could appear at inde-
melding the aristocracy and the gov- pendence days or church ceremonies
ernment into a business with annual on behalf of the queen. In fact, history
reporting requirements and a mandate had already done such a good job of
to be self-sufficient. Royal commentators
eliminating the purpose of the minor
have predicted that Charles will be a tran-
royal that Charles’s enthusiasm might
have been unnecessary. The millennials
sitional king. Part of that means clearing
might be the first royal generation who
liabilities from the balance sheet in order
to leave his own successor with as feware not only encouraged but demanded
potential headaches as possible. to work real jobs—of course, their gold-
With his taxpayer-funded office, plated education and instruction in the
ways of the Windsors have given them a
William, the millennial future king, is
the only grandchild left in the palacedistinct advantage.
establishment. From a purely structural Even in the face of such historical
perspective, Harry’s 2020 departure for
trends, a cold war has raged inside the
family for decades. For the queen’s grand-
Los Angeles might have been inevitable.
For years, Harry had been living in lim-
children, the most visible side of this has

A L A S TA I R G R A N T. Z A R A T I N D A L L : J O N B R O M L E Y/ M I N E W S / N U R P H O T O . J A M E S , V I S C O U N T S E V E R N , A N D L A DY LO U I S E W I N D S O R :
D U K E A N D D U C H E S S O F S U S S E X : K E V I N M A Z U R . T I N D A L L A N D P H I L L I P S , A N D P R I N C E S S B E AT R I C E : I N D I G O . P R I N C E S S E U G E N I E :
fulfill the monarchy’s objectives?” he rhe- bo. He wasn’t quite important enough been through the dissemination of titles.

C H R I S J A C K S O N . A L L : G E T T Y I M A G E S . D U K E A N D D U C H E S S O F C A M B R I D G E W I T H FA M I LY : S A M I R H U S S E I N / W I R E I M A G E .
torically asked in 1992, according to his to become a core decision maker in theWhen Anne married her first husband,
biographer Jonathan Dimbleby, before family or even take part in William’s Captain Mark Phillips, he declined to
suggesting they bring in a team of consul- childhood lessons in kingship at Wind-take a courtesy title, and when their first
tants to think strategically about the issue. child, Peter, was born, he became the first
sor Castle. Still, until his wedding, he
legitimate commoner
grandson of a mon-
With the mindset of a NEOLIBERAL CEO , Charles has arch in more than 500
years. In 2003, Edward
GOVERNMENT
long been sensitive to the fact that and Sophie had their
SUPPORT for his extended family is an first child, Louise, and
UNPOPULAR proposition. announced that she
should be styled as
the daughter of an earl
As veteran royal expert Sally Bedell shared an office with his older brother though she was entitled to be a princess.
Smith recently told me, Charles has and kept a schedule similar to his. When When James was born, he became Vis-
already drafted the royal team for his Meghan Markle married into the family, count Severn, one of Edward’s subsidiary
reign, and none of the royal cousins is on she shared her husband’s lofty chari- titles, instead of Prince James. In a 2020
it. “He said some years ago that he really table ambitions, but they chafed against interview with The Sunday Times, Sophie
wanted it to be himself and Camilla, the limits the palace places on the minor said she has always told her children that
William and Kate, and Harry, and that royals—especially the financial ones. they would need to find careers and life
was it. I think of the balcony appearance For the rest of the grandchildren, exit paths of their own.
after the diamond jubilee. Prince Philip planning began much earlier. The British For years, Prince Andrew was Charles’s
was in the hospital, but his siblings were system was designed to give automatic main adversary in the debate over titles
annoyed that they weren’t included,” she financial support to a monarch and and the size of the royal family. He and

52 VA N I T Y FA I R
ex-wife Sarah Ferguson decided to give Last spring, there was an anomalous Beatrice are affiliated with a limited
their daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie, result from the youngest respondents: A number of charities that reflect their own
HRH titles upon their birth, and pal- plurality said they would prefer an elected experiences. Beatrice was diagnosed with
ace courtiers have said that their status head of state—and they rated Harry higher dyslexia as a seven-year-old, and she has
as “blood princesses” is important for in popularity than William and Kate. “That since become a patron of the Helen Arkell
him. In 2011, Andrew was reportedly shift was quite a new thing compared to Dyslexia charity, speaking openly about
upset when the palace cut off the secu- recent years, but it’s something that we’ll the support the charity gave her while
rity afforded to his daughters. Later that need to keep asking,” Abraham said. she was in high school. Eugenie had sco-
year, Andrew was criticized for bringing ---------- liosis, which was corrected by surgery at

T
Eugenie on an official visit even though HE ROYAL MILLENNIALS are deal- the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospi-
she isn’t a working royal. (When Andrew ing with the transition at least tal when she was 12. As an adult, she has
lost his royal role over his connections to somewhat gracefully, if only become a patron for the NHS hospital’s
Jeffrey Epstein in 2021, the prince himself because the world is much more comfort- auxiliary foundation, and the charity
might have really ensured that his daugh- able with people who are semifamous for says it has raised 3 million pounds in the
ters wouldn’t have one either.) their proximity to fame than ever before. decade she has been in the position.
Indeed, the 21st
century’s royal scan-
dals have come dis- The 21st century’s ROYAL SCANDALS have
proportionately from
the family members
come DISPROPORTIONATELY from the
who have public titles family members who have PUBLIC titles and
and private business
interests. From Prince
private BUSINESS INTERESTS .
Michael of Kent’s in-
creasingly problematic ties with Russian Beatrice and Eugenie might be the most Meghan and Harry reportedly had
oligarchs to Andrew’s time on Epstein’s successful at maintaining the air of roy- Beatrice and Eugenie in mind when they
plane, it’s been trouble at times to have alty while also snagging some of the mentioned a desire to have a hybrid “work-
too many family members floating freedoms that the working members ing model” like “other current members
around with a history of drawing taxpayer of the family have given up. Eugenie’s of the Royal Family” in one of the state-
support or even an HRH. So the next gen- Instagram handle is @princesseugenie, ments explaining their royal exit. But the
eration of royals who de-emphasize their but neither royal uses her title in profes- queen has rules on these sorts of things—
titles to pursue careers and celebrity sional contexts. Beatrice is on LinkedIn you’re either in or you’re out. From the
could be thought of as a clever bit of as “Beatrice York,” which lists her role at Chinese commercials where Peter Phil-
rebranding. The minor royals are increas- the Boston-based tech company Afiniti as lips talks up the milk from Jersey cows to
ingly able to contribute to the Windsor vice president for partnerships and strate- the details about Zara you can pick up in
brand’s salience while giving the palace gy. On the website of art gallery Hauser & Mike Tindall’s podcast, the royals seem
license to call any misbehaviors a “private Wirth, you’ll note that the name of one of to have a lot more fun when they’re not
matter.” It’s also a hedge. If the public the directors is given as “Eugenie York.” living under palace supervision. And so
wants more royal appearances, there is a Still, they’ve been able to take advan- Harry and Meghan went the way of their
whole roster of 30- and 40-somethings tage of that royal affiliation in other arenas. generation, becoming, in their singular
who might come off the bench. Both princesses’ weddings were paid for way, content creators in the gig economy.
The shrinking rolls might beg an obvi- privately, but because Eugenie’s had a Yet there is still something royal about
ous question about the necessity of any public component, the British government them. In 2013, Harry, Beatrice, and Eug-
monarchy at all. But current data suggests contributed 2 million pounds for security. enie all signed on as ambassadors for
no great rush in Britain to flush all the By the time Beatrice was married two GREAT Britain, a tourism campaign pro-
Windsor brand equity—in 2017, a consul- years later, Andrew had already stepped moting the country as a destination and
tancy estimated the intangibles are worth back from public life due to his association trade partner. For the launch event, Harry
about 42 billion pounds—down the drain with Epstein and no public component traveled to New York City with then prime
by becoming a republic. was planned. However, she did borrow minister David Cameron before touring
“Those who are 65 plus...they’re really a dress from her grandmother—along New Jersey with Chris Christie. Beatrice
strong on their attitudes when they say with the Queen Mary fringe tiara that and Eugenie, on the other hand, toured
that the monarchy is a good thing for the queen wore at her own wedding— Berlin in a Mini Cooper. As Harry travels
Britain, compared to the 18- to 24-year- and announcements about both women’s the United States in the 2020s, commem-
olds, where opinion is slightly more weddings and pregnancies have been orating 9/11 with Bill de Blasio, riding a
divided,” said Tanya Abraham, research routed through the palace offices. double-decker bus with James Corden, or
director of polling agency YouGov UK. They both give public support to chari- popping up in unexpected places like the
“Current polling is showing that around ties using their HRH titles, but unlike Stockyards Championship Rodeo in Fort
a third of 18- to 24-year-olds don’t really the royal patronages that are distributed Worth, it’s easy enough to see him as a
have an opinion of whether it’s good or among working family members with new type of goodwill ambassador for the
bad for the country.” direction from the queen, Eugenie and motherland—at no cost to the taxpayer. n

M AY 2 0 2 2 53
 ALL IN
THE FAMILY
54 VA N I T Y FA I R
 JAMES REGINATO CHECKS IN ON THE FOURTH GENERATION OF GETTYS—
A LIVELY BATCH OF GREAT-GRANDCHILDREN FROM AMERICA’S MOST INFAMOUS
OIL DYNASTY—IN THIS SNEAK PREVIEW OF GROWING UP GETTY

M AY 2 0 2 2 55
“STAND
BACK—IT’S
ABOUT TO
GET WACK!”
“Single droppin’ in a couple hours.
Wack—Balt Getty—wack.”
Behind a turntable set up in the parking
lot of a strip mall on Fairfax Avenue in Los
Angeles, on an evening in June 2019, Paul
Balthazar Getty—J. Paul Getty’s eldest
great-grandchild—was whipping up the
crowd. At his invitation, a couple hundred
local hipsters and characters—including
Tommy the Clown, the hip-hop-dancing
L.A. legend—had gathered for a block
party. At 44, Balthazar had much to cel-
ebrate: Monk Punk, his luxe streetwear
line, was debuting; his retail store (housed
in a former RadioShack outlet) was open-
ing; and his latest hip-hop track—entitled
“Wack,” if you hadn’t guessed—was
about to drop.
A father of four, Balthazar was
now one of Hollywood’s most multi
multihyphenates: actor–producer–
director–DJ–musician–artist–fashion
designer–shopkeeper.
His trajectory into fashion began when
he started customizing items of clothing
with his own sketches as well as with vari-
ations of the old Getty Oil logo. Then he
took his designs to the next level, with a
line of accessories and clothing, which he
christened Monk Punk.
“It came to me one night,” he
explained. “It makes you think of
spirituality, being in touch with your
emotional side, let’s say. But then, you’re
still a punk. So—I’m not a pussy, you’re
not going to push me around. It’s about
Previous spread: Balthazar Getty and his wife,
Rosetta, at their former home in the Hollywood
Hills, 2017; Ivy Getty in San Francisco, 2021.
56 VA N I T Y FA I R
embodying both sides, both of which I
think are important.”
Balthazar, wearing an oversized Monk
Punk white T-shirt, a large gold chain, and
a pink knit cap, showed off the line’s look
book, which featured former members of
the Rollin 60s Neighborhood Crips, the
fearsome street gang. “Instead of models,
I said, ‘Let’s do something authentic. No
styling…. You guys, just rock it how you
would rock it.’ ”
As he has pointed out, this Getty
wasn’t born with a silver spoon: “I grew
up scrappy…the money wasn’t there.”
Balthazar’s spigot to the Getty fortune
had been (temporarily) turned off in utero.
It was September 1974—when his father, J.
Paul Getty III, married his mother, Gise-
la Schmidt Zacher, in Tuscany. She was
about five months pregnant, and he, at 18,
was four years below the age at which he
and his siblings were permitted to marry,
according to the terms of the trust his par-
ents set up when they divorced.
Patriarch J. Paul Getty (“JPG”) did
agree to give his grandson a small allow-
ance. It was also decided that Rome
(where he’d been abducted the year
before) wasn’t a safe home for the new-
lyweds. Weeks after the couple moved to
Los Angeles, Balthazar was born.
In Balthazar’s toddler years, the elec-
tricity at the family’s bungalow in Laurel
Canyon was sometimes turned off due
to unpaid bills. In a small apartment in
San Francisco, where his mother took
him after she and Paul separated, he
slept on a futon.
Then, one afternoon in 1988, after a
casting agent spotted the 13-year-old at
school, he landed a lead role in a film
adaptation of Lord of the Flies. Return-
ing to L.A. from the shoot in Jamaica,
Balthazar had money in his pocket. He
was unabashed about enjoying the bling.
He dated Drew Barrymore and went club-
bing all night with the Beastie Boys. Yet
even with continued success in films,
family sorrows took their toll. His father’s
misfortune wasn’t just a private family
matter; it was yet another manifestation
of the “Getty curse,” as the press repeated
time and again. “That’s a lot to cope with
and you’re growing up and I didn’t handle
it well,” Balthazar said. He became, in the
1990s, a third-generation heroin addict.
“Without Mom’s guidance, I’d be
dead. In fact, I did die, several times. I
was just lucky,” a recovered Balthazar
later told the London Times (“Member
of a Troubled Dynasty” read the head-
line). “Normally, these things don’t have a
happy ending, but my family are together
and made me want to be a better person.”
J
UST DAYS AFTER Balthazar set
up his turntable in the strip-mall
parking lot, his second cousin,
Isabel, could be found inside the Royal
Enclosure at Royal Ascot, under the gaze
of the queen, the Prince of Wales, and the
Duchess of Cornwall, who were seated
P R E V I O U S S P R E A D : B A LT H A Z A R A N D R O S E T TA G E T T Y : F R A N C O I S D I S C H I N G E R / T R U N K A R C H I V E . I V Y G E T T Y : TA G H I N A D E R Z A D / G E T T Y I M A G E S .
above in the Royal Box.
Isabel, a budding artist and musician,
had been asked to paint one of the bench-
es beside the track; she transformed it
with crosshatching inspired by the forms
and colors of the Viennese Secessionists
Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt.
Looking on proudly were her par-
ents, Christopher (son of JPG’s second
son, Ronald) and Pia (one of the three
daughters of “duty-free” billionaire Rob-
ert Miller).
Per the strict rules of Royal Ascot, the
Gettys were in regulation attire—top hat
and morning coat for him; dresses “of
modest length with straps of one inch or
greater” and fanciful hats for the ladies.
A mass of violet-hued feathers extended
from Isabel’s bonnet.
Born in New York City, where she
spent her early childhood in her parents’
six-story town house, Isabel is a pic-
ture of transatlantic poise. At eight, she
moved with her mother to London; she
later boarded in Switzerland at Le Rosey,
where she was a member of the choir.
She graduated from New York Univer-
sity’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded

Music. Yet she was still scared of perform-
ing. Of all people, it was Diana Ross who
helped Isabel get over her stage fright.
It was May 2013, at Farmington Lodge,
an 18th-century manor house in Eng-
land’s Cotswolds belonging to her aunt
and uncle, Marie-Chantal and Pavlos of
Greece, where 400 guests had gathered
to celebrate her maternal grandfather’s
80th birthday. At one point, Ross, the
gala’s entertainer, pulled Isabel onstage.
“It’s Diana Ross passing you the mic—
you better bloody sing,” she remembers
thinking to herself in panic. Isabel deftly
belted out some classic Supremes lines.
“It was pretty epic,” she recalls.
After NYU, she moved back to Lon-
don. Within a few months, she landed
on the cover of Tatler as well as on Dolce
& Gabbana’s runway in Milan.
With two friends, she formed a band,
Jean Marlow. Isabel identified herself—
the group’s singer-songwriter—as Izzy
Getty. Her voice is soft, slightly raspy;
the band has a soulful grunge soft-rock
sound. “We’re die-hard acoustic musi-
cians,” Isabel said. On Spotify and iTunes,
Jean Marlow has released several EPs, for
which she drew the album art.
In 2020, following a lockdown stay in
Los Angeles, the group released “San-
tana Winds,” a hypnotic ballad inspired
by Southern California’s fierce and some-
times evil winds.
“There was so much destruction
going on,” Isabel recalled a year later,
from Gstaad, Switzerland. By this time,
things were considerably brighter. She
had just returned from Mykonos, where
she and her South African–reared cousin
Vanessa Waibel staged a high-spirited
bachelorette weekend for their San Fran-
cisco relation Ivy Getty. Photos of the
girls—at one point in matching pink hot
pants, dancing stageside at Jackie O’, the
fashionable beach club—splashed across
Instagram and the Daily Mail.
“They are like sisters—we grew up
together,” Isabel said of Vanessa and Ivy.
“I’m very close to a lot of my cousins.”
(Despite living across four continents
today, most of JPG’s approximately 40
great-grandchildren are surprisingly
close-knit.)
Her extended family has had its trou-
bles, she acknowledged. “[But] everyone
has tragedies in their families. It’s just that
ours have been more public. There has
been a lot of suffering, but that’s why it’s
important to stay grounded and together.”
O
THER YOUNG GETT YS— some
by way of marriage—have
been cutting glamorous figures
through Europe. Sabine (née Ghanem) was
born in Geneva to a Lebanese father and
Egyptian mother, but her introduction to
the family happened one weekend in New
York, where she was enrolled in the Gem-
ological Institute of America. At a dinner
party, she met Brown University under-
graduate Joseph Getty, the British-raised
son of Italian aristocrat Domitilla Harding
and Getty Images cofounder Mark Getty
(a son of JPG’s third born, Paul Jr.).
Joseph was smitten with Sabine. Long-
limbed, brown-eyed, with a bob of flaxen
hair, she has a commanding personality
and a cosmopolitan air. Fashion-mad, she
describes her style as Bob Mackie meets
Catherine Deneuve.
After the couple settled in London, she
launched her line of fine jewelry, Sabine
G. Her fanciful pieces were soon adorning
the likes of Celine Dion, Rihanna, Nicole
Kidman—and Deneuve.
On a brilliant morning in May 2015,
a pack of paparazzi swarmed outside
Basilica dei Santi XII Apostoli in Rome
as a parade of young royals, including
Princess Beatrice and Monaco’s Pierre
Casiraghi, filed in. Thirty-three years
“EVERYONE HAS TRAGEDIES IN THEIR
FAMILIES. IT’S JUST THAT OURS HAVE BEEN
MORE PUBLIC.”
after Mark and Domitilla were wed inside
the ancient basilica, Joseph and Sabine
chose to exchange their vows here.
But where was the bride and her
hooded cape? Since the latter stretched
23 feet and featured 500,000 sequins
(hand-embroidered by Maison Lesage)
shaped into an image of a radiating sun,
it required its own minder and car, which
threaded its way through Rome’s tortu-
ous traffic. At last, the garment arrived
and was fastened to the bride, who was
already clad in a figure-hugging, long-
sleeve duchesse silk dress, the handiwork
of Schiaparelli Haute Couture.
Tatler subsequently ranked Sabine
and Joseph number three in its “Social
Power Index,” just behind the Duke and
Duchess of Cambridge. While many Get-
tys today lead surprisingly unglamorous
lives, Sabine lives up to the expectations.
“She’s the most Getty of them all!” one
social observer remarked.
I
N THE NONGLAM category, there
is Beau Perry, who labors in the
remote reaches of Alaska. A mari-
culturist, Beau is the largest grower of
seaweed on the Pacific Coast, and at the
forefront of sustainable marine aquacul-
ture. Beau’s mother, Claire Perry, is one
of the three daughters born to JPG’s first
son, George. “The Georgettes,” as the
women have been called, are all dedi-
cated environmentalists and intensely
private; their offspring share their aver-
sion to the press.
Raised in Southern California and
educated at Georgetown University, Beau
founded his seaweed-propagating com-
pany, Blue Evolution, in 2013; the next
year he headed north to Kodiak Island.
He was among the first entrepreneurs
who saw the potential to cultivate sea-
weed in Alaskan waters.
“I have loved seaweed all my life,” he
once explained on Instagram. “As a surfer
I’ve spent an eternity bobbing up and
down amidst California’s kelp forests….
Traveling the coast you can find…giant
kelp, bull kelp, sea palm, the list goes on
and on—and they feel as different to me
as beech, redwood or oak forest.”
Blue Evolution provides Alaskan fisher-
men with seed stock, which it makes by
extracting spores from wild kelp; the seed-
lings are grown on pieces of string known
as seed pipes, which the fishermen thread
along ropes that are suspended from a
floating frame. After the “planting” is done
in November, the ribbons of kelp grow up
to a foot a day. Weaving and protecting
the lines is arduous. In May, Beau and his
M AY 2 0 2 2 57
cohorts haul up the fruit of their labor—
tons of nutritious, slimy green bunches.
I
N THE AMERICAN branch of this
dynasty, the epicenter is San
Francisco—a palatial mansion in
Pacific Heights, to be exact. Here, Ann
and Gordon Getty (now 88, he is JPG’s
only surviving son) raised their four sons.
At Christmastime 1998, Billy, the
youngest, became engaged to Vanessa
Jarman. Ann, one of the era’s most formi-
dable grandes dames, took a considerable
interest in the bride’s gown. She called
her friend Oscar de la Renta in New York.
IVY’S SPECTACULAR GOWN, RUMORED TO
COST $500,000, FEATURED FOUR LAYERS,
BEHIND WHICH TRAILED
A 16-FOOT EMBROIDERED VEIL.
“I want you to dress Vanessa,” she told
him, according to Boaz Mazor, a longtime
de la Renta executive. “I want her to be
the most beautiful bride ever. I want her
to look unbelievable.”
“Oscar dropped everything. He called
in all his assistants, the office was turned
upside down,” Mazor continued. “Then
we got a call to cancel everything.”
Vanessa had decided to go with Nar-
ciso Rodriguez. For her, the new star
designer agreed to make his first wedding
dress since the one that had launched him
to stardom—Carolyn Bessette’s, for her
wedding to John Kennedy Jr. in 1996.
“Ann was livid! Furious!” says Mazor.
Yet when Vanessa made her entrance
to the Renaissance-themed ceremony at
a ranch in Napa Valley, riding sidesaddle
on a speckled horse at sunset, pretty much
everybody had to agree she chose right.
Her formfitting matte satin gown with
crystal-embroidered layers glistened.
Gavin Newsom was the best man, and
the 165 guests included a new assistant
district attorney in town, a 34-year-old
up-and-comer named Kamala Harris,
Vanessa’s new friend. (The future gover-
nor’s father, William “Bill” Newsom III,
was Gordon’s lifelong best friend; his
58 VA N I T Y FA I R
grandfather, William Newsom II, was a
beloved father figure to Gordon and his
brother Paul Jr. during their boyhoods in
the 1940s.)
Two months after the wedding, Ann
and Gordon were floating somewhere
on the Mediterranean aboard a friend’s
200-foot yacht when Gordon received a
call, one he knew would come one day.
At some point, the media was bound to
expose the existence of his other family
in Los Angeles. For some time, a small
circle of San Franciscans, including Ann
and their sons, had been aware of the situ-
ation, but it remained a secret.
On August 20, 1999, the San Jose Mer-
cury News broke the story:
Billionaire Gordon Getty’s secret family
of 4 revealed
S.F. socialite has 3 daughters; inheritance
being negotiated
Anticipating this day, Gordon had pre-
pared a statement: “Nicolette, Kendalle,
and Alexandra are my children. Their
mother, Cynthia Beck, and I love them
very much….”
Nicolette, then 14, Kendalle, age 10,
and Alexandra, who was 8, had been
brought up with the surname Beck. In
April 1999, a lawyer working on their
behalf had filed documents requesting
their names be changed to Getty.
According to a Getty family friend,
Gordon had revealed his secret first to
his third-born son: “Gordon drove over
to see John in Berkeley. ‘You know, I
have three daughters,’ ” he said. Under-
standably stunned, John kept the news
to himself initially.
From Growing Up Getty: The Story of America’s
Most Unconventional Dynasty by James Regi-
nato. Copyright © 2022 by James Reginato.
Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, an
imprint of Simon and Schuster.
Until one day when Gordon, Ann, and
the four boys were all aloft at 30,000 feet
aboard their much-used, two-bedroom,
gold-leafed 727 (“the Jetty”). As a family
discussion grew heated, John blurted it
out: “Dad has another family.” Accord-
ing to the source, Ann sat in her seat
“stone-faced.”
“She was upset when she found out,
but they came to an understanding,” said
another friend.
By most accounts, Gordon, a well-
respected composer of classical music,
ended the affair with Cynthia; he intro-
duced his Los Angeles family to his San
Francisco family in hopes of establish-
ing cordial relations, which by and large
happened. Two months after the news
exploded, the San Francisco Chronicle’s
Social Scene column reported that
“Ann and Gordon Getty have been giv-
I S A B E L G E T T Y : D AV I D M . B E N E T T/ DAV E B E N E T T. B A LT H A Z A R G E T T Y : M I C H A E L B E Z J I A N . J . PA U L G E T T Y I I I A N D B A LT H A Z A R : N A N C Y M O R A N / C O R B I S P R E M I U M H I S T O R I C A L . A L L F R O M G E T T Y I M A G E S .
ing some simply MAHvelous dinner
parties lately.”
Over the years, prominent San Fran-
ciscans saw Gordon’s daughters at the
gala holiday parties he and Ann hosted.
Yet as the girls matured, their creative and
S A B I N E A N D J O S E P H G E T T Y : S I M O N WAT S O N . A N N G E T T Y : H O R S T P. H O R S T/ V O G U E . G I G I G O R G E O U S A N D N AT S G E T T Y : A L E X W E L S H / T H E N E W YO R K T I M E S / R E D U X .
political endeavors remained relatively
unknown, perhaps because none of the
young women, until recently, chose to use
the Getty name.
O
N HER INSTAGRAM account,
@Freudian.slit, Kendalle
identified herself as Kendalle
Aubra, a name she used with various proj-
ects too. In 2018, she founded the Angry
Feminist Pin-Up Calendar to aid survi-
vors of abuse and violence. Net proceeds
were donated to organizations including
the Battered Women’s Justice Project.
In the calendar, she upends traditional
pinup tropes “to empower femme-iden-
tified people of all shapes, colors, sizes
and backgrounds,” as she wrote. For her
own turn as Miss March, she drew inspi-
ration from some strong characters:
“We paid homage to one of my all-time
favorite films, #Barbarella (of course)
from that fierce scene where #Talitha
Getty, uncredited, offers Barbarella a hit
of ‘Essence of Man.’ ”
One of Kendalle’s tattoos, on her right
arm, is a depiction of Barbarella. A nose
ring and changing hair coloring (green
sometimes) are among her other features.
In 2020, after long being intrigued by
talk of the so-called gay agenda, she pub-
lished The Gay Agenda—a weekly planner
meant to be, in C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 9 2
Clockwise from top left: Isabel Getty
at the Royal Ascot in 2019; Sabine and
Joseph Getty with their daughter at home
in London, 2019; Ann Getty in her Pacific
Heights living room, 1997; Gigi Gorgeous
and Nats Getty’s 2019 nuptials in
Montecito; Balthazar Getty at work, 2019;
J. Paul Getty III and Balthazar, 1975.

