Vanity Fair November 2017 by Artistbiz Solution Magazine

AMES ELLROY :

ive!

THE ‘CAREER GIRL’ MURDERS!

The 2017

What Happened? ppened?

ESTA B L I S H M E N T WHO’S

TRENDING?

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ANN I

WHO’S

TOX I C ?

VERSARY

the I N N O VATO R S , M O G U L S , T I TA N S , and T EC H I ES RANKING

How S.N.L’.s Kate McKinnon Became Comedy’s Brightest Star By

ESSAYS

N I C K B I LTO N and WA LT E R I S A AC S O N

l Specia t!

LILI ANOLIK

Photos by

S I L I C O N VA L L E Y ’ S

A N N I E LEIBOVITZ

SECRET TRUMP WHISPERER ADAM CIRALSKY

us! FAIL TO THE CHIEF:

JARED KUSHNER’S W O B B LY L E G A C Y By

THE “Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions.” — R A L P H WA L D O EMERSON

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RICH COHEN

THE BACKSTORY BEHIND

G R E AT E S T R O L L I N G STONE COVER EVER By

JOE HAGAN

P E N N S TAT E ’ S GREEK-LIFE TRAGEDY By

BENJAMIN WALLACE

F E AT U R

112

THE MCKINNON REPORT By LILI ANOLIK

Playing Hillary Clinton on Saturday Night Live brought Kate McKinnon a new level of fame. It also taught her just how personal the political can be. Photographs by Annie Leibovitz.

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FRENEMY OF THE STATE B y A DA M C I R A L S KY

B OY N TON P HOTO GR A PHE D BY NAGI SA K A I ; D RE SS BY KATE SPA DE N EW YO R K; RI NG BY DAVI D Y URMAN. PHOTO GRAPH F RO M B ET TM A NN /GE T T Y I MAGE S ( W E NNE R ) . I L L USTR AT IO N BY B R Á UL IO A MA DO . F O R DE TA I LS , GO TO VF.CO M/C RE DI TS

Billionaire venture capitalist and contrarian Peter Thiel has been quietly advising the Trump administration. Steve Bannon, White House officials, colleagues, friends, and foe gauge Thiel’s motivations, and his Washington mojo.

122

HIS MARSHALL PLAN

124

THE POTEMKIN PRINCE

Spotlight on Chadwick Boseman, Marvel’s Black Panther, who plays another hero in this month’s Marshall. By Krista Smith. Photograph by Art Streiber.

By RICH COHEN

Jared Kushner has the president’s ear, a choice office

in the West Wing, and a vast portfolio, from Middle East peace to re-inventing government. But the real-estate scion’s influence rests on a hollow foundation.

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REFLECTIONS IN A CAMERA

Spotlight on photographer Annie Leibovitz, who explains why her new book—collected images from the past decade—doesn’t end as planned.

ON THE COVER Kate McKinnon wears a custom bra and tap pant by Rubin Singer; hat by Monique Lee Millinery. Hair products by R & Co. Makeup by YSL. Nail enamel by Deborah Lippmann. Hair by Teddy Charles. Makeup by Tom Pecheux. Manicure by Angel Williams. Set design by Mary Howard. Produced on location by Portfolio One. Styled by Jessica Diehl. Photographed exclusively for V.F. by Annie Leibovitz in Old Brookville, New York. For details, go to VF.com/credits.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 28

Clockwise from top left: the New Establishment (page 87); Jann Wenner in 1970 (page 144); Lucy Boynton (page 59).

CON TINUED FROM PAGE 25

132

GOOD GOLLY, MISS MARLEY!

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FATAL INITIATION

On leave from N.Y.U., this month’s “It Girl,” model Selah Marley, is taking a gap career. By Derek Blasberg. Photograph by Jennifer Livingston.

B y B E N JA M I N WA L L AC E

Since more than a dozen frat brothers at Penn State were charged after the death of a pledge last winter, the university has come under renewed fire. An investigation details the alcohol-fueled events that were officially condemned, yet still occurred. Photograph by Gasper Tringale.

142

BUTTERFLY STROKE

144

BETWEEN THE COVERS

Spotlight on the Broadway revival of M. Butterfly, directed by Julie Taymor and starring Clive Owen. By Doug Stumpf. Photograph by Julian Broad.

music magazine in 1970. A decade later, after Lennon’s assassination, the Rolling Stone editor would become keeper of the flame. An adaptation from a biography of Wenner relives their drama of bonding and betrayal.

151

THE KEYS TO MARGARITAVILLE

Spotlight on the Broadway-bound musical Escape to Margaritaville, opening in New Orleans this month. By Jimmy Buffett. Photograph by Sandro Miller.

Clockwise from above: Jared Kushner (page 124); Shonda Rhimes (page 178); a Daily News front page in the “Career Girl” Murders case (page 152).

152

BUZZ M FOR MURDER B y JA M E S E L L ROY

It was a murder that gripped New York and would reverberate to the Supreme Court: the brutal 1963 slaying of two “career girls” on the Upper East Side. One of the greatest living crime novelists resurrects the investigation, creating a new voice in the landmark case. Photo illustrations by Sean McCabe.

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P HOTO GR A PH BY CHI P SO MO DE VI L L A / GE T T Y IM AGE S ( KU SHN ER ) . I LL UST RATI ON BY RI SKO

B y J O E H AGA N

John Lennon rescued Jann Wenner’s struggling

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 28

VA N I T I E S

WE LOVE LUCY

Keep time in style. My Desk: Cecile Richards, Planned Parenthood’s fearless leader. Haute News. FA N FA I R

30 DAYS IN THE LIFE OF THE CULTURE

Harry Benson: Persons of Interest is a visual celebration of a photographer’s incomparable career. Hot Type. According to Kaitlin Olson; what to watch. Hot Tracks: Jason Isbell and St. Paul & the Broken Bones revive the sound of southern soul. COLUMNS

B y JA M E S WO L C OT T

The time has come to start imagining life after Trump. Step one: figure out how to avoid a replay, or worse. Photo illustration by Darrow.

AMERICA NEEDS TALENT B y M I C H A E L K I N S L EY

“America’s Got Talent,” proclaims the country’s most popular TV show. But much of its star power comes from abroad, mirroring the reality of immigration. Illustration by Ross MacDonald.

THE NEW ESTABLISHMENT 2017

This year, V.F.’s power-player roundup foreshadows a turbulent future as moguls elbow into one another’s businesses and transform the status quo. Plus: Nick Bilton on the coming upheaval and Walter Isaacson on why it pays to be human. ET CETERA

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CONTRIBUTORS EDITOR’S LETTER The Reckoning THE COASTER CORRESPONDENCE LETTERS Men Behaving Badly IN THE DETAILS Beck PROUST QUESTIONNAIRE Shonda Rhimes PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

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M A RL E Y P HOTO GR A PHE D BY J E NN IF E R L I VI NGSTO N ; D RE SS BY MI CHA E L KO RS CO L L E CTI O N ; SH OES BY CHR I STI A N L OUB O UT IN ; E A R RI NG S BY O S CA R DE L A RE N TA . P HOTO IL L UST RAT I ON BY S EA N M C CABE ; P HOTO GR A PH S BY RON S ACHS/ GE TT Y I MAGE S ( TR UM P) , MA RTI N SH IE L DS/ A L A MY ( WHI T E HO USE), ALE X WO N G/GE T T Y IM AGE S ( TH IE L ) . I L L USTR ATI O N BY B EN W I SE MA N . F OR DE TA I L S, GO TO VF. CO M/ C RE DI TS

Clockwise from above: Selah Marley (page 132); the New Establishment (page 87); Trump and Peter Thiel (page 118).

THE TYRANT TRAP

V ID EO STI L LS BY CO LE E VEL E V A N D CHA R L IE J OR DA N

Kate McKinnon goes corporate at VF.com.

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Editor GRAYDON CARTER Managing Editor CHRIS GARRETT Creative Director CHRIS DIXON Executive Editor DOUGLAS STUMPF Features Editor JANE SARKIN Creative Director (Fashion and Style) JESSICA DIEHL Photography Director SUSAN WHITE Deputy Editors AIMÉE BELL, DANA BROWN, STEPHANIE MEHTA Associate Managing Editor ELLEN KIELL Fashion Director MICHAEL CARL Legal Affairs Editor ROBERT WALSH Director of Special Projects SARA MARKS Copy Editor PETER DEVINE Research Director DAVID GENDELMAN Beauty Director SUNHEE GRINNELL Executive West Coast Editor KRISTA SMITH Art Director HILARY FITZGIBBONS Photography Research Director JEANNIE RHODES Deputy Art Director TONYA DOURAGHY Deputy Director of Special Projects MATT ULLIAN Associate Legal Affairs Editor CHRISTOPHER HICKMAN Associate Copy Editor DAVID FENNER Production Director PAT CRAVEN Research Editor MARY FLYNN Assistant Editors LOUISA STRAUSS, BEN ABRAMOWITZ Reporter-Researchers BRENDAN BARR, SIMON BRENNAN, SUE CARSWELL, DAVID GEORGI, BEN KALIN, WALTER OWEN, MICHAEL SACKS Assistant Copy Editor ADAM NADLER Associate Art Director KAITLYN PEPE Editorial Finance Manager GEOFF COLLINS Editorial Business Manager DAN GILMORE Senior Photography Producer KATHRYN MACLEOD Senior Photography Research Editors ANN SCHNEIDER, KATHERINE BANG Accessories Director DAISY SHAW-ELLIS Photography Editors CATE STURGESS, RACHEL DELOACHE WILLIAMS Senior Designer ELLEN PETERSON Special Projects Manager ARI BERGEN Art Production Director CHRISTOPHER GEORGE Copy Production Manager ANDERSON TEPPER Executive Assistant to the Editor NATHAN KING Assistant to the Editor DAN ADLER Assistant to the Managing Editor SARAH BRACY PENN Fashion Editor RYAN YOUNG Market Editor ISABELLA BEHRENS Menswear Market Editor CHRISTOPHER LEGASPI Vanities Associate ISABEL ASHTON Fashion Associate KELLI ORIHUELA Features Associate BRITT HENNEMUTH Editorial Business Associate CAMILLE ZUMWALT COPPOLA Editorial Associates MARY ALICE MILLER, JULIA VITALE Features Assistant SAMANTHA LONDON Research Assistant TAYLOR SMITH Beauty Assistant NORA MALONEY Editorial Assistant DANIELLE WALSH Production Assistant KRISANNE MADAUS Editor-at-Large CULLEN MURPHY Special Correspondents BOB COLACELLO, MAUREEN ORTH, BRYAN BURROUGH, AMY FINE COLLINS, NICK BILTON, SARAH ELLISON, WILLIAM D. COHAN, MARK SEAL, GABRIEL SHERMAN Writers-at-Large MARIE BRENNER, JAMES REGINATO Style Editor–at–Large MICHAEL ROBERTS International Correspondent WILLIAM LANGEWIESCHE London Editor HENRY PORTER Paris Editor VÉRONIQUE PLAZOLLES European Editor–at–Large JEMIMA KHAN Editor (Los Angeles) WENDY STARK MORRISSEY Our Man in Kabul TOM FRESTON Our Man in Saigon BRIAN MCNALLY Our Man on the Street DEREK BLASBERG Architecture Consultant BASIL WALTER Editorial Consultant JIM KELLY Senior Editorial Adviser WAYNE LAWSON Editor, Creative Development DAVID FRIEND

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The Hive Editor JON KELLY Executive Editor JOHN HOMANS Senior Editor BENJAMIN LANDY Senior Media Correspondent JOE POMPEO Wall Street Correspondent BESS LEVIN Writer-at-Large T. A. FRANK Senior Staff Reporter EMILY JANE FOX Staff Reporters MAYA KOSOFF, TINA NGUYEN, ABIGAIL TRACY

Contributing Editors HENRY ALFORD, KURT ANDERSEN, SUZANNA ANDREWS, LILI ANOLIK, ROBERT SAM ANSON, JUDY BACHRACH, CARL BERNSTEIN, PETER BISKIND, BUZZ BISSINGER, HOWARD BLUM, PATRICIA BOSWORTH, MARK BOWDEN, DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, ALICE BRUDENELL-BRUCE, MICHAEL CALLAHAN, MARINA CICOGNA, ADAM CIRALSKY, EDWIN JOHN COASTER, RICH COHEN, JOHN CONNOLLY, SLOANE CROSLEY, STEVEN DALY, BEATRICE MONTI DELLA CORTE, JANINE DI GIOVANNI, LISA EISNER, BRUCE FEIRSTEIN, STEVE GARBARINO, PAUL GOLDBERGER, VANESSA GRIGORIADIS, MICHAEL JOSEPH GROSS, LOUISE GRUNWALD, BRUCE HANDY, DAVID HARRIS, JOHN HEILPERN, REINALDO HERRERA, CAROL BLUE HITCHENS, A. M. HOMES, LAURA JACOBS, SEBASTIAN JUNGER, DAVID KAMP, SAM KASHNER, MICHAEL KINSLEY, FRAN LEBOWITZ, ADAM LEFF, DANY LEVY, MONICA LEWINSKY, MICHAEL LEWIS, DAVID MARGOLICK, VICTORIA MATHER (TRAVEL), BRUCE MCCALL, BETHANY MCLEAN, PATRICK MCMULLAN, ANNE MCNALLY, PIPPA MIDDLETON, SETH MNOOKIN, NINA MUNK, ELISE O’SHAUGHNESSY, EVGENIA PERETZ, JEAN PIGOZZI, WILLIAM PROCHNAU, TODD S. PURDUM, JOHN RICHARDSON, LISA ROBINSON, DAVID ROSE, MARK ROZZO, RICHARD RUSHFIELD, NANCY JO SALES, ELISSA SCHAPPELL, GAIL SHEEHY, MICHAEL SHNAYERSON, SALLY BEDELL SMITH, JAMES B. STEELE, MATT TYRNAUER, CRAIG UNGER, DIANE VON FURSTENBERG, ELIZABETH SALTZMAN WALKER, BENJAMIN WALLACE, HEATHER WATTS, JIM WINDOLF, JAMES WOLCOTT, EVAN WRIGHT, NED ZEMAN In Memoriam SNOWDON (1930–2017), A. A. GILL (1954–2016), INGRID SISCHY (1952–2015), FREDERIC MORTON (1924–2015), CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS (1949–2011), TIM HETHERINGTON (1970–2011), DOMINICK DUNNE (1925–2009), DAVID HALBERSTAM (1934–2007), MARJORIE WILLIAMS (1958–2005), HELMUT NEWTON (1920–2004), HERB RITTS (1952–2002)

Contributing Photographers

Contributors Senior Photography Producer RON BEINNER Special Projects Art Director ANGELA PANICHI Digital Production Manager H. SCOTT JOLLEY Associate Digital Production Manager SUSAN M. RASCO Production Manager BETH BARTHOLOMEW Associate Editor S. P. NIX Photography Associate JAMES EMMERMAN Accessories Associate ALEXIS KANTER Art Assistant ALISON LENERT Fashion Assistant ALYCIA COHEN Photography Production Assistant EMILY LIPSON Photography Assistant JULIAN TAFFEL Stylist DEBORAH AFSHANI Editorial Assistant LINDSAY SCHNEIDER

Communications Executive Director of Communications BETH KSENIAK Deputy Director of Communications LIZZIE WOLFF Communications Manager OLIVIA AYLMER Communications Assistant HARRISON VAIL

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ANNIE LEIBOVITZ BRUCE WEBER, JONATHAN BECKER, MARK SELIGER, PATRICK DEMARCHELIER, LARRY FINK, TIMOTHY GREENFIELD-SANDERS, SAM JONES, JONAS FREDWALL KARLSSON, NORMAN JEAN ROY, MARIO TESTINO, GASPER TRINGALE Contributing Artists HILARY KNIGHT, ROBERT RISKO, TIM SHEAFFER, EDWARD SOREL, STEPHEN DOYLE, ROSS MACDONALD

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CONTRIBUTORS

WALTER ISAACSON Former Time managing editor Walter Isaacson has chronicled the lives of visionaries throughout history in his best-selling biographies of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Leonardo da Vinci (out this month from Simon & Schuster). For “The Soul in the Machine,” on page 110, the epilogue to V.F.’s annual New Establishment, he analyzes today’s disrupters in a meditation on innovation through the ages. “It’s not about the technology,” he writes. “It’s about connecting people to the technology and using the technology to connect humans to other humans.”

STEPHANIE MEHTA AND JON KELLY “Everyone on this list is in the business of competing for attention,” says Hive Editor Jon Kelly, who, with Deputy Editor Stephanie Mehta, assembled V.F.’s 2017 New Establishment, the 100-person register of disrupters across every industry, on page 87. What makes this list uniquely 2017? The blockbuster mergers of telecom and media companies, for example, show that, as Kelly says, “everyone is in everyone else’s business.” Highlighting another major shift, Mehta points to the newly inducted late-night antagonists: “Audiences are looking for an evisceration of politics—it’s not cool to be the nice guy anymore.”

JAMES ELLROY In “Buzz M for Murder,” on page 152, James Ellroy re-examines the infamous 1963 “Career Girl” Murders case, involving the slaying of two women in their Manhattan apartment. The project was personally fraught for Ellroy: “The horror of the inexplicably savage murder of women has haunted me since the occasion of my own mother’s murder in 1958,” he reflects. Ellroy is the best-selling author of The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential and is currently writing the second volume of his L.A. Quartet, out next fall.

PHOTOGR A PH S BY PATR IC E GI LB E RT ( I S A ACS O N) , PA M EL A J O NE S ( B UF F E TT ) , GA SP E R TRI N GA LE ( ME HTA A N D KE LLY ) , BE N WATTS ( E L LROY )

JIMMY BUFFETT In “The Keys to Margaritaville,” on page 151, musician, writer, and entrepreneur Jimmy Buffett explores the casting of Escape to Margaritaville, a new musical he inspired. The show, starring Paul Alexander Nolan as bar singer Tully Mars, is touring New Orleans and Chicago before its Broadway debut, in March. Buffett says that his fans’ traditional tailgating parties “will be a challenge in New York City.” CONTINUED ON PAGE 44

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CONTRIBUTORS CONTINUED FROM PAGE 42

ADAM CIRALSKY

JOE HAGAN Sticky Fingers, journalist Joe Hagan’s biography of Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone, is in bookstores this month— a real coup, since two previous biographies were abandoned when Wenner got cold feet. An adaptation, “Between the Covers,” on page 144, illuminates Wenner’s tumultuous friendship with John Lennon. “The hardest part of my relationship with Jann was resisting his editorial advice to show him the final manuscript,” Hagan says. “He kept promising to ‘make it better.’ ”

DOUG STUMPF In “Butterﬂy Stroke,” on page 142, V.F. Executive Editor Doug Stumpf anticipates the Broadway revival of David Henry Hwang’s 1988 Tony Award–winning drama, M. Butterfly. Stumpf, who celebrates his 23rd year at the magazine this month, has a day job of editing Michael Lewis, Evgenia Peretz, Bethany McLean, Bryan Burrough, and William D. Cohan, among other writers. But at night he is a theater buff and well remembers the original production. “It will be fascinating to see how new audiences respond to this play that was so deeply shocking 30 years ago,” says Stumpf.

LILI ANOLIK Contributing Editor Lili Anolik learned that S.N.L.’s master impersonator Kate McKinnon has not only the sharpest eye in the business but the tenderest heart. “Kate gave Hillary warmth and plausibility—poignancy too,” says Anolik, whose “The McKinnon Report” is on page 112. “Well, Hillary had all those qualities already, but Kate brought them to our attention.” Anolik is currently working on a book about Eve Babitz and Hollywood for Scribner.

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STUM PF PHOTO GR A PHE D BY GA S PE R TR IN GA L E . P HOTO GR A PH S CO URTE SY O F L I L I A N OL I K ( A NO L I K) , BY J OH N F ORTÉ ( C IR A L SKY ) , S A MA NT HA HUN T ( HAGA N )

In “Frenemy of the State,” on page 118, V.F. Contributing Editor Adam Ciralsky investigates Team Trump’s curious relationship with Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, an early and unexpected supporter of Trump’s presidential ambitions. “He’s probably the most important person that nobody associates with this administration on a regular basis,” says Ciralsky. “To hear Steve Bannon put Thiel in the same league as people like Jared [Kushner] is an eye-opener.”

EDITOR’S LETTER

s we tiptoe up to the one-year anniversary of the election that left more than half the country— and much of the rest of the world— reeling in astonishment and revulsion, it’s difficult not to recoil at the sight of our great leader strutting the world stage, alternately lecturing and hectoring his betters. Donald Trump’s brand of preening narcissism and incompetence is a constant reminder of just how far we’ve fallen. Not only is he the most childish man to have held the nation’s highest office, he may be the most childish man to have held public office in this country ever. You could replace “childish” with all sorts of adjectives—vindictive, erratic, vainglorious, temperamental, and untruthful quickly come to mind—and that declaration would still hold.

o be fair, the Trump administration has dispatched some of the clammier oddities of the president’s inner circle. But others remain. One such survivor is Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist and a co-founder of PayPal, whom most Americans could not pick out of a lineup (but who ranked No. 17 on this year’s V.F. New Establishment list—see page 87). He is one of the very few tech moguls who supported Trump’s improbable candidacy. As Adam Ciralsky reports in “Frenemy of the State,” on page 118, Thiel not only advised the president-elect’s transition team on key hires but, according to two senior White House advisers, continues to operate in the shadows of the administration, playing a pivotal role in matters concerning intelligence, cyber-security, and anti-trust regulation. “I cannot overstate his impact,” former chief strategist Steve Bannon told Ciralsky. “Of all of the issues we were looking at in preparation for assuming power, 25 to 30 percent were part of Peter’s portfolio.”

nother political ingénue with a vast West Wing portfolio is Jared Kushner, a young man who aside from his own line of preening narcissism has several things in common with his fatherin-law, the president. Chief among these is a spotty business record. One notable stumble was his purchase of the widely admired New York Observer. He bought it in 2006, just as the newspaper business began its precipitous downturn, and churned through editors and formats to the point where it is now an online-only product. He also bought what was then the most expensive office building in the country—666 Fifth Avenue—burdening his family’s real-estate concern with more than a billion dollars in debt. He did this in 2007, moments before the financial crisis and real-estate crash. The building is now underwater, and the Kushners have been scrambling for

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new investors to bail them out. The interest-only mortgage—now $1.4 billion—will come due in less than two years. Other Kushner dealings have raised the eyebrows of investigators. In “The Potemkin Prince,” on page 124, Contributing Editor Rich Cohen (like me, a veteran of the old Observer) traces Kushner’s origin story—equal parts book of Kings, The Godfather, and the cartoon character Richie Rich. In Cohen’s telling, Kushner’s erratic rise to prominence—or, to some eyes, the White House’s most special potted plant—may have begun at a Passover Seder back in 2000, with a family feud that would ultimately land his father, Charles, in federal prison and leave young Jared, at the tender age of 24, to run the family’s billiondollar real-estate empire. The son-in-law is the sort of hyphenate you don’t generally find in the higher reaches of the federal government, where “scholar-diplomat” might be more common. And yet, as we know, Trump has given this inexperienced and underprepared young man with the high-pitched voice a dizzying array of responsibilities, including bringing peace to the Middle East, solving the opioid crisis, and innovating the entire executive branch. Cohen’s assessment of Kushner: “He’s either canny and shrewd, dumb and lucky, or dumb and unlucky. He’s either in the engine room or just along for the ride.”

aking note of a constellation of factors—the escalation of Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in our election; the exodus of West Wing “assistant warlocks” such as Bannon and Sebastian Gorka; the administration’s continuing failure to accomplish anything other than sowing fear and hatred; even the typos in presidential tweetstorms—columnist James Wolcott foresees the inevitability of a truncated term for the current Oval Office occupant. In “The Tyrant Trap,” on page 80, Wolcott contemplates how we as a once civilized nation will cope with the post-Trump era. It will be psychologically as well as politically momentous when he is subtracted from the White House, whether by his own doing or the Constitution’s. For one thing, “so much headspace will be opened up.” Shunning the Trump family is only the first step in Wolcott’s program for national recovery: “The moment Trump leaves the White House for early retirement, jail, a sanitarium, or a Russian refuge, let the reckoning begin,” Wolcott writes. Yes, the man who came to Washington claiming that he would drain the swamp will, when he exits, leave the city—and the nation—high and dry, save for a clump of yellow hair clogging the drain. —GRAYDON CARTER N OVEMB ER

2017

AN N I E L E I B OVI TZ

THE RECKONING

ED COASTER e dwi n Dear Gr aydon:

COASTER CORRESPONDE

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LETTERS

MEN BEHAVING BADLY

Fyre Festival goes up in flames; We the People are sick and tired; Faustian deals be damned

REPTILIAN ROY

fter reading “Deal with the Devil,” by Marie Brenner, as well as “The Enablers,” by Sarah Ellison, and the Editor’s Letter, by Graydon Carter [August], I offer congratulations for three pieces that absolutely nail President Trump and those around him. If he were not bad enough all by himself, the exposés on Roy Cohn and the G.O.P. just seal the deal. I’m old enough to remember Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn. When I learned last year that Cohn was also mp’s mentor, I had the first in a continuing series of sick feelings. PARTY

ANIMALS Fyre Festival– goers with indigenous pigs, in April.

VANI T Y FA I R

FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE

hank you for the August issue. The best article is “The Enablers” [by Sarah Ellison]. John McCain and Lindsey Graham were belittled and bullied by Trump. Trump said McCain was not a hero, because he was “captured,” in reference to McCain’s military history as a prisoner of war. McCain should have verbally blasted him. I’ve lost so much respect for all who have enabled Trump. I hope our country withstands the destruction they are bringing down upon us. ANNE CAMPBELL

BERNIE CASEY Austin, Texas

illy McFarland, Roy Cohn, the G.O.P. enablers—too many men behaving badly for one issue. MELISSA SNYDER Vienna, Virginia

CORRECTIONS: On page 58 of the August issue, in “Good Evening, Vietnam,” by David Kamp, the building in Saigon from which evacuees boarded a helicopter was misidentified. They boarded from the roof of a local apartment building.

Denver, Colorado

‘ W

hat we’ve got here is failure to communicate.” This line by the actor Strother Martin’s character in Cool Hand Luke comes to mind as I grapple with what’s happened in our government. The aisle separating Republicans from Democrats has become a perilous no-man’s-land neither side will cross for fear of reprisals from their big-buck donors, whose bulging checkbooks have become weapons of war. And We the People are held hostage to this insanity.

BETH TREPPER

STUART KERN

Wilmington, Delaware

Palos Verdes Estates, California

www.vanityfair.com

very informative read [about Roy Cohn and Donald Trump’s relationship with him] and so emblematic of what we have seen of [Trump’s] demeanor. He does seem to be a carbon copy of his mentor. Vindictive and untrustworthy!

On page 197 of the September issue, in “The 5th Risk,” by Michael Lewis, contact between the Trump administration and the Department of Energy’s acting inspector general was mischaracterized. The administration did not ask the inspector general to resign. Letters to the editor should be sent electronically with the writer’s name, address, and daytime phone number to letters@vf.com. All requests for back issues should be sent to subscriptions@vf.com. All other queries should be sent to vfmail@vf.com. The magazine reserves the right to edit submissions, which may be published or otherwise used in any medium. All submissions become the property of Vanity Fair. N OVEMB ER

2017

PHOTOGR A PH BY J E N NA A ND TA RA CO NL I N

s a part-time resident of Great Exuma for more than 20 years, I can attest that this tiny jewel of an island in the Bahamas was the absolute wrong location for a music festival such as the Fyre Festival [“It Seemed Like a Good Idea,” by Bryan Burrough, August]. Despite its natural beauty and easy access from the States, Exuma is a longstruggling island with a fragile infrastructure. Many of its native citizens live in povertyriddled conditions. A community center and library, once promised by the nearby resort developers, never happened. To even think this area was capable of handling an invasion of drunk and entitled partyers, let alone all the construction and permits required for a festival, is absurd. What’s even more heartbreaking is the vulnerability of these islanders, who were tantalized and, ultimately, deceived into believing they could benefit financially from the festival. The chance to feed their families led the islanders into the web of lies. Now, as the islanders are still hoping to recoup the income they never received, and their home is littered with the remains of the Invasion of Greed created by the arrogant Billy McFarland, the island will be slow to heal from the physical and emotional devastation.

JAMES MURPHY

Santa Fe, New Mexico

2017

NOVEMBER

Watches that work for him and for her

My Desk: cile Richards p. 62

p. 60

ST Y L ED BY S A RA H COB B ; H A I R BY KE NS HI N A SA N O ; M A KE UP BY E RI C PO L I TO; M A NI CUR E BY MI CHI N A KOI DE ; F O R DE TA IL S , G O TO VF.COM /C RE DI TS

Boynton wears a dress by Miu Miu; hair products by Oribe; makeup by Lancôme; nail enamel by Chanel.

23. PROVENANCE: Bi-continental. SCREEN GAB: Daughter of British journalist Graham Boynton, she moved to London from New York when she was five. “I consider myself British through and through, but owe Sabrina the Teenage Witch for when I need my American accent.” BUNNY HOP: At 10, she enrolled in drama class. “I was incredibly lucky. A casting director came to my school to audition girls for Miss Potter, and in that process I realized that I loved, craved, and needed acting.” She got the part. “It was a magical introduction to this world.” CATCH HER: With a dozen films complete, Boynton recently starred as Claire Douglas, J. D. Salinger’s second wife, in IFC’s biopic Rebel in the Rye. “I was familiar with Salinger’s work, but not his reclusive nature. The rose-tinted glasses are elegantly removed.” NEXT STOP: Boynton, as Countess Andrenyi, joins Johnny Depp, Penélope Cruz, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Judi Dench next month in Kenneth Branagh’s starry Twentieth Century Fox adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express. “The script stays brilliantly true to Agatha Christie, with a modernized twist.” ALL ABOARD: “My first day, I was in the train carriage looking down that line of faces. It was very surreal and intimidating, but the best learning experience you could ask for.” — KRISTA SMITH AGE:

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Patek Philippe Perpetual Calendar, $82,784. (212-218-1240)

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Cartier Drive de Cartier Extra-Flat, $14,300. (Cartier boutiques)

Vacheron Constantin Overseas Date, $22,600. (vacheron-constantin .com)

N OVEMB ER

2017

VANITIES My Desk CECILE RICHARDS

s the president of Planned Parenthood and a passionate promoter of women’s rights, Cecile Richards is one of the most influential women in America. Under her leadership, the organization has more than tripled its number of active supporters, with an inspirational total of more than

10 million. Now, with its future threatened by the Trump administration, Richards has launched a nationwide campaign to rally support for the indispensable care its centers provide. Herewith, a look inside her office in Planned Parenthood’s New York headquarters.

A daily reminder of what my mom, Governor Ann Richards, would say.

This picture with President Obama was taken the day he addressed Planned Parenthood—the first time a sitting president had ever spoken to our organization. With Obama, we got birth control covered for all women in America under their insurance. This is what I am most proud of in my time here.

I always have pictures of my three kids, and no desk is complete without Tabasco. You can take the girl out of Texas …

Before birth control was legal, all women had was the rhythm method. Under the current president, we may have to manufacture these charts again.

My desk is a reflection of who I am: my kids, my idols, and my adventures. It includes everything from the blue-footed booby from the Galápagos Islands to my collection of sea glass off an island in Maine, to Ndebele boxes from South Africa.

My favorite bootleg, off-brand, and totally on-point Planned Parenthood button.

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P H OTO G R A PH S

TRIA GIOVAN

N OVEMB ER

2017

R DE TAI LS, GO TO VF.CO M/C REDI TS

We do anything and everything to educate folks about Planned Parenthood and health care, including driving this enormous pink bus around America.

VANITIES

Back to Your Roots

Haute News S H O P, S I T, A N D S I P S U S TA I N A B LY

nita Dongre’s Grassroot was born from her desire to revive the traditional textile craftsmanship of her native India. Working with artisans in rural villages to produce the handwoven fabrics for her designs, Dongre is passionate about creating clothes that preserve these age-old skills and enable better livelihoods for their creators, while staying mindful of the planet. With a new flagship store in New York, the future of Grassroot looks bright. “The question,” Dongre muses, “is whether fashion that isn’t respectful of its people and the planet has any future.” Responsible, sustainable, and irresistible style—that’s here to stay. (anitadongregrassroot.com)

H O M E G ROW N

Obsessions from People We’re Obsessed With

Liya Kebede

Rosario Dawson

Livia Firth

(Model and founder of Lemlem)

(Actress and co-founder of Studio 189)

(Producer and founder of Eco-Age)

Lemlem x Ancient Greek Thais ruffle sandals.

Waves for Water.

“Altering my clothes— I do it constantly.”

The Nile Hilton Incident. San Pellegrino Sanbitter.

The Eric Andre Show. Studio 189.

“Eco-Age—I love my job.” “Friday Night Lights— I started watching it recently.”

EYE ON ... Keeping it in the family: (1) Locally farmed ingredients and no additives are reason enough to try Mezcal Amarás. Fifteen percent of the brand’s gross profit going back to local communities in Mexico is the clincher. You will love. (mezcalamaras.com, from $38) (2) Moët Hennessy’s new premium tequila, Volcán de Mi Tierra, recycles the water used in the agave-milling process at its distillery, located at the base of Mexico’s aptly named Tequila Volcano. Boom. (volcan.com, $60) (3) The Lost Explorer Mezcal works with indigenous Oaxacans to gather their cherished wild agave, protecting it from industrial-scale harvesting. Actions taste louder than words. th l t x l r rm z l m 1

A L L I S FA I R

Partnered with Eco-Age, Chopard took the first step on its “Journey to Sustainable Luxury” with its Green Carpet jewelry collection, made with Fairmined gold. Working with South America’s Alliance for Responsible Mining, the brand is the world’s first luxury jewelry house directly enabling mines to achieve Fairmined certification. Gold star. (chopard.com/us)

VANI T Y FA I R

N OVEMB ER

2017

PHOTOGR A PH S BY NI KUN J R AT HO D (G RA S SRO OT) , R AY TA M A RR A /GE T T Y I MAGE S ( DAWS ON ) , VE NTU RE L LI /W I RE I MAG E ( KE BE DE ) ; F O R DE TA IL S, GO TO VF.CO M /CR ED I TS

Makr’s Wood Factory stool checks all the boxes. Made of locally sourced white oak and meticulously crafted to reduce waste, it’s exemplary of the design studio’s socially responsible products, which not only last but also look good. Meet your Makr. (makr.com)

3 0 DAY S i n t h e L I F E o f t h e C U LT U R E

PHOTOGR A PH S © H A RRY B EN S ON

Ê HOT T YPE

p. 70

NOVEMBER 2017

ACCORDING TO: KAITLIN OLSON p. 72 WHAT TO WATCH p. 72 HOT TRACKS: THE NEW SOUTHERN SOUL p. 76

SHOOTING STARS

On the 1975 set of The Missouri Breaks, Jack Nicholson mugged for renowned photographer and longtime V.F. contributor Harry Benson. Nicholson’s spirit—snapped during a production delay caused by co-star Marlon Brando—is one in a cache of moments featured in Benson’s new book, Harry Benson: Persons of Interest (Powerhouse). In the collection, the Scotsman reveals the intimate details behind his most enduring images, including the Beatles’ madcap pillow fight in 1964, and the panorama features portraits of cultural figures from Elizabeth Taylor and Amy Winehouse to Muhammad Ali and the Clintons. Here’s to Harry, and the legends he’s put in focus. — L I N D S AY S C H N E I D E R

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2 017

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FAIR

From the eponymous Calvin Klein (Rizzoli): the designer surrounded by models Shaun Casey, Patti Hansen, Lisa Taylor, and Janice Dickinson; photographed by Harry Benson in 1978.

ometimes lightning does strike the same place twice. Sometimes it strikes a whole bunch of times. In Orange Award winner Naomi Alderman’s chilling The Power (Little, Brown), women across the globe discover a sudden ability to harness their aggression by inflicting electric shocks through their fingertips. Fans of speculative fiction (see also: Margaret Atwood and Ben Marcus) about empowered youth will be struck by Alderman’s speedy and thorough inhabitation of a world just different

Caricaturist Study

Hot T

enough from ours to jolt the imagination. Mothers, lock up your boys. Checking in? Here are your room keys: John Hodgman’s Vacationland (Viking) is a tour through the wilds of one’s 40s given by a man who once resembled “a bushy nineteenth-century president who also happened to be a baby.” Order room service and tuck into some emotional reading with beloved author Amy Tan’s marvelous memoir, Where the Past Begins (Ecco). Dine à la carte with The Collected Essays of Eliz-

abeth Hardwick (New York Review Books), selected by Darryl Pinckney and brimming with bite. You’ll need the freight elevator for Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant, a collection of the illustrious writer-illustrator’s original pages (Fantagraphics). Take a look beyond your own balcony with Gold Star parent Khizr Khan’s patriotic and personal narrative of An American Family (Random House). Stay up all night partying with the narcos and rock stars of Roben Farzad’s Hotel Scarface (Berkley)—you can c out anytime, but yo plead. — S LOA N E C R O S L E Y

For more than 75 years, Al Hirschfeld, who died in 2003, caricatured the stars of Broadway and Hollywood in finely detailed pen and ink, often with the name of his daughter, Nina, hidden in the lines. (Whoopi Goldberg holds the record, with 40 Ninas.) In Hirschfeld (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Ellen Stern buoyantly captures the artist in finely detailed prose, and the result is a tale of both ebullient high jinks and, especially for the troubled and resentful Nina, poignant miseries. The Line King, as a 1996 documentary dubbed him, turned to drawing to escape the unhappiness, which may explain why he made it to the age of 99. — J I M K E L LY

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N OVEMB ER

2017

PHOTOGR A PH S © H A RRY B EN S ON ( KL E I N) , BY T IM HO U T ( BO O KS ) ; F O R DE TA IL S , GO TO VF.CO M/C RE DI TS

IN SHORT Dave Eggers draws on his inner animal in Ungrateful Mammals (Abrams). Politics get sketchy via cartoonist Barry Blitt’s eponymous Blitt (Riverhead). Walter Isaacson paints the scientific side of Leonardo da Vinci (Simon & Schuster). Melissa Rivers curates satisfyingly sardonic scribbles with Scott Currie in Joan Rivers Confidential (Abrams). Jonathan Alpeyrie focuses on Syria through The Shattered Lens (Atria), with Stash Luczkiw. The garden has gone to seed in Rosetta S. Elkin’s Tiny Taxonomy (Actar). Government roots are ivy grown in Daniel Golden’s Spy Schools (Henry Holt). Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine (Doubleday) uncovers a 20th-century Ukraine under siege. Anthony DeCurtis digs underground with Lou Reed (Little, Brown). Alexandre de Betak relishes the runway in Betak (Phaidon). She (Abrams) exudes elegance, in a tribute from Kate Spade New York. Garry Wills probes piety with What the Qur’an Meant (Viking). V.F. contributing editor Rich Cohen knocks it out of the park for The Chicago Cubs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The American hero is hewn in Nancy Schoenberger’s Wayne and Ford (Nan A. Talese). Booze, drugs, and advertising out-vice one another in David Szalay’s London and the South-East (Graywolf). Richard Aldous’s Schlesinger (Norton) considers the man who crafted the J.F.K. legacy. David Yurman links up in David Yurman (Rizzoli). Harper’s habitués Ellen Rosenbush and Giulia Melucci Know That What You Eat You Are (Franklin Square). Syl Tang pulls the economic thread in Disrobed (Rowman & Littlefield). T. C. Boyle cracks open The Relive Box and Other Stories (Ecco). Mystery spirals in John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down (Dutton). The Met collects inspiration from the innovators in The Artist Project (Phaidon). Delightful detritus makes for Sad Stuff on the Street (Ammo), a bite-size book for charity from Todd Oldham, Greg Larson, and yours truly. — S . C .

TELEVISION SERIES

MUSICIAN

Olson is an evangelist for Minneapolis-based hip-hop artist Lizzo. “You gotta go listen to her,” she stresses. “She’s amazing. I’ve been stalking her on Instagram. Her songs are hilarious.”

(without husband)

Olson is a Real Housewives fanatic, and she does not discriminate between the different franchises. “They’re all competing equally for my attention,” she says, though she admits Atlanta is her favorite at the moment. “It’s fantastic intellectual programming,” she says, wryly. “It challenges the brain.”

BOOK

Welsh novelist Sarah Waters is Olson’s favorite author, and she is currently working through The Paying Guests. Waters’s Fingersmith is Olson’s “favorite book in the entire world,” featuring a twist so big that Olson “gasped out loud while reading it.”

TELEVISION SERIES (with husband)

When husband and Always Sunny co-star Rob McElhenney is around, the couple enjoys watching Game of Thrones, or … U.F.C. fighting. “When it’s fight night, we are so excited,” Olson says, explaining that their interest was sparked when they became friends with a few of the fighters. “We’ll put the kids to bed early, I’ll make dinner, and we’ll sit and watch.”

TWITTER FEED

Though “humiliated” to concede it, Olson says Twitter is definitely her “go-to news source,” an admission she describes as “maybe the saddest, most American thing I’ve ever said.” The account she enjoys the most? “Rob Delaney is one of my favorites,” she says. “Almost every one of his tweets makes me laugh.”

M OV I E

While she expresses great affection for Bill Murray (“I don’t think he’s ever made a movie I didn’t love”), she is also partial to Will Ferrell. Elf, to Olson, is a masterpiece. “Elf made me emotional and made me laugh, and that’s tough to do at the same time. It’s so good,” she says. “To be fair, I may have been pregnant and emotional [when I watched it], but I’ll stand behind it.”

B EYO N C É S O N G

The It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia actress—also starring in The Mick, now in its second season—recommends some people, places, and things By J O S H D U B O F F

WATCH LIST What to go see:

BPM (BEATS PER MINUTE) A whole bunch of attractive young people.

WHO’S IN IT

What to tune in to:

MINDHUNTER

Sedaris, alternativecomedy mainstay and beloved Letterman guest.

Hamilton vet Jonathan Groff and Fringe favorite Anna Torv. The Silence of the Lambs if it were a procedural series.

How to Survive a Plague with a fictionalized romance woven in.

Martha Stewart during a gas leak.

WHY NOW

Director Robin Campillo’s striking, sad, sexy film about AIDS activists in 1990s Paris won second prize at Cannes this year and for good reason.

Sedaris’s brand of humor, cracked and homey, is a perfect counterbalance to today’s holier-than-thou lifestyle experts.

VANI T Y FA I R

In selected theaters October 20.

www.vanityfair.com

What to stream:

AT HOME WITH AMY SEDARIS

WILL REMIND YOU OF

WHEN YOU CAN SEE IT 72

By R I C H A R D L AW S O N

Premieres on truTV October 24.

Charlize Theron and David Fincher (who also directs some episodes) re among the producers of this grim, glossy dive into the minds of killers. On Netflix beginning October 13.

N OVEMB ER

2017

PH OTO GRA P HS BY K. C. B A I L EY / TR UT V ( AT H OM E W IT H A MY S E DAR I S) , PAT RI CK H A RB RON /N E T F LI X ( M IND H UNT E R ) ,© L E S F IL MS DE PI E RR E ( B P M ) , BY WI LL I A M S & HI RA K AWA /AUGUST ( O L SO N )

Kaitlin Olson

“Countdown,” off 4, is many a Beyoncé fan’s favorite jam, and Olson is among those who count it as their No. 1 Bey tune as well. “It’s a good one, right? I found it because when one of my kids was, like, two, he found that video, somehow, on my phone and watched it and became obsessed with it. We would literally have dance parties to ‘Countdown’ over, and over, and over.”

‘ heard a lot of racist comments from people I grew up with,” says Alabama native, singer/songwriter/guitarist Jason Isbell. “But when I started listening to the music of Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, and the Staple Singers, it taught me that if there’s something wrong with the people making that, then I’d also like that to be wrong with me.” Isbell, 38, a former member of the rock band Drive-By Truckers, went solo in 2007. Since then, he has quit drinking, released six albums, won two Grammys, and had a daughter with his wife, the noted musician Amanda Shires, who also plays in his band, the 400 Unit. Here, he talks with Lisa Robinson about music, politics, and fame. LISA ROBINSON: A song on your latest

album (The Nashville Sound) is titled “White Man’s World.” How do you feel coming from the state that gave us Jeff Sessions? JASON ISBELL: I grew up in a place surrounded by white people; there weren’t any black people in my high school. I live in Nashville now, which is pretty much the same. But when I got into my teens, music was the thing that kept me from winding up as closed-minded as the people I grew up with. L.R.: As a songwriter, can you ignore what’s going on in our country now? J.I.: It’s heartbreaking—the last time I saw Sharon Jones was in Charlottesville at the Jefferson Theater, and it was a beautiful night.

This administration has emboldened hateful beliefs to come forward because we’ve rewarded bad behavior. But people are communicating in a way we haven’t in years, and calling people out for hateful beliefs. L.R.: Are you surprised by the attention you’ve gotten from musicians like Willie Nelson, Bruce Springsteen, and John Prine? J.I.: The Truckers were very well received critically; people had a lot of respect for that band. But I never expected my work to reach this point. John Prine was always a hero of mine; some of his songs made me realize what a songwriter was. To be able to go swimming at John’s house or go to dinner with him and his wife is just incredible. I never thought to dream of that.

SOUNDS OF THE SOUTH

ot everybody in the South is conservative,” says Paul Janeway, lead singer/songwriter of the soul-rock band St. Paul & the Broken Bones, who, along with other Alabamaborn musicians (Jason Isbell, Alabama Shakes), don’t back away from airing their progressive views. Janeway had a Pentecostal church upbringing and observed people speaking in tongues and casting out demons—which, he says, “scared the shit out of me.” He considered becoming a preacher because he liked the performance part of it, but by the time he was a teenager, he’d fallen out of love with the church and formed a band in Birmingham, Alabama. His voice has been compared to Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, and Al Green, but, says Janeway, “those names—that is god to me. That is an unreachable bar. I sang in church, but in all honesty I never thought I had a good voice or that I could do this as a living.” ISBELL In 2008, while working in a mechanic shop, he saw that Prince was playing Coachella. “So I spent a month’s worth of money, [went there], got up early, and stood in the front row. It changed my life. I was crying through the whole show. That was the moment I knew I wanted to be a performer.” The eight-piece St. Paul & the Broken Bones have released two albums, toured all over the world, opened shows for the Rolling Stones, and count Keith Richards and Elton John among their fans. Janeway’s own eclectic tastes range from Prince to Serge Gainsbourg, and the painters Caravaggio and Mark Rothko. “Growing up in Alabama,” he says, “you’re not really exposed to a lot of art, so when I go to Europe, I like to go to museums.” But he says he’ll robably always live in Birmingham because I think it’s important for people to know there re others here who think [the same] way: ou can’t look at what’s going on in the world nd not be angry or unhappy.” —L.R.

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BECK

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he pendulum has swung back pop-ward for Beck Hansen. His new album, Colors, to be released this month, is his most uptempo collection of songs since 2005’s Guero: shiny and hooky, in marked contrast to the more whole-grain, singer-songwriterly sound of his last LP, 2014’s Grammy-winning Morning Phase. Two of Colors’ songs are already in wide circulation—the singles “Dreams” and “Wow,” released in 2015 and 2016, respectively—and much of the previously unheard material is in this same radio-friendly vein, in particular the infectious “I’m So Free,” which features backing vocals by Feist. The album, largely a collaboration with the pop-whisperer and production maestro Greg Kurstin (Adele, Sia, Foo Fighters), is “something I’ve wanted to do for a long, long, long time,” Hansen says, but the process of making it proved laborious and complicated: “To have it all sit together and not sound like a complete disaster, it takes a lot of work.” The good news is, Hansen now has a cache of reverberant megadome stompers that will serve him well for many a festival season to come. (He got to test out Colors’ songs on stadium audiences in September, when he opened for U2 on nine dates of its Joshua Tree Tour 2017.) Herewith, some facts and insights gleaned from a sunny morning’s conversation with the artist usually mononymously known as Beck.

HE FINDS it odd to contemplate the fact that he is 47 years old, because, he says, “I spent so many years navigating this constant commentary that I looked like a baby—this backhanded man-child assessment of me.” HE IS fond of using the word “bones” in his song lyrics. (See, for example, “Girl,” “Where It’s At,” and “Jack-Ass.”) “It’s such a great word to sing,” he says. “It’s also another way to say ‘heart,’ I think—the core of something— but ‘heart’ is such an overused metaphor.” HE HAS DISCOVERED the early hours of morning, around four or five, to be conducive to finish78

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ing “stubborn” songs that have resisted getting finished. “I should know better and just give up on them,” he says. “But, occasionally, I’ll wake up and I’ll have a solution.” HE CITES the gorgeous, strummy “Heart Is a Drum,” off Morning Phase, as a song that solved itself in this way. HE HAS two children with his wife, Marissa Ribisi: a son, Cosimo, who is 13, and a daughter, Tuesday, who is 10. HE CREDITS his children with his decision to release “Wow,” a recording he considered to be more of a sonic doodle than a proper P H OTO G R APH S

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song. “They were very emphatic for me to put that out,” he says. “Usually my music is just in the background for them. But they made a point.” HE FURTHER allows that his children have helped him get past a certain jadedness. “Everything is new and exciting for them,” he says. “So you see certain things that are maybe transitory in the culture, but you see it through their eyes, and I feel like they help me understand.” HE CITES, as something he has come to understand, the current D.I.Y. vogue among schoolchildren for making slime. “There are translucent slimes, neon-orange slimes, slimes full of colored Styrofoam flecks,” he says. “It’s not a pleasant smell, either. It has something to do with Barbasol, borax, and Elmer’s Glue, with a little bit of contact-lens solution.” HE IS a multi-instrumentalist but considers himself most proficient at guitar and piano. He most enjoys playing bass. HE DOES not rate high his skill at mimicry, though he thinks he does a good imitation of Digital Underground’s Shock G (Greg Jacobs) rapping on “The Humpty Dance.” HE IS a wearer of hats, despite an awareness that “we definitely live in a post-hat world.” He admires how, for such midcentury figures as the multi-disciplinary artist Joseph Beuys, of the Fluxus collective, hats were “just an interesting ingredient in their persona.” HE IS particularly fond of a black fedora bequeathed to him by his maternal grandfather, the Fluxus artist Al Hansen (1927–95). HE SPENT his childhood in Los Angeles with his mother, the performance artist Bibbe Hansen. HE FELL hard as a youth for the music of the Velvet Underground, oblivious to the fact that his mother knew the band well and had even briefly participated in their 1960s concerthappenings as a dancer. HE LIVED during his teen years in a predominantly Salvadoran neighborhood in Westlake bordering Pico-Union. He picked up hip-hop from riding city buses, which, by the time he boarded them, were filled with kids from farther south, playing music on boom boxes. HE WAS on one such city bus when he first heard Mantronix’s 1985 song “Needle to the Groove,” which features a vocoder-ized voice rapping, “Got two turntables and a microphone.” HE FILED away that song in his mind. Ten years later, it gave him an idea … —DAVID KAMP N OVEMB ER

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LETTER FROM L.A. cinematographer in China (Zhao Xiaoding), and a director in Hungary (Ildikó Enyedi). “There are those who feel that Hollywood is elitist,” the Academy’s newly elected president, cinematographer John Bailey, told me. “But things have been changing so much, with the diversity and international outreach.” The change has maddened some longtimers, who say the new entry standards are lower—they no doubt had to walk barefoot in the snow uphill both ways on Wilshire to collect their first membership cards. But amid the fist-shaking, Hollywood still is asking the same questions: What do I have to do to win an Oscar? Whose rings do I have to kiss? What red carpets do I have to walk? Where will I have to eat canapés with voters? Demographics aren’t destiny, and plenty of white members voted for Barry Jenkins’s black coming-of-age drama, Moonlight, to earn the Academy’s top prize in February. But year there are films that could ee their fortunes shift. Some VARIETY SHOW international members might Adam Driver, gravitate toward Angelina JoDwayne Johnson, and Leslie Jones are lie’s Cambodia-set war drama, among the Academy’s First They Killed My Father. diverse new New members of color could invitees. ast a ballot for Jordan Peele’s horror social commentary, Get Out, or Dee Rees’s Mississippi-set saga, Mudbound. The increase in women could be good for Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman and for Emma Stone’s portrayal of Billie Jean King in Battle of the Sexes. And two British World War II films that would have been catnip to voters of yore, Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour and Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, might land with less power. What about Meryl Streep? Will today’s voters The Academy now skews less white, male, and give her a 21st nomination next year for playing American, so what is an awards movie anymore? This Washington Post publisher Kay Graham in Steven Spielberg’s press-freedom drama, The Post? Oscar season, anguished Englishmen, W.W. II The influx of far-flung members also has dramas, and Meryl Streep might not have an edge had some unintended consequences for the companies wishing to court them. Distributors must now subtitle their screeners in more By REBECCA KEEGAN languages—one awards strategist recommends ritish accents, corseted star- demographically diverse classes in its 90-year French, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Japanese, lets, tortured artists. Movies history. As the most exclusive club in Holly- Mandarin, and Cantonese. And the standard that cater to Hollywood’s An- wood has become more inclusive, a question locations for events—influencer screenings on glophilia and high self-regard is reverberating through town. “What is an L.A.’s West Side, contender lunches on New always have done well at the awards movie anymore?” asked one Oscar York’s Upper East Side—seem sadly narrow Oscars—or, as former host strategist, who plots a course of screenings, when staring at a list of member addresses in Chris Rock called them in his 2016 mono- parties, and for-your-consideration ads for a Beijing, Mumbai, Harlem, and Echo Park. It’s logue, “The White People’s Choice Awards.” major film studio. “Who actually is the Acad- a brave new Academy—so long as everyone is But over the last two years, after endur- emy membership? What do they like?” able to participate in the awards-season bacing criticism of its all-white slates of acting In June, such newcomers as comedian chanal. “The Academy forgot any part of the nominees, the Academy of Motion Picture Leslie Jones, action star Dwayne Johnson, administrative and logistical issues that apply Arts and Sciences invited 1,457 new people to and actor Adam Driver were added, as well to this, which is, how are people going to see join, which could add some 20 percent to its as lesser-known artists, including a docu- the films?” said one awards strategist. “I am membership rolls and recruit the largest, most mentarian in India (Anand Patwardhan), a not screening this in Kuala Lumpur.”

AND THE OSCAR COMES FROM...

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t is my dearly beloved hope (yours too, I trust) that it won’t take another presidential election to expel the Desecrator in Chief from the premises, to liberate us from the otiose spectacle of Donald Trump tramping over the Constitution in his golf spikes and exercising his tweeting thumbs at the expense of decency, democracy, and basic spelling (“Somtimes you need protest in order to heel, & we will heel, & be stronger than ever before!”). The frantic tempo of his cruel, petty fits of pique—the pardoning of the sadist sheriff Joe Arpaio, the transgender ban, the decision to end the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program simply to inflict pain and roll back any vestige of the Obama-stamped compassionate policy— d the Agatha Christie elimination CORNERED of assistant warlocks such as Mike OFFICE Flynn, Steve Bannon, and Seb The Trump Gorka (could Stephen Miller be administration has the nasty defensiveness next on the skewer?) signal an of a trapped administration heading toward a rat these days. crescendo, not one buckling down the duration and plotting new coordinates. It’s stuck in a dead man’s float. All Trump has to show for his first year in office is a whole lot of nada. No border wall. No tax reform. No infrastructure package. His sole bragging point—the installation of Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court—was a gimme, owing everything to the Republican There is plenty of ugly fight left in Donald Senate’s obstruction of Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, not to any exertion of his Trump’s presidency, which has already own. His spats with congressional chieftains warped American culture. But it’s not too soon (Mitch McConnell, John McCain, Paul Ryan) reek of sour grapes and frustrated to contemplate a post-Trump challenge: stalemate. Meanwhile, in the background is tyrant-proofing the country, in case the next the ominous sonar beep of Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference, one isn’t such a clown

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a run-silent, run-deep probe drawing upon a lode of legal brainpower that ought to make any finky operator nervous. (And Mueller’s reported Batman-Robin team-up with New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman takes the magic pardon wand out of Trump’s little hand.)

n the sorriest days of the Watergate scandal, the iconoclastic journalist and 60 Minutes commentator Nicholas von Hoffman compared the Nixon presidency to “a dead mouse on the American family kitchen floor. The question is: who is going to pick it up by the tail and drop it in the trash?” It would be premature to write off the Trump presidency as a deceased rodent lying on the linoleum. In its nasty defensiveness, it is closer to a cornered rat. It still has plenty of ugly fight left. But we are at the beginning of the endgame and it is not premature to start imagining how to pick through the damage the Trump presidency will leave behind and future-proof the republic so that It Can’t Happen Here never happens again. So much headspace will be opened up once Trump is no longer occupying it that we must make the most of it. The moment Trump leaves the White House for early retirement, jail, a sanitarium, or a Russian refuge, let the reckoning begin. Cue the exodus of his cronies from the Cabinet and commence the shunning. The Trump family itself should be as unwelcome in what passes for society as Bernie Madoff at a Bar Mitzvah. Pay no heed to those pious owls in politics, the op-ed pages and cable-news panels—pastoral Voices of Civility such as Jon Meacham and David Gergen— who will caution that “now is not the time” to be raking over the recent past, casting recriminations, and turning Schadenfreude into tasty casseroles; the nation must move forward and let the healing process begin. To such doily knitters and thumb twiddlers, it’s never the right time to sift through the debris, apportion responsibility, and name the guilty parties; this is why it took more than a year to establish a 9/11 commission, and its final report was analytical, rhetorical mush. The day after Trump is deposed will be the day to get cracking on addressing what got him to where he never should have been.

hen Laura Ingraham seemingly snapped a Sieg heil! salute at Trump’s giant-screen image at the Republican convention, it was a signal that a rabid strain of Fascist flirtation had been reborn—and mainstreamed. PostTrump, the country needs its own, domesNOV E M B E R

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tic version of the de-Nazification program established in Germany after World War II, an inquiry into how so many alleged neoNazi, white-supremacist sympathizers had input into this presidency, and their connection with neo-Nazi and nativist movements overseas. Trump has legitimized the hate militias like no president ever before, one of his many blighting legacies and perhaps his most lasting. The domestic threat posed by white-supremacist militias and other violent extremists armed to the steel teeth has been minimized by Republicans, who, jerked around by their Fox News puppet masters, prefer fulminating against Black Lives Matter and antifa street fighters. But white people’s grievances are always given precedence, reflecting the racial makeup of newsrooms and corporate hierarchies. This bias infiltrates political feature writing past the point of exasperation. How nice it would be if even before Trump humps out of view and into the elephants’ graveyard we were given a journalistic moratorium on earnest dispatches devoted to the Loyal Trump Voter in the battered industrial ruinscape who still supports the big guy despite the latest storm out of Washington. Nary a month goes by without The New York Times or The Washington Post filing a story about Trump supporters who can’t quit him even though he’s plotting to cut off their health coverage or shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die. This sentimentalization of the Loyal Trump Voter, whose rationale for standing by the president is often cradled in incoherence and plain, proud ignorance with a large chunk of stubborn pride, is the latest extension of the press’s centering of the White Working Class in the national narrative, no matter how much the demographics and the complexion of the country change. Every election cycle, eastern reporters ritualistically venture into caucus and primary states such as Iowa and New Hampshire on Norman Rockwell safari to file copy from the diners and truck stops on “real Americans” in plaid jackets and tractor caps with heartland values and comfort-food appetites. It is time this romance with Ma and Pa Kettle was put out to pasture. Let journalists find other ways to pretend to be in touch with those left behind and clinging to their discredited articles of faith. Otherwise, decades from now, if news outlets as we know them survive, reporters may still be tramping through the hinterlands searching for the last remaining Trump holdouts to interview as if they were Japanese soldiers hiding in the jungles long after World War II ended.

t will be welcome to see arts and entertainment return to tumultuous normalcy after so much Trump-infused fear and loathing. Late-night hosts such as Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers have risen to the challenge of converting the asteroid belt of daily bad news into satire and serrated commentary, but four years of this is too much to ask of them, their writers, the audience. Even Jon Stewart, the Cal Ripken of Comedy Central’s Daily Show, experienced occupational burnout after so many years covering the follies. It will also be a blessing to have no more need of Alec Baldwin’s Trump impersonation, that neckless head and those pursed lips bypassing humor and hunching toward the macabre. Inspired as Baldwin’s travestying of Trump is, perforating as the pellet-gun attacks by Colbert, Meyers, and HBO’s John Oliver (who has inherited Jon Stewart’s gift for ratcheting up irony into saeva indignatio) are, this is an administration undone by its own boneheaded incompetence and overreach, and still managing to reap misery and havoc through the sheer power of the executive office. Pop culture can help release our fear and anxiety, distributing the angst and focusing on moving targets that the news media filter out, but it is no substitute for actual politics, a lesson so many liberals neglect. One of the handicaps of the liberal mind-set is this overrating of pop culture and brand-name clout, this celebrating of feminist gestures and political provocations by big-name entertainers as if they signified shifts in the Zeitgeist; meanwhile, the rollbacks of reproductive rights and the degradations of the underprivileged continue. Look at the superstars lined up on Hillary Clinton’s side for the 2016 election (LeBron James, Lady Gaga, George Clooney, Adele), then look at the C-list has-beens supporting Trump (Scott Baio, Ted Nugent, Gary Busey)—did it make any difference to the outcome? Superstar culture feeds the thirst for saviors, and since celebrity superstar culture tilts liberal, we’re the ones looking up when we should be looking around and attending to the ground game. Losing on the local level has hollowed out the bench strength of the Democratic Party, and one-party rule is a recipe for tyranny. If we don’t prevent future Trumps, the next self-styled, Putin-picked autocrat may not be a complete boob and may have a better handle on how to accomplish his heinous goals. Which suggests a President Pence won’t be any picnic. Oh well, let’s just wait and detonate that bridge when we get to it. www.vanityfair.com

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AMERICA NEEDS TALENT A look at the most popular show on television— America’s Got Talent—explains why the U.S. needs its immigrants. Most often, they’re doing this country a favor

he most popular show on television in the United States right now is America’s Got Talent. If you’ve never seen it (which is hard to imagine), it’s a talent show and talent competition, essentially the same as Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour, a lar show in the early days of teleision and the program that gave us the useful phrase “amateur NO PROBLEM Hand-wringing hour”—applied as a metaphor about immigration for incompetence, although this gets the is nearly the opposite of what balance sheet all wrong. the word “amateur,” which simly connotes a love of some activity, originally meant. It is now directed sarcastically at almost anything people do. The winner each year on A.G.T., as it’s called, gets $1 million and a stint headlining at one of the Las Vegas casinos. But the publicity value of being a winner on A.G.T. is worth at least the same sort of number. By now, even appearing on A.G.T. is a surefire career starter. And I don’t want to pile a lot of sermonizing on top of this innocent cultural icon. It is less than harmless. If you haven’t seen it, or any of its spin-offs, you’ll find it somewhere on the spectrum between riveting and boring, depending on your taste, but above all harmless. To do well on A.G.T., it helps to have some conventional talent, such as being a

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KINSLEY great singer or dancer. But the winner tends to have some special backstory, such as extreme youth (being a three-year-old magician would be good) or overcoming a handicap (like a blind hip-hop artist). The talent on display may indeed be inspiring, but the inspiration contains a large dose of admiration for the courage and grit of the performer rather than for the talent itself. A woman in her 20s who sings like Barbra Streisand at her peak will lose out to, oh, a woman in her 90s who can still belt them out, sort of.

merica’s Got Talent may be brimming with talent, but what it’s short of, given its unspoken premise that talent is good and we’ve got more of it than anyone else, is Americans. America may have talent—America does have talent, and a culture that takes better advantage of it than any other on the planet, probably—but before we get all puffed up about that, consider where that talent came from. I’ll tell you where: it came from elsewhere. In the most recent season of A.G.T.—Season 12—

IT IS MISPLACED SELFISHNESS

TO KEEP IMMIGRANTS OUT THINKING THAT DOING SO IS GOOD FOR US. This speaks well of America. Despite its title, what the show demonstrates is that there are more important things than talent. The Major Bowes of A.G.T. is an oleaginous character named Simon Cowell, who more or less single-handedly revived the genre. He also is one of four judges on A.G.T. and on Britain’s Got Talent and The X Factor, which he created. He has spread the brand around the world. Were you aware that Mongolia Has Talent? It may or may not, but Mongol TV has a program called Mongolia’s Got Talent. The formula is pretty formulaic, but Cowell or someone who works for him has dreamed up a surprising number of variations on a theme in order to squeeze every drop of juice from this grapefruit. One technique is to make the rules bizarre and complex, to extend the competition as long as possible. There are quarter-finals and “golden buzzers.” Contestants are eliminated but then magically revived. The ultimate decision is made by viewers online. (The judges may have determined who gets into the competition to begin with, but on the air they are largely superfluous.) There’s no question that the participants in America’s Got Talent have plenty of talent—except for a judge named Howie Mandel, one of those celebrities whom you recognize but don’t know why, and who are famous for being famous. But to be a star of the country’s most popular TV show with no discernible talent qualifies as a talent in itself, I suppose. 84

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6 out of 36 acts are explicitly from abroad. And the Americans tend to be individual performers, while the foreign acts tend to be groups, such as Just Jerk, a hip-hop dance group from Seoul, and Light Balance, a dance group from Ukraine. If you were to include first-generation native-born Americans, an even bigger slice of the pie would qualify as recent arrivals. And then there are the regulars, the judges, who must find a dozen new ways to say “superb,” “brilliant,” and “I just love you” every night during taping season. Foreigners are over-represented here too. There’s “Mel B,” whom Wikipedia reveals to be Melanie Janine Brown, formerly known as Scary Spice. There’s Heidi Klum, a supermodel from Germany. The inexplicable Howie was born in Toronto. And of course there’s Simon Cowell, who is British but really qualifies at this point as a man of the world, with America’s Got Talent having spread to 190 countries. And so what? It’s only to say that, if America’s got talent, it’s because the possessors of this talent, or their parents, decided to come here—and America decided to let them in. (When I say “them” I really mean “us,” or a vast majority of us.) And it’s a small measure of what we might lose if we slam the door on them, as many Americans would like to do. You might think that a kid with a dancing dog is no big loss to the most powerful nation on earth. But you’d be wrong. Anti-immigrant politicians can often be heard on television saying, “Oh, I’m not against immigration. I’m for

immigration—I’m against illegal immigration.” Obviously—so obviously that even the dimmest, least talented among them must know they’re talking crap—this is meaningless without a number attached. You have to decide how many immigrants to take in every year, and I suppose there is a limit. But we’re nowhere near it yet. There is no immigration crisis in this country. Certainly nothing like the scale they have to deal with in Europe. The U.S. population is now about 325 million. By 2020, if it remains on its current path, it’s likely to reach 335 million—a whopping 10 million increase, most of it made in the U.S.A., not imported from abroad. The immigration debate often accepts as a premise that we (native-born Americans) are doing them (would-be immigrants) a favor by deigning to let them into our country. In fact, more often than not, they’re doing us a favor by bringing their talent to the point where America’s got it. The responsible, moderate position on immigration is that America wants talent, and that we should take the ones whose talent is most evident: doctors, Ph.D.’s, and people who will become these things. This is not exactly in the spirit of “Give me your tired, your poor … ” It’s a legitimate question whether we should be encouraging people to leave places that need their contribution more than we do. But it is misplaced selfishness to keep them out thinking that doing so is good for us. The controversy over the so-called Dreamers—non-citizens who came to America as children with their illegalimmigrant parents—involves people who barely have a memory, if any memory at all, of the countries they would be sent back to if President Trump has his way. As usual, there’s some dispute as to what “his way” actually means—it’s been amateur hour. But after the president rescinded the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, the White House distributed talking points on Capitol Hill saying it expected the affected people to up and leave: “The Department of Homeland Security urges DACA recipients to use the time remaining on their work authorizations to prepare for and arrange their departure from the United States.” Ordinarily I would cringe at the fanciful use of the term “Dreamers.” But it is the most brilliant bit of agitprop since someone at a conservative business association thought to popularize “death tax” as shorthand for the federal estate tax, back in the 1990s. By now it is too effective to throw away. America’s Got Talent, sure enough. But we can always use more. N OVEMB ER

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The four horsemen of the coming economic apocalypse— Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, and Facebook—have already flattened entire industries. With scenarios that make the Industrial Revolution look like a picnic, some moguls are now focused on managing the social impact

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t was getting close to midnight at the Slanted Door, Charles Phan’s renowned Vietnamese restaurant in the Ferry Building, overlooking San Francisco Bay. Outside, Teslas and Priuses were making their way along I-80, over the bridge toward Oakland and Berkeley; a few lights from the tankers, trawling the waters past Yerba Buena Island, flickered like fireflies. A cold early-October breeze rippled the waves. C.E.O.’s are an early-waking group, and inside the restaurant only a few stragglers remained from the speakers’ dinner of Vanity Fair’s third annual New Establishment Summit. Bob Iger and Richard Plepler had left

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GOOGLE, ONE EXECUTIVE SAID, “HAS AN ALGORITHM THAT PRINTS MONEY.”

at least an hour earlier. Sarah Jessica Parker and Jony Ive were gone, too. Meanwhile, the restaurant staff was carefully bustling around the sleek, modernist dining room, whisking away wineglasses and stacking empty dessert plates after another busy night in America’s idea capital. For some, though, the night was still young. At a long table sat Travis Kalanick, then still the C.E.O. of Uber, and Jeff Bezos, soon to be the richest man in the world (for about four hours, before relinquishing the title back to Bill Gates), who were laughing like old friends despite the fact that they had met for the first time earlier that evening. From a nearby booth, I was struck by how friendly the billionaires seemed with each other. As Bezos howled in his signature laugh, I leaned over to a colleague and whispered about the irony of the conversation. By that time, Uber was already morphing from a ride-hailing service to a massive logistics conglomerate—and emerging competitor to U.P.S., FedEx, and, yes, Amazon. And Amazon was itself far along into its journey of entering new markets (food, Hollywood) and quickly dominating them—an economic earthquake that has become known as the Amazon Effect. The two men may have been laughing that evening, but their companies were on a collision course. In a few years, they would almost certainly be trying to put each other out of business—if they weren’t already doing so secretly. I had no doubt that Bezos and Kalanick, beneath their jovial guffaws, knew that, too.

o be fair to Kalanick, Bezos could have been sitting next to any C.E.O. in the world, and I would have uttered that very same pronouncement. Uber, at some $70 billion in private valuation, is massive. Amazon, however, is gigantic. The company, along with Apple, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), and Facebook, is quickly becoming one of the four horsemen of the economic apocalypse—public companies that are expected to be worth $1 trillion, and continue to reorder the business universe in their image. We’re almost there: Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, and Facebook together are now worth about $2.5 trillion, or about 13 percent of the value of the entire Fortune 500—and growing. Amazon’s stock price has tripled since 2015; Apple is currently storing some $260 billion in cash; Google, as one executive once told me, “has an algorithm that prints money”; and a quarter of the entire planet is on Facebook. But what’s most remarkable, or terrifying, is that no business is safe from their jaws. When the meal-kit delivery service Blue Apron announced it was going public, for instance, its bankers had planned to price its initial public shares between $15 and $17. But upon the mere news that Amazon had concocted a pithy slogan—“We do the prep. You be the chef.”—for a potential future meal-delivery business of its own, Blue Apron was forced to slash the share price to between $10 and $11. Earlier this year, supermarket chains saw their market capitalization recede by $22 billion in a mass sell-off just hours after Amazon had announced that it was buying Whole Foods. Presumably, these investors had nightmares of owning shares of the next Borders, which is out of business, or Barnes & Noble, which saw its stock drop some 75 percent in the past two years alone. The Amazon Effect, alas, is no longer unique to Amazon. Kodak was once worth more than $31 billion, and Polaroid used to do nearly $3 billion a year in sales, yet both companies (among many others) were walloped by the iPhone. Facebook has no qualms about leveling any 94

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competitor (such as Vine, Twitter, and, most recently, Snapchat) that enters its periphery. Google’s prowess can be seen in the vanquished legacies of Excite, Lycos, AltaVista, AskJeeves, and Yahoo. And that’s before considering how the company has torn asunder the businesses surrounding classified ads, cartography, home heating, and wearables. The recent history is chilling, but the future is what really scares people. A June 2017 Ball State University study noted that about half of all U.S. jobs could be eliminated in the coming years due to advances in automation. A March report by PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that 38 percent of all jobs in the U.S. could be lost to automation in just 15 years. The Obama White House prevised that artificial intelligence could eliminate up to 47 percent of all jobs in the next two decades. Some in Silicon Valley, namely the venture capitalists that underwrite such companies, optimistically compare this phenomenon to the Industrial Revolution. In reality, the Industrial Revolution was a horribly painful event that spanned some 80 years. This time around, the swallowing of jobs by a few companies is going to happen with the pell-mell of a clap of thunder. And everyone—including even Travis Kalanick’s Uber—is susceptible.

his year the New Establishment list, celebrating its 23rd anniversary, is not merely a catalogue of the most influential personalities who inhabit the rarefied realm where tech, entertainment, media, business, finance, and politics all meet. It is also a harbinger of what the world will look like during the next quarter-century—and the people who will dictate that future. Perhaps this outsize pressure explains why so many moguls— Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos—are focused on the world they are inheriting. Some are fixated on the notion of the universal basic income (U.B.I.), which suggests that government pay citizens a stipend to compensate for the jobs that tech may have eaten up. Others are fearful that we’ll create even more terrifying innovations, such as bots or other A.I. devices, which will pose serious threats. This group knows what they’re talking about. They are the ones who gave Donald Trump his artillery. But there’s something else. An abiding and solid company, and even an entire industry, can fall in just a few years as a result of technology in the hands of an adept competitor. Bezos could be enjoying dinner with someone we’ve never even heard of today, and that could be the upstart who is threatening to destroy Amazon. I have no doubt that the people on this year’s New Establishment list know that, too. N OVEMB ER

2017

NEW ESTABLISHMENT I

n 2016, Vanity Fair’s annual New Establishment list acknowledged that, these days, everyone is in the technology business—and we gestured at this phenomenon by collapsing what had previously been two lists into one cohesive catalogue of power and influence in the intelligence age. This year, however, it seems that everyone is increasingly in everyone else’s business: Apple is in the car sector (and, more recently, the entertainment industry); Disney is going head-to-head with Netflix in the streaming game; Emerson Collective, the philanthropic organization created by Laurene Powell Jobs, is now a dark horse in media. Jeff Immelt, who transformed General Electric from a light-bulbs-and-fridges company to a tech colossus, nearly became C.E.O. of Uber. This year’s list also foreshadows the coming battles as these various industries, and the titans who captain them, increasingly weave together into one. Meanwhile, some adjustments have been made. We have added Jay-Z, among others, to the Hall of Fame; Lloyd Blankfein, on the other hand, has been unretired. (A full list of Hall of Fame inductees can be found on the Hive, V.F.’s site covering Wall Street, Washington, and Silicon Valley, at www.vfhive.com.) Blankfein, after all, already describes Goldman Sachs as a technology company. Who knows what business the banking behemoth may enter next?

Age: 5 3 L ast ye a r ’s ra n k : 1

JEFF BEZOS Amazon Ë C R OW N I N G AC H I E V E M E N T: Overtook Bill Gates as the world’s richest person for a brief, glorious, four-hour span. EVIDENCE OF VULCAN CHESS

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M A S T E R Y : Bought Whole Foods for $13.7 billion, which sent Amazon’s stock soaring beyond the value of the acquisition itself. B I G N U M B E R : $5 billion, the amount Amazon says it will invest in building and operating a second headquarters in North America. The city of Tuscon “bid” for the site by sending Bezos a giant cactus. E V I D E N C E O F B I O N I C E N G I N E E R I N G : Bezos showed up at this year’s Sun Valley retreat with bulging biceps and a Terminator-esque countenance, spawning an Internet meme frenzy. W O R K O U T R E G I M E N : “Heavy weights and whiskey. Not simultaneously.”

A ge: 3 3 Last year ’s rank : 2

MARK ZUCKERBERG Facebook Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: Led Facebook to two billion users worldwide, making it nearly as ubiquitous as running water. BIG

NUMBER: $3 billion, the amount Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, pledged to spend to try to cure, prevent, or manage all diseases in existence. RARE DISPLAY OF MORTALITY: Said it was “crazy” to suggest that Facebook may have swung the election. Later admitted that Facebook hadn’t done enough to crack down on real fake news. QUIXOTIC QUEST: Has spent the year visiting all 50 U.S. states, hobnobbing with truckers and farmers and spawning relentless rumors that he will run for president in 2020. (He won’t, he says.)

A ge: 5 6 Last year ’s rank : 11

TIM COOK Apple Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: With a market cap north of $800 billion, Apple is on track to be a trillion-dollar company. RARE DISPLAY OF MORTALITY: As consumers reject the new MacBook Pro and Apple arrives late to the game with HomePod, an Echo wannabe, the company is clinging to the iPhone for more than half of its revenue—an inauspicious strategy, since phone sales are predicted to decline. MORTIFYING TRUMP MOMENT: Cook showed up at Trump Tower in December to kiss the ring, then went to the White House in June to try to convince Trump of the importance of coding in schools.

A ge: 4 4 Last year ’s rank : 13

LARRY PAGE Alphabet Ë EVIDENCE OF VULCAN CHESS MASTERY: Alphabet, Google’s parent company, gained ground on at least one competitor in the self-driving-car space this year when it took Uber to court for intellectualproperty theft. Fallout from the lawsuit could kneecap Uber’s

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P HOTO GRA P HS BY J E F F CHI U/A . P. I MAG ES ( 4) ; BY DRE W A N GE RE R ( 1 ), DAV ID PAUL M OR R IS /B L O OM BE RG ( 2) , B OT H F RO M GE T T Y I MAGE S ; BY NOA M GA L A I /W I RE I MAG E ( 3)

THE 2017

NEW ESTABLISHMENT

autonomous-vehicle endeavors for years to come. RARE DISPLAY OF MORTALITY: Some of Alphabet’s projects—notably Fiber, its Internet division—have struggled in the past year as Google C.F.O. Ruth Porat pressures them to make money. BIG NUMBER: $47.2 billion: Page’s net worth, a new record high.

BOB IGER

MARTY BARON

RARE DISPLAY OF MORTALITY:

Cord-cutting consumers are ditching ESPN, which laid off workers earlier this year.

Tesla, SpaceX Ë L AT E ST C O N Q U E STS : This year alone, Musk has launched rockets into space (and landed them back on earth), showcased a plan to create colonies on Mars, and built an affordable electric car. B I G N U M B E R : $63 billion, Tesla’s market capitalization, which makes it the world’s most valuable car-maker.

A ge : 5 7 N ot ra nke d l a st ye a r

RANDALL STEPHENSON AT&T

Age: 7 3 Not ra n ke d l a st ye a r

ROBERT MUELLER D.O.J. special counsel Ë C R O W N I N G A C H I E V E M E N T: The former F.B.I. chief, respected by nearly everyone in Washington, caps a storied, four-decade career of military and government service with the assignment of a lifetime: investigating the alleged ties between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Mueller has assembled a veritable dream team of attorneys to help him, including former colleagues at the F.B.I. and WilmerHale, the white-shoe D.C. firm. L AT E S T T R I U M P H : Getting his hands on Trump aide Stephen Miller’s first draft of the letter firing F.B.I. director James Comey, which some readers have described as a “rant.” R A R E D I S P L AY O F M O R TA L I T Y: Running into territorial fights with the two congressional panels investigating Trump’s ties with Russia.

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A ges: 62 , 61 Last year ’s rank : 4 4 ( B aron)

Ë EVIDENCE OF VULCAN CHESS MASTERY: Rumors still abound that Iger may run for president in 2020.

ELON MUSK

www.vanityfair.com

A ge : 6 6 La st ye a r ’s ra nk : 4

Disney

Age: 4 6 L ast ye a r ’s ra n k : 5

Ë LATEST CONQUEST: Acquiring media giant Time Warner for $85.4 billion in a deal that makes the Bell System lifer the undisputed king of content-distribution convergence. BIG NUMBER: $193 billion, the estimated revenue of the combined AT&T–Time Warner.

A ge : 5 6 La st ye a r ’s ra nk : 6

REED HASTINGS Netflix Ë B I G N U M B E R : 50 percent of Netflix subscribers are international. R A R E D I S P L AY O F M O R TA L I T Y: Netflix finds itself under increased pressure as competition heats up in the digital-streaming space, with Amazon and Apple boosting spending on original shows and movies, and Disney pulling its content off the platform.

The Washington Post

DEAN BAQUET

The New York Times

Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: In an era when the American president has an attenuated relationship with the truth, these two editors have stood up for real news, breaking stories ranging from West Wing gossip to nationalsecurity scoops on a daily basis. RARE DISPLAYS OF MORTALITY: The Times is shedding hundreds of employees, and the Post recently announced it can fire staffers for disparaging its advertisers on social media.

ANTI-TRUMP MOMENT: Donated

$1 million to Planned Parenthood after the president threatened to de-fund the organization.

A ge: 6 8 Last year ’s rank : 15

LES MOONVES CBS Ë BIG NUMBER: CBS stock is up nearly 26 percent in the past 12 months, and has easily outperformed an index of similar media stocks and the S&P 500.

A ge: 52 Not ranked l ast year

JEFF ZUCKER

Ages: 39, 35 Last year ’s rank : 9

CNN

JEAN LIU & CHENG WEI

Ë RARE DISPLAY OF MORTALITY: Zucker blinked in the face of the threat of a $100 million lawsuit from Anthony Scaramucci, oversaw the resignation of three reporters, and retracted their story about an alleged investigation into the Mooch’s business dealings.

Didi Chuxing Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: After forcing Uber out of China, Didi has expanded its global empire with a series of strategic partnerships and investments with ride-hailing services such as Europe’s Taxify, India’s Ola, Southeast Asia’s Grab, and Lyft.

A ge: 4 8 Last year ’s rank : 14

SHERYL SANDBERG Facebook Ë EVIDENCE OF VULCAN CHESS MASTERY: Reportedly turned down Uber’s vacant C.E.O. job. DEFIANT

A ge: 5 3 Last year ’s rank : 16

JACK MA Alibaba Ë R A R E D I S P L AY O F M O RTA L I T Y: Ma has said he applied to (and was rejected by) Harvard University 10 times. EVIDENCE OF TRUMP SUPPORT: Ma moved early to ingratiate himself with the president, pledging in January to create a million American jobs over the next five years. (Alibaba employs about 50,000 people worldwide.)

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P HOTO GRA P HS BY A L E X B RA N DON /A . P. I M AGE S ( 12 ) ; BY A N DR EW TOTH ( 13) , TA SI A W EL L S ( 7) , BOTH FRO M FI LMMAGI C ; FRO M THE ASAHI SHI MBUN (14), FRO M VCG ( 11, L E F T) , BY M IKE WI N DLE (5 ) , A LE X WON G ( 6) , A L L F ROM G ET T Y I MAG ES ; F RO M I M AGI NE CH I NA/NE WSCO M (11, RI GHT); BY TO DD HEI SLE R/ T HE NE W YOR K T IM E S (10, R I GHT) , ST EP HE N VO SS ( 10, L EF T ) , B OT H F RO M R E DUX; F RO M A .P. IM AGE S /R EX /S HUT TE R STOCK ( 9); FRO M REX/SHUTTERSTO CK (8); © JUNGE /NTB SC ANPI X/ZUMA PRESS (15)

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A ge s: 59, 3 3 N ot ra nke d l a st ye a r

A ges: 59, 58 Last year ’s rank : 2 5

RUPERT MURDOCH

ALEC BALDWIN & KATE MCKINNON

STEVE BURKE

BRIAN CHESKY

NBCUniversal

Airbnb

News Corp., 21st Century Fox Ë L AT E ST C O N Q U E ST: Trump whisperer Murdoch had been urging the president to get rid of chief strategist Steve Bannon, who left the White House in August. R A R E D I S P L AY O F M O RTA L I T Y: Back at Breitbart, Bannon now poses a threat to Murdoch’s Fox News and its influence on the right wing. P HOTO GRA P HS F RO M R E X FE ATUR ES ( 16 ) , CHA R LE S SYKE S /I NV IS I O N (2 2 , L E F T) , B OTH F RO M A .P. I MAGE S; BY JASO N L A VE RI S/FI LMMAGI C (26, 27); BY DAVI D PAUL MO RRI S/BLO O MBE RG (20), ALE X WO NG ( 17) , B OTH F ROM G ET T Y I MAG ES ; BY GA B RI E L A H A SB UN ( 25 ) , F RO M V ISTA PR E SS /CA M E RA P RE S S (21), BOTH FRO M RE DUX; BY LUC AS JACKSO N/RE U TERS (23); BY MARK LE NNI HAN/A.P. I MAGE S (22, RI GHT), F RO M S I LVER HUB ( 19 , L E FT ) , BOTH F ROM R EX /S HUT T ER STOCK; BY T HE O WA RGO ( 18) , PAUL ZI M MERMAN (19, RI GHT), BOTH FRO M WI REI MAGE ; © J O RDI BO I XAREU/ZUMA WI RE (24)

NEW ESTABLISHMENT

A ge : 8 6 Last ye a r ’s ra n k : 8

Age : 49 Last ye a r ’s ra n k : 19

PETER THIEL Founders Fund, Trump supporter Ë RARE DISPLAY OF MORTALITY: Thiel, one of Trump’s earliest supporters from the business community, sold most of his Facebook stock within three months of the company’s 2012 I.P.O., netting around $1 billion on a $500,000 investment. Had he held the stock, his stake would be worth more than $6 billion.

BRIAN ROBERTS

Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: By the end of the 2016 election season, some voters were tuning in to the presidential debates merely to see how the barbs would be re-interpreted by Emmy Award winners McKinnon (as Clinton) and Baldwin (as Trump) on S.N.L.

Comcast

A ge : 4 5 La st ye a r ’s ra nk : 2 3

SUNDAR PICHAI Google Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: Pichai is focused on harnessing the artificial intelligence within Google products such as Google Home, the company’s answer to the Amazon Echo. RARE DISPLAY OF MORTALITY: Alphabet profit declined sharply in the middle of 2017, hurt by a $2.7 billion fine levied by European anti-trust regulators.

A ge : 4 4 La st ye a r ’s ra nk : 20

Age : 72 Hall of Fame

LORNE MICHAELS Saturday Night Live Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: Michaels and Saturday Night Live came out swinging during the 2016 election to take back the crown as the most influential voice in political comedy—and earn its highest ratings in nearly a quarter of a century.

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KEVIN FEIGE Mar vel Studios Ë RARE DISPLAY OF MORTALITY: Allowing Warner Bros./DC to beat Marvel to the punch when it came to debuting a female-led superhero movie. Wonder Woman cleaned up at the box office. BIG NUMBER: During Feige’s decade-long tenure, Marvel Studios has pulled in $12.6 billion at the global box office.

Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: Two unlikely twists of fate: NBCU’s eighth iteration of its Fast and the Furious franchise drove revenues higher, and NBCU’s cable-news network, MSNBC, has been giving Fox News a run for its money.

A ge: 41 Last year ’s rank : 7

TRAVIS KALANICK

A ge : 3 6 Last year ’s rank : 2 1

Ë RARE DISPLAY OF MORTALITY: The company’s biggest nemesis, the hotel lobby, has been relentless in its anti-Airbnb campaigns. The company may be its own worst enemy, however: protesters in San Francisco, Airbnb’s home city, have accused it of contributing to rising rental rates in already unaffordable neighborhoods.

A ge: 58 Last year ’s rank : 27

RICHARD PLEPLER HBO

Uber Ë RARE DISPLAY OF MORTALITY: A blog post written by a former Uber engineer outlining allegations of sexism and retaliation led to internal investigations, bad press, and eventually Kalanick’s resignation from the company he co-founded. EVIDENCE OF VULCAN CHESS MASTERY: Retaining a seat on Uber’s

board, even after he stepped down from his C.E.O. role. Kalanick has reportedly told people he’ll be “Steve Jobs–ing it,” by which he means returning to Uber as its leader.

A ge: 6 0 Not ranked l ast year

MASAYOSHI SON SoftBank Ë BIG NUMBER: $100 billion: the size of SoftBank’s “Vision Fund”— the biggest tech fund on the planet.

Ë C R OW N I N G AC H I E V E M E N T: HBO says it is on track to deliver its biggest subscriber gain in more than 30 years. Even as Game of Thrones comes to a close, the brand has never been stronger. R A R E D I S P L AY O F M O RTA L I T Y: Hackers breached HBO’s cyber-system this year, after an admitted six-month effort, to get their hands on executives’ e-mails and, naturally, a script summary of an upcoming Thrones episode.

A ge: 5 3 Last year ’s rank : 31

TED SARANDOS Netflix Ë BIG NUMBER: 5.2 million, the number of subscribers Netflix added during its second quarter this year, eclipsing the projected 3.2 million and causing its stock to soar more than 10 percent.

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VAN IT Y

FAIR

NEW ESTABLISHMENT

A ge : 5 1 La st ye a r ’s ra nk : 26

A ge: 4 5 Not ranked l ast year

Age: 27 L ast ye a r ’s ra n k : 3

EVAN SPIEGEL

BILL GURLEY

MARC LORE

Snap

Benchmark

Walmart

Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: Spiegel, who famously turned down a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg (No. 2), took Snap public earlier this year.

Ë RARE DISPLAY OF MORTALITY: After Uber ousted C.E.O. and co-founder Travis Kalanick in the wake of myriad scandals, Gurley left the company’s board. BIG NUMBER: Benchmark’s 13 percent stake in Uber, which touts a valuation of $68.5 billion.

Ë BIG NUMBER: Lore raked in $243.9 million in pay last year, tied to his sale of Jet.com to Walmart.

RARE DISPLAY OF MORTALITY:

Alas, shares of Snap are down some 40 percent, thanks, in part, to Facebook’s efforts, via Instagram, to outmaneuver Snapchat.

A ge s: 4 3, 5 0 N ot ra nke d l a st ye a r

Age: 4 6 L ast ye a r ’s ra n k : 24

MARC ANDREESSEN

MAGGIE HABERMAN & GLENN THRUSH The New York Times

Andreessen Horowitz Ë LATEST TRIUMPH: His firm’s $60 million investment in ride-sharing also-ran Lyft, in 2013, is starting to look smart in light of Uber’s very bad year. RARE DISPLAY OF MORTALITY: Andreessen has yet to hire a female investing partner. MOST RECENT BOOK FINISHED? Extreme Ownership, by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin.

Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: The go-to reporters on everything involving the Trump White House recently signed a major book deal with Random House. BIG NUMBER: Three, the number of times Thrush has been portrayed on S.N.L.

A ge s: 47, 4 6 La st ye a r ’s ra nk : 32

Age: 3 4 L ast ye a r ’s ra n k : 87

DANIEL EK

DAVID BENIOFF & D. B. WEISS Game of Thrones

Spotify Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: Spotify is preparing for an I.P.O. that could change how I.P.O.’s are done. The company is expected to opt for what is known as a “direct listing,” instead of going through Wall Street underwriters. BIG NUMBER: 60 million subscribers, more than double those of Apple Music.

100

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Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: Game of Thrones is on its way to becoming the most watched show in the world. RARE DISPLAY OF MORTALITY: The bungled announcement of their next project, the controversial alt-history Confederate, has resulted in widespread backlash and a #NoConfederate social-media campaign timed to disrupt Thrones discussions on Sunday nights.

A ge: 3 3 Last year ’s rank : 8 4

LOGAN GREEN Lyft Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: As Uber struggles, Lyft has stayed scandal-free.

A ge: 70 Hall of Fame

STEPHEN SCHWARZMAN

Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: Transforming himself from a professional wrestler to one of the highest-paid actors on earth, with a reported $65 million earned between June 2016 and June 2017. RARE DISPLAY OF MORTALITY: Baywatch flopped with U.S. moviegoers this summer.

A ge: 4 5 Last year ’s rank : 2 9

MA HUATENG Tencent Ë LATEST TRIUMPH: In just two years, Tencent’s WeChat messaging app has quadrupled its share of China’s important mobile-payment market.

A ge: 61 Last year ’s rank : 39

JAMIE DIMON JPMorgan Chase Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: In July, Dimon’s bank reported secondquarter earnings of $7 billion, bringing the previous 12 months’ profit to a whopping $26.5 billion, more than any other bank has earned in U.S. history.

Blackstone Ë MORTIFYING TRUMP MOMENT: Chairing the president’s Strategic & Policy Forum. TRUMP HUMBLING: Disbanding said council after Trump’s “many sides” comment post-Charlottesville.

A ge: 4 5 Not ranked l ast year

DWAYNE JOHNSON Actor

A ges: 4 0 –5 3 Not ranked l ast year

LATE-NIGHT ANTAGONISTS Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Samantha Bee, Seth Meyers, and John Oliver Ë LATEST TRIUMPH: Unabashedly dissecting the stupidity of Trump and

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P HOTO GRA P HS BY R I CHA R D DRE W/ A .P. I M AGE S ( 35 ) ; BY J A SO N L A VER I S/ F IL M MAGIC ( 3 3, L EF T) ; BY PATRI CK T. FALLO N (36), JO HAN JEPPSSO N (30), MI CHAEL NAGLE (28), PAUL YE UNG (38), ALL FRO M BLO O M B E RG/ GE T T Y IM AGE S; BY B RI A N B E DDE R ( 40 , FA R L E F T) , MI CHA E L KOVAC ( 2 9) , KAT HRY N PAG E ( 40 , S E CO ND FRO M LE FT), ALL FRO M GE TT Y I MAGES; BY EARL WI LSO N/ T HE NE W YOR K T IM E S (32, RI GHT); BY RO GER KI S BY ( 3 2, LE F T ), P ET E R E A R L M C CO L L OUG H/T H E N EW YO RK T IM E S ( 31) , PA SC A L SI TT L ER /R E A ( 3 9) , A LL FRO M REDUX; BY MI CHAEL BUCKNER/ VAR IE T Y (33, RI GHT), MARI O N C URTI S/STARPI X (40, SE CO ND FRO M R I GHT), S E TH W EN I G/A .P. IM AGE S ( 34 ) , A L L F RO M RE X /SH UTT E RSTO CK; BY A MA N DA EDWA R DS ( 4 0, CE N TE R) , WALTE R M C BRI DE (40, FAR RI GHT), BOTH FRO M WI REI MAGE ; © DAVE STARBUCK/FUTURE-I MAGE /ZUMA PRE S S (37)

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his administration, making them the true heirs to Jon Stewart.

Age: 5 7 L ast ye a r ’s ra n k : 45

DAVID ZASLAV Discovery Communications Ë LATEST TRIUMPH: Discovery will acquire Scripps Networks Interactive—for $14.6 billion. DISPLAY OF (NON–SHARK WEEK) VULCAN CHESS MASTERY: Though Zaslav

clearly likes reality and documentary television, Discovery Channel’s foray into scripted drama, Manhunt: Unabomber, has generated Netflix-like buzz.

Age: 4 8 Not ra n ke d l a st ye a r

DARA KHOSROWSHAHI Uber

A ge : 5 3 La st ye a r ’s ra nk : 7 3

LAURENE POWELL JOBS Emerson Collective Ë LATEST TRIUMPH: Powell Jobs led the Emerson Collective to acquire a majority stake in The Atlantic in July, adding to a media portfolio that includes stakes in Axios, Anonymous Content, Mother Jones, and ProPublica. Many assume that she now has her eye on The New York Times.

A ge : 52 La st ye a r ’s ra nk : 3 4

Ë BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR: In late August, Uber named Khosrowshahi as C.E.O. of the troubled transportation company, a role that will require him to clean up its toxic corporate culture, bring together warring shareholder groups, and figure out how to make money— all with former C.E.O. Travis Kalanick (No. 23) looking over his shoulder.

Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: Completing the construction of the Salesforce Tower, now set to be the tallest building in San Francisco.

Age: 6 3 Hall of Fame

102

Gary Cohn, joined several former Goldman executives in the Trump White House, Blankfein has not shied away from criticizing the administration, using his first-ever tweet to denounce the decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement. BIG NUMBER: As of the end of July, the bank has enjoyed a 55 percent gain in its stock price under Blankfein’s tutelage.

MARC BENIOFF Salesforce

A ge : 5 1 La st ye a r ’s ra nk : 30

LLOYD BLANKFEIN

J. J. ABRAMS

Goldman Sachs

Director

Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: Although his longtime number two,

Ë LATEST TRIUