SEPTEMBER 2022

RACHEL
MADDOW’S
BIG GAMBLE

THE
SUPREME
COURT’S
WAR ON
DEMOCRACY

JOAN
DIDION’S

N
BEST FRENEMY

O
THE BITCOIN

T
BONNIE
& CLYDE

I L LI N E

M
IS S H
E W I NI

A
L E F The Formula 1

T H

H
superstar

N D looks ahead

Y O BY C H R I S H E AT H

BE
P HOTOGRA P H S BY
ADRIENNE RAQUEL

PLUS

V. F. talks to
Alfre Woodard
Eve Jobs
Audrey Gelman
 Haute Joaillerie, place Vendôme since 1906

9 NEW BOND STREET - HARRODS - SELFRIDGES

www.vancleefarpels.com - +44 20 7108 6210
Perlée collection
Perlée watch, yellow gold,
guilloché white
mother-of-pearl.
Vanities
46

27
27 / Opening Act
South African breakout
Thuso Mbedu on
the megastar cast of
The Woman King.

30 / The Gallery
A classic watch gets a
true-blue update.

32 / Beauty
Pared-back skin care
and makeup from
three Paris-based
luxury juggernauts.

34 / Trending
The season’s most
exuberant, maximalist
styles, inspired by
the iconic film Clueless.

36 / Fairground
Hollywood glitz heads
for Balthazar.

37 / Books
Heady true crime,
personal nonfiction, and
six new novels.

38 / The Hive
Insider tell-alls from
Trump’s swamp.
Columns
39 / My Stuff

40 42 44
Homeware and
beauty favorites
from a brother-sister
design duo. Comic Effect Guess Who’s Back? Power,
L E W I S H A M I LT O N ’ S S W E AT E R B Y F E N D I M E N ’ S ; E A R R I N G S B Y DAV I D Y U R M A N ;

BY REBECCA FORD BY KEZIAH WEIR Not Reason

PHOTOGRAPH BY BY CRISTIAN FARIAS
R I N G B Y C H R O M E H E A R T 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 .

For nearly a decade, the JOSEPHINE SCHIELE ILLUSTRATION BY

streamers and cable have Sequel mania has come for QUINTON M c MILLAN

ruled the Emmy for best us all. Even Pulitzer The Supreme Court is
comedy category. Now, the Prize–winning novelists are leading us down a path
networks are striking back. getting in on the act. of no return.

On the Lewis Hamilton’s clothing by Valentino; earrings by Greg Yüna; necklaces by

Cover Mikimoto (bottom) and XIV Karats. Hair products by Ampro Pro Styl. Grooming 20 Editor’s Letter
products by Evolve Organic Beauty. Hair by Lisa Torres. Grooming by Yuko.
24 Contributors
Manicure by Cheme Dolker. Tailor, Claudia Diaz. Set design by Stefan Beckman.
Produced on location by Very Rare Productions. Styled by Eric McNeal. Photographed 25 Behind the Cover
exclusively for V.F. by Adrienne Raquel at Related’s 520 West 28th by Zaha Hadid 136 Proust Questionnaire
building in NYC. For details, go to VF.com/credits.

12 VA N I T Y FA I R PHOTOGRAPH BY A D R I E N N E RAQUEL SEPTEMBER 2022

RM 037
In-house skeletonised automatic winding calibre
50-hour power reserve (± 10%)
Baseplate and bridges in grade 5 titanium
Oversize date and function selector
Variable-geometry rotor
Case in ATZ white ceramic and white gold

A Racing Machine
On The Wrist
 PAGE 60

“It doesn’t mean this is

easy or idyllic, but it’s
different, and that’s what
I needed.”
— RACHEL MADDOW

Features

46
Keys to
60 Far From the
68
Fast
78
Chef ’s Kiss
the Kingdom Maddow Crowd Company BY NATE FREEMAN
BY CHRIS HEATH BY JOE POMPEO BY LILI ANOLIK PHOTOGRAPHS BY
PHOTOGRAPHS BY PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARK PETERSON
ADRIENNE RAQUEL ANNIE LEIBOVITZ A trove of unseen letters from In the kitchen with
Formula 1 leading man Gone fishin’ with Rachel Eve Babitz sheds light on restaurateur Mario Carbone,
Lewis Hamilton on fashion, Maddow as she downshifts her complicated friendship whose elevated Italian
fame, and breaking from her nightly with Joan Didion—and their American food is a magnet
all the rules. anchor role at MSNBC. ’60s-era social scene. for A-list celebrities.

RAZZLE-DAZZLE

“I can’t explain it. I guess

I am just not for everyone.” $3.6 billion
Estimated value of 94,000 stolen Bitcoin
—AUDREY GELMAN [P. 94] retrieved from a young couple in Manhattan—the
largest financial seizure in U.S. history. [P. 86]

14 VA N I T Y FA I R PHOTOGRAPH BY A N N I E LEIBOVITZ
 The September Issue / No. 741

Features

86
The Ballad of
Bitcoin Bonnie
and Clyde
BY NICK BILTON
ILLUSTRATIONS BY
JONATHAN BARTLETT

How an unlikely couple’s

multibillion-dollar crypto
caper went south.

94
Vintage Audrey
BY EMILY JANE FOX
PHOTOGRAPH BY
GILLIAN LAUB

The fallen founder of The

Wing talks about her unlikely
E V E J O B S ’ S D R E S S A N D J E W E L R Y B Y S A I N T L A U R E N T B Y A N T H O N Y VA C C A R E L LO ; B O O T S B Y A LT U Z A R R A . 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 .

next act—founding a twee

antique store in Brooklyn.

100
All About Eve
BY BRITT HENNEMUTH
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
EMMA SUMMERTON

World-class equestrian
turned fashion model
Eve (daughter of Steve) Jobs
in fall style—and a certain
iconic black turtleneck.

108
94

PROUST QUESTIONNAIRE
The Magic Mountain
BY JENNIFER GOULD What do you consider your
Inside the battle for the late
Herbalife founder’s
greatest achievement?
billion-dollar dream plot. A jackknife jump into a full front split. Repeatedly. —ALFRE WOODARD [P. 136]

PHOTOGRAPH BY E M M A SUMMERTON SEPTEMBER 2022 15

 ®

Editor in Chief Radhika Jones

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

Director of Editorial Operations Kelly Butler Executive Editor, Features & Development Claire Howorth
Executive Editor Matthew Lynch Executive Hollywood Editor Jeff Giles Editor, The Hive Michael Calderone
Director of Special Projects Sara Marks Global Head of Talent Alison Ward Frank
Awards and Audio Editor Katey Rich Editor, Creative Development David Friend
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TV Correspondent Joy Press Art Columnist Nate Freeman
Staff Writers Dan Adler, Kenzie Bryant, David Canfield, Yohana Desta, Charlotte Klein, Chris Murphy, Erin Vanderhoof
Staff Reporter Caleb Ecarma Special Correspondents Nick Bilton, Bryan Burrough,
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Design & Photography

Design Director Justin Patrick Long Visuals Director Tara Johnson Art Director Emily Crawford
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Visuals Editor Allison Schaller Digital Designer Quinton McMillan
Associate Visuals Editor Madison Reid Designer Pamela Wei Wang

Fashion & Beauty

Fashion Director Nicole Chapoteau
Beauty Director Laura Regensdorf Accessories Director Daisy Shaw-Ellis
Senior Menswear Editor Miles Pope Market Editor Kia D. Goosby Assistant Fashion Editors Samantha Gasmer, Jessica Neises

Content Integrity
Senior Counsel Terence Keegan
Production Director J Jamerson Research Director David Gendelman
Copy Director Michael Casey Associate Legal Affairs Editor Simon Brennan
Production Managers Beth Meyers, Susan M. Rasco, Roberto Rodríguez
Research Managers Brendan Barr, Kelvin C. Bias, Audrey Fromson, Michael Sacks
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Video & Audience Development

Director, Audience Development Alyssa Karas
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Communications
Vice President, Communications Carly Holden Director of Communications Rachel Janc
Communications Associate Izzy Goldberg

Contributors
Contributing Art Director Theresa Griggs Associate Editor S.P. Nix Digital Visuals Editor Jessica Xie Architecture Consultant Basil Walter
Summit Contributing Producer Graham Veysey Special Projects Art Director Angela Panichi

Contributing Photographers
Annie Leibovitz
Jonathan Becker, Larry Fink, Nick Riley Bentham, Collier Schorr, Mark Seliger

Contributing Editors
Kurt Andersen, Lili Anolik, Jorge Arévalo, Peter Biskind, Buzz Bissinger, Derek Blasberg, Christopher Bollen, Douglas Brinkley,
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Ariel Foxman, Alex French, Paul Goldberger, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Michael Joseph Gross, Bruce Handy, Carol Blue Hitchens, A.M. Homes, Uzodinma Iweala,
May Jeong, Sebastian Junger, Sam Kashner, Jemima Khan, Hilary Knight, Wayne Lawson, Kiese Makeba Laymon, Franklin Leonard, Monica Lewinsky,
Bethany McLean, Nina Munk, Katie Nicholl, Maureen O’Connor, Jen Palmieri, Evgenia Peretz, Maximillian Potter, Robert Risko, Lisa Robinson,
Mark Rozzo, Maureen Ryan, Nancy Jo Sales, Elissa Schappell, Jeff Sharlet, Michael Shnayerson, Chris Smith, Richard Stengel,
Diane von Furstenberg, Elizabeth Saltzman Walker, Benjamin Wallace, Jesmyn Ward, Ned Zeman

16 VA N I T Y FA I R SEPTEMBER 2022
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e-tech 145 hybrid R.S. line are: 58.9 (4.8) and CO2 emissions are 109 g/km.
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Renault recommends renault.co.uk

 ®

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18 VA N I T Y FA I R SEPTEMBER 2022
 On Time
PORTR A IT: L UI S MON TEI RO

THE FILM TV ISSUE &

On Sale September 16
Editor’s Letter

Of all the surprises in

Chris Heath’s mesmerizing
cover profile of the Formula 1
icon Lewis Hamilton, the
one that charmed me most is
that Hamilton dislikes driving.
Not on the racecourse, to be clear—
there he channels the joy and dedi-
cation of an athlete who found the
exact thing he was born to do (one
thinks of Serena Williams on the
tennis court, Simone Biles on the
gymnastics floor). No, this was about
being hamstrung by two-way traffic
and junctions and impatient road
hogs, navigating the twisty roads
outside the picturesque town of Èze The pleasures and personalities in this September issue
in the South of France, where he abound: a star-studded feature on Mario Carbone and his
talked to Chris about his tumultu- celebrity-magnet restaurants; the first interview with Audrey
ous season and what’s to come. For- Gelman since her dizzyingly successful start-up The Wing suf-
mula 1 is huge in Europe and growing fered its equally dizzying decline and fall; an archive dive into
its profile in the U.S., thanks in part irresistible, never-before-seen correspondence from Eve Bab-
to Netflix’s gripping series Drive to itz to literary frenemy Joan Didion; and an in-depth interview
Survive, and Hamilton is in a class of with post–prime time Rachel Maddow, who is downshifting her
one when it comes to his racing bona presence as the face of MSNBC at arguably the precise moment
fides but also his grace and sports- when her audience needs her most, on the eve of extremely
manship, in victory and in defeat. consequential midterm elections.
Here he speaks without reservation On that note, as much as we love to look forward to the fall
of his disappointment after a contro- slate, it feels particularly important this September to acknowl-
versial call that cost him a deserved edge the darkness preceding it. The summer of 2022 was
win, of the friends who pulled him marked by a series of Supreme Court decisions that fundamen-
out of despair, and of the fortitude tally altered our cultural and political landscape, from Miranda
that brought him to the pinnacle of rights to the EPA to bodily autonomy. The shock of the Dobbs
achievement in the first place—the decision, if I try to diagnose my own, had less to do with the
same fortitude, mixed with a healthy actual ruling; conservative legislators and judges have been
dose of rebellious spirit, that now chipping away at Roe for decades, and I wish I could say I was
carries him through. surprised that candidates for the highest bench lied about their

20 VA N I T Y FA I R PHOTOGRAPH BY M A R K SELIGER
 @vanityfairlondon
3.
1.
2.
5.
Endless SUMMER
Embrace the very last of the sunnier
season with the best new people, places
and things to check out this month
■ Style File
POP UP: The Harrods Moët
& Chandon champagne
bar (3) has arrived, and it’s
a haven of fizz by the glass,
signature cocktails and
7. divine “food bites”.
moet.com
6.
IN THE BAG: Louis
Vuitton’s Petit Noé Bucket
Bag (6) is made from white
calfskin with the house’s
iconic monogram pattern
reproduced in delicate
cut-outs. louisvuitton.com
ON A ROLL: Travel in
serious style with the
Hermès R.M.S suitcase (9)
in boldy patterned Plume
H canvas. hermes.com
9.
■ On Beauty
NEW FLAME: Only Loewe
could get away with a
cucumber-scented candle.
Somehow, it just works—
helped in part by the
I R V I N G P E N N , T H R E E P O P P I E S , “ WA R A B C H I E F ” , N E W Y O R K ,
characteristically chic
1 9 6 9 ( C ) C O N D E N A S T P U B L I C AT I O N S , I N C ( P O P P I E S ) .
ceramic jar (8).
perfumesloewe.com
■ Culture Trip
FLORAL TRIBUTE: Richard
Learoyd & Irving Penn:
Flowers at Hamilton’s
Gallery (7) brings together
8. exquisite still life
photography from two
Agenda / September
4.
masters of the subject.
Until September 10.
hamiltonsgallery.com
■ Jet Set
TALK OF THE TOWN:
Launched this summer,
Anantara’s hotel in
Downtown Dubai (5)
offers an enviable central
location and knockout
Burj Khalifa views.
anantara.com
■ Finer Things
SEE THE LIGHT: The
hypnotic Midnight Aura
necklace (1) is part of the
new chapter of De Beers’
The Alchemist of Light
High Jewellery collection.
debeers.co.uk
INTO THE BLUE: A splash
of colour, a hint of
shimmer and floral motifs
breathe new life into three
fresh versions of Rolex’s
Oyster Perpetual Datejust
31 (2). rolex.com
HIDDEN GEM: Boghossian’s
Inlay Shine creates a
bewitching blend of
colour, with gemstones
carved and set seamlessly
into one another in
earrings (4) and other
pieces. boghossian-
jewels.com
SEPTEMBER 2022 21
Editor’s Letter

commitment to upholding prece-

dent. Nor is it surprising, in the arc
of American history, to confront the
fact that certain classes of people
are afforded fewer rights and pro-
tections than others. What struck
me was the backslide: the idea that
for my 49 years as an American
woman, born the day after Roe v.
Wade was decided, I possessed an
agency over my body that, depend-
ing on what state they live in, my
nieces and goddaughter might not;
and further, the notion, offensive
in the extreme, that the Supreme
Court now presumed to frame my
own relationship to my body differ-
ently. In constitutional terms, we
have recognized more rights over
the last 230 years, not taken them
away. And so the decision overturn-
ing Roe feels bizarre not only in its
feeble originalist claims (as if the
founders were sparing bandwidth
for the privacy or privileges of any
women), but in its reversal of a tra-
jectory toward greater, if always
imperfect, equality of opportunity
for all citizens. On the day of the
abortion decision, I happened to be
flying to London, and things looked
even worse from abroad because—
as I heard from everyone who asked
me about it—the United States had
revealed itself to be not a beacon
but a backward force.
We will have more to say on
these topics throughout the fall. For
this issue, Cristian Farias takes on
the subject of the Supreme Court’s
current war on democracy, the way
SWAG BAG
the conservative wing of the Court
From deliciously
is helping to dismantle democratic oversized totes to
apparatuses against popular will and notebooks and
postcards featuring
even reason. With scant respect for vintage V.F. covers,
history and precedent, they use the there are great
finds in the new
blunt tools at their disposal to derail Vanity Fair Shop
our future. n at vf.com/shop.
J U S T I N B I S H O P.

radhika jones, Editor in Chief

22 VA N I T Y FA I R SEPTEMBER 2022
The
C H Y P R É
Fragrance Family
Contributors

Clockwise
from top left:
Nicole
Chapoteau,
Lili Anolik,
Nate Freeman,
Emily Jane
Fox, and
Chris Heath.

H E AT H : J O L I E H E AT H . C H A P O T E A U : C O U R T E S Y O F N I C O L E C H A P O T E A U . F OX : J I L L I A N M I T C H E L L . A N O L I K : M I C H A E L B E N A B I B . F R E E M A N : C A S E Y K E L B A U G H .
Chris Nicole Emily Jane Lili Nate
HEATH CHAPOTEAU FOX ANOLIK FREEMAN
“KEYS TO THE KINGDOM,” “ALL ABOUT EVE,” “VINTAGE AUDREY,” “FAST COMPANY,” “CHEF’S KISS,”
P. 46 P. 100 P. 94 P. 68 P. 78

“When athletes “We shot on a beauti- To prepare for “I thought I knew Art columnist—and
don’t seem to have ful farm estate in her Audrey Gelman everything about brand-new dad—Nate
too much to say, Cold Spring, New profile, national Eve Babitz, and then Freeman first saw
I sometimes wonder York. It was such a correspondent Emily her sister, Miran- the cult of Carbone
whether it’s because treat for me as I grew Jane Fox boned up di, found these boxes in action last Decem-
the core of what they up in the area,” says on accountability with letters, journals, ber at the restaurant in
do is nonverbal, or V.F. fashion director politics and media photos,” says V.F. Florida’s South Beach.
whether it’s more Nicole Chapoteau, treatment of female contributing editor “The frenzy during Art
that no one thinks to who styled Eve Jobs. founders. She and Lili Anolik, who is Basel transcended
ask,” says British- “She absolutely loves Gelman talked about working on a revised spicy rigatoni,” he says.
born, Brooklyn-based clothes and wanted everything from edition of her book “It was a cultural phe-
contributor Chris to try on everything, Trump-era pop fem- on the subject, nomenon.” Freeman,
Heath. “Lewis her playlist was inism to cottagecore. Hollywood’s Eve: who splits his time
Hamilton has a epic, and she even “It was a master class Eve Babitz and the between the East Vil-
remarkable story, made a funny joke in world building Secret History of L.A., lage and the Catskills,
one he is clearly still about supporting the tied to cultural tastes for Scribner. “I now marvels at Carbone’s
pondering himself. family business.” and political moment understand Eve— empire. “It’s as if the
If you’re truly meeting,” she says. Joan Didion too—in rich and powerful sim-
prepared to listen, a whole new way. ply are not aware that
he’ll tell you plenty.” It’s thrilling.” other places exist
to get dinner.”

24 VA N I T Y FA I R
 BehindRubric
the Cover
Tk

In April, V.F. took

over an acclaimed
Zaha Hadid–designed
building in Manhattan
to create a multidimensional,
candy-colored world for Formula 1
superstar Lewis Hamilton. The
West Chelsea apartment tower rises
elegantly above the elevated High
Line, with dynamic curves and open,
flowing rooms, the fluid, futuristic
hallmarks of Hadid’s work.
Photographer Adrienne Raquel
set the lighting to cinematic opulence.
“I wanted the imagery to ooze
impeccable style and bravado,” she
says, “and to really capture Lewis
from a new gaze.”
H A M I LT O N A N D R A Q U E L : A D R I E N N E R A Q U E L . L A M B O R G H I N I : N ATA L I E G I A L L U C A . P O O L : N ATA L I E G I A L L U C A . H A M I LT O N

As Chris Heath reveals in his

A N D R A Q U E L AT M O N I T O R : TA R A J O H N S O N . H A M I LT O N A N D M C N E A L : E R I C M C N E A L . B E C K M A N : A D R I E N N E R A Q U E L .

profile of Hamilton, off the racetrack

he is a cautious and courteous
driver who dislikes driving. But there From top left: Lewis Hamilton
with photographer Adrienne
is one car he has always been drawn Raquel; posing with a 1989
to: a 1989 Lamborghini Countach, Lamborghini Countach;
capturing the cover shot;
infamously featured in Martin Hamilton and Raquel; Hamilton
Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. Set with stylist Eric McNeal; set
designer Stefan Beckman managed designer Stefan Beckman.
to track one down for the occasion.
Throughout the portfolio, stylist
Eric McNeal cut a swath through
this season’s most celebrated looks.
“We spoke of our shared love for
things like Japanese fashion and Black
designers,” McNeal says. “Lewis
passionately insisted we have them
included in the shoot.”
For the cover image, the team
constructed a stage in the middle of
the indoor pool. Hamilton walked
onto a floating platform, dressed
head to toe in Valentino pink, never
mind those pant hems. n

SEPTEMBER 2022 25
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VA N I T I E S VA N I TA S VA N I TAT U M

PAGE 28

THUSO MBEDU
prepares for battle in
The Woman King
H A I R , T E D G I B S O N ; M A K E U P , R E B E K A H A L A D D I N ; M A N I C U R E , T H U Y N G U Y E N ; 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 P R E I S S C R E AT I V E . 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 34

CLUELESS
STYLE FTW

PAGE 36

A STARRY NIGHT
AT BALTHAZAR

PAGE 38

LOGROLLING IN
MAGA MEMOIRS

Gown by Carolina Herrera;

sandals by Fendi; bangles by
Tiffany & Co.; ring by Van
Cleef & Arpels. Throughout:
hair products by Starring
by Ted Gibson; makeup
products by Set by Rebekah
Aladdin; nail enamel by
Chanel Le Vernis. Styled
by Olivia Weeden.

VA N I T Y FA I R PHOTOGRAPHS BY N I C K RILEY BENTHAM SEPTEMBER 2022 27

Vanities /Opening Act
Crown JEWEL
As Nawi in The Woman King,
THUSO MBEDU channels the
power of an Agoji warrior
Thuso Mbedu broke hearts and raked in
accolades as Cora in Barry Jenkins’s limited
series The Underground Railroad, based
on Colson Whitehead’s book. Now the rising
South African star makes her big-screen
debut in Gina Prince-Blythewood’s historical
drama The Woman King opposite Viola
Davis. “Being surrounded by such strong,
fierce women…” She smiles and pauses.
“I am looking forward to the press tour.”
BORN IN KwaZulu-Natal—“the land of the
Zulus”—she’s the first artist in her family
“because my parents were born during the
apartheid era. My mother wanted to be a
geologist, but she wasn’t allowed.” She lost
her mother young, so Mbedu’s grandmother
raised her and her sister. “My gran passed
three days before my onscreen debut.”
AFTER GRADUATING from drama school in
Johannesburg—“I couldn’t afford to fail and
go back home. It was not an option”—her
28 VA N I T Y FA I R
Due Time
Black filmmakers star in a new
exhibit at L.A.’s Academy Museum.
When visitors step into
“Regeneration: Black Cin-
ema 1898–1971,” they will
see rare objects like Lena
Horne’s gown from Stormy
Weather, clips from buried
blaxploitation films like
Black Chariot, and home
movies from the likes of
Cab Calloway. “From the
onset, there has been Black
participation in cinema,”
F I L M S T I L L : C O U R T E S Y O F M A R G A R E T H E R R I C K L I B R A R Y/ T W E N T I E T H C E N T U R Y F OX . 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 .
cocurator Rhea Combs says.
The show has been five years
in the making, says cocura-
tor Doris Berger, along the
way shaped by advisers like
Dress and earring Ava DuVernay and influ-
by Dior; bangles by
Tiffany & Co.
enced by research trips to
the South of France, where
the curators visited Josephine
Baker’s preserved castle.
big break came in the form of the series
Is’Thunzi. “I hadn’t worked for six straight
“Regeneration” was sparked
by the historic 2017 rediscov-
months; I’d gone through depression as a ery of Something Good—
result. I was like, ‘If I don’t get this, take me, Negro Kiss, a short clip from
Jesus,’ ” she laughs. “I’m dramatic.” 1898 depicting two Black
AFTER TWO consecutive international Emmy actors tenderly kissing, which
nominations, she auditioned for The will show beside Glenn
Underground Railroad. At her final callback, Ligon’s Double America 2
she cried so much, her contact lens flipped neon work to create a
inside out. I hope they don’t want another take! dialogue between historic
she thought. “I practically ran out.” and contemporary Black
YEARS LATER, the newfound Angeleno and art—the past stepping into its
Jenkins remain close. “I bother him at rightful place in the present.
random times. I invite myself to use the pool. —yohana de sta
‘I don’t even need you to be at the house!’ ”
SHE TURNED DOWN a major franchise—which
one? “I can’t say!”—to do The Woman King.
THE FILM has an all-star cast, which Mbedu
says are all introverts—except for John
Boyega, who is “a complete clown and a joy to
work with.” She and Davis formed a particular
bond: “Viola did say that if her story was
turned into a biopic, she would love me to
play [her]. I said, ‘I can audition?’ And
she said, ‘No, Thuso can play.’ I said, ‘Oh.’ ”
NOW SHE’S PRODUCING, with a deal at
Paramount+, to make socially conscious
content. “I want to create opportunities for
The Nicholas Brothers
other people, and I’m grateful I’m able to.” in a scene from Stormy
—brit t hennemuth Weather (1943).
SEPTEMBER 2022
 LUXURY HOTELS • SPAS • VENUES

CONDENASTJOHANSENS.COM
TAJ EXOTICA RESORT & SPA, MALDIVES, INDIAN OCEAN
Vanities /The Gallery

Photograph by
INA JANG

S E T D E S I G N , K R I S J E N S E 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 .

Field of DREAMS
When Rolex launched the Datejust in 1945, it was an
everyday watch, a stroke of beautiful efficiency in a busy
postwar world, its name signifying the tiny calendar at
three o’clock. The new version, with diamonds for pistils
Rolex Datejust 31
watch in Oystersteel, on the 24 flowers that blossom across its face, is a
white gold, and wrist corsage of modern femininity. (In addition to the
diamonds, £8,100. blue, photographed here amid thistle, the Datejust 31
(rolex.com) comes in silver and olive green.) —Daisy Shaw-Ellis

30 VA N I T Y FA I R SEPTEMBER 2022
 STOR E
Timeless prints from the world’s most iconic artists
condenaststore.com
Vanities /Beauty

OUTSIDE Interests
With its first complexion line, Hermès Beauty taps the age-old
appeal of adventure By Laura Regensdorf

flapper shaded by a striped parasol. “Pour

le sport, pour le bain, pour la plage,” reads
the copy beneath a map of French tourist
cities, plus a bonus inset of New York.
It was a soigné invitation to get outdoors.
Nearly a century later, that impulse
returns with the debut complexion range
from Hermès Beauty—the brand’s young Beau Travail
métier whose color-block lipstick cases Dior Beauty bottles up a storied
Granville rose for its newest skin-care
made a splash in 2020. “Plein Air conveys product.
a certain idea of simplicity, of freedom, of
movement and well-being,” says Gregoris PALE PINK PLASTER decorates the
Pyrpylis, a Greek-born makeup artist exterior of Les Rhumbs, a villa in
who joined as creative director this year. Granville, France, where the Dior
It’s a sunny day in Normandy, near family moved when Christian

WHEN ÉMILE HERMÈS
took the reins of the
family’s saddle-
making firm in the
interwar years, a spirit of leisure class
joie de vivre hung in the air. He ushered
in handbags and swimsuits; a circa-1930
advertisement shows a beach-going
Hermès Plein Air is an edited five-piece range,
including an SPF skin tint and blotting papers.
A 1970s
tweed look.
shoreline horse trails, and Pyrpylis
is talking through the line. The
complexion balm is the hit: a sheer
tint with mineral SPF 30, in a dozen
shades that suit a deep swath of
skin tones. Along with its skin-care
boosts (hyaluronic acid, evening
primrose oil), the cap bears Émile’s
ex libris. There are two powders:
Radiant Matte (paired with a chic
goat-hair brush) and Radiant Glow
for highlighting. Inside the orange
boîte are Japanese blotting papers,
soft as silk with tiny H watermarks.
“In Greece, your first books are about
mythology,” Pyrpylis says, tracing back
an early conception of beauty that went
beyond the goddess Aphrodite. “There
was Athena—so sportive and so powerful,
with character.” What is more radiant
than a force of nature incarnate?
NEED FOR T WEED
In a twist of 1920s hobnobbing, the Duke of
Westminster’s Scottish tweeds helped inspire
Chanel’s enduring use of the material—from
the original boxy suits to Karl Lagerfeld–era
hot pants to Virginie Viard’s feather-sleeve
shift on the spring 2022 couture runway.
Attention to detail is the common thread, as
seen in this limited-edition eye compact, in
four versions. Each shadow is stamped with a
woven texture, and the tweed case by Maison
Lesage artisans is the perfect little jacket.
S C U L P T U R E : K E I R N A N M O N A G H A N & T H E O VA M V O U N A K I S . C H A N E L M O D E L : G E T T Y I M A G E S . D I O R G A R D E N S : C O U R T E S Y O F D I O 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 .
was a year old. Named after the
compass rose, a starlike maritime
tool depicted in a floor mosaic,
the property instead attuned the
future couturier to the floral
kind—pruned in the garden or
growing along the cliffs. It’s the
wild variety that Dior Beauty has
homed in on. Through a series
of hybridizations, the next-gen
rose de Granville is the jewel of
the brand’s Prestige skin care,
with active ingredients harnessed
from stem to petal. This year, the
house inaugurates a six-hectare
garden devoted to the sustain-
able cultivation of these cosmetic
powerhouses, powdery pink like
the nearby Les Rhumbs (now
the Musée Christian Dior).
Organic farming practices make
use of companion plants to lure
friendly fauna and deter pests;
extraction methods utilize cold
pressure and electromagnetic
fraction without the need for
solvents. It all powers the latest
innovation, Rosapeptide, with 88
bioavailable rose molecules—the
star of the revamped, refillable
Prestige La Crème. Designed
to spur collagen growth, it makes
the idea of a perennial bloom
something of a tangible reality.

32 VA N I T Y FA I R SEPTEMBER 2022
Vanities /Trending

1. 2. WHAT. EVER!
1. Prada coat, £4,500.
(prada.com/gb) 2. Miu Miu
sweater, £1,050. (miumiu
3. .com/gb) 3. Dior Men’s tote,
price upon request. (Dior
Men’s stores) 4. Boy Smells
Woodphoria fragrance.
(available in the U.S. at
sephora.com) 5. Gucci
boots, £3,430. (gucci.com/
uk) 6. Nécessaire The
Sunscreen SPF 30. (available
in the U.S. at necessaire
.com) 7. Trinity for Chitose
Abe of Sacai ring, £4,250.
(cartier.com/en-gb)
8. Westman Atelier Vital
Skincare complexion drops,
£62. (westman-atelier.com)
9. Loewe dress, £895.
6. 7. 8. (loewe.com/eur) 10. Louis
Vuitton men’s jacket,
£3,800. (uk.louisvuitton
.com) 11. La Prairie Skin
Caviar Harmony L’Extrait,
£650. (Selfridges stores)
12. Vintner’s Daughter

C L U E L E S S : E V E R E T T C O L L E C T I O N . D I O R B A G , G U C C I S H O E , B O T T E G A B O O T : 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 .
Active Renewal cleanser.
4. 5. (available in the U.S. at
vintnersdaughter.com)
13. Róen Cheeky Cream
Blush, £33. (cultbeauty.com)
14. Bottega Veneta boots,
£5,997. (bottegaveneta
9. .com/en-gb) 15. Alexander
10. McQueen pants, £1,190.
(alexandermcqueen.com/
en-gb)

11.

Clued IN
Fall essentials embrace indulgent
maximalism: feathered coats,
vibrant blush, spiked boots, and
brocade fit for Monet—plus
an inclination toward only the
merriest meddling

12.

13. 14. 15.

Pair au courant style with the voracious energy of

Cher Horowitz in 1995’s Clueless.

34 VA N I T Y FA I R SEPTEMBER 2022
 ®

Coming together to help

end breast cancer for all. 
Our global community supports research,
education and medical services through
60+ organizations worldwide.

#TimeToEndBreastCancer

Learn more:
ELCompanies.com/BreastCancerCampaign
Vanities /Fairground

1. Tribeca Festival juror

1. Lucy Boynton photobombs
Diana Silvers. 2. Andrew
Garfield and Dianna Agron.
3. Derek Blasberg, Christy
Turlington, and Edward
Burns are all ears. 4. B.J.
Novak, freshly pressed.
3.

2.
4.

Downtown DARLINGS 5.
7.
Balthazar was the place, fun was the time, for
Chanel’s 15th annual Tribeca Festival Artists
Dinner celebrating movie stars and fine art
By Britt Hennemuth

5. Following a tour of
9. the restaurant’s bakery,
Penélope Cruz and
Robert De Niro cook up
some laughs. 6. Gracie
Abrams will clink to that.
7. Kimber Sprawl and
Denée Benton. 8. Judith
Light, incandescent.
9. Whitney Peak dishes
with Evan Mock.

7.

6.

8.

36 VVAANNI ITTYY FFAAI IRR PHOTOGRAPHS BY O K M c CAUSLAND

 Vanities /Books

On Display
Three authors explore private
lives lived in public.

EDIE SEDGWICK
In As It Turns Out (FSG),
Alice Sedgwick Wohl describes
in intimate detail the short,
explosive life of her younger
sister Edie, from her abuse
allegations against their father
to her defining entanglement
with Andy Warhol. Dark MATTER Holocaust Ends, from PublicAffairs, unpacks
the case that threatened to exonerate a
deceased Nazi who’d served in the same
Courtroom dramas and murder unit as the author’s grandfather, while in
mysteries reach for bigger truths Deer Creek Drive: A Reckoning of Memory and
Murder in the Mississippi Delta, from Knopf,
TRUE CRIME IS booming on a spectrum from the novelist Beverly Lowry juxtaposes
pulp to procedural, but the best of the genre her upbringing in segregated Mississippi
WA R H O L A N D S E D G W I C K : S P R I N G E R C O L L E C T I O N / C O R B I S . G I L P I N : W I R E I M A G E . E N N I N F U L : DAV E B E N E T T. A L L : G E T T Y I M A G E S . I L L U S T R AT I O N : A P P L E ,

seeks to answer questions more complex against a brutal crime that occurred when
than whodunnit. In No One Crosses the Wolf, she was 10 years old, highlighting stark
P E X E L S ; C R O W , U N S P L A S H ; A L L O T H E R S , G E T T Y I M A G E S . 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 .

BETT Y GILPIN
Through the 20 essays of
Betty Gilpin’s All the Women
in My Brain (Flatiron), the
GLOW actor describes
heartbreak and connection on
and off set. “I tell myself I have
found a version of it that is both
cathartic and healthy,” she
writes. “But maybe that’s a lie.”
out from Little A, Lisa Nikolidakis recounts
her father’s murder of his girlfriend and
her daughter, followed by his suicide, and
traces a family history of psychological
manipulation. Two other books, treading
only slightly further from home, weave
memoir into the headlines. Linda Kinstler’s
Come to This Court and Cry: How the
inequities of class and race. And in Blood &
Ink: The Scandalous Jazz Age Double Murder
That Hooked America on True Crime, from
William Morrow, Joe Pompeo, V.F.’s senior
media correspondent, traces the birth
of the American tabloid industry—and the
dubious taste for exactly these narratives—
to 1920s double homicide. — keziah weir

EDWARD ENNINFUL
British Vogue editor Edward
Enninful fell in love with clothes
at his mom’s dress workshop in
Ghana; in A Visible Man
(Bloomsbury), he describes his
“all-consuming addiction to
forward motion,” from moving
to London to pushing for
diversity in media. —K.W.
SIX PACK Family woes, 1980s New York City, and more new fiction
AFTERLIVES MY GOVERNMENT THE UNFOLDING
2021 Nobel Prize winner MEANS TO KILL ME Following the 2008
Abdulrazak Gurnah The Chi writer and election, one white
depicts four residents producer Rasheed American man is
of German-occupied Newson’s debut novel desperate to maintain
Zanzibar in the lead-up presents as the memoir control—of his family,
to and fallout from WW I—the of a gay Black man looking back his money, the country—in
scale is both epic and poignantly on life in 1980s NYC; even the A.M. Homes’s sharply honed
personal. (Riverhead) footnotes are gripping. (Flatiron) novel. (Granta)
IF I SURVIVE YOU MY PHANTOMS TOUCH
Weaving in patois British novelist Olaf Olafsson’s tale of
and varying points of Gwendoline Riley’s love rekindled finds
view, these novelistic trenchant story of an 70-something Reykjavík
linked short stories estranged mother and restaurant owner
by Jonathan Escoffery daughter is bleak and Kristófer reeling after
follow a Jamaican family from hilarious: One character declines shuttering his shop at the start of
Kingston to the beaches and urban a funeral invite with “I don’t do the pandemic, when a former
sprawl of Miami. (Fourth Estate) ‘family’ these days.” (Granta) lover gets in touch. (Ecco) —K.W.

I L L U S T R AT I O N BY K L AW E RZECZY SEPTEMBER 2022 37

Vanities /The Hive

A Brief History of TRUMPWORLD Tell-Alls

The Trump administration is the publishing grift that keeps on grifting. A year and a half after the end of Trump’s
presidency, more than 10 of his advisers and lackeys have put out books. In August, his son-in-law and former senior adviser,
Jared Kushner, will join the self-enriching authorhood. But telling the public all goes down easier with a
cushy advance and a fresh chance at fameballing. Here, five of the most recent, broken down. —arimeta diop

THE BOOK BREAKING HERE’S THE THE CHIEF’S I’LL TAKE A SACRED OATH
HISTORY: DEAL: A MEMOIR CHIEF YOUR QUESTIONS Mark T. Esper,
A WHITE HOUSE Kellyanne Conway, Mark Meadows, NOW: WHAT I SAW secretary of defense,
MEMOIR senior counselor, chief of staff, AT THE TRUMP 2019–2020
Jared Kushner, 2017–2020 2020–2021 WHITE HOUSE
senior adviser, Stephanie Grisham,
2017–2021 press secretary and
chief of staff to the
first lady, 2017–2021

THE REVEAL Kushner promises to “I may have been “I didn’t want to take “With all the talk of As demonstrators filled
bring readers “inside the first person Donald any unnecessary risks, sanctions against the streets around the
debates in the Oval Trump trusted in his but I also didn’t want Russia for interfering White House following
Office, double- inner circle who told to alarm the public if in the 2016 election the killing of George
crosses at the United him that he had come there was nothing to and for various human Floyd, according to
Nations, tense up short this time.” worry about—which, rights abuses, Trump Esper’s book, Trump
meetings in Arab according to the new, told Putin, ‘Okay, I’m stated: “Can’t you just
palaces...and much more accurate going to act a little shoot them? Just shoot

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 . A L L O T H E R S : G E T T Y I M A G E 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 .
the daily barrage test, there was not.” tougher with you for them in the legs or
of leaks, false a few minutes. But it’s something?”
allegations, for the cameras, and
investigations, after they leave we’ll
and West talk. You understand.’ ”
Wing
infighting.”

THE IRONY Speaking of She stacks her hit Touching on everything Too bad the
meetings in Arab list with everyone from from the former writer lauded for
palaces, Kushner’s Kushner to Reince Meadows confirms president’s hair care “score-settling” with
new investment firm, Priebus, going after the sneaking public to hangers-on like an “incompetent”
Affinity Partners, all the men who suspicion that Trump Lindsey Graham administration had
recently took on have wronged her, was a one-man and Trump family to wait for a payday
$2 billion from Saudi including husband super-spreader. dynamics—the moment to tell the
Arabia’s sovereign George Conway— Kushners were called American public
wealth fund. but not Trump. “the interns”— the truth.
Grisham’s memoir
is the overstuffed
White House briefing
she failed to give
while in office.

FIDELITY TO
THE BOSS

COPIES SOLD TBD 55,918 21,825 38,440 22,798

Copies-sold figures from NPD BookScan, as of July 9.

38 VA N I T Y FA I R

1. 2.
3.
Family MATTERS
The brother-sister duo behind
6. architecture and interiors firm Studio
7. Shamshiri prove good taste is by design
PAMELA SHAMSHIRI
8.
■ Style File
FAVORITE ACCESSORY:
I got a Gabriela Hearst
demi bag in cognac leather
9. (1) as a gift, and I’m in love
10.
with it. It’s like carrying a
sculpture with a top handle.
DAILY UNIFORM: Maria
Cornejo (7) and Jil Sander,
usually navy or white.
STYLE ICON: Nefertiti,
my Italian mother, and
11. Franca Sozzani.
■ At Home
RECENT ADDITION: I bought
a series of five James Brown
12. sculptures (5). I can’t wait
to install them. PETS: I have
an Australian shepherd
13. named Roquefort and two
O F S T U D I O S H A M S H I R I . G R I F F I T H PA R K : G E T T Y I M A G E S . A L L O T H E R S :
P O R T R A I T : D E W E Y N I C K S . C O F F E E : G E T T Y I M A G E S . F LO W E R S : A D O B E
tortoises named Dwight
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 .
S TO C K . BO O K : CO U R T E S Y O F T H E P U BL I S H E R . T U R T L E S : CO U R T E S Y
and Jim (13).
■ The Menu
POWER SNACK: Hard-boiled
egg with whole-grain
mustard and a pinch of
Maldon (9).
■ For Pleasure
READING: The Uninhabitable
Earth, by David Wallace-
Wells. It’s categorized by
14.
disasters (4).
Vanities /My Stuff
5.
4.
RAMIN SHAMSHIRI
■ Style File
DAILY UNIFORM: Black,
white, or navy button-
down or T-shirt with Acne
black jeans (10).
■ On Grooming
and Wellness
EVERYDAY ESSENTIALS:
Nivea basics crème (8)
and shaving cream,
Tancho Hair stick.
WORKOUT: Pool, speed
bag, and hiking trails at
Los Padres National Forest
and Griffith Park (14).
■ At Home
DISHWARE: Splatterware
from March SF by
Nicola Fasano (3). RECENT
ADDITION: We just
incorporated a José Zanine
Caldas leather woven
daybed (6). ON THE TABLE:
Peonies in a vase (11).
COOKWARE: Mauviel (12).
UNEXPECTED ITEM ON
DISPLAY: Family portraits
of us as chickens on plates
by Konstantin Kakanias.
■ The Menu
MORNING BEVERAGE:
Almond milk mocha (2).
SEPTEMBER 2022 39
Vanities /Awards Insider

COMIC Effect turned out to be the last network sitcom

to win the award. Audiences have
continued to fracture, and Emmy voters
It’s been nearly a decade since a network show won the have championed shows—Veep, Fleabag,
Emmy for best comedy. Will the pendulum ever swing back? and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel among
them—that you watch after the kids

T
By Rebecca Ford
THE EMMYS MUST be a frustrating night
for network TV executives trying to
get their 10,000 steps in—they certain-
ly don’t get to walk to the stage much.
“Even when broadcast shows do step
more outside the box, it can be a
challenge to fight the perception that
cable/streaming is just cooler and
more ‘prestige,’ ” says Justin Spitzer,
who created the new NBC series
American Auto. “The slogan ‘It’s not TV,
it’s HBO’ has translated into a lot of
network writers’ empty trophy cases.”
Broadcast shows can’t explore the
dark side of human behavior like
cable networks and streamers can, but
surely a comedy Emmy or two should
be doable? In 2010, when ABC’s
Modern Family won best comedy series,
executive producer Steven Levitan
told the crowd, “We are so thrilled that
families are sitting down together to
watch a television show.” It was a sly
reminder that the TV set was once
the new fireplace, and that more fam-
ilies means more eyeballs and more
advertising dollars. But Modern Family
have gone to bed. Network series like
Black-ish and The Good Place have been
nominated, but the best-comedy stat-
uette has always eluded them. In 2014,
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings predict-
ed that broadcast TV would be extinct
within 20 years: “It’s kind of like the
horse, you know. The horse was good
until we had the car.”
This year, the horse has made a
comeback. One of the biggest success
stories of the season hasn’t come
from streaming or paid cable but from
ABC. “I think whenever anybody says
broadcast is dead, something comes
along, like Abbott Elementary, that
really strikes a chord and gets people
talking,” says Channing Dungey,
chairman of Warner Bros. Television
Group, which produces the show.
Abbott Elementary, nominated
for seven Emmys including best
comedy series, is a cheerful, mocku-
mentary-style sitcom about teachers
at an underfunded Philadelphia school.
Quinta Brunson, who created the
show and stars in it, first found success
on the internet making Instagram and
BuzzFeed videos but wanted her show
on ABC from the start. “I was really
interested in making Abbott for network
specifically because I wanted it to
be watched by families,” she says.
A B B O T T E L E M E N TA R Y : A B C . G H O S T S : C B S . A M E R I C A N A U T O : N B C .

HIGH SPIRITS
Quinta Brunson created, and stars in, Abbott
Elementary, the most buzzed about network
comedy of the year; CBS has seen Ghosts soar.

40 VA N I T Y FA I R
“Although we’ve gone so far with
streaming—and streaming shows can
be the most popular shows in the
world—I felt like I hadn’t quite seen sit-
coms really thrive in those spaces yet.”
Abbott, along with American Auto
and CBS’s Ghosts, has snagged both
the aging broadcast audience and the
streaming-focused younger crowd,
essentially meeting every generation
of the modern family on their platform
of choice. Says Brunson, “When you
want to create something that inspires
family viewing—but is still funny, is
still fresh, is still moving the needle a
little bit—network is still the best place.”
“IT WILL PROBABLY always annoy me a
little bit that some people can just
easily whisk away network shows as
somehow being an inferior product,”
says CBS Entertainment president
Kelly Kahl, a self-proclaimed “network
guy” who worked at Warner Bros.
Television before joining CBS in 1996.
“I’ll stack our shows up against any
on any other platform.”
Ghosts is the top new broadcast
series for the 2021–22 season. Joe Port,
who runs the show with Joe Wiseman,
says people are always telling them
how wholesome the show is: “I guess it’s
meant as a big compliment when they
say that.” But the series, which follows
a pair of New Yorkers who inherit a
country home inhabited by spirits, is full
of PG-13 story lines and innuendo, from
a pantless, hard-partying Wall Street
bro ghost who says he died after having
sex with a limo driver, to a pair of ghosts
attempting to create a throuple. “It’s
not that wholesome in my mind,” says
Port. “But we’re getting to do the show
that we want to do, so we’re happy.”
Wiseman believes the show has
grabbed audiences because it’s
about tribes of very different people
learning to coexist. If the living and
the dead can get along, in other words,
there’s hope for all of us. “Wholesome”
may just be code for “funny” and
“feel-good”—adjectives that, with the
exception of Ted Lasso, aren’t thrown
around a lot in the era of dark prestige
shows like Barry and Atlanta, which
have recently dominated the Emmy
comedy categories while expanding the
definition of comedy itself.
Abbott Elementary has a feel-good
sheen to it too, and, far from giving
off a broad, bland network vibe, it’s
grown its audience exponentially
throughout its first season, particularly
with the coveted segment of viewers
ages 18 to 49. (It’s also the most tweeted-
about comedy series of 2022, according
to Twitter, a sure sign that viewers
are engaged.) Disney aired the Abbott
premiere on ABC on December 7,
then put it on Hulu the next day, giving
audiences a month to find it before
airing the rest of the series. “That was
the best advertisement for the show—
the show itself,” says Craig Erwich,
president of ABC Entertainment and
Hulu Originals. “That gave it a month
or so for people to discover it on
demand and evangelize on our behalf.”
Kahl is similarly “platform agnostic”
in terms of how people discover his net-
work’s shows: “Of course, we want them
to see it on CBS, but it’s a new world.”
THRIVING IN THAT new world also means
taking risks, even within the confines
of a traditional sitcom. “I think
network is letting us do more than they
ever have before, in terms of pushing
the envelope,” says Spitzer, whose, NBC
series American Auto centers on the
hapless corporate team at a Detroit
car manufacturer struggling with one
P.R. nightmare after another, from a
MOTORMOUTHS
NBC’s American Auto has captured both
network and streaming audiences.
driverless car that only hits Black
people to a serial killer using one of their
cars in a high-speed chase. The show
plays on Peacock the day after it airs
on NBC, and more than one showrun-
ner says that the pressure on ratings has
eased somewhat because network execs
are aware that audiences are finding
the shows on streaming as well. Spitzer,
who previously worked on The Office
and created Superstore, says his live
ratings are in line with those of other
NBC shows—numbers, he jokes, that
“they would’ve shot me for four or five
years ago and now gets us renewed.”
The streamers are coming around
to the appeal of network-style sitcoms
too. Even Netflix is reportedly looking
for a good old horse to ride—citing
New Girl as an example of a show it
would love to emulate. So as streamers
hew closer to the broadcast format they
once claimed to be rendering obsolete,
perhaps the Emmys will swing back as
well. Creators are certainly giving voters
enough comedies to take seriously.
“It feels like there’s just starting to be a
bit of a blurred line between broadcast
and streaming,” says Port. “So I think
as those terms lose their meaning, so
too will any residual bias against
so-called broadcast. Because it’s really
all just starting to be the same thing.” n
SEPTEMBER 2022 41
Vanities /Encore
Guess Who’s
BACK?
Back again. Your favorite
book characters—tell
a friend By Keziah Weir
A
AFTER ANDREW SEAN GREER won the
Pulitzer Prize for Less in 2018, his agent
issued a single warning. “Literally,
she said, ‘You can’t write a sequel to a
Pulitzer Prize–winning novel,’ ” Greer
recalls. This month, he launches Less Is
Lost, the sequel to Less, about an author
42 VA N I T Y FA I R
named Arthur Less on a road trip across
America. He joins four other Pulitzer
winners and finalists who have recently
done their own serializations.
Of major prizes awarded to American
authors of literary fiction, the Pulitzer
has a particular gravitas, due in some
combination to its institutional backing
(Columbia University), its longevity
(the first awarded to a novel was in
1918, more than three decades before
the first National Book Award for
fiction and more than 60 years before
the Pen/Faulkner), and the you-can’t-
sit-with-us hauteur with which the
board reserves the right not to award
a prize at all. “There are no set criteria
for the judging of the Prizes,” the
Pulitzer website declares. The fiction
prize is awarded to “distinguished
fiction published in book form during
the year by an American author,
preferably dealing with American life.”
This leaves a rather broad field.
The five books in question are
accordingly varied. Viet Thanh Nguyen,
who won in 2016 for The Sympathizer,
released The Committed in March of
last year. The pair tell the story of the
son of a Vietnamese mother and French
Catholic priest as he serves as both a
communist mole and a double-crossing
PHOTOGRAPH BY J O S E P H I N E SCHIELE
underling (in the first) to a Vietnamese
general, then escapes to Los Angeles
following the fall of Saigon and (in the
second) decamps the underworlds of
SoCal for those of France. In April,
Jennifer Egan came out with a com-
panion to her genre-busting 2011
winner, A Visit From the Goon Squad,
a formally inventive story cycle cen-
tered on the music industry. The Candy
House turns various of that book’s
minor figures major, continues mess-
ing with form, and zeroes in on the
tech world. Elif Batuman’s Either/Or
arrived last spring as well. Its narrator,
Selin, an undergraduate at Harvard
in the ’90s who thinks about sex in The
Idiot (a finalist in 2018), finally has it.
And now Elizabeth Strout gives us
Lucy by the Sea, not just a sequel but a
crossover: The writer-narrator of
Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016)
and Oh, William! (2021) flees Manhat-
tan with her ex-husband (and titular
focal point of Strout’s last book) at the
start of the pandemic to settle in
fictional Crosby, Maine, hometown
of Olive Kitteridge, the spiky antihero-
ine of Strout’s 2009 winner.
While Greer wasn’t aware of these
books back in 2018, he might have
directed his agent to other data. Allen
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 .
Drury’s Advise and Consent, the 1960
winner, was the first in a series of six;
Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove,
which won in 1986, the first of four.
Philip Roth’s novel The Ghost Writer
was a finalist in 1980; five Nathan
Zuckerman–narrated follow-ups later,
American Pastoral was the 1998 win-
ner, after which Zuck returned three
more times. John Updike won in 1982
and again in 1991 for the third and
fourth books in the Rabbit tetralogy
(plus a novella). Sure, this is a scant
handful, and the Pulitzer board has
awarded the prize (under the designa-
tion of novel from 1918 through 1947
and fiction after that) to 95 books, with
87 finalists, so for five authors to join
the ranks of the above sinners in such
close proximity is notable, particularly
given that there is some anxiety about
even employing the word.
“I’m supposed to call it a follow-up,”
Greer tells me, “and not a sequel.” At
first I chalk this up to a malaise over
sequels, captured succinctly in a tweet
by the writer Elizabeth Bruenig: “we’re
living after the end of culture…nothing
but reboots, sequels, copies of copies,
simulations and nostalgia/kitsch
until the sun burns out.” This isn’t the
problem, though. It’s more a question of
marketing: Greer’s newest book is a
stand-alone, he says. One needn’t read
the first to enjoy the second. In public-
ity material, Batuman’s book is billed
as a “continuation,” Egan’s a “sister
novel.” (“It’s about people writing
sequels?” Batuman asks of this article.
“That includes me!”)
In this cohort, it’s tough to impose a
taxonomy. “Autofiction kind of lends
itself to sequels because you’re the
same person,” Batuman says, and it’s
true that four of the books have charac-
ters who resemble their authors. Egan
is the outlier here. “There’s a lot of me
in there,” she says, “but not in the form
of characters.” All of the authors in
question started writing their follow-
up long before the pandemic—except
Strout, who wrote in feverish real time.
“I had to try and get something down
to remind myself that this was what my
mind was doing at that point,” she says.
“I mean [Lucy’s] mind, which meant
my mind at that point.” All—Batuman,
Egan, Greer, Strout, Nguyen—say that
their revisited characters felt particu-
larly compelling. But what author isn’t
beguiled by their protagonist?
What is true and distinctive of all
five authors is that each one wrote their
follow-up during the reign of Donald
Trump. “I didn’t think of it as a political
book,” says Batuman of her experience
writing The Idiot. Advance copies of
the book “came out right around the
pussy grabbing stuff, when we thought
Trump was finished, and then it turned
out he wasn’t.” She began to reconsider
her first novel and decided to write
Either/Or as the #MeToo movement
swelled. Greer, whose protagonist
bumbled Americanly abroad in Less,
began a road trip through the Southwest
in November 2016 and—inspired but
heeding the warnings—started writing
a brand-new draft with a brand-new
central character, which never fully
cohered. By 2018 he realized hapless
Arthur Less was just the reluctant
driver for the job.
“In the West, typically, when
someone who’s a communist becomes
disillusioned, they become liber-
al Democrats, they go flip in the exact
opposite direction,” says Nguyen of
his narrator. “I felt that if I just left the
novel at that point, that’s what a lot of
readers would assume, that he would
just embrace the West, or America,
or whatever. And I thought that that
wasn’t his future.” Colson Whitehead,
whose The Underground Railroad won
in 2017, had planned to follow it with a
humorous heist novel, “but then,” he
said, “like a lot of people, after Trump
got elected, I had to wrestle with where
are we going as a country.” He post-
poned his other project and instead,
three years later, released The Nickel
Boys, another sober novel addressing
systemic racism, which also won.
Whatever one might say about
prizes—about the intrinsic peculiarity
of ranking dissimilar artistic projects to
select one as “distinguished” above all
others—the Pulitzer illustrates a certain
aesthetic and moral consensus. Great
authors are early but good publishing is
slow; if a book is timely, it’s because its
creator was prescient. Egan, who start-
ed drafting The Candy House while
she was on her Goon Squad book tour,
but set it aside and only returned to it
years later, puts it this way: “It almost
felt to me like what I had was more rel-
evant in 2016 than it had been in 2012,
2013, when I wrote it.” It was, she adds,
“very odd.” But “this is what fiction
writers do. We’re just soaking up all of
the various strains and moods around
us and writing from that, and obviously
all that has happened also arose
from those same strains and moods.”
So how to know when to call it
quits on a theme? Strout already has
a nice collection. Batuman has set
plans to revisit her narrator at least once
more—though next time, Selin will
likely be in her 30s. (If Batuman were to
stick with the year-by-year timeline,
she says, “She’d still be buying her first
Ikea futon, and I’ll be dead of old age.”)
Egan has other projects in the works
but doesn’t discount tugging again the
threads in Goon Squad and The Candy
House. “Three,” she says, “is a wonder-
ful number.” By the time Nguyen began
writing The Committed, he knew it
would be the second in a triad; now
that he’s beginning to conceptualize
the final installment, he’s running into
existential hurdles. “I’m debating
whether he lives or dies,” the author
says of his nameless narrator. “And
so if he is my alter ego, it is a medita-
tion for me….”
What, then, of our most recent—
and first post-Trump—winner? “My
characters tend to live book-length
lives,” says Joshua Cohen, author of
The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor
and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode
in the History of a Very Famous Family,
in response to whether a follow-up
is in his future. “Not that I kill them off,
rather I’m afraid I exhaust them, or
they exhaust me, and we both exhaust
the reader. Each book is a chance to
make the world anew—the world from
a voice—and if I’m going to repeat
myself, and repeat my blundering, I’d
prefer to do so in private and not
in literature. It’s only on the page that
I—that all of us on this one trashed
earth—get a do-over.” n
SEPTEMBER 2022 43
Vanities /Case Study
POWER,
Not Reason
The Supreme Court is
unraveling American
society, and our democracy,
just because it can
By Cristian Farias
O
ON THE EVE of his retirement, the nation’s
first Black justice and constitutional
giant, Thurgood Marshall, took a
moment to denounce the Supreme Court
of the United States over its “radical”
path of abandoning past decisions for no
other reason than the court’s member-
ship had changed. Owing to these shifts
in personnel, Marshall charged, now
“scores of established constitutional
liberties” hung in the balance, the pow-
erless were left defenseless, and the
court’s own authority and legitimacy
were diminished. “Power, not reason,
is the new currency of this Court’s
decisionmaking,” Marshall warned in
1991, in what turned out to be his final
dissenting opinion.
The dissenting justices in Dobbs v.
Jackson Women’s Health Organization,
the watershed case that discarded near-
ly 50 years of American jurisprudence
protecting a woman’s right to termi-
nate a pregnancy, felt the need to quote
from Marshall’s decades-old warning
because power, indeed, is the only sensi-
ble explanation for the Supreme Court’s
present course. The seismic end of Roe v.
44 VA N I T Y FA I R
Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey,
two pillars of a much larger structure of
unenumerated constitutional rights
the high court has erected over almost
a century, was neither legally necessary
nor a product of profound changes
in American society. Instead, five justices
tore these precedents off the law books,
ushering in a new era of abortion crimi-
nalization and second-class citizenship
for half the nation, simply because they
could—and had the numbers to do so.
“Neither law nor facts nor attitudes
have provided any new reasons to reach
a different result than Roe and Casey
did,” wrote Justices Stephen Breyer,
Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan in
their anguished Dobbs dissent. “All that
has changed is this Court.”
As radical and destabilizing as the
fall of Roe is for our most intimate per-
sonal decisions, beyond just abortion
rights, its ripples will extend to other
areas where the conservative justices
are already smelling blood. Not sat-
isfied with the erasure of just one
constitutional right, Clarence Thomas,
writing separately in Dobbs, indicated
that contraception and same-sex mar-
riage could be next. That future begins
now. These actions and other signals
I L L U S T R AT I O N BY Q U I N T O N M c
make abundantly clear what Marshall
foresaw: The Supreme Court is on a col-
lision course with democracy itself.
Dobbs merely sets the stage.
Every new justice creates a new
court, the maxim goes. Yet for much of
their time on the bench, Justice Samuel
Alito, long a soldier in the Republican
holy war to curtail abortion rights, and
Thomas, an avowed Roe antagonist,
had the will but not the votes to impose
their antiabortion vision on the majority
of the Supreme Court, much less on
the rest of the country. Their fortunes,
and power, changed with the election of
Donald Trump, whose own marriage
of convenience with white evangelicals
and social conservatives paved the way
for his presidency and the installation
of three new justices of a different mold,
all of them more extreme and lacking
the moderation of Republican appoin-
tees of the past, including those who
made Roe and Casey possible.
Next to this “restless and newly con-
stituted Court,” as Sotomayor branded
this new majority in June, Chief Jus-
tice John Roberts looks as weakened
as ever. The Supreme Court may bear
his name, and the chief may have come
of age during the abortion wars of the
MILLAN

1980s and ’90s, but neither his title nor
institutionalist bent could convince the
reactionaries to his right that their power
grab in Dobbs represented “a serious jolt
to the legal system” that he simply could
not join in full. Too much, too soon. To
the Trump justices, plus Thomas and
Alito, this shock to the nation could not
come soon enough.
Nominated by a president who lost
the popular vote and narrowly confirmed
by a Senate plagued by minority rule,
these justices—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kava-
naugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—were
all groomed for this moment. All of them
were grown in the test tube of the Feder-
alist Society, the conservative legal brain
trust that for decades has been a judicial
pipeline for Republican administrations
S U P RE M E CO U R T : S H U T T E R S TO C K . J U S T I CE S : G E T T Y I MAG E S .
and state governments, which since the
time of Ronald Reagan have made the
fall of Roe a white whale of their politics.
In theory, interpretative judicial tools
like originalism and textualism, which
this movement held up as a goal, were
meant to keep judges restrained, behold-
en to policy choices made by the political
branches. In practice, they’ve become
Republican orthodoxy, embraced by
party officials, scholars, and activists to
wield power. When Alito writes, as he
does in Dobbs, that the right to an abor-
tion is nowhere in the Constitution, and
thus the issue must return to the states,
his sleight of hand allows his majority
to ignore that women, enslaved or free,
had no say in the content of our found-
ing document, let alone to set the course
of their own lives and livelihoods—
a brutal “history and tradition” the
Supreme Court fails to confront.
The justices are not trained histori-
ans, yet their insistence on surveying
history and tradition to find the bench-
mark for deciding some of the nation’s
most contested constitutional con-
troversies can be embarrassingly
tendentious and ahistorical. The liberal
justices, cognizant of the risks of cherry-
picking the past to solve difficult legal
questions in the pluralistic, multiracial
society of today, tried their best to make
that point in recent dissenting opinions.
In a case that recently expanded the
scope of the Second Amendment right
to carry a firearm outside the home,
Breyer observed how the Supreme
Court, “not an expert in history, had
misread Blackstone and other sources
explaining the English Bill of Rights.”
And in a hypertechnical criminal case,
Kagan chided the conservatives for
playing historians: “My view of the
history, just like the majority’s, has pre-
cious little—no, has nothing—to do with
resolving this case,” she wrote.
Notably, in these and other disputes
beyond Dobbs, the Supreme Court
broke sharply 6 to 3, which suggests that
Roberts’s disagreements with the five
justices to his right only go so far. And
as if to show that he is at least nominal-
ly in charge, the chief rounded out the
term with a blockbuster ruling, which
he assigned to himself, all but declar-
ing war on administrative agencies.
“The Court appoints itself—instead
of Congress or the expert agency—
the decisionmaker on climate policy,”
Kagan wrote in dissent in West Virginia
v. EPA, which sharply curbed the gov-
ernment’s power to regulate carbon
emissions from power plants. “I cannot
think of many things more frightening.”
The Supreme Court isn’t done
sending shocks through American
society in a way that lines up neatly with
the priorities of the Republican Party.
When the justices return to the bench
from their summer recess in October,
Roberts’s first order of business will be
to give a warm welcome to Breyer’s
replacement, Ketanji Brown Jackson,
and then get right down to the real
business: a docket that already has
advocates of voting rights, racial justice,
and democracy on high alert. In the
justices’ sights, among other targets, are
the future of affirmative action in higher
education, the power of Black voters
under what’s left of the Voting Rights
Act, and an esoteric legal question that
could well give cover to Trump-friendly
Republican-led state legislatures
wishing to contest the results of the next
presidential election—or, at the very
least, wreak electoral mischief at the
expense of voters.
“Women are not without electoral or
political power,” wrote without irony
the five justices who ended their right to
be full and equal citizens before the
law in Dobbs. In asserting power rath-
er than reason over what remains of our
less than perfect union, the Supreme
Court may well unravel democracy with
it, taking us down a path from which
there is no return. n
SEPTEMBER 2022 45
 LE W IS
H AM I
the F LTON —
or
superst mula 1
style ic ar,
entrepron, and
is one oeneur—
V.F. find f a kind.
what d s out
rives hi
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BY
CHRIS
H E AT
H

P H OTO
G RA P H
ADR I E S BY
NNE
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EL

ST YLE
D BY
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McN E
AL

Lewis H
a 1989 amilton with
Counta Lamborghini
520 W ch at Related
Zaha Hest 28th by ’s
in NYC adid building
in April
.

46 VA N I T Y FA I R
SEPTEMBER 2022 47
 When
became
a Formula 1 driver,
success came quickly, but an easy
sense of belonging did not.
“I didn’t feel like I was welcome,” he tells me. “I didn’t feel
like I was accepted. God knows how many of these drivers
say: ‘This is not what a Formula 1 driver is. That’s not how you
behave. This is not how you do it. Tattoos? No! A Formula 1
driver doesn’t have tattoos! A Formula 1 driver doesn’t have a
personality—and piercings!’ ”
Hamilton carried on regardless, doing things his own way,
and it can’t be said to have worked out too badly. He is now
one of most famous athletes on earth, even more so since Net­
flix’s documentary series Formula 1: Drive to Survive brought his
sport to a new audience, particularly in the U.S. He has won a
record­equaling seven world championships, and when it comes
to driving cars like these around 200 miles an hour, some would
argue he’s the best there’s ever been.
That’s not to say that, even now, everything is always smooth
or straightforward. There is a tattoo arcing across the top of
Hamilton’s chest that reads Powerful Beyond Measure. The
words are taken from a longer quote by the writer Marianne
Williamson: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is
our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.” “I read it,
and I thought it was one of the greatest sayings ever,” Hamilton
says. “We limit ourselves the majority of the time. And where
it really hit me hard is: We should never have to dim our light
in order to make others feel….” He pauses, gathers himself. “If
anything, we should shine as bright as we can to liberate others
to do the same. I live my life by that quote. For so long in my life,
I felt like I was dimming my light because I felt uncomfortable.”
Given all that he has achieved, it
might be reasonable to imagine that any
lingering tensions between his need for
Previous spread:
clothing by Versace; individual self­expression and his sport’s
earrings by Greg diktats and conventions would have been
Yüna; necklaces by ironed out or dissipated long ago. Rea­
Mikimoto (white pearl)
and XIV Karats. sonable, but quite wrong. This season,
for instance, a conflict has blown up with
Hamilton over his jewelry. There has been
a rule on the books, it turns out, since 2005—a couple of years
before Hamilton’s first race in Formula 1—forbidding drivers
from wearing jewelry in the cars, for safety reasons. But until now,
there appears to have been no attempt to enforce it. Hamilton,
who habitually races with two earrings and a nose piercing, was
recently told that he must remove them going forward. “People
love to have power,” he says. “And to enforce power.”
48 VA N I T Y FA I R
I ask him whether this feels as though it is particularly
directed toward him.
“I mean, yeah,” he replies. “Because I’m the only one that
has jewelry on, really.”
Aware that the issue was coming to a head, Hamilton attend­
ed a press conference before the Miami Grand Prix in May
wearing—in an act of playful mockery and protest—rings on
every finger, multiple chains, and three watches. “I just put on
as much as I could,” he says. He announced that, if need be, he
would refuse to race rather than remove his race­day jewelry,
and also upped the ante—and sent the internet bubbling—with
this comment: “As I said, I can’t remove at least two of them.
One, I can’t really explain where it is.”
This, Hamilton now insists, was flippant provocation. “I was
just fucking with it,” he says, laughing. “I don’t have any other
piercings anywhere. But I love that there’s this thinking: Shit,
has he got his balls pierced?”
In subsequent races, he removed his earrings, but his nose
stud was fused in place and could not be removed, then rein­
serted, at will. When I first speak to him, he has been granted a
temporary exemption. If that expires, a decision will have to be
S T E FA N B E C K M A N . P R O D U C E D O N LO C AT I O N B Y V E R Y R A R E P R O D U C T I O N 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 .
made, and he would clearly prefer to stand firm.
“Since I was a kid—rules,” he says, shaking his head. “I’ve
H A I R , L I S A T O R R E S ; G R O O M I N G , Y U KO ; M A N I C U R E , C H E M E D O L K E R ; TA I LO R , C L A U D I A D I A Z ; S E T D E S I G N ,
never loved being told what to do.”
HE FIRST TIME we meet, it is for lunch at a Moroccan
restaurant, Cafe Mogador, in Manhattan’s East Vil­
lage, across town from an apartment he owns here.
Hamilton orders the hummus and falafel. “I used to
look at hummus and I was like, ‘No way would I ever
eat hummus!’ ” he says. “And I love it now. It’s my go­to thing
every day.” Just one totem, it will become clear, of his relentless
search for a better way.
Hamilton, who’s 37, tells me that veganism wasn’t even on
his radar when he was growing up just north of London. He’s
now been plant­based for about five years, a change triggered
by a vegan friend he met in New York who opened his eyes
to the realities of food production. The physical demands of
elite racing are extreme, and doctors advised him that he would
struggle to get enough protein. Instead he found his energy
levels smoothing out and his skin clearing up. “I mean, I’ve
won five world titles since then,” he points out. “I’ve been more
consistent than I ever was in the past. So it just takes proving
people wrong. And that’s what I did.”
Proving people wrong has been a persistent theme in Ham­
ilton’s life. “Look, when I was at school, I was dyslexic and
struggling like hell,” he says, “and one of the only few Black kids
in my school, being put in the lowest classes and never given a
chance to progress or even helped to progress. Teachers were
telling me, ‘You’re never going to be nothing.’ I remember being
behind the shed, in tears, like, ‘I’m not going to be anything.’
And believing it for a split second.” Even today, he can still list
the specific teachers who reinforced this message. It was, he
says, “the most demotivating thing to hear—especially when
you witness them doing the complete opposite with your white
counterparts.” Still, he talks about it now as though their cruelty
and indifference became a kind of gift: “I don’t actually hold
any grudge against those people, because they fueled me up.”
Hamilton’s improbable ascendancy began even as he floun­
dered at school. From six, he proved himself a wunderkind at
guiding remote­controlled cars—beating adults and appearing
on British TV. At eight, he demonstrated a similar aptitude for
karting before graduating to progressively more powerful cars.
By 12, his parents, who had split when he was two (his mother
is white, his father Black), agreed that he should live with his
father, who could best nurture his evident talent. His father
worked three or four jobs, and all of the family’s money went
into supporting the prodigy.
Hamilton says that from the first time he drove a go­kart,
he couldn’t wait to do it again. “Firstly, it’s like having a super­
power,” he says. “I couldn’t be Superman, but that was like your
cloak. When I got in the car, I put a helmet on, and I wasn’t seen
any different. You can’t see my skin color. You just see me as a
driver. And I was able to do things that others weren’t able to
do. And it didn’t matter how big the other kids were, I could
still beat them.”
There had never been a Black Formula 1 driver, and the
sport’s participants generally came from far more privileged
backgrounds than his. But when he was 13, he was offered a con­
tract, a place in the driver development program for a Formula 1
team, McLaren, which offered a potential path to his goal. Then,
just after his 16th birthday, something happened that seemed
likely to derail it all.
One day, an ugly incident took place at lunchtime in a school
bathroom. A classmate of Hamilton’s was severely beaten by six
boys. Hamilton was one of many drawn by the commotion but
took no part. In the days that followed, as those responsible were
identified and punished, Hamilton was called into the head­
master’s office. As Hamilton remembers it, the headmaster
told him: “I don’t have the evidence just yet to get rid of you.”
“What do you mean?” Hamilton says he retorted. “I didn’t do
anything.” A couple of weeks later Hamilton was called back in.
“Finally,” the headmaster declared, “I have enough to get rid
of you.” Hamilton was said to have kicked the injured boy. He
was expelled, with immediate effect.
Walking home, Hamilton felt as though everything might
be over: the racing contract, his future, all of it. “The one thing
I had to do was just finish school, and I couldn’t even do that,”
he says. He momentarily considered whether it was even worth
facing his father. How, he wondered, did one flee the country?
“I remember shaking like a leaf, telling my dad,” Hamilton
says. “And him asking me: Did I do it? I remember telling him,
‘I didn’t do it, Dad. I wouldn’t do that. It’s just not part of who I
am.’ And he said, ‘Okay.’ ”
His father contacted other families, whose kids verified Ham­
ilton’s account, then doggedly fought for his son’s exoneration.
Months later, the decision would be overturned, the record cor­
rected. Hamilton’s racing contract was unaffected. But he never
went back to the school.
In 2020, on the final lap of the race that would confirm Ham­
ilton’s pivotal seventh title, he says that much of this history
flashed before his eyes: “Just all these past experiences, all the
doubts that I had to overcome. It was one of the most emotional
experiences of my life. That’s why I said, ‘This is to all those
kids out there…’ ” Over the headset, as he slowed down after
the finish line, viewers could hear his voice breaking up with
emotion. His exact words: That’s for all the kids out there who
dream the impossible.
“I would just always have, in the back of my mind, people
telling me that ‘you’re never going to be able to achieve that....
There’s no way you’re going to do this,’ ” he says.
N THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY Lewis Hamilton: My Story, pub­
I lished in 2007 after his first year in Formula 1, Hamilton
declared, “For me, race is not an issue at all.” This, he
now says, was the stance he was encouraged to take.
“Those early years, we were just always trying to fit
in,” he says. “My dad’s just: Don’t talk about that, just blend in.”
His perspective evolved over time, but the greatest change
came in response to the racial upheavals in the spring and sum­
mer of 2020. Partly, it was that Hamilton felt compelled, on
principle, to speak out and take a stand. “I’ve always wondered:
Why me? Why am I the only? Out of all the kids in the school,
or all the other young Black kids in Black communities, how is
“Since I was a kid—
rules,” he says,
shaking his head.
“I’ve never loved being
told what to do.”
it us that stumbled across it and got into it? And not only got in
there, but why am I as good as I am? Why am I wired the way I
am? And I feel like there’s a much bigger picture.”
But what was happening out in the world had also unexpect­
edly reawakened some memories.
“There’s a lot of feelings that I suppressed at the time that I
didn’t even realize that I suppressed—emotions and feelings
SEPTEMBER 2022 49
Clothing by
Fendi Men’s;
earrings by David
Yurman; rings
by Chrome Hearts.

50 VA N I T Y FA I R
 Clothing and
boots by Fear of
God; necklace by
Mikimoto
(white pearl).

SEPTEMBER 2022 51
that I had when I was younger—and it all came up,” he says.
The casual racist abuse he would face, for instance, in his go­
karting days, particularly when he’d travel to Italy and France.
“There was a lot of the N­word going around,” he says. Other
times, it was more than words. One day when he was 11 or 12,
Hamilton was walking to the shops in Newcastle where his
mother and stepfather then lived. He was daydreaming, sing­
ing under his breath, thinking about the Mr. Kipling chocolate
cakes he wanted to buy. He didn’t even really notice the two of
them—a father and son—until they attacked. In a blink, they
had him on the ground and were kicking him, shouting “Go
back to your country.”
“Even today,” he says, “I remember how terrifying it was. I
really, really couldn’t understand it. It was like, ‘Are they talking
to me? I’m from here. What do they mean?’ I could never under­
stand it. When you’re being attacked, there’s this fear—there’s
fear, and there’s anger as well because you want to get them
back for the pain that they’re causing you.”
Moments like this he kept to himself. “I never spoke about it
to my parents,” he says. “I didn’t speak about it to my mum—I
didn’t think she’d understand. And my dad, I was probably too
scared to tell my dad, because I didn’t want him to think I was
a wuss. You know, I didn’t want him to think I couldn’t defend
myself. I just remember a lot of times just being alone, just in
tears in my room.”
In 2020, Hamilton led his sport’s reaction to these troubled
times—for instance, successfully encouraging most of his fel­
low drivers to take a knee, persuading his team to rebrand
its cars in a new black paint job, and accepting his winner’s
trophy at a grand prix in Italy in September 2020 wearing a
T­shirt emblazoned with the words: ARREST THE COPS
WHO KILLED BREONNA TAYLOR. As he noted later, maybe
a little tartly, “In the 70 years of our sport, no one’s ever stood
up there for anything but themselves.” Perhaps predictably,
a ruling was subsequently issued that drivers on the podium
must only display team attire.
Hamilton has continued to take more concrete steps. A
research group he set up, the Hamilton Commission, issued
a report examining in detail the structural reasons for Black
underrepresentation in all parts of U.K. motorsport and identi­
fying potential remedies. In its wake, he launched a foundation,
Mission 44, the mission in question being “to support, cham­
pion, and empower young people from underserved groups
to succeed through narrowing opportunity gaps in education,
employment, and wider society.” In conversation, these are
themes he refers to constantly.
O NEED TO look too far for other clues to Hamil­
ton’s eventual post­racing life, given how many
other things he has managed to do alongside
driving—which is another way he has defied the
orthodoxy of his sport. When he agreed to join his
current team, Mercedes, in 2013, Hamilton says that he told
them how it would be: “This is who I am. These are things I
like to do. Don’t ever try to control me in that respect. I’m going
to give everything to this, and I’m going to help you win cham­
pionships. And I’m going to show you that being different is not
a bad thing for your brand.”
52 VA N I T Y FA I R
Conventional wisdom was that drivers should be early to
bed during racing season and shy from all other distractions.
Hamilton’s chosen way was different. Eyebrows were raised, for
instance, when he was part of a Tommy Hilfiger fashion show in
New York, followed by a big party—“The best party of Fashion
Week,” he notes—then flew to Singapore for his next race. He
knew it would be seen as a test: “If I’m going to be doing these
other things, I’ve also got to show up and do it, and be the shit.
And I did the best lap I’d ever put together. And people were like
‘How the fuck does he do it?’ ”
Hamilton’s interest in fashion is an enduring one, both in
creating clothes for others and as personal style, the latter
closely followed by his fans. The reason I can tell you pre­
cisely what he wore when we met in New York—Nahmias
Miracle Academy trucker hat, Louis Vuitton printed flower
drop shoulders T­shirt, Storia sunglasses, Ami Paris Alex
straight­leg jeans, Off White Vulcanized high­top sneakers—
is neither because I recognize them nor because Hamilton
itemizes them for me. It is because any time there is a public
photographic record—he had posted an Instagram Story of
himself that morning reflected in his building’s elevator mir­
rors—acolytes immediately deconstruct and analyze the day’s
outfit. Beginning in 2018, Hamilton designed a handful of col­
lections in partnership with Hilfiger.
“I saw it as a bit of an internship,” he says. Recently, as well
as looking to help “young Black creatives coming up that are
overlooked, particularly in the fashion space,” he’s been consid­
ering his own brand and talks about how important it is to him
that it be fully sustainable. “There’s not many big Black­owned
brands out there,” he says. “And why not?”
Hamilton’s business interests extend in multiple directions;
conversation with him is punctuated with statements like
“I’m growing into a space of becoming an entrepreneur, really
looking into planet­friendly start­ups.” A vegan restaurant in
London, Neat Burger, is now expanding into the U.S. with Leon­
ardo DiCaprio recently coming on board as a partner. And there
is also Hollywood. Hamilton is one of the producers of a For­
mula 1 movie to be directed by Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph
Kosinski and produced by (and featuring) Brad Pitt. Hamilton
has met with Pitt and arranged for him to tour the factories in
Britain where 2,000 people are united in the sole task of creating
this year’s Formula 1 car for Mercedes. Hamilton has also been
vetting the storytelling for authenticity: “To hear the B.S. that’s
in the script because the Americans that are writing it are just
getting newly accustomed to Formula 1.”
Hamilton doesn’t expect to act alongside Pitt in this film—
he feels it might be too clichéd for him to appear in a racing
movie—but he has dipped his toes previously, doing a cameo
in Zoolander 2 and lending his voice in Cars 2 and Cars 3. And,
it turns out, he nearly took on something much more substan­
tial a while back. “Basically I’m a friend of Tom,” Hamilton
says. “Cruise,” he adds. (In person, Hamilton is low­key and
unshowy, and I meet a group of friends around him who seem
very down­to­earth, but it’s also evident how comfortably he
runs with the famous.) “One of the nicest people you’ll ever
meet,” Hamilton says of Cruise. “He invited me to his set years
ago when he was doing Edge of Tomorrow, and then we just built
a friendship over time.” As a child, Hamilton saw the original
Top Gun and fixated on becoming a fighter pilot. “So when I
heard the second one was coming out, I was like, ‘Oh, my God,
I have to ask him,’ ” he says. “I said, ‘I don’t care what role it is.
I’ll even sweep something, be a cleaner in the back.’ ” Cruise
said yes. And Hamilton was not to be a cleaner; he was to be
one of the fighter pilots. Then reality set in. Filming would
have taken place during the climax of the Formula 1 season,
and Hamilton knew he couldn’t countenance turning up on
set without having done every last piece of preparation. “I’m a
perfectionist,” he says. There just wasn’t time. Reluctantly, he
contacted Cruise and Kosinski—“The most upsetting call that
I think I’ve ever had”—to let them know.
Finally, there is music. “I love music so much,” he says. “I
would say music saves me every single day.” For years, Hamilton
has been writing and recording his own, and has periodically
intimated that he might soon share it publicly. Aside from the
occasional Instagram snippet and one other almost accidental
exception, he has yet to do so. The almost accidental exception
was his guest appearance on Christina Aguilera’s 2018 album
Liberation. Hamilton rented a studio in New York and wrote and
recorded his contribution to the libidinal song “Pipe” in three
hours. No one was supposed to know it was him; he wanted
people to hear it without prejudgment: “People say: ‘Lewis
Hamilton’s doing music? Oh, I’m sure that’s going to suck.’ It’s
only when they hear stuff that I do, then they’re like, ‘Oh, you’re
actually pretty good.’ ” But although he was credited as XNDA,
his real name was inadvertently included in the songwriting
credits. He wouldn’t confirm that it was him for some time, but
the secret was pretty much out.
O GET A true sense of who Lewis Hamilton is in
2022, you need to understand something that hap­
pened to him in Abu Dhabi on December 12, 2021.
Before this final race of the Formula 1 season,
Hamilton and the much younger Dutch firebrand
Max Verstappen were tied on points. Whoever finished ahead
of the other in Abu Dhabi would become champion—and if it
was Hamilton, he would be the first man in history to win eight
world championships. With five laps to go, Hamilton was lead­
ing Verstappen by 11 seconds. Barring a random puncture or
a sudden engine failure, it was hard to imagine what could go
wrong. And hard to believe as it did.
“You see things start to unfold,” he says, remembering, “and
my worst fears came alive. I was like, there’s no way they’re
going to cheat me out of this. There’s no way. That won’t hap­
pen. Surely not.”
To explain in detail the subsequent series of events, ini­
tially triggered by another car’s accident, would be baffling to
anyone not steeped in the world of safety cars, pit stops, dif­
ferential tire wear, and unlapping procedures. But the crucial
part is this: To anyone who understood F1 rules and protocols,
Hamilton now seemed destined to win in a rather anticlimactic
ceremonial procession. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the
race director appeared to improvise a ruling under the intense
pressure of the moment, one without precedent, which allowed
for one final lap of superficially competitive racing. It was a lap
Hamilton would have no realistic prospect of winning because
Verstappen, now right behind him with fresh tires, could easily
overtake him. That’s exactly what happened. After an inquiry
weeks later, the race director transferred from his post—the
official report stated that what had happened was human error
made in good faith, but the rules were clarified and updated to
ensure this wouldn’t happen again. The result stood.
I ask Hamilton how he felt as he got out of the car.
“I don’t know if I can really put into words the feeling that
I had,” he replies. “I do remember just sitting there just in
“I think he’s an artist,”
says Tom Brady.
“I think he probably
sees lines on the track
no one else can see.”
disbelief. And realizing I’ve got to undo my belts, I’ve got to get
out of there, I’ve got to climb out of this thing, I’ve got to find
the strength. I had no strength. And it was one of the tough­
est moments, I would say, that I’ve had in a long, long time.”
I suggest to him that he must have felt cheated.
“I knew what had happened. I knew what decisions had been
made and why. Yes, I knew that something wasn’t right.”
When he did get out of the car, his father was standing there.
Such is the bubble of preparation and focus before races that
Hamilton didn’t even know whether his father was in Abu Dhabi.
Over the years, their relationship has had its difficult moments:
Hamilton never fails to credit everything his father did to make
his career possible, but there was an awkward schism after his
first burst of Formula 1 success when Hamilton decided that he
needed to go it alone professionally, and told his father that he
just wanted him to be his father. It had taken time, but that day
in Abu Dhabi, that’s who his father was.
“He embraced me, and I think he was like, ‘I want you to
know how proud I am of you.’ Having your father embrace
you in that way is one of the most profound things I’ve ever…”
Hamilton trails off. “Especially as you’ve grown up not many
times having that.”
AMILTON’S CLOSE FRIEND Mellody Hobson was
also in Abu Dhabi that day. Hobson is a hugely
successful business leader, the current chair­
woman of Starbucks and soon­to­be part owner
of the Denver Broncos. She first met Hamilton
when her motor­racing enthusiast husband­to­be, George
Lucas, took her to the Monaco Grand Prix in 2007, telling her
how “a rookie Black driver had just broken into the top ranks
for the first time in the sport’s 70­year history.” Hamilton con­
siders Hobson a big sister, a mentor, and, generally, “one of the
SEPTEMBER 2022 53
54 VA N I T Y FA I R
 Coat by
Saint Laurent
by Anthony
Vaccarello;
sweater by
Giorgio Armani;
pants by Louis
Vuitton Men’s;
shoes by Gucci;
socks by
Pantherella;
earrings by Greg
Yüna; brooch,
bangles, and ring
by Tiffany & Co.

SEPTEMBER 2022 55
most inspiring women I’ve ever met in my life.” Part of what
they share is the experience of what he describes as being “the
first and only one” to achieve what they’ve achieved.
“We’ve bonded over that,” Hobson agrees. “I remember
he gave this interview with Gayle King on the CBS morning
show a couple of years ago, and he said, ‘Being the first and
only Black anything is a proud and lonely walk.’ And I liter­
ally stopped. I had chills and sort of welled up. I knew exactly:
proud and lonely…. It’s how it feels.”
Watching this, Lucas—a man who has a fairly notable history
when it comes to the subject he was about to speak of—leaned
over to Hobson and said: “Heroes are bigger than champions.
Lewis just earned hero status.”
Hamilton learned about this comment soon after, but for a
long while he couldn’t really hear it. “Look, I was going through
whatever emotions I was going through, so no one could say any­
thing to me,” he remembers. “It doesn’t matter who. It doesn’t
really matter what is said. When you’re feeling a certain way,

“I remember sitting there in disbelief.

And realizing I’ve got to undo my belts, I’ve
got to climb out of this thing. I’ve got to find
the strength. It was one of the toughest
moments that I’ve had in a long, long time.”

Hobson had not told Hamilton that she and her husband
were coming to Abu Dhabi, and they were carefully kept out
of his sight the whole weekend. “George kept saying to me,”
Hobson explains, “ ‘There’s nothing worse than when you’re
in the last days of your movie and you’re totally behind and
your family shows up—it’s the worst.’ ” But after what Hobson
characterizes as “the horrible act,” she and Lucas saw him.
“He’s really stunned,” she remembers. “Stunned. Like shock.
He’s asking the same question over and over again: ‘What hap­
pened?’ I grabbed him by both shoulders. I was like, ‘You did
everything right.’ I kept saying that to him. I said, ‘It wasn’t
you. You did everything right.’ And he just literally said, like
four or five times: ‘What happened?’ ”
Hamilton apologized for her coming all that way just to see
him lose. “That’s why we came,” she told him. “In case you lost.
We didn’t come in case you won.”
It would have been understandable—expected, almost—if,
when Hamilton got out of his car in Abu Dhabi he had been
raging, shouting, declaiming the unfair­
ness of it all. “Like, no one would have
Custom tuxedo by been surprised if he had taken off his
Giorgio Armani helmet and thrown it,” says Hobson. “Or
Made to Measure;
shirt and tie by
thrown the steering wheel.”
Giorgio Armani; But that is not what Hamilton did. As
earrings by his friend Tom Brady, who was stand­
Greg Yüna.
ing in front of his TV, watching what
he calls “just the craziest of all crazy
endings,” observes, “He handled it as gracefully as anyone
possibly could imagine.” There would be no public venting
of any kind. Instead, Hamilton walked over to the declared
victor, Verstappen, shook his hand, and congratulated him.
sometimes it’s hard to break through.” But, in time, he took it
in. “It’s one of the greatest compliments you could receive,” he
says. Also: “It is very, very surreal to grow up watching Star Wars
and have Yoda’s dad say positive things about you.”
Hamilton was publicly silent for several weeks after Abu
Dhabi, and there was widespread speculation that he was done
with racing—that he would walk away. “I, for sure, considered
whether I wanted to continue,” he confirms. “He was in a dark
place,” says Hobson, explaining how she had asked him to join
her and Lucas for Christmas in the Caribbean. When Hamilton
demurred, she told him that if he didn’t come, she would go to
him; in the end, he came. Everyone there was instructed not
to bring up what had happened, but many mornings he and
Hobson found the other awake at dawn. “And that’s when we
spent a lot of time sort of going in and debriefing,” she says.
“And I just kept telling him things like: We make no decisions
in times of great anguish or pain. You have to just sit with this,
and it’s going to be hard and uncomfortable. But there’s noth­
ing to be done at this moment. So do nothing.”
Hobson told him that she would support him if he didn’t go
back but also shared her belief that “this is what you do, and you’re
not done.” The Olympic fencer Miles Chamley­Watson, one of
Hamilton’s closest friends since they first hung out a few years ago
at the Met Gala—“He was sat between Madonna and Rihanna,”
Hamilton says, “and I remember looking at him: ‘Who is that?’ ”—
was another of those who gathered around him after Abu Dhabi.
“I knew that he needed me just as his mate to just get him out
of the mindset,” Chamley­Watson says, adding that he never
doubted what Hamilton would do. “If you know him, you know
that man is not going to stop until he wants to finish. Not because
somebody else made him stop.” CON TIN U ED ON PAGE 116

56 VA N I T Y FA I R
SEPTEMBER 2022 57
Earrings by
Jacob & Co.;
necklaces
by Mikimoto
(white pearl, both);
bracelet by
Cartier; rings by
Chrome Hearts.
Throughout:
hair products by
Ampro Pro
Styl; grooming
products by Evolve
Organic Beauty.

58 VA N I T Y FA I R
SEPTEMBER 2022 59
 FAR
A year ago, RACHEL MADDOW negotiated a staggering

FROM THE
multimillion-dollar annual deal not to be on the air five nights a week.

MADDOW
In her first interview since stepping back, she talks V. F. through her next act

CROWD
By JOE POMPEO
Photographs by ANNIE LEIBOVITZ
 FISHER OF ZEN
Rachel Maddow, fly-fishing on her property
in Western Massachusetts, July 1, 2022.

SEPTEMBER 2022 61

“THE ONLY REASON you’ll ever need this
is if you fall through the ice,” said Rachel
Maddow, standing beside her pickup
truck at an empty boat launch on a cloudy
winter’s day. She tossed me something
that looked like a cross between a bike
lock and a telephone cord and told me
to put it around my neck: safety picks.
In a worst-case scenario, you’re sup-
posed to pull apart the orange handle
things, stab the ice in front of you, and
claw your way back onto solid ground.
“There’s 20 inches of ice out here, you’re
not gonna fall through,” Maddow prom-
ised. “But just in case.”
It was a Monday in early February, on
Maddow’s home turf of Western Massa-
chusetts. We met up in the parking lot of
a frozen lake rimmed by low-slung moun-
tains, Maddow in buffalo plaid, a baseball
cap emblazoned with the logo for YUM
fishing baits, and tortoiseshell Coke-
bottle glasses that the folks at home don’t
get to see when she’s all made up for the
cameras. The temperature had plunged
to something like 12 degrees over the
weekend, but now it was in the mid-30s,
ideal for our piscatorial excursion: more
than enough ice to minimize your risk of
a frosty death, warm enough to keep your
hands from falling off. Maddow lives for
this stuff, even as someone who grew up in
62 VA N I T Y FA I R
sunny Castro Valley, California. Before we
set off, she showed me the cozy lakefront
fixer-upper she’d purchased weeks earlier
with her longtime partner, the photogra-
pher Susan Mikula, about 30 minutes
from the couple’s 164-year-old farm-
house. We dropped by her go-to bait shop,
in the garage of a home boasting tattered
Trump flags, where Maddow stocked up
on rosy red minnows and medium shin-
ers. Then we squeezed into our snow
pants, strapped medieval-looking spikes
over our boots, and trekked out onto the
M
lake with a sled full of gear. “It
may be a little slushy,” she said,
“but I promise it’s fine.”
One week earlier, Maddow
had knocked the wind out of
her 2.4 million viewers. “I am
going to go on hiatus for a little
bit,” she said, broadcasting on
a laptop from home as opposed to her
nearby studio because she’d just had a
COVID-19 exposure. (It was to Mikula,
who’d already had a frightening run-in
with the disease in the fall of 2020.) Mad-
dow said she had several projects in the
pipeline outside of her nightly duties—
including a Ben Stiller– and Lorne
Michaels–helmed adaptation of her 2018
podcast series, Bag Man, about Spiro
Agnew’s Nixon-era bribery scandal—and
that she needed time and space to work
on them. She said she’d pop back in with
special coverage as warranted, like for
the State of the Union or “other big news
events.” (The largest European ground
war since World War II, which would
briefly disrupt Maddow’s hiatus, wasn’t
what she had in mind.)
A few days later, on a Thursday, Mad-
dow signed off from The Rachel Maddow
Show for the last time until her planned
return in mid-April. That Friday, she
called me with an invitation to go ice fish-
ing. And on Monday, out on the lake, as
we drilled small holes and fiddled with
our tip-up traps and Vexilar transducers—
it’s a more high-tech sport than you’d
think—it occurred to Maddow that this
was the first Monday in 13 years that she
wasn’t about to be live on air five nights a
week, with no end in sight. “Today’s day
one,” she said.
Maddow was embarking on a new
chapter in her career, a foray into the
wilds of our multiplatform media future,
in which her success and influence would
no longer be so neatly quantifiable. Over
the next few months, we would talk a lot
about what was at stake—for her health
and well-being and career trajectory, for
her continued cultural relevance, and for
the network that has long depended on
her massive nightly audience. But right
now, there were fish to catch. We reeled
in the first one before too long. “This,”
said Maddow, holding up our trophy, “is
a pickerel. This is, like, a typical-size, per-
fect pickerel.” She released it back into the
hole. “Bye! See you! Ahh. That was great.
God and country, thank you very much.”
ADDOW’S HIGHLY RATED 9 p.m.
show—long the crown jewel
of MSNBC prime time, if not
the entire network—debuted
on September 8, 2008, with a
handoff from then superstar
Keith Olbermann, whose sub-
sequent defenestration elevated Maddow
to queen bee status. The program, known
as much for its historical wonkery and
sweeping monologues as its lefty bona
fides, was immediately successful. But it
also proved to be a massive slog. Maddow
is exceptionally hands-on, and the open-
ing of each show—the “A-block,” in cable
news parlance—requires an intensive
level of preparation on a tight deadline.
(Someone described it to me as being like

“a bunch of people holed up studying for
finals every night, like in a library, panic
researching.”) Throughout the years,
Maddow has usually written the A-block
monologue herself, on the heels of a full
day’s worth of research. In October 2010,
after a particularly rollicking broadcast
from a historic Delaware tavern, where
the Maddow Show was covering a Senate
showdown between Chris Coons and
Christine O’Donnell (remember her?),
an exhausted Maddow remarked to a col-
league, “A person could only do this job
for five years.”
As if. Maddow, at 49, has been behind
the desk for almost a decade and a half.
She’s been doing the job long enough
that it supremely messed up her back,
which now has seven herniated or bulg-
ing discs that she manages with physical
therapy. Long enough that when she
had a melanoma scare within months of
Mikula ending up on death’s door with
COVID, it sunk in that she didn’t want
to be working 60 hours a week until she
retires. Long enough that she had begun
to worry, as she explained to me between
nips from the pickerel down below, that
she was “losing the ability to be able to
sort of have the energy and the intellectu-
al bandwidth to do other kinds of work.”
And so Maddow decided it was time for
a change. Last fall, she negotiated a mega-
deal that left jaws on the floor—a reported
$30 million annually not to be on the air
five nights a week. Starting at some point
in 2022, she’d get to do a lot less gabbing
about the news cycle and a lot more premi-
um long-form projects: podcasts, specials,
documentaries, film adaptations, etc.
Such is the might of Rachel Mad-
dow that it was better for the company
Remember when
PRINT WAS DYING but online was
not quite yet what it is now?
THAT’S WHERE CABLE NEWS IS.
So the existential question is not
Rachel Maddow. IT’S MSNBC.
I
to lose her four nights a week
than not to have her at all.
The industry chatter is that
NBCUniversal gave Maddow
an enormous raise only to cede
her in the key prime-time block
that remains incredibly vital
to ratings, advertisers, and cable sub-
scriptions. Words thrown around in my
conversations with industry hotshots—
most of whom think Maddow’s great,
by the way—include “ridiculousness,”
“so nuts,” and “stupidest deal ever.”
NBCUniversal News Group chairman
Cesar Conde strongly disputes those
characterizations, telling me in a phone
interview, “We only do things that make
sense for us strategically or financially.
The primary focus for us was, how do we
come up with a structure of what we need
and want from Rachel, and also what she
needs going forward.” Phil Griffin, the
former longtime president of MSNBC,
who remains one of Maddow’s closest
advisers, acknowledged it was hard to
lose her every night but said, “The way
she works is so demanding, we were
lucky to get 14 years out of her.”
After Maddow’s nine-week sabbati-
cal, she returned to The Rachel Maddow
Show on April 11 and made it official for
her viewers: They’d have her four nights
a week through the end of the month,
and then, starting in May, “I’m going to
be here weekly. I’m going to be here on
Monday nights.” Thus began the next
act of Rachel Maddow, whose power
was undeniable even to her naysayers—of
whom there are many. As Maddow critic
Erik Wemple observed on his Washington
Post blog, “Rachel Maddow can do what-
ever she pleases.”
T’S HARD TO overstate Mad-
dow’s value to MSNBC over
the past 14 years. In the wake of
Olbermann’s firing, she became
the face of the network’s prime-
time roster, “the touchstone of
everything we do,” as her col-
league Joy Reid puts it. MSNBC’s other
crown jewel, Morning Joe, is the network’s
power center, commanding influence
within the establishment corridors of
New York and Washington. Maddow, you
might say, sets the network’s ideological
agenda, a signifier for the entire MSNBC
brand. Her broad progressive appeal and
singular approach to anchoring—story-
driven monologues that run as long as
30 minutes, connecting dots you never
knew existed and dragging viewers down
any number of rabbit holes—have made
her MSNBC’s number one celebrity and
perennial ratings champ, the only figure in
non-Murdochian cable news who can play
in the same sandbox as the fire-breathers
at Fox. She has at times eked out wins over
rival Sean Hannity while keeping CNN’s
rotating cast of 9 p.m. hosts in third place—
often distantly—ever since The Rachel
Maddow Show started to regularly trounce
Larry King Live more than a decade ago.
During the first week of her hiatus this
past February, the 9 p.m. audience plum-
meted 26 percent and stayed down for
weeks before soaring back above 2 million
upon her April 11 return. According to data
from MoffettNathanson, Maddow’s rat-
ings share in 2021—11 percent of MSNBC’s
total ratings—was higher than that of any
other solo host in all of cable.
This popularity has, naturally, made
her a target. On the extreme end of the
spectrum, there’s the hate mail and death
threats, which she says haven’t abated
even though she’s no longer on TV as
much. Then there are the requisite recrim-
inations from the right, which regards
her with the same contempt that liberals
harbor for personalities like Hannity and
Tucker Carlson. But even among non–
enemy combatants, it’s not as if Maddow
is universally beloved. Typical criticisms
are that she can be snarky, obnoxious,
pedantic. On a practical level, her thor-
oughly complex monologues simply
aren’t for everyone, and the payoff doesn’t
always justify the windup. In March 2017,
Maddow took blowback for hyping what
seemed like a holy grail–level scoop
about Trump’s taxes, which she teased
SEPTEMBER 2022 63
out in a suspenseful 20-minute opener.
She finally revealed a single federal pay-
ment from two pages of Trump’s 2005
return, obtained by her guest that eve-
ning, the journalist David Cay Johnston.
(The much-maligned segment, to be fair,
was the spark that ignited a landmark New
York Times investigation that did manage
to unearth the mother lode of Trump’s tax
returns, as Times reporter Susanne Craig
explained during an appearance on Mad-
dow’s show the following year.)
Whatever her detractors think, Mad-
dow remains a sui generis star in the
media firmament, which explains the
breathless interest in her career machina-
tions. Intrigue began swirling last summer
with leaks that Maddow was thinking
about leaving the network for new oppor-
tunities. Before long, news broke that
Maddow, after months of discussions
quarterbacked by her superagents at
Endeavor, would be sticking with NBCU-
niversal after all. She’d secured a new
multiyear contract to pursue projects in a
wide range of formats, from documenta-
ries and streaming specials to movies and
books, all under the banner of her newly
minted independent production company
whose name I can now reveal: Surprise
Inside. Maddow would conceive the
projects and NBC would get first right of
refusal. The Rachel Maddow Show would
eventually go weekly and she would con-
tinue to do specials for the network, but
she would have a lot more flexibility. It
was the Daily Beast that pegged her annu-
al compensation at $30 million.
Maddow wouldn’t comment on any
of this (“I’m legally restrained from dis-
cussing the terms of my contract”), other
than to dispute the reported $30 million.
(Someone else with direct knowledge of
the matter told me Maddow’s full pack-
age is worth more when you add a separate
overhead and development deal.) She also
specified that she hadn’t yet signed the new
contract when news outlets reported on it.
Through my own reporting, I was able to
piece together how it all went down. The
story begins about two years prior, when
Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel and president
Mark Shapiro began actively pursuing her.
They’d wanted to sign her for a while, and
they were even more motivated to do so
after Bag Man became a hit. Maddow
was willing to hear them out because
her beloved longtime agent, Jean Sage of
the much smaller Napoli Management
64 VA N I T Y FA I R
Group, had signaled her intention to retire. HISTORY MAKING
Emanuel and Shapiro first met with her in Maddow in her
home office, where
November 2019 at an apartment on the she’s polishing a
West Side of Manhattan, where they gave new World War II–
era podcast
Maddow the hard sell on working with series expected to
them to grow her career across the media debut this autumn.
spectrum. She wasn’t ready to make any
moves just yet—super loyal to Sage—but
Endeavor kept in touch, kept talking, and
eventually, as the expiration of Maddow’s
contract began to poke out over the hori-
zon, the stars aligned. Sage was ready to
take a bow, and Endeavor promised to do
the right thing by cutting Napoli in on any
deal they struck.
By now it was mid-2021. Shapiro start-
ed taking meetings all over town, a couple
of which Maddow joined. They talked to
Netflix. They talked to Amazon. They
talked to Spotify, Showtime, CNN. Jeff
Zucker, president of CNN at the time,
toyed with the idea of hiring Maddow for
the network’s ill-fated streaming service,
CNN+. The brass surmised that having
Maddow, from a liberal network, and
Chris Wallace, from conservative Fox
News, would give the platform a certain
range. But Maddow’s agents balked at the
proposed salary, in the $10 to $15 million
range, according to people who know
the numbers. There was a much bigger
opportunity on the table: SiriusXM was
poised to offer Maddow closer to $40 mil-
lion plus a first-look deal, sources told me.
(Sirius had no comment.) The idea was
that she could do a weekday talk show
and still pursue all of her other creative
projects. This wouldn’t free Maddow
from the daily grind, but it was a tempting
proposition. She had a lot to think about.
Amid these flirtations, Conde had
two options: give Maddow the freedom
she craved or risk losing one of the com-
pany’s most important talents. Someone
plugged into the talks assured me that of relief. “I’m just glad she’s staying in
before NBC landed on a number, they any capacity,” says Reid. “We all felt
“worked through the economics and that kind of pit-in-the-stomach panic.”
finances of it,” in terms of the output Ditto Chris Hayes: “The fact that she’s
they could expect from Maddow in her not leaving makes it feel less seismic. If it
new multiplatform role, and what that was like, Oh, now she’s at CNN, it would
would mean to the bottom line. The be different.”
talks unfolded in two stages. First Conde By all accounts, working for the Mad-
reached an agreement on the specifics of dow Show can be extremely demanding.
what Maddow’s job would entail. Then It’s a tight-knit and deeply loyal staff.
Jimmy Horowitz, who oversees global Going from five days a week with Mad-
dealmaking for NBCUniversal’s film and dow to one day must feel like a bit of a
television portfolio, negotiated the salary. bummer. Maddow’s longtime execu-
Once the deal was a fait accompli, tive producer, Cory Gnazzo, who will
Maddow’s colleagues breathed a sigh continue to shepherd her live MSNBC
appearances, acknowledged, “It’s a chal-
lenging time. Change is difficult. We’ve
been doing this, most of us, for many
years. We’re used to producing for
Rachel. So it’s a challenge for us to pro-
duce for someone else.”
Maddow opened up about the whole
process while we fished. It wasn’t “some
sort of, like, hostile, heated negotiation
with NBC,” she said. “What I asked for,
and I realize it’s a really hard thing to ask
for from a big corporate entity, is flexibil-
ity, fluidity, and forgiveness. Like, I want
us to handle this in a way that we don’t
have to map every second of it. And I want
my staff to all stay employed, and I want
them to be able to shift between different
types of projects, just as I am.”
Did she think they would agree to all of
that? “No,” said Maddow. “I don’t know
anybody who’s ever asked for it.… It’s
potentially higher risk, higher reward,
right? I think, writ large, if they ended up
with, like, a hit award-winning podcast,
and a hit movie, and a docuseries, and a
serial TV show, and I’m covering the State
of the Union, and some of the time I’m
doing The Rachel Maddow Show, that’s
probably a better deal for them long-run
than me just doing TRMS and killing
myself and not being able to do anything
and, ultimately, having a shorter career
because I’m burning myself out. Like, I’m
not becoming a painter.”
Nonetheless, you can see why Mad-
dow’s retreat from the nightly schedule
is a pickle for the suits at 30 Rock. In
late June, the network announced that
Alex Wagner would take over Maddow’s
crucial hour Tuesday to Friday starting
August 16, making her “the only Asian
American to host a prime-time cable
news program.” Wagner had hosted a
daytime MSNBC show before it was can-
celed in 2015, but she made a comeback
SEPTEMBER 2022 65

with gigs at CBS News and Showtime’s
The Circus with John Heilemann. Wag-
ner rejoined MSNBC this past February
as a senior analyst and substitute anchor,
which positioned her for the elevation to
9 p.m. To say she’s got a tall order would
be an understatement, but MSNBC
president Rashida Jones doesn’t see it
that way. “The universe is very different
from when Rachel joined the cable news
spectrum. My focus is less about: How
does this one hour perform in this one
space?” she tells me. “It’s a huge change.
But in this environment, where we know
the cable universe is changing, this allows
us to get more Rachel in more places.”
Changing indeed: With viewers
increasingly unmoored from their tradi-
tional cable packages, MSNBC’s linear
television business was in a dicey posi-
tion even without the headache of losing
a ratings powerhouse four nights a week.
In the words of one cable news veteran,
“Remember when print was dying but
online was not quite yet what it is now?
That’s where cable news is. So the exis-
tential question is not Rachel Maddow.
It’s MSNBC.”
Maddow’s view of the industry is less
fatalistic, if a bit jaded. “It has sort of
been like Chronicle of a Death Foretold
the whole time I’ve been doing cable
news,” she told me. “Stuff changes at
the executive level, and stuff changes
in terms of who’s up and who’s down,
which network’s winning, which host is
hot. But ultimately, does anything really
change that much?” I noted the lack of an
obvious successor, whereas Maddow had
been the natural successor to Olbermann.
“That’s how it works in retrospect,” she
countered, “but in the moment, it’s much
harder to see. Like, Tucker’s doing great
right now”—as in Carlson of Fox News—
“but look at Tucker’s career. The first
show I worked on was his 11 o’clock show
on MSNBC that nobody remembers. But
he was always kicking around the busi-
ness and has always been talented. It
just—this turned out to be his moment.”
It may surprise people to hear Mad-
dow speak so matter-of-factly about
someone whose views are abhorrent to
her. But Maddow has never shied from
respectful engagement with her ideo-
logical adversaries. The early days of
her MSNBC program featured amiable
debates with Pat Buchanan. She was
friendly with Roger Ailes, who blurbed
66 VA N I T Y FA I R
M
one of her books. She told Ste-
phen Colbert in 2019 that she
had “a lot of respect” for Sean
Hannity. It was Carlson who
gave Maddow her first paid TV
gig when she began appearing
on MSNBC’s Tucker back in
2005. Carlson spoke admiringly of her in
a 2019 New York Times Magazine profile,
and when his name came up as we fished,
Maddow recalled bumping into him at an
event for the first time in a long time. “It
was really nice to see him,” she said.
A few months later, I asked Maddow
what she thought of the Times’ recent
series that unpacked how Fox News Chan-
nel’s number one host “weaponizes his
viewers’ fears and grievances to create
what may be the most racist show in the
history of cable news.” What Maddow
found “most interesting” about the series,
she told me, was an interactive analyzing
Carlson’s rhetoric from 1,150 episodes
of Tucker Carlson Tonight. “For me,” she
said, “more than the issue of, you know,
how dangerous are Tucker’s ideas, and
how do they interact with the growth of
the authoritarian right in the Republican
Party, more so than that question, which
is obviously what the central thrust of the
reporting was about, I was interested in
how they deconstructed why it works.”
Rather than engaging on Carlson’s
politics, Maddow talks about him and
other cable news rivals as fellow prac-
titioners. “If you think about baseball
players,” she said, “who are extremely
competitive and who are fighting to win
and who have rivalries, and some of those
rivalries are bitter rivalries, that doesn’t
mean you don’t study the pitching tech-
nique of their star pitcher. It doesn’t mean
you don’t appreciate whatever they’re
doing in terms of, you know, where they
put their shortstop in order to give them
a better defense. There’s a sort of, like,
respecting the game, in terms of people
who are doing well and people who are
good at it. I mean that was the basis of my
professional friendship with Roger Ailes.
I wanted tips from him about how to be
better on TV. And he was willing to talk
to me about what I was doing well, and
doing poorly, to help me get better.”
Of course, Maddow being great on TV
can’t neutralize Trump conspiracy theo-
ries or save democracy. The stakes of this
competition are significantly higher than
a World Series ring.
ADDOW HAD BEEN in the busi-
ness for about a decade by the
time she truly began to cultivate
an audience. This was back in
2008, when Griffin gave Mad-
dow her own show. Nine years
earlier, she’d retreated from
London to Western Massachusetts to
finish her dissertation for Oxford, where
she’d been a Rhodes Scholar. Since her
teen years in California’s Bay Area—filled
with volleyball tournaments and swim
meets and the “emotional cliff dive,” as
Maddow put it, of coming out at 17 during
her freshman year at Stanford—Maddow
had been a passionate and driven activ-
ist for the AIDS crisis, the subject of her
doctoral research. If you’d have asked
anyone from her inner circle back then,
that’s where they thought Maddow was
headed professionally. Then, on a whim,
she won a contest to host a local radio
show. “It was just hilarious,” says Chuck
Bayliss, one of Maddow’s oldest friends.
“None of us could have ever guessed
this trajectory.”
Local radio led to Air America, which
led to regular appearances on MSNBC,
which led to a political analyst gig, which
led to substitute hosting for Countdown
With Keith Olbermann, and, finally, just
two months before Barack Obama’s his-
toric election, Maddow’s own hour as
Olbermann’s lead-in. “In our very first
show meeting, she said, ‘I wanna do a
15- to 20-minute opening,’ ” recalls Grif-
fin, who’s now working with Maddow to
build Surprise Inside. “And I went, ‘Whoa!
That’s radical.’ So I said, ‘Okay, let’s see if it
works.’ She did that first day, she beat Larry
King—virtually unheard of at the time—
and she created something brand new.”
Those epic openers continue to dis-
tinguish Maddow’s now weekly show. In
a 17-minute, 26-second monologue that
kicked off the May 16 episode, two days
after 10 African Americans were gunned
down by a white supremacist inside a Buf-
falo supermarket, Maddow gave viewers
a long and winding history lesson that
stretched back to the 1940s, when a fas-
cist mob set upon Black workers in Detroit
and Theodore Bilbo embraced the now
ubiquitous “great replacement” theory
during his Senate reelection campaign.
“It is not a new concept,” she said, her
voice rising as she peered into the camera.
“It’s not even a new pretext, a new justifi-
cation for violent racist terrorism. It has
 “2024 is gonna be, you know,
NOT A DRESS REHEARSAL. This is the playoffs.
Like, this is high stakes, really important, and
DETERMINATIVE OF OUR FUTURE as a country.
And that’s not a fatalistic thing. I feel like I’m on the
edge of my seat, and I’m convinced
of the IMPORTANCE OF THIS MOMENT. ”

long been so. It is right now being newly
popularized, newly mainstreamed by the
biggest names in conservative media, and
even by the leadership of the Republican
Party in Congress. But it is an old idea. It
is an old and stupid idea. It is an old and
stupid and dangerous idea. Old, stupid,
and dangerous in equal measure.”
During Donald Trump’s presidency,
when Maddow became a bellowing sooth-
sayer for the anti-Trump resistance, her
monologues delved into the spy-novel-
worthy esoterica of the Russian-collusion
saga and the Christopher Steele dossier,
the credibility of which took a hit last
year when one of Steele’s main sources
was indicted on a charge of lying to the
FBI. If you’re looking for a whiff of con-
troversy around Maddow’s journalistic
record, this would be it. The critical takes
of her Russiagate coverage didn’t just
come from Maddow’s tormentors on the
right. Slate’s TV critic diagnosed a case of
“Conspiracy Brain.” The Post’s Wemple,
in a blistering series about media cover-
age of the unverified dossier, excoriated
Maddow for “a pattern of misleading and
me of the informal ban, when I paid a sec-
ond visit to her neck of the woods, “and
they just quietly changed their minds
without ever saying why they changed
their minds was, to me, sort of just sad
on their part, and telling.”
It was three months after our ice fish-
ing trip, and I was back in Western Mass,
this time sitting with Maddow on her
screened-in porch, eating sandwiches
on a rainy spring day. We talked about
pretty much everything—her spirituality
and Catholic upbringing (“I one hundred
percent believe in the power of prayer”),
her history of depression (“very much a
chemical and biological process,” which
she manages with “exercise and sleep”),
her media diet (no physical publications
or, no joke, cable news; lots of digital sub-
scriptions and The Great British Baking
Show). We also got into a back-and-forth
about her dossier segments. “Trying to
turn the Russia scandal into the dossier,
or trying to turn the dossier into the Russia
scandal, is a revisionist history designed to
intimidate people out of covering stories
like that in the future,” she said, “and to
Maddow, reaching back into the past to
make a point about the present.
“Do you remember what the Dan
Rather scandal was about?” she said,
referring to a 2004 controversy in which
the legendary newsman’s career came to a
screeching halt over a 60 Minutes segment
based on allegedly forged documents that
CBS News failed to authenticate. “There
was a document that was involved. He
was reporting on, like, how did George W.
Bush avoid going to Vietnam? How was
his National Guard service arranged? Why
did he get this coveted spot in this group
that wasn’t gonna be fighting? The story
of George W. Bush getting a sweet gig in
the National Guard so he didn’t have to
go fight in Vietnam was true. Somebody
giving Dan Rather a forged document, so
he had a screwed-up news story about it,
is fascinating, and it’s an interesting thing
about CBS News. But it doesn’t mean that
the National Guard thing about George
W. Bush was not true! It just—it neutral-
ized it. Like it made that go away. And the
whole thing became a Dan Rather scandal.
That’s what’s going on with the dossier.”

dishonest asymmetry.” Michael Isikoff, a
longtime Maddow guest and fellow Rus-
siagate chronicler, asked on his podcast,
“Do you accept that there are times that
you overstated what the evidence was?”
By mid-2019, as I reported back then,
Maddow had become too hot for the
newsroom management of The New York
Times. Aside from her Russia coverage,
they viewed her as a raging partisan,
and the paper indicated that its reporters
should steer clear of doing her show. “The
fact that it didn’t last long,” Maddow told
T
try to obscure the seriousness of
what Russia did, and what the
Trump campaign’s relationship
was with what Russia did.”
I suggested that Maddow’s
coverage may have given view-
ers a false sense of hope that
Trump was about to get taken
down, not unlike how, say, viewers of
Newsmax may have been led to believe
that the 2020 election was about to be
overturned. At this point in our conver-
sation, Maddow did something very
HE PROPERTY WHERE Maddow
and Mikula live spans 12 acres
of woods and streams, lots of
room for their two black Labs,
Francis and Charms, to run
free. There’s a duck pond, a
swimming hole, a beautifully
tended garden, and a veggie patch burst-
ing with asparagus, garlic scapes, lettuce,
and a gazillion herbs. When Maddow
first came to Western Massachusetts
in September C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 2 1

SEPTEMBER 2022 67
 F A S T C
By Lili Anolik

In a trove of never-before-seen letters, the

unlikely, uneasy friendship between Joan Didion
and Eve Babitz comes to electrifying life in
the fast-lane social and literary milieu of 1960s L.A.

68 VA N I T Y FA I R
O M P A N Y

PAPER TRAIL
The letter Eve Babitz
wrote Joan Didion
(each shown on this
spread in Julian
Wasser’s photos) lives
at the Huntington
Library in California.
Middle: A 1972
correspondence in
which Babitz
castigates Didion.

SEPTEMBER 2022 69

WHEN I MET Eve Babitz in the spring of
2012, she was living in a one-bedroom
condo in a sun-faded building on a quiet
block in West Hollywood. Entering was
difficult, nearly impossible. Why isn’t
easy to explain. There was, first of all,
Eve’s radical strangeness. This sounds,
I realize, like a polite way of calling her
nuts, and she was nuts. (Huntington’s dis-
ease had been eating away at her brain
for years.) But she wasn’t only nuts, and
she wasn’t always nuts. There were plenty
of lucid moments. The problem was the
stench—black, foul, choking—that sur-
rounded the condo like a force field.
If intense fascination with someone
is love, then I loved Eve. And the inten-
sity of my fascination was what finally
allowed me, six months after our first
encounter, to breach the force field, make
it past the front door.
The lights were off, the shades drawn
tightly against the California sunshine. I
waited for my vision to adjust. It did, and
I gasped. What I saw was full-scale filth:
trash—several years’ worth—piled on
every surface, crammed into every crev-
ice so that it seemed to be growing from
the floor, the furniture, the walls, so that it
seemed alive, like a species of jungle plant.
There was no room to sit, or even stand,
really. And the smell, that thick, hot stink,
was so strong my nostrils were clogged
with it. (When the people from Jewish
Family Services came to clean the condo,
they worked in hazmat suits, lest you think
I’m exaggerating or overstating.)
If I had any hopes that Eve kept records
or personal papers, they were dashed the
70 VA N I T Y FA I R
instant I crossed the threshold of unit 2
at 951 North Gardner Street. Nothing
could survive an environment so putrid
and putrefying. Not even Eve, who suc-
cumbed to Huntington’s on December
17, 2021, age 78.
Yet something did survive. In the deep-
est reaches of a closet was a stack of boxes
packed by Eve’s mother decades before.
The boxes were pristine, the seals of duct
tape unbroken. Inside: journals, photos,
scrapbooks, manuscripts, and letters. No,
inside a lost world. This world turned for
a certain number of years in the late ’60s
and early ’70s, and was centered in a two-
story rental in a down-at-heel section of
L.A. The Franklin Avenue scene, I call it
for reasons that will become apparent.
And it had all the explosive vitality that
the scene at Les Deux Magots on the Left
Bank had for Ernest Hemingway and his
fellow Lost boys. It was the making of one
great American writer, the breaking and
then the remaking—and thus the true
making—of another. These two writ-
ers were friends. Enemies as well. They
were also women, a fact fundamental
rather than incidental, as you’ll see from
the below letter.
It’s dated October 2, no year, though
the year is 1972. It’s unsigned, though is
from Eve. It’s addressed to “Dear Joan,”
“Joan” as in Joan Didion, though the
“Dear” is either sarcastic or misplaced.
And it’s got the boisterous, clamorous,
surging, sprawling, lewd, destructive
glee of a predawn, reeling-drunk tem-
per tantrum, though it was written in
the bright light of day (the closing line,
“Good-bye morning letter”) and stone-
cold sober (in ’72, Eve was far more
likely to fuck herself up on acid and/or
ludes and/or coke than alcohol):
This morning I telephoned and want-
ed you to read A Room of One’s Own.…
It’s so hard to get certain things together
and especially you and [Virginia Woolf]
because you’re mad at her about her
diaries. It’s entirely about you that you
can’t stand her diaries. It goes with
Sacramento. Maybe it’s better that you
stay with Sacramento and hate diaries
and ignore the fact that every morning
when you eye the breakfast table uneas-
ily waiting to get away, back to your
typewriter, maybe it’s better that you
examine your life in every way except
the main one which Sacramento would
brush aside but which V. Wolffe [sic] kept
blabbing on about. Maybe it’s about you
and Sacramento that you feel it’s undig-
nified, not crickett [sic] and bad form to
let Art be one of the variables. Art, my
God, Joan, I’m embarrassed to mention
it in front of you, you know, but you men-
tioned burning babies in locked cars so I
can mention Art.
I
’M CUTTING EVE off. Watching
her let rip is great theater. But
B A B I T Z : A N N I E L E I B O V I T Z . B A B I T Z A N D D U C H A M P ; D I D I O N : J U L I A N WA S S E R . A L L O T H E R S : E V E B A B I T Z PA P E R S , H U N T I N G T O N L I B R A R Y. P R E V I O U S S P R E A D : D I D I O N : LO S A N G E L E S T I M E S
P H O T O G R A P H I C A R C H I V E / L I B R A R Y S P E C I A L C O L L E C T I O N S , C H A R L E S E . YO U N G R E S E A R C H L I B R A R Y , U C L A . B A B I T Z : E D R U S C H A . L E T T E R : E V E B A B I T Z PA P E R S , H U N T I N G T O N L I B R A R Y.
you need a little context in order
to follow.
We’ll go back by first going for-
ward, jumping ahead two years:
1974, the year Eve published her first
book, Eve’s Hollywood. In the dedication,
she wrote, “And to the Didion-Dunnes
for having to be who I’m not.” A defini-
tion of Joan that was really a definition
of herself as the un-Joan. (I’m ignoring
Joan’s husband, John Gregory Dunne,
here on purpose because he failed to
capture Eve’s imagination—“I don’t like
the way [he] writes,” she noted in her
journal—and I suspect she only lumped
him and Joan together to needle Joan.)
So who was Joan in 1974? One of the
biggest writers in America. A celebrity
writer in the way that Norman Mailer
was, or Tom Wolfe, or Hunter S. Thomp-
son. Still more remarkable, that other
writers, i.e., male writers, allowed her
to be a writer who was also a woman,
rather than insisting she be a capital-W
Woman Writer. No modifier on writer,
no flies on Joan.
CAFÉ SOCIETY
Opposite, clockwise from top left: The enigmatic
Earl McGrath poses for a photograph.
Jackson Browne in his kitchen in Glencoe.
Babitz photographed by Annie Leibovitz
for Eve’s Hollywood. Babitz with Dan Wakefield
in 1971. Didion photographed in 1968. Steve
Martin, a lover of Babitz’s while she was on the
Franklin Avenue scene. The famous photo of
Marcel Duchamp and Babitz taken by Julian
Wasser in 1963.
 And now we’ll go back by going back,
five years into the past:
1967, the year Eve met Joan, though
the Joan Eve met was not yet Joan
Didion. So who was Joan in 1967? A
promising but obscure writer. Her first
book, fiction, Run, River, published in
1963, when she was living in New York,
was assured and arresting. It was also
traditional—a generational drama set in
an earlier period—probably the reason
critics and audiences paid it little mind.
“Could you write what you write IF YOU WEREN’T SO TINY, Joan?…
Would the BALANCE OF POWER between you and John have collapsed long
ago if it weren’t that he regards you a lot of the time as a child…”
(“Traditional” can so easily translate
to “unadventurous,” “corny,” “irrele-
vant.”) A painful outcome for any writer,
extra painful for one who wanted to be
noticed—nay, spectacular—so badly.
Joan was, undoubtedly, a genius, but it
isn’t enough to be a genius. You must also
be lucky: right place, right time. It was
both for her next book, the nonfiction
collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
published in 1968, when she, Dunne,
and their adopted daughter, Quintana,
were living in L.A., at 7406 Franklin
Avenue. Just as Run, River felt tradition-
al, so Slouching, with its title piece set
in Haight-Ashbury, the counterculture
capital, felt contemporary. Alarmingly,
dangerously contemporary. (Remember
“High Kindergarten,” where five-year-
olds tripped on acid?) It was and it wasn’t.
What it was was an old-fashioned gothic
horror story tricked out in New Journal-
ism’s clothing. Sometimes, though, a
costume change is all it takes.
Slouching was a cultural phenomenon.
That made Joan one too. In an outtake
from Betsy Blankenbaker’s 2001 docu-
mentary, New York in the Fifties, Dunne
said to the camera, “[Slouching] was
reviewed by someone in The New York
Times,” then to Joan, “And it was—
boom!—all of a sudden, you were a
figure.” Time commissioned portraits,
sending photographer Julian Wasser to
the Franklin Avenue house. Wasser’s
series is familiar to you even if his name
isn’t, because the picture you have of Joan
in your mind is likely one he took. I’ll jog
your memory: Joan, hair flowing past her
72 VA N I T Y FA I R
shoulders, in a long jersey dress, loose
yet clinging, the expression on her face
defiant, dreamy, a little bored. In several
shots, she’s leaning against a Corvette, or
sitting in the driver’s seat. Her presence
is romantic, yet chaste. (How could Joan
be sexual? That savage appetites, erotic
or otherwise, might snarl for satisfaction
within a form so slight, an aura so cool,
seems inconceivable.) She’s a master of
the intimate close-up, gazing through
the eye of the camera and directly into
your eyes. It’s an actor’s trick rather than
a writer’s, fitting since Joan didn’t have
readers, as writers do. She had what
movie stars have—she had fans.
Joan, 33, had, at last, become Joan
Didion. And she’d done it on the Franklin
Avenue scene. Her house; Earl McGrath’s
scene.
How to explain Earl McGrath, a person
who defies explanation? Eve took a crack
in a letter written in late 1970 to artist
Chris Blum. “Would you like to hear about
my friend Earl?” she asked, and then pro-
ceeded to detail his early life as a runaway
Catholic schoolboy from Wisconsin; his
amour with a future Zen monk in Big Sur;
his stint as head of production at 20th
Century Fox in New York. “[Finally] he
moved to California and away from his
wife[,]… a lame Italian countess.… Earl is
wonderful at social masterpieces.”
7406 Franklin Avenue was, in 1966—
the year Joan moved in—a ramshackle
house in a neighborhood in Hollywood
that nobody wanted to go to. 7406 Frank-
lin Avenue was, in 1967—the year Eve
came along—the place to be.
It was McGrath who brought Eve in.
They met on an early morning in June
1967. Eve, 24, was lying in the bed of Peter
Pilafian, electric violinist and road man-
ager for the Mamas & the Papas, when
through the front door breezed McGrath.
McGrath was infatuated with Pilafian.
Once he got an eyeful of a sleep-tousled
Eve, though, he redirected the flow of his
lovey-dovey. A romance, passionate but
not sexual, began. From Eve’s letter to
Blum: “Earl invited me to dinner.… I was
uncomfortable at first but Earl’s personali-
ty and energy are such that once the people
got inside his house all outside social fac-
tors were dropped.… He loved us with this
funny intelligent brilliant radiance like a
diamond net. The next day he would call
us all up and ask us questions like ‘What
did you say to Mrs. Dunn—she thinks you
are the most brilliant person in Califor-
nia?’ ” (“Mrs. Dunn,” and please note the
misspelling, is how Eve refers to Joan in
journals and letters from this period.)
McGrath had a circle. “When Earl
came here two or three years ago, he
knew no one.… After about six months
he had created a society of people who
were not only the most talented around
but who also all shared these incredible
parties.… He has the best young artists,
writers, actors, poets with established
people like Larry Rivers[,] Jasper Johns,
Uri (a white Russian who discovered the
jet engine and was in the U.N.), Henry
Geltzelher [sic].” Even Natalie Wood
“[who] breastfeeds her baby while wear-
ing a mask so she won’t get germs on it.”
McGrath also had an inner circle. In
it: Joan and Dunne; Michelle Phillips, a
Mama in the Mamas & the Papas; Peter
Pilafian; and Harrison Ford, before he
was Han Solo (said Phillips, “I didn’t even
know Harrison was an actor. I remember
getting dragged to Star Wars at 10 a.m. on
a Saturday morning. I was sitting there,
watching the screen, and all of a sudden
Harrison comes on and I gasped and
said, ‘That’s my pot dealer!’ ”).
The relationship between Joan and
McGrath was a long-standing one, deep
and full of funny gallantry—another
courtly romance in which consumma-
tion was unthinkable. In 2016, Joan told
Vanity Fair, “Earl and I met in 1962,
immediately loved each other, and never
stopped.… I very clearly remember sit-
ting on the front steps [of the Franklin
Avenue house] talking to Earl.… We gave
parties together.”
The most storied took place on Sep-
tember 6, 1968, in celebration of the
publication of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric
Kool-Aid Acid Test. Joan’s nephew Griffin
Dunne, in junior high and up way past his
bedtime, was a guest. “I just wandered
around and watched adults. Earl and
Harrison went as movable art objects.
Earl wore all white and Harrison wore
all black. They stood back-to-back. And
Earl, in white, would start a conversa-
tion with someone, then Harrison, in
black, would continue it. I think they
were stoned out of their minds. I was just
waiting for Janis. And no one was really
wanting to talk to a 13-year-old, except
this bald guy in a Nehru jacket. He said,
‘Boy, come here quick, quick.’ And he
holds my wrist really tight, and goes, ‘I
have taken the acid, and I’m having the
bummer. You are the only ray of light in
this horrible place.’ It was Otto Prem-
inger [Austro-Hungarian-born director
of Laura]. Anyway, there was a parking
valet, but most of the cars were stolen in
front of the house. Joan complained, and
the valet said, ‘Well, I didn’t know you
lived in such a ratty neighborhood!’ ”
In 1970, Joan published the novel Play
It As It Lays, as alarming and dangerous
in its contemporaneity as Slouching. And
Play It was truly a product of the Franklin
Avenue scene, because a nightmare ver-
sion of the Franklin Avenue scene served
as its backdrop—the L.A. of the very fast
and very famous; Hollywood L.A.—but
also because the Franklin Avenue scene
was where Joan got her ending. Said Eve,
“Michelle Phillips told the best stories in
town. I remember her once lying down
on the floor of my apartment [during] a
dinner party—Joan and John were there,
“Earl McGrath and HARRISON FORD went to the party as
MOVABLE ART objects. Earl wore all white and Harrison wore all black.
I think they were stoned out of their minds.”
Earl was there—and telling that amazing
story about her friend Tamar.”
That amazing story about Tamar:
Tamar Hodel, in her mid-20s, in despair
over a failed love affair, decided to kill
herself. She asked a 17-year-old Phillips
to help. Phillips: “I begged Tamar for
three days not to commit suicide. Finally
I said, ‘If that’s what you really want to
do, I’m not going to stand in your way.’
Tamar took 26 Seconal, then said, ‘I want
to be dead, but I don’t want to look dead.’
She went to the bathroom and was put-
ting makeup on. The Seconal hit her all at
once, and she went down. I managed to
rock her back and forth into the bed. I lay
down next to her and went to sleep. The
next thing I remember was John [Phillips,
Michelle’s soon-to-be husband] tickling
my feet.” An ambulance was summoned;
and Hodel, fortunately, saved. “Joan
called me up the next day and said, ‘Is it
all right if I use that story you told in the
book I’m working on?’ ” In Play It’s cli-
max, the protagonist, Maria, lies in bed
with her best friend, BZ, as he overdoses
on Seconal. Maria and BZ fall asleep.
They’re found by Maria’s husband. It’s
too late to summon an ambulance; and
BZ, unfortunately, isn’t saved.
Play It wasn’t just an instant best seller,
it was an instant classic. Joan was in the
stratosphere now. Even ranking divini-
ties genuflected before her. Recalled
writer Josh Greenfeld, “John used to say,
‘Guess who I just met on the beach? I met
Jesus. Jesus said he loved Joan’s work.’ ”
That Joan wasn’t straitjacketed into
the role of Woman Writer was neither
luck nor chance. She did it by being very,
very good, and a very, very particular
kind of good. A masculine kind of good
is the way I would, with some trepida-
tion, characterize it. She was the child
of Hemingway, and eager to acknowl-
edge her paternity. “When I was fifteen
or sixteen I would type out [Heming-
way’s] stories to learn how the sentences
worked,” she told The Paris Review. In
fact, she was the son Papa always want-
ed, even if she was the daughter he never
knew he had. Her sentences were, like
his, as cold and clean as spring water.
Feelings were there, and strong to the
point of overpowering, though they were
addressed only obliquely. To address
them directly would be to violate the
cowboy code—baring your soul? yikes,
sissy stuff!—and Joan was from Sacra-
mento, technically a city in Northern
California, really the Old West.
Yet alongside this emotional reti-
cence was an impulse to emotional
pornography—to wit: Joan letting drop
in Life magazine that she and Dunne
were vacationing in Hawaii “in lieu of
filing for divorce”—an impulse I would
characterize, with more than some trepi-
dation, as feminine. These contradictory
extremes, of reserve and exhibitionism,
of male and female, should’ve canceled
each other out, but didn’t. The paradox
was riveting, thrilling.
W
HAT IT MEANS to
be the un-Joan,
i.e., Eve.
Joan famous-
ly wrote, “It had
not been by acci-
dent that the people with whom I had
preferred to spend time in high school
had, on the whole, hung out in gas sta-
tions.” It’s a good line—self-revelation
disguised as social commentary. Only
the self being revealed is false. The
people with whom Joan spent time in
high school were, on the whole, middle-
class strivers, like herself. (Joan was on
Student Council, Sophomore Ball com-
mittee, Junior Prom committee, and
worked not just on newspaper but year-
book.) Or upper-class already-theres.
(Joan was in the Mañana Club, known
locally as the “rich girls’ sorority,” as was
Nina Warren, daughter of Earl Warren,
then governor of California.)
The statement was true, however, of
Eve: a low-high, pop-trash, bohemian-
aristocrat by birth. Her mother was
Cajun, a hash house waitress turned
artist, from Sour Lake, Texas. Her father
was Jewish and a virtuoso violinist from
Brooklyn, a studio musician—you can
hear his bow and strings shrieking along
with Janet Leigh in the Psycho shower
scene—and member of the Los Angeles
Philharmonic. Once, at a party given by
her parents, she led Russian composer
Igor Stravinsky by hand to American
jazzman Stuff Smith just before Smith,
afflicted mightily with the d.t.’s, was car-
ried off on a stretcher. (This was the first
SEPTEMBER 2022 73
74 VA N I T Y FA I R
 improbable introduction she’d make in a
lifetime of: Frank Zappa to Salvador Dalí,
Steve Martin to white suits.)
Eve was a bohemian-aristocrat by
inclination, as well. At Hollywood High,
she decided that the sororities weren’t
for her, as the Brownies hadn’t been for
her at Cheremoya Elementary. (Joan
was both a Brownie and a Tri Delt.)
And after Hollywood High, Eve picked
LACC, a community college, over UCLA
because UCLA, in her view, wanted to
turn its female students into “educators,”
and no way was she letting anyone make
an honest citizen out of her.
I believe that every true artist is, in a
fundamental sense, an outsider artist.
Joan was a true artist; therefore, Joan was
an outsider artist. But she was an outsider
artist from the inside. And she treated
writing, a renegade pursuit and improvi-
sational, as a career, with steps to follow,
a ladder to climb. Her way of keeping her-
self from looking down perhaps. (If she
saw that the ladder was actually a tight-
rope, she might lose her nerve.) Again and
again, she opted for conventional modes
and stratagems. As a senior at Berkeley,
she won the Vogue-sponsored “Prix de
Paris” essay contest. During her seven
years at the magazine, she’d go from pro-
motional copywriter to feature associate.
In 1963, the year she got her book, Run,
River, published, she also got a husband, or
at least a fiancé: Dunne, a Princeton man,
the son of a Hartford surgeon.
By 1963, Eve, too, had a husband,
though he wasn’t hers: Walter Hopps,
director of the Pasadena Art Museum. To
get back at him for inviting his wife, not
inviting her, to a party he was throwing
for French surrealist Marcel Duchamp,
she posed for Julian Wasser. (Yes, the
Time photographer again.) A few days
after the party, Wasser shot a 76-year-
old Duchamp, wearing a suit, playing
chess with a 20-year-old Eve, wearing
not a thing. In his photos of Joan and the
Corvette, Joan’s face is the focus. In his
photo of Eve and Duchamp, Eve doesn’t
E V E B A B I T Z PA P E R S , T H E H U N T I N G T O N L I B R A R Y.
FACE IN A CROWD
Opposite, clockwise from top left: The
Didion-Dunnes at their Malibu home. Babitz
and one of her collages. Leibovitz, Babitz’s
lover and Rolling Stone colleague. Gram Parsons
photographed by Babitz at the Chateau
Marmont. Various Babitzes and Eve’s godfather,
Igor Stravinsky. Babitz’s photograph of the
Byrds, which would become the art for their
album Untitled. A young Harrison Ford,
circa 1968. Right: Babitz hits the photo booth.
have a face, her features obscured by her
hair. She’s just a body, and that body is
the antithesis of Joan’s—an explosion of
voluptuous flesh, and helplessly carnal.
Eve getting naked for the camera was
more than an act of revenge against her
lover. It was an act of homage to her idol:
Marilyn Monroe. Eve wrote, “I used to
wander down Hollywood Boulevard
hoping that Georgia O’Keeffe wasn’t
really just a man by accident because
she was the only woman artist, period,
but then…[my mother] told me Marilyn
Monroe was an artist and not to worry.”
It’s worth noting that Eve’s artistic model
was the opposite of Joan’s. Hemingway,
supremely macho, a man of action as well
as letters, was a winner—of Pulitzers and
Nobels, of Bronze Stars and Silver Med-
als. Contrastingly, the intensely femme
Monroe was the ultimate victim, an artist
who was treated as a bimbo, a loser even
if she was the biggest star in the world.
In Slouching, Joan wrote, “[Self-respect]
has nothing to do with reputation, which,
as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is
something people with courage can do
without.” Another good line. But again,
one that doesn’t apply to Joan, who
worked on her reputation as diligently,
as carefully as she worked on her books.
(The statement itself is Joan working on
her reputation.) It was Eve who couldn’t
be bothered. How having a well-managed
versus a carelessly managed reputation
plays out for a woman in practical terms:
When I asked Julian Wasser if he’d told
Joan how to dress or where to stand dur-
ing their session, he replied, his tone
reverent, “With a girl like Joan Didion,
you just don’t tell her what to do.” When
I asked him why he’d chosen Eve for the
Duchamp photo, he replied, his tone con-
temptuous, “She was a piece of ass.”
Eve dropped out of LACC almost as
soon as she enrolled. Her education
thereafter would be of the sentimental
variety. Joseph Heller, writer of Catch-22,
married and in his 40s when they began
their affair, tried to help her with Travel
Broadens, the autobiographical novel
she’d started as a teenager. “Your spell-
ing, my dove, is even more scandalous
than your impertinence,” he told her
in a 1964 letter. “I think it is eminently
readable, but probably not publishable.…
I thought we ought to try anyway.”
The attempt would fail. And Eve, who,
early on, was as interested in becoming
an artist as a writer, switched her focus
to art. She was already a regular at Bar-
ney’s Beanery, an artists’ bar in West
Hollywood. Eve, however, was not con-
sidered an artist by the other artists, all
men, it goes without saying. The best
she could do was inspire the Barney’s
artists, “inspire,” of course, being code
for “fuck.” The Barney’s artists Eve
“inspired”: Ed Ruscha, Ed Moses, Ken
Price, though she stayed away from Den-
nis Hopper (“too weird”). A few of them
understood what she was—an original
and profound and for real. But most saw
her the way Wasser did: as a piece of ass.
No gallery showing was offered. She paid
her bills by doing secretarial work. (Eve
spelled poorly, typed quickly.)
Yet in 1967, when she joined the Frank-
lin Avenue scene, things were looking up.
She’d switched her focus again, this time
from fine arts to rock and roll arts. And
from fine artists to rock and roll artists.
Now, the term groupie is one Eve often
assigned to herself. And, in the strictest
sense, she was a groupie; that is, a woman
in hot sexual pursuit of rock and rollers.
But, really, she was a courtesan; that is, a
woman in hot sexual pursuit of the men
of her era who moved and shook. It just
so happened that the men who moved
and shook in late-’60s L.A. were rock and
rollers. Playing the courtesan-groupie
was how Eve filled herself with the spirit
of her time and place.
In 1966, Eve spotted a pre-fame Jim
Morrison at a club on the Sunset Strip. Her
first words to him were “Take me home.”
Soon after, she set her sights on Jackson
Browne, Don Henley, Glenn Frey. And in
1967, she got Stephen Stills to let her do the
Play It wasn’t just an instant best seller, it was an INSTANT
CLASSIC. Recalled writer Josh Greenfeld, “John used to say, ‘Guess who I just met
on the beach? I met Jesus. Jesus said HE LOVED JOAN’S WORK.’ ”
cover art for his band’s next album, Buffalo
Springfield Again. “I knew my early days
of fucking around would pay off,” she told
Walter Hopps in a letter from that year.
For a while everything was golden. Eve
was mixing business with pleasure and
they mixed just fine. Until they didn’t.
Abruptly, inexplicably, McGrath turned
on her. From the letter to Blum: “Earl
decided I was beyond the pale about 8
months ago. He decided I was vulgar or
76 VA N I T Y FA I R
something.” My guess is that McGrath’s
jealousy rather than Eve’s vulgarity was
the reason for the about-face, since the
guys he was pining for, she was sleeping
with. Not only Peter Pilafian, but Harri-
son Ford. Said Eve, “Earl was in love with
Harrison. One time Earl and Harrison
and I were taking acid at the beach. I sud-
denly decided we had to go home because
there were too many cops around. We
stopped for breakfast. Harrison started
talking about working on a movie with
Elliott Gould. He thought Elliott was a
nice guy. Well, Earl stood up and threw
all the dishes on the floor.”
McGrath would attack Eve where she
was vulnerable. A year into their friend-
ship that had morphed into something
else, he introduced her to Ahmet Erte-
gun, president of Atlantic Records, then
the ruler of the music world. McGrath
must’ve known when he brought Erte-
gun to Eve’s apartment on an afternoon
in 1968 that he was bringing her an apple
from a fairy tale—something as irresist-
ible as it was deadly. Eve, in the letter to
Blum, on the McGrath-Ertegun origin
story: “Earl and Ahmet met at a super-
formal dinner party.… [They] disappeared
after dessert and weren’t heard from for 3
days.… Earl telephoned Ahmet’s wife and
told her to send the car down from South-
hampton [sic] to the most sordid tawdry
street in Baltimore.” Though McGrath
began working for Ertegun in an official
capacity in 1970, when Ertegun gave him a
record label, Clean Records, to run, he was
already working for Ertegun in an unof-
ficial capacity. He was Ertegun’s social
director; in other words, a kind of pimp.
Ertegun was a cultivated man, an artist
as well as an operator. (In his pre-mogul
days he wrote songs for Ray Charles.) But
there was a barbarous side to his nature,
and he’d reveal it in his relationship with
Eve, which wasn’t a relationship at all,
which was an arrangement. Said Eve’s
sister, Mirandi, “Ahmet would call up
Eve late at night, and she’d go over to
the Beverly Hills Hotel. He always had
the best drugs. Not just the best drugs,
the best exotic drugs. He’d have things
like opium. And there was room service
all over the place, and Champagne on ice.
Evie loved all that. And she’d service him
or whatever, and then she’d go home.”
Eve had always been about overin-
dulgence: profligacy and promiscuity,
reckless and spectacular consumption.
Yet she’d remained unspoiled. Her capac-
ity for pleasure was large—movingly so.
Any delights or diversions that came her
way, she accepted with gratitude. Which
means that her depravity was all on the
surface. Underneath, she was an inno-
cent. This changed with Ertegun.
Another memory of Mirandi’s: “There
would be times that we went to Earl’s,
after a show or a concert. I’d see the mix
of people who were there. Top music
people, like Mick Jagger. They were half-
cocked, drunk, and full of whatever. And
the talk was so mean and mean-spirited.
It would be directed at the girls, some-
times at Eve—these horrible put-downs.
Most of the girls would just crumble. Not
Eve. She’d figure out what the deal with
you was and just go for the jugular. So
she’d give it right back to Ahmet. I worried
she’d get slapped, but I think he liked it.”
Eve could not, would not flinch. And
her bravura, her stupid physical courage,
allowed her to hold on to her self-respect.
(If Joan’s definition of self-respect has a
living embodiment, Eve is it.) But at
what cost? The experience with Ertegun
was coarsening, brutalizing. Her behav-
ior was, on one level, admirable; on
another, bitter, frustrated, self-destruc-
tive—redundant since McGrath was
already so intent on destroying her.
Something he could do without conse-
quence. She wasn’t famous or attached.
Who was going to kick up a fuss?
One day in 1970, he’d look at a paint-
ing she was working on and ask, “Is that
the blue you’re using?,” a question as
tasteless and odorless as arsenic—and as
fatal. It wiped out her artistic confidence.
Her art career would continue for a few
more years, but was effectively over at
that moment.
A
S M c GRATH WAS laying
waste to Eve, he was
shielding Joan. From
Eve’s 1970 journal: “Last
night I had a good par-
ty.… Wickhem got here
with this ex-Marine[,] whose name was
Jack Clement. He discovered Jerry Lee
Lewis.… [Jack] made a pass at Mrs. Dunn
which caused her, John & Earl…to run
out the door.”
This vignette exposes Joan. She might
have balked at the safety of the drawing
room where the well-bred young ladies
clutched their pearls; yet she wasn’t quite
Eve getting naked for the camera was more than an act of REVENGE against her
lover. It was an act of homage to HER IDOL: Marilyn Monroe.
willing to risk the mean streets, at least
not unescorted. Eve, on the other hand,
prowled the mean streets alone, after
dark, dressed hot and trashy, a bloody
lip for a badge of honor. She faced death
every single night. The situation got too
real, the smell of a rumble too sharp, and
Joan was out of there.
“You married a protector,” Griffin
says to Joan in his documentary of her,
The Center Will Not Hold, and she read-
ily agrees. Dunne, though, only looked
like the dominant one. Said Josh Green-
feld, “I told [Michiko Kakutani, then the
Times book critic], ‘What you see in John,
you get in Joan.’ He came on as tough
and blustering, but he was soft. Don’t
forget, she handled all their finances.
And that shyness—that weakness—was
actually her strength because it got John
to run interference.”
When discussing her courtship with
Dunne, Joan said, “I don’t know what
‘fall in love’ means.… But I do remember
having a very clear sense that I wanted
this to continue.” It isn’t true that falling
in love was a concept Joan had no truck
with. In a piece on Howard Hughes, she
wrote of the “apparently bottomless gulf
between…what we officially admire and
secretly desire, between, in the largest
sense, the people we marry and the
people we love.” Are we to assume then
that Dunne was someone she married
but did not love? In any case, she and
Dunne were very married, presenting
themselves to the world as a unit. Joan,
in fact, insisted on being addressed as
“Joan Dunne” by friends. (“Mrs. Dunn”
was, I think, Eve taking a dig at Joan for
this insistence, for playing the little
woman to Dunne’s big strong man.)
And not only were Joan and Dunne a
couple, they were also coworkers, edit-
ing each other’s books and articles,
writing screenplays jointly. As Eve put
it, “They were connected at the type-
writer ribbon.”
The relationship, though, was more
symbiotic even than that. It was Dunne
who made it possible for Joan to be Joan.
Joan told Griffin, “People often said that
he finished sentences for me. Well, he
did.” And his willingness to do her talk-
ing for her allowed her to be silent. Said
writer Dan Wakefield, a friend of the
Didion-Dunnes from their New York
days, “I gave a party. A guy was there—
Norman Dorsen—a law professor at
NYU, involved in liberal politics and all
that shit. Joan was just standing there,
not saying a thing. She had on this pair
of dark glasses. Norman goes up to her
and says, ‘Ms. Didion, why do you wear
those sexy, intriguing, dark glasses?’
I cracked up and said, ‘I think you’ve
answered your own question.’ She was
like the sphinx. And when the sphinx
spoke, everybody listened.”
Also making it possible for Joan to be
Joan: Earl McGrath. Eve described the
parties at Franklin Avenue as “nonstop.”
When I asked if the parties were Joan’s
or Earl’s, she replied, “Both. They were
the same person.” As Dunne supple-
mented Joan professionally, so McGrath
supplemented her socially. Joan was, by
all accounts, a withdrawn and inward
person, yet one with a strong desire to
be on the scene. How to do that? Cre-
ate the scene. Or rather, get somebody
to create it for you. Get McGrath, whose
charm is the stuff of legend, but who’s
lacking—an artist with no art. (Social
masterpieces don’t, alas, count. They’re
gone by morning.)
So the man who was doing Eve in was
nourishing Joan. Eve was getting eaten
alive; Joan had her teeth sunk deep in his
throat, was drinking, drinking, drinking
with glassy-eyed, sweet-sucking bliss.
T
HEN, THE FRANKLIN
Avenue scene ended,
in January 1971, when
Joan left it, moving with
Dunne and Quintana
to Malibu. Joan would,
however, return at the close of the decade
with the essay collection The White Album,
the title story set in the years 1966–1971,
while she was “living in a large house in
a part of Hollywood that had once been
expensive and was now described by
one of my acquaintances as a ‘senseless-
killing neighborhood.’ ” She’d quote the
psychiatric report of a patient at St. John’s
Hospital in Santa Monica in the summer
of ’68. “In [the patient’s] view she lives in
a world of people moved by strange, con-
flicted, poorly comprehended, and, above
all, devious motivations which commit
them inevitably to conflict and failure.”
The twist? Joan was the patient. So under
her controlled exterior: tumult. The same
tumult as under Eve’s uncontrolled exte-
rior. And the thoughts and feelings that
Eve had blurted out spontaneously and
unselfconsciously in journals and letters,
written in the as-it-happens present, Joan
shaped, artfully and with premeditation,
in an after-the-fact book.
Michelle Phillips would make an
appearance in The White Album. So would
Janis Joplin. And McGrath was the co-
dedicatee. Eve was in there too, though
just out of sight, tucked behind Jim Morri-
son, dropping lit matches down the fly of
his vinyl trousers during a Doors record-
ing session. (It was Eve who got Joan in
front of Morrison—yet another of her
improbable introductions.)
The White Album was a critical and com-
mercial triumph. It was also a return to
form for Joan, whose hot streak had gone
cold since she abandoned Franklin Ave-
nue for the Pacific Coast Highway. (Her
1977 novel, A Book of Common Prayer, was
a flop.) So Joan’s best books, her defini-
tive books, C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 2 2
SEPTEMBER 2022 77
 How MARIO CARBONE’S namesake restaurant—and its Italian maximalism—
became the defining celebrity supper club of our era

By N A T E F R E E M A N | Photographs by M A R K P E T E R S O N

CHEF’S KISS
78 VA N I T Y FA I R
SEPTEMBER 2022 79

DURING THE FORMULA 1 Miami Grand
Prix in May, the owners of Carbone, the
decade-old temple to red-sauce dining
in Greenwich Village, opened a pop-
up underneath a gigantic tent on the
beach. Even if this was set to be a huge
weekend for the Magic City, this kind
of ambition—the kind that prompts one
to prop up a cathedral of carbs in South
Beach—has been in somewhat short sup-
ply since the pandemic crippled large
swaths of the restaurant industry. For a
lot of reasons Carbone Beach seemed
particularly hubristic.
First, there already is an outpost of
Carbone in Miami, just a short drive
down Collins Avenue, one that’s large
enough to pull off close to a thousand
covers on a big night. The pop-up went
head-to-head not just with itself but
with a hundred other global hot spots for
Carbone is akin to this century’s DEUX
customers during the jam-packed race
weekend schedule. Then there was the
little issue of the cost. To eat at Carbone
Beach, the price tag was $3,000 per per-
son. Still, in the days leading up to the
races, Jeff Zalaznick, cofounder of Major
Food Group, the umbrella company that
owns Carbone, was bullish.
“We’ve never seen demand like this,”
he said, referring to the restaurant and
Miami itself. “It’s going to be a very hedo-
nistic experience.”
80 VA N I T Y FA I R
Zalaznick knew his market. Over the
four-day Carbone Beach pop-up, the
guest list was a remarkable cross sec-
tion of American wealth and celebrity:
real estate billionaires Stephen Ross and
Richard LeFrak, oil heir Mikey Hess;
media mega-dealer Aryeh Bourkoff;
Gen Z Marvel hero Hailee Steinfeld;
directors Michael Bay and Spike Lee;
Derek Jeter; Venus and Serena Williams;
Patrick Mahomes; and more. LeBron
James alone managed to stop by Car-
bone Beach on four consecutive nights.
Even deposed princelings Ivanka Trump
and Jared Kushner were there, enjoying
a rare night out insulated from sneering
restaurantgoers who can’t afford to drop
three stacks to get into dinner.
At 200 heads per night times four,
Carbone Beach ostensibly grossed more
than $2 million. The brick-and-mortar
MAGOTS, with Kim Kardashian and
Carbone down the beach was booked
from opening until closing.
At the center of it all is Mario Car-
bone, a perpetual kid from Queens now
approaching middle age, who opened
his namesake restaurant in 2013 at the
age of 33. All weekend long in Miami—
where he relocated with his girlfriend,
the powerful TikTok star publicist Cait
Bailey, during the pandemic—he was
personally plating the rigatoni and flip-
ping the steaks on the grills while also
playing politician, greeting VIPs, and
introducing the talent onstage.
Throughout the madness, Carbone
remained the tastefully five-o’clock-
shadowed big shot in chef ’s whites, an
Italian American culinary god to every
foodie with a black card. He wears his
restaurant world celebrity with the
well-groomed mien of a guy with a few
menswear podcasts in the Spotify queue.
In fact, his side hustle is a fashion line,
Our Lady of Rocco, and like both Car-
bones—restaurant and restaurateur—it
wears its influences—Mean Streets, The
Pope of Greenwich Village—on its sleeve.
One particular Rocco item might be
the key to inner Mario, an item that’s
retrograde but forward-thinking, smile
inducing, and thoroughly meta-Italian.
It’s a simple ribbed white tank for guys
that has been called a “wife-pleaser.”
For months, I had been speaking to
Carbone in an effort to understand how
his name had become shorthand for a
very specific kind of luxe dining in the
last decade—how he and his cofounders
built and are now expanding a supper
club that has so consistently lured not just
the likes of LeBron and Jeter, Spike and
Drake, Jared and Ivanka, but all the vari-
ous moguls and machers and hypebeasts
and influencers in their various wakes. At
one point during our series of conversa-
tions, I ask Carbone if such extravagance
and global influence seemed remotely
attainable back when he and cofounder
Rich Torrisi decided to open their first
Italian joint 13 years ago.
“I don’t think we had any idea how
it was going to happen,” Carbone says
to me. “But if you would’ve told me
and Rich in our late 20s, you guys were
going to be fucking big, you’re going to
be huge, we would’ve been like, ‘Yeah,
you bet your ass.’ ”
S
INCE RESTAURANTS gradually
started to reopen in the fall of
2020, there’s been no spot on
earth more perennially celeb-
packed than Carbone. It’s as if the rich
and powerful simply are not aware that

other places exist to get dinner. This had
been building for years; Carbone was
the rare room that Leonardo DiCaprio
could enter and maybe not be the most
famous guy present. But it’s taken on a
new dimension of late.
Rihanna’s pregnancy announcement
was bookended by visits. Justin Bieber
beelined there the day after the Met Gala
in September 2021. Kanye West and Julia
Fox went on their first date at the Miami
outpost on New Year’s Day, and then fol-
lowed up three days later with another
date…at Carbone in New York, as they
vamped for the paparazzi. The whole
thing bordered on a work of perfor-
mance art, with Carbone as a backdrop,
seen on phone screens the world over.
Over the course of a workweek, Page Six
wrote no fewer than 17 stories referenc-
ing the couple’s dinners there.
The pair could not have chosen a
better backdrop, a certain element of
metatextual, post-everything exegesis
having been baked into Carbone’s ziti
from day one. The restaurant delivers
its highfalutin versions of classic Ital-
ian American comfort food hits—ragu,
ravioli, rigatoni, calamari, puttanesca,
shrimp scampi, lobster fra diavolo, veal
Parmesan—with a side of arch referen-
tiality: the red-tuxedoed captain singing
along to Frank while his bazooka arms
mix a gigantic Caesar salad; the reddest,
spiciest, booziest vodka sauce ever served
over noodles on white tablecloth; the
courtesy-of-the-chef wink wink nod nod
free courses coming out to make you feel
like you’re a made man in a mob hang.
The Carbone celebrity complex
has been egged on by the dogged
Pete Davidson FILLING IN for Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.
pseudo-reporting of the pandemic-era
Page Six meets Gawker Stalker that is
@deuxmoi, the gossip-spewing Oz of
Instagram. In @deuxmoi world, Carbone
is akin to this century’s Deux Magots,
with Kim Kardashian and Pete David-
son filling in for Simone de Beauvoir and
Jean-Paul Sartre.
“I name a lot of different restaurants,
and for whatever reason, they just
latched on to Carbone, it’s become so
synonymous with the account,” one of
the founders of @deuxmoi tells me on a
phone call. “Does anyone eat anywhere
else? I get so excited when someone
sends me a picture of their burger or
something because I feel like all I post
is Carbone.”
Carbone’s gone-Hollywood version of
cooking linguine with clams arrived right
as Instagram began to take off. Three
months after the restaurant opened its
doors in March 2013, the picture-sharing
behemoth first
allowed users
THE MOVES
Previous spread:
to add video to
Mario Carbone, their feeds. And
photographed Carbone is per-
June 13, 2022, at
the New York City haps best seen
flagship of the as video stream-
Carbone empire.
ing on an app,
capturing this
Sinatra-washed rigatoni fantasia, one
that unfolds as if on a New York back
lot in an L.A. movie studio filling in for
Greenwich Village.
“Carbone’s like a movie set, where
every waiter’s like an actor,” says Daniel
Boulud, who once employed Carbone and
Torrisi at his own Café Boulud. “Mario
and Rich, they’re New Yorkers, and they
have this nostalgia for classic New York,
and it gives it this joie de vivre.”
The creators know this and relish the
hell out of it. When talking about the
restaurant, Carbone and Torrisi often
bring up a concept they have dubbed
“The Move.” The Moves are wink wink
mini performances pulled off by the serv-
ers that weave together into a narrative,
a series of over-accommodation that will
charm and overwhelm and crescendo
until you have been pomodoro-pilled.
“Generally it means unique service
style moments, whether it’s the verbiage
we use, how the captain guides you, the
spiel they use to rattle off specials,” Tor-
risi says. “And people might not notice
the Move, and that’s the point—the
point is that you aren’t thinking about it
because we got you, we captured your
imagination, we’re pouring wine quick-
ly and we’re getting you a cocktail and
you’re having a great time and that’s why
you’re coming back. That’s a Move.”
I
HAD DINNER AT Carbone on the
first Sunday of May, and the main
takeaway, apart from the relent-
lessly euphoria-inducing fare, was
something like: This is an unapologeti-
cally self-aware way to go out for a meal.
Contra the boys, it’s not so much a series
of Moves but a sequence of discrete
actions unfurling as a narrative about
the Move. The first Move is a meta one:
leading us past the main dining room
with tiles reminiscent of those in the
restaurant in which Michael Corleone
accepted his destiny in The Godfather,
through the kitchen à la Scorsese’s
direction en route to the best table at
the Copacabana in Goodfellas. Another
Move is a capitan greeting the table in a
tuxedo, handshakes all around, launch-
ing into an antipasti assault: gratis salami
from down Bleecker Street; a Brobding-
nagian basket of various carbs topped
with a square of grandma bread the size
of a stop sign; oily, pepper-flecked cauli-
flower giardiniera; and fist-size chunks
of Parmesan. Out comes the tableside-
tossed Caesar but also a tire-size platter
of extra-rich beef carpaccio speckled
with ant-size chives. Out comes the spicy
rigatoni vodka but also off-the-menu
gnocchi slathered in fresh ramp butter.
Out comes the lobster fra diavolo but also
that famous veal Parm, cut tableside. Out
come the coffees but also a bottle of Sam-
buca, dropped at the table for diners to
use to spike at will.
Also a Move: that time the waiter
handed over comically large menus and
then rattled off the night’s oysters, a list
as long as the names of who begat whom
in the book of Genesis, ending with
“New Brunswick—and that’s Canada,
not Jersey! No offense to Jersey though.”
Wink wink. One last Move: placing a
Tesla-size basket of chestnuts and other
unidentifiable shells on the table—“This
is a nutcracker, and ladies, you only use
them on these nuts.”
But then the Move could not account
for the fact that in the back room’s cor-
ner booth sat Aviv “Vivi” Nevo, the
überwealthy Zelig-like investor with a
self-fashioned mystique—for years, his
SEPTEMBER 2022 81
BRIGHT LIGHTS
Clockwise from
left: Jay-Z;
Kendall Jenner;
Rihanna; James
Corden, LeBron
James, and
Dwyane Wade;
Orlando Bloom;
Kate Hudson; and
Victoria Beckham
are among the
celebrity hordes
coming and going
at Carbone.
top Google searches said that he was
ungoogleable. Or that a tablemate came
back from the bathroom to announce he
had just been introduced to Olivia Rodri-
go, the stratospheric 19-year-old pop star,
who was sitting with, among others, the
actor Sebastian Stan and Valentino cre-
ative director Pierpaolo Piccioli.
Here, though, are two variables that
might get us closer to solving for Car-
bone’s gravitational force. Within hours
of dinner, the Daily Mail and @deuxmoi
had each reported that Rodrigo had been
at Carbone on the night before the Met
Gala, complete with Thompson-Street-
as-runway snaps of her in a see-through
chain-mail dress. That Nevo held court
at a table in the back room wasn’t report-
ed anywhere.
U
NLIKE YOUR USUAL celeb-
studded clubstaurants—your
Taos and your Buddakans and
your Catches—the cuisine at
Carbone has earned three stars from
Pete Wells at The New York Times. This
82 VA N I T Y FA I R
sort of critical appraisal is something of
an important marker in the evolution
of fine dining in New York. Krishnendu
Ray, a professor of food studies at New
York University and author of The Eth-
nic Restaurateur, explained that Italian
cuisine is becoming one of the dominant
forms of haute cuisine, gaining ground
on French and Japanese. If you go to
a globalized luxury hotel in Bangkok
or Buenos Aires, the restaurant there
is more likely than anything else to be
serving Italian food. But this very often
tends to be Italian Italian food, which
means the food the wealthy eat in Milan
or Genoa, not Italian American food. Spa-
ghetti and meatballs was invented here
by Italians who saw their jobs eliminated
as the Industrial Revolution spread down
the boot, forcing them to come to Amer-
ica in droves until the National Origins
Act of 1924 limited immigration. Ray
said that, to his knowledge, no one had
seriously tried to elevate this cuisine to
the peaks of gastronomy and hospital-
ity until restaurants like Carbone did.
“Carbone is very significant, because
it’s the food of the poor immigrants, and
it’s fighting against the Northern Italian
disdain,” said Ray.
Mario Carbone has none of this dis-
dain, and despite the high-flying Miami
lifestyle punctuated by bro hugs from
LeBron, he’s still the kid from Queens
who worked at local eateries through
high school. The red-sauce joint on
Thompson might be just one of the 30+
restaurants on three continents under
the Major Food Group umbrella, but
Carbone is the flagship restaurant and
the one that bears his name.
“The idea to do what Carbone is, that’s
more acutely Mario’s particular dream as
a young chef,” says Torrisi, whose name
graced their first restaurant, Torrisi Ital-
ian Specialties.
On a brisk Texas morning on the last
day of March, I am sitting with Car-
bone at the new Carbone in Dallas, in
the bones of a restaurant set to open,
alarmingly, that night. It doesn’t look
G E T T Y I MAG E S .
ready, but he is. Carbone was born to
Italian Americans in a residential part
of Queens, and his grandparents, who

came over from Italy as adults, were
always around, always cooking.
“My grandfather would wake up, he’d
get dressed, and part of getting dressed,
he’d put an apron on,” Carbone tells me.
“And then, for the remainder of the
day, he has an apron on, watching TV,
gardening, doing something outside,
actually cooking,” Carbone continues.
“And my grandmother was his con-
summate doting sous chef…. So when
they were watching me, I was always in
the kitchen.”
Home-cooked Italian food was part
of the culture, but he was also fascinated
by the business model of a restaurant,
the magician’s sleight of hand that hap-
pens in an invisible back room where you
choose what you want and it miraculously
appears. He worked at seafood joints in
Queens to make pocket money for dates,
and after high school decided to bet on
cooking as a way forward. He enrolled in
the Culinary Institute of America, the go-
to incubator for kitchen stars.
“Everyone thinks they’re going to be a
grand chef—everyone was going to be
the four-star chef, the three-Michelin-
star chef, the grand restaurateur,”
Carbone recalls.
When looking for an externship, Car-
bone sent letters to all of the restaurants
on a local magazine’s top 50 list and heard
back from very few. Finally, he got a call
from a chef at the recently opened Babbo,
Mario Batali’s first hit restaurant. His job
was to show up at dawn, scale fish, fetch
coffee, say yes to everything, and leave
long after the last service.
“I landed in an incredible place that
was making a shit ton of noise,” he says.
“Mario, that was only his second restau-
rant at the time. He was there every night.
And I became the kid. I was the gofer. But
I was like Rudy Ruettiger at fucking Notre
Dame. I was gonna do it, and I was gonna
do the shit out of it.”
Batali asked Carbone to join the team
at his new spot Lupa, on Thompson
Street. After a year came a spell at La
Dogana, a storied must-hit in Tuscany,
where he learned the ancient techniques
of Etruscan cooking. When he got back
to the States, he thought he had the stuff
BIG CITY
Clockwise
from top left:
Nick Jonas,
Olivia Rodrigo,
Sebastian
Stan, Kim
Kardashian,
Hailey Bieber,
Emma Roberts,
and Jennifer
Lopez.
to make it in the kitchens stacked with
chefs who would come to define the next
two decades of restaurants in New York.
First up was the flagship space of Boulud,
who is in Carbone parlance “one of the
LeBron Jameses of this thing.” Carbone
had a surefire plan to get a gig. He’d go to
Boulud’s four-sparkler East Side temple
of Gallic haute cuisine and slip a résumé
in his pocket to pass to the chef-owner.
But he ended up having to call Boulud’s
assistant every day before he got a spot
to trail on the line. “He was very green at
the start,” Boulud says.
After a few days during which Carbone
passed as a legit employee, the execu-
tive chef made eye contact with a young
Mario, a man he had never hired, stand-
ing in the kitchen. The chef happened
to be Alex Lee. “About as intimidating
a human being as you’re going to find,”
Carbone says of Lee. “He’s yelling at
other French chefs in perfect French.
His build is stocky, shaved head. And
he’s screaming in all languages. I’ve never
seen anything like it. I’m terrified of this
man. I’m terrified of this man. And at the
SEPTEMBER 2022 83
end of one service, he looks down the
line at me. So I walk up to him. And he
goes, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ Great ques-
tion, chef. My name’s Mario Carbone. I
was trying to get a job here, blah, blah,
blah, blah. And he’s like, ‘I don’t have any
positions here.’ ”
But Carbone did manage to find a spot
at the less formal Café Boulud, which,
while still a world-class joint, wasn’t as
stuffy as the four-star dining room off
Park Avenue. At the time, the kitchen was
run by Andrew Carmellini, who would go
on to open Locanda Verde in Robert De
Niro’s Greenwich Hotel, The Dutch in
SoHo, and the sprawling French bistro
Lafayette in NoHo.
A fellow grunt on the line was a Korean
American kid from a D.C. suburb named
David Chang, who quit after his mother
was diagnosed with cancer and who
entertained hopes of striking out on his
own. “Café Boulud was intentionally
difficult,” Chang told The New Yorker in
2008. “It was chip-on-your-shoulder
cooking, like, all these other restaurants
have twice as many cooks, all this new
equipment, and we’re gonna fucking out-
cook them with nothing but our sheer will
and technique.”
Chang was the most immediate suc-
cess of the pledge class, as he went on to
open a noodle bar called Momofuku that
begat a global empire. But it seemed as
though all the young guys in Carmellini’s
kill-or-be-killed kitchen were comers,
content to sweat out the rough times and
earn the scars needed to open their own
places. Another Café Boulud employee
was Torrisi, whom Carbone had met back
at CIA, on the first day of orientation.
Boulud, who was very much aware
of Carmellini’s activities over at the
café, said he remembered the young
chefs fondly. “They were a little bit of
a clique,” says Boulud. “They were a part
of this fuck-you generation, they were
molecular gastronomy, and then to Del
Posto, the city’s first Italian Italian restau-
rant in decades to score four stars from the
Times, courtesy of then critic Sam Sifton.
Torrisi eventually went to work at A Voce,
the first boîte helmed solo by Carmellini.
But the two, Torrisi and Carbone, stayed
close. After postshift drinks late one night
at the Sullivan Street chef hangout Blue
Ribbon, Torrisi told his bud he needed a
place to crash. They became roommates
and spent each
morning getting
ITALIAN ready for work,
AMERICAN
Carbone in bitching about
the kitchen at the their jobs, per-
Greenwich
Village outpost. fecting dishes
by woodshed-
ding on the tiny
stovetop, and communing with the cook-
ing god on the television, Bobby Flay.
“So we would watch all things Bobby
Flay and just talk about shit,” Carbone
says. “And the assumption was at that
time that he would go on and do his own
thing and I would do my own thing. And
we had entrepreneurial ambitions sepa-
rately. I was going to do something. He
was going to do something.”
For Carbone, that was a project with
Chang, but things got scuttled during the
Great Recession. The roommates decid-
ed to join forces. They had spent all this
time talking about their ideal menu, in
their ideal spot. So they started looking
around. They had some funds from their
families and a few investors, they just
needed a place, preferably somewhere
downtown. Soon they found a former
blue jeans store on Mulberry Street,
spent months gutting it, and opened
Torrisi Italian Specialties. After a spell Jane Hotel. Here’s what Zalaznick was
serving sandwiches at lunch to modest proposing: What about opening what
returns, some press accompanied one of would become the greatest, fanciest red-
their first dinner services, and soon they sauce joint the city has ever seen?
were drawing lines around the block. Torrisi and Carbone were intrigued.
In time, a 27-year-old regular named More than that—they had a similar idea.

“Carbone’s like a MOVIE SET, where every waiter’s like an actor,” says Daniel

ready to do anything to get ahead, they
were so ambitious.”
Carbone and Torrisi both eventually
moved on: Carbone to wd~50, the Lower
East Side mecca where Wylie Dufresne
was cooking on the bleeding edge of
Jeff Zalaznick approached them about
getting drinks. Torrisi and Carbone
knew the guy, they had grappa after
tasting-menu meals at the restaurant
sometimes, so it wasn’t all that strange.
Carbone went for drinks with him at the
In the lofted lobby of the Jane Hotel, the
place that once hosted survivors of the
sunken Titanic, an idea was born for a
new kind of restaurant that would build
on the buzz of Torrisi Italian Special-
ties but take it one step further by going

84 VA N I T Y FA I R
 two steps back. It wouldn’t be an Italian
American place leaning on modern-
ist techniques to get insanely fancy. It
would be a place that was both insanely
Italian American and insanely fancy.
“Torrisi was this real juggernaut—it
Boulud, who ONCE EMPLOYED Carbone and Torrisi at his own Café Boulud.
was a sandwich shop, it was this incred-
ible multicourse restaurant—and they
were beside themselves with enthusi-
asm,” says Ben Leventhal, a cofounder of
Eater who went on to cofound the popular
reservation service Resy, on which you’ll
be hard-pressed to find a table at a reason-
able hour at Carbone’s flagship anytime
soon. “They were energized and engaged
coming off of Torrisi, and they just shifted
gears into Carbone. And it was a rocket
ship right out of the gate.”
Z
ALAZNICK HAD ONE thing the
friends lacked: bona fide gen-
erational wealth. Jeff ’s father is
David Zalaznick, who cofound-
ed property and investment company JZ
Capital Partners with the financier Jay
Jordan. His grandfather was real estate
titan Paul Milstein.
And Jeff Zalaznick, who’d worked a
bit in the industry, was looking for some-
thing new. “He went to Cornell, he tried
banking, he hated it,” Carbone says. “And
he just started showing up at Torrisi.”
After the meeting at the Jane, all three
of them got together, this time at the
Mulberry Street playground across from
the bar Spring Lounge—Carbone called
it Shark Bar, C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 1 8
SEPTEMBER 2022 85
 COUPLES RARELY COMMIT CRIMES TOGETHER. BUT
ILYA “DUTCH” LICHTENSTEIN AND HEATHER “RAZZLEKHAN” MORGAN,
WHOSE SOCIAL MEDIA ANTICS DISGUISED AN ALLEGED PLOT TO ABSCOND
WITH BILLIONS IN STOLEN CRYPTO, ARE NO ORDINARY COUPLE

BY NICK BILTON | ILLUSTRATIONS BY JONATHAN BARTLETT

86 VA N I T Y FA I R
THE BALLAD OF

BITCOIN
BONNIE AND

IT WAS AROUND 3 A.M. the first time they arrived. An unmarked,
nondescript government-issued vehicle pulled up to the towering
brown brick and blue glass building in downtown Manhattan
known simply by its address: 75 Wall Street. The city that never
sleeps was in that rare moment when the ostinato of car horns
and rattling subway cars had been replaced by a deep, albeit brief,
slumber. The agents stepped out of their vehicle and walked
through the revolving doors of the 42-story building, crossing
the shiny white oak floors of the lobby to reach the doorman on
duty that night. It was 2021, in the midst of the second wave of the
COVID pandemic, and the bottom 18 floors of “75,” which had
originally opened as the Andaz Hotel, had shuttered because of
the virus. Seeing anyone at this hour was rare for the doorman,
but seeing a group of federal agents was an utter anomaly.
“We’re picking up signals that someone in this building is
trafficking child pornography,” one of the agents said to the
doorman. “We need to go up to the roof to see if we can track
where the signal is coming from.” The doorman, though slightly
taken aback, obliged and pointed the way to the elevators.
As the agents stepped in one of the building’s four elevators,
the doorman wondered which resident of the 346-unit building,
where condos can cost as much as $7 million, could be traffick-
ing child porn. After a while, the agents came back to the lobby
and left the building.
A couple of weeks went by and the feds returned. And again
a few weeks after that. At one point, the night doorman offered
them a little investigative advice. “You sure you’re in the right
building?” he said. “Seems more like something you’d find at
95 Wall Street?” Indeed, 95 was far more malefic than 75. Over
that same summer of 2021, the shiny glass building across the
street had been the site of a series of drug busts by the NYPD;
88 VA N I T Y FA I R
reviews of the building online had called
it a haven for coke dealers, gangsters, and
all-night Airbnb parties. Most recently,
a high-end escort had been killed there,
stuffed into a 55-gallon drum and wheeled
out the back door before being dumped
in New Jersey.
“Nope,” the agents said. “Definitely
this building.” And off they went to the
roof again. Then, one evening, the pattern
changed. The agents showed an interest
in one specific floor. The signal they were
after, it seemed, was getting stronger.
In reality, the agents were not at 75
because of child pornography. The crime
they tracked there had originally taken
place in Hong Kong in the summer of
2016, when someone had found a flaw in
the code of the Bitfinex crypto exchange
and stolen 119,754 Bitcoin, worth around
$72 million at the time. Its value had
since grown 70-fold and was now in the
billions. After a half decade tracking and
tracing, climbing on roofs and skulking
through the dead of night, the feds had
finally—finally!—found the people who
had somehow gotten their hands on that
stolen Bitcoin. A married couple in their
early 30s, with a wild online presence
and a Bengal cat named Clarissa (who
had her own Instagram account). The
husband, Ilya “Dutch” Lichtenstein, a
Russian-born émigré, was an investor
and part-time mentalist magician. His
wife, Heather “Razzlekhan” Morgan,
who was from the U.S., was an entrepre-
neur, journalist, and rapper.
That was just the beginning, as I dis-
covered in more than 50 interviews with
friends and former colleagues of the
couple, investigators close to the case,
and employees and residents of 75 Wall
Street. As the feds were about to find out,
this would prove to be one of the strang-
est cases in the ever-evolving world of
crypto crime—and the first clue of just
how bizarre this case would become was
sitting right there on the couple’s social
media accounts.
“RAZZLE, DAZZLE,
BITCHEZ!”
AH, BITCOIN, a new era of money. That
invention-slash-ideology that promised
to usher in an era of glittering, spar-
kling, frolicking financial technotopia.
Our generation’s fiscal Woodstock! And
by God, did the internet need it. Back at
the turn of the aughts, when this bizarre
Bitcoin thing was slowly being squeezed
from the birth canals of the web’s most
arcane forums, financial anonymity
simply didn’t exist online. You bought
something digitally, and a database
somewhere was tattooed with every
microscopic detail about you.
Bitcoin, which made its hushed debut
in 2009, promised to change that. It
went on to upend the global financial
It was as if Lichtenstein and Morgan HAD A STOLEN Ferrari and
as they were TRYING TO HIDE IT in their garage, it turned into
a sparkling diamond-encrusted jumbo jet with GOLDEN toilet seats.
landscape in ways that no one could have
ever believed possible (anyone who tells
you they foresaw the world we live in
today is either a liar or a Bitcoin billion-
aire). Crypto now makes up $3 trillion in
wealth, and the world’s largest financial
institutions, including Chase and the
Bank of England, cite digital currencies
as the future of finance, although a major
collapse in value this year has even some
true believers wondering if that predic-
tion will pan out.
The rise of cryptocurrencies also
brought with it a new era of crime unlike
anything we’ve ever seen before. Sites
soon popped up on the dark web that
made it easy to buy drugs, guns, mur-
der, fake diplomas, ricin, body parts,
bombs, rocket launchers, and even ura-
nium, all using Bitcoin. And a few years
later, because of that promise of financial
anonymity, came the rise of a relatively
obscure crime called the ransomware
attack, where a company’s or person’s
computer system is taken hostage and
the only way to unlock it is by paying a
fee in—you guessed it—crypto. While
this kind of computer hijacking dates to
the early ’90s, payment was often made
by cash or credit card, and as such, was
few and far between. Last year, the FBI
released a report saying there are now
4,000 ransomware attacks every day
(compared to seven bank robberies a
day), and that online perpetrators stole
$14 billion in Bitcoin in 2021 alone (traditional bank robbers,
by comparison, only got away with a couple hundred million).
Because of the ease of crypto, hospitals are now taken hostage
and held at financial gunpoint. Banks and hedge funds grind
to a halt. Even a meatpacking plant was recently forced to pay
$11 million in Bitcoin to get access to its beef patties, chicken
cutlets, and pork sausages.
Then there are the other crimes, where new waves of hackers
phish, spoof, rootkit, worm, cloak, and brute-force their way into
stealing all sorts of digital assets, from NFTs to literally (and
sometimes figuratively) making off with millions in digital gold.
Most of these hacks are pretty small in scale. Simple bad luck
for whoever chose a shitty password or was fooled by a phish-
ing scam. But the Bitfinex hack—the one that led the feds to
75 Wall Street—was big. Very big. Bitfinex was one of the top
exchanges for buying and selling cryptocurrencies and other
digital assets, and the hackers cleared out more than half its
inventory—119,754 coins in all—in under four hours on the
morning of August 2, 2016.
At the time of the theft, a single Bitcoin was worth about
$600. Almost immediately afterward, cryptomania set in and
the value of Bitcoin skyrocketed. The money simply wouldn’t
stop growing, a frightful problem for Lichtenstein and Morgan.
At its vertiginous peak last year, a single Bitcoin had ballooned
to $69,000, raising the price of the coins stolen in 2016 to an
absurd $8.3 billion—and making the heist the biggest in U.S.
history. (In typical crypto roller-coaster insanity, the value fell
to a measly $2.5 billion after the great sell-off of 2022.) It was
as if Lichtenstein and Morgan had a stolen Ferrari and as they
were trying to hide it in their garage, it turned into a sparkling,
diamond-encrusted jumbo jet with golden toilet seats and
wheels made of Jubilee rubies. How the fuck were they sup-
posed to hide that?
It’s not just pimply teenagers in their mother’s basement
who are hacking and stealing crypto. These funds are also being
stolen by criminal syndicates sponsored by rogue states like
North Korea and Iran, and their funds are being used to buy
illegal arms or even fund terror cells like ISIS and al-Qaida. To
tackle this problem, a new industry has cropped up in Silicon
Valley—companies like TRM Labs and Chainalysis, which both
worked on the Bitfinex case—hired by international govern-
ments, corporations, and crypto exchanges to monitor every
single transaction on the blockchain and then use sophisticated
A.I. to figure out where the money began and where it wound
up. In other words, that early utopian promise of guaranteed
anonymity in crypto turned out to be just another dystopia.
SEPTEMBER 2022 89
 Charging someone with the crime of
the actual online hack is almost impos-
sible because, unlike a traditional bank
robbery, where someone is caught run-
ning out of the building with a suitcase
full of cash or leaves fingerprints behind,
once an online perpetrator has committed
a crime, it’s almost impossible to tie them
to it. As with this case, the only way to do
so is to catch them with the stolen money.
In the year after the Bitfinex hack, the
feds didn’t see any movement of the sto-
len Bitcoins. The money just sat there,
growing on the blockchain. That was
until early 2017, when software security
companies noticed that someone was
laundering some of that stolen crypto
through a dark-net marketplace called
AlphaBay, one of the world’s largest sell-
ers of fentanyl and heroin. Authorities
watched as a “store” was created on the
AlphaBay site, and then watched as that
same store processed hundreds of “sales”
before the store was quickly “closed” and
the proceeds funneled into secret crypto
wallets. The money was being laundered
using sophisticated techniques called
chain hopping and peel chains, where the
money is sliced and diced and then put
back together in order to make it less iden-
tifiable. A few months later, when the feds
finally took AlphaBay down and arrested
the site’s founder in Thailand (he later died
by suicide in a Thai jail), they were able to
seize AlphaBay’s servers, and investigators
began piecing together clues that led them
from the Bitfinex hack to 75 Wall Street.
They were PUTTING TOGETHER a new life—new identities—
a life that the feds would eventually allege was
THE PAGES OF A SPY NOVEL.”
“Often, with these hacks and ransom-
ware cases, we track down the people
responsible, if we can find them, and they
turn out to be state-sponsored hackers
from places like North Korea, Russia, or
Iran, and there isn’t really anything we
can do—these countries are not handing
these people over to us,” said Ari Red-
bord, who formerly worked on terrorism
90 VA N I T Y FA I R
and financial intelligence at the Treasury Department and is
now head of legal and government affairs at TRM Labs. “What
was truly shocking and different about the Bitfinex case—what
made it unlike anything investigators had seen before—was that
the people who had the keys to the wallet from the Bitfinex hack
were right here, in a building in downtown Manhattan.”
“I’M A MOTHERFUCKING BEAST,
LIVING ON THE COAST THAT’S EAST,
CROCODILE WAITIN FOR A FEAST…
RAZZLE DAZZLE LIVIN IN
A GLASS CASTLE.”
ON AVERAGE, GUN-TOTING, bank-robbing, car-stealing Ameri-
cans commit almost 10 million crimes a year. These crimes run
the gamut from minor misdemeanors, like stealing a Snickers bar
or someone pulling out their pecker in public, to major felonies,
like murder and rape. And while the ages and net worths and zip
codes of the people who commit these crimes are a lottery of
mismatches, there is, actually, an anomalous type of criminal.
Few crimes, it turns out, are ever committed by couples. There’s
perhaps a good reason for that: Imagine your spouse rolling over
in bed and, amid a little postcoital pillow talk, suggesting you
rob the local bank together, or kill the neighbor, or try to launder
billions of dollars in stolen Bitcoin. Most mates in this situation
would either try to talk their significant other out of the act or
call the cops while googling “quickest divorce lawyer.”
When couples do commit crimes together, perhaps because
of the anomaly of it all, the American scandal-loving public
slurps it up. Felonious lovebirds are given nicknames like the
Ken and Barbie Killers, the Lethal Lovers, or the most famous
crime-committing couple of all—who would surely be TikTok
influencers if they were around today—Bonnie and Clyde.
So you can imagine the surprise the feds felt when they finally
figured out that the signal speeding along the highways and
“PULLED FROM
byways of the internet that was tied to the Bitfinex hack, the
same signal used desperately to try to launder this ever-growing
money unnoticed, was tied to a couple who lived in downtown
Manhattan. You can also imagine their shock when they looked
at the couple’s social media profiles and found something far
from the empty void of some faceless North Korean computer
syndicate. Nope—the couple with the keys to $5 billion in stolen
crypto had more social media accounts than a TikTok mansion
in the Hollywood Hills.
 Lichtenstein, who is five foot eight with
short black tousled hair, an intense stare,
and a soft Russian accent, had a Twitter
account where he espoused thoughts
about NFTs and crypto and occasion-
ally retweeted Edward Snowden. He
portrayed himself as a business guy,
with big thoughts on tech and other top-
ics, and on his Instagram and Facebook
he posted pictures of his hikes alongside
pictures of himself staring into the eyes
of Clarissa (the cat). Morgan, who is two
inches shorter than her husband, with
pin-straight hair and a penchant for fan-
ny packs, seemed to live more of her life
online than she did IRL. She had multiple
accounts on Twitter, TikTok, YouTube,
and Facebook, and a handful of differ-
ent Instagrams, including two for herself,
one for her rapper alter ego, Razzlekhan,
another for Clarissa, whom the couple
often walked outside in a cat stroller, and
even one for Lichtenstein’s apparent alter
ego, the Cat Monkey Wizard.
When investigators delved through
these accounts, they were greeted by the
oddest couple on the internet.
In one video, Lichtenstein talked
about tasting the cat food he fed Clar-
issa, then told his wife, “It’s pretty good.
It needs salt, it needs pepper. But other
than that it’s pretty good.… If it’s palat-
able to me then it’s palatable to her.”
When he wasn’t dining on kitty kibbles,
he hugged bags of nuts that his Russian
grandma sent him, or made tea with
his Grabber Buddy Reacher tool, one
of those extendable claw hands. He’d that can only be described as a man masturbating—she called
use it to steep tea while standing a few this a “jerk dance.” She would rap literally anywhere and every-
feet away from his teacup. He once put where—the New York City subway, on the steps of the public
an authentic VIP red carpet rope up in library, in front of the Wall Street bull, and in every orifice of
the kitchen, telling his wife she couldn’t her apartment building: the hallways, elevators, and on the roof,
enter because “the club” was closed, where those federal agents were apparently skulking around in
then fended her off with a chopstick. the dead of night.
Morgan, for her part, had half a dozen All of this made the case more perplexing: These two young
different outré personalities online. She adults surely were not acting like they had stolen billions in cryp-
was sometimes Turkish Martha Stewart, to, both because they shared so much of their lives online and
who cooked lamb kebabs in her kitchen because they didn’t exactly live like they were furiously wealthy.
and “be-razzled” her elliptical machine Alas, we do live in the age of the internet, where perception
by decorating it with spray paint and and reality rarely meet. And in reality, a lot more was going on
LEDs. Other days, she called herself the behind the scenes with the owners of those effervescent rapping,
Crocodile of Wall Street. She also had an cat-food-eating social media accounts. Lichtenstein and Mor-
alter ego of sorts named Charlene, who gan were indeed spending money, but in very secretive ways. He
wore an ’80s-era blond wig and spoke in had been buying gold coins—70 in all, worth tens of thousands
a Southern accent about taking laxatives of dollars. He had been purchasing gift cards (from places like
before going out so “I can look skinny.” Walmart), which could then be converted to air miles. He had
And then there was the ultimate second also started what appeared to be fake investment companies
self—the one, the only—Razzlekhan, a with actual fake employees, with names like Linara Baymiewa
rapper who took selfies with her tongue and Andrey Shevelev, which—as far as I can tell—were created
out and with her hands making a gesture using a random name generator.

SEPTEMBER 2022 91
 Then there was the travel—all over the world, to places like
Malaysia, Hong Kong, Egypt, Vietnam, San Francisco, and Los
Angeles. They stayed in five-star hotels, including The Ritz and
Mandarin Oriental. And back in 2019, months before the pan-
demic would lock down movement around the globe, they had
taken a monthlong trip to Ukraine to plan a life there. On the
trip, according to federal prosecutors, Lichtenstein and Morgan
had procured numerous packages from the dark web that they
had delivered to a nearby hotel—packages that contained fake
Agents RETRIEVED $40,000 in cash tied together with pink rubber
bands, an assortment of foreign currencies in clear plastic bags, and
another bag with the words “BURNER PHONE” written in black Sharpie.
Ukrainian passports, SIM cards, and details for surreptitious
bank accounts. They were putting together a new life—new
identities—a life that the feds would eventually allege was
“pulled from the pages of a spy novel.”
“I’M A MOTHER FUCKIN’ BAD BITCH;
GO ON, MAKE ME A SAMWICH,
YOU ANNOYING, LIKE VAG ITCH,
SO LAME, IT’S FUCKIN’ TRAGIC…
BAD BITCH, BAD BITCH.”
LICHTENSTEIN APPEARED to methodically plan everything he
did. Once he had decided to ask Morgan to marry him, he took
a year to plan the proposal. At first, he had wanted to pull a prank
on Morgan, even considering faking his own death in front of
her, then with a “Surprise! I’m alive!” asking her if she’d spend
the rest of her life with him. But instead, he decided to have
countless posters of Razzlekhan placed all over New York City,
which would lead to a “non-cheesy” billboard placed in Times
Square with a photo of her taken from one of her rap videos with
the words “The most brutally honest rap album of the year.”
She said yes.
In late 2021, as investigators were running surveillance opera-
tions on Lichtenstein and Morgan, the couple boarded a plane
and flew to the West Coast to get married.
The ceremony took place at Playa Studios in Culver City, Cali-
fornia, but like all things about the duo, the wedding itself was not
a traditional affair. Their friends waved gold spray-painted banana
leaves (with sexual innuendos) as Morgan, dressed in gold herself,
was carried into the ceremony on a Moroccan palanquin. The
hundred or so guests were given Razzlekhan stickers as offerings.
The couple’s first dance was to the trance-clubby-eccentric song
“Golden Boy,” by Sin With Sebastian, where the newlyweds thrust
their arms in the air repeatedly as they jogged in place. Then, at
the reception, Morgan transformed into Razzlekhan and rapped
92 VA N I T Y FA I R
her latest song, “MOON n STARS,”
which was about Lichtenstein. (The song
opens with Lichtenstein saying: “I love
you, I support you, but I don’t want to be
involved.”) While Lichtenstein proudly
watched from the side, other guests,
especially the elderly, were seemingly in
a state of confusion. This was followed
by a magic performance by Lichtenstein,
who wore a black suit and black shirt and
performed a mentalist David Blaine–like
magic trick where he told guests to recall
a fond memory of Morgan and then went
around the room guessing what moment
was in their head. “He was actually really
good,” one guest told me. “He got quite a
few of them right.”
They both cried during their vows,
where they talked about where they
had met (San Francisco), how they had
fallen in love (over shared eccentricities
and a love for “Waffle Parties”), and how
they’d moved to New York City to start a
family together. They were clearly in love
and, having both been labeled eccentrics
their whole lives, they’d found each oth-
er. He called her his “best friend and the
woman of my dreams.”
After the ceremony, Morgan surrep-
titiously told two dozen of the couple’s
closest friends that a secret bus would
pick them up later in the evening and
take them to an exclusive after-party.
The bus weaved through Los Angeles and
dropped them off at a mansion in West-
lake Village. There, at a massive home,
a DJ played and bartenders and waiters
passed hors d’oeuvres. Guests were told
not to share any of this on social media.
“We’re sitting in this massive mansion
being served this incredible food, and I
kept wondering how they were able to
afford all of this,” one of Morgan’s long-
time friends told me.
Back in New York City after the wed-
ding, while Lichtenstein was seemingly
confident about his plan to launder the billions of dollars in sto-
len Bitcoin and eventually set off to Ukraine where they could
not be touched by the U.S. government as there is no extradition
treaty with the United States, Morgan was starting to feel the
pressure. Friends from earlier in her life who hadn’t seen Morgan
in a while were a little shocked by how much she had changed.
She was more confident with Lichtenstein, but there was also a
bit of a crack in the veneer—not of their relationship but of her.
A group of friends whom she had been in a Japanese club with
had wondered if her Razzlekhan alter ego was her way of dealing
with something bigger—some sort of pressure she didn’t know
how else to release.
Life for Morgan had not been easy. She was an only child who
had grown up in Tehama, California, population around 400.
At Lassen View Elementary School, her classmates made fun of
her high-pitched voice and lisp. By the time she got to Pleasant
Valley High School, in Chico, a 30-minute bus ride away, she
had started using a rolling suitcase for her books and, in the
hallways, kids would kick the wheels and laugh as she walked
by. Her friend Kyle Peevers told me that he often just saw her
standing by herself at lunch without anyone to talk to. “She even-
tually made friends with—I can call them non-socialites—kids in
science and math class that have scientific skills, but you can’t
sit down and have a beer with them,” Peevers said.
When she arrived in San Francisco after college, according
to more than half a dozen people who knew her then, Morgan
desperately wanted to be accepted. She would hang out at the
Cuban Cigar Bar in North Beach, where
the marketing and sales tech folks congre-
gated to network. Clearly uncomfortable,
she started to drink to feel more at ease—
something industry colleagues started to
notice. She traveled a lot for work then,
and at the 500 Startups conference, she
met Bruno De Souza, a Brazilian app
maker, and fell in love. According to
people who were her friends at the time,
she moved to Brazil and married him on
a whim before the relationship quickly
turned sour and she had to “escape” while
De Souza was away on a trip. She bounced
around, trying to figure out who she was.
A professor she had worked with
after college had witnessed Morgan’s
transformations by following her email
signature alone. Back in college, Mor-
gan had noted at the bottom of each
email that she was an “ECONOMIST”
before upgrading to “ECONOMIST &
ENTREPRENEUR” once she arrived
in San Francisco years later. As of late,
the signature read: “ECONOMIST,
ENTREPRENEUR, and HUSTLER.”
Morgan once C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 2 3
SEPTEMBER 2022 93
V I
A U
IN APRIL, Audrey Gelman
boarded a plane from JFK to
Cleveland and drove about 75
miles to Berlin, Ohio, an Amish communi-
ty of roughly 1,000 people, right near the
self-proclaimed world’s largest cuckoo
clock, a 23-foot marvel from which every
30 minutes a five-piece robot oompah
band pops out to play Swiss polka music
while a wooden couple dances. She
checked into an Airbnb, ate a roast turkey
and grilled country corn dinner at a com-
munal table at Mrs. Yoder’s Kitchen and a
slice of the famous strawberry pie at Boyd
& Wurthmann. She was only there for
36 hours, to visit the Amish Country Pick-
ers Antique Mall and the Walnut Creek
BY E M I LY JA N E
94 VA N I T Y FA I R
N T A G
D R
A F T E R T H E W I N G T O O K A S WA N D I V E ,
ITS FOUNDER AUDREY GELMAN
WA S I N N E E D O F A R E B O O T. W I T H
A B R O O K LY N S H O P H AW K I N G H A U T E
THRIFT TREASURES, THE FORMER
POLITICAL FLACK AND POWER CEO IS
C R A F T I N G A N EW NA R R AT I V E
Antique Mall, to source wares for the
home goods store she was about to open.
She picked a hand-painted wooden cow,
no fewer than 20 butter crocks, and an
industrial pushcart that she stacked with
pieces of spongeware, which she has
always loved. She rented a Mercedes
Sprinter van, for which, at five feet and
an inch, she needed a booster seat to reach
the steering wheel, and began the 10-hour
haul back to Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, where
the Six Bells would swing open its little
forest green door later that month. She
almost made it with just two bathroom
breaks (listening to a book on tape about
the Mitford sisters), but she had to call it
at the edge of the city. Gelman, about a
F OX | P H O T O G R A P H BY
E
E Y
minute pregnant with her second child,
stayed the night at the Hyatt next to the
George Washington Bridge.
This was about the 10th such trip
Gelman had taken over the last nearly
two years since she left The Wing, the
all-female, WeWork-backed, pop femi-
nist self-described coven of a coworking
space that she cofounded in 2016. Gelman
resigned in June 2020 as the pandemic set
in, keeping all 12,000 of the company’s
members at home and their annual fees—
up to $3,000 per person—suspended.
The Wing shuttered the 11 locations it
had opened over the course of three and
a half years, and, as The Wall Street Journal
reported, Gelman laid off all but 84 of its
G I L L I A N L AU B
SIX BELLS OF
THE BALL
Audrey Gelman,
photographed in
her newest venture,
the Six Bells, in
Brooklyn in June.

SEPTEMBER 2022 95
nearly 500 employees. (A handful of Wing
locations remain open, as do outposts of its
imploded backer, WeWork.) At the same
time, against the backdrop of the protests
that summer, former employees, most
of them young women drawn in by the
company’s mission of being a “utopia” for
“women on their way,” alleged mistreat-
ment they experienced, some of which
they said was by Gelman herself. And they
called for change. That meant Gelman.
“I REMEMBER BEING pregnant
with my son [in 2019], taking a
flight to Los Angeles, where I
was for three hours before I flew back on
a red-eye that same night, and just think-
ing, I really wish that I just had a little
store that sold things with, like, primitive
cows on them,” she told me, pointing
toward a faded antique wooden cow
perched on a red arrow that the website
says will “point you in the direction of the
nearest cottage.” The store wouldn’t open
for another hour or so, and morning light
streamed through the gingham curtains.
She’d lit Idyllic Morning, a vegan hemp-
soy-based candle made by Cottagecore
Black Folks—one of the store’s best-
selling brands—that smells of a fresh
clothesline. Gelman wore white overalls
and a plain white cotton tee, her
unstraightened hair clipped half up to
reveal her bare face behind thick black
frames. This was not the Gelman whose
last magazine interview featured her on
the cover, bump-cupping in a tight black
power dress with a blowout and big prom-
ise as a master of the universe, under the
cover line “The Women Building Amer-
ica’s Most Inspiring Businesses.” This was
Gelman 2.0, minister of the Cobble Hill
countryside. “Obviously, yes, the life I am
living now is really different than the life
I was living, but it was actually, it’s a life
that I fantasized about before. It’s not a
consolation prize, you know?”
The Wing, and life then, and the Six
Bells, and life now, feel foundationally
opposite and exactly the same. Aestheti-
cally, the two spaces are diametric. If
The Wing looked and felt like the most
privileged, most online popular girl,
then the Six Bells is her grandmother.
The Wing’s workplaces cropped up amid
that pussy-hat moment of the hyper-
perfect Instagram grid, when FOMO
reigned and everyone sold perfection
and order and access, the most curated
96 VA N I T Y FA I R
lives you desperately wanted to exist for the townspeople, with brass name
LO N D O N : DAV I D M . B E N E T T/ T H E W I N G / G E T T Y I M A G E S . W E I S S : DAV I D X P R U T T I N G / B FA .
C H A N E L : R A B B A N I A N D S O L I M E N E P H O T O G R A P H Y/ G E T T Y I M AG E S . C L I N T O N : A N G E L A
in—yet it was a cultural moment of dis- plaques underneath to identify the likes
P H A M / B FA . L AW R E N C E : M O N I C A S C H I P P E R / T H E W I N G / G E T T Y I M A G E S . T H E W I N G
order, chaos. The Wing is where the New of the town gossip, the businessman, the
York Times Style section sent a reporter rabbi. The name of the store was inspired
to watch what everyone assumed would by a pub in Warborough, Oxfordshire,
be Hillary Clinton’s victory in 2016 and, where several episodes of Gelman’s favor-
ultimately, where she found a soft place ite British crime serial, Midsomer Murders,
to land in her post-defeat press tour. The were filmed (she made a pilgrimage last
Wing was brazenly girly (though Gelman year). A watercolor map of the town that
insisted otherwise to Architectural Digest), she commissioned hangs nearby (an inter-
devoid of clutter, pitch-perfect for the active version lives on the website). The
only New York era in recent memory that store is strewn with feather-stuffed frilled
anointed the try-hards as cool. In Wing cushions, tiny cups and saucers, floral
sprach, it was intentional. “Our inspira- dinner plates designed in Paris and hand-
tion was the apartment of a really cool painted by artisans on the Amalfi Coast,
Danish artist you wanted to make your mismatched paperbacks in primary colors
best friend,” Gelman told Architectural that may disintegrate if you look at them
Digest as the first Wing location opened too long, and enough block-printed linens
its doors. Vogue followed her as she and
her partner scouted spots for their Paris
location, calling The Wing “a perfect,
jealousy-inducing blend,” the spatial,
cool-girl equivalent of a letterman jacket.
Walking into the Six Bells, on the
other hand, feels like taking off your bra
the instant you get home. Tucked into a
real-life block of nondescript brokerage
firms and dry cleaners is the charming
fictional village of Barrow’s Green, which
Gelman made up, and that is where the
Six Bells—both real-life and fictional—
is doing business as a “country store of
homewares from a world far away,” as
the hand-painted sign out front says. A
corporeal metaverse for the so-called
grandmillennials. Gelman has populated
Barrow’s Green with a cast of characters
to whom she gave backstories. Inside the
store, she’s hung oil portraits she’s col-
lected over the years to serve as avatars
BIRD’S-EYE
VIEW
From top:
Gelman
attends a
Chanel dinner
during the
2017 Tribeca
Film Festival.
Lauren Kassan
and Gelman
give Hillary
Clinton a tour
of The Wing
SoHo in 2018.
 “ T H E L I F E I A M L I V I N G N O W I S A L I F E T H AT I FA N TA S I Z E D A B O U T B E F O R E .

I T ’ S N O T A C O N S O L AT I O N P R I Z E , YO U K N OW ? ”

and precious quilting to fill a farmhouse. “We have a motto that is written on a Every design is a reaction to what came
ASHLEIGH CIUCCI. HAIR PRODUCTS: IGK.

The Six Bells sells the work of more pillow in the store,” says Laetitia Gorra before it, Gelman points out. “There is
PREVIOUS SPREAD: HAIR AND MAKEUP,

than 40 independent brands along with of Roarke Design Studio, who designed such sameness and such a sterile qual-
antiques Gelman has selected on trips the Six Bells with Gelman after doing ity in design right now, and this is a very
MAKEUP PRODUCTS: ILIA.

to Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania, Verona, spaces for The Wing for years. She intentional departure from that. There’s
Virginia, and the like. You can practically came onto the project almost as soon as an alienation you start to feel when you
hear your mother saying, “Look with your Gelman came up with the idea. “ ‘Out look around and every coffee shop and
eyes, not your hands,” and then, “Go grab with the new and in with the old.’ So dentist’s office looks identical, and it
that old quilt.” that’s where we started.” Gorra settled feels connected [to the] dystopia of the
on Farrow & Ball’s world.” She herself felt alienated by all
From top: Cane, a cool yellow, the minimalism, she said. “I just wanted
Gelman and wanting the walls to to create something that was the furthest
Glossier founder
Emily Weiss look like a memory thing from an NFT possible. I’ve always
at Refinery29’s of her grandfather’s been interested in the idea of opening a
30 Under 30
celebration in living room in Nor- door, walking through it, and entering
2013. Jennifer mandy. The rest of into a different reality, and right now, you
Lawrence speaking
with Gelman in the store’s colors— enter into so many spaces that are miss-
2018. Ahead of country red and ing any texture or personality. I wanted to
its 2019 London
expansion,
forest green and create a space that both lowered people’s
The Wing hosts mustard—were cho- blood pressures with a space and didn’t
a dinner. sen to take people take itself too seriously.”

WHAT GELMAN DOES—be it the

out of the whites and grays of the digital
world. Gelman brought on Deva Pardue,
a graphic designer who’d also worked with
them at The Wing, to add what Pardue
called a “handmade” feel to the branding,
relying on book cloth and paper textures
as backgrounds to make everything feel
“intentionally imperfect, not made on a
computer.” In a former life, teams would
assemble 20,000-square-foot spaces,
sometimes at the same time. The Six Bells
is 600 square feet and, counting Gelman,
employs five people.
Six Bells or The Wing or a politi-
cal campaign or a TV show—has
never mattered as much in drawing peo-
ple’s interest as the fact of Gelman doing
it. She is an astute reader of rooms, a
generationally gifted flack, a connector
of people, willful enough in her control
that before I had made a single call for
this piece, I got a call from a mutual friend
telling me that Gelman heard that I was
writing a story about her. She is a story-
telling capitalist and a builder of worlds
who understands what her customers
want before they know they want it—Don
Draper if he’d put himself in the ads. She
is pretty and rich, unfailingly pulled
together, and friends with everyone you
hate-watch on the internet. She is not a
household name, but if the name Audrey
Gelman does ring a bell, you have an
opinion about her. She is highly conduc-
tive, radiating heat in the current era of
guilty pleasure. “I can’t explain it,” she
tells me when I ask her why she thinks
people have such a strong reaction to her.
“I guess I am just not for everyone.”
People started tripping over Gelman
nearly a decade ago, when, at 26, she man-
aged to wrangle all the downtown kids
and New York celebrities to care about a
snooze of a candidate in a snooze of a race

SEPTEMBER 2022 97
for the New York City comptroller. No one
had much heard of the candidate, Scott
Stringer, yet all the great rags, from Page
Six to New York magazine to Women’s Wear
Daily, turned up to write about a fundraiser
he held at the Maritime Hotel in Chelsea.
“Not since Bloomberg banned smoking
almost everywhere in town have city hall
politics garnered so much interest among
the downtown fashion set,” Vogue wrote of
the evening. New York called it “the most
hip fundraiser in the history of the office of
New York City comptroller.” But nobody
was there for the candidate. People turned
up because of Gelman. She was a thing—
Lena Dunham’s best friend who worked
on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign, dated
Terry Richardson, and followed the String-
er gig with a stint as senior vice president at
the P.R. firm SKDKnickerbocker. “Let’s Go
Mets” was tattooed on her inner lip. She
listened to speed metal, wore Chanel and
Jimmy Choo, and played a recurring role
in Dunham’s hit HBO show, Girls, a wink
of a cameo, as she plays opposite the char-
acter Marnie, who is said to be based on
Gelman. After Stringer’s win, before she
left politics and P.R. to start what would
eventually turn into The Wing, The New
York Times called her a “boldface name”
in her own right, “dogged” in her pursuits,
dubbing her “the Girl Most Likely.” She
was everywhere, toggling between meet-
ings and parties, D.C. and New York, a top
contender in the Busy Olympics. She got
tired of changing for events in Starbucks
bathrooms, so she came up with the idea
for Refresh Club, a practical place where
women could access well-appointed lock-
er rooms, maybe redo their hair, and meet
up with friends between work and play.
She brought on a cofounder, Lauren Kas-
san, who expanded the concept to make it
more of an all-encompassing coworking
space for women. The women went out
to raise money alongside other millennial
female-founded start-ups like Glossier,
Away, and Outdoor Voices. All of them
faced the headwinds of seeking funds from
primarily male V.C.s and investors (that is
to say, women receive less than 3 percent
of all venture money invested in start-
ups, closer to 2 percent in the last year).
Amid the twin phenomenons of Donald
Trump and the #MeToo movement,
T H E R E WA S A N I D O L A T R Y T H AT WA S P A R T O F T H E F E M A L E F O U N D E R M Y T H O L O G Y.
S H E WA S E X P E C T E D T O B E B O T H T H E E N G I N E A N D T H E H O O D O R N A M E N T.
98 VA N I T Y FA I R
Gelman, like many women executives at
the time, leaned in (reference intended)
to a mission beyond the fundamentals.
The cofounders renamed the idea The
Wing to hearken back to Virginia Woolf ’s
notion that women need an entire wing to
themselves, and the company began rack-
ing up millions of dollars from the likes of
Adam Neumann at WeWork and Whitney
Wolfe Herd of Bumble, Valerie Jarrett,
Mindy Kaling, and Megan
Rapinoe. Their “beauty
rooms” were wrapped in a
custom toile wallpaper of
women hopping from taxis
to race to yoga and school
pickup. Conference rooms
and phone booths were
named after Lisa Simpson
and Ramona Quimby and
Christine Blasey Ford. The
Perch, its café, sold wine
from female vintners and a
“Fork the Patriarchy” bowl.
They hired women archi-
tects, hung women artists,
booked women speakers
from Serena Williams to
Lorena Gallo (formerly
Bobbitt). Keychains declar-
ing “girls doing whatever
the fuck they want” could
be had for $15.
The world that Gelman built with The GIRL themselves had set.
W I R E I M A G E / G E T T Y I M A G E S . R I C H A R D S O N A N D L E T O : B I L LY FA R R E L L / B FA . Z E C H O R Y : B I L LY FA R R E L L / B FA .
Wing, as we know, ended up eating her. UNINTERRUPTED At times, it seemed
M A G A Z I N E C O V E R : C O U R T E S Y O F I N C . M A G A Z I N E . D O W N T O W N D E M O C R A C Y : D AV I D X P R U T T I N G / B FA .
From top: Then
Her knack for the narrative has been both like The Wing was
D O W N T O W N D E M O C R A C Y TA B L E : A N G E L A P H A M / B FA . D U N H A M A N D A O K I : D E N I S E T R U S C E L LO /
the press secretary
her hook and her heel. People believed to the Manhattan a piñata with Gel-
borough president,
in what she was selling at The Wing so Gelman hosts a man’s face on it, in
much that when the inherent tensions 2012 debate party part because she
between capitalism and feminism pulled with Downtown for sold herself as a
Democracy (D4D)
at its seams, too much had been stuffed and Vice. Gelman leader who could
inside of it, by her, by the media writing mingling with cure cultural ills.
Terry Richardson
piece after piece about her and other so- (far left) and In practice, ten-
called girlbosses of the time, that it could Jared Leto (right) sions had b een
at a 2011 Barneys
not contain itself. The resulting explosion New York party. mounting since well
was both general to the time and specific before the pandem-
to The Wing. Gelman, like her contem- ic. After the New
poraries, was in the thrall of a toxic loop: York City Commission on Human Rights
In order to raise money, they needed to investigated the club in 2018 for gender
stand for something, be public facing, discrimination, it began allowing mem-
and hit incomprehensible growth targets. bers of all genders. (The investigation
But being public facing and responsible concluded the following year when both
for a mission greater than just creating parties reached an agreement.) This
extreme growth subjected them to intense was followed by an incident at the West
scrutiny and to the higher standards they Hollywood location when a white guest
 In February 2020, she wrote a short piece
in Fast Company admitting that she
had erred in “selling a new version of a
decades-old fantasy that didn’t account
for the reality that running a company is
messy, terrifying, and often chaotic.”
“When your product is community
and the emotional and professional eco-
system that people create together, your
work is inherently challenging,” she went
on, “especially without the consistent
self-interrogation of our own blind spots
as white cis women—[this] has led to seri-
ous stumbles and outright failures.” The
hardest part, she added, “was that these
failures led us to inadvertently replicate
some of the very social hierarchies we’d
set out to dismantle.” Soon after, a New
York Times Magazine story raised ques-
tions about the company’s, and Gelman’s,
treatment of staff, particularly women
of color, who
worked in hour-
ly roles at The
Wing. And then
the COVID
lockdown took
hold. When The
Wing posted on
Instagram that
it would donate
$200,000 to
racial justice
organizations
in the wake of
George Floyd’s
murder in June
2020, former
From top: Gelman employees continued to speak out about
and her husband, what their experiences had been like
Ilan Zechory,
outside Balthazar in working with The Wing, from low-wage
2018. A millennial positions to unfair treatment, an experi-
cool kid roundtable
of Matt Colon, ence that seemed antithetical to the public
Steve Aoki, ideologies that Gelman and the company
Gelman, and
Lena Dunham at spent years building up. Gelman resigned
a 2007 T-Mobile as CEO on June 11, 2020, the week after
event in Park City,
Utah. Gelman in
her 33rd birthday, and issued a public
2012. Far right: apology. In the months around Gelman’s
The October 2019 cancellation and resignation, a handful of
cover of Inc.
other white women founders, including
Steph Korey of Away, Leandra Medine
of Man Repeller, Christene Barberich
of Refinery29, and Yael Aflalo of Refor-
allegedly yelled at a Black member over mation, all stepped down amid similar
a parking space. In the fall of 2019, the accusations of racism and toxic workplac-
company hosted a series of community es. “It’s clear that there was a gap between
meetings about race, around the time the values we expressed publicly at The
Gelman posed for Inc. magazine’s Female Wing and the day-to-day experiences our
Founder issue, making her the first visibly employees had working at the company,”
pregnant CEO on the cover of a magazine. Gelman told me recently. “Many of those
complaints were centered around race,
and I deeply regret the experiences these
employees had at The Wing, and that they
weren’t addressed appropriately. As the
CEO at the time, the buck stopped with
me and I take full accountability.”
She has taken the time to speak to
former employees in what she called pri-
vate and meaningful conversations. She
maintains she is proud of the richness and
specialness of The Wing, the friendships
and relationships.
“It’s correct and important for people
who are running companies and made
the decision to take on that responsibility,
knowing that it comes with the territory,
to take responsibility for the mistakes
that you’ve made and ways you’ve fallen
short, and being a woman is not a shield
or a way to shield from accountability
around mistakes that were made.” At the
same time, she explains, it felt like there
was an idolatry that was part of the female
founder mythology. She was expected to
be both the engine and the hood orna-
ment, someone once told her. “In terms
of investors, employees, the media, there
are mismatched expectations—and yes,
different standards. And there are a lot
of young women who are afraid to start
companies because they think that is the
price of admission.”
When Gelman resigned, she told the
Times that she was looking forward to
spending time as a stay-at-home mom.
Which she did and she loved. She and her
husband, Ilan Zechory, who sold his com-
pany, Genius, for $80 million last year,
tucked into their home upstate. She is
uncomfortable when, over the course of
reporting this story, I ask her about the
period of time between when she had
left The Wing and started working on
the Six Bells. I told her that I’d heard she
sold her $3.3 million house in Brooklyn
last year (this is true). I had also heard that
she worked as C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 2 5
SEPTEMBER 2022 99
 Photographs by Styled by
E M M A S U M M E RTON N I C O L E C H A P O T E AU

All About
100 VA N I T Y FA I R
 Eve
WORLD-CLASS EQUESTRIAN,
MODEL, and DAUGHTER of the
LATE APPLE LEGEND,
EVE JOBS IS OFF to the RACES
By B R I T T H E N N E M U T H

SEPTEMBER 2022 101

 I
FREE SPIRIT
Eve Jobs,
photographed in
Cold Spring,
New York, in June.

Dress by
Louis Vuitton.

Dress by Loewe.

IN HIS BEST-SELLING biography Steve

Jobs, Walter Isaacson writes that the
visionary’s youngest daughter, Eve, is
the apple that fell closest to the tree—a
“strong-willed, funny firecracker” who
used to call her father’s assistant to make
sure she was on his calendar.
“I have zero recollection of that,” Jobs
tells me over lunch. “I’m so sorry to let
you down there. I have a recollection of
going to work with him and drawing on
this one whiteboard in his office that I
believe stands there to this day, with all
my little doodles on it. I would just sub-
consciously soak in all the beauty and
gorgeous design around me.”
I note that there’s an iPhone resting on
the table between us and recording our
interview. “It’s a beautiful reminder for
me every day,” she says, looking down at
it fondly. “All day, every day. It really is.
It makes me feel warm.”
Even if Jobs can’t remember negotiat-
ing with her dad’s assistant, I can attest
that Isaacson got the strong-willed, funny
firecracker part right. We’d first crossed
paths at a cocktail party at Los Angeles’s
Academy Museum, during which she was
quick-witted and wickedly observant, and
grilled our tablemates with questions.
“I’m a little weird,” Jobs says now.
“Some people get a little taken aback by
me: I don’t know where to place her. But
humor makes you feel like you are living.”
I tell her it’s clear that she doesn’t suffer
fools. “Sometimes one will slip through
the cracks,” she tells me. “But it’s a rarity.”
The 24-year-old world-class equestri-
an and Stanford graduate traded Silicon
Valley for New York City in the fall of
2021 after making her runway debut for
Coperni in Paris. Jobs has since signed a
deal to be a face of Louis Vuitton and will
star in a digital campaign later this year.
For our meeting, her agent has chosen a
restaurant in Chelsea near the High Line,

102 VA N I T Y FA I R
SEPTEMBER 2022 103
Dress by Saint
Laurent by Anthony
Vaccarello.

104 VA N I T Y FA I R
 MODELING, SHE DISCOVERED
DURING A COPERNI FASHION SHOW,
IS NOT ENTIRELY UNLIKE
SHOW JUMPING:
IT’S ALL ABOUT TURNING IT ON
FOR TWO MINUTES AT A TIME.
and Jobs arrives early in a crisp white
smock and flowing trousers. The only
sign that she’s actually a 20-something
are the Nike Jordan 1s on her feet. “I live
in a very basketball-heavy household.”
Jobs is a self-proclaimed “horse girl”
who used to bring carrots to her sister’s
barn and began taking proper pony
lessons at the age of six. Her parents
encouraged her to prioritize school but
allowed her to travel for show jump-
ing competitions during summers and
spring breaks. “I wanted to see how far
I could take this,” Jobs says. “It’s a hard
sport to do, mostly because you only get
two minutes in the ring and you’re work-
ing with something, an animal, that’s
inherently unreliable.” She was in con-
tention for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics but
had to bow out after they were postponed
a year because of COVID. After gradu-
ating from Stanford, she says, “I was at
this turning point. I had done everything
I wanted to achieve in the sport, and I just
felt at peace.”
Modeling, Jobs discovered quickly, is
not entirely unlike show jumping: It’s all
about turning it on for two minutes at a
time. “I was more grateful than nervous,”
she says. “I never foresaw modeling, and
on a whim, I was like, ‘Why not?’ It drew
upon things I knew, igniting the part of
me that competing always did.”
Jobs is well aware how charmed her life
has been, notwithstanding the untimely
loss of her father to cancer when she was
13. She considers her mom, business
executive and philanthropist Laurene
Powell Jobs, a guiding light. “As my life
unfolds a bit, I’m going to find my avenue
to impact the most people in the best way
possible,” she says. “I want to take my
time and get it right and find something
I love, just as I see my mom finding ways
in which to reach people.”
With Fashion Week nearly upon us
again, Jobs hopes to be walking many
major catwalks. At home, meanwhile, she
keeps things casual. She has started a col-
lection of vintage Apple T-shirts, one of
which holds tremendous personal value:
It appears to be a one-of-a-kind prototype
from the Computer 1 era, likely made by
her dad when Apple was still based out
of his garage. On the front, the T-shirt
alludes to a certain biblical icon: “Eve had
the right idea,” it reads. On the back, the
text continues: “She picked an Apple.”
“It means so much to me,” Jobs says.
“I smile every time I wear it.” n
SEPTEMBER 2022 105
Dress by Molly
Goddard.
Throughout: hair
products by Oribe;
makeup products
by Clé de Peau
Beauté; nail
products by Minx.

Hair, Takuya
Yamaguchi; makeup,
Benjamin Puckey;
nails, Yuko
Tsuchihashi; set
design, Viki Rutsch.
Produced on location
by Viewfinders.
For details, go to
VF.com/credits.

106 VA N I T Y FA I R
SEPTEMBER 2022 107
108 VA N I T Y FA I R
 HERBALIFE
FOUNDER MARK
HUGHE S PLANNED
TO BUILD HIS
DREAM MANSION ON
A SPECTACULAR
PLOT OF L.A. REAL
E STATE, BUT WHEN
HE DIED OF AN
OVERD OSE, IT
BECAME GROUND
ZERO IN A LEGAL
WAR. NOW HIS
EX-WIFE IS OPENING
UP ABOUT THE
BATTLE OVER THE
BILLION-D OLLAR
PROPERTY

By
JENNIFER
GOULD

MOUNTAIN
SEPTEMBER 2022 109
 HIGH
ABOVE
THE
LIGHTS
of Los Angeles stands the Mountain, impervious to the Hol-
lywood power players and business tycoons plotting and
scheming below. Many have coveted its 157 acres, but the
Mountain has remained tantalizingly out of reach. Spanning
a surface area bigger than 100 football fields, this grassy, lush
mountaintop has been the prize—once valued at $1 billion—of
Middle Eastern royals, A-list stars, and mega-moguls. Rihanna,
Salma Hayek, James Cameron, Elon Musk, and others have
made pilgrimages to the Mountain, for roving Oscar parties
and charity balls. Yet the only creatures to make the Moun-
tain their home are the deer that frolic nearby. At other points
known as Tower Grove or the Vineyard, the Mountain of Bev-
erly Hills is arguably the city’s most spectacular undeveloped
parcel of land.
For the rare few who have owned it, the Mountain has been
both a blessing and a curse. The last Shah of Iran’s sister once
owned the Mountain. She planned to build her brother a pal-
ace in exile until Molotov-cocktail-hurling Iranian students
changed her mind. Next came Merv Griffin, who set out to
best Aaron Spelling by building the city’s biggest mansion at its
peak; then he ran out of steam. In 1997, Griffin sold to Herbalife
guru Mark Hughes for $8.5 million, setting a Southern Califor-
nia record at the time. Hughes planned to build his own dream
house there, but his whole dream unraveled. Three years after
Hughes bought the plot, he was dead from an alcohol- and
antidepressant-fueled overdose. A reportedly $400 million
estate, including the Mountain, went to his only son, Alex, then
eight years old.
And a brutal war ensued, pitting Alex and his mother, Suzan
Hughes, against the estate’s three trustees, whose role was to
protect the estate’s assets until Alex turned 35. But as Suzan
levied in court, the trustees had plans of their own. “Instead
of acting like trustees, they wanted to be Mark Hughes and
develop the Mountain themselves,” Suzan told V.F. Launching
numerous lawsuits, Suzan alleged that the group made “arbi-
trary and capricious” decisions and were hostile to Alex. She
also alleged that one of the trustees sexually harassed her, and
she wanted them removed. The trustees denied her accusations,
and Suzan lost. She cast herself as a David against their Goliaths
110 VA N I T Y FA I R
in a pre-#MeToo world, one that negated her claims as a mother
protecting her child, while the trustees retorted that she wanted
to wrest control of the trust for her own benefit.
“The impression that everyone had on the trustees’ side was
that Suzan was litigating to take over the trust herself, because
she was the mother of the only child and heir and therefore she
should be the trustee, even though it was Mark’s money and he
was entitled to choose who he wanted to manage it for Alex’s
benefit—even if Mark did not have great insight into the people
he was naming and they ultimately abused the trust,” an attor-
ney who once worked for the trustees told V.F. “Never did I have
the impression that they were managing this estate because they
cared about Alex.”
The trustees consulted a psychiatrist and a rabbi about the
potentially harmful impact of wealth on a child. As the trustees’
then lawyer, Edward A. Woods, said in a 2005 interview with the
Los Angeles Times: “Does he need a chandelier or would he be
content with something from IKEA?” Any kid would be fine with
Ikea, but Alex had been raised in mansions, with nary a budget
fixture in sight. In court papers, Suzan said Alex’s lifestyle when
his father was alive “included vacationing with Mark at his lavish
beach home, cruising on Mark’s yacht, driving in Mark’s fleet of
luxury cars and attending events of extraordinary prestige, lav-
ishness and extravagance.” As Suzan saw it, Mark had hired the
trustees to maintain Alex’s lifestyle, not downgrade it. “These
three guys are employees, sycophants and dictators,” Suzan
said to a reporter in 2003. “Suzan wants Alex to have the life his
father intended for him,” her lawyer, the late Hillel Chodos, said
in a separate interview. “They loathe Suzan. She has criticized
them. They don’t like to be criticized.”
As the court fights exploded, Alex was thrust into an unwant-
ed spotlight, dubbed “America’s richest teenager.” At the heart
of the lawsuits was the Mountain, which Mark had wanted pre-
served for his son. The property cost around $250,000 a year
to maintain by 2020, but maintenance was never a question.
The trustees saw its potential as a development site. In 2004,
the trustees sold the Mountain in a no-cash deal to Charles
“Chip” Dickens, an Atlanta businessman, lending Dickens the
money to buy the Mountain, and the Mountain was lost. When
Alex turned 18 in December 2009, he hired his own lawyers
and launched his own lawsuit to have the trustees removed.
In 2013, he won, mainly because the trustees had botched the
Mountain sale so badly. Judge Mitchell Beckloff ultimately
ruled the trustees showed “a gross breach of trust” that “bor-
ders on recklessness” and “resulted in significant damage to
the trust.” The trustees had lent money to Dickens, a man with
no experience and no money, then sat back and did nothing as
his company continually defaulted, according to a court rul-
ing. The trust is now run by institutional trustees at Fiduciary
International Trust of California. While Alex, now 30, declined
to be interviewed, sources say he agreed with the actions his
mother took. (“Their interests have always been aligned,” a
legal source said.) “Alex has been through so much, he just
wants to be out of the spotlight,” a source close to him said. “He
is just not ready to talk.” (Alex is an independent producer and
founder of Spacemaker Productions who recently coproduced
Armageddon Time, starring Anne Hathaway, Jeremy Strong, and
Anthony Hopkins, which received a standing ovation at Cannes
in May.) “My son’s privacy is über-important,” says Suzan. “He
didn’t ask for any of this.”
 G
OLDEN HOUR BLOOMED as we
reached the Mountain’s top.
Ribbons of colored light and
jet contrails laced the sky,
and a family of deer romped
in the distance. My guide exhaled. Less an
aerobic heave, more a long sigh of relief.
“Standing here makes it all worth
it,” said Suzan Hughes. The Mountain
was Mark’s dream, not hers. But she’s
ready to talk about her fight to keep it,
and her life with Hughes. “Did you see
The Insider?” she asks, referring to the
1999 film, starring Al Pacino, about a
tobacco-industry whistleblower (and
coincidentally based on a 1996 Vanity
Fair article). “That’s kind of how I felt for
13 years. Opening up today takes a lot out
of me. It takes me back there.”
A drop of around 1,400 feet and out
beyond L.A. lies the Pacific. On the Fourth
of July, Suzan says, you can see the fire-
works displays of five different enclaves,
including Malibu, Marina del Rey, and
Encino. “I wanted to take Alex here after
his father died, to see the fireworks. But
the trustees wouldn’t give us the key.”
The key was in the hands of Conrad
Klein, Mark’s lawyer and one of three
literal gatekeepers, who died in 2019.
The other trustees were senior Herbalife International exec
Christopher Pair, who became acting CEO after Mark’s death,
and John “Jack” Reynolds, Mark’s biological dad, who died in
June 2021. (Pair stepped down as CEO in 2001, after investors
complained that Pair, Klein, and Reynolds, all executives as
well as trustees, had conflicts of interest. Pair did not respond to
requests for comment for this story. Herbalife was sold in 2002.)
“The devil had nothing on Klein,” says Suzan. “He became the
dictator of my life.”
During the first decade of the dispute, Alex’s lawyers said
the trustees spent $22.6 million of the trust’s money on litiga-
tion, plus around $10 million as payment to themselves, while
denying Suzan’s requests for the smallest of things—some of
Mark’s clothing, his surfboard, furniture that reminded Alex of
his father, according to Suzan and to court documents. (Alex’s
lawyer, Eric Rowen, also declined to comment for this story.)
Suzan had been the third of Mark’s four wives and the mother
of his only child. She was also his longest relationship.
“When I met Mark, it was like this explosion,” says Suzan,
who joined Herbalife in 1985, five years after Mark started it, and
married him in 1987. “I had all these great ideas and he had this
marketing system, so it was like, whoosh! It was perfect. We got
it to a billion dollars in 1997 and then I said, ‘We did it!’ And he
said, ‘Let’s do another billion.’ And I said, ‘Hmm. Not so much.’ ”
In 1998 they divorced, and in 1999 Mark married Darcy
LaPier, a self-described actor, model, and rodeo barrel racer
(whose past husbands included Hawaiian Tropic mogul Ron
Rice and actor Jean-Claude Van Damme). The next year, Mark
was dead. LaPier received around $34 million, according to
reports. But Suzan got to keep Mark himself—the only thing

THE MOUNTAIN’S FIRST GALA, HOSTED BY CHARLIZE THERON TO BENEFIT HER

AFRICA OUTREACH PROJECT IN 2014, WAS REPORTEDLY A DISASTER, WITH BAD FOOD,

PARTY CRASHERS, AND MALFUNCTIONING PORT-A-POTTIES.

H U G H E S FA M I LY : T O M R O D R I G U E Z / G LO B E P H O T O S / Z U M A P R E S S /A L A M Y. P R E V I O U S S P R E A D : J U WA N L I .

the trustees granted without demanding the request come in

writing, she says—and still keeps his ashes in an urn on a mantle
in her Beverly Hills home, where years of framed Christmas
photos of Mark, Suzan, and Alex populate a wall.
The couple first met at an L.A. restaurant. Mark had just flown
in from New York. “He was perfectly dressed, with his hair, and
he looked so handsome. His friends asked if I knew who he was,
and I said, ‘Yeah, the maître d’, and I’m the rocket scientist.’
TOP OF Everyone was laughing,” Suzan said. “We were having so much
THE WORLD fun, like it was all in slo-mo…. We were like Ken and Barbie.”
Previous spread:
The Mountain’s
They were both into health and nutrition. Mark was a market-
asking price tumbled ing genius, and Suzan had ideas about skin, hair, and fitness.
from $1 billion For a time they lived large, then sold their home to fund their
before it sold in
foreclosure auction legal battles against “big pharma,” which tried to “wipe them
for $100,000 plus out,” Suzan said. For a while they lived in a rental on Benedict
debt four years later.
Left: Suzan and Mark Canyon. Their landlord, according to Suzan, was Max Baer Jr.,
Hughes with their who played Jethro Bodine on The Beverly Hillbillies and was a son
son, Alex, in 1997,
three years before of the heavyweight boxing champion. They married in Maui in
Mark’s death. September 1987 and renewed their vows each year, in places like

SEPTEMBER 2022 111

Cabo San Lucas, Tahiti, the French Riviera, and Hawaii. It was a
little like a fairy tale at first.
But Herbalife had its ups and downs, and so did the mar-
riage. Mark, a high school dropout, launched the company out
of the trunk of his car in 1980. He said he was inspired to help
people lose weight following the death of his mother, who had
been addicted to diet pills. Inspiration may have also come
from a now shuttered Cedu school, a controversial system of
reform schools for troubled teens like Mark, whose education
included fundraising from strangers; other former attendants,
including Paris Hilton, who attended a Cedu school, have
alleged disturbing and abusive forms of group therapy. Accord-
ing to reports, Pair’s relationship with Hughes dated back to
his own connection to the school. By 1984, Herbalife was a
$500-million-a-year business. The next year, however, the
FDA, the California A.G.’s office, and the state Department
of Health cited labeling and sales practice issues; there were
also complaints about health and safety, as well as allegations
the company was a pyramid scheme.
But Herbalife continued its radical rise, and Mark and Suzan
had Alex in 1991; the family bought Grayhall, a historic man-
sion where Douglas Fairbanks once lived, traveling by secret
tunnel to the home he shared with Mary Pickford next door.
(The mansion was also a setting for Kris Kristofferson’s home
in the 1976 version of A Star Is Born.) Suzan stopped accompa-
nying Mark on travels, with Alex in school. When Mark would
return from a trip, recalls Suzan, “he’d be dead tired from the
long flight. I’d say, ‘What are you doing?’ and he’d say, ‘I just
like walking around the house to see what I worked so hard
for. This is what you give up your life for.’ ”
By 1997 Herbalife had topped $1 billion in sales. That’s when
Mark and Suzan bought the Mountain—and Suzan filed for
divorce. The Mountain didn’t cause their problems, but it
was emblematic of them. Instead of enjoying Grayhall, Mark
wanted to build a 50,000-square-foot Mediterranean villa atop
the Mountain, with a wildlife refuge, million-gallon pond, and
tennis pavilion. For Suzan, it was too much.
112 VA N I T Y FA I R
“I didn’t want to build a giant house.
It’s a beautiful piece of property and
there is nothing like it on the planet,
but I was happy with the house we had.
You can have enough without having to
go further and higher and bigger,” she
said. “You can be satisfied.”
T
HE DIVORCE WAS finalized in
six months, with Mark keep-
ing 98 percent of the marital
assets. “He was a nice guy,
and I didn’t want to fight
with him over money,” Suzan said, though
outlets reported she hired Anthony Pelli-
cano, who was later convicted on separate
wiretapping charges, as an investigator.
“I didn’t need three houses or a yacht or
things. We ended as friends.” They even
lived together during the divorce, as Suzan
renovated her own $4 million “fixer-
upper”—a beautiful 11,000-square-foot
mansion with a pool and tennis courts in
Beverly Hills a few blocks from Grayhall.
It was another smart real estate invest-
ment, worth around $20 million today.
Suzan leveraged the mortgage to pay
for her Mountain litigation, even if that
meant she occasionally couldn’t afford to
repair things like ceiling leaks.
From the start, Suzan believed the
cotrustees did not have Alex’s interests
at heart. Ten days after Mark’s death,
according to Suzan, Klein sent Suzan a
letter demanding she use the word please
when asking for something sentimental
from the trust on behalf of Alex. Suzan felt
that Klein viewed her in sexist terms—as a
dumb, greedy ex–beauty queen who was
jealous of the fourth wife’s inheritance.
She also says Klein’s behavior wouldn’t
fly today. But Miss Petite USA was also a
certified court reporter. “I lost 80 hours
a week of litigation to get Mark’s golf
clubs,” she said—“pretty trivial” stuff—
“while they were stealing a mountaintop
or using Herbalife as their candy store.”
G AT E : J U WA N L I . H U G H E S : C O U R T E S Y O F S U Z A N H U G H E S .
Even LaPier, Hughes’s fourth wife,
says Alex and Suzan “were surrounded
by sharks. Mark knew how to tame them.
He said it was like going to nursery school.
But when he passed, everything was off.”
The trustees, she says, “turned their
OVER THE HILL aggression onto little Alex and Suzan”
A private
cobblestone drive (and notes she’s “thankful” the mother
leads to a plot and son have finally won it back).
with 5,000 plants
and more than After Suzan asked the trust for the
500 trees. Aubusson pillows, the request made it
into media reports. The trustees, she
said, couldn’t believe that a child asked
for couch pillows. “They blew it up to
discredit me,” Suzan said. Suzan, who
had partly been raised in a Brooklyn
orphanage and with foster parents,
taken from her parents when she was
seven months old, says she felt very
alone throughout the experience, “no
family, no friends.”
“As they paraded around on stages
around the world, Hotel du Cap-Eden-
Roc in Cannes rented out by Herbalife,
having Elton John play for them and the
company, I was trying to get my son’s Bat-
man bedsheets from them.”
“We asked for Mark’s favorite T-shirt.
They said, ‘Sue us,’ ” she said, adding
that she had to file lawsuits to force the
trust to pay the already agreed upon
$10,000 a month in child support.
“There’s a lot of money. There’s the
company and the land, and all they have
to do”—Suzan’s voice dropped below a
whisper—“is just fuck over one little boy.
It gets very tempting.”
Once, when Suzan asked for $160,000
to pay for a two-month summer rental in
Malibu for herself and Alex, the trustees
instead granted her $80,000 for one
month. Not long after, Pair called to invite
Suzan and Alex, then 13, to a King Tut
exhibit that night with his own son, who
was nine. It was the first time Pair and
Suzan had spoken in three years. When
Suzan asked Pair why the trust wouldn’t
pay for the summer rental, Pair said they
could—if she would be “nice” to him.
“You know everyone always had a thing
for you,” she says Pair told her. “You are
one of the most beautiful, unattainable
women in the world. Here’s my home
telephone number and call me when
you’re ready to give me what I want.”
Suzan took Alex to the King Tut exhibit
herself. Pair was there and approached
her, according to Suzan. Alex was just a
few feet away, as she recalls, when Pair
leaned in and allegedly said, “I’ll get you
on your knees eventually. I’m going to fuck
you one way or the other.” Suzan says that
happened in June 2005. By August, she
filed a lawsuit alleging emotional distress
and sexual harassment. While Pair did not
respond to V.F., at the time he denied the
allegations: “The suit is totally without
merit and I’m deeply offended and sad-
dened she would resort to such tactics.”
Pair won dismissal of the suit. The
courts concluded that the emotional
distress Suzan claimed to suffer wasn’t severe enough, but
they did acknowledge “conduct attributed to Pair was grossly
inappropriate.”
At the time, Klein’s wife, Joan Dempsey Klein, was an
esteemed and powerful justice on the California Appeals
Court (a fifth-generation Californian who became the state’s
first female presiding justice, she retired, at age 90, in 2014 and
died six years later, in December 2020), and although Judge
Klein had nothing to do with this case, from Suzan’s perspective,
that gave him an advantage in court.
T
HE TRUSTEES HAD set up MH Holdings II H, LLC
(MH2) in 2003, an entity that held the Mountain,
then known as Tower Grove, as an asset of the trust,
managed by Klein. That year, after the court denied
the trustees indemnification in a quest to develop
the property themselves, MH2 leased Tower Grove to Chip
Dickens for zero dollars and loaned him $1.5 million to com-
plete a tract map, with an option to buy the Mountain. That
was the trustees’ first loan to Dickens.
Though Dickens completed the tract map, he could not come
up with the money to buy the Mountain. So the trustees lent
him another $23.75 million, with no money down, even though
another buyer had offered $25.75 million in cash for the Moun-
tain. That was the trustees’ second loan to Dickens. In court
papers, the trustees said that Suzan signed off on the deal,
receiving $250,000 herself. But Suzan told V.F. she never gave
her approval and thought the $250,000 payment was for the
tract map. In 2006, the trust loaned an entity operated by Dick-
ens another $12 million for construction—the trust’s third loan
to Dickens—but stopped the disbursements at $10.6 million.
As time went on, it seemed to Suzan that Dickens was a proxy
developer for Klein. In the ensuing years, Dickens defaulted
IN RESIDENCE on the loans and struggled to hang on to the Mountain; his
Suzan spent years
embroiled in legal entity, Tower Park Properties, filed for bankruptcy in 2008.
battles with her Dickens’s company came out of bankruptcy in 2010 still own-
ex-husband’s estate
in an effort to protect ing the Mountain. The trustees then loaned one of his entities
their son’s assets. another $7 million, a fourth loan; more than $5.5 million of
SEPTEMBER 2022 113
that loan was disbursed. But by then, Alex had filed his own property was large but only zoned for six
petition to remove the trustees. homes, none of which existed. By Febru-
In court, Alex’s lawyers asked Klein if he had done his due dili- ary 2019, the asking price had dropped to
gence and if he believed Dickens was good for the money. “Mr. $650 million. Still no bites. (Developer
Dickens? No. As far as I know, he’s a poor man,” Klein testified. Scott Gillen submitted a $400 million
Dickens himself testified that he had to make sure Klein “was bid, which was rejected. When reached
happy…if I went against or disagreed with him, I was putting by V.F., Gillen said the “smoke and mir-
myself in jeopardy because…my middle name is ‘default,’ and ror” days of developers “having no skin
at any time he could have pulled the plug.” in the game” are over.) By 2013 Klein and
In 2010, as the trustees turned off the loan spigot, Dickens the other two trustees were gone, and the
teamed up with Victorino Noval, a Cuban-born convicted felon new institutional trustee wanted Dickens
turned Hollywood producer. Noval’s biography sounds straight and Noval to pay the trust what they owed.
out of Hollywood too: His father had driven a truck filled with At this point, the Mountain was owned
weapons to help the CIA’s failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961—and by Secured Capital Partners, which was
then drove into the gates of the Uruguayan embassy in Cuba to controlled by Noval’s son, Victor Franco
seek asylum before fleeing with his family to the U.S. By the late Noval. A month earlier, in July, Secured
1990s, Noval—then known as Victor Jesus Noval—had defrauded Capital had tried and failed to declare
the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development of at Chapter 11 bankruptcy. That led the trust
least $60 million and spent three years in jail on mail fraud and to push for a foreclosure auction to force
tax evasion charges and was ordered to pay $25 million in resti- a sale. SCP then transferred ownership
tution. Noval’s lawyer, Ronald Richards (whose ex-wife, Louise back to Tower Park Properties, where Vic-
Linton, is now married to Steven Mnuchin), says that Noval no torino Noval and Dickens were majority
longer owes restitution. He notes that it was Noval who brought owners, Richards, Noval’s lawyer, told
Sheik Khalid al-Jarrah Al Sabah, a Kuwaiti big shot, into the V.F. When the foreclosure auction was
Mountain’s prospects. From 2010 to 2019, Khalid—a member set for August 2019, the Mark Hughes
of Kuwait’s ruling family and the minister of defense—wired $163 Family Trust pounced, buying it back for
million to Noval-linked bank accounts, according to court papers. $100,000 plus $200 million in debt. The
Noval further raised the Mountain’s profile by throwing star- trust once again owned the Mountain—
studded parties. Online, he bragged that his charity—the now with no limitations on selling it, Suzan’s
defunct Victorino Noval Foundation—boasted $1.2 billion in lawyer, Lisa McCurdy, explained to V.F.

“THE DEVIL HAD NOTHING ON CONRAD KLEIN,” SUZAN SAYS OF HER BILLIONAIRE
EX’S TRUSTEE. “HE BECAME THE DICTATOR OF MY LIFE.”

assets. (Richards, his lawyer, later told me that Noval had fac-
tored the estimated value of the Mountain, $1 billion, into the
charity’s assets.) These days, Noval—who declined to comment
to V.F.—is still living large. He has a following of 25,200 on his
verified Instagram, where he describes himself as a “movie pro-
ducer & investor based in Beverly Hills.”
In 2014, the Mountain had one of its first galas, hosted by
Charlize Theron to benefit her Africa Outreach Project, but it
was a disaster, with bad food, party crashers, and malfunction-
ing port-a-potties, according to reports. Another charity event,
hosted by Rihanna that December, did better, drawing celebs like
Salma Hayek, Jimmy Kimmel, Kim Kardashian, and Brad Pitt—
who had reportedly looked at the property back in 2002. In 2015,
Dickens and Noval briefly floated the Mountain for $1 billion,
although there was no official listing, according to sources with
D I C K E N S : J O E P U G L I E S E /A U G U S T.

knowledge, but three years later, they listed it at that price, with GOING, GOING,
celebrity broker Aaron Kirman, who declined to speak with V.F. GONE
Chip Dickens owned
The property instantly drew interest from billionaires, including the Mountain before
Jeff Bezos and, coincidentally, Mohammed bin Salman (accused losing it in a
foreclosure auction
of ordering the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, employed by Bezos that he’s now
at The Washington Post). Despite the buzz, there were no bids. The challenging.

114 VA N I T Y FA I R
(McCurdy was also part of Alex’s legal team that successfully
petitioned the court to remove the trustees.) But the ex-trustees
had caused serious damage.
“The beneficiary and current trustee believe the former trust-
ees are responsible for hundreds of millions in damage to the
trust,” McCurdy said. The trust’s job is to preserve assets, not
squander them. In April Dickens’s company filed a challenge to
the validity of the foreclosure auction. Richards, Noval’s law-
yer, concurred. “The borrower contended that no money was
owed. If a creditor elects to do nonjudicial foreclosure, there is
no recourse against the borrower. So, when the Hughes trust
foreclosed on the property, any debt owed by Tower Properties
went to zero as there is an anti-deficiency statute in California.”
Suzan was at the auction back in August 2019. It was not wide-
ly attended, just regular auctiongoers in lawn chairs behind a
fountain at an outdoor plaza in Pomona, according to reports.
When a Los Angeles Times reporter approached Suzan, clad in a
pinstripe suit and sunglasses, and asked who she was, she said
she was “no one” and that she was just stopping by while on
a walk. When the trust won the sale, she was in tears. “I went
behind a tree to cry,” Suzan told me.
M
EANWHILE, ON September 13, 2019, around a
week before the foreclosure auction, Khalid filed
a lawsuit in California claiming that Noval and his
associates had misused the $163 million. Instead
of funding the Mountain, the lawsuit claimed, the
money fueled Noval’s “lavish and extravagant lifestyle,” which
included the purchase of Beverly Hills mansions, a yacht, a jet,
a Lamborghini, and $40,000 worth of a prizefighter’s memo-
rabilia. Khalid was seeking close to $500 million in damages,
alleging that he would have at least doubled his investment if the
Mountain had actually been developed. Noval denied the claims
and maintained his innocence through his lawyer, Richards.
Khalid’s L.A.-based lawyer, Bobby Samini, declined comment.
Back in Kuwait, anti-corruption prosecutors had been inves-
tigating the disappearance of billions of dollars from Kuwaiti
state coffers. Khalid’s California lawsuit provided them with a
picture of what happened to some of the money. Investigators
were able to trace close to $1 billion that passed through London
bank accounts to Lebanon, Bahrain, France—and California.
Prosecutors could see transfers to other accounts but couldn’t
access the accounts to learn more. “It was the dumbest thing he
could have done,” an anti-corruption source told V.F. “It was so
interesting and clear.”
In March 2021, Khalid was arrested and jailed in Kuwait for
his alleged role in a $790 million corruption scandal known as
the “military fund case,” along with former prime minister Sheik
Jaber al-Mubarak Al Sabah and other high officials. Khalid, in
his defense, said the payments to (Noval-controlled) California
bank accounts were made in the interest of national security.
He also said the payments were made with the knowledge and
consent of the emir, who by then was dead.
Now that the Mountain was back with the trust, run by an
institutional trustee of Alex’s choosing, Alex and Suzan con-
sidered their options. By May 2020, the trust had tapped a top
New York broker, Doug Harmon, to bring the Mountain back to
market. “It’s a magical masterpiece, the Mona Lisa of available
land sites,” Harmon told me at the time. (Harmon has sold some
of the country’s most valuable commercial properties, including
the GM Building in New York, the Willis Tower in Chicago, and
the Bank of America Center of San Francisco.)
But the listing never stood a chance. First came rumblings
from Dickens, challenging the foreclosure. And Khalid’s legal
situations in Kuwait and California had the unintended con-
sequence of waking another sleeping giant. In July 2020, the
Justice Department filed seven lawsuits seeking the forfeiture of
prized California real estate, including the Mountain. The feds,
following FBI and IRS investigations, alleged that “former high-
level officials” in Kuwait’s ministry of defense had embezzled
more than $104 million from Kuwaiti state coffers. The money,
the feds claimed, moved from Kuwait to London to California
bank accounts controlled by Noval’s son. Khalid was not named
in the suits, but Victorino Noval was. The government settled
the case against the Mountain on September 28, 2020, a Justice
Department spokesman says, adding that the feds stayed the
other cases seeking forfeiture of other assets allegedly bought
with Kuwaiti money.
Ever since 9/11, when Congress tightened anti–money launder-
ing laws in banking under the Patriot Act, unsavory characters
from around the world—including public officials—have found a
workaround by investing stolen money in real estate, including in
the U.S. Under President Biden, such corruption has finally been
acknowledged as a national security threat, because it undermines
democracy while strengthening autocracies. Just look at Russia.
The Kuwaiti asset forfeiture case “is significant because it is anoth-
er example of how the U.S. will assist foreign countries,” says a
former federal prosecutor with extensive kleptocracy experience,
and knowledge of the Mountain case. “It’s important for countries
to know that their corrupt politicians won’t be able to come to the
U.S. and buy toys and invest in properties and retire here.”
In March this year, Khalid was released from jail and acquit-
ted, devastating Kuwait’s anti-corruption activists. But in May,
the Justice Department filed a new consolidated asset forfei-
ture case against three unnamed high-ranking Kuwaiti officials,
along with Victorino Noval, Victor Franco Noval, Secured Capi-
tal Partners, and others connected to the other California assets.
“The U.S. government is seeking forfeiture of any assets
purchased with stolen Kuwait money. There is no evidence that
the Novals had any knowledge that Mr. Sabah had used stolen
Kuwait funds for any monies he sent to the U.S.,” Richards said.
And as for the $163 million Khalid wired to Noval-controlled
bank accounts? “It was used in the Mountain.”
T
HE MOUNTAIN REMAINS, even as Dickens and Noval
continue to challenge the foreclosure auction in
court. Suzan doesn’t seem too worried.
“There are no holds on the Mountain now,”
Suzan says. “I feel more safe, and have more peace,
but you can never get back those 13 years.” Suzan says Alex
has no big plans for the Mountain at the moment. She would
like to put in a pond, build a gazebo. This winter she planted
geraniums, but deer ate them.
The Mountain, she says, has “had a lot of commotion and it’s
resting now. It’s beautiful and green. I might put it with a conserva-
tory and make it a park. That’s not out of the question.” n
SEPTEMBER 2022 115

Keys to the Kingdom
CON TIN U ED F ROM PAGE 56
A WEEK AFTER our New York lunch, Ham­
ilton and I are supposed to meet at what
I’ve been told is one of his favorite res­
taurants, in the French village of Èze,
not too far from his Monaco home. But
arrangements somehow go awry. “I’ve
never been here before,” he says as we
are led to a table at a terrace where the
expansive views over the Mediterranean
are breathtaking, but where he is also
surrounded by unknown others in fairly
close proximity. When you are as famous
as Hamilton is in most of the world, you
learn to avoid these situations. “This is
more exposed than I normally am,” he
notes. “We’ll see how it goes.” As we talk,
his voice is often so quiet that my record­
er can barely pick it up, as though he feels
constrained by the surroundings. When
he orders a latte with oat milk, the waiter,
seemingly baffled by his presence, asks
him the awkward and fairly unanswer­
able question: “Is that the real you?”
We talk a little about Hamilton’s life.
In the first half of his Formula 1 career,
he was in a relationship with ex–Pussycat
Dolls singer Nicole Scherzinger for sev­
eral years, their every perceived up and
down relentlessly tracked by the British
tabloid media. Whatever private life he
has had since then, he has mostly kept
to himself. “I learned the hard way,” he
says. “I learned the hard way.” But then
he also tells me—“I haven’t talked about it
much”—that there haven’t been any long
relationships in recent years. “I’m really
just super focused on work,” he says. “I’ve
realized that I can’t do two things or three
things at once, I’ve got to focus on one.”
Furthermore, he adds, “I really wanted
to go through a growth process of getting
myself to a point where I’m happy on my
own, comfortable in my space. So that if
I ever do meet someone, it’s an addition,
rather than ‘I need you in my life.’ ”
As with most lives lived under such
close scrutiny, in Hamilton’s there have
116 VA N I T Y FA I R
been occasional wrinkles. He has long
had a sturdy social media communion—
his present Instagram followership is more
than 29 million—but not everything has
always landed as he’d hoped it might. We
discuss one particularly difficult moment.
On Christmas Day 2017, he posted to the
world what was presumably intended as a
cute and amusing 12­second video in which
he sits with his nephew, who’s wearing a
purple­and­pink dress and brandishing
a wand with a fluffy pink heart at its end.
“Why are you wearing a princess dress?”
Hamilton asks the boy, who is laughing. “Is
this what you got for Christmas? Why did
you ask for a princess dress for Christmas?
Boys don’t wear princess dresses!”
The world’s response was swift. Ham­
ilton was condemned for gender shaming
and other insensitivities. A typical forceful
riposte: “Go stick your toxic masculinity
up your arse.”
“That was so stupid,” he tells me of
what he did. “I realized that a lot of my
upbringing was coming out. I went with
just an ignorant moment. And I straight­
away realized that that’s not actually
how I feel deep inside.” By the next day,
he had deleted the post; by the end of
the week he had deleted his entire Ins­
tagram history. “I’m just not the kind of
person that wants to ever hurt anybody,”
he says. “And the idea that I could have
hurt somebody through a stupid post or
just from something I said, again through
ignorance, just reminded me of how I had
felt from the experiences that I had had.
And I was like, how am I projecting that? I
realized that was wrong. And so then find­
ing ways of not necessarily undoing it, but
showing that community that I support
them. It’s difficult in today’s world. It’s
difficult to undo things.”
Hamilton is fond of adages like “It’s
not how you fall, it’s how you get back
up,” and he seems to use them less as
glib catchphrases to brandish when con­
venient and more as serious guides to
better living. In this instance, he apolo­
gized, fully and clearly, for the mistake
he had made and the hurt he had caused.
Privately, he took it upon himself to edu­
cate himself. He posed in a kilt on the
cover of British GQ and, inside, gave a
self­lacerating interview. He also went
to Disneyland Paris with some of his
extended family. Beforehand, Hamil­
ton’s nephew had asked to go to the store
to buy another princess dress. “I was like,
let’s go,” says Hamilton. And that was
how the two of them came to walk hand
in hand—Hamilton and his nephew in his
brand­new dress—through Disneyland.
“What’s crazy is,” he reflects now,
“you have to learn something from a
six­year­old.”
Our conversation aside, the meal here
doesn’t go too well. Surveying the menu,
Hamilton realizes that there is more or
less nothing he can eat. He orders the
asparagus. Some time later it arrives,
garnished with some kind of egg and
crouton topping. He patiently explains
that his diet doesn’t allow for this. The
waiter nods, promising to return with
“virgin asparagus.”
Some further time passes before a plate
of asparagus arrives.
“This,” the waiter declares with a flour­
ish, “is without eggs.”
Hamilton surveys the delicately driz­
zled greenery placed in front of him.
“But,” he points out, with restrained
politeness, “it’s got mayonnaise.”
And with that, he gives up. He drinks
another latte and suggests that we go
for a drive.
LEWIS HAMILTON IS behind the wheel
and I am his passenger. This experience
is not entirely as you might expect. First,
there’s the car we are in. He knows that
people expect him to have some kind
of cool sports car, and he did have cars
like that when he was younger. But these
days his vehicle of choice for trips like
this is a tiny electric Smart car, made by
his team’s parent company, Mercedes.
Second, on open roads, Hamilton is an
achingly sensible and careful driver,
never speeding and frequently pulling
over to let impatient drivers pass. Third,
as he explains, he actually doesn’t like
driving. Not this kind, the kind the rest of
us do, with traffic in two directions, and
pedestrians, and junctions, and nothing
clear­cut to prove. In fact, he rarely does
it. “I just think that I find it stressful,” he
says. “I try not to do things that don’t add
to my life.” And then he adds—a state­
ment said with sincerity—“Look, we’re
on these roads, anything can happen.”
After a while, we find ourselves in the
outskirts of Nice, down toward the harbor.
“This is now stressful for me,” he says.
“This road is crazy. So much going on here.
I’m going to turn around in a second.”
On the racing track, he tells me, he
doesn’t feel fear, and he also searches out
experiences like skydiving, rock climbing,
and surfing. And yet, even in the most
controlled minds, fear and logic may
sometimes lead each other in the most
unpredictable of dances. We all have our
vulnerabilities. That’s why, when Hamil­
ton travels to Australia, he prefers to get a
hotel room on one of the higher floors, and
when he gets into the room, he will often
check around the toilet. “I do,” he tells me.
“It’s pathetic, but I do.” The reason? “Oh
God, spiders,” he says. Some Australian
spiders are notoriously deadly, but even
if he sees a picture of a spider on a screen,
Hamilton can’t look at it. He credits his
fear to the time as a kid when his sister
made him watch the movie Arachnopho-
bia. He knows, given everything else that
he does so dauntlessly, that it might seem
odd. “People say: ‘Dude! You drive around
at 200 miles an hour!’ And I’m like, in
terms of fear factor, that’s easy for me. I
guess we’re just all wired differently.”
Back in the mountains, well away from
the city, Hamilton selects increasingly
narrow and winding roads until he turns
down one that seems little more than a
track. I quietly wonder whether this is a
terrible idea—I can see us hitting a tight
dead end and having to back out, or get­
ting stuck entirely—but his instincts are
good. We twist back and forth down the
edge of a slope through a secret world
of incredible houses perched above the
sea. It reminds him of how, a while back,
he went for a ride round here one night
on his motorbike. He just wanted to “get
away from everything” and ended up on
a road like this. He stopped, turned off his
lights—and was astonished to discover
that he was surrounded by fireflies. He’d
only ever seen them in animated movies.
IN THE MOVIE version of the Lewis Ham­
ilton story, he would have returned this
season after the painful fiasco at the end
of the last and—the bloodied boxer rising
from the canvas—dominated every race.
But it hasn’t worked out like that. Every
few years, Formula 1 teams are obliged
to design almost completely new cars to
a revised set of specifications. Mercedes
was expected to excel at this challenge, but
for 2022 it got something wrong. At high
speeds, the new car repeatedly moved up
and down. The cute name given to this,
“porpoising,” belies the unpleasantness
of the experience—“The worst charac­
teristic I’ve ever experienced in a car,”
Hamilton says—and its catastrophic effect
on competitiveness.
After he finished 13th in a race in April,
chatter grew once again that he would
walk away. People seemed to assume
that his pride wouldn’t be able to take
this. In response, he was silent for a
few days. Then he posted an imposing
backlit image of himself in the team’s
tire garage, with this message: Working
on my masterpiece, I’ll be the one to decide
when it’s finished.
“A lot of people out there are shit
talkers,” he tells me. “If I let those words—
those projections people are putting out,
those little digs—if I let that bring me
down, then they win.”
Toward the end of May, when I join
nearly 122,000 other spectators watch­
ing the Spanish Grand Prix in Barcelona,
there is, at last, some restrained opti­
mism around Hamilton’s team that
the car’s worst problems have been
overcome. As usual on race weekends,
Hamilton spends his time not on the
track sequestered from all the crazy sur­
rounding hullabaloo in his bubble. If this
was ever just a “rev it up and give it your
best shot” kind of sport, it is no longer:
At one point I’m taken up to glimpse the
private engineering room where rows of
serious­looking people, Hamilton among
them, are studying data on the screens in
front of them, trying to work out how to
maximize every incremental advantage.
Alas, the best­laid plans.... On the
first lap, another driver cuts too close
to Hamilton and they collide. Hamilton
has a puncture. He is able to change his
tire, but when he rejoins the race he is
19th. Over the team radio, he sounds
momentarily disconsolate, suggesting
it might be best to save the engine for
another race. His team encourages him
to keep pushing: Their data analysis sug­
gests that in this improved car he could
still finish eighth and at least earn some
world championship points.
And from then, he flies. At times, he is
the fastest driver on the track, doing once
more what he has done over and over for
all these years. “I think he’s an artist,”
Brady will tell me later. “I think when he
sees the racetrack, he sees it different than
everyone else does. Like any great ath­
lete, you have your unique way of doing
things—everyone else looks at something
one way and you look at it a different way.
And you create strategies and you execute
under pressure in ways that other people
can’t. I just think he probably sees lines on
the track no one else can see.”
Today, Hamilton finishes fifth, but
afterward he is bubbling. To do that
from where he was felt like a win. “I was
[thinking], these guys are crazy—they’re
smoking something,” he says of the advice
after the collision. “There’s no way I can
come from 30 seconds behind dead last.”
Things are turning around. “We’re defi­
nitely going to get a win this year. That’s
something I couldn’t have told you before
the race. So it feels great.”
Hamilton has another year on his
contract, which people have assumed
may offer a natural end point for a driver
his age who’s achieved all that he has.
Assume all you like.
“I’ll be lying if I said that I hadn’t
thought about extending,” he tells me
later. Yes, he’s giving extensive thought to
his after­sport life and how he can fulfill
a credo to, as he puts it, “live to the max,
and live to the best of your ability, help as
many people as you can in the time that
you have.” But just because he’s making
plans for when it’s over doesn’t mean that
it is. “I’m still on the mission, I’m still lov­
ing driving, I’m still being challenged by it.
So I don’t really feel like I have to give it up
anytime soon.” Perhaps one further sign of
this renewed determination is that when
he vies for victory at the British Grand
Prix in early July before finishing third, he
offers no public explanation for the fact
that he is no longer wearing his nose stud.
“Anyone can have a great season,”
says Brady. “Anyone can have five great
seasons, but it’s really hard to have 10
great seasons or 15 great seasons. That
takes different traits, different quali­
ties. A lot of those come from things
that have happened in your life that
allow you to be motivated over a long
period of time.”
“I would say,” echoes Hamilton’s
friend Chamley­Watson, “he has noth­
ing to prove but a lot more to accomplish.
And I think he’s just going to keep going
until the wheels fall off, literally.”
In truth, Hamilton is insulted that, even
now, so many people might possibly mis­
take him for someone who would walk
away from a fight.
“But again,” he says, “that’s what they
would do.”
Not him.
“I’m built different,” he says. “I mean,
I was built for this. It reminds me that
people still don’t know me. Even after all
these years. People still don’t know. So, all
right, I’ll prove you wrong again.” n
SEPTEMBER 2022 117

Chef ’s Kiss
CON TIN U ED F ROM PAGE 85 like any legit
SoHo dweller does—and agreed to form
a partnership that would turn into Major
Food Group. “So then Jeff ’s on squad, he’s
making calls, he’s doing all sorts of shit—
he’s figuring out how to be a restaurateur,”
Carbone recalls.
First order of business was finding a
space for their dream restaurant, their
temple to Southern Italian comfort food
as slick as a summer blockbuster. At one
point, a friend who represented the build-
ing at 181 Thompson Street told Zalaznick
about the site, that they were renting the
retail space, which for 90 years had been
held by a legendary but bygone Green-
wich Village red-sauce joint called Rocco
Restaurant.
The space had an earned-through-
the-decades patina that could actually
fulfill the trio’s spaghetti-wrapped dreams.
When Rocco started serving pasta a cen-
tury ago, the South Village was a nexus for
immigrants from the Mezzogiorno—the
southern part of the old country. They
were drawn to the namesake restaurant
opened by Rocco Stanziano in 1922, steps
away from some of the first churches for
Italian immigrants in the country, which
served locals and the occasional Italian-
descended royalty—Joe DiMaggio is said
to have come along with Marilyn Monroe
in the 1950s, and De Niro dropped in as late
as the 2000s.
But in 2011 the landlord reportedly
informed Stanziano’s grand-nephew
Antonio DaSilva that his rent would be
jacked from $8,000 to $18,000 per
month, and the family balked. When Zala-
znick told his two new partners that he had
heard about a space at 181 Thompson, both
knew exactly what he meant. Carbone had
worked at Lupa right across the street. “I
was like, Dude, I know that, of course, that
space across the street with the epic sign
outside,” Carbone says.
Torrisi describes it as the trio’s “oh
shit” moment. “That sign was etched in
118 VA N I T Y FA I R
my brain from eating in my early 20s,” he
says. “We look to craft a story, and it’s a
100-year-old Italian American sign, a
perfect location in the other Little Italy of
Manhattan.”
Rocco provided the space that could
be the canvas on which Carbone and
his partners could create a postmodern
red-sauce joint that could seize the zeit-
geist—seize it not with Momofuku Ko’s
Donald Judd–inspired minimalism or
wd~50’s thing-that-looks-like-another-
thing neo-surrealism, but with a novel
pour of self-aware nostalgia.
“It was a young generation of people,
ourselves, not doing something youthful,”
Carbone says. “That was our space. And
they said, ‘The new thing, that’s supposed
to be your space. That’s what you were
doing at Torrisi. You were taking an idea
and you were being really youthful with it.
I get it. I don’t get this. You’re doing some-
thing very old, when you’re young. You’re
not supposed to be doing that.”
OTHER ATTEMPTS TO take New York’s Ital-
ian cuisine nationwide include Il Mulino,
a go-to West Village upscale spot that was
sold to investors in 2001 and expanded
rapidly; its parent company declared bank-
ruptcy for seven locations in 2020 amid
the pandemic. (That place’s moment, it
seems, has passed. In 2009, then president
Barack Obama caused a stir by eating at Il
Mulino with former president Bill Clinton,
but there’s no indication Obama ever went
back. Instead, he took time off from run-
ning the free world to share veal Parm and
the porterhouse with his daughters at Car-
bone in 2015—then went back to Carbone
again in 2017, this time after he departed
the White House.)
But Il Mulino’s prelaunch build-out was
no match for the conceptual rigor girded
to the opening of an Italian American
juggernaut like Carbone. When I asked
Carmellini what he made of the Carbone
concept when he first heard of it, he sug-
gested it was ambitious to say the least.
“We kind of shared this Italian Ameri-
can background, and we joked that red
sauce wasn’t quote-unquote real Italian,”
Carmellini says. “My kind of mentors were
Italians who hated Italian American cook-
ing, because it wasn’t Italian.”
The Carbone trio enlisted Zac Posen to
design the captains’ tuxedos. Art dealer
Vito Schnabel curated the work in the
space, commissioning a series of paintings
by the critic and poet turned artist’s artist
Rene Ricard. Part of the appeal is that after
decades of putting up with mediocre Ital-
ian food just because it’s still homey and
comforting to tuck into a plate of sauce-
and-cheese-slathered carbs, New Yorkers
were ready for a concept that understood
what makes those kinds of restaurants so
appealing while upping the food quality.
“Jeff said something interesting about
people in New York,” Torrisi says. “People
in this city love Italian American food so
much that they’re willing to eat it badly,
but they don’t care. They know that what
you’re eating isn’t good food, but you have
such a place in your heart for it that you
love it anyway.” But with better quality
food came bigger price tags. At Torrisi, the
gang had initially been known for their $45
tasting menu, a direct response to the type
of insanely expensive bill that came after
dining at Eleven Madison Park or Masa.
“There was definitely a large group of
naysayers, all of a sudden, that had never
existed,” Carbone says. “There was a lot
of ‘Good for you, kids!’ for a long time, the
first couple of years. And then we came out
with $50 veal Parms and tuxedos and they
were like, ‘Wait a minute. Wait a minute.
Wait a minute. That one thing cost more
than that whole menu you used to serve.’
And we’re like, ‘Yeah, I know, but it’s dif-
ferent. We don’t have to be those guys,
we’re these guys now.’ I was like, ‘I don’t
shine shoes no more.’ ”
In the week before the opening, the
place got more press than a visiting pope.
Alongside glossy write-ups in the Times and
New York, though, there were early press
pieces bemoaning Carbone’s maximalist
approach as pastiche. The NIMBY crowd
was particularly incensed that Carbone
had a hand in elbowing out of New York the
very element to which it was supposedly
paying homage. Jeremiah Moss, the propri-
etor of an online historical concern called
Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, accused
places like Carbone of turning the Big
Apple into “an Epcot Center Jurassic Park
of a city.” Eater did a one-paragraph post
about Moss’s rant. That story got more than
100 comments from angry anti-gentrifiers
and supporters alike.
Then the restaurant opened in March
2013, and Eater couldn’t stop writing about
it. In Carbone’s first two months of exis-
tence, the site published 25 stories about
the place, often under the same rubric:
“Carbone Fever.” “It was one of those
restaurants where they got everything
right,” Leventhal said. The commenters
kept at it too. “Sheeple and celebrities =
sweet spot,” one wrote. “An overpriced
douchetrap,” read another. “$135 per
person for FUCKING SPAGHETTI???
hahahahaha!!! douchebags, all of you!”
went another.
Jay-Z and Beyoncé came in early and
often, as did other celebrities. It was
booked solid for the rest of the year. In
December, Pete Wells at the Times named
it the second-best new restaurant he’d
reviewed that year, bested only by Sushi
Nakazawa, a now-faded fancy sushi joint.
“I was not surprised at all personally,”
Torrisi says about the immediate success.
“We knew exactly what we wanted to say,
how we wanted to say it. We believed it
was missing from the fabric of New York.”
When I asked Carbone to explain the X
factor that brings in boldface names more
reliably than any eatery on earth—this is
based on inexact science, to be sure, but
it’s believed to be true by many experts of
A-lister rubbernecking—he slipped into a
pose that was maybe knowingly clueless,
trying not to sound disingenuous while
also protecting the discretion of his clien-
tele. “It’s this sort of amazing thing that
happened along the way, there’s no way to
put the pieces together to create that as a
result,” he says. “With celebrities, I think
that we do a good job of preaching ano-
nymity, and we welcome them and try to
do our best to keep them in their own little
world and bubble and take care of them as
we would anybody else, as best you can.
Some of them we know through the years
now. It’s really hard to explain.”
Torrisi has a more direct theory. “Celeb-
rities are just fucking people too—they
might not be normal people, but they are
people like anyone else,” he says. “And
people love Carbone.”
A secret reservation list does not hurt:
“We’ve created systems by which reserva-
tions happen,” Carbone says. “And people
have contacts. And we can make shit hap-
pen on the fly.”(Nota bene to the rich and
famous: Advance warning is key. In June,
Justin Bieber played before a Barclays Cen-
ter crowd and then reportedly showed up
on a whim to Carbone with his wife Hailey
for a postshow date, only to be told they
were fully booked.)
Try as he might to not confirm A-list fans
by name, Carbone was at times unable to
not mention celebs who have transcended
from regulars to family. “We also hap-
pened to be these young guys doing this
old thing, which we didn’t realize crosses
this really, really wide demographic,”
Carbone says. “My dad loves it. And he’s
sitting next to Jay-Z. That’s a very strange
thing for all of us. But it works. And we’re
all listening to Frank. And I can’t explain
it sometimes.”
SO PITCHED WAS Carbone Fever that
within a few years, Major Food Group
had a shot at the Mount Olympus of the
restaurant world: the space in the Seagram
Building that housed the Four Seasons.
After building owners Aby Rosen and
Michael Fuchs kicked the Four Seasons
operators out of the landmarked Philip
Johnson–designed space, Rosen started
asking around about who could inject new
energy into the bastion of influence that
birthed the term “power lunch.”
Vito Schnabel helped him connect with
Zalaznick in 2015, and Rosen—whose
company also owns the Chrysler Build-
ing—was impressed. “The Major Food
guys understand the importance of the
show, of looking good, and the staff is
entertaining,” Rosen later told Town &
Country. “You’re there for a play; you’re
part of an act. But you also get what you pay
for, which a lot of times doesn’t happen.”
Rosen knew there would be backlash
about telling the masters of the universe
their $49 single crab cake would be made
by guys in their 30s that food blog com-
mentators loved to call douchebags. “I
have zero issue with coming off as a vil-
lain in the press,” he told Town & Country.
Once it was announced that Major
Food Group would take over the coun-
try’s most famous restaurant and turn it
into The Grill, the criticism leapfrogged
several social strata up from the com-
ments section. Henry Kissinger, who
reputedly spent decades of lunches at
the same perch ordering the same baked
potato with its own bottle of olive oil, com-
plained to Rosen, as did Martha Stewart;
the starchitects Robert A.M. Stern and
Norman Foster reportedly urged him not
to change a thing. Joni Evans, the former
publisher of Random House, told New
York’s Grub Street blog that it was like
losing your childhood home—and learn-
ing that they’ve moved it to the Bronx. “I
have no interest in going back,” she said.
“I don’t want to see what they’ve done.”
PHYLLIS LAMBERT—THE DAUGHTER of Sea-
gram president Samuel Bronfman, who
commissioned the building in the 1950s—
wrote a blistering op-ed for The New York
Times about the restaurant swap, saying
“Mr. Johnson designed the Four Seasons
to be soft and relaxing, unlike the hot spot
destination restaurants that dominate
Manhattan.” Nevertheless, a week’s worth
of opening dinners were attended by titans
of business and real estate, among them
Robert Kraft, Jonathan Tisch, Leon Black,
Steven Roth, and Henry Kravis.
“With The Grill, we fucking put our balls
on the table,” Carbone says. “And it’s like,
‘We’re going to do it. Someone’s got to do
it. It should be us. It has to be us.’ That was
our thought process back then. It’s like,
‘This space is closing. It has to be us to take
it. And we will be the ones to do it right.’ ”
Lambert eventually came around and
had her 90th birthday in the space. The
critics came around too. Eater’s Ryan Sut-
ton made The Grill the rare non–tasting
menu in the city with four stars. “At the
moment, this is as close as you can get to
a perfect New York restaurant,” he wrote
in August 2017. “May we all be rich enough
to eat here more often.”
E XPANSION OF A global nature has,
unsurprisingly, been an entire chapter
of the Carbone playbook almost since
day one. In 2014, a year after the origi-
nal opened, young restaurateurs behind
the dining group Black Sheep helped
open Carbone Hong Kong. Carbone Las
Vegas was a no-brainer, so by 2015 there
was an edition at the Aria. A Carbone in
the Mansard Riyadh, a Radisson-backed
hotel in the capital of Saudi Arabia, will
open later this year. Speaking of the King-
dom: There’s also a new edition of Torrisi
Italian Specialties, simply called Torrisi,
opening in 2022 in the Puck Building,
which is owned by Kushner Companies,
the real estate empire once run by Jared
Kushner—whose firm recently took a
$2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s
sovereign wealth fund.
Then there’s the recently announced
private Carbone inside a member’s club
set for some not-too-distant future in
Hudson Yards. (It already seems like it’s
impossible to get a table at Carbone. But
what if it actually…was impossible to get a
table at Carbone?)
But before that, they had to open in the
Kingdom of Texas.
“I’m not gonna lie, I don’t really know
anything about Dallas,” Carbone says, sit-
ting in the not-quite-finished dining room
at the end of an oblong parking lot in the
Design District of the Texas metropolis,
SEPTEMBER 2022 119

Chef ’s Kiss
1,551 miles from Greenwich Village. A hun-
dred employees fritter around, trying to
turn two closed restaurants into open ones.
They have a matter of hours.
“You know I love the sound of the drill
at 2 p.m. on opening day,” he deadpans,
leading me into the outdoor courtyard as
a number of workers are eating into the
earth and the beeping of a dump truck
blares louder as it gets closer to us. “A con-
struction site five hours before opening is
the sort of adrenaline we’re looking for.”
Still, he seems a bit on edge. Investors
were hoping that the Carbone essence
could be successfully uncorked for the
10-gallon-hatted high rollers in Big D:
AT&T executives, Cowboys and Mavericks,
old-money art collectors with Twombly-
dotted mansions. We walk into the kitchen,
where young guys in oil-slicked chef ’s
whites are hammering away at their sta-
tions. “This is Chef Ed,” he says after one
addresses him as “Chef Mario.”
As we walk through the cramped kitch-
en, Carbone tells me that the night’s crowd
will be made up mostly of investors and
friends and family, an elaborate cocktail
party, he says. Beside us is a stack of about
500 loaves of bread.
“Tonight’s a little bit abnormal, but
an opening nonetheless. Chef Ed, what’s
going on with our great wall of bread?”
“It’s a great wall of bread, chef,” says
Chef Ed.
“I can’t imagine we need it all,” Car-
bone says.
“It’s the order that came today,” says Ed.
“You might want to peel back,” Car-
bone says.
We walk out, and two guys, one older
and one younger, have been standing on
the restaurant’s asphalt. Carbone jerks a
thumb toward them and swings his head
my way to shoot me a “These your peo-
ple?” stare. These are not my people. After
a beat, the younger guy walks up. They
are a father and son who have made the
couple-hour drive from Longview to Dal-
las just to meet their hero, Mario Carbone,
the man who charges Kendall Jenner and
Bella Hadid as much as $100 a plate for his
gussied-up Italian American food.
“So we drove three hours,” the younger
man says, stuttering a bit, clearly nervous.
“I’m originally from Brooklyn—”
“Brooklyn’s further than three hours
away!” Carbone says.
120 VA N I T Y FA I R
“—but my parents are from Sicily,” he
says, turning toward his dad. “We’re in
the restaurant business 43 years, my par-
ents. We drove here just for a chance to
meet you. I don’t know if you’d get in too
much trouble, but I have some Our Lady of
Rocco gear. Would you mind signing it?”
“Not at all,” Carbone says.
“You don’t understand,” the fan says.
“My wife and I got engaged on Ellis Island
six years ago and our first meal after get-
ting engaged was at Parm.” The man, who
is just over five feet tall, takes out a bag of
cigars. “These are for you—sticks just to
commemorate, and they should be right
up your alley because I kind of know your
profile,” the man says.
“You are right,” Carbone marvels.
As Carbone bends down to sign it, I get
the uncanny feeling like this is something
rehearsed—a Move. But then again, for a
certain demographic, Italian American
men who have a nostalgic vision of New
York as a romantic postwar playground,
maybe meeting Mario Carbone, whose
conjuring of a version of this world is
somewhat miraculous, is akin to an audi-
ence with a god—or at least a pope.
Did this sort of thing happen all the time?
“Not all the time, but, I mean, that guy is
acutely positioned to be a fan,” Carbone
says as he watches the two men walk away.
“I mean, that? It was like a 16-year-old and
Taylor Swift right there,” Carbone says.
ON THE EVENING of Carbone’s first ser-
vice in the Lone Star State, Lamborghini
Murciélagos peel into the tiny Design Dis-
trict strip mall and their owners hop out,
throw the keys to the valet, and walk into
the cocktail party, which straddles both
Carbone and the new restaurant concept
next door, Carbone Vino, a wine bar that
will serve Carbone staples—the Caesar, the
rigatoni—along with, in a first, pizza.
“Just shaking hands and kissing
babies,” Carbone, now in full-on papal
visit mode, says at the entrance, dressed
in chef ’s whites. He points out that, against
all odds, the horror show of a construction
zone hours earlier has been replaced by
a distinctly Texan display of conspicuous
wealth: rhinestone blazers, cowboy boots,
and looks fresh off the runway from Paris.
Tux-clad waiters wheel around little tuna
tartare bites and gooey rice balls, and
at Carbone Vino is a cornucopia of treyf
that exists at the end of a pork eater’s
dream: San Marco 24-month prosciutto
di Parma, Elevation coppa, soppressata
piccante, Leoncini mortadella, and herb-
crusted lardo that melts on the tongue for
a moment of porcine bliss.
A few minutes later, the crowds are still
a bit thin. A friend from New York who
relocated to Dallas for a job in the art world
says that in her experience, “Texans are
very set in their ways, and the New York
imports don’t really work here.” (Il Mulino
New York lasted all of two years in Dallas
and closed in 2006.)
“Dallas doesn’t like to pay high prices
for Italian unless they are in New York or
Los Angeles or Italy,” Nancy Nichols, a
longtime local food writer, wrote after the
spot closed. “However, they don’t blink
at forking over $50 for an 8-ounce filet of
beef. It’s a reality of how the majority of
palates and pocketbooks in this city roll.”
Despite such doubts, the party starts to
heat up. Several Dallas-based art collec-
tors I’d met over the years appear at the
Carbone grand opening, and they intro-
duce me to a number of young museum
trustees, who introduce me to socialites,
who introduce me to the scions of AT&T
executives—“All of Dallas seems to be
here,” says one investor as servers whip
around with trays of negronis and that
ever-present spicy rigatoni vodka. The
cocktail party becomes a full-on party, Ol’
Dirty Bastard and Biggie Smalls blasting
on the speakers, and eventually Carbone
joins Torrisi and Zalaznick by the front,
and they tell me that the place is booked
out already for two months.
“This is how we fucking do it, my
guy,” Zalaznick tells me, wine in hand.
And then he yells for Carbone, and the
two of them take me out to the parking
lot—a Move—to take in the spread that he
and the boys have created. Then another
Move: Carbone takes out one of the cigars
gifted to him, looks me in the eye, and
lights it as Sinatra hits the last high note
in “My Way.” Torrisi is standing nearby,
downing a glass of wine. Carbone is feel-
ing nostalgic, thinking about their Torrisi
Italian Specialties days.
“We called [it] a 400-square-foot rocket
ship, that’s what we told each other in our
apartment before we went to bed each
night,” Carbone says later. “This is not a
deli. It’s a rocket ship. That’s what we said.”
And then one last Move.
“Right there, you see right there?”
Zalaznick says, spilling a little wine as he
gestures to an empty lot in the Dallas night.
“Right there, we’re going to build our first
Carbone hotel.” ■

Far From the Maddow Crowd
CON TIN U ED F ROM PAGE 67 1998, it was
almost a fluke. She needed a place to
hunker down and finish her dissertation
without any distractions, and she knew
someone who had a spare room in a former
B&B. “I had no interest in New England,
no interest in the country, no interest in
winter, no interest in snow,” Maddow said.
“I figured, Oh, that’s perfect. Like, I’ll be
totally miserable and that’ll make me want
to get outta here!” But Maddow fell in love,
first with the landscape and the seasons,
which she had never experienced grow-
ing up in California, and then with Mikula,
who had hired her to do odd jobs in the
same house where they live to this day.
(They keep an apartment in Manhattan.)
“I fell in love as soon as I saw her. I didn’t
end up doing much work.”
Showing me around under a steady
drizzle, Maddow talked about the proj-
ect that had been consuming most of her
bandwidth, a historical-narrative non-
fiction podcast in the vein of Bag Man,
except this time set in World War II–era
America. She led me to a second-floor
annex that doubles as Mikula’s art studio
and Maddow’s home office, with stacks
of archival documents neatly arranged
on the floor and a whiteboard scribbled
with plot points.
The podcast, scheduled to debut this
fall, was her first pitch under the Surprise
Inside umbrella. “It’s an American history,
underappreciated story,” said Maddow,
“that has resonance for all these things
we’re dealing with today—the threat of
authoritarianism and the question of
whether or not criminal law is the appropri-
ate venue, and has the right constitutional
powers, to handle those kinds of threats.
It’s about journalism and journalistic eth-
ics, and the ability of powerful people to
manipulate American systems.” (She sold
an accompanying book to Crown.)
Maddow’s other projects include anoth-
er podcast, another book, “two potential
movies and two potential TV shows,” one
of which actually sounds a little more than
potential. “It revolves around a group of
women in post–World War II America in
Washington, D.C.,” says Susan Rovner,
the NBCUniversal executive who oversees
the company’s television entertainment
portfolio. Rovner said there was a decent
chance the show could air in 2023 on NBC’s
streaming service, Peacock, which, to be
honest, could use a high-wattage period
drama if it expects to tussle with HBOMax
and Netflix.
In this new multiplatform realm, the
measure of success for someone like
Maddow is not as cut and dried as in the
traditional cable universe, where you
know how successful you are based on
how many people watch your show every
night, which is in turn a measure of how
many brands want to advertise during
your commercial breaks. For years, mil-
lions of people tuned in to The Rachel
Maddow Show as nightly appointment
viewing. Will her future projects inspire
the same loyalty? What will success look
like for, say, a long-form Rachel Maddow
podcast, or limited series, or film adapta-
tion? Is it the number of streams? Critical
acclaim? Box office numbers? “This is
gonna be a disappointing answer,” she
says. “But for me, success is doing work
that I’m proud of. It’s about feeling like
I am free to do what I want, and to say
what I want, and to talk about things that
I think are important, and to contribute
something that wouldn’t necessarily have
been contributed had I not been the one
working on it.”
Back on her porch, Maddow talked
about the physical toll her work had taken
over the years—schlepping back and forth
between Manhattan and Massachusetts
every week, feverishly toiling at a desk 10
hours a day, every day, with bad posture
and a dash of scoliosis. In March 2017, as
she was settling into middle age, it all final-
ly caught up with her. “I was underneath
my desk trying to plug in the laptop,” she
recalled. “And I just felt—it felt like a bal-
loon burst inside my back, a wet popping
feeling that was absolutely disgusting. I
collapsed on the ground and I could not
move.” A couple months later, Maddow’s
doctor diagnosed herniated discs in her
thoracic vertebrae and gave her an injec-
tion for temporary pain management.
After a day or so, she began to develop
a severe rash and swelling so bad that it
puffed her eyes shut. She went to the hospi-
tal, where they determined she was having
a rare, potentially life-threatening allergic
reaction. “That was super scary,” she told
me, “but it resolved, and I started doing a
new kind of physical therapy that ended
up being really effective.” She said the
new work routine has been a significant
life improvement. “It doesn’t mean this is
easy or idyllic, but it is different, and that’s
what I needed.”
Maddow’s withdrawal from the nightly
news cycle comes at a moment of alarming
upheaval. The world is on fire—figuratively
and literally. Americans’ rights are being
rolled back. We’ve lost a sense of collective
truth. Maniacs and racists massacre inno-
cent people, innocent children, and our
leaders are too polarized, or too feckless,
to take any meaningful action. Extrem-
ists are ascendant, authoritarianism is en
vogue, and with two years to go until the
2024 election, our system of government
faces arguably its biggest crisis since the
founding of the republic. “2024 is gonna
be, um, you know, not a dress rehearsal,”
Maddow said. “This is the playoffs. You
know what I mean? Like, this is high
stakes, really important and determina-
tive of our future as a country. And that’s
not a fatalistic thing. That’s an edge-of-
my-seat kind of thing. That’s how I feel. I
don’t feel fatalistic about it. I feel like I’m
on the edge of my seat, and I’m convinced
of the importance of this moment.”
Depending on how it all shakes out,
viewers might end up seeing more of
Maddow than they think. The last time
she and I caught up before my final dead-
line in mid-June, it was the thick of the
January 6 hearings. Maddow was back in
New York, back on the air, coanchoring
nightly prime-time recaps from MSNBC’s
studios at 30 Rock. It was a big moment
for the network, and Maddow was fully
in the game, not off burying her nose in
historical research for some project that
wouldn’t see the light of day until months
or years down the line. Perhaps that’s why
she so firmly rejected the premise of my
follow-ups about staying relevant and her
legacy and all of that.
“I’m still working! I mean, I know 49
is old,” she said with a hint of sarcasm,
“but I’ve just done, like, eight hours of
live prime-time television in the past week.
I’m going back for another two tonight. I’m
gonna be here every night working for the
next few weeks or so.” I reframed the ques-
tion: What does she want her legacy to be?
Her answer, this time, was short and to the
point: “I wanna be proud of my life.” n
SEPTEMBER 2022 121

Fast Company
CON TIN U ED F ROM PAGE 7 7 the books on
which she built her name and on which that
name now rests—Slouching, Play It, White
Album—are her Franklin Avenue books.
BACK TO EVE. Had the Franklin Avenue
scene not died, she might’ve. So excessive
had her excesses become by late 1970 that
she had to invent a term to describe her
condition: “squalid overboogie.” She was
washed up sexually, emotionally, artisti-
cally. Away from McGrath and McGrath’s
crowd, though, she began to recover. “I
don’t really need to be told things like
what Earl tells me nowadays—things
like about how…gross I am,” she wrote
to Blum. “The less I see them the more
human I seem to be getting.”
Who Eve was seeing more of: Dan
Wakefield. Wakefield, who came to L.A.
in early 1971 to adapt Going All the Way,
his best-selling novel, was an outsider. Not
that much of an outsider, though, because
he was already close with Joan and Dunne.
Recalled Wakefield, “I called up Joan and
John. I said, ‘I’ve met this terrific girl.’ I told
them her name, and there was laughter.
And then John said, ‘Ah, yes, Eve Babitz,
the dowager groupie.’ ” (Proof of the cou-
ple’s sly careerism: It was Wakefield who
wrote the rave of Slouching for the Times.
Wakefield, an intimate of many years, is
the person Dunne referred to as “some-
one” in Blankenbaker’s documentary.)
In the fall of ’71, Eve wrote a short
piece, a reminiscence that was really a rap-
ture, about the girls of Hollywood High,
titled “The Sheik.” A few months later, it
appeared in Rolling Stone, the hippest mag-
azine of its day. And Joan made it happen.
Joan made it happen in an obvious way.
After Eve showed “The Sheik” to Wake-
field and Wakefield crabbed—Wakefield,
“I’ve always made it a point to never
have a girlfriend who was a writer”—and
after Wakefield’s agent sent Eve a let-
ter with detailed instructions on how to
get it into publishable shipshape—Eve,
122 VA N I T Y FA I R
“I hate people who tell me what to do to
improve”—Eve thrust it into the hands of
Joan, who then thrust it into the hands of
Rolling Stone editor Grover Lewis.
Joan made it happen in a subtle way as
well. She wrote Play It As It Lays, a novel
set in an L.A. that’s hell on earth even if
it looks like paradise. Eve expected this
sort of hysterical, Puritan nonsense from
Nathanael West, a New Yorker and the
writer of The Day of the Locust, which
Play It was, in so many ways, an updated
version of. And Eve would use West to
go after Joan by proxy: “People from the
East all like Nathanael West because he
shows them [L.A.’s] not all blue skies and
pink sunsets.… [I]t’s shallow, corrupt,
and ugly. I think Nathanael West was a
creep.” With Play It, Joan was, in Eve’s
view, telling people from the East, once
again, what they wanted to hear—sucking
up, basically. It was an act of betrayal by
a native daughter. “The Sheik” was Eve
defending L.A.’s honor.
Eve was in a tricky position: The person
to whom she owed the largest debt was the
person making her see red. And the debt
would only get larger, the red redder.
IN THE SUMMER of ’72, Eve was no longer
with Wakefield. Or Lewis. (After Lewis
accepted “The Sheik,” Eve moved up
north and in with him. She wrote, “I was
living in San Francisco until two things
happened, one, I decided to murder the
guy I was living with and two, I suddenly
found out I had an advance for a book.”)
The advance was from Seymour Law-
rence, who ran an imprint at Delacorte.
The book, Eve’s Hollywood, as in Not-Joan’s
Hollywood, was to be a collection. Law-
rence suggested Eve think of a unifying
principle, adding, “Joan may be able to
give you advice along these lines.”
Joan would give more than advice. It
was she and Dunne, not anyone at Dela-
corte, who edited Eve’s Hollywood. In a 1973
letter, Eve wrote, “Joan Didion and her
husband are editing [the book]. They are
terrifyingly exacting, they nearly scared
me to death a week ago telling me I was
sloppy and they were right. They are like
my best self and who can live with that?”
Nor did Joan’s promotion of Eve stop
with Eve’s writing. Eve, in a letter from the
summer of ’72: “Am in vogue this month in
the Dunne’s bathroom.… One of my post-
ers [a collage of drummer Ginger Baker] is
in there and they say, ‘California artist, Eve
Babitz,’ which is about time.” It was about
time, and it was Joan who recognized it
was about time.
Really, Eve had no stauncher support-
er or more ardent ally. As she seemed to
understand. (Why else start using Joan’s
proper name, spelling “Dunne” correctly?)
Also to resent. In a letter to Wakefield, she
describes Lewis as the editor who “opened
the doors of stardom to me.” Then, sound-
ing considerably less cocksure, “I suppose
I should be grateful but all I can think of is
that if Joan hadn’t sent him a letter in the
first place, he never would have taken the
story.” The aside tells the tale. She knew
what Joan had done for her.
And yet, on October 2, 1972, Eve wrote
Joan that letter, the one so blazingly angry
it’s still, 50 years later, hot to the touch.
You said that the only thing you liked
to do was write.… Just think if it were 200
years ago and the only thing you liked to
do was write.… I know I’m not making
sense, but the thing beyond what your
article was about was what A Room of
One’s Own is about.… The whole women’s
thing that is going on now is so stark and
obscene most of the time that no wonder
one recoils in horror.… But for a long long
long time women didn’t have any money
and didn’t have any time and were con-
sidered unfeminine if they shone like you
do.… Could you write what you write if you
weren’t so tiny, Joan?… Would the balance
of power between you and John have col-
lapsed long ago if it weren’t that he regards
you a lot of the time as a child so it’s all
right that you are famous. And you your-
self keep making it more all right because
you are always referring to your size.
The article of Joan’s that Eve is allud-
ing to: “The Women’s Movement,” New
York Times, July 30, 1972. It’s written
with Joan’s usual intelligence and grace.
Yet there’s something insidious about it.
And borderline dishonest. The women’s
movement had its problems—classism, for
one, as Joan noted. (She zinged the women
who claimed trauma from catcalls made
by “uppity proles” working construction
sites.) It also, though, had a point, and
Joan was pretending it didn’t. She wrote,
“That many women are victims of con-
descension and exploitation and sex-role
stereotyping was scarcely news, but nei-
ther was it news that other women are not:
nobody forces women to buy the package.”
Joan, in her career, had beat men at their
own game. That didn’t mean the game
wasn’t rigged, though, or that you could
win without also losing. For example,
so that her writing might be formidable,
flashy, and self-possessed, Joan made her-
self itsy-bitsy, meek, and self-doubting—a
tongue-tied wallflower. As Eve points out,
Joan emphasized, almost fetishized, her
frailty. From the closing paragraph of the
preface to Slouching: “My only advantage
as a reporter is that I am so physically
small, so temperamentally unobtrusive,
and so neurotically inarticulate that peo-
ple tend to forget that my presence runs
counter to their best interests.” What Eve
doesn’t point out, but which is also true:
Joan used her frailty to conceal her dead-
liness. She was a predator who passed
herself off as prey. The rest of that para-
graph: “And it always does. That is one
last thing to remember: writers are always
selling somebody out.”
It was Eve’s belief that Joan was selling
out women to get in good with men, as
Joan had sold out L.A. to get in good with
New York.
It embarrasses me that you don’t read
Virginia Wolffe [sic]. I feel as though you
think she’s a “woman’s novelist” and that
only foggy brains could like her and that
you, sharp, accurate journalist, you would
never join the ranks of people who sogged
around in The Waves. You prefer to be with
the boys snickering at the silly women and
writing accurate prose about Maria [Wyeth
of Play It] who had everything but Art. Vul-
gar, ill bred, drooling, uninvited Art.
Eve was tracing the connection she
believed Joan made between women and
art: alike in their volatility, their illogic,
their emotional extremes and lurid chaos.
And both, in Eve’s view, were appalling to
Joan, an affront to Joan’s orderly and aus-
tere intellect. Which means that Eve, with
her double-D breasts and overlapping
love affairs and big, unwieldy, slovenly
talent was also appalling to Joan. And she
was. Didn’t McGrath, Joan’s proxy, reject
Eve as “gross”?
Except Joan, unlike McGrath, was an
artist. (Perhaps in spite of herself.) And
Joan didn’t reject Eve. On the contrary,
Joan, whose relationship with so many
in her orbit strikes me as vampiric, nur-
tured Eve. Why? How to account for the
sympathy that Joan felt for Eve. Was it the
sympathy that Thanatos feels for Eros, yin
for yang? Meaning, could Joan and Eve
have been two forces that were, on the
surface, opposed, yet secretly in concert?
This is certainly true of their books. Eve’s
Hollywood—sunny, casual, meandering,
the littlest bit slipshod—and Play It As It
Lays—dark, airless, precise, every word
placed on the page just so—make for natu-
ral companions. They complete and reveal
one another. And to understand a particu-
lar postwar L.A., you must read both.
I imagine, too, Joan intuiting that Eve,
who didn’t care about prizes or husbands
or careers, who was interested only in fol-
lowing her own vector, was going to run
into trouble. And Eve wouldn’t disappoint.
Every pitfall that Joan avoided, she fell—
practically jumped—into. For most of her
literary life she’d be treated like a Califor-
nia cutie-pie with a typewriter. A piece of
ass who thought she was an artist. When
critics weren’t ignoring her, they were
trashing her. That’s what happened with
the very good Eve’s Hollywood. And Slow
Days, Fast Company, published in 1977
and even better—her masterwork—fared
much the same.
By the early ’80s, Eve had squalid-
overboogied herself into incoherence, and
then A.A., the moment she definitively
broke with Joan and McGrath. (Though
she’d put the moves on Griffin at a Hol-
lywood Hills party first. “He was way too
young. Everyone pounced on him. I got
him.”) “They were too seductive,” she
said. Post-sobriety, she’d write more and
she’d write well, at least in bursts. But she’d
never write another book that came close
to Slow Days. She’d publish her final book,
also her weakest, Two by Two, in 1999,
after which she’d go quiet, and nobody
seemed to care. Only in the last few years
did she begin to receive her due. By that
time her mind was shot, and she was living
in the kind of helter-skelter filth that would
give Joan a thousand nightmares.
I wonder whether the key to solving the
mystery of the Eve-Joan relationship hasn’t
always been in the Eve’s Hollywood dedica-
tion. What if it cut both ways? Sure, Eve was
grateful to Joan for “having to be who I’m
not.” Perhaps, though, Joan, whose life
wasn’t without pain—first Dunne dying,
then Quintana—but whose life made
sense, and who was lauded up until the
end—a National Book Award in 2005, a
National Medal of Arts in 2013—was even
more grateful that the reverse was also true.
And Joan’s response, unwritten, which isn’t
to say unthought, might have been:
To Eve Babitz, for having to be who
I’m not. n
The Ballad of Bitcoin
Bonnie and Clyde
CON TIN U ED F ROM PAGE 93 ran an email
marketing company, where, for a while,
she became a minor celebrity in the “cold
email” space. She then became a colum-
nist for Forbes and Inc. magazines, and
labeled herself a fashion designer and sur-
realist artist. But nothing seemed to stick.
Until she met Lichtenstein.
Now, the couple labeled themselves
“crypto investors.” Under the guise of
wanting to invest in these new start-ups,
they began meeting with crypto compa-
nies to learn more about the tools they
offered. “We get a lot of incoming inqui-
ries from people who want to invest in us,”
said the CEO of a crypto start-up who had
agreed to meet with Morgan and Lichten-
stein but immediately noticed something
off about their questions. “We saw their
backgrounds and something looked
strange. I found myself asking, Who are
these people? They had this Bonnie and
Clyde vibe about them.”
“is she homeless, is she broke,
could be either, could be
both. all we know is
r a z z l e k h a n i s f u c k i n ’ d o p e .”
THE SKIES OVER New York City were gray
on the morning of January 5, 2022, when
the feds returned to 75 Wall Street. This
time was different. They didn’t show up
at 3 a.m., when the city and the residents
of that towering brown building were
fast asleep. They didn’t approach the
doorman with a ruse about child porn
signals being sucked from the internet
into a pervert’s computer. Instead, on
that frigid January morning, around 7
a.m., agents from the FBI, IRS criminal
investigation division, and Department
of Homeland Security entered the rear of
75 with a search warrant. They boarded
the freight elevator and rode up. A knock.
An announcement. And inside an apart-
ment they went.
SEPTEMBER 2022 123
The Ballad of Bitcoin
Bonnie and Clyde
Into Dutch and Razzlekhan’s apartment.
Over the past decade or so, digital
investigators have learned how important
it is to catch perpetrators off guard during
a raid so they can’t close their laptops or
lock any of their electronics—devices that,
in this case, could offer important clues
as to where the stolen crypto was stored.
That morning, as the feds entered the
apartment, chaos set in almost imme-
diately. Clarissa—meow!—scampered
under the bed. When the couple was given
an opportunity to stay and watch the feds
rummage through their lives or leave, they
opted to go but first asked to get Clarissa.
According to the criminal complaint,
while Morgan climbed under the bed to
fetch the kitty, she grabbed her cell phone
from the nightstand and tried desperately
to lock it. When an agent saw what she was
doing, the agent had to wrestle the device
from her.
In all that day, agents retrieved $40,000
in cash tied together with pink rubber
bands, an assortment of foreign curren-
cies in clear plastic bags, and another
bag with the words “burner phone” writ-
ten in black Sharpie. There were about
50 computer tablets, phones, and other
electronics in the apartment. The feds
also found a copy of the novel The Water
Goats and another book on Japanese maps,
which had both been hollowed out to hide
money or electronics.
The evidence taken from the raid
allowed the feds to definitively tie the
online wallet associated with the Bitfinex
hack to Lichtenstein and Morgan, and a
month later they were arrested.
The duo was charged with conspiracy to
commit money laundering and conspiracy
to defraud the United States, which are
punishable by up to 25 years in prison.
In its press release announcing the
arrest, the government noted this was
the “largest financial seizure” in U.S. his-
tory. While the government had managed
to seize 94,000 Bitcoin, worth around
$3.6 billion, 25,000 of the original coins
were missing and had been, according
to the feds, “transferred out of Lichten-
stein’s wallet via a complicated money
laundering process that ended with some
of the stolen funds being deposited
into financial accounts controlled by Lich-
tenstein and Morgan.”
124 VA N I T Y FA I R
News of the arrest was like Clarissa’s
catnip for social media and the press.
On Twitter, the couple was lambasted
and ripped apart. “Never mind about the
Bitcoin hack, this vid is a crime against
humanity,” one person wrote about Mor-
gan’s rap videos. “Judge gotta add another
50 yrs to her sentence for this.” “I would
like this better if she were silent,” another
person wrote about her videos. “It would
not be humane to lock this person up with
another human being,” another wrote.
Headlines leaned into the multiple
nicknames the couple had given them-
selves over the years. “Meet the ‘Crocodile
of Wall Street’ Rapper Accused of Laun-
dering Billions of Dollars in Crypto” wrote
The Washington Post. Soon they got their
own couple’s nickname: “Bitcoin Bonnie
& Clyde.” (Or “Bitcoin Bonnie and Crypto
Clyde.”) The case against them seemed to
be so secure that they were already in talks
to secure a plea deal.
I asked one person involved in the inves-
tigation why the duo didn’t just pull an
Edward Snowden? Hop on a plane to Rus-
sia or Ukraine, where they could eat blinis
and drink vodka and launder their billions
in stolen crypto? It turns out they were
planning to do just that—going to Russia or
Ukraine or both—and hiding out far from
the reaches of the federal government, this
person explained. “That’s why they had
the passports and the cash and the books
with the cutout holes to hide electronics.
It appears they were planning to leave but
that we got them right before they had
the chance to do so.” This person added:
“There’s a scenario where we would have
entered their apartment with a search war-
rant and they were already gone.”
Looking back, the oddest thing is what
happened in the month between the time
the feds raided the couple’s home and the
moment they were arrested and charged.
While Lichtenstein remained relatively
quiet online, as he had for the past sev-
eral years, Morgan continued to post
on all of her social media accounts as if
nothing was going on. As if life were nor-
mal. She posted an early rap song she had
written, titled “Bleeding Buckets,” which
was about getting her period. “Endome-
triosis; cleaving like mitosis,” she sang.
“Feels so atrocious; lots of emotions;
makes me ferocious.” She proclaimed
it was her “fucking theme song.” Clar-
issa the cat continued to post pictures of
her outings. And Morgan continued to
tweet about crypto and investing.
You wouldn’t have believed that the
woman behind these accounts was just
days away from being arrested for conspir-
ing to launder billions of dollars in Bitcoin.
A woman who could possibly not get out of
federal prison until she was 56 years old.
Was Morgan just not that concerned
about her fate? Or was her alter ego Razzle-
khan, as her friends had suspected, actually
her way of dealing with a mounting pres-
sure she simply didn’t know how to escape?
A clue into Morgan’s psychological state
came around the same time the feds were
closing in like a suffocating demon. One
day Morgan found herself on Facebook,
and she came across a post by a friend who
had had a rough go of it a few years earlier
and who, on this particular day, posted an
image of a kintsugi pot—which, as Morgan
knew all too well from her days in the Japa-
nese club—is a piece of pottery that was
broken but had been pieced back together
with glue and golden filigree. It is meant
as a metaphor for embracing one’s flaws
and imperfections.
Below the picture, Morgan commented
that things were “not going well” for her.
“Life was not good,” and, like the pottery,
she said, “I feel broken.”
The friend saw the post and offered
a little advice: “Many of us feel broken;
hopefully some of us get put back together
again.” There was a brief pause in the con-
versation. Then Morgan responded with a
half–smiley face emoji.
A few days later, the news broke that she,
along with Lichtenstein, had been arrested
and charged with possessing $3.6 billion
in stolen Bitcoin. The hundreds of friends
that Morgan had made over the last 20
years couldn’t have been more surprised
by what they read. Of all the different alter
egos and personalities that Morgan might
have created, being a multibillion-dollar
crypto launderer was not among them.
“Shocked” was all that people who knew
Morgan and Lichtenstein could say when
I asked what they thought when they read
the news. “Shocked!”
Lichtenstein, who was deemed a
flight risk because of his Russian ties, is
currently being held in a jail in Virginia.
Morgan, who recently got her own lawyer
separate from the one she was sharing with
her husband, was allowed to return to the
apartment at 75 Wall Street. Both are cur-
rently negotiating a plea deal with the U.S.
government. Neither of them have posted
on social media since they were arrested.
“Razzle Dazzle, bitches!” n

Vintage Audrey
CON TIN U ED F ROM PAGE 99 a waitress
part-time for three months at a diner not
far from their home. (Also true. “I wanted
something to do and I knew the women
there, and they were like, ‘Come on in.’ ”)
Her husband went back to school to
become a practicing psychoanalyst.
She was alienated and at home, for the
first time—along with everyone else. The
hustle-culture sterility gave way to a slow
era of cozy pandemic maximalism, one in
which those grandmillennials wore nap
dresses on Zoom calls in homes outside
of cities that they absconded to for months
on end. She would read her son a book,
It’s OK, Slow Lizard, about how all these
animals are so anxious and going as fast
as they can and doing a million things, and
then there is this little lizard there remind-
ing them that there is a different way to
live. “I became very into that, philosophi-
cally.” So Gelman built a world around
that feeling, albeit one in which everything
was for sale.
The Six Bells was the productive appli-
cation of hundreds of hours of reading
through stacks of G.K. Chesterton and
Anthony Horowitz and watching all the
British crime shows there ever were. Gel-
man and Pardue hired an Irish illustrator
named Niamh Langton to draw a map
of the town that would be interactive,
where people could scroll over the differ-
ent locations and click on characters. She
says she didn’t know this at the time, but
Walt Disney’s first illustration of Disney
World looks very similar to the Six Bells’
interactive map. She showed me a photo
of a brass plaque hung where you walk into
Disneyland that reads, “Here you leave
today and enter the world of yesterday,
tomorrow and fantasy.” So, yes, it’s a com-
mercial enterprise. “But in some ways,”
says Gelman, “that is secondary, because
you are so absorbed by the storytelling.”
There is a snapback to reality from
running a company on the unicorn track,
managing tens of thousands of square feet
of real estate and hundreds of employ-
ees, to stocking antiques and baskets in
an eensy neighborhood storefront. But
the smallness so far suits her. “There is a
grinding pressure that comes along with
growth and scale, and it can end up degrad-
ing things that begin small and special, and
I did want to resist that here.” There are the
things that you think are going to make you
happy, she said, and the things that actu-
ally make you happy.
So far, customers seem happy to be in
her world again, even if they don’t want
to admit it. In a piece for The Cut, writer
Danielle Cohen wrote that she “rolled
my eyes so hard my eyeballs just about
left my skull” when she heard about the
concept. “Drawn in by the prospect of hate-
browsing this problematic fairy tale/brand
concept,” she continued, “I soon came to
the realization that, actually, I would very
much like to buy some of this stuff [and]…
frankly, I’m ready to move in.” The Cut
posted the story to its Instagram referring
to Gelman as “disgraced founder,” prompt-
ing scores of comments about how harsh
the tone of the post was. (The word dis-
graced has since been removed from the
post without a note.) The antiques sold
out so fast—the first week—that she had
to make an emergency trip to Virginia to
restock. So, too, did the little soaps made
to look like purple grapes, made by a family
that’s been crafting soap in the northern
Lebanese city of Tripoli since 1803.
Online shoppers are spending more than
their in-store counterparts, and they have
hailed from faraway lands: Plano, Texas;
Birmingham, Alabama; Perkiomenville,
Pennsylvania; Winooski, Vermont; and
Bremen, Maine.
Just as the Six Bells aesthetic of quar-
antined ladies needlepointing in their
gardens supplanted the aspirational
perfectionism of The Wing, so, too,
tastes will shift again. “I actually think
the aesthetic of the Six Bells is rooted in
changelessness,” Gelman told me, “which
is why it supersedes trend.” In June, she
hosted the Six Bells’ first summer fête at
Inga’s Bar in Brooklyn Heights, where
editors and writers from Architectural
Digest, The Wall Street Journal, and Vogue,
brand founders, and friends of Gelman’s
drank orange ginger spritzes and solved
a semi-immersive mystery hosted by
the Barrow’s Green town gossip, Ursula
Lumley. Another gathering is planned for
the fall. She isn’t thinking about opening
a second location yet, though she’s not
not dreaming of what’s next. The Ver-
mont Country Store, a company she has
loved since she was a child, comes to mind.
According to the map, Barrow’s Green has
a fictional inn, which begs the question of
whether Gelman could open a real one. “I
think the way to evolve and grow a brand
like this is through new forms, and not
necessarily through changing the prod-
uct to shift to whatever the new tastes
emerge,” she says. “I’m approaching this
with a different mentality.” n

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IG: @mondoinfinito_official
Loominate’s designs are rooted in innovation and
are dedicated to minimising environmental
impact. This two-piece set uses a unique fabric
made from an innovative blend of tencel,
recycled materials, and pineapple leaf fibre.
Incorporating upcycled pineapple leaves with
other recycled materials balances sustainability
without sacrificing on style and comfort.
Visit loominate-designs.com
Visit mitchdesunia.com IG: @mitchdesunia
IG: @loominate.designs
ORZA
Aurélie Alezera created
ORZA, a brand of
couture swimwear with
a unique design,
created with the
meticulousness of a
goldsmith. Her new
collection Fruit, invokes
the elegance of the
fifties, nature, and
with jewels of the sea. For LA-born Promesa, true style and beauty are
Her collection
includes apple green to inspire and empower women to look and feel
and pineapple in their very best, you’re sure to fall for Promesa’s
handmade glass beads,
€380. Photography by
Visit shoppromesa.com IG: @shoppromesa
MOLINA SUAZ
Molina Suaz
is an
Australian
based leather
goods brand
letting you
carry a touch
of elegance
wherever you
go. Their
products are
made with top
quality, vegan
and genuine
leather and
designed with
MONDO INFINITO CLOTHING
Born in Barcelona
2022, Mondo
Infinito Clothing
was designed by a
team of young
creatives. They
arose with the idea
of creating an ideal,
sustainable
wardrobe, including
timeless,
sophisticated and
high-quality pieces,
with a versatile
collection including
Visit lindameyerhentschel.com
IG: @lindameyerhentschel
MITCH DESUNIA
Mitch Desunia
specialises in creating a
range of luxury
garments, from haute
couture, including bridal,
to a range of high-end
ready-to-wear pieces
and accessories.
Featured is a design
from her SS 2023
collection, modelled by
Leona Andersen and
photographed by MJ
Feliciano. Styling is
also by Nash August
and makeup by MUA
Yves Marcelo.
Visit lxryapparel.com IG: @lxryappvrel
PROMESA
more than skin or fabric deep. On a mission
trendy yet wearable autumn styles made
with quality fabrics, craftsmanship,
and flattering shapes.
ARCTIC AFFAIR
Arctic Affair creates
luxury knitwear,
perfect for the working
woman. Born from
a need to look elegant
whilst also wanting
to feel warm and cosy
when sitting in
business meetings.
All garments are
produced in Italy using
high-quality, luxurious
yarn while respecting
environmental and
ethical standards.
Photo by Silja Tõntson.
Visit arcticaffair.com
IG: @arctic_affair
LINDA MEYER-HENTSCHEL
Linda Meyer-
Hentschel believes
you deserve the
best the world has
to offer. So, her
collections use the
finest fabrics,
handcrafted with
an impeccable eye
for detail in Italy to
create a wardrobe
of timeless,
must-have
essentials which
can be worn from
season to season.
LXRY APPAREL
LXRY Apparel is a
fashion house
based in Atlanta
redefining the idea
of luxury.
Specialising in
outerwear, the
brand intentionally
contrasts high-end
garments with
nostalgic vintage
touches, providing
your wardrobe with
an authentic yet
stylish edge.
Photography by
Taylor Moore.
 VANIT Y FAIR ADVERTISING FEATURE

The Vanity Cabinet

1. Meet the double cleansing duo by YEMI COSMETICS, that will change 1 3 4
2
your life. This duo contains their sulfate-free “Soothing Gel Cleanser” and
“Hydrating Cream Cleanser”. They highly recommend adding these gems to
your daily skincare routine to help skin appear hydrated and glowy. Visit
yemicosmetics.com IG: @yemicosmetics
2. ARIADNE ATHENS. Overnight Renewal Serum is infused with
Bio-retinol, a natural cutting-edge ingredient. This product aims to
reduce the feeling of irritation and reduce the appearance of
expression lines and wrinkles. Your complexion will appear
refreshed and luminous. Visit ariadne-athens.com
IG: @ariadneathens
3. Epilixir Ingrown Oil by GAIA BARE CARE. The Epilixir Ingrown Oil
Wax and Shave Aftercare is infused with oils. It is designed to be the
answer to every goddess’s ingrown hairs, razor burns and bumps. Its
plant-based exfoliant aims to gently remove dead skin, and reduce the 5 6
appearance of blemishes and the feeling of inflammation. It leaves the skin
with a goddess glow. Visit gaiabarecare.com IG: @gaiabarecare
4. DÁRSY creates products that help give you an Aussie glow. Featured is 7
their Sweet Facial Oil, a fast-absorbing formula which allows for an effortless
application process. Designed to be simple and feel effective, making it
super-easy to use on its own (or alongside your existing products) every
day. Visit darsy.com.au IG: @darsyskincare
5. Inspired by Ayurveda and backed by science. BUMI BOTANICAL’s
luxurious Hair Oil contains just 12 naturally derived ingredients, including
Amla, Hibiscus and Fenugreek. It aims to nourish your hair and scalp with
moisture, leaving it feeling revitalised. Visit bumibotanicals.com
IG: @bumibotanicals
6. DR BIANCA PISCIONERI ELEMENTET. Elegant and sensory. An
exclusive experience of biomolecular science and intrinsic beauty of 8
nature. Their Hydra Re-New Rejuvenating Face Elixir is an exquisite 9
infusion of apples, flowers, Caribbean cocoa, and Alpine microalgae.
Helping to reduce the appearance of fine lines, leaving your skin nourished
with moisture, revealing a fresh-looking glow. Visit elementet.com.au IG: @elementetbeauty
7. DIPPED IN HUNNEE inspires you to create unique looks using their vegan and cruelty-free 10
eyeshadow palettes. Be bold or subtle, perfect for everyday use. Highly pigmented with a
long-lasting and easy to blend formula. Their mission is to make beauty stand out on all skin
tones. Visit dippedinhunnee.co.uk IG: @dippedinhunnee
8. L’ÉTÉ SKIN introduces their powerful, petite Nano Current. It is a facial toning device that
is designed to make skin appear toned, lifted and contoured whilst also helping to reduce the
appearance of fine lines for a temporary visible lift. Visit leteskin.com IG: @leteskin
9. A true masterpiece lies in the essence of MONA LISA. Based in Los Angeles, this timeless
scent created from pure amber oils attuned with Herkimer Diamonds inspires the muse
from within. Visit monalisapure.com IG: @monalisapureoil
10. Discover brighter looking skin with CLAY AND OLIVE SKINCARE’s Anti-Aging 11
Super Elixir. Recommended as a daily primer under makeup and moisturisers, this serum
aims to awaken skin giving you a natural-looking glow. Ingredients include Vitamin C,
Vitamin E and Ferulic Acid. Visit clayandoliveskincare.com IG: @clayandoliveskincare
11. Introducing LANEWAY BEAUTY’s cult BB Crème, a glow-inducing skin tint that is

TO APPEAR ON THESE PAGES, CONTACT CLASSVANITYFAIR@CONDENAST.CO.UK OR CALL 020 7152 3705

designed to leave your skin appearing smooth with a radiant look. This five in one formula is a
beauty breakthrough that aims to combine cosmetic and skincare benefits for a healthy-
looking complexion. Visit lanewaybeauty.com.au IG: @lanewaybeauty_
12. LUKA DAYSPA & SALON, and their in-house professional range is taking the
beauty world by storm. The Nocturnus Facial Oil is light, dry and emits a delicate 12
amber scent. It contains Bakuchiol as a natural retinol alternative. It is designed to 13 15
14
be the perfect anti-aging masterpiece for sensitive skin. Visit shop-luka.co.uk
IG: @luka_dayspa_salon
13. RESTORVA’s Luminous Botanical Moisturiser is derived from desert
botanicals. The formula is as natural as it is luxurious. It is designed to leave your
skin feeling hydrated, smooth the appearance of impurities, and give you a
radiant-looking glow. Visit restorva.com IG: @restorva
14. GLOBYJADE creates all-natural, organic body butters with a sweet aroma
of Shea Butter, infused with special oils. It leaves your skin feeling soft and
nourished with moisture with an amazing glow and is perfect for any skin type.
Featured is their Pumpkin Spice Body Butter. Visit globyjadec.bigcartel.com
IG: @globyjade
15. The Nourishing Hair Oil by FAVEN ESSENTIALS features 21 handpicked
extracts and essential oils, including organic hemp, tea tree oil and ginger root
extract. This oil nourishes the hair with moisture, helping to reduce the feeling
of an itchy and dry scalp, leaving your hair appearing shiny. Visit 19
favenessentials.com IG: @favenessentials
16. ‘Oil I Dream Of’ by AMARE VITA SKINCARE is a concentrated night oil that
contains coenzyme Q10. Ingredients include argan, jojoba, rice bran, rosehip, 16 18
borage, and evening primrose oils. This product aims to help with the appearance of 17
skin inflammation and leaves the skin feeling moisturised. Visit
amarevitaskincare.com IG: @amarevitaskincare
17. AZIO BEAUTY’s Intense Lifting Eye Serum helps to target the appearance of
wrinkles and puffiness. It is formulated with a potent peptides complex and seven
types of hyaluronic acid. It aims to leave the skin appearing brighter. Visit
aziobeauty.com IG: @azio.beauty
18. KANZEN SKINCARE’s Pre-Makeup Bacteria Barrier helps to keep bacteria
at bay whilst working in natural harmony with your body. Kanzen Skincare is
natural, vegan, cruelty free and is dermatologically tested to help cleanse and
reduce the the appearance of acne and redness in all age groups. Visit
kanzenskincare.com IG: @kanzenskincare
19. The 3Way Face and Body Sponge by CYLK expands up to three times in size
when wet, allowing easy application of makeup and self-tan. Its soft texture helps
create the appearance of flawless skin, allowing you to look your best. Visit
cylkbeauty.com IG: @cylkbeauty
VANITY FAIR ADVERTISING FEATURE

Just A Sparkle
3 1. PRAIRIE SKY JEWELRY CO is an Oklahoma
1 2 based jewellery brand focused on handcrafting
heirloom quality, one-of-a-kind pieces using
traditional silversmithing techniques. Featured
is the ‘Aureus’ pendant in sterling silver with an
authentic ancient Roman coin, and a raw black
diamond. Visit prairieskyjewelryco.com
IG: @prairieskyjewelryco
2. At the intersection of affordability and quality is
ANNIE AUSTEN, a brand focused on tarnish-resistant,
hypoallergenic, and size-inclusive pieces. From intricate pendants to
6 adjustable rings, they believe that every day is a special enough occasion to
wear something you love. Visit annieausten.com IG: @shop_annie_austen
5 3. THE LITTLE THINGS NYC creates unique pieces of jewellery, designed
to celebrate the little moments. Designs are inspired by geometric shapes
and are sustainably handcrafted in NYC. The Accartocciati collection is
inspired by crumpled paper, encouraging us to find the beauty within
4 imperfection. Visit thelittlethings-nyc.com IG: @thelittlethings_nyc
4. ALANA MARIA is a contemporary Australian fashion label dedicated to
wearable luxury. Their collection combines a sophisticated range of statement and
everyday pieces. All pieces are designed and handmade to a standard of perfection in
Sydney, by a team of empowered young women. Visit alanamariajewellery.com
IG: @alanamariajewellery
5. BY RAE offers the perfect high-quality, affordable everyday jewellery. Their pieces are
waterproof and non-tarnish meaning that they can be worn throughout summer in the sea
and the shower without fear of turning green. Sustainability sits at the heart of By Rae,
7 they plant a tree for every order placed and all their jewellery is packaged in recycled
cotton pouches. Visit byraejewellery.co.uk IG: @byraejewellery
6. MY BIJOUX is a Canadian jewellery brand that believes jewellery is so much more than
just an accessory – jewellery tells stories, evokes emotions, and enables people to express
8 themselves. They offer a well curated collection of everyday pieces that are high quality,
hypoallergenic, and durable that will last for years to come. Visit mybijouxtoronto.com
IG: @mybijoux.toronto
7. ANNE X JOSEPH is a luxury accessories brand, specialising in bespoke jewellery which
incorporates high-quality gold-filled chains, freshwater pearls, crystals and more. Founder and
Designer, Daniele Klien, states that each piece is made for the person who exudes
class, style, confidence, and sophistication. Visit annexjoseph.com
IG @annexjoseph
10 8. NOE & MANE is an inclusive jewellery brand with an aim to challenge
the stereotypical views surrounding the jewellery industry. They
11 specialise in an effortless approach to compliment everybody’s individual
style. Pieces can be layered or worn individually, without having to
overthink the styling process. Everyone deserves to sparkle. Visit
9
noeandmane.com IG: @noe_and_mane
9. AVIKA is a Thai jewellery boutique founded from the passion of the
owner. Their pieces are classic, timeless and versatile – perfect for
every occasion and all ages. They meticulously select special materials,
such as pearls from the Andaman Sea, when creating their jewellery.
Visit a-vi-ka.com IG: @jewellery.avika
10. With great attention to detail and a deep love for colourful
crystals, ERGINA JEWELS creates Greek handcrafted treasures to
be passed on from mothers to daughters, from elders to youngsters.
Visit erginajewels.com IG: @erginajewels
12 11. FULLORD Enkai Earrings in 18k rose gold with black ceramic diamonds.
13 Inspired by the traditional MASAI spear, a childhood memory of the
Founder and Creative Director Sandrine Thibaud who was born and raised in
14 Africa. Visit fullord.com IG: @fullord_geneva
12. BENEKE JEWELLERY is a new brand which uses the natural world as design
inspiration. From the colours and delicacy of florals to star constellations, their aim is to
capture Earth’s beauty and translate this into high-quality, affordable jewellery. Featured
are their Serenity Hoop Earrings. Visit benekejewellery.com IG: @benekejewellery
13. Get bigger, better, and more brilliance for less at MIADONNA. The woman-owned fine
jewellery company pioneered the Lab-Grown Diamond and Gemstone industry.
15 Handcrafted, ethical and luxurious, using 100% recycled gold and platinum, each piece is
bespoke and timeless. Certified B Corporation. Visit their website miadonna.com and
IG: @miadonnadiamond
14. Female owned, NANÈ COLLECTION embodies the strength and beauty of Nanè
(Nah-neh), the Armenian ancient warrior Goddess of Wisdom and Motherhood, who also
inspired their collection. The brand provides high-quality, meaningful pieces to remain
timeless within a jewellery collection. Visit nanecollection.com IG: @_nanecollection_
15. Born in 2011, EDGAR NAVARRO meticulously creates luxury handmade jewellery that
embeds pure creativity and style. Pieces are inspired by Edgar’s curiosity towards the universe
and are created by Guatemalan hands, which use ancestral techniques and inspiration to
produce a range of bespoke pieces. Visit navarroofficial.com IG: @navarroofficial
16. Inspired by the art of fragrance, JOSÉPHINE DE STAËL revives Parisian Art
16 Nouveau fine jewellery techniques to reveal the polysensory wonders of the natural
world. Paris, London and Milan-trained designer and jeweller, Joséphine has created
a summer collection featuring strawberries, cherries, lemons and the featured
Ukrainian sunflower – available online and at Flying Solo in Soho, New York City.
Each jewel is hand-sculpted in wax, cast in silver and 18k gold and/or
enamelled by Joséphine and features Japanese hand-woven silver/gold
thread. Visit josephinedestael.com IG: @josephinedestaeljewellery
17. Las Vegas-based brand EARTH SAGE JEWELRY was created to honour
spirituality. They have three stunning collections: Talisman, Secret Garden, and
17 Earth Stone, each created using the lost wax casting method. Visit
earthsagejewelry.com IG: @earthsagejewelry
 VANIT Y FAIR ADVERTISING FEATURE

18. THE JEWELLERY SET creates exclusive, versatile sterling silver jewellery.
Each piece is handcrafted and focuses on bringing beauty and wearability 18 19
together. They offer everyday pieces plus more elaborate pieces for a statement
jewellery kind-of-day. Visit thejewelleryset.com IG: @thejewelleryset
19. Based in Canada, CAROLILY FINERY designs and meticulously
creates stunning handcrafted statement jewellery that embodies a
sense of self-expression and the notion that we should celebrate life at
every stage. They use sterling silver, hypoallergenic stainless steel,
pearls and gemstones to craft pieces that are beautiful in appearance
and versatile in use. The brand is mother-daughter owned and inspired
by female empowerment. Featured is their Carol Necklace – the
sparkling combination of pearls and crystals makes this a truly
glamorous necklace. Visit carolily.com IG: @carolily_finery
20. THE KADAI is a social enterprise based in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo 20 21
that engages local communities to create timeless pieces that reflect 22
their cultural diversity. Elevating and empowering one community at a
time, The Kadai strives to bring you closer to the cultural wonders of
Borneo. Visit thekadai.com and IG: @thekadaiofficial
21. Beautifully designed and handcrafted in Virginia
RIINA METTAS JEWELRY offers stylish, elegant and versatile pieces.
Established by Estonian-born Riina, this brand is influenced by modern, innovative
and simple Nordic designs. This brand aims to offer high-quality, stylish,
handmade jewellery to effortlessly transform women’s business or evening wear, 23
with striking and elegant statements. Browse the coveted designs at
riinamettas.com and IG: @riinamettasjewelry
22. GILDED GIRL ACCESSORIES designs lightweight, sculptural jewellery by
hand in 14k gold fill and sterling silver. Specialising in vegan leather and pearl
designs, each piece is a limited-edition work of art – like the individuals who wear
them. Visit gildedgirlaccessories.com IG: @gildedgirlaccessories
23. With a focus on quality and affordability, LIS THE LABEL aims to bring stylish
26
pieces for women and men that are non-tarnish and hypoallergenic. Mixing
25
gold and silver tones, Lis the Label has a large variety of designs, from basics
to statement pieces for any jewellery lover. Visit shoplisthelabel.com
IG: @lis.the.label 24
24. MARE DE VETRO introduces curated collections that showcase the
most definitive pieces for the modern woman. They combine traditional
hand craftsmanship with the finest materials, and integrate a design
ethos that prioritises purity and integrity. Visit maredevetro.com.au
IG: @maredevetro.seaofglass
25. COSENZA NYC is an American-based, handcrafted jewellery brand
founded by cousins Mia Selvaggio and Maria Gennarelli-Zaccaria. Their curated 27
collection of gold-filled and vermeil jewellery is inspired by the beaches and castles
of Cosenza in Italy. They offer international shipping. Visit cosenzanyc.com
IG: @cosenzanyc
26. Celebrate the end of summer with the Skye Bead Soup Earrings by FLUX
STUDIO. Each pair is unique and features genuine Tourmaline and Garnet 28
gemstones and glass beads in a beautiful array of summery hues. Switch out your
hoops with different charms using the gold-filled clasp – the style options are
endless. Visit shopfluxstudio.com IG: @shopfluxstudio

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27. VINTAGE PARIS JEWELRY takes you on a journey to the past with vintage
and antique jewellery circa 1800’s-1990’s. Their pieces are crafted from semi-
precious stones and precious metals, with handmade pieces inspired by and 29
infused with vintage components. See the full collection at 30
vintageparisjewelry.com IG: @vintageparisjewelry
28. Every bracelet by CANDY BEADS is handmade to order. Made with Healing
Crystals or 14K Gold Filled Beads, these bracelets are strung on flexible elastic
and personalised to bring individual meaning to the wearer – a modern take on
nostalgia for friendship bracelets. Visit candybeads.co.uk IG: @candy_beads1
29. At SUSANA GRAU BATLLE, they don’t want to make jewellery, they want to
create a mark of consciousness in an unconscious world. Through the brand’s
creativity and authenticity, Susana’s one-of-kind collection pays tribute to the
earth and its feminine force. Featured is the Kingdom 2 piece made from
chrysocolla azurite, garnet mandarin and tsavorite in 18 karat rose gold.
Visit susanagraubatlle.co IG: @susanagraubatlle
30. ALLISON AVERY is your new demi-fine jewellery brand designed 32
to make every woman feel unique. Allison’s fun and edgy pieces will make
you feel like a Goddess whether on vacation or in a board meeting. There’s
no such thing as too much bling. Visit allisonaveryco.com
31
IG: @allisonaverycollection
31. THE FINISHING PIECE is an accessories brand most known for their
statement jewellery. They are an inclusive brand who believes that accessories
finish an outfit. Visit thefinishingpiece.com IG: @the.finishing.piece
32. TIPSY HYPSIE offers a range of handmade jewellery, preserving mother
nature’s beauty by using dried and pressed botanicals, paper butterflies, 34
suncatcher glass, sea findings, crystals, gemstones and more in their creations.
Visit tipsyhypsie.ie IG: @tipsyhypsie
33. CRISTINA LUCIA is a Polymer Clay Jeweller based in Sweden. Her designs 33
are bold, contemporary and playful, perfect to highlight any outfit. Collections
come in a variety of colours and styles; each piece is handmade. The earrings are
lightweight, comfortable and safe for sensitive ears. Visit cristinalucia.se
IG: @cristinaluciasweden
34. ZAVIA WALKER’s handmade earrings are super lightweight; you won’t notice
you’re wearing them, but others will. They use fun colour combinations, so their
pieces are sure to be conversation starters. Zavia Walker invites you to embrace
your individuality, while exuding confidence in your personal style. Visit
zaviawalker.com IG: @shopzaviawalker
VANITY FAIR ADVERTISING FEATURE

A Pick Of The Best

3 4 1. STIVALI NEW YORK handcrafts aspirational yet
1 2 attainable, ethically handmade leather footwear
for women. Stivali New York stands as a symbol
of timeless sophistication and effortless style
whilst incorporating quality and comfort.
Their recent collection, The Origin
Collection, is simultaneously inspired by the
history of Colombia and modern sensibilities
of NYC. Visit stivalinewyork.com
IG: @stivalinewyork
2. MI MADAS TI MARGARITA is a
women-led, Greek jewellery workshop creating
their pieces with sustainability in mind.
Geometry loves bold colours, and combining the
austerity of their classic statement Trapeze earrings
5 6 7 with magnificent rubies, they have created a very beautiful
pair to wear and impress. Visit mimadastimargarita.gr
IG: @mimadastimargarita
3. ELISA FRIMAN is a ceramic artist who makes unique
ceramic objects and ceramic art. Elisa’s work is to a great
extent about intuition, playful colours, shapes, layers and
contrast. She is also interested in utilising recycled
pottery as a basis for her work. Visit elisafriman.com
IG: @elisafriman
4. BRAMWELL BROWN CLOCKS, a family-run business
that handmakes all their Weather Clocks at their workshop
in Hampshire. Designed to be incredible gifts or the
finishing touch to a family home, these clocks’ novel
mechanical movements will inspire nostalgia. The featured
“Weather Clock” moves its mechanical clouds depending on changes in barometric air
pressure. Prices start at £395 with free UK delivery. Visit bramwellbrown.com
IG: @bramwellbrown
8 9 5. GAIA HOMEWARE, a mother and daughter venture based in Kent that will help you
create a luxurious and stylish space with their beautiful eco-friendly furniture and
homeware. All designed and produced to protect the planet and bring a touch of nature
to your home. Alex, co-founder, creator and furniture maker offers a bespoke service
for her handcrafted furniture and wooden wares. Appointments can be made through
their website or Instagram. Visit gaia-homeware.com IG: @gaiahomewareuk
6. Quality meets craftsmanship at ANTONI BARCELONA. They offer a luxurious
range of hand-blown and painted artisan glassware, embellished with mesmerising
colours and patterns. Visit antonibarcelonaglass.com IG: @antonibarcelonaglass
7. IQUAR, founded by Paris-born and London-based designer Matilda de Lageneste,
creates a range of hand-sewn silk scarves. Manufactured in the UK, the
11 colourful designs aim to bring a versatile addition to everyday styling. Visit
10 iquarparis.com IG: @iquar__
8. Everyone’s going wild for KORRFLEX. Their lush faux suede workout mats
are made from sixteen recycled plastic bottles and natural tree rubber. Featuring
six luxe colours that match with any home decor, or roll up for the gym and yoga.
Designed in Australia. Visit korrflex.com.au IG: @korrflex
9. BAILIES COFFEE ROASTERS, based in Belfast, sources some of the best
coffees from around the world. Crafting world-class coffee experiences; from
Espresso Blends, Single Origins and Microlot coffees that showcase the skilled
labour of their farming partners. Visit bailiescoffee.com IG: @bailiescoffee
10. Elly founded ELLY HOME DECOR to help others de-stress and bring peace
and wellbeing into their homes. Her soy and coconut wax scented candles and
pillows are handcrafted with love and beautifully packaged in her studio in
Trinidad and Tobago. Her candles are available in four sizes and nearly 40
scents. Use code VanityFair15 for 15% off (expires 30/09/22). Photographer:
Alicia Pierre. Visit ellyhomedecor.com IG: @ellyhomedecor
11. At SELF-CARE SUNDAYS, they believe in routine practices
12 13 that make us feel peaceful and serene. Their natural soy candles
are blended with a mix of essential oils and made with 100%
domestically grown soy wax, each one individually handcrafted to
assist you in your personal self-care routine. Visit:
shopselfcaresundays.com IG: @shopselfcaresundays
12. WOLF’s effortlessly sophisticated jewellery cases combine the
finest materials with over five generations of handmade tradition.
Interiors are treated with Lusterloc™ to keep your jewellery
sparkling and ready-to-wear. Made for home and travel with
designs for every taste. They have the perfect jewellery box for
everyone. Visit wolf1834.com IG: @wolf1834
14 13. LOOK DOLLICIOUS is a nineties inspired, accessories haven for
the eccentric twentysomethings. Everything is handmade with love,
with the highest of quality. Shop their eclectic range of luxurious
handmade gold Tarot decks, scented candles, snazzy keychains, bags
and more. Visit mylookdollicious.com IG: @lookdollicious
14. ARAW is an artisanal ice cream company inspired by vibrant
cultures and authenticity from around the world. Their ice cream aims
to deliver a sense of childhood nostalgia with every scoop. Their
unique and unexpected flavour combinations help give that vibrant
feeling. All their ice creams are made with natural, thoughtfully
sourced ingredients – no shortcuts, preservatives, artificial flavours or
nasties. Visit arawlondon.com IG: @arawlondon
 VANIT Y FAIR ADVERTISING FEATURE

15. CREATED BY ZOE offers a bespoke range of

15 16 17
premium, personalised prints. Providing high-quality,
eco-conscious gift ideas for all. Capture, celebrate
and commemorate all of life’s special moments, with a
timeless print from Created By Zoe. Visit
createdbyzoe.com IG: @createdbyzoe_
16. ELEGANTLY BOXED offer a unique range of
carefully curated gift boxes. Their focus is supporting
Black owned and small British businesses to offer
customers a beautifully presented gift for a friend,
colleague or loved one. Use code VanityFair30 to get
30% off (expires 30/10/22). Visit
elegantlyboxed.co.uk IG: @elegantlyboxed 18
19 20 21
17. DOLLY ‘N’ STAN is a British-based,
luxury dog grooming brand specialising in
fragrance sprays to keep dogs smelling and
feeling fresh. All of their fragrances are
vegan, cruelty-free and packed with
vitamins B3, B5, B6, C and E. Visit
dollynstan.co.uk IG: @dollynstan
18. TRACEY COOPER designs
contemporary homeware and gifts. Her work
is vibrant and joyful, bringing colour and
originality into the home. Celebrating British
manufacturing ensures the highest quality
fabrics and craftsmanship for all her
products. For unique quality homeware 22 23
visit traceycooper.co.uk
IG: @tracey.cooper.artist
19. Enjoy the pleasure of sharing moments
with luxury and unique tableware pieces
with ALEGORIA CASA. Based in Brazil,
their products are made with unique
watercolours and artisanal techniques.
Visit alegoriacasa.com.br
IG: @alegoria.casa
20. LA MÈCHE is home to some of the
most unique and exquisite candles. All
individually handcrafted in Sydney,
Australia, using a natural soy wax blend.
Discover the La Mèche range online. Visit
lameche.com.au IG: @lamechecandles
21. A personal masseuse to target your
cramps. NOMISK’s Maia is a warm,
relaxing massage that hits all the right
spots. The combination of heat and
massage therapy helps to soothe the feeling of 24
cramps and reduce the appearance of bloating.
Visit nomisk.com IG: @nomisklife

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22. MODAYA is home to luxury, yet affordable
essentials for daily wear. From creating sketches
and moulds, to melting metals and creating the
finished product, each piece is designed and
conceptualised in Los Angeles. Their curated
collection offers chic, timeless pieces that will
never go out of style. Visit modaya.com
IG: @modaya
23. BIAMO is a New York-based boutique that
specialises in luxurious handmade Italian silk
scarves. Their unique design includes a built-in
face covering, making this the perfect accessory
for work, travel or social gatherings. Biamo is
Luxury with a Twist. Visit biamodesigns.com 26
IG: @biamo.designs
24. GLOWSAINT launched in 2022 with the aim
of providing sustainable, vegan-friendly and
cruelty-free luxury products. All their candles are
25
made in the UK using coconut wax and eco-friendly
methods. They offer worldwide shipping, use code
VANITYFAIR for 15% off your order (expires
01/11/22). Visit glowsaintlondon.com IG: @glowsaint
25. LOVE LANE LONDON offers prêt-à-porter
evening wear and bridal accessories for eco-
conscious fashionistas. Mix and match elegant
dresses with trendy capes and exquisite hair
accessories, including their Swarovski Pearl String
which can be worn as a headband, necklace, or
bracelet. Items are sustainably made with love in
London. Visit lovelanelondon.com
IG: @lovelanebridal
26. BUNNIE CADDIE has reinvented organisation
when it comes to your little one. Stylish yet
functional, seen here is a beautifully neutral caddie
with thoughtfully designed compartments to ensure
you have everything you need at arms reach. Visit
bunniecaddie.com IG: @bunniecaddie
VANITY FAIR ADVERTISING FEATURE

State Of The Art

3 1. RAY DAK LAM is a designer and illustrator from Edmonton,
1 2
Alberta. His work is characterised by bright colours, playful
geometric shapes, and bold shading techniques. He’s worked
for big players within the tech, design and creative industries.
Visit: raydaklam.com IG: @raydaklam
2. AMY TODMAN is an artist from Scotland currently living
between Beirut and Yerevan. Full of common objects and
geometries, her paintings are close communications with the
viewer. Distinctive and sensitive, her odd compositions
combined with a playful use of colour and line brings the
strange or uncanny to the surface. Visit amytodman.com
and @amytodman on IG.
4 5 6 3. Bankoleart – UK based Artist, DANLADI KOLE BAKO
has been creating Drum Art for over 20 years. His latest
work ‘’Bejewelled Series’’ was created under ethical
conditions using plant-based membranes and
embellished with authentic, precious stones ranging from
rubies, sapphires and emeralds. This artist uses
traditional media and new technologies to create works
that explore many issues, such as environmental
conservation, culture, the preservation of native heritage
and ecology. Visit itooknw.wixsite.com/bakoart
IG: @bankoleart
4. BARBRO P. BISMO. Inspired by the contrasting light
7 and colours in the raw nature of Northern Norway. She
often paints intuitively by inner images, mood, and
feelings. She explores the chaos of life expressed
through intense and captivating play with colours. Visit
barbrobismoart.no IG: @barbrobismoart
5. Contemporary artist, EVELYN RAPIN, focuses on
musical themes in her painting, drawing and collage
works. She produces a very limited edition of high-quality
archival prints from her original pop art collages. For
more information, visit her website evelynrapin.com and follow her IG @evelynrapinstudios
9
6. AUTUMN HUES ART produces uncommonly original abstract paintings that explore the
utility of media and the ability to elicit climbing inquisition and appreciation of fine detail.
8
Connect with these pieces at autumnhuesart.com or follow her IG @autumnhuesart
7. GREGORY LOGAN DUNN is an abstract painter from Arlington, Virginia. He uses intense,
transparent layers of colour to create textural layered artworks. Pictured here is his 2021 work
Gethsemane. Visit gldunnart.com IG: @gregorylogandunnart
8. Wild natural forests inspire contemporary artist AMANDA HORVATH to create her
outstanding paintings brimming with beauty, colour and life.
11 Renowned for expressing mood and light, Amanda exhibits with
leading UK galleries. Commissions are welcome. Visit
amandahorvath.co.uk IG: @amandahorvathfineart
9. Madrid based artist MANUEL HERNÁNDEZ is completely self
taught, dedicating himself 100% to painting during his retirement.
10 In his pieces, this artist references the American expressionists
and is also influenced by Modernism and contemporary painting.
Visit berbelart.com and follow @berbelart on IG.
10. Australian contemporary artist REBEKAH FREEMAN
reinterprets the sounds and colours of Australian life. She uses
depth and colour to capture feelings of time spent in the country,
city and coast. Pictured is “Mitch, Mark and Melbourne”. Visit
13 14 rebekahfreemanart.com IG: @rebekahfreemanart
11. South African born artist LARA LENHOFF began her
career in 2014 and by 2019, became a featured artist during
Art Week Art Basel. This artist creates transitional and
emotional pieces intended to encourage a dialogue. Lara is
12 heavily influenced by music and the energy it invokes and is
an advocate for the healing powers of art, with her work
helping her to cope with her own struggles. Visit
laralenhoffgallery.com and follow @laralenhoff24 on IG.
12. SOPHIA OSHODIN is a self-taught figurative painter
based in London. She is known for visual storytelling that
centres around the spirit of everyday using imaginary
subjects. Her work captures both the daily exuberance and
joy of black life in the diaspora. Visit sophiaoshodinart.com
IG: @sophiaoshodinart
13. ULEVICUS (1979) is an American artist and poet who
15 16 wants you to feel. Her flower-themed work is motivated by the intentional
return to joy, love and free expression. Her flowers interrogate the
transience of being and the hospitality of presence. Visit
jocelynulevicus.com IG: @jocelyn.ulevicus
14. RYA SEIFERT is a multi-media abstract artist from Germany.
Thematically, her art practice is rooted in the concept of chaos, with all of
its facets. To learn more about the meaning, visit ryaseifert.com
IG: @rya.s.art
15. LIBBY HOLLAND is a California based, Toronto born contemporary
artist with a vibrant, bold style. Her larger-than-life paintings of flowers and
native plants have drawn international attention since bursting on the scene
in 2020, after a residency with the Santa Barbara botanic garden. Visit
libbyhollandart.com IG: @libbyhollandart
16. LAURA FROUDE explores life on our beautiful planet with her
contemporary landscapes alongside the wonder of the female form. Her narrative embraces global
issues from climate change to conflict, which she expresses in vivid colour and brushstrokes. See
more of her unique works at froudiefineart.com or follow her on IG @laura.froude
 VANIT Y FAIR ADVERTISING FEATURE

17. DANIEL CHECHLACZ is a contemporary and abstract

17 18 19
artist, based in Toronto, who typically works on large
canvases using acrylic paint and mixed media. He focuses
on themes of movement, growth, and fluidity. Painting
brings joy and inspiration into Daniel’s life and he loves to
pass that feeling on to others. Visit
modernartbydaniel.com IG: @modernartbydaniel
18. Inspired by the majesty of the natural world, American
oil painter REBECCA E. MILES references Romanticism
and Impressionism in her enchanting landscape paintings.
Elements of fantasy and storytelling permeate her work,
inviting the viewer to step into another world. Visit
vraix.art Follow @vraiix on IG. 20 21
19. SOPHIA ROSE is a Canadian-born artist, best known for her brilliant and
vibrant paintings of classic cars that capture and honour their individual
personalities. She is inspired by tangible beauty and drawn to classic design,
whether in art, cars or fashion. Visit sophiaroseartist.com and
follow @sophiaroseartist on IG.
20. CHRISTINA KERSTEN creates collages in which the political and
personal are interwoven. This artist creates pieces which are multi-layered,
both in technique and meaning. Combined they form worlds of imagery and
great intensity. Visit christinakersten.de IG: @christinakersten
21. CARINA JÄGER creates abstract artworks on canvas from acrylic paints
and strong textured pastes. Let these abstract artworks remind you to have
the courage and strength to live in freedom. For more information visit 22 23 24
carinajaegeratelier.com or follow @carinajaegeratelier on IG.
22. LAURA SANDERS is an American painter who unabashedly addresses the
vulnerability of women and nature. In this series she places women in the
woods, tattooed by light, engulfed by shifting trees. Visit
contemporaryartmatters.com and follow @laurasandersstudio on IG.
23. New York based artist JENNY INK seeks inspiration in the city, the people
and through music. Colours, deconstruction and multilayering are the key to
understanding this artist’s entire poetics. Her art is pure rebellion and invites
the viewer to reflect upon social and economic inequalities. It is an invitation to
grasp the beauty of diversity, to notice the small but important signs around us.
Visit jennyinkart.com IG: @paintedladystudiojennyink
24. BRYONY COX produces dynamic landscape paintings and evocative 25 26 27
portraits from her travels, seeking to capture what it is to be human and the
universal emotions we all share. Fleeting moments of human stillness are
captured and the light within the land and the sky. Bryony also runs White
Chalk Gallery in Wiltshire. Visit bryonycox.com IG: @bryonycoxartist
25. DES BROPHY takes his inspiration largely from human observation, with
his signature style portraying uplifting figurative scenes. Des offers a range of
prints, originals and cards through his website, as well as a commission
service whereby he paints to order. For more information visit
desbrophy.co.uk and follow @desbrophy on IG.
26. MEANDER & MOSEY is the playful moniker of American abstract artist

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Andrecia, who is based in Los Angeles, California. Her paintings depict bright,
colourful shapes brought forth by allowing her intuition and the
negative space between forms to inform what comes next. View 28 29
all of her vibrant pieces on IG, @meandermosey For inquiries
visit meandermosey.com
27. DESSIE SPEARS, an intuitive abstract expressionist, uses
various mediums to articulate her most authentic self. She pulls
inspiration from nature, personal experience and memory to
create raw, emotional, and truly unique art. Visit
dezidezign23.com IG: @dezidezign23
28. CARLA COHEN is a Minnesota based mixed media artist.
She finds inspiration through her exploration of colour, texture,
and pattern to create a visual story. Her work is influenced by her
love of paper, where she uses transparent layers providing a
sense of mystery of what’s beneath. Visit carlacohenstudio.com
and follow @carlacohenstudio on IG.
29. California based contemporary artist RAMONA STELZER
is fascinated and inspired by nature, its process, lifecycle and
transformation. She loves to paint on a grand scale, inviting the
viewer to escape into the painting. This artist paints flowers in an
increasingly abstract way, with the meaning of her art extending
beyond its subject. Her art symbolises the connection between 30 31
humans and nature, and their abilities to not only be delicate and
beautiful, but also powerful, strong, and wild. Visit
ramona-stelzer-art.com IG: @ramonastelzerart
30. ANDY ALAIN is an international contemporary artist from
Canada. Inspired by nature and texture, her style is a merge
between modern abstract art and street art. Through her work of
contrasts, she makes a point of transmitting emotions of love
and joy in people’s daily lives. Visit andyalain.com and
follow @andyalain on IG.
31. MARIA PENN is a Germany-based abstract artist. Her work
portraits exposed human forms that strikingly permeate the
painting. She depicts modern humans in a permanent clash with
societal rules while accepting behavioural reconciliation and living by social norms. Available for
public and private commission. Seen here is “Three under the Rain” Acrylic on Canvas. Visit
mariapenn.wixsite.com/mirapenn IG: @maria_penn_art
 P roust Questionnaire

ALFRE WOODARD
The award-winning actor and activist
on jackknife jumps, sailing, and waving
the baton at the L.A. Phil

What is your idea of

perfect happiness? Under
sail somewhere with my
children, Mavis and Duncan,
and my husband, Roderick,
with no agenda. What do you
dislike most about your
appearance? I’m all peaced
out about it. Which living
person do you most despise?
I despise the actions of so many who are willfully endangering
the lives of Americans they fear. Which words or phrases
do you most overuse? “Can I ask you a question?” What is
your greatest regret? I laughed at a vulnerable classmate’s
socks in fourth grade. It hurt and surprised her. What or who
is the greatest love of your life? My hilarious, exceptional,
irreverent, and kind children. When and where were
you happiest? Between “action” and “cut.” What is your
greatest fear? Rats. Which living person do you most
admire? My dear friend Eve Plotkin, supervising attorney at
the N.Y. Legal Aid Society, head of the Family Law Unit for
25 years. What do you consider your greatest achievement?
A jackknife jump into a full front split. Repeatedly. What is
the trait you most deplore in others? Inefficiency. Whiners.
What is your greatest extravagance? Traveling well.
What is your favorite journey? To the unfamiliar. Then
returning because of the fellowship formed. What do you
consider the most overrated virtue? Selflessness. Who are
your favorite writers? Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez.
On what occasion do you lie? When I have nothing left to
give, but people don’t accept that. Which talent would
you most like to have? Dancing à la Judith Jamison. What is
your current state of mind? Reaching toward balanced.
If you could change one thing about yourself, what would
it be? I’d like to be six feet tall. If you were to die and
come back as a person or thing, what do you think it
would be? I would not come back. What is your most
treasured possession? Whenever I’ve had one, I’ve lost it.
What is your motto? No one surrenders here! What is it
that you most dislike? Racist actions, racist policies,
unexamined racist thought. Where would you like to live?
New Zealand, pulled a little closer. What is your most
marked characteristic? The timbre of my voice. What do
you most value in your friends? Humor. Who is your
favorite hero of fiction? Janie Crawford, from Zora Neale
Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Who are your
heroes in real life? Marian Wright Edelman, Graça Machel,
Serena Williams. How would you like to die? Unaware. If
you could choose what to come back as, what would it be?
The maestro for the L.A. Philharmonic at Disney Hall! n

136 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 SEPTEMBER 2022