M AY 2 0 2 2 59
Illustration by
B R I A N S TAU F F E R

60 VA N I T Y FA I R
By JAMES POGUE

M AY 2 0 2 2 61

IT WAS HALLOWEEN
IN ORLANDO,
and we had piled into a car to make a
short trip from the Hilton to an after-party
down the road, to wind up the first night
of the latest edition of a gathering called
the National Conservatism Conference.
For at least many of the young people,
the actual business of conference going
seemed to be beside the point, a gesture
at how we used to conduct politics back
before life in America spun out of control.
There were jokes, or maybe they were
serious questions, about whether one of
the guys tagging along with us was a fed. I
surreptitiously made a few searches of the
name he’d given me and was surprised
when I couldn’t find a single plausible
hit—though that could have been because
he was a hyper-secret crypto type; there
were some of those floating around. Not
that anyone cared. These were people
who were used to guarding their words.
“Don’t fuck me here,” a dark-haired
woman named Amanda Milius said to
me—as she somewhat imperiously dealt
with a guy at the door who was skeptical
about letting a reporter into the party—
“and say we’re all in here sacrificing kids
to Moloch. We’re just the last normal peo-
ple, hanging out at the end of the world.”
I had met Milius outside the Hilton
when I asked for a cigarette, and she
began to chaperone me around, telling
people who eyed my press pass that I
was there to profile her as an up-and-
coming female director who, she said,
had attracted more Amazon streams than
any woman ever with her first documen-
tary, a counternarrative about Russiagate.
“Annie Leibovitz is still scheduling the
photo shoot,” she kept saying. In this
world, almost every word is layered in
so much irony that you can never be sure
what to take seriously or not, perhaps a
semiconscious defense mechanism for
people convinced that almost everyone
is out to get them.
“Oh, fuck,” she said as we walked
into a small ballroom where the party
was already underway. The room was
62 VA N I T Y FA I R
pitifully quiet, lit in strip-club red, and
the sparse crowd was almost entirely
male, with a cash bar off in the corner
that seemed unable to produce drinks
fast enough to buoy the mood. “We have
a thing we say,” she said. “ ‘This is what
the people at The Washington Post think
we’re doing.’ Well, this is exactly what
the people at The Washington Post think
we’re doing.”
A portly guy running for Congress in
Georgia made his way to the front of the
room to give a speech heavy on MAGA
buzzwords and florid expressions of
fealty to Donald Trump.
“This is sad,” Milius said. No one
cheered or even seemed interested. But
this was not Trumpworld, even if many
of the people in the room saw Trump as
a useful tool. And these parties aren’t
always so lame. NatCon, as this confer-
ence is known, has grown into a big-tent
gathering for a whole range of people who
want to push the American right in a more
economically populist, culturally conser-
vative, assertively nationalist direction.
It draws everyone from Israel hawks to
fusty paleocon professors to mainstream
figures like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.
But most of the media attention that the
conference attracts focuses on a cohort of
rosy young blazer-wearing activists and
writers—a crop of people representing the
American right’s “radical young intellec-
tuals,” as a headline in The New Republic
would soon put it, or conservatism’s “ter-
rifying future,” as David Brooks called
them in The Atlantic.
But the people these pieces describe,
who made up most of the partygoers
around me, were only the most buttoned-
up seam of a much larger and stranger
political ferment, burbling up mainly with-
in America’s young and well-educated
elite, part of an intra-media class info-war.
The podcasters, bro-ish anonymous Twit-
ter posters, online philosophers, artists,
and amorphous scenesters in this world
are variously known as “dissidents,”
“neo-reactionaries,” “post-leftists,” or
the “heterodox” fringe—though they’re
all often grouped for convenience under
the heading of America’s New Right. They
have a wildly diverse set of political back-
grounds, with influences ranging from
17th-century Jacobite royalists to Marx-
ist cultural critics to so-called reactionary
feminists to the Unabomber, Ted Kaczyn-
ski, whom they sometimes refer to with
semi-ironic affection as Uncle Ted. Which
is to say that this New Right is not a part
of the conservative movement as most
people in America would understand it.
It’s better described as a tangled set of
frameworks for critiquing the systems of
power and propaganda that most people
reading this probably think of as “the way
the world is.” And one point shapes all of
it: It is a project to overthrow the thrust of
progress, at least such as liberals under-
stand the word.
This worldview, these worldviews, run
counter to the American narrative of the
last century—that economic growth and
technological innovation are inevitably
leading us toward a better future. It’s a
position that has become quietly edgy
and cool in new tech outposts like Miami
and Austin, and in downtown Manhattan,
where New Right–ish politics are in, and
signifiers like a demure cross necklace
have become markers of a transgressive
chic. No one is leading this movement,
but it does have key figures.
One is Peter Thiel, the billionaire who
helped fund NatCon and who had just giv-
en the conference’s opening address. Thiel
has also funded things like the edgelordy
and post-left–inflected New People’s Cine-
ma film festival, which ended its weeklong
run of parties and screenings in Manhat-
tan just a few days before NatCon began.
He’s long been a big donor to Republican
political candidates, but in recent years
Thiel has grown increasingly involved in
the politics of this younger and weirder
world—becoming something like a
nefarious godfather or a genial rich uncle,
depending on your perspective. Podcast-
ers and art-world figures now joke about
their hope to get so-called Thielbucks. His
most significant recent outlays have been
to two young Senate candidates who are
deeply enmeshed in this scene and influ-
enced by its intellectual currents: Hillbilly
Elegy author J.D. Vance, running for the
Republican nomination in Ohio, and Blake
Masters in Arizona.
 Thiel has given more than $10 million
to super PACs supporting the men’s can-
didacies, and both are personally close to
him. Vance is a former employee of Thiel’s
Mithril Capital, and Masters, until recently
the COO of Thiel’s so-called “family
office,” also ran the Thiel Foundation,
which has become increasingly inter-
twined with this New Right ecosystem.
These three—Thiel, Vance, Masters—are
all friends with Curtis Yarvin, a 48-year-
old ex-programmer and blogger who has
done more than anyone to articulate the
world historical critique and popularize
the key terms of the New Right. You’ll
often hear people in this world—again
under many layers of irony—call him
things like Lord Yarvin, or Our Prophet.
I was looking around the party for
Vance, who hadn’t arrived yet, when
Milius nudged me and pointed to a
table off to our left. “Why is it
P
that whenever I see Curtis, he’s
surrounded by a big table of
incels?” she asked with appar-
ent fondness. I spotted Yarvin,
a slight, bespectacled man with
long dark hair, drinking a glass of wine
with a crowd that included Josh Ham-
mer, the national conservatism–minded
young opinion editor of Newsweek, and
Michael Anton, a Machiavelli scholar
“Most of the girls downtown ARE NORMAL, but they’ll wear a Trump
hat as an accessory.” The ones deep into the online scene, she said, “ want to be like
LENI RIEFENSTAHL–EDIE SEDGWICK.”
and former spokesman for Trump’s
National Security Council—and a
prominent public intellectualizer of the
Trump movement. Other luminaries
afoot for the conference included Dig-
nity author Chris Arnade, who seemed
slightly unsure about the whole NatCon
thing, and Sohrab Ahmari, the former
opinion editor of the New York Post, now
a cofounder and editor at the new maga-
zine Compact, whose vision is, according
to its mission statement, “shaped by our
desire for a strong social-democratic
state that defends community—local and
national, familial and religious—against
a libertine left and a libertarian right.” It
is a very of-the-moment project.
Political reporters, at least the ones
who have bothered to write about
Yarvin, have often dismissed him as a
kook with a readership made up mostly
of lonely internet weirdos, fascists, or
both. But to ignore him is to underesti-
mate how Yarvin’s ideas, or at least ideas
in conversation with his, have become
foundational to a whole political and
cultural scene that goes much deeper
than anything you’d learn from the pan-
els and speeches at an event like NatCon.
Or how those ideas are going to shape the
future of the American right, whether or
not Vance and Masters win their Sen-
ate primaries. I introduced myself, and
soon Milius and I were outside smoking
as Yarvin and I chatted about whether
he’d be willing to talk to me on the record.
EOPLE OFTEN STRUGGLE with
what to make of Thiel’s involve-
ment in this ecosystem. Last
year the journalist Max Chafkin
published a biography of Thiel,
titled The Contrarian, in which he
described Yarvin as the “house political
philosopher” for a network often called
the Thielverse. The book focuses heav-
ily on Thiel’s political maneuverings,
describing how he evolved from being a
hyper-libertarian to someone who now
makes common cause with nationalists
and populists. And it explains how Thiel
helped both Cruz and Josh Hawley on
their paths to the Senate. The Contrarian
ends with a dark picture of the billionaire
trying to extend his political reach ever
more overtly by funding and shepherd-
ing the campaigns of Masters and Vance.
“Masters and Vance are different from
Hawley and Cruz,” Chafkin writes; the
former two are “extensions” of Thiel.
This is only partly true. It would be just
as accurate to say that Thiel has been
influenced by the intellectual currents
and political critiques of the New Right
that he’s now helping to support. Many of
these people are friendly with Thiel, or
admire him, but are by no means behold-
en to him. And many of them hold views
that would seem to make Thiel, a tech
oligarch currently worth around $8 bil-
lion who recently resigned from the
Meta—née Facebook—board of directors,
their natural enemy.
This New Right is heavily populated by
people with graduate degrees, so there’s a
lot of debate about who is in it and whether
or not it even exists. At one end are the
NatCons, post-liberals, and traditionalist
figures like Benedict Option author Rod
Dreher, who envision a conservatism rein-
vigorated by an embrace of localist values,
religious identity, and an active role for the
state in promoting everything from mar-
riage to environmental conservation. But
there’s also a highly online set of Substack
writers, podcasters, and anonymous Twit-
ter posters—“our true intellectual elite,”
as one podcaster describes them. This
group encompasses everyone from rich
crypto bros and tech executives to back-
to-the-landers to disaffected members
of the American intellectual class, like
Up in the Air author Walter Kirn, whose
fulminations against groupthink and
techno-authoritarianism have made him
an unlikely champion to the dissident right
and heterodox fringe. But they share a the
basic worldview: that individualist liberal
ideology, increasingly bureaucratic gov-
ernments, and big tech are all combining
into a world that is at once tyrannical, cha-
otic, and devoid of the systems of value
and morality that give human life richness
and meaning—as Blake Masters recently
put it, a “dystopian hell-world.”
Kirn didn’t want to put a label on this
movement, describing it as a “fractious
family of dissenters” when I called him
at his home in Montana—“a somewhat
M AY 2 0 2 2 63
new, loose coalition of people whose
major concern is that we not end up in a
top-down controlled state.” He told me
he didn’t consider himself right wing and
found some of the antidemocratic ideas
he heard expressed in this sphere to be
“personally chilling.” But he described
it as a zone of experimentation and free
expression of a kind that was now closed
off in America’s liberal mainstream.
“They seem to want a war,” he said. “The
last thing I want is some kind of definitive
ideological war which leaves out the het-
erodox, complicated, and almost naively
open spirit of American politics.”
And the ferment is starting to get
noticed. “I think that’s a really good
sign,” one of the hosts of the dissident-
right podcast The Fedpost said recently,
discussing how Tucker Carlson had just
quoted a tweet from one of their guests.
“This is a kind of burgeoning sect of
thought,” he went on, “and it’s causing
people who are in positions of larger influ-
ence and relative power to actually have
to start looking into it.”
Vance sits somewhere in between
these two tendencies—at 37, he’s a ven-
ture capitalist who is young enough to be
exposed to the dissident online currents.
But he’s also shaped by the most deeply
traditionalist thinking of the American
One man raised his hand to ask how Masters planned
to DRAIN THE SWAMP. He gave me a sly look. “Well, one of my friends has this
acronym he calls RAGE,” he said. “Retire All Government Employees.”
right. He is friends with Yarvin, whom he
openly cites as a political influence, and
with Dreher, who was there when Vance
was baptized into the Catholic Church
in 2019. I’d been writing about militias
and right-wing stirrings in the rural West
for years, but I didn’t really understand
how this alchemy worked until I first met
him last July. I’d gone back to Ohio to
see my uncle, who was dying of cancer.
Vance and I both grew up around Cincin-
nati, immersed in a culture of white rural
migrants who had come from coalfields
and farm towns to look for work in the cit-
ies of the Midwest. We had met as a kind
64 VA N I T Y FA I R
of experiment—I was going to be in town
anyway, and because my uncle was sick,
I was thinking a lot about the place and
what it meant to me. On a whim, I asked
an editor at a conservative magazine if I
could write something from the perspec-
tive of a skeptical leftist. Vance suggested
that we meet at a diner where my dad had
often taken me as a kid. He was barely reg-
istering in the polls at the time.
Vance believes that a well-educated
and culturally liberal American elite has
greatly benefited from globalization,
the financialization of our economy,
and the growing power of big tech. This
has led an Ivy League intellectual and
management class—a quasi-aristocracy
he calls “the regime”—to adopt a set
of economic and cultural interests that
directly oppose those of people in places
like Middletown, Ohio, where he grew
up. In the Vancian view, this class has
no stake in what people on the
P
New Right often call the “real
economy”—the farm and factory
jobs that once sustained middle-
class life in Middle America. This
is a fundamental difference
between New Right figures like Vance
and the Reaganite right-wingers of their
parents’ generation. To Vance—and he’s
said this—culture war is class warfare.
Vance recently told an interviewer, “I
gotta be honest with you, I don’t really
care what happens to Ukraine,” a flick at
the fact that he thinks the American-led
global order is as much about enriching
defense contractors and think-tank types
as it is about defending America’s inter-
ests. “I do care about the fact that in my
community right now the leading cause
of death among 18- to 45-year-olds is
Mexican fentanyl.” His criticisms of big
tech as “enemies of Western civilization”
often get lost in the run of Republican
outrage over Trump being kicked off
Twitter and Facebook, though they go
much deeper than this. Vance believes
that the regime has sold an illusive story
that consumer gadgets and social media
are constantly making our lives better,
even as wages stagnate and technology
feeds an epidemic of depression.
I wrote a piece that came across as
critical of him. It expressed my deep
hopelessness about the future of Amer-
ica. I figured he’d want nothing more to
do with me. But the morning it was pub-
lished he sent me a short, heartfelt email.
He said that he’d been a bit “pained” to
read in the piece that my parents dis-
liked him but said he’d like to talk more.
“I don’t see you as a member of the elite
because I see you as independent of their
ideological strictures and incentives,” he
wrote. “But maybe I’m just saying that
because I like you.”
“Despair,” he signed off, “serves
the regime.”
ART OF WHY people have trouble
describing this New Right is
because it’s a bunch of people
who believe that the system that
organizes our society and govern-
ment, which most of us think of as normal,
is actually bizarre and insane. Which
naturally makes them look bizarre and
insane to people who think this system
is normal. You’ll hear these people talk
about our globalized consumerist soci-
ety as “clown world.” You’ll often hear
the worldview expressed by our media
and intellectual class described as “the
matrix” or the “Ministry of Truth,” as
Thiel described it in his opening keynote
speech to NatCon. It can be confusing
to turn on something like the influen-
tial underground podcast Good Ol Boyz
and hear a figure like Anton talk to two
autodidact Southern gamers about the
makeup of the regime, if only because
most people reading this probably don’t
think of America as the kind of place that
has a regime at all. But that’s because, as
many people in this world would argue,
we’ve been so effectively propagandized
that we can’t see how the system of power
around us really works.
This is not a conspiracy theory like
QAnon, which presupposes that there
are systems of power at work that nor-
mal people don’t see. This is an idea that
the people who work in our systems of
power are so obtuse that they can’t even
see that they’re part of a conspiracy.
“The fundamental premise of liber-
alism,” Yarvin told me, “is that there is
this inexorable march toward progress. I
disagree with that premise.” He believes
that this premise underpins a massive
framework of power. “My job,” as he
puts it, “is to wake people up from the
Truman Show.”
We spoke sharing a bench outside in
the dark one evening, a few days into the
conference. Yarvin is friendly and solici-
tous in person, despite the fact that he
tends to think and talk so fast that he
can start unspooling, reworking baroque
metaphors to explain ideas to listeners
who have heard them many times before.
Strange things can happen when you
meet him. I’d gotten in touch with him
through a mutual friend, a journalist I
knew from New York who once had a big
magazine assignment to write about him.
The piece never came out. “They wanted
him to say I was really evil and all that,”
Yarvin told me. “He wouldn’t do it and
pulled the piece. And I thought, Okay,
that’s a cool guy.” This friend has now
made a bunch of money in crypto, works
on a project Yarvin helped launch to build a
decentralized internet, and lives hours out
into the desert in Utah, where he’ll occa-
sionally call in to New Right–ish podcasts.
He recently had dinner with Thiel and
Masters—both Masters and Vance have
raised money by offering donors a chance
to dine with Thiel and the candidate.
Yarvin has a pretty condescending
view of the mainstream media: “They’re
just predators,” he has said, who have to
make a living attacking people like him.
“They just need to eat.” He doesn’t usu-
ally deal with mainstream magazines
and wrote that he’d been “ambushed”
at the last NatCon, in 2019, by a reporter
for Harper’s—where I also write—who
made him out to be a bit of a loon and
predicted that the NatCons’ populist
program would soon be “stripped of its
parts” by the corporate-minded Repub-
lican establishment.
But the winds are shifting. He told
me about how he’d gone to read poetry
in New York recently, at the Thiel-fund-
ed NPC fest. “A bunch of lit kids showed
up,” he said, grinning. I had grown into
adulthood in the New York lit-kid world;
even a few years ago, there was no ques-
tion that anything like this could have
happened. But now Yarvin is a cult hero
to many in the ultrahip crowd that you’ll
often hear referred to as the “downtown
scene.” “I don’t even think antifa both-
ered showing up,” Yarvin said. “What
would they do? It was an art party.”
Yarvin had asked his new girlfriend,
Lydia Laurenson, a 37-year-old founder
of a progressive magazine, to vet me.
The radical right turn her life had taken
created complications.
“One of my housemates was like—‘I
don’t know if I want Curtis in our house,’ ”
she told me. “And I’m like, ‘Okay, that
makes sense. I understand why you’re
saying that.’ ”
Laurenson had been a well-known
blogger and activist in the BDSM scene
back when Yarvin was the central early
figure in a world of “neo-reactionary”
writers, publishing his poetry and politi-
cal theory on the Blogger site under the
name Mencius Moldbug.
As Moldbug, Yarvin wrote about race-
based IQ differences, and in an early post,
titled “Why I Am Not a White National-
ist,” he defended reading and linking to
white nationalist writing. He told me he’d
pursued those early writings in a spirit of
“open inquiry,” though Yarvin also openly
acknowledged in the post that some of his
readers seemed to be white nationalists.
Some of Yarvin’s writing from then is so
radically right wing that it almost has
to be read to be believed, like the time
he critiqued the attacks by the Norwe-
gian far-right terrorist Anders Behring
Breivik—who killed 77 people, including
dozens of children at a youth camp—not
on the grounds that terrorism is wrong but
because the killings wouldn’t do anything
effective to overthrow what Yarvin called
Norway’s “communist” government.
He argued that Nelson Mandela, once
head of the military wing of the African
National Congress, had endorsed terror
tactics and political murder against oppo-
nents, and said anyone who claimed “St.
Mandela” was more innocent than Breivik
might have “a mother you’d like to fuck.”
He’s tempered himself in middle
age—he now says he has a rule never to
“say anything unnecessarily controver-
sial, or go out of my way to be provocative
for no reason.” Many liberals who hear
him talk would probably question how
strictly he follows this rule, but even in
his Moldbug days, most of his controver-
sial writings were couched in thickets of
irony and metaphor, a mode of speech
that younger podcasters and Twitter per-
sonalities on the highly online right have
adopted—a way to avoid getting kicked
off tech platforms or having their words
quoted by liberal journalists.
He considers himself a reactionary,
not just a conservative—he thinks it is
impossible for an Ivy League–educated
person to really be a conservative. He has
consistently argued that conservatives
waste their time and political energy
on fights over issues like gay marriage
or critical race theory, because liberal
ideology holds sway in the important
institutions of prestige media and aca-
demia—an intertwined nexus he calls
“the Cathedral.” He developed a theory
to explain the fact that America has lost
its so-called state capacity, his explana-
tion for why it so often seems that it is not
actually capable of governing anymore:
The power of the executive branch has
slowly devolved to an oligarchy of the
educated who care more about compet-
ing for status within the system than they
do about America’s national interest.
No one directs this system, and hardly
anyone who participates in it believes
that it’s a system at all. Someone like me
who has made a career of writing about
militias and extremist groups might go
about my work thinking that all I do is
try to tell important stories and honestly
describe political upheaval. But within
the Cathedral, the best way for me to
get big assignments and win attention
is to identify and attack what seem like
threats against the established order,
which includes nationalists, antigov-
ernment types, or people who refuse
to obey the opinions of the Cathedral’s
experts on issues like vaccine mandates,
in as alarming a way as I possibly can.
This cycle becomes self-reinforcing and
has been sent into hyperdrive by Twit-
ter and Facebook, because the stuff that
compels people to click on articles or
share clips of C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 9 6
M AY 2 0 2 2 65
 MODERN
FOLKLORE

ADIA VICTORIA
album A Southern Gothic | liner notes As the title of her latest album suggests, the South Carolina native’s sonic creations
are imbued with the deep hues of gothic indie blues—tales of life that both unsettle and intrigue listeners.

66 VA N I T Y FA I R
 COUNTRY MUSIC’s new stars are not aw-shucks,
down-on-their-luck cowboys but YOUNG BLACK WOMEN carving a
HALLOWED SPACE in opry’s pantheon—and
THEY’VE GOT the lyrics, the SOUND, and the looks to last
By TRESSIE McMILLAN COTTOM Photographs by MIRANDA BARNES Sittings editor, NICOLE CHAPOTEAU

AMYTHYST KIAH
album Wary + Strange | liner notes An alum of East Tennessee State University’s Bluegrass, Old-Time, and Roots Music
Studies program, Kiah already has a Grammy nomination for penning “Black Myself ” in 2020.

M AY 2 0 2 2 67

TEN YEARS AGO, you could not name more than three Black
country music artists, if you could name any country artists at all.
In 2022, there are so many Black artists making contemporary
country music, you would have to book a festival to get even
half of them on one show bill. And if you did book that festival,
it would feature a lot of Black women. Respect to the brothers,
like classic man Darius Rucker and youngblood Jimmie Allen,
but the Black country women are serving.
What you want, they got it: love songs, girl-power anthems,
grooves, protest music. And they do not just serve bops. They
also serve looks. They are sexy, cool, and irreverent. Grounded
in multiple musical traditions, each has a unique sound, but all
of them pay homage to the Black music dynasty.
In the 1940s, Sister Rosetta Tharpe strutted onto stages with a
guitar strapped around her neck and helped invent rock and roll.
Starting in the late 1960s, soul-funk-psychedelic pioneer Betty
Davis (may she rest in funk) survived Miles Davis and made
anthems for weird Black girls who didn’t want to marry a genre.
Rock, gospel, blues, roots, folk. A little Stax, a little Motown, a
Previous spread:
little Philly, and a little Mississippi Delta. Joy Oladokun, Allison
jacket by Gucci; Russell, Adia Victoria, Amythyst Kiah, and Brittney Spencer
earrings by Lisa have bits of it all in their songwriting and stagecraft. Their secret
Eisner Jewelry;
hair products sauce is as old as human migration. These women have soul.
by R+Co; makeup Black female artists reimagining country music is a revival
products by MAC.
Suit and tie by of sorts, and it is not happening in a vacuum. R&B music is also
Elise Fife; tuxedo finding its footing in pop music again after being reduced to hip-
blouse by Giorgio
Armani; hair
hop hooks and adult contemporary radio. The R&B revival also
products by Mizani; owes a lot to women artists—H.E.R., Ella Mai, Summer Walker,
makeup products and Ari Lennox have successfully cut through the hip-hop/dance
by Inglot.
music domination. Social media platforms like TikTok play a
Earrings by significant role in getting the jams out to the people. But that only
Jennifer Fisher; works because the music has, as H.E.R. described it in a 2018
hair products by
Unite; makeup interview with Gerrick D. Kennedy, “real, genuine emotions”
products by Ilia. that people want. And need, especially now.
68 VA N I T Y FA I R
Critically for a writer, Joy, Allison, Adia,
Amythyst, and Brittney are in the part of
the celebrity cycle where they are still
interesting, still talk like humans. When
I sat down with them over the course of a
week in Nashville—which I essayed about
elsewhere at the time—they were open,
real, and above all, ready. Now, they
are gracing the pages of Vanity Fair as
emerging icons of country soul’s musical
dynasty. It is 2022, and mainstream coun-
try music has not yet figured out how to fit
these singer-songwriters into traditional
platforms. Like independent and minor-
ity artists before them, they have much
better success with live shows, satellite
radio, and streaming platforms. And their
ride is far from over. They are touring,
releasing new music, getting corporate
sponsorships, and being name-checked
by musical heroes like Brandi Carlile,
Jason Isbell, Maren Morris, and Rhiannon
Giddens. Individually and collectively,
these artists are poised to write a new
chapter in Black music’s enduring legacy.
W
ELL-MEANING PEOPLE have
asked them a million times
about race and equity and
diversity in country music. I don’t want
to be well-meaning. I want to mean them
well. These are artists, with perspec-
tives on the world. As artists who have
the entire legacy of Black music at their
disposal, I want to talk about how they
choose to make their art and what it means
to be making it in surprising ways. Their
answers varied, but all spoke of a musical
tapestry that saved them in some way. As
good keepers of the legacy they inherited,
they are simply paying it forward.
The sense of coming into one’s own is
especially true for Allison Russell, who
made one of the best albums of 2021.
Fight with somebody else about this.
Outside Child is otherworldly. Variety
called it “beautiful, harrowing.” It was
nominated for best Americana album at
the 2022 Grammys. The album’s standout
track is “Nightflyer,” which lives inside of
you, moving between traditional roots
instrumentation—at one point in the live
version, she plays the clarinet—and the
kind of jazz vocalization that scandal-
ized audiences in the early 20th century.
Her delivery reminds you that jazz was
not always easy listening—it used to be
dangerous. Jazz was once considered a
sexual vice, bound to lead to race-mixing
and civil rot. Henry Ford was so incensed
by jazz’s popularity that he spent money
to train America’s youth to square-dance
instead. Biracial, sexy, and jazzy, I like to
imagine Russell’s music playing as Ford
drove himself over a metaphorical cliff.
If Russell’s fierceness is not evident,
it is because people often underestimate
beautiful women. Sitting across a screen
from Russell, 42, I know a survivor when I see one. Hers is a
story of slightly different flavor than those who usually make
Black music. She is Canadian, for one. “I didn’t grow up in Black
culture at all,” she says plainly. That her journey brought her to
the same place as generations of soul women before her speaks
volumes about the universality of Black creative genius.
Far from the clay dirt roads that made Black music, Russell
was part of a white Canadian family that rejected her Blackness.
Her mother married an adoptive father that Russell describes

ALLISON RUSSELL
album Outside Child | liner notes Ever the collaborator, Russell’s debut solo project delves into her long-held fascination with
fables, historic myths, and lullabies, many of which she was exposed to by her Scottish Canadian grandmother.

M AY 2 0 2 2 69
 JOY OLADOKUN
album In Defense of My Own Happiness | liner notes Inspired to first pick up a guitar after seeing a video of Tracy Chapman,
the songwriter and self-proclaimed “sensitive stoner” writes music focused squarely on life as she learns to live it.

as a white supremacist. “You know, I was in the belly of this musical dynasty that matched the depth
horrific colonial beast,” she told me. Scarred but unbowed, by of the trauma that growing up in an abu-
the time she owned the 2021 Newport Folk Festival stage, it was sive household visited upon her. It was
clear that Russell had found her way home. To get there, she the legacy of Black joy and pain—that
had to go south. melding of the sacred and the profane
Russell’s journey to roots music through racial geography so integral to the Black diasporic expe-
was, she says, part of what saved her life. “Coming to the South rience—that helped her find her voice.
has been like, holy shit, I’m not alone. There’s mixed-heritage Joy Oladokun does not care what you
Black folks like me everywhere.” In roots music, Russell found a call her music, just don’t come calling

70 VA N I T Y FA I R
her all the time. She is busy up on her mountain, playing with
chickens, blazing for a little relaxation, and making music in
her home studio. Smooth as triple-distilled whiskey, everything
about Oladokun is a vibe. Her 2020 album, In Defense of My Own
Happiness (the Beginnings), has earned her a lot of love—in 2021,
when she was nominated for the Americana Music Honors &
Awards’ emerging act of the year, and this year, as she’s up for
the GLAAD Media Awards’ outstanding breakthrough music
artist. Her music has been featured on some of the biggest tele-
vision series of the last few years, most recently the Sex and the
City reboot And Just Like That….
Oladokun, 30, is the youngest of this cohort. Her name is
both prescient and redundant. She oozes energy that shifts a
room’s center of gravity and makes you happy for it. It is cha-
risma and she has it in spades. It’s the way
she approaches her craft too. “The story and
the emotion are first,” she tells me. “I want
people to feel like they’re sitting across the
Their claim to contemporary country music
table from me, talking about the past few REACHES BACK before genres sliced culture into
months, or talking about that breakup. The
emotion, the thought, the conclusion. Not
a lot of fuss.” Last fall, as COVID was roar-
ing back, I posted Oladokun’s “Look Up’’
on social media. People went nuts. There is
something about her delivery, for sure. Her
voice is honeyed, lilting like teacups at Dis-
neyland. It is a New Age gospel song. No big
riffs or exhaustive runs. No drum machines.
But the heart of soul is there. Someone tweets at me that they
have been in tears listening to it. “It could be a Negro spiritual
for how I am crying,” they say.
Like Russell, Oladokun came by her musical inheritance
through a circuitous route. Her family is Nigerian Ameri-
can. She grew up in Casa Grande, Arizona, which is midway
between Tucson and Phoenix. But like generations of Black
American musicians, Oladokun’s musical training happened
in church. The evangelical church, to be exact. She worked at
the church and led music worship, until she could not sing the
songs that did not recognize who she fully was. Today she is
an out queer Black woman and can joke about that time in her
life. “For a while, [my audience] was a lot of white Christian
college girls. [My music] sounds like worship. I could play it
at a coffee shop at Liberty [University].” I bend over laughing
at the image of Oladokun laying down a deep soul-inflected
groove for a bunch of conservative Christian, mostly white
coeds at a university where they agree to a moral purity code.
Still, it is not hard to imagine that it was difficult for her to leave.
“If I strip away all the political and the motivations that some-
times come with religion, especially in this country, and just go
back to the basics of what attracted me to it, I love the idea of
treating people well and being treated well,” says Oladokun. “I
love the idea of taking care of the planet and taking my work
just seriously enough that I can be proud of what I made at the
end of the day, but not so seriously that I have no time to be with
family or people that I care about.” Her love ethic also infuses
her political critiques. On “I See America,” love supplants ego,
making a concept song less preachy and imminently more enjoy-
able, and making hers unique. Even when she does a cover, like
her ebullient take on the Beatles’ “Blackbird,” Oladokun never
sounds like anyone but herself.
It takes a lot of courage and discern-
ment to be one’s self. Amythyst Kiah’s
path to breakout star is a case in point.
Kiah, 35, grew up in Chattanooga as a
Black girl who really liked rock music.
The louder and harder, the better. There
was a Scandinavian symphonic metal
phase: “I’m very much melody first,
even when I’m listening to metal—it has
to be like melodic metal, like this band
Nightwish…. The lead vocalist was an
operatic soprano.” And there was a pop
punk and alternative rock phase. She
wonders out loud about the optics of
commodities, back to “THE ROOT OF
THE THING,” as Angela Davis might say.
her taste. “As a Black kid growing up in
white suburbia, why is it weird that I like
Blink-182 or Green Day? A huge majority
of rock and roll is inspired by Black art-
ists.” Inspired and created. That creation
legacy is what ultimately brings Kiah to
country music.
By 2018, Kiah had become a member
of Our Native Daughters, a young group
playing traditional music so antithetical
to metal’s raging energy that it is colloqui-
ally called “old-time music.” Our Native
Daughters should be remembered like
the Trio albums by icons Dolly Parton,
Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt.
It is a Black supergroup that includes
Giddens, Russell, and classically trained
cellist Leyla McCalla. They put out their
first album, Songs of Our Native Daughters,
in 2019. “Up until working with Rhiannon
and Leyla and Allison, I’d kind of adopted
a ‘shut up and sing’ policy,” says Kiah. “I
just kept [my opinions] to myself because
I didn’t feel safe…. Having the opportu-
nity to work with four other Black women
who have all had very similar experiences,
it was the first time I was able to discuss
how I was feeling and somebody really
understand what it feels to be there.”
Jacket by Bode; hair Kiah’s solo debut, Wary + Strange, fea-
products by R+Co;
makeup products by tures as full-throated an identity anthem
Face Atelier. as one can imagine: “Black Myself.”
M AY 2 0 2 2 71
Making that song signified Kiah’s growth as a person as much
as an artist. “Our Native Daughters really gave me the cour-
age to write ‘Black Myself,’ the most confrontational song and
specific song I’d ever written,” Kiah tells me. It was not just the
song itself or even the very personal lyrics. It was merging her
private self with her public image. As is often the case, it took a
sisterhood for Kiah to own all the parts of herself.
Kiah is growing alongside her audience, owning her role
leading her own band. “I’m going from doing mostly solo singer-
songwriter stuff, maybe telling a few stories in between songs, to
now, I’m playing with a really dynamic and exciting band that is
absolutely rock and roll,” she says. It is a big deal for a young art-
ist to take the helm creatively and onstage. Being in charge is part
of the bigger story each of these artists is writing. Ultimately,
only you can make your art. That requires radical authenticity.
Authentic storytelling is also at the heart of what Brittney
Spencer creates. “I’m always telling a story, or I’m talking
about something that I learned or observed or experienced
down South,” Spencer says. “I think the art of storytelling is
just beautiful.” A gifted writer and vocal pow-
erhouse, Spencer, 33, is recording her first full
album. But her singles “Sober & Skinny” and
“Sorrys Don’t Work No More” already put her
in enviable company—she joined Russell and
Carlile on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in 2021. Like
Russell, Spencer finds creative freedom in
this genre. “That’s why I love country music,”
she says. “You literally can write about any-
thing. You can write about anything and you
can make anything a story, because really
everything has a story.”
Vulnerability weeps from all of Spencer’s
performances. Even when the song is up-
tempo, like “Damn Right You’re Wrong,” her vocal stylings do
not rely more on emotion than acrobatics. It is like old-school
soul in her careful attention to phrasing to evoke a feeling. Think
about the way Lionel Richie enunciates “purpose” or Gladys
Knight delivers the lyrics “I’d never no, no stop loving you.” But
to be clear: Spencer isn’t a throwback artist. Her sound is modern
and fresh. “Sober & Skinny” catapults a come-to-Jesus talk with
a man into a delightful little earworm. “In a perfect world, you
get sober, I get skinny / We live off of more than pennies,” she
sings to an underwhelming boyfriend. Spencer’s willingness
to puncture her own delusions as easily as she does those of a
puffed-up partner is on full display. It is refreshing, especially
amid all the empty bravado sucking up all the air in pop music.
One hopes her bold honesty is contagious.
Adia Victoria does not have to hope for shit. Victoria, 35, who
came out with her critically acclaimed third album, A Southern
Gothic, last year, makes music on her own terms and asks for
what she wants of the universe. Rolling Stone said the album
“reclaims the Southern experience.” She also started her own
podcast, Call & Response. (I have been a guest. Victoria is a nim-
ble interviewer who might be gunning for more than Stephen
Colbert’s musical guest slot.) And this year, she is touring North
America and Europe.
In January 2022, Victoria tweeted Colbert, saying that as two
South Carolinians (she from Spartanburg, outside Greenville,
and he of James Island), they should get together on his late-
night talk show: No more beating around the magnolia tree,
72 VA N I T Y FA I R
“we are asking for what we want!” She
comes by her boldness honestly. Raised
in the Bible Belt, Victoria had her share
of church hurt and good old-fashioned
Southern racism. To survive, she learned
to listen first to herself. Setting her own
course has made her path rockier than it
might have been, but she would not have
had it any other way. “When I released
my first record [Beyond the Bloodhounds]
in 2016, I felt that the Americana Associa-
tion was trying to co-opt me. So I wrote
an open letter to the Americana Asso-
ciation. I mean, big old mouth from the
South that I am. I basically told them, I’m
not your Negro!”
Victoria had a sketchy path through
school, choosing to instead enroll her-
self in a Black girl’s school of hard knocks.
A little STAX, a little MOTOWN, a
little PHILLY, and a little MISSISSIPPI
DELTA. Their SECRET SAUCE
is as old as HUMAN MIGRATION.
Some questionable relationships, rou-
tinely hotboxing the car with her friend
Eric, traipsing up and down the interstate
that connects Atlanta to Greenville. When
Ronnie Spector died early this year, I real-
ized who Victoria reminds me of. She is
tough, yes. But it is scar tissue. As a teen-
ager she nursed her pain with the blues
after a friend left her a guitar. “Learning
the blues was the first time that I did not
feel stupid or crazy—because I knew I
wasn’t dumb,” she said. “But I knew the
intelligence that I had was not recognized
by the Southern Christian world that I
grew up in. So the blues allowed me, for
the first time, autonomy.”
At its core, Victoria says her music is
blues. “The blues for me, they were the
original punk rock. They were able to
stand outside of the system of mainstream
mores and morals, and be comfortable
Dress by Eloquii; there. That was my first, Oh, so I don’t
earrings by Jennifer have to change…. I don’t have to give up
Fisher; bracelet by
Lisa Eisner Jewelry; these parts of myself. I just got to figure
hair products by out a way to be the orchestra leader of
Paul Mitchell;
makeup products by them.” She doesn’t mean the blues that
Charlotte Tilbury. caters to white audiences by offering them
 their singular approved version of a Black
artist. She means music that troubles your
spirit by reminding you that you have one.
All of them—Joy, Allison, Amythyst,
Adia, Brittney—are asking for all of it.
Their claim to contemporary country
music reaches back before genres sliced
culture into commodities, back to “the
root of the thing,” as Angela Davis might
HAI R , MAR Z CO L L I N S ( O L AD O KU N , V I C TO R IA ) , AU BRE Y H E L L E R ( K IAH , RU S S E L L ) , J AD E S T YL E Z ( S P E N CE R ) ; MAK E U P , AU BRE Y H E L L E R ( K IAH , RU S S E L L ) ;
M A R Z C O L L I N S ( A L L O T H E R S ) . P R O D U C E D O N LO C AT I O N B Y V I R G I N I A R I D G E R S . F O R D E TA I L S , G O T O V F. C O M / C R E D I T S .
say of country music’s glaring erasure of Black artistry. The
root of the thing is the drum and the guitar that traveled with
enslaved people across choppy waters, some to islands and oth-
ers to colonized indigenous nations. It is a rhythm, yes. And
a vocalization. It is a legacy of storytelling and survival. It is
what soul music is at its very core. Whatever genre these artists
choose, they are making music for the soul. It may have taken
them some hard knocks to find it and a global crisis for me to
find them. But theirs is clearly music for who we could be. n

BRITTNEY SPENCER
ep Compassion | liner notes The Baltimore native received the internet’s approval when her cover of The Highwomen’s
“Crowded Table” led not only to viral notoriety but an invitation from the group to tour with them.

M AY 2 0 2 2 73
THIN ICE
Once a coal-mining
town, Qullissat, in
Greenland, now stands
emptied of residents.

74 VA N I T Y FA I R
 G R E E N
G O L D
COBALT MINING H A S L O N G H A D A D I R T Y R A P,
WITH COMMODITIES KINGPINS WRINGING RICHES FROM
TH E CONGO. YE T TH E WORLD DEMANDS E VER MORE OF
T H E M E TA L , SO A B I LLI O N A I R E A LLI A N C E— FE AT U R I N G
J E FF B E ZOS , B I L L GAT E S , A N D M I C H A E L B LOO M B E RG —
IS STRIKING OUT FOR THE ARCTIC, WHERE
PROFITEERS A R E T H E N E W PRESERVATIONISTS

By
WI L LE M MAR X

Photographs by
RI C HAR D MOS S E

M AY 2 0 2 2 75
AS THE BANKERS FROM J.P. MORGAN’S than $39 billion. The metal has become a critical component in
LONDON OFFICES STEPPED the global transition to a greener future, a reality reflected in its
OFF THE T WO-HOUR soaring price: $29,000 per metric ton in July 2020; by the time
this story went to print in late March, $82,000 per ton. Most
PRIVATE FLIGHT
lithium-ion batteries depend on cobalt, and everything from
FROM JOHANNESBURG iPhones to Teslas depends on those batteries. One analytics
ONTO THE HOT RUNWAY, firm estimates the worldwide market for electric vehicles and
consumer electronics will drive cobalt demand at least three
times higher by the end of this decade.
soldiers sporting sunglasses and semiautomatics watched them But the green gold has become a dirty business—bad
closely. The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s brutal civil enough that Elon Musk has vowed to engineer cobalt out of
war had ended several years earlier, but peace remained tenu- his vehicles—with a small coterie of individuals and compa-
ous, and the Lubumbashi airstrip was still heavily militarized. nies growing immensely wealthy from the DRC’s resources
It was the summer of 2006, the height of a period that at scant benefit to ordinary Congolese people. In 2019, a U.S.
became known as the commodities “Super Cycle,” in which a human rights organization filed suit against Tesla, Apple, Dell,
hardy vanguard of investors sought to sate industrializing Chi- and other tech giants on behalf of the families of 14 children
na’s seemingly endless appetite for raw materials, particularly killed or injured mining in the DRC; the lawsuit was dismissed
metals. Relying on low-cost financing, dealmakers at Credit in November. Meanwhile, Gertler and dozens of companies
Suisse, First Boston, HSBC, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stan- linked to him are under U.S. sanctions for allegedly corrupt
ley scoured the world for once state-owned mining assets in deals, while Glencore, the Swiss-based commodities giant
need of fresh funds or those primed for privatization. But the and current majority owner and opera-
capital markets group at J.P. Morgan had proved more adept than its peers at this tor of KOV, faces ongoing investigations
international treasure hunt, earning tens of millions in fees thanks to a series of mining- from the U.S. Department of Justice and
company flotations that grew ever more exotic, remote, and risky. And the sortie into the Commodities and Futures Trading
the DRC—one of the world’s wealthiest nations in terms of natural resources but Commission, as well as Britain’s Serious
among the poorest by gross domestic product—sat at the riskiest end of that spectrum. Fraud Office, Switzerland’s Office of the
Once their customs paperwork was handled, the bankers reboarded the Challenger Attorney General, and the Netherlands
for a 45-minute flight northwest, to a dust-choked mining settlement called Kolwezi. Public Prosecution Service. The U.S.
Before they landed, the pilot circled the prize: Kamoto Oliveira Virgule, known simply Treasury used an NGO’s calculations
by its initials KOV, a rain-flooded mining pit named for its big- that indicated Gertler was responsible
gest three ore bodies, as geologists call deposits, each one the for stiffing the DRC on more than $1.3 billion in lost revenue
size of an underground Manhattan skyscraper. The bankers’ between 2010 and 2012 alone. Although Gertler found brief
invitation had come from a handful of foreign businessmen reprieve in the final days of the Trump administration, cour-
who’d secured the rights to resume digging at KOV more than tesy of Steven Mnuchin, Biden administration officials swiftly
a decade after the DRC’s state mining company essentially reimposed sanctions. As a result, Gertler, who is Israeli, is pro-
abandoned it. The specific draw had been what the owners hibited from using U.S. financial institutions and is largely
were claiming was the planet’s largest barred from the international banking system. One of his
high-grade copper mine, metallic ore so lobbyists, Trump impeachment lawyer Alan Dershowitz, has insisted that Gertler
concentrated as to be visible to the naked has complied with U.S. and international law. But Vanity Fair interviews with banking
eye. From the air in the bright June sun- officials and experts in enforcing U.S. sanctions, alongside reviews of multiple financial
shine, though, as one mining executive and corporate documents, indicate Gertler has continued to try to circumvent restric-
put it, KOV looked like little more than “a tions, even as he receives royalties from the company that operates KOV.
fucking big hole in the ground…you might Mines are finite, though. And as cobalt’s value skyrockets, so does the significance
as well go scuba diving or waterskiing.” of its role in the economic contest between Beijing and Washington. In an effort to
Beneath 5 million or so gallons of simultaneously save the planet and turn a profit, an enterprise funded by—among
floodwater, in addition to all that copper, others—a swashbuckling half-trillionaire group that includes Bill
surveys suggested a spectacular trove of another metal, cobalt. Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Michael Bloomberg has set its sights as
To the bankers peering down from the jet, the cobalt was inci- far afield as Greenland, whose citizens may eventually embrace
dental, an ingredient in aircraft turbines and, so it happened, such lucrative pursuits too.
part of the mine. “Nobody ever thought it was at all strategic or
important,” remembers one of those bankers, Michael Rawl-

inson, who now holds top positions at several mining firms.
But Daniel Gertler, 32 at the time and the youngest of the busi-
nessmen involved, saw raw opportunity. This deal would help
him move beyond his family’s trade in diamonds to become a
player in the commodities world, cementing him as a dominant
force in the DRC’s economic engine and the country as the
source of some 70 percent of the world’s cobalt supply.
The cobalt that today remains unmined at KOV—one of
Gertler’s largest remaining interests in the DRC—is worth more
T
HE SEARCH OCCUPIES the minds of a growing
army of geologists, software engineers, and data
scientists at KoBold Metals, a U.S. technology firm
focused on accelerating and expanding the explora-
tion process for cobalt and other so-called battery
metals, including nickel. The lack of alternatives to Congolese
cobalt is “a major motivator” for KoBold’s workforce, accord-
ing to cofounder and CEO Kurt House, a Harvard PhD who
wrote his thesis on carbon dioxide capture. “We can’t solve

76 VA N I T Y FA I R
all governance problems of the world, to discover beneath Disko’s stark, frigid, and remote surface will differ greatly in its
we can’t solve corruption and labor, at geology from that found in the lush, heavily populated mining belt of southeastern DRC
least on our own—but what we can cer- and northern Zambia. And the cobalt will likely coexist with much larger quantities
tainly do is diversify supply,” he told me of not just copper but nickel as well. These kinds of ore bodies, known as magmatic
on a video call from Northern Califor- sulfide deposits, can be relatively deep underground and difficult to locate, but once
nia. One location where his firm hopes to identified and extracted, their metal can be easier to process.
find cobalt and nickel is Disko, an island Millions of years ago heat from the earth’s core rose up to the mantle, forming
slightly larger than Delaware and Rhode magma. If that magma reacted with enough sulfur from the surrounding rock layer,
Island combined. It lies off the remote the products—nickel or cobalt sulfides—might separate out as
west coast of Greenland, the ice-riven North Atlantic landmass a more stable form and sink into the keel—the underside—of
with 57,000 residents that President Trump considered trying a larger tube of magma. Ideally, that keel is what House calls
to buy from Denmark, its former colonial power. “chock-full of the really good stuff.” The absence of those met-
“If we diversify supply, if we find a major cobalt discovery als in higher layers of the magma is often a good indication of
in Greenland, we can guarantee that cobalt is going to be pro- a keel’s presence. Disko seemed to show an exciting absence.
duced under extremely high labor standards, and extremely “This is the best Norilsk analog in the world,” House had
high environmental standards, and then you have a choice,” said before the trip, referring to a Siberian deposit site that
House posits. “Apple can then buy its cobalt from us, where it’ll was originally mined by Gulag prisoners under Stalin. Today,
have a really reliable chain of custody, and no corruption issues, a company called Nornickel is the world’s largest producer of
and no child labor issues, and minimal environmental impact.” refined nickel, and its mines in the Norilsk region produced
In 2019 KoBold received backing from one of Silicon Valley’s more than 4 percent of global cobalt in 2021. Over the past
top venture capital funds, Andreessen Horowitz, and further decade, the deposit has helped generate more than $120 billion
firepower from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a multibillion- in revenue. The two largest stakes in it are controlled by promi-
dollar funding vehicle created by Microsoft cofounder Gates nent Russian oligarchs. (One, Oleg Deripaska, was sanctioned
and seeded by a boldface group that includes Bezos, Bloom- by the U.S. in 2018 for his links to the Russian government
berg, Ray Dalio, David Rubenstein, Jack Ma, Reid Hoffman, following Vladimir Putin’s 2014 invasion of Crimea. The U.K.
and Sir Richard Branson. The fundraising ran into the tens of sanctioned Deripaska in March. The other, Vladimir Potanin,
millions of dollars and gave KoBold a four-year financial run- saw around $3 billion of his net worth temporarily wiped the
way for preliminary exploration efforts at more than a dozen day Russia invaded Ukraine in February.)
sites, including in Greenland. A more recent round brought in Among the earliest Western geologists
a further $192.5 million. And the high demand forecasts should help attract future to visit Norilsk, then part of the USSR,
loans and bigger projects, even in one of the world’s most inhospitable locations. was a man named Peter Lightfoot. His
By the time our Air Greenland charter helicopter tilts northwestward at dawn, there’s knowledge is “encyclopedic,” according
only a dusting of the previous day’s seasonal snowstorm, which grounded all flights. to House, who sought him out as one of
Disko Island’s desolate jumble of ridges, valleys, and glacial ice forms a ragged base- KoBold’s earliest hires. A Canadian min-
ball glove facing west to Baffin Bay and the Canadian Arctic beyond. Beside me, Hans ing firm, Falconbridge (subsequently
Jensen points out where a new, longer runway will be blasted from a headland’s small and coincidentally acquired by Glen-
hillock, at the edge of Greenland’s third largest town, Ilulissat. “Useful for bringing core), had asked Lightfoot to evaluate
miners and equipment in,” he explains through his headset. Jen- Disko’s deposits back in the 1990s. At an
sen is the chief operations officer for Bluejay Mining, KoBold’s early KoBold staff meeting, he had wowed his new colleagues by
exploration partner in the far North Atlantic, and has been wait- recalling the Falconbridge data with unfathomable precision—
ing to revisit an abandoned town on Disko called Qullissat that “It was almost like a parlor trick,” House says. But by the time
will serve as a geological exploration camp this summer. A Dane Gertler was beginning his DRC copper-cobalt acquisitions in ear-
with a shaved head and blond-gray goatee, he has spent his adult nest, the then independent Falconbridge had abandoned further
life working in Greenland, first landing on Disko in 1987. exploration on Disko after several drill holes turned up zip. It was
Below us as we cross the channel from the mainland, deep an all too common cost-related decision in the boom-and-bust
anthracite-colored inlets and fjords are occasionally marked mining industry, but it left behind some tantalizing breadcrumbs.
by lighter currents. Steep cliffs of black stratified rock hug the “It has all of these signals, it has all of the right rocks, and it’s
shoreline near Qullissat, their staggered elevation accentuated still not tested,” Lightfoot told me of the territory that is now
by thin lines of packed snow. The abandoned settlement was the center of his focus.
once a prosperous town, pretty enough to feature on a Green- Despite pressure to phase out hydrocarbons from global
landic postage stamp. Now from above it resembles a series of energy supplies, the exploration budgets of oil and gas giants
ragged matchboxes, variously red, yellow, blue, and pewter; continue to dwarf those of even the largest mining firms look-
Jensen identifies a large rust-colored building on a knoll as the ing for battery metals. Consequently, “big mining companies
possible home of a future site manager. The air is bitingly cold, tend to spend more money where they already know something
painful punishment for any exposed skin. A solitary iceberg exists—the chances of success are higher,” explains Lightfoot.
loiters offshore, a stone’s throw from where the old main street With help from Jensen and Bluejay, KoBold’s exploration on
peters out at the beach. Disko this summer will start with airborne surveys employing
In its quest for quality and quantity, the global commodities various technologies to measure the density, magnetism, and
market has rarely cared for its climactic surroundings or distinc- conductivity of larger tracts of land, along with electrical read-
tive color palettes. But the cobalt that KoBold and Bluejay hope ings and geochemical analysis of sledgehammered rocks. What

M AY 2 0 2 2 77
 “IF GOD GAVE US A D I F F E R E N T
PE R I O D I C TA B LE , T H E N T H I N GS
W O U L D B E D I F F E R E N T . BUT IT JUST
IS WHAT IT IS.”

HARBOR’S BAZAAR
A view from the Bluejay
offices overlooking the
growing town of
Ilulissat, Greenland.

78 VA N I T Y FA I R
M AY 2 0 2 2 79
80 VA N I T Y FA I R
 makes KoBold unusual are its proprietary machine-learning
algorithms that can process data on a daily basis, mapping
results into pixelated, predicative atlases that can help geolo-
HOMELAND
gists on the ground determine the next day’s exploration and
As settlement
inhabitants move on to sampling targets. It’s not hard to see the trimmed costs, both
more economically financially and environmentally.
viable areas, the
still-standing homes The technique should solve a “sequential planning problem”
are all that remain. that has long bedeviled mining exploration efforts, according to
Jef Caers, a Belgium-born director of Stanford University’s Cen-
ter for Earth Resources Forecasting, who examines KoBold’s
data as part of his academic research while advising the compa-
ny. “You want to drill with the idea to confirm or to walk away,”
he explains, something House describes as the “speed to kill.”
If there’s no “there” there, KoBold can redeploy quickly with
less impact on the land—and its financial outlays. “A lot of what
we’re doing is trying to create both the culture and the DNA in
the company that will fail fast and fail proudly,” says House.
KoBold’s almost instantaneous feedback loop represents a
start-up approach the mining industry has never fully consid-
ered. The first several dozen employees—“curious, technically
capable people who want to understand the cosmos around
them”—were the cofounders’ top choices for each position,
House says. The Stanford connection also helped attract
Andreessen Horowitz, where general partner Connie Chan
says KoBold’s ability to hire “world-class talent” encouraged
her to invest in a sector that was outside her usual consumer
tech wheelhouse.
As part of her due diligence, Chan and her team examined
the broader battery industry, since the challenges around cobalt
supply have encouraged researchers to experiment with replac-
ing cobalt. But Chan says the literature and experts gave her
reassurance about future demand for cobalt, at least in the
medium term. “A lot of the other experiments around differ-
ent kinds of batteries, I think, have a far, far, far lower chance
of working and for sure not in a time frame that could be com-
mercialized in the next decade,” she says on a call from Los
Angeles, where she lives.
House admits cobalt supply shortages—and price spikes—
could make the metal less affordable, but its properties ensure
it remains the best-performing option. “If God gave us a dif-
ferent periodic table,” he quipped, “then things would be
different. But it just is what it is.” At Apple, cobalt remains a
cathode constituent. But auto manufacturers may see it dif-
ferently. A vehicle battery requires several thousand dollars of
cobalt; a phone handset just a few cents. To electrify the world’s
automotive fleet at current market prices, we need a “tremen-
dous amount” of metals, House acknowledges. According to
KoBold’s calculations, using International Energy Agency esti-
mates, the necessary discoveries of new cobalt, nickel, lithium,
copper, and rare earth elements will be worth around $10 tril-
lion at current prices. But, says House, “we’re staring down the
barrel of catastrophe,” referring to the challenges in the context
of climate change. “Otherwise, you fry.”
“We’re supposed to be going after the biggest, hairiest prob-
lems that are around,” says Eric Toone, the technical lead on
the investment committee at Breakthrough Energy Ventures,
the $2 billion–plus fund established by Gates that has backed
KoBold. “There is almost no way to wrap your head around
what scale means when we get talking about energy,” he says.
“A billion dollars is certainly a significant amount of money,

M AY 2 0 2 2 81
right? But compared to the amount that’s required to do what
we’re trying to do, it’s a drop in the bucket.”
“There’s no other opportunity like the one that’s provided by
POWDER ROOM
people like Mr. Gates,” Toone concludes—which is why “you
Beneath the ridges
really don’t want to fuck this up.” of Disko Island is a
With a staff that’s roughly 70 percent PhDs, Breakthrough potential wealth of
battery metal deposits.
aims to back businesses it thinks will more quickly reduce
carbon emissions. In 2019 it began vetting KoBold, first by
gauging its potential to reduce emissions—the minimum is
“at least half a gigaton per year of CO2,” says Toone—then by
scrutinizing its technical feasibility, leadership, and business
plan. Breakthrough invested in the same early funding round
as Andreessen Horowitz, while Norwegian state-owned oil
and gas giant Equinor subsequently purchased a stake. More
recently, KoBold’s “machine prospector” has intrigued one of
the mining world’s traditional behemoths, BHP, and the two
are now partnering to explore a swath of Australia equivalent
to roughly 6 percent of the country’s entire landmass. But rath-
er than just lease out its software like a contracted supplier,
KoBold’s famous backers have helped it financially to coinvest
with other mining businesses, as it has done with Bluejay in
Greenland. “I don’t want to get paid a few million dollars in
service fees,” says House, hypothesizing. “I want to own half
of the $10 billion asset we discovered together.”

“ T H E R E ’ S NO OTHER OPPORTUNIT Y
L I K E T H E O N E T H AT’ S PROV I D E D BY
P E O P L E L I K E M R . G A T E S . Y O U R E A L LY
DON’T WANT TO FUCK THIS UP.”

T
HE HISTORY OF the KOV pit near Kolwezi is crucial to
an understanding of the current stakes. After touring
the site back in 2006, Rawlinson and his J.P. Mor-
gan colleagues were whisked in battered SUVs to
the Pink Palace, the only guesthouse in town. Run
by a Belgian couple, it offered mattresses resting on concrete
slabs. During Belgium’s colonial rule that ended in 1960 and
for some time after, KOV and the nearby town had helped drive
the DRC’s export economy. But after decades of underinvest-
ment by a state-owned company, most of the region’s pits and
underground mines had flooded or fallen apart, equipment
had rusted, workers had gone unpaid. Rawlinson had only just
taken the reins at J.P. Morgan’s European mining team when
one of Gertler’s business partners approached the bank for help
financing the KOV pit. Rawlinson was astounded by the “indus-
trial archaeology site” they encountered, “a forgotten hellhole”
without even a reliable power grid.
As for Gertler, the bankers knew few details about the ori-
gins of his ownership stake, just that it represented his first
substantial foray into mining metals. Much of his prior expe-
rience lay in the diamond sector, and they had heard he was
close to the country’s youthful president, Joseph Kabila. Gertler
and his partners had chosen the Isle of Man, off the English
coast, to register KOV’s new holding company. They named
it Nikanor, for a semi-mythic figure who miraculously trans-
ported a pair of copper-alloy doors from Africa to Jerusalem
for its Holy Temple. During the mine C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 9 3

82 VA N I T Y FA I R
M AY 2 0 2 2 83
CONFESSIONS
In the 1980s and 1990s

DAVID RUGGERIO
was a rising star
of French cooking in
New York and a
proto–celebrity chef
with cookbooks and TV
shows to his name. But
all that success in the
kitchen belied the double
life he was leading as
a rank-and-file member
of the Mob. Decades
after his fall from grace
and mysterious
disappearance from the
food world, Ruggerio
is coming clean

BY
GABRIEL SHERMAN

PHOTOGRAPHS BY
GILLIAN LAUB

OPEN KITCHEN
David Ruggerio in his Long Island
home last winter.

84 VA N I T Y FA I R
 OF A MOB CHEF

M AY 2 0 2 2 85

B
BY THE TIME he was 30, David Ruggerio had helmed kitchens
at the finest French restaurants of 1990s New York: La Cara-
velle, Maxim’s, and Le Chantilly. A Brooklyn-born boxer turned
chef, Ruggerio cooked for presidents past and future (Richard
Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump);
Wall Street titans (Stephen Schwarzman, Lloyd Blankfein, and
Jamie Dimon); media moguls (Michael Bloomberg and Martha
Stewart); Hollywood royalty (Sophia Loren); and actual royalty
(Prince Albert of Monaco). The New York Times food critic Bryan
Miller twice awarded Ruggerio’s restaurants three stars. New
York magazine’s Gael Greene hailed his cooking at Le Chantilly
as a “miracle on 57th Street.” PBS aired his series Little Italy With
David Ruggerio, and Food Network gave him a prime-time show,
Ruggerio to Go. With his fuhgeddaboudit persona and wiseguy
quips—“Ya know what I mean?”—Ruggerio was rocketing toward
Emeril Lagasse–level stardom.
But it all blew up on the afternoon of Thursday, July 2, 1998,
when police entered Le Chantilly with a search warrant. The
Manhattan district attorney charged Ruggerio with defrauding a
credit card company out of $190,000 by inflating diners’ tips—in
one instance by as much as $30,000. Ruggerio initially denied
the allegations, but facing 15 years in prison, he pleaded guilty to
attempted grand larceny in exchange for five years’ probation and
an agreement to pay $100,000 in restitution. Within months, Food
Network canceled his show, his restaurants closed, and he filed for
personal bankruptcy. Then he disappeared from the food world.
“Overnight it was gone,” Ruggerio recalled one afternoon last fall
as he sautéed onions in the cluttered kitchen of his modest home
at the end of a Long Island cul-de-sac. Now 59, his refrigerator-
size body and T-bone thick hands made him appear too big for the
cramped room. He was preparing an ambitious lunch menu: goat
cheese terrine, mignon of lobster, wood-fired roast chicken, and
crème brûlée. An open laptop rested on a small desk next to the
dining table. It’s where Ruggerio has been writing his memoirs,
which recount his rise to the highest echelon of the New York res-
taurant world but also reveal the secret he kept along the way: He
was for decades—including the entirety of his cooking career—a
working member of the Gambino Mafia family.
“I was living two lives,” Ruggerio told me.
I was introduced to Ruggerio in the spring of 2021 by friends
who said he was ready to go on the record about his years in the
86 VA N I T Y FA I R
Mob. Ruggerio’s operatic rise and fall sounded like one of the
most improbable career arcs I’d heard about—one part Goodfel-
las, another Kitchen Confidential.
Over the summer and fall, I interviewed Ruggerio about his life
of cooking and crime—the first time he’s spoken about his time in
the underworld to a journalist. The name David Ruggerio is itself
an invention. According to his baptismal certificate, he was born
Sabatino Antonino Gambino on June 26, 1962. Ruggerio’s Sicilian
father, Saverio Erasmo Gambino, was a cousin of Carlo Gambino,
the infamous “boss of bosses,” who ruled New York’s five Mafia
families in the 1960s and ’70s. In the 1980s, Ruggerio joined a
Brooklyn crew run by Gambino capo Daniel Marino. Ruggerio
said his own Mob résumé includes heroin dealing, truck hijack-
ings, loan-sharking, bookmaking, extortion, and participating in
several notorious gangland murders. He said he steered lucra-
tive restaurant supply contracts to Mob-connected vendors and
bribed union officials to keep his kitchens nonunion.
In recent years, though, he said he was motivated by feelings
of guilt and betrayal to violate his sacred vow to uphold omertà.
In 2014, Ruggerio’s 27-year-old son, an aspiring gangster, died
from an apparent drug overdose. Ruggerio felt responsible. He
was deeply wounded and enraged that Marino didn’t show up
at the funeral: “When Danny didn’t come, that’s when I said,
‘Fuck this. I’m done,’ ” Ruggerio told me. (Though his old capo
was under house arrest at the time, Ruggerio insisted such con-
ditions weren’t exactly encumbrances for the guys he knew. “A
wake was a reason that his parole officer would have okayed in
a split second,” Ruggerio said.)
During our conversations, Ruggerio toggled between the
rarefied backdrop of gourmet cuisine and unspeakable street
violence—some of which he was committing himself. His stories
provided a singular glimpse of late-20th-century New York, the
twilight years of both French cuisine and the Mob in the city,
when The New York Times credibly described La Caravelle as
an “elegant Midtown temple to French gastronomy” and fed-
eral authorities were systematically dismantling the New York
families, case by case. It was also a time before everyone carried
a camera in their pocket. Rich and famous New Yorkers could
be their unvarnished selves in public, and no one outside the
dining room would know about it. Ruggerio’s restaurants were
stages for some truly outrageous episodes.
In the author’s note of his unpublished memoir, Ruggerio
writes: “Everything within these pages is accurate…. There was
no need to embellish; the truths were horrific enough.” At times,
though, I questioned if he was exaggerating for dramatic effect,
as wiseguys have been known to do. I cross-checked names and
dates he cited with contemporaneous newspaper accounts,
public records, court filings, and personal photographs. I also
spoke to former FBI agents and Ruggerio’s former employees,
who confirmed mobsters were frequently hanging around his
restaurants. Bruce Mouw, who ran the FBI’s Gambino squad in
the 1980s and ’90s, confirmed Le Chantilly was one of Danny
Marino’s haunts. “We knew it was a hangout,” he said. Mouw’s
successor on the Gambino squad, Phil Scala, confirmed that
Ruggerio was a member of Marino’s crew. “Danny would tout
Ruggerio and invite all his friends to his restaurants,” Scala said.
“When you called about David, my first thought was, is this the
FBI calling?” said Dawn DuBois, a former corporate attorney who
worked at Le Chantilly. “I remember we once owed money to a
meat company. A guy walked into the restaurant with a baseball
bat and said, ‘You better pay, or I’m coming back and using this.’
I’m this nice girl from Brooklyn thinking, What in the hell?”
Ruggerio was candid during our conversations, sometimes
shockingly so. But members of organized crime are, not surpris-
ingly, just as organized about what they admit to—and what
they don’t. As he detailed the shadow life he led while rising
through the city’s finest kitchens, Ruggerio openly discussed
brutal crimes he committed with mobsters who are dead. He was
circumspect, though, when I asked about more recent activities.
Ruggerio was adamant that while he quit the Mob, he didn’t
want to get any current Gambino members in trouble. “I will
not cooperate against anyone. That isn’t why I did this,” he told
me. Over lunch, I asked if he was worried that he could implicate
himself or become a target of the Mob for going public. “I’ll let
the chips fall where they may. After I lost my son, I knew that
this has to end with me,” he said.
R
UGGERIO DESCRIBED HIS Brooklyn childhood as a
series of Dickensian tragedies. Before he was born out
of wedlock, his father, Saverio, a prolific heroin traf-
ficker, was deported from Brooklyn to Sicily and jailed
in Palermo’s infamous Ucciardone prison. When
Ruggerio was about four, he says he found his infant sister dead
in her crib. “Her coffin was so tiny, we didn’t need a hearse,” Rug-
gerio recalled. A year later he watched his pregnant mother die
in bed during an asthma attack: “The last memory of my mother
was watching them carry her lifeless body out of the house.”
After Ruggerio’s father went to jail, Ruggerio’s mother married
one of his friends, who agreed to adopt her son but demanded he
change his first and last names. “He beat me every chance he had,”
Ruggerio said of the man. Ruggerio took David after his mother’s
favorite movie, the 1962 psych-ward love story David and Lisa.
(His sister took Lisa.) Ruggerio hated his adoptive father’s last
name and later took Ruggerio, the Americanized spelling of his
grandmother’s maiden name, Ruggiero. (Her nephew, Angelo
Ruggiero, would become Gambino boss John Gotti’s confidant.)
The adoptive father could not be reached for comment.
When his mother died, Ruggerio’s adoptive father sent David
and Lisa to live with their maternal grandparents in Park Slope
and, later, the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn, a middle-class
enclave where Barbra Streisand and Rudy Giuliani grew up a gen-
eration prior. “My mother’s family was as straight as an arrow,”
RUGGERIO WAS CANDID DURING OUR CONVERSATIONS,
SOMETIMES SHOCKINGLY SO. BUT MEMBERS OF ORGANIZED
CRIME ARE, NOT SURPRISINGLY, JUST AS ORGANIZED ABOUT
WHAT THEY ADMIT TO—AND WHAT THEY DON’T.
Ruggerio recalled. (According to public records, his grandfather
had been an administrator for the New York City Department of
Corrections.) But by the 1960s, East Flatbush had become one
of the city’s roughest neighborhoods. “It was a different time in
Brooklyn. There were so many murders,” Ruggerio recalled. Rug-
gerio said his grandmother made the kitchen an oasis. “To watch
her hand-make pasta, knead bread, or simply jar vegetables was a
joy. Everything she did was with such care and precision,” he said.
Grim reality soon intruded. Not long after the move, Rugge-
rio’s grandfather had a heart attack. Ruggerio said he found him
collapsed in the bathtub. Ruggerio believes his early experiences
with death stripped him of his ability to feel empathy. “I learned
early that I had a very cold side to me,” he said. The toughness
was also a survival tactic. By elementary school Ruggerio had
started his first hustles. He ran a three-card monte game and
soon graduated to selling stolen Christmas trees, fireworks, and
Jordache jeans for local wiseguys. He honed his fighting skills
at a local gym owned by the famous Jewish boxer Izzy Zerling.
Around this time, Ruggerio recorded his first of multiple arrests
for gambling and fighting. “Did I want to be a gangster? Never
one day did I say to myself, Yeah, I want to be a gangster when I grow
up,” he recalled. “All I wanted to do was survive the next day.”
Ruggerio fell in with one of his father’s trusted lieutenants
named Egidio “Ernie Boy” Onorato. “Ernie was younger than
my father and weighed about 155 pounds, but he was the most
ruthless gangster I ever saw,” Ruggerio said. Onorato died in
1998, which liberated Ruggerio to talk about his mentor. Accord-
ing to Ruggerio, wiseguys nicknamed Ernie “M&M,” short for
“murder and mayhem.” Ruggerio recalled one night when he
was 11 years old that he accompanied Onorato, then 23, to the
Alley Cat bar on the Lower East Side and waited on the street
while Onorato went in and lured a federal informant named
Anthony Finn to an alley. Ruggerio said he watched Onorato
beat Finn to death and then shoot him and stuff a packet of coke
in his mouth. “We loaded the body into a car and drove it over
to Avenue A and Ninth Street,” Ruggerio said. (On March 4,
1974, The New York Times reported: “A 33-year-old Bronx man
was found dead in his car on the Lower East Side with a bullet
wound in the back of the head shortly before 11 a.m. in what the
police said was a gangland-style slaying. The police identified
him as Anthony Finn…”) Onorato and Ruggerio were never pub-
licly linked to the crime. Two men, Louis Santos and Salvatore
Scudiero, were later convicted for conspiracy to commit murder.
In 1976, when Ruggerio was 13, his father was released from
prison and returned to Brooklyn. Ruggerio was on edge having
M AY 2 0 2 2 87
 “I DID THINGS WHEN I WAS PUSHED THAT I’M
NOT PROUD OF. BUT TO REALLY, TRULY BE IN THE STREETS,
YOU GOTTA HAVE A BLACK HEART…”
to explain that he gave up the Gambino name. “When I told him
about my name, he just said, ‘We’ll take care of that.’ He never
called me David. It was always Sabatino,” Ruggerio recalled.
Saverio opened a fish market and a car service in nearby Mill
Basin, Brooklyn, and put Ruggerio to work. “He did loan-sharking
out of the car service and brought in heroin to the fish market,”
Ruggerio recalled as he showed me the storefronts on a hazy July
afternoon. “They were bringing in sardines, squid, and octopus
frozen in 2.2-pound boxes,” he said. “In the center [of the fish]
was pure heroin. When it landed here, the dogs couldn’t smell it.”
Ruggerio worked out of another one of his father’s front
companies: a dog grooming store. To make some extra money,
Ruggerio said he started dealing exotic animals in the back.
One Christmas, Ruggerio said Gambino capo Frank Piccolo
(also known as Frank Lanza), who was famously indicted in
1980 for conspiring to extort singer Wayne Newton, bought a
monkey named Bongo for his grandchildren. Soon after, Pic-
colo demanded Ruggerio take him back. “I let that cocksucker
out of the cage, and now all he does is sit in the corner, shit, and
throw it at me!” Ruggerio remembered Piccolo screaming over
the phone. Ruggerio said he and a friend took the monkey back
and let him loose into the Prospect Park Zoo late one night.
As Ruggerio prepared to start high school in the summer of
1977, his father took him to Sicily to be made. Ruggerio said
Santo Inzerillo, the brother of Palermo boss Totuccio Inzerillo,
presided over the ceremony in the basement of a café in Castel-
lammare del Golfo, his family’s ancestral village. A man used a
dirty needle to tattoo Ruggerio’s right shoulder with a fiery cross
image. The tattoo includes the words Uomo de Fiducia (Italian
for “man of trust”).
S
HORTLY AFTER FATHER and son returned to Brooklyn,
Saverio was arrested again and deported to an Italian
jail. Before going away, Saverio assigned Onorato
to look after Ruggerio. By this point, Ruggerio was
participating in Ernie’s brutality. Ruggerio said that
in March 1978, he helped Onorato torture and kill a 56-year-
old Genovese and Colombo associate named Pasquale “Paddy
Mac” Macchirole at a tire repair garage in Yonkers, New York.
Ruggerio said they left Macchirole’s corpse in a car trunk in
Brooklyn. (On March 24, 1978, The New York Times reported:
“The police found Mr. Macchirole’s body yesterday after his
88 VA N I T Y FA I R
family received an anonymous phone call telling them where
to look. He had been missing for three weeks.”)
Onorato rewarded teenage Ruggerio handsomely. “Ernie had
a house down in Fort Lauderdale. It had a sunken living room
and in the middle was a big coffee table. There was always a
quarter or half kilo of coke piled up on it. Ernie used to have girls
over and everybody was naked. For me, sex at 14 and 15 wasn’t a
big deal,” Ruggerio said. (Public records show Onorato’s name
associated with an address on Sea Island Drive in Fort Lauder-
dale.) Ruggerio said during his teenage years he earned $50,000
from drug dealing—about $230,000 in today’s dollars—which
he hid in the attic of his grandmother’s home. “When I was 16,
I sent my grandmother and my sister on a monthlong tour of
Italy,” he recalled.
The thrills didn’t last, however. In the summer of 1980, Rug-
gerio’s friends started dying. Ruggerio said the first to go was
a 22-year-old aspiring stand-up comic named Joey “Skeetch”
Cannizzaro. “Skeetch was a wannabe. He was fucking crazy to
be a gangster,” Ruggerio said. On the way to meet Onorato one
night, Ruggerio noticed that Cannizzaro was limping. “He tells
me he had fallen in love with a Jewish girl, and she made him
get circumcised. He showed me a gold chain around his neck.
On it there looked like there was a dried-up piece of chicken. It
was foreskin. I said, ‘Get rid of that fucking thing! And whatever
you do, don’t tell Ernie.’ ”
They drove to a burned-out building in East New York, where
Onorato sent Cannizzaro out for Chinese food. “Everybody’s
grabbing cartons off the table. Skeetch leans over and his fucking
gold chain falls out. And Ernie goes, ‘Oh! What the fuck is that?’
I put my hands over my head because Skeetch starts telling the
story of getting circumcised! I’m looking at Ernie and there was
no expression on his face, nothing. Against the chair there was a
lead pipe. Ernie picked up the lead pipe and he went berserk. He
beat this kid to the point where you couldn’t recognize him any-
more. Ernie whirled around and I thought, I’m getting killed
next. He put the pipe an inch from my face. It was dripping blood.
He says, ‘You brought this fucking guy around! He’s your fuck-
ing problem. So we started wrapping Skeetch’s body in an old
rug. That’s when I heard Skeetch moaning. Turns out he was
C O U R T E S Y O F DAV I D R U G G E R I O .
alive.” Ruggerio said he weighed Skeetch’s body down with lead
window sashes and dumped him in the water near Sheepshead
Bay. (According to Social Security Administration death records,
Cannizzaro was 22 when he died in June 1980.)
In July 1981, Ruggerio’s best friend, a 21-year-old bodybuilder
named Caesar Juliani, was found dead, shot in the head, behind
 the steering wheel of a car parked in Brooklyn. Ruggerio believed
Onorato killed Juliani on the orders of a Bronx wiseguy whose
girlfriend Juliani was sleeping with. (According to public records,
Juliani was buried on July 16, 1981, in Suffolk County, New York.)
Not long after Juliani’s murder, Ruggerio said his girlfriend
overdosed and drowned at Jones Beach on Long Island. Her
friends told Ruggerio she took pills Onorato had given her. Rug-
gerio believed Onorato had given her pure heroin because he
was angry about how much time Ruggerio was spending with
her. “That’s when I decided I was going to kill him,” Ruggerio
said. Ruggerio said he planned to kidnap his mentor and murder
him in the back of a stolen Good Humor ice cream truck.
But before he executed the plot, a Gambino soldier named
PRESSURE Peter “Little Pete” Tambone intervened. “Little Pete was prob-
COOKER ably about four foot six. He goes, ‘I know this guy Ernie is with
Ruggerio in his
teenage boxing your father, but let’s be honest, he’s U gira diment,’ a Sicilian term
days; in the kitchen for ‘going crazy.’ He then says, ‘You’re going to kill him and go
at Maxim’s while to jail, or he’s going to kill you, or you’re both going to die. On
hosting the “meal
of the century” with Friday you come to Grotta D’Oro.’ ”
chefs Gray Kunz, Grotta D’Oro was a popular Italian restaurant in Sheepshead
Michel Richard, and
Jean Louis-Palladin; Bay. On Friday nights, Gambino capo Carmine Lombardozzi
with Jacques Pépin conducted business there out of his Rolls-Royce parked out
at the James Beard
House; on a PBS front. Lombardozzi was possibly the Gambino family’s big-
cooking show set. gest earner. He specialized in “pump and dump” stock market
fraud and loan-sharking. (His nickname was “The King of Wall
Street.”) When Ruggerio showed up, Little Pete waved him over.
Lombardozzi whispered to Ruggerio that he would be working
for him. The message was clear: Ruggerio couldn’t touch Ernie
Onorato, but Onorato couldn’t touch him either. “Carmine was
the 900-pound gorilla that Ernie wasn’t going to fuck with. And
from that day on, I was one of Carmine’s guys,” Ruggerio said.
The new affiliation came with a requirement. Lombardozzi
expected that members of his crew would find legitimate jobs to
deflect law enforcement attention. Ruggerio had dim prospects.
He was recently expelled from high school and had a criminal
record. He did, though, have a secret passion: cooking. If he had
to get a job, then he wanted to be a chef.

D
ESPITE HIS HERITAGE, Ruggerio had no desire to
work in an Italian kitchen. “Italian restaurants
were junk in those days. They were red-sauce
places. You know, glorified pizzerias,” he said. In
the early 1980s, French cuisine dominated the New
York dining scene, and that’s the food Ruggerio aspired to cook.
“I went to the Kings Plaza mall where there was a B. Dalton
bookstore,” he recalled. “I bought all the French cookbooks by
Julia Child, Auguste Escoffier, and Jacques Pépin,” he recalled.
“I started memorizing French terms. I consumed the New York
Times food section and Jay Jacobs’s restaurant reviews in back
issues of Gourmet magazine. After all that reading, I knew what
the top restaurants were.”
One of them was La Caravelle. The menu had barely changed
since the restaurant opened in 1960. It featured classics such as
quenelles de brochet, striped bass Dugléré, and oeufs à la neige. “I
walked in, and it was like something out of a movie,” Ruggerio
recalled. “The kitchen was in the basement of the Shoreham
Hotel. There were all these Frenchmen in pristine white toques

M AY 2 0 2 2 89
and big hats running around. There was no English being spo-
ken.” After lunch service one day, Ruggerio approached the chef,
Roger Fessaguet. “Before I could get three words out, though,
he goes, ‘Non! I’m not hiring. Leave!’ Right then, I decided this
is where I was going to work.”
In the spring of 1981, La Caravelle hired Ruggerio as an entrem-
etier, a junior cook who mainly works with vegetables and soups.
There was a mind-numbing amount of information to absorb
at a breakneck pace in a language he barely understood. Chefs
would yell out an order for consommé Tosca and another for
consommé vert-pré, and he’d have to immediately know the dif-
ference between one (chicken consommé thickened with tapioca
and garnished with julienned carrot and quenelles of chicken,
truffles, and foie gras) and the other (chicken consommé gar-
nished with finely cut vegetables and fresh sorrel). He kept the
book Le Répertoire de la Cuisine at his station and feverishly flipped
through it when he got lost, which was often. “Those first couple of
services were pure hell,” he recalled. “They screamed at me all the
time. But the more they screamed, the more I wanted it. I knew
that if I stayed in the street, I was going to get killed or go to jail.”
Ruggerio quickly understood that a French kitchen was
not dissimilar to La Cosa Nostra. Both were governed by rigid
hierarchies and Old World codes. Transgressors were punished
harshly. “At La Caravelle they would inspect your drawer twice
a day, and if your knives weren’t clean and sharp, they threw
everything on the floor,” Ruggerio said. He respected how the
imperious owner, Robert Meyzen, enforced the dining room’s
dress code like a hardened don. “He once didn’t let Jackie Ken-
nedy in because she was wearing pants,” Ruggerio recalled.
“Another time, Ralph Lauren showed up wearing one of those
Western leather bolo ties. Meyzen told him he had to wear a tie.
Ralph said, ‘I am wearing one.’ Meyzen pointed at it and said,
‘No, you tie horses up with that!’ He threw him out.” (Lauren
did not respond to a request for comment.)
W
HEN RUGGERIO WASN’T in the kitchen,
he was knocking heads in the street. “I
would often go with guys to small stock
brokerages that Carmine had and lean on
brokers,” Ruggerio said. Ruggerio intend-
ed to compartmentalize his two lives, and he never told anyone
at La Caravelle who he ran with. “He would just tell me about
RUGGERIO QUICKLY UNDERSTOOD THAT A FRENCH KITCHEN
WAS NOT DISSIMILAR TO LA COSA NOSTRA.
BOTH WERE GOVERNED BY RIGID HIERARCHIES AND OLD
WORLD CODES. TRANSGRESSORS WERE PUNISHED HARSHLY.
90 VA N I T Y FA I R
CLEARING THE TABLE
Ruggerio said his son’s death led him to leave organized crime:
“I knew that this has to end with me.”
where he grew up in Brooklyn and his past being a boxer,” said
former La Caravelle cook Fabrizzio Salerni, who now works
for Daniel Boulud.
Violence, though, wasn’t something Ruggerio could switch
on and off—it nearly ended his nascent cooking career.
One night a few months after landing the job at La Caravelle,
Ruggerio said he was mugged on the subway in Brooklyn. In
the ensuing fight, Ruggerio grabbed the attacker’s knife
and stabbed him in the arm and stomach. “I was out of con-
trol. I got on top of the guy and assaulted him,” Ruggerio
recalled. Ruggerio claimed self-defense, but the Brooklyn D.A.,
seeing Ruggerio’s arrest record, charged him with attempted
murder. Ruggerio remembered spending 10 days in jail on
Rikers Island until, he says, Lombardozzi’s 40-year-old nephew,
Danny Marino, bailed him out. Ruggerio said Marino instructed
him to get out of town.
Ruggerio returned to La Caravelle and begged Fessaguet
to find him a cooking job in France. “He must have seen the
emotion in my eyes,” Ruggerio said. Fessaguet sent Ruggerio
to the Riviera to train under famed chef Jacques Maximin at
the Michelin two-star restaurant Le Chantecler in Nice’s famed
Hotel Negresco. The French press dubbed the five-foot-five
Maximin the “Bonaparte of the Ovens.” Ruggerio found that his
new boss lived up to the moniker. Maximin disdained American
cooks (and Americans in general). “He said American prod-
ucts were shit, there was no American cuisine, and American
chefs were all shit,” Ruggerio recalled. But Ruggerio’s outer-
borough background amused Maximin. “You are not American,
you’re from Brookleeen!” Maximin once joked. (Maximin did not
respond to a request for comment.) After a year, Maximin sent
Ruggerio to complete his apprenticeship with some of France’s
top chefs. First stop was Roger Vergé, who had mentored Max-
imin, Boulud, and Alain Ducasse at his Michelin three-star
restaurant Le Moulin de Mougins, near Cannes. From there it
was on to Michel Guérard, who pioneered nouvelle cuisine at
his spa restaurant in the Pyrenees. Ruggerio’s final destination
was Paul Bocuse’s legendary restaurant L’Auberge du Pont de
Collonges, on the outskirts of Lyon.
Meanwhile, Lombardozzi’s crew cleaned up Ruggerio’s legal
problems. “Guys visited my attacker at his mother’s Brooklyn
home and convinced him to not cooperate with the investigation,”
Ruggerio said. When I asked what they did, Ruggerio responded,
“Let’s just say they spoke the English this guy understood.”
In the fall of 1983, Ruggerio returned to New York. La Cara-
velle hired him back as a saucier, which was one step below
sous-chef. He was 21. I asked Ruggerio why he didn’t walk away
from the Mob when his food career was taking off. “I had a ter-
rible need to be wanted and respected. And I never felt like I
belonged in the legitimate food world. In the street was where
I felt respected,” he said. “I can’t tell you the points I earned
when I got [then Gambino boss] Paul Castellano a table at La
Caravelle by telling them he was my uncle.”
Ruggerio’s straight job gained the attention of Marino, an
ascendant figure in the Gambinos. “Danny loved food. You
never saw him in a jogging suit. He didn’t wear jewelry. His
thing was beautiful suits and high-end restaurants. He was a
different kind of gangster,” Ruggerio said. Marino took over
Lombardozzi’s crew and began inviting Ruggerio to join his
inner circle for a weekly Sunday meal of meatballs Marino
hosted at his house in Brooklyn. “Danny was so damn proud
of his meatballs,” Ruggerio said. Ruggerio recalled Marino giv-
ing him a printed copy of his recipe. At the bottom of the page
was a warning: “This paper will self-destruct if this recipe falls
into unfriendly hands!!! Good luck!!!” One time, Ruggerio said,
after infamous Gambino capo John Gotti criticized Marino’s
meatballs, Marino didn’t speak to Gotti for months.
W
HEN RUGGERIO RETURNED to La Caravelle,
the nouvelle cuisine revolution was sweep-
ing New York’s French restaurants. The
trend toward lighter, inventive cooking
created previously unfathomable opportu-
nities for young American chefs. In 1984, 32-year-old Michael
Romano took over La Caravelle from Fessaguet. Romano
named Ruggerio his sous-chef. A few years later, Danny Meyer
poached Romano to oversee the kitchen at Union Square Café.
At 26, Ruggerio became La Caravelle’s executive chef.
The Gambino family was also in the midst of a revolution.
Nine days before Christmas in 1985, Castellano was gunned
down in front of Sparks Steak House in midtown Manhattan.
The unsanctioned hit on the family’s boss was ordered by
Gotti. “I’ll never forget. I was at La Caravelle. I got the call
and ran over [to Sparks]. There were cops and photographers
everywhere,” Ruggerio recalled. C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 0 0
M AY 2 0 2 2 91

All in the Family
CON TIN U ED F ROM PAGE 58 her words,
“fabulous,” as well as “radical and fierce…
something to reinforce and reunite the
LGBTQ+ with my kind of feminism—inter-
sectional feminism, of course….”
Kendalle is also a member of the Poetry
Brothel, a roving risqué literary burlesque,
where she has recited her poetry under the
name Ophelia Up. According to its web-
site, the Poetry Brothel “strives to promote
empowered sexuality practices and radically
open artistic expression.”
On December 12, 2018, @Freudian.slit/
Kendalle Aubra posted a portrait she had
painted in oil of Gordon (though she didn’t
identify him). “Today, my father…lost his
very best friend in the world,” she wrote.
“They’d known each other since they were
about 12…. I loved Bill, and I still do. Today
hurts so badly and I’m so tired of having
feelings.” (Bill Newsom had passed away
at age 84.)
Two years later, the sudden death of John
shook the family. Earlier in his life he had
struggled with drug addiction, but, at 52, he
was leading a full life and had become an
attentive parent to his daughter, Ivy, then 25.
After his body was found in a neat hotel room
in San Antonio, the coroner determined that
he died accidentally, due to “cardiomyopathy
and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
[COPD] complicated by fentanyl toxicity.”
Just after his loss, Kendalle again
expressed her emotions on Instagram:
“Two days ago…one of my brothers died…I
find myself very affected by this loss…. It’s
been scary being the bastard daughter of our
father and his mistress in a family that’s so
notorious. I hid my truth, but never because
I hated you guys. I’m sorry. I promise to take
care of your daughter from here on out….”
Within days, she updated the name on her
profile. She was now Kendalle Getty.
A YE AR F I L L E Dwith considerable grief
ensued for the entire family. (Ann died of a
heart attack in September 2020.) But 2021
concluded with joyful events: On a vacation
in Greece, Kendalle’s boyfriend, Johnny Latu,
a musician, proposed to her at the Acropolis,
and John’s daughter, Ivy Love Getty, married
her fiancé, Tobias Engel, a photographer, in
spectacular style.
92 VA N I T Y FA I R
Capping three days of epic celebrations
that began with a ball at the Palace of Fine
Arts, where Earth, Wind & Fire performed,
the couple was joined in holy matrimony
under the stately dome of San Francisco City
Hall. When the ceremony began at 6 p.m. on
Saturday, November 6, Nancy Pelosi, the
officiant, was resplendent in a gold Giorgio
Armani pantsuit. Just before midnight the
previous evening, the Speaker of the House,
under the rotunda of the Capitol, had signed
the hard-fought, historic $1.8 trillion Biparti-
san Infrastructure Framework. “I hightailed
it out of there for Ivy, who I’ve known since
she was a baby,” Pelosi told guests.
Ivy’s spectacular gown, rumored to
cost $500,000, featured four layers—the
outermost one resembling fragments of
a mirror—behind which trailed a 16-foot
embroidered veil. It was the handiwork of one
of her grandmother’s favorite designers, John
Galliano, who also dressed the bridal party,
including maid of honor Anya Taylor-Joy.
At the gala dinner that followed at the
Getty mansion, Pelosi stayed past midnight,
mixing with hundreds of Ivy and Tobias’s
young friends and relatives. “It was all so
inclusive—you could let your freak flag fly,”
said one of them.
Ivy’s relatives who had flown up from Los
Angeles have certainly done their part to sup-
port inclusivity.
Siblings August Getty and Natalia “Nats”
Getty, and Nats’s spouse, Gigi Gorgeous,
have become high-profile advocates for gay
and transgender rights. But it was August and
Nats’s mother, Ariadne (a daughter of Paul
Jr.), who led the way. While she had rejoiced
in her children’s identities when they each
came out to her as gay, she grew fearful as she
saw an increase in discrimination and vio-
lence against LGBTQ+ people after Donald
Trump got elected. Previously a shy philan-
thropist, Ariadne journeyed to the World
Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland,
in January 2018—accompanied by August,
Nats, and Gigi—to announce her response:
a $15 million gift to GLAAD, the LGBTQ+
media-monitoring organization.
In her children’s early years, Ariadne felt
a need to protect them from the weight that
came with the Getty name. Brought up using
their father’s surname, Williams, they were
not told anything about their mother’s family.
Even on school field trips to the J. Paul Getty
Museum, they were unaware they had any
connection to it. It was only around 2000,
when the family relocated for a decade to
England, where August and Nats would be
attending schools with their cousins, that their
mother told them about their Getty blood.
As young adults, both siblings chose to
use the Getty surname, and each launched
a fashion line. (In 2021, Nats adopted the
male pronoun when he announced his gen-
der transition.)
The extravagant custom creations of
August Getty Atelier have been worn by the
likes of Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus,
and others. “I just want to make the world a
shinier place—one sequin at a time,” he says.
With his online company, Strike Oil, Nats
produces hoodies, trucker hats, and other
staples of streetwear to which he gives an
arty, luxe spin. In choosing the name, Nats
paid homage to his great-grandfather, who
stated that the key to success was “Rise early,
work hard, and strike oil.” “It’s one of my
favorite rules to live by. I have it tattooed on
my right ankle,” Nats says.
Gigi—growing up as Gregory Lazzarato
near Toronto—found her path forward in
high school when she discovered the power
of cosmetics, which led her to make video
makeup tutorials and post them on YouTube.
When she moved to L.A. in 2014, she
was already a tall, striking blond with full
breasts but still in the transition process,
which involved years of hormone treatments
and surgeries, all of which she documented
on social media. In the process, she gained
some 8 million followers across YouTube
and other platforms, and a reputation as a
trans role model.
Despite wealth and privilege, Nats had
struggled. “I never realized how ill I truly
was,” he reflected in 2020. “Between drugs,
eating disorders, and mental health issues,
I honestly felt I was knocking on death’s
door…. I returned to a life of drugs, darkness
and self-hate….”
When he met Gigi in Paris in 2016, where
both were walking in one of August’s fashion
shows, he saw “this amazing bright light.”
Two years later, Nats proposed, once
again in France. As their helicopter landed
at Chateau Vaux-le-Vicomte, which Nats
had rented for the occasion, WILL YOU
MARRY ME? appeared in large lights. Cue
the fireworks. The following year, 200 for-
mally clad guests attended their wedding
in Montecito.
The pandemic was a contemplative time
for Nats; in January 2021, he posted a photo
of himself bare-chested. His breasts had
been removed. “I am transgender, nonbi-
nary,” he wrote. All his life, he explained, he
had felt “not in synch with the body I was
born with….”
“I didn’t fall in love with Nats because of
his gender, I fell in love with the person he
is,” said Gigi shortly afterward, when, at the
same time, she announced her new status
as pansexual.
Then Nats got back to business. With its
new “Oil Spill tee,” Strike Oil continued to
attract buzz (Machine Gun Kelly was spotted
wearing one).
“Pretty much since we came out the
womb, we’ve been who we are,” Nats
summed up about his family. “And no one
was going to tell us otherwise.” n

Green Gold
CON TIN U ED F ROM PAGE 82 visit, the group
passed kids—some looked barely past adoles-
cence—digging in piles of discarded mining
by-products, known as tailings, or carrying
sacks of a cobalt ore called heterogenite. A
video taken from inside the KOV pit in 2006
shows two children standing close to two adult
locals, described by the man filming as “arti-
sanal” miners—independent contractors who
sell their mined ore to roadside cobalt traders.
One of the children in the video throws a rock
toward a Nikanor group and other visitors.
That same summer the NGO Global Witness
published a report that called for a strength-
ening of regulations against child labor in the
Congo, where “the presence of children in the
mines is so visible,” the authors wrote, “that
it is very unlikely that companies would not
be aware of the problem.” (A source close to
Gertler told Vanity Fair that he would never
approve of children working in danger, not
least because he has 11 of his own. A spokes-
person for Glencore, which took control of
the mine in 2009, emailed the magazine that
“there are no teenagers under 18 working for
our operations in the DRC. We do not toler-
ate any form of child, forced, or compulsory
labor anywhere in our business or our sup-
ply chain.”) Gertler meanwhile introduced
the bankers to local officials, including the
governor of the province, whom he referred
to as a “brother.”
Future trouble may have been foreshad-
owed, but the J.P. Morgan team worked to
minimize Gertler’s role and focused instead
on the abandoned pit’s potential, forging
ahead with plans for Nikanor’s imminent
IPO. Buried in the prospectus shared with
potential investors was an acknowledge-
ment that Gertler had by then already faced
allegations of “improper dealings with the
Government of the DRC” (that lawsuit
was dismissed) tied to the country’s dia-
mond mines. The implication was that he
had helped very senior officials line their
pockets. As the IPO’s sponsors, the bankers
ensured he was kept away from the London
boardrooms where they pitched pension
trusts and hedge funds, and they recruited
Jonathan Leslie, a former head of copper at
mining giant Rio Tinto, to act as executive
chairman, alongside a new finance direc-
tor, Peter Sydney-Smith. (Both executives
declined interview requests from Vanity
Fair.) Nikanor shares attracted $800 mil-
lion when they began trading in July 2006
on London’s Alternative Investment Market,
instantly making it the exchange’s most valu-
able business. On paper, Gertler’s 15 percent
of the company was suddenly worth around
$225 million, borne of an initial investment
that has never been disclosed—but on paper
was zero. (Gertler did not comment.)
Problems quickly emerged. Bateman, a
consulting firm owned by one of Gertler’s
fellow shareholders, Beny Steinmetz, had
conducted the feasibility study prior to the
public offering, but after the IPO, it became
apparent that “the methodology for doing the
costing was not accurate,” Nikanor’s head of
funding at the time, Brian Scallan, told Van-
ity Fair. Lowball projections may have helped
entice U.K. investors, but now they meant the
company would require hundreds of millions
in further funding to get off the ground. The
news incensed the J.P. Morgan team, who felt
they and their market clients had been hood-
winked. After failed talks with a potential
Chinese suitor and as Nikanor’s stock price
started sliding, Gertler and Steinmetz sought
to take the company private again, with help
from Glencore, which increasingly wanted
not only to sell metals to a global market but
to mine them too. The privatization plan was
a highly unusual and controversial move for
a recently listed business and prompted
more angry recriminations. So, facing stiff
resistance from executive chairman Leslie
and J.P. Morgan executives, Gertler and
his original partners used their controlling
shares to instead vote through a $736 mil-
lion cash injection that left Glencore with
a sizable stake and significant control over
Nikanor—including the ability to decide its
top executives and the right to sell all mined
material. Part of that cash included a $297
million Glencore loan to a Gertler-controlled
company in the Cayman Islands, which
massively expanded Gertler’s share in the
business and unpicked the previous efforts
of the J.P. Morgan team to downsize his role.
Gertler’s increased shareholding wasn’t dis-
closed until several hours after the sale had
gone through (and only then under duress),
and Glencore’s loan to Gertler’s company
was only incidentally disclosed months later,
in a separate firm’s financial filings.
It was the first of more than a dozen trans-
actions between Gertler and the Swiss firm
that revolutionized global cobalt production,
generating geysers of cash—and collateral
damage. Many of the sales, loans, and divest-
ments involved companies incorporated in
offshore jurisdictions like the British Virgin
Islands, where ownership is unidentifiable.
Some had Congolese names—Ruwenzori is
a mountain range that borders Uganda. Oth-
ers, like Ellesmere Global Limited, offered
a patina of British-sounding respectability.
But what united many of these Gertler-affil-
iated corporate entities and trades was their
utter opacity, making it hard for anyone to
learn how his businesses had won access to
prized Congolese mines, when exactly they
had traded, or where the dollars (or euros or
Congolese francs) ultimately ended up. The
unwelcome attention that shoddy mining
operations have drawn over the years con-
tinues to scare major miners and investors
away from the country’s mineral riches and is
indirectly driving the discovery efforts 6,500
miles away, in Greenland.
KUUPIK KLEIST WAS one of the last children
born in Qullissat, the result of a Danish
craftsman’s union with a local woman. He
was adopted by an aunt and uncle, the town’s
telegram operator, who punched out a final
message to confirm the settlement’s clo-
sure on his own way out of town. Like many
Greenlanders of his generation, Kleist was
dispatched at an impossibly young age to
a boarding school hundreds of miles away,
where he pursued his education assiduously,
all the while internalizing his anger over the
unilateral closure of his hometown. He later
led Greenland’s negotiations with Denmark
over autonomy and in 2009 became the first
prime minister of the self-governed nation, at
the time publicly welcoming foreign invest-
ment at every opportunity. People from
Scandinavia had arrived on a Greenland
inhabited by Inuits in the mid-13th century,
and the impacts of colonialism linger to this
day, with the current secondary school syl-
labus still taught in Danish rather than the
native Greenlandic tongue that is used in
primary schools. Smaller settlements often
lack educational provision for older children,
making high school prohibitively expensive.
On several domestic flights in Greenland, I
sat beside a young teenager returning home
from school or visiting a parent in a far-off
settlement. A Greenlandic education his-
torian estimates that by the end of colonial
rule in 1953, there were just only a “few” col-
lege graduates in Greenland, all with Danish
degrees. Today, only around one in eight
students who enter primary school finishes
secondary school.
While formally an autonomous territory,
Greenland remains part of the Danmarks
Rige, or Danish realm. Its government must
still defer to Denmark on matters of defense
and foreign affairs, and it relies on Danish
taxpayers for roughly half its $600 million
annual budget. For some time Greenlan-
dic nationalists have argued the potentially
lucrative revenues from mining could help
replace that subsidy and strengthen the case
for full independence. But Kleist, now retired
from politics and working as a consultant to
a foreign mining company, disagrees. “It’s
not a means to liberate the state of Green-
land,” he told me when we met in Nuuk, the
M AY 2 0 2 2 93

Green Gold
fast-growing capital city. “Mining would nev-
er kind of pave the way for independence.”
The father of Naaja Nathanielsen, Green-
land’s current mining minister, was also
born in Qullissat, then sent to Denmark at
six when his mother died. “He never went
home,” Nathanielsen told me one morning
when we met near the parliament building
in Nuuk. Greenland has limited experience
negotiating with well-funded foreign mining
firms, but “being late to the party,” as she
puts it, may provide advantages never avail-
able to a country like the DRC. “We were very
much aware of what has been done around
the world—and what has been done wrong
around the world,” she said.
In November Nathanielsen spearheaded
a ban on uranium extraction that may sink
a joint Australian-Chinese mining project
focused on rare earth elements. Months ear-
lier, she and her ministerial colleagues had
also ended oil and gas exploration because of
“severe” risk of a potential spill. The World
Wildlife Fund’s project coordinator for
Greenland approvingly described the prohi-
bition as a “gutsy” move, particularly given
the potential for tax revenues. But Nathan-
ielsen insists it was a no-brainer for a nation
with a pristine Arctic environment where
fishing provides thousands of jobs and a huge
chunk of economic output. She is broadly
supportive of the mining sector but plans
to update transparency and environmen-
tal requirements. Currently, just two small
mines operate in the entire country, extract-
ing rubies and preparing to mine anorthosite,
a mineral used in manufacturing.
All this might make Trump’s pseudo-
imperial fantasy of buying Greenland not
sound like such a lark, though that pro-
posal ultimately ended up as a $12 million
economic grant to encourage mining coop-
eration. At Greenland’s only mining school,
where students learn to dynamite rocks and
build pit roads, the director has developed a
million-dollar partnership with U.S. counter-
parts to help construct a training facility for
an underground mine—the kind that might
be built on Disko. Well before that, though,
Bluejay will need to sign an “impact benefit
agreement” with the local community that
could include employment guarantees. And
given that any mine would be dozens of miles
from the nearest residents with no roads in
sight, as one Greenlandic investment expert
speculated, “without foreign labor you will
not be able to run projects like this.”
Toone, the technical lead at Breakthrough
Energy Ventures’ investment committee,
says the hardest—and fastest—race will be
to complete the global energy transition
before it’s too late. “The electrification of
transportation is something that absolutely
94 VA N I T Y FA I R
has to happen if we’re to make a significant
impact on the production of greenhouse
gases,” he says, while virtually all batteries
used toward that effort today still require
cobalt mined in the DRC under “conditions
that I don’t think any of us would be com-
fortable with.” Within the next few years, if
enough new deposits have been discovered
elsewhere—in Greenland, or Australia, or
maybe Canada—it still will not solve that
problem fast enough. But the desire to make
money may ultimately be the only solution
available. As Toone says, “The kind of capi-
tal that’s necessary to do what we want to do
here is going to come from investors who are
seeking to earn a return.”
WHILE I WAS reporting this story, Glencore
invited me to see KOV firsthand. It is cur-
rently the world’s largest source of cobalt
and is still a cash tap for Gertler, with Glen-
core’s KOV-anchored complex netting him
$20,000 every hour or so in mining royalties.
The vast canyon of minerals stretches more
than a mile across and more than 1,000 feet
deep. A geological kaleidoscope of oxida-
tion fans out from beneath an observation
deck on its northeastern flank; flaming red
and bright lilac tinged with dark green. My
December visit followed torrential rain,
and black pipes as thick as culverts snaked
into multimillion-dollar pumping stations
to combat the streams of water. Every hour
in the dry season, hulking shovel machines
dump 3,000 tons of earth into enormous
trucks that trundle up sloped roads cut into
the mine’s walls; radar dishes scan for any
concerning movement. Several years ago,
seven workers died in a wall collapse. In
2019, more than 40 local creuseurs—French
for “diggers”—died when a section of KOV
they were excavating without the mine oper-
ator’s permission collapsed. Of the 9,000
staff and contractors Glencore employs
around Kolwezi, some 1,200 now work in
security, and the company has clearly made
and continues to make significant efforts to
stop similar intrusions.
Just outside Glencore’s concession, now
largely ringed by 24 miles of concrete blast
walls like the ones that surrounded U.S. mili-
tary installations in Iraq and Afghanistan, an
enthusiastic team of Congolese community
liaisons greeted me and took me on a tour
of a clean but empty new maternity clinic in
Kamoto, a village that abuts the pits. Depart-
ing the clinic, we passed clusters of workers
scavenging chunks of ore from a small pond
at the village edge.
The trucks from KOV dump their loads
near the pit’s edge, where miles of conveyor
belts carry the material to a complex that
transforms it into sheets of copper metal or
powdery blue-green cobalt hydroxide, which
is then poured into vast piles of 1,300-pound
white canvas bags and trucked to East
African ports, destined for yet more pro-
cessing, primarily in China. Rusting freight
train carriages lie in piles beside the rutted
road, on land still controlled by Gécamines,
the Congolese state-owned mining company
that is a nonoperational partner in most of
the company’s larger mines. Clint Donkin,
Glencore’s top copper executive in Africa,
explains how complex it has proven to be to
run a professionalized operation here. “The
concession is spread out over a large area,” he
says, and “in amongst it is the infrastructure
from the original workings.”
He was referring to various plots of land
and aging facilities that separate Glencore’s
underground mine from the vast pits and
the refinery, which uses a chain of pro-
cesses, including towering crushers, mills,
and concentration systems, to convert ore
into shining squares of copper and moun-
tains of cobalt hydroxide. Back in 2006, the
refining and concentrating facilities Donkin
showed me were the only ones in the area
but belonged to a Canadian competitor of
Nikanor called Katanga. Its CEO, Arthur
“Art” Ditto, was not initially interested in
pooling resources with Nikanor, but over
time the capital-intensive nature of restart-
ing a mine depleted Katanga’s funds, just as
credit markets tightened ahead of the 2008
financial crisis.
What came next was almost a transac-
tional replica of how Gertler had gained
control of Nikanor: His offshore firms grew
his stake in Katanga; Glencore kicked in $265
million in loans to Katanga while also loan-
ing money to Gertler’s companies, again
undisclosed at the time. Within two years,
all the original partners and competitors
saw their shares diluted to the point of irrel-
evance. “I couldn’t trust Dan further than I
could throw him,” said Eric Lilford, a former
Nikanor board member Beny Steinmetz had
brought in who resigned when the merger
was announced, for “personal reasons,”
calling Gertler “as crooked as they come.”
Ditto, who resigned as Katanga’s CEO soon
after the merger, said Gertler and Glencore
executives had operated “like they were in
the Wild West,” avoiding disclosure to mask
their long-held ambition to combine the vari-
ous mining assets. These were guys, he told
me by phone from his retirement home in
Arizona, “who play the game under different
rules, a different way, in a way that I wouldn’t,
I couldn’t.” Nikanor had burned through
cash as well, though, and “would have been
an abject failure for J.P. Morgan and the peo-
ple who put money in” without the merger,
one mining executive told me, “because it
was no chance of ever being mined.” (The
DRC’s mining minister, whose department
had once chosen to separate the two projects,
welcomed the “milestone” transaction.)
But by the time of the merger’s comple-
tion in late 2007, almost a decade of fuzzy
and sometimes iniquitous purchases by
foreign investors of the country’s most valu-
able mining rights—including at KOV—had
begun drawing international scrutiny. Pres-
sure from foreign NGOs in particular led the
government to reexamine deals struck in
the early years of the Kabila administration,
a review that eventually led many foreign
firms to pay sizable rebalancing payments
back to the government to cement their
existing rights. At a Zurich airport hotel
conference room in mid-2008, Katanga’s
board gave Gertler the mandate to lead nego-
tiations with Congolese authorities over its
own settlement payment. In just two weeks
he negotiated down the requested total pay-
ment from $585 million to $140 million. The
eventual settlement for KOV, his first big
asset in the region, dropped from an initial
request of $240 million to just $5 million.
And on it goes: Gertler bought a stake in
another cobalt mine called Mukondo Moun-
tain, and almost immediately work there
halted while he renegotiated profit sharing
with the mine’s operator, a firm called Camec.
Not long afterward, Camec’s CEO, Andrew
Groves, tried to buy Katanga before Gertler
and Glencore could, and saw that effort
stymied when his firm’s mining permit was
unexpectedly suspended by the Congolese
government. Within months, Gertler and
Glencore controlled the combined Nikanor-
Katanga, and Camec had announced a joint
venture with Gertler at Mukondo; Groves
hailed him in a press release as “one of the
leading and most successful investors in
DRC.” Days later, Camec’s permit suspen-
sion was lifted. Over a recent breakfast in
London, Groves told me that he suspected
interference from competitors led to the
permit threat, but he didn’t criticize Gertler,
calling him a fellow “fighter.”
One of the most thorough delineations
of Gertler’s modus operandi came in 2016,
when the Department of Justice reached a
settlement with Och-Ziff Capital Manage-
ment Group for $213 million and the hedge
fund’s admission of guilt in a scheme to bribe
officials in the DRC and Libya. (Och-Ziff has
since rebranded as Sculptor Capital and is
publicly traded—NYSE: SCU—with more
than $37 billion under management.) That
agreement obliquely referred to a “DRC
partner” throughout—widely reported to be
Gertler. (Gertler did not comment.) Accord-
ing to the Department of Justice, Och-Ziff
had an agreement with the DRC partner to
fund mine acquisitions in the DRC and was
aware that the tactics likely involved pay-
ment to public officials, which would be a
violation of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practic-
es Act. “The DRC landscape is in the making
and I am shaping it—like no one else,” the
DRC partner emailed a London-based Och-
Ziff partner in 2008. Gertler has continued
to deny the settlement agreement’s premise
that he made around $100 million in bribe
payments between 2005 and 2015.
In December 2017, the U.S. government
directly accused Gertler of having “amassed
his fortune through hundreds of millions of
dollars’ worth of opaque and corrupt mining
and oil deals,” and the Treasury Depart-
ment’s Office of Foreign Assets Control
added him to a sanctions list, alongside a raft
of his businesses. In February 2017, Glencore
paid $534 million to buy out Gertler’s remain-
ing shares in Katanga and another mine,
but he was still left holding some previously
acquired royalties. The office of the DRC’s
president announced that one of Gertler’s
companies will return some $2 billion of oil
and mining assets to the country—more than
2 percent of its GDP. The Israeli newspaper
Haaretz reported that, according to “sourc-
es with knowledge of the proceedings,”
Gertler’s representatives proposed he serve
time in an Israeli prison in exchange for the
closure of the investigations against him.
Gertler’s lawyer told Haaretz that “no nego-
tiations are being conducted on Gertler’s
behalf with any law enforcement authority.”
A representative told V.F. the report is “utter,
utter nonsense.” For Brad Brooks-Rubin, a
lawyer at OFAC during the George W. Bush
administration and at the State Department
under President Obama, the announcement
highlighted concerns that sanctions can
often come “a few steps behind what actors
like Gertler are trying to do.” Brooks-Rubin,
currently a senior adviser at The Sentry, an
investigative and policy organization found-
ed by John Prendergast and George Clooney,
says enforcement requires greater action.
The government investigations have kept
on coming, though, even if they take years to
resolve. A senior Glencore executive, Aristo-
telis Mistakidis, who had been appointed in
2008 to the board of Katanga, faced penal-
ties in a December 2018 settlement with the
Ontario Securities Commission, as Katanga
was on the Toronto Stock Exchange. The
commission accused Katanga’s officers of
having “failed to disclose material risks to its
business,” specifically “public sector corrup-
tion in the Democratic Republic of Congo”
and “the nature and extent of Katanga’s
reliance on individuals and entities associ-
ated with Dan Gertler.” Glencore delisted
Katanga from the exchange just as the pan-
demic was exploding, in April 2020, and still
faces the American, British, and Swiss inves-
tigations. In its past two financial reports,
Glencore had said it was “not possible to pre-
dict or estimate” the size or scale of the fines,
penalties, or subsequent lawsuits that could
stem from these various investigations. But in
February, the firm announced it was putting
aside $1.5 billion to resolve U.S., U.K., and
Brazilian enquiries, while Swiss and Dutch
authorities continued their own probes.
Tony Hayward, Glencore’s chairman since
2013—who was replaced as BP CEO after the
Deepwater Horizon disaster—stepped down
last summer and was replaced by Kalidas
Madhavpeddi. He’d led the Chinese mining
giant China Molybdenum, which had been
racing to match Glencore’s Congolese cobalt
output—until this winter, when local authori-
ties seized its largest asset.
As a confidant of then President Kabila,
Gertler played a role in bringing peace to
the DRC in the early 2000s, according to
one former U.S. assistant secretary of state,
even traveling to Washington in an effort
to end the drawn-out conflict. But almost
two decades on, he has been fighting his
own kind of rearguard action for influence
in the U.S. capital, hiring former FBI direc-
tor Louis Freeh’s lobbying firm in late 2019,
with Dershowitz as part of his team. In the
chaotic days following the January 6 insur-
rection at the Capitol last year, the Trump
administration granted Gertler a yearlong
exemption from the earlier sanctions, allow-
ing him to transfer any funds that had sat
frozen in U.S. accounts. Treasury Secretary
Mnuchin approved the special license with-
out the knowledge of several senior State
Department officials. Biden reimposed
sanctions quickly after taking office, follow-
ing condemnation from several Democratic
senators and representatives.
Meanwhile, Gertler or his proxies began to
register new companies, often in Kinshasa,
rather than the Caribbean. He also began vis-
iting a Congolese branch of a Cameroonian
bank, Afriland First Bank, which business-
men with links to Hezbollah and the North
Korean government have allegedly used to
evade their own U.S. sanctions by ensur-
ing that international transfers from that
bank—including via the SWIFT system—do
not share identifying details of transactions.
(Gertler has denied trying to evade sanctions
and any wrongdoing.)
Navy Malela, a former auditor at the bank,
told me that when he saw the freshly sanc-
tioned Gertler walk past his office in 2018,
it was like seeing a “phantom.” Malela
called a trusted colleague into his office and
warned the coworker that if the man who
had just walked down the corridor began to
frequent their business, “we will have prob-
lems.” Malela and the colleague worked to
alert the bank’s board to the presence of
Gertler-linked accounts and suggested they
be frozen, but in response both received
threats from upper management. The two
men eventually became whistleblowers in a
series of sprawling accusations that involved
foreign nationals and entities. Fearing for
their lives, they fled Kinshasa and now live
in undisclosed European locations. (Lawyers
for Afriland have accused the men of stealing
and falsifying bank data.)
“Dan Gertler inserted himself into every
bloody mining transaction, he took an equity
M AY 2 0 2 2 95

Green Gold
stake or a royalty or both,” says Lilford, the
former Nikanor director. But Gertler has
said his dealmaking has attracted unprec-
edented investment to the country, pushing
up tax revenues and supporting local com-
munities. He told one journalist that he
should be offered a Nobel Prize, while his
old friend Kabila—whose father once fought
alongside Che Guevara in an earlier Congo-
lese conflict—said Gertler had “braved the
hurricane” during the country’s difficult
Free Radicals
C O N T I N U E D F R O M P A G E 6 5 a p ro fes s o r
tends to affirm their worldview, or frighten
them, or both at the same time. The more
attention you gain in the Cathedral system,
the more you can influence opinion and gov-
ernment policy. Journalists and academics
and thinkers of any kind now live in a desper-
ate race for attention—and in Yarvin’s view,
this is all really a never-ending bid for influ-
ence, serving the interests of our oligarchical
regime. So I may think I write for a living. But
to Yarvin, what I actually do is more like a
weird combination of intelligence-gathering
and propagandizing. Which is why no one I
was talking to at NatCon really thought it
would be possible for me to write a fair piece
about them.
You won’t hear people use the Cathedral
term a lot in public, although right-wing Twit-
ter lit up with delight when Yarvin sketched
the concept on Tucker Carlson’s Fox Nation
show last September. People who’ve opened
their eyes to this system of control have taken
the red pill, a term Yarvin started using back
in 2007, long before it got watered down to
generally mean supporting Trump. To truly
be red-pilled, you have to understand the
workings of the Cathedral. And the way con-
servatives can actually win in America, he
has argued, is for a Caesar-like figure to take
power back from this devolved oligarchy and
replace it with a monarchical regime run like
a start-up. As early as 2012, he proposed the
acronym RAGE—Retire All Government
Employees—as a shorthand for a first step
in the overthrow of the American “regime.”
What we needed, Yarvin thought, was a
96 VA N I T Y FA I R
period after the civil war, when others had
abandoned the DRC.
Gertler visits the DRC less frequently
nowadays, spending more time at his home
outside Tel Aviv, but he did travel to Kinshasa
in late February to sign an “amicable agree-
ment” with the country’s justice minister to
end ongoing litigation between the two sides.
DRC president Felix Tshisekedi, as well as
the DRC’s finance and mining ministers,
refused repeated interview requests.
One of Kabila’s most influential appoin-
tees, the wealthy former chairman of the state
mining company, Albert Yuma, once insisted
“national CEO, [or] what’s called a dictator.”
Yarvin now shies away from the word dictator
and seems to be trying to promote a friend-
lier face of authoritarianism as the solution to
our political warfare: “If you’re going to have
a monarchy, it has to be a monarchy of every-
one,” he said.
By the time TechCrunch publicized
Yarvin’s identity, in 2013, he had become
influential in a small circle of the disaffected
elite. In 2014, The Baffler published a lengthy
look at his influence, titled “Mouthbreath-
ing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich.”
The piece warned that Yarvin’s ideas were
spreading among prominent figures like
Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan, formerly the
CTO of Coinbase, and that it was possible for
an intellectual fringe to “seize key positions
of authority and power” and “eventually
bring large numbers of people around,” just
as the Koch brothers once had with their pro-
business libertarianism, a position that Thiel
was quickly moving away from.
In 2017, BuzzFeed News published an
email exchange between Yarvin and Milo
Yiannopoulis in which Yarvin said that he’d
watched the 2016 election returns with Thiel.
“He’s fully enlightened,” Yarvin wrote. “Just
plays it very carefully.” Masters soon had an
office in Trump Tower. He and Thiel worked,
generally without success, to install figures
like Srinivasan, whom they proposed to head
the FDA, and who himself often talked about
the “paper belt,” in an echo of Yarvin’s Cathe-
dral concept, and made common cause with
figures like Steve Bannon, who wanted to
pick apart the administrative state, an idea
that at least had a hint of Yarvin’s RAGE pro-
posal. Yarvin eventually stopped working as
a programmer and left the Bay Area, mov-
ing with his wife and two children to Nevada.
His wife died in April 2021, and he seems to
have been devastated, publishing search-
ing poems about her. But last September, a
month before we spoke, he posted a dating
call, inviting women who were “reasonably
pretty and pretty smart,” as he put it, and
“have read my work and like it,” and who
thought that “the purpose of dating is to get
to a local interviewer that Gertler’s wealth
was “the fair reward for taking the risk.” And
while a businessman with long experience
in the DRC—and with Gertler—told me that
“since everyone is corrupt, everyone holds
hands” to protect one another, there are signs
that a new DRC administration is seeking to
change that status quo. During a speech in
Kolwezi in May 2021, Tshisekedi told his
audience he was “tired of the situation I’ve
been seeing in this country for years now….
People are coming here with nothing in their
pockets but they go back to become billion-
aires, while we ourselves still remain poor.” n
married and have kids,” to email him so they
could set up a Zoom date.
“His writing doesn’t really represent who
he is,” Laurenson told me. “So I answered
this email and I was just like, ‘Hi, I’m a liberal,
but I have a high IQ. And I want kids, and I’m
actually just really curious to talk to you.’ ”
The two are now engaged.
Laurenson told me she’d had a gradual
awakening that accelerated during the
upheavals of the early pandemic and the pro-
tests of the summer of 2020. “I started really
getting drawn to NRx ideas,” she said, using
a common online abbreviation for the neo-
reactionary fringe, “because I was tracking
the riots,” by which she meant the violence
that erupted amid some of the Black Lives
Matter protests.
“I have a background in social justice,”
she said. But she was “horrified” by “how
the mainstream media covered the riots.… It
was just such a violation of all of my values.”
She’d had a strange realization after she
and Yarvin started dating, discovering that
some of her friends had been reading him
for years. “I found out that all these people
had been reading NRx stuff just like me. They
just never told anyone about it,” she said. “It
has been very striking to me,” she said, “how
cool this world is becoming.”
Yarvin had given people a way to articu-
late a notion that somehow felt subversive
to say out loud in America—that history was
headed in the wrong direction. “Somebody
said something earlier that captured it for
me,” Laurenson said, just before they had to
leave to go to a slightly hush-hush private din-
ner with Vance and a few others. “They said,
‘You can be here and know you’re not alone.’ ”
PEOPLE AT THE conference seemed excited
about being in a place where they weren’t
alone. I skipped most of the talks—which
ranged from sessions about confronting the
threat of China to the liberal influence on pop
culture to “Worker Power.” Hawley gave a
keynote on the “assault on the masculine
virtues,” and Cruz offered up a traditional
stump speech, evoking Reagan and saying
he thought conservatives would soon prevail
at the ballot box. “I’m pretty sure a lot of the
20-somethings rolled their eyes at that,”
Yarvin said to me afterward with a smirk. The
20-somethings had a bigger vision.
Up by the bar every night, hordes of young
men, mostly, would descend to drink and
bear-hug and spot favorite podcasters and
writers. You could see Dave Rubin, and Jack
Murphy, who hosts a popular New Right–ish
YouTube channel and is trying to build a fra-
ternal group of men who believe in “positive
masculinity” that he calls the Liminal Order.
Pretty much everyone had the same trimmed
beard and haircut—sides buzzed short, the top
longer and combed with a bit of gel to one side.
I didn’t see a single Black person under
the age of 50, though there were attendees
of South Asian and Middle Eastern descent.
In March, the journalist Jeff Sharlet (a Van-
ity Fair contributing editor who covers the
American right) tweeted that the “intellec-
tual New Right is a white supremacist project
designed to cultivate non-white support,”
and he linked it to resurgent nationalist and
authoritarian politics around the world: “It’s
part of a global fascist movement not limited
to the anti-blackness of the U.S. & Europe.”
Yet many on the New Right seem increasing-
ly unfazed by accusations that they’re white
nationalists or racists. Masters in particular
seems willing to goad commentators, believ-
ing that the ensuing arguments will redound
to his political advantage: “Good luck
[hitting] me with that,” Masters told the pod-
caster Alex Kaschuta recently, arguing that
accusations of racism had become a politi-
cal bludgeon used to keep conservative ideas
outside the political mainstream. “Good luck
criticizing me for saying critical race theory is
anti-white.” But for all the chatter of looming
dystopia, no one I spoke to raised one of the
most dystopian aspects of American life: our
vast apparatus of prisons and policing. Most
people seemed more caught up in fighting
what they perceived as the cant and group-
think among other members of the political
media class, or the hypocrisy of rich white lib-
erals who put up Black Lives Matter signs in
front of multimillion-dollar homes, than they
were with the raw experience that has given
shape to America’s current racial politics.
Milius was a sardonic and constant pres-
ence, easy to find smoking as Yarvin stood
and talked at warp speed in his unmistak-
able voice. She was by far the most strikingly
dressed person there, favoring Gucci and
Ralph Lauren and lots of gold jewelry and big
sunglasses. She is the daughter of the con-
servative director John Milius, who cowrote
Apocalypse Now and directed Red Dawn. She
grew up in Los Angeles, and it turned out that
we’d both gone to the same tiny liberal arts
college in Manhattan, so, like pretty much
all the people there, she was used to living in
social spaces where conservative views were
considered strange if not downright evil. She
thought something had radically changed
since 2015, after she went to film school at
USC and started working in Hollywood,
before she suddenly dropped everything to
work for Trump’s campaign in Nevada, even-
tually landing a job in his State Department.
“What this is,” she said, “is a new thought
movement. So it’s very hard to put your finger
on and articulate what it is outside of Trump-
ism. Because it really is separate from the
man himself, it has nothing to do with that.”
She argued that the New Right, or what-
ever you wanted to call it, was, paradoxically,
much less authoritarian than the ideology
that now presented itself as mainstream. “I
get the feeling, and I could be wrong,” she
said, “that the right actually at this point is like
almost in this live-and-let-live place where
the left used to be at.” What she meant spe-
cifically: “The idea that you can’t raise your
kids in a traditional, somewhat religious
household without having them educated
at school that their parents are Nazis.”
This apparent laissez-faire obscures some-
what the intense focus that some people
in this world have on trans issues—or what
they might say is the media’s intense focus on
trans issues, one of a suite of “mimetic virus-
es,” as Kaschuta, the podcaster, put it, that
spread a highly individualistic liberal culture
that is destructive to traditional ways of life.
But the laissez-faire has helped win unlikely
converts. Milius brought up Red Scare, a pod-
cast that has become the premier example of
this attraction—she’d actually cast one of the
hosts, Dasha Nekrasova, in the film she made
as her senior thesis in directing school at USC.
The Red Scare hosts both started out as
diffident socialists, back when it was still pos-
sible to think that socialism represented an
edgy political stance, in the little interlocking
spheres of America’s media and political set.
One of them, Nekrasova, actually became
known in media circles for a clip that went
megaviral in 2018, when she cut dead a report-
er for Alex Jones’s Infowars trying to ambush
Bernie Sanders supporters at a festival in Aus-
tin. “I just want people to have health care,
honey,” she deadpanned. “You people have,
like, worms in your brains. Honestly.”
Fast-forward to November 2021, and
Nekrasova and her cohost Anna Khachiyan
were posting photos of themselves with
Jones’s arms wrapped around them under
an evening Texas sun. Nekrasova now has a
role on HBO’s Succession, playing a P.R. rep
working with Kendall Roy; the show itself
set “right-wing Twitter”—a sphere heavily
populated by 20-somethings who work in
tech or politics and seem to disproportion-
ately live in D.C. and Miami—alight with
delight when an episode in the latest season
included a litany of key New Right phrases
such as “integralist” and “Medicare for all,
abortions for none.”
The Red Scare hosts are only the best-
known representatives of a fashionable
dissident-y subculture, centered in but not
exclusive to downtown Manhattan. “Every-
one dresses like a duck hunter now,” a
bewildered friend of mine texted recently.
People use the derisive term “bugman” to
describe liberal men who lack tangible life
skills like fixing trucks or growing food—guys
who could end up spending their lives behind
the bug-eyed screen of a V.R. headset.
Women wear clothes from Brandy Melville,
which you can hear described ironically as
fashionwear for girls with “fascist leanings,”
and which named one of its lines after John
Galt, the hero of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
People are converting to Catholicism. “It’s
a good thing I have a girlfriend,” my friend
texted. “Because casual sex is out.”
Yarvin has mused that the liberal regime
will begin to fall when the “cool kids” start to
abandon its values and worldview. There are
signs that this may be happening, though not
all the so-called cool kids involved in this vibe
shift would want to be colored as the van-
guard in a world historical rebellion against
the global order.
“I’m not, like, into politics,” the writer
Honor Levy, a Catholic convert and Ben-
nington grad, told me when I called her. “I
just want to have a family someday.”
Levy, who was a leftist recently enough
that she cried when it became clear that
Bernie Sanders wouldn’t be the Democratic
presidential nominee, is friendly with Yarvin
and has had him on the podcast she cohosts,
Wet Brain—“Yeah, the Cathedral and blah
blah,” she said when we got to talking about
political media. But she said she’d never even
heard of J.D. Vance or Blake Masters.
Levy is an It girl in a downtown Manhat-
tan scene—The New Yorker has published
her fiction; she is named in a New York Times
story that tries to describe that scene—where
right-wing politics have become an aesthetic
pose that mingles strangely with an earnest
search for moral grounding. “Until like a year
and a half ago I didn’t believe good and evil
existed,” she told me, later adding: “But I’m
not in a state of grace, I shouldn’t be talk-
ing.” I asked if she would take money from
Thiel and she cheerily said, “Of course!”
She also described her cohort as a bunch of
“libertines,” and on her podcast you can get
a window into a world of people who enjoy
a mind-bendingly ironic thrill by tut-tutting
each other for missing church or having pre-
marital sex. “Most of the girls downtown are
normal, but they’ll wear a Trump hat as an
accessory,” she said. The ones deep into the
online scene, she said, “want to be like Leni
Riefenstahl–Edie Sedgwick.”
Like Levy, Milius is in the funny position
of being at the intersection of many of these
crosscurrents, having worked in mainstream
politics but appearing on so-called dissident
M AY 2 0 2 2 97

Free Radicals
podcasts and being on the periphery of a cul-
tural scene where right-wing politics have
taken on a sheen approximating cool.
She said she was too “black-pilled”—a
very online term used to describe people
who think that our world is so messed up that
nothing can save it now—to think much about
what it would look like for her side to win.
“I could fucking trip over the curb,” Milius
said, “and that’s going to be considered white
supremacism. Like, there’s nothing you can
do. What the fuck isn’t white supremacism?”
“They’re going to come for everything,”
she said. “And I think it’s sinister—not that I
think that people who want to pay attention
to race issues are sinister. But I think that the
globalization movement is using these divi-
sive arguments in order to make people think
that it’s a good thing.”
This is the Cathedral at work.
A FEW WEEKS after NatCon, I drove from
California to Tucson to meet Masters, a very
tall, very thin, very fit 35-year-old. I wanted to
see how all this might translate into an actual
election campaign, and I’d been watching a
lot of Fox News, including Yarvin’s stream-
ing interview with Carlson in which he gave
a swirling depiction of how the Cathedral
produced its groupthink. “Why do Yale and
Harvard always agree on everything?” he
asked. “These organizations are essentially
branches of the same thing,” he told a mes-
merized Carlson. “You’re like, ‘Where are
the wires?’ ” He sketched his vision of (as
he calls it) a “constitutional” regime change
that would take power back from this oligar-
chy—so diffuse most people hardly knew it
was there. “That’s what makes it so hard to
kill,” he said.
At a coffee shop near the house he’d
bought when he moved back home to Tuc-
son from the Bay Area, Masters and I went
through the tenets of his nationalist platform:
on-shoring industrial production, slashing
legal immigration, regulating big tech com-
panies, and eventually restructuring the
economy so that one salary would be enough
to raise a family on. I mentioned Yarvin and
his line of arguing that America’s system had
become so sclerotic that it was hopeless to
imagine making big systemic changes like
these. “In a system where state capacity is
very low…” I started the question.
“Alas,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye.
“Do we need a crisis to get there?”
I asked him.
“Maybe, maybe, maybe,” he said. It wasn’t
where his immediate thinking was. “I’ll have
the proverbial machete,” he said. “But yeah, it
may take some kind of crisis to get us there.”
He paused. “But we’re already sort of in
one, right?”
98 VA N I T Y FA I R
Masters often says he’s not as black-pilled
and pessimistic as some in the New Right
spheres. He seems, unlike many New Right-
ers, to still earnestly believe in the power of
electoral politics. But he does think that the
culturally liberal and free-market ideology
that has guided America’s politics in recent
years is a hopeless dead end. “A country is not
just an economy,” Masters told the dissident-
right outlet IM—1776 recently. “You also
need a conception of yourself as a nation, as
a people, and as a culture. And that’s what
America is increasingly lacking today.”
“It’s true that I’m incredibly hopeful,” he
said to me. “I think it’s really bleak, I think the
default is continued stagnation, and maybe
you get the crisis in 5 years or maybe it’s 30
years from now.”
He told me that he didn’t like to use terms
like the Cathedral and used “the regime” less
often than Vance, although I later noticed
that he used this latter phrase frequently with
interviewers on the dissident right.
“ ‘The regime’ sounds really sexy, right?”
he said to me. “It’s a tangible enemy—if you
could just grapple with it in the right way, you
can topple it. And I think it’s actually just a
lot less sexy and a lot more bureaucratic,”
he said. “But I’ve read that stuff, and I see
what it means.”
I asked him about the term Thielbucks,
and how true it was that the Thiel Foundation
was funding a network of New Right podcast-
ers and cool-kid cultural figures as a sort of
cultural vanguard.
“It depends if it’s just dissident-right
think-tank stuff,” he told me, “or if anyone
actually does anything.”
“I don’t know how that became a meme,”
he said about Thielbucks. “I think I would
know if those kids were getting money.”
“We fund some stuff,” he told me. “But
we’re not funding an army of meme posters.”
He told me that he and Thiel had met with
Khachiyan, one of the cohosts of Red Scare.
“Which was cool,” he said. “Their podcast
is interesting.”
I asked if there was a world in which they
might get funding from Thiel. “Maybe,
yeah,” he said. “We fund some weird stuff
with the Thiel Foundation.”
We drove together to a campaign event,
talking about everything from how technol-
ogy is reshaping our brains to environmental
policy, both of us circling from different polit-
ical directions to an apocalyptic place. “I do
think we’re at a moment of crossroads,” he
said. “And if we play it wrong, it’s the Dark
Ages.” Masters has publicly said he thinks
“everybody should read” the Unabomber’s
anti-tech manifesto, “Industrial Society and
Its Future,” which may sound strange for a
young tech executive running to serve in
the United States Senate. But to Masters,
Kaczynski’s critique was a useful analysis
of how technology shapes our world and
how “degrading and debasing” it could be
to human lives.
I asked whether he thought the core of
his project was a fight against a consumerist
techno-dystopia that many on the left have
also come to fear. He said yes. I asked why,
if this was the case, it almost never came
across in his mainstream media appearanc-
es. “That’s interesting feedback,” he said.
“That it’s not coming through.”
“I go on, and it’s the tail end of the B block,
and I’ve got two minutes to talk about Kyle
Rittenhouse,” he’d said earlier, talking about
his spots on Fox News. “And it’s like, ‘Well,
the left is insane, and this kid shouldn’t have
been on trial, and they’re punishing him for
being a white guy who defended himself with
an AR-15.’ ” Conservative media seems to
thrive on culture-war touch points as much
as all the rest of it. “I feel like I’m willing to
go there,” he said. “But you can’t do that on
Laura Ingraham sound bites.”
He was a little less rosy about the future
with some interviewers than he was with me.
“We need someone with their hand on the
tiller who understands where we’ve been and
where we need to go,” he told the podcaster
Alex Kaschuta recently. “Otherwise we will
get just totally owned by the progressive
left. And the progressive left just remains
the enemy. It’s the enemy of true progress.
It’s the enemy of everything that is good.”
I asked if he could give me a vision of what
he thought victory for his side would look like.
“It’s just families and meaningful work,”
he said, “so that you can raise your kids and
worship and pursue your hobbies and fig-
ure out what the meaning of it all is.” Pretty
much anyone could agree with this. And
pretty much anyone could wonder how it is
that this sort of thing has come to seem radi-
cal, or distant from the lives of many people
growing into adulthood today. “It just feels so
networked,” he said. “It’s so in-the-matrix.”
We drove a long way into the desert
before we arrived at the campaign meet-and-
greet, which was being hosted by a former
CIA official in a comfortable retirement
community. The crowd of a few dozen was
mostly sweater-wearing retirees, immersed
in a media culture in which the people who
repeated the most incendiary and Trumpist
talking points tended to gain attention and
political support. This kind of groupthink
was not just a phenomenon of the liberal
media, and this fact has hampered the
campaigns of both Masters and Vance, who
are often seen as Trump-aligned culture
warriors, and who have had a lot of trouble
working their more complicated policy ideas
into our fervid political conversation. He
talked through his proposal to regulate tech
companies as common carriers, like America
once regulated phone companies. The crowd
seemed interested but hardly electrified.
When he took questions at the end, they were
mostly the usual ones about the supposedly
stolen 2020 election—a view that Masters did
not push back on—the border wall, vaccine
mandates. One man raised his hand to ask
how Masters planned to drain the swamp. He
gave me a sly look. “Well, one of my friends
has this acronym he calls RAGE,” he said.
“Retire All Government Employees.” The
crowd liked the sound of this and erupted
in a cheer.
ON THE LAST afternoon of NatCon, a few
hours before he was set to give the keynote
address, Vance showed up. He spotted
me drinking a beer at the bar and came
over to say hello. “I still have no idea what
I’m going to say,” he said, though he didn’t
seem worried.
I wandered down to the ballroom to wait
and ended up sitting with the U.S. corre-
spondent for the German newsmagazine
Der Spiegel. I knew that some of the reporters
there might have been under the impression
that this was all mostly just tweedy MAGA
pageantry. He had a more complex view,
having just spoken to Yarvin, and asked me
to explain his philosophy. I found myself at a
loss. I said that there were these things called
the regime and the Cathedral and that Yarvin
was “sort of a monarchist.”
“A monarchist?” he asked. He seemed
taken aback to learn that what this hero fig-
ure of the New Right dreamed of was a king.
Vance showed up, wearing a suit and
bright red tie, looking relaxed for a person
who was about to give a speech to hundreds
of people who viewed him as possibly a last
great hope in saving the American nation
from global corporatist subjugation. He’d
shot up in the polls and at that moment was
second in his primary, helped by regular invi-
tations from Carlson.
I asked how he was feeling about the
speech. He looked impish. “I think I’ve got
a good topic,” he said. “I’m going to talk
about college.”
What he meant was that he was about to
give a genuinely thunderous speech, titled
“The Universities Are the Enemy.” People
immediately pointed out that it was a varia-
tion on something that Richard Nixon said to
Henry Kissinger on White House tapes back
in 1972. Vance denounced elite colleges as
enemies of the American people; he has long
proposed cutting off their federal funding
and seizing their endowments. The speech
was later linked in alarmed op-eds to “anti-
intellectual” movements that had attacked
institutions of learning. But that doesn’t
quite reckon with what an apocalyptic mes-
sage he was offering. Because Vance and
this New Right cohort, who are mostly so,
so highly educated and well-read that their
big problem often seems to be that they’re
just too nerdy to be an effective force in mass
politics, are not anti-intellectual. Vance is
an intellectual himself, even if he’s not cur-
rently playing one on TV. But he thinks that
our universities are full of people who have
a structural, self-serving, and financial inter-
est in coloring American culture as racist and
evil. And he is ready to go to extraordinary
lengths to fight them.
Yarvin and Laurenson bounded out of the
crowd as the cheers were still ringing. They
were giggling, seeming to have had some
wine. “Nixon—Nixon!” Laurenson said, still
laughing. I couldn’t tell if she was delighted
or horrified.
A couple of hours later I found Vance
standing up by the bar, surrounded by a cir-
cle of young and identical-looking fanboys.
I went over. He asked what I’d thought of
the speech, and he suggested we find some-
where to talk.
He asked me to turn my recorder off so we
could speak candidly. I agreed, with regret,
because the conversation revealed someone
who I think will be hugely influential in our
politics in the coming years, even if he loses
his Senate primary, as both of us thought
was possible.
It also revealed someone who is in a dark
place, with a view that we are at an ominous
turning point in America’s history. He didn’t
want to describe this to me on the record. But
I can show it anyway, because he already says
it publicly, and you can hear it too.
That night, I went up to my hotel room
and listened to a podcast interview Vance
had conducted with Jack Murphy, the big,
bearded head of the Liminal Order men’s
group. Murphy asked how it was that Vance
proposed to rip out America’s leadership class.
Vance described two possibilities that
many on the New Right imagine—that our
system will either fall apart naturally, or that
a great leader will assume semi-dictatorial
powers.
“So there’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has
written about some of these things,” Vance
said. Murphy chortled knowingly. “So one
[option] is to basically accept that this entire
thing is going to fall in on itself,” Vance went
on. “And so the task of conservatives right
now is to preserve as much as can be pre-
served,” waiting for the “inevitable collapse”
of the current order.
He said he thought this was pessimistic. “I
tend to think that we should seize the insti-
tutions of the left,” he said. “And turn them
against the left. We need like a de-Baathifica-
tion program, a de-woke-ification program.”
“I think Trump is going to run again in
2024,” he said. “I think that what Trump
should do, if I was giving him one piece of
advice: Fire every single midlevel bureau-
crat, every civil servant in the administrative
state, replace them with our people.”
“And when the courts stop you,” he went
on, “stand before the country, and say—” he
quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge
to the entire constitutional order—“the chief
justice has made his ruling. Now let him
enforce it.”
This is a description, essentially, of a coup.
“We are in a late republican period,”
Vance said later, evoking the common New
Right view of America as Rome awaiting its
Caesar. “If we’re going to push back against
it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and
pretty far out there, and go in directions that
a lot of conservatives right now are uncom-
fortable with.”
“Indeed,” Murphy said. “Among some of
my circle, the phrase ‘extra-constitutional’
has come up quite a bit.”
I’d asked Vance to tell me, on the record,
what he’d like liberal Americans who thought
that what he was proposing was a fascist take-
over of America to understand.
He spoke earnestly. “I think the cultural
world you operate in is incredibly biased,” he
said—against his movement and “the leaders
of it, like me in particular.” He encouraged
me to resist this tendency, which he thought
was the product of a media machine leading
us toward a soulless dystopia that none of us
want to live in. “That impulse,” he said, “is
fundamentally in service of something that
is far worse than anything, in your wildest
nightmares, than what you see here.”
He gave me an imploring look, as though
to suggest that he was more on the side of
the kind of people who read Vanity Fair than
most of you realize.
If what he was doing worked, he said, “it
will mean that my son grows up in a world
where his masculinity—his support of his
family and his community, his love of his
community—is more important than wheth-
er it works for fucking McKinsey.”
At that, we called it, and the crowd of
young men who wanted to talk to him imme-
diately descended on the couches. People
kept bringing drinks, and there was a lot of
shit talk, and it went on late. I remember
thinking at one point how strange it was that
in our mid-30s Vance and I were significantly
older than almost everyone there, all of whom
thought they were organizing a struggle to
change the course of human history, and all
of whom were now going to get sloppy drunk.
The next morning, wrecked, I put on
sweatpants and a hoodie and tried to smug-
gle myself out of the hotel without having
to talk to anyone. I gave my chit to the valet
and looked around to find Vance and Yarvin
standing there waiting for cars. “How do you
guys feel?” Yarvin asked. Vance was wearing
a hoodie too and looked like I felt. “I feel hor-
rible,” he said. “Not good.”
Yarvin asked what I’d thought of every-
thing. I said it would take a long time for
me to figure that out. We all shook hands,
and they waved as I got into my car and we
all resumed our usual battle stations in the
American info-wars. n
M AY 2 0 2 2 99

Confessions of a Mob Chef
CON TIN U ED F ROM PAGE 91 Gotti’s coup
was perilous for Ruggerio because Rugge-
rio was aligned with Marino, a Castellano
loyalist. “John despised Danny,” said for-
mer FBI agent Mouw. A few months after
Castellano’s murder, according to inves-
tigators, Marino approved a revenge plot
to kill Gotti with a car bomb. (The device
blew up Gambino underboss Frank DeCicco
instead.) Fearing reprisal, Ruggerio hid from
Gotti’s crew. “We changed our habits and
didn’t frequent places that we normally
did,” Ruggerio said.
Ruggerio’s vaunted place in the restaurant
scene would wind up protecting him from
Gotti’s wrath because Ruggerio was a guy
Gotti wanted to know. “The thing you gotta
understand is, when wiseguys get together,
you know what’s the first thing they talk
about? What’d you have for dinner last night?
What’d you have for lunch? What wiseguys
do most of the time is they talk about food,”
Ruggerio said.
In April 1990, the fashion mogul Pierre
Cardin hired Ruggerio to reinvent Cardin’s
restaurant Maxim’s. “Gotti loved Maxim’s,”
Ruggerio said. The Madison Avenue loca-
tion was a virtual reproduction of the Belle
Époque Parisian dining room, with its Art
Nouveau woodwork, pink table lamps, and
rose-colored banquettes. In October 1990,
Gotti asked Ruggerio to cater his 50th birth-
day at Maxim’s. Ruggerio remembered
papering over the windows so FBI agents
surveilling Gotti couldn’t peer inside,
where 25 of the city’s most powerful gang-
sters toasted Gotti with jeroboams of 1961
Lafite and magnums of Cristal Rosé. “It was
a fucking shindig,” Ruggerio said. Rugge-
rio’s menu started with a buffet of Beluga
caviar, roasted loins of tuna, swordfish, and
aged prime beef. For the main course, Rug-
gerio served a Gotti favorite, loup de mer,
whole braised bass with fennel, butter, and
flambéed with Pernod. As Ruggerio carried
the flaming platter into the dining room, he
felt a searing pain in his hand. The sous-chef
had inadvertently splashed too much Per-
nod on the fish, and it set Ruggerio’s hand
on fire. “The flames leaped in the air, and the
scent of fennel was mixed with slight odors
of my burning flesh,” Ruggerio recalled. He
said he fought every urge to drop the platter
100 VA N I T Y FA I R
so as not to enrage the explosive Gotti. The
dinner turned out to be Gotti’s last birthday
as a free man. The FBI arrested the Teflon
Don two months later on racketeering
charges. He was convicted and sentenced
to life in prison without parole. He died of
cancer in 2002.
As Ruggerio gained food world status,
hiding his Mob life was becoming increas-
ingly difficult. In January 1992, Bryan Miller
awarded Maxim’s three stars in the Times.
Ruggerio should have scaled back his Mob
activity. Instead, he plunged deeper into
gangland. “I was a tortured person. I knew
right from wrong, but at times I couldn’t stop
myself,” he said.
IN THE SUMMER of 1992, the restaurateur
Camille Dulac courted Ruggerio to take
over the kitchen at Le Chantilly on East 57th
Street. Dulac hoped Ruggerio could revive
his venerable French restaurant, which had
slipped in recent years. Ruggerio modern-
ized the menu with Italian influences such
as crab ravioli and quail risotto. Not long after
hiring Ruggerio, Dulac got good news: The
Times and New York magazine were going to
publish reviews.
One afternoon in early February 1993,
Ruggerio said he was preparing dinner
service when the maître d’ burst into the
kitchen and informed him that police were
in the dining room and a locksmith was at
the front door changing the locks. Rug-
gerio ran to investigate. A man in a trench
coat approached. He identified himself as a
court-appointed auctioneer and said he was
there to liquidate the restaurant. Le Chantilly
had been in bankruptcy since 1991; Ruggerio
said Dulac hadn’t told him. “I was furious,”
Ruggerio recalled. Ruggerio glared at the bar
where Dulac was forlornly sipping crème de
menthe. He needed a way to keep the restau-
rant open until the reviews ran in a few days.
A positive review would fill up the reservation
book for months.
Ruggerio looked at the auctioneer again.
I know this fucking guy, he thought. Then it
clicked: He was a low-level hoodlum from
Brooklyn named Bob Moneypenny (yes,
that’s really his name). Ruggerio leaned over
and whispered that he was a friend of Joe
Watts. “The blood drained out of his face,”
Ruggerio recalled. Joe “The German” Watts
was a Gambino member and one of the most
feared gangsters in the city. (According to
prosecutors, Watts was a backup shooter on
Gotti’s hit squad that whacked Castellano.)
Phil Scala, the former FBI agent, told me
Watts would have been the family’s boss if
both his parents had been Italian. “He was a
brilliant criminal,” Scala told me.
Moneypenny apologized profusely and
called the court for permission to pause the
liquidation. “We opened at 5:30 like noth-
ing happened,” Ruggerio recalled. The
following week, the Times and New York
magazine published rave reviews. Le Chan-
tilly became one of the city’s hottest tables.
Money poured in.
But the restaurant was still in bankruptcy.
Ruggerio said he conspired with Moneypen-
ny, who died in 2007, to rig the auction and
buy the restaurant for $100,000. “The cel-
lar alone had half a million dollars of wine
in it,” Ruggerio said. The plan was simple,
according to Ruggerio. Legally, Moneypenny
needed to advertise the auction in a newspa-
per. So he advertised it in the Staten Island
Pennysaver, where few buyers would see it.
However, a day before the auction closed,
Ruggerio learned a guy in the garment dis-
trict offered $150,000. Ruggerio said he sent
three “friends” to reason with the bidder.
Ruggerio got the restaurant.
The purchase kindled Ruggerio’s ambi-
tions of restaurant moguldom. “People
bowed down to me when they found out I
owned the place,” he said. In the spring of
1994, Ruggerio checked his judgment at
the door and partnered with Dulac to open
an Italian restaurant called Nonna. I asked
Ruggerio why he continued to work with
Dulac if, as Ruggerio claims, Dulac had
hidden Le Chantilly’s bankruptcy. “It was
a huge mistake,” Ruggerio said. Ruggerio’s
much bigger error was, he said, accepting
a six-figure investment from Marino. It vio-
lated Ruggerio’s bedrock rule: Never borrow
money from the Mob. “It was pure stupidity
and ego on my part,” Ruggerio said. Marino
was about to do six years in federal prison
on a murder conspiracy conviction. Rugge-
rio said Marino warned him that if Nonna
folded, Ruggerio and Dulac would repay
him in full.
Ruggerio and Dulac’s partnership unrav-
eled almost immediately after Nonna
opened, as both Ruggerio and multiple for-
mer employees of Le Chantilly told me. In
August 1994, Ruggerio said he discovered
Le Chantilly owed New York State tens of
thousands of dollars in back taxes. (New York
City and State records show a series of tax
judgments against the restaurant throughout
the 1990s.) Ruggerio said he wanted to cut
ties with Dulac right then, but he couldn’t
without getting Marino’s permission. Rug-
gerio went down to Ashland, Kentucky, to
visit Marino in federal prison and explain the
situation. Marino was not pleased, Ruggerio
remembered. According to Ruggerio, Marino
reminded him that Ruggerio had vouched for
Dulac. Ruggerio promised he would get all of
Marino’s money out.
On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve,
Ruggerio and Dulac’s troubled partner-
ship ruptured for good. Ruggerio said he
caught Dulac on the sidewalk taking a case
of Cristal Champagne from Le Chantilly.
Ruggerio said he punched Dulac in the
face, causing the bottles to smash on the
sidewalk. “I couldn’t contain my rage,” Rug-
gerio recalled. Dulac denies this, though a
former Le Chantilly employee confirmed
parts of Ruggerio’s account. Ruggerio said
the next day he called Dulac into a private
room at Le Chantilly and put a dollar bill on
the table. “Consider yourself bought out,” he
told Dulac. “You have an hour to clear out.
When I come back, if you’re still here, I’ll kill
you.” While Dulac denies this as well, former
employees recalled that Dulac didn’t have a
regular presence at the restaurant following
the conflict.
Still, this wasn’t the street, and elbowing
an unwanted partner aside took more than
words. Ruggerio seethed as the partnership
took its time to formally unwind. When
another money matter arose between the
two, something inside Ruggerio snapped.
“When I lost it, I didn’t get crazy. I got quiet
and cold,” he said.
According to Ruggerio, he assembled a
crew from Brooklyn. One night in early 1995,
they followed Dulac to the West Village and
pulled him into a van and sped off. “At first he
was indignant. He kept saying, ‘I’m going to
call the police!’ ” Ruggerio recalled. Rugge-
rio said he drove Dulac to a remote beach in
Breezy Point, Queens, where, earlier that
day, one of Ruggerio’s guys had dug a hole in
the sand. “It was pitch-black when we drove
out there. When we pulled in, the headlights
from the van shined on the hole. We dragged
Camille from the van and marched him over
to the hole. By this time, he was on his knees,
begging for mercy.” It was the middle of
winter, but Ruggerio said he told Dulac to
take off his shoes and socks, which Rugge-
rio threw into the Atlantic Ocean. Ruggerio
said he then pulled out a contract he had had
a lawyer draw up for Dulac to sign. “I kicked
him into the hole, we got in the van, and we
left,” Ruggerio said. Dulac denies this inci-
dent ever took place.
Ruggerio said he regrets what happened.
“I did things when I was pushed that I’m
not proud of,” he said. “But to really, truly
be in the streets, you gotta have a black
heart. When you turn that switch, there can
be no emotion. You have no pity. You gotta
just do it.”
One way Ruggerio rationalized his law-
lessness was that the hospitality industry was
not exactly a bastion of upstanding behav-
ior. “There are more thieves and deviants
in the restaurant business than there are
wiseguys in the street,” Ruggerio said. He
also observed powerful New Yorkers act
appallingly, sometimes violently so. “They
judged me, but they were no better,” he said.
Ruggerio recalled attending a meeting with
Pierre Cardin and Maxim’s landlord, the late
real estate heiress Leona Helmsley, during
which Helmsley called Cardin a “little fuck-
in’ French fag.” He said La Caravelle owner
Robert Meyzen once put the world-famous
cardiac surgeon Christiaan Barnard in a
headlock during an argument over whether
Barnard should be seated despite arriving 25
minutes late for his reservation.
IN THE END, they got Al Capone on tax eva-
sion. David Ruggerio got pinched for credit
card fraud. On Thursday afternoon, July 2,
1998, Ruggerio was filming a cooking seg-
ment at Macy’s when he got the news police
barged into Le Chantilly with a search war-
rant. He raced to the restaurant and found
officers in orange “Gambino Squad” vests
removing the restaurant’s financial records.
The Manhattan D.A. wanted to indict Rugge-
rio and two employees for stealing hundreds
of thousands of dollars from Le Chantilly’s
credit card processing company by inflating
tips. “I didn’t do the credit card crime,” Rug-
gerio told me. There was enough evidence,
though, that Ruggerio said famed Mob law-
yer Charles F. Carnesi told him to take a deal.
On March 11, 1999, Ruggerio pleaded guilty
to attempted grand larceny.
It was a ridiculously stupid thing to get
caught for. Ruggerio didn’t need the money.
Vintner Robert Mondavi named Ruggerio
one of the 13 best young chefs in America
in 1995. Cardin had lured Ruggerio back to
Maxim’s the following year and made him
a co-owner. Ruggerio was planning to open
Pastis in Le Parker Meridien hotel with a
dining room designed by architect David
Rockwell. He published cookbooks, taped
a PBS series, and was signed by Food Net-
work. “After the credit cards, the press just
categorized me as a moron because I fucked
up my TV career. I had five restaurants, 650
employees. And it was gone,” he said.
The more painful thing Ruggerio lost was
the respect of the gangsters that cooking
had given him. Shortly after the credit card
bust, Marino was released from prison and
went to see Ruggerio at Le Chantilly. “We
sat in the back of the restaurant and he said
to me, ‘I gotta ask you a question. Don’t lie
to me. Why the credit cards? What the fuck
possessed you to do this shit? You had things
that none of us could have had.’ I just sat
there. There was nothing left to say,” Rug-
gerio said.
After that, Ruggerio drifted. He co-
owned a strip club for a while. He ran a
Jewish deli, a sushi bar, and a doughnut shop
on the Upper West Side until those closed by
2014. That same year, Ruggerio was arrested
for allegedly forging a check during a real
estate deal gone bad. (He said he pleaded
guilty to one count of possession of a forged
bank instrument and avoided jail time.) On
the morning of June 21, 2014, he got a call
that his oldest son, Anthony, was dead. “He
did a lot of OxyContin and drank. He went
to sleep and never woke up,” Ruggerio said.
Ruggerio knew his life in the Mob was over
when Marino didn’t attend his son’s funer-
al. Ruggerio told me he stopped returning
Marino’s calls. The Mob had cost him the
only two things that gave him joy: cooking
and his children. “I wouldn’t have wished
my life on anyone. I hate to sleep. The nights
are very long and filled with nightmares,”
he told me recently. “I didn’t want to be a
criminal. I want you to understand that. I
loved being a chef.” n

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M AY 2 0 2 2 101
 P roust Questionnaire
JAMIE LEE CURTIS
The actor and advocate on living well, letting go,
and learning to play the drums
What is your idea of perfect happiness? Knowing that each
day I have lived wisely and loved well. What is your greatest
fear? Not doing the above. What is your greatest extravagance?
I am a replicant. I buy multiples of things I love. Bandolier
phone cases. Anatomie clothes. Fleece Birkenstocks and fleece
Merrell clogs. Armani lip balm. What is your favorite journey?
Psychoanalysis. Which talent would you most like to have?
I am currently taking drum lessons. Which historical figure
do you most identify with? Eleanor Roosevelt. If you
could change one thing about your family, what would
it be? I should have insisted on family dinners. What do
you regard as the lowest depth of misery? February 2, 1999,
when I realized I would die from opiate addiction. What
do you consider your greatest achievement? My sobriety.
Which living person do you most admire? Greta Thunberg.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Judgment.
What is the trait you most deplore in others? Superiority.
What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Order/neatness. What do you dislike most about your
appearance? My ankles. Which living person do you most
despise? I try to remember that hurt people hurt people.
Which words or phrases do you most overuse? “Far out.”
What is your greatest regret? Squandered time. What
or who is the greatest love of your life? Christopher Guest.
Whose picture I saw in Rolling Stone in 1984 and I said to
my friend, who was sitting next to me, “I’m going to marry
102 VA N I T Y FA I R I L L U S T R AT I O N BY R I S K O
that guy.” And eight months later I did, 37 years ago. When
and where were you happiest? When I am in a creative flow.
What is your current state of mind? To thine own self be true.
Who is your favorite hero of fiction? Lee from East of Eden.
If you could choose what to come back as, what would it be?
A Lagerfeld rose. Where would you like to live? The
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, but place it
in the places I already live. What is your favorite occupation?
Divesting. What are your favorite names? Runi, Lulu,
Ruby. What is your most marked characteristic? I hope
kindness. What do you most value in your friends? Seeing
and being seen. What is your most treasured possession?
My Cathy Waterman child charm with Annie’s and Ruby’s
names engraved. Who are your favorite writers? John
Steinbeck, James Clavell, P.D. Eastman (Go, Dog. Go!),
Mark Nepo. Who are your heroes in real life? Bill and Lois
Wilson, Debra Hill, Dr. Bob Silkworth. What is it that you
most dislike? Liars. How would you like to die? ALIVE!!!!
What is your motto? If not now, when? If not me, who? n
M AY 2 0 2 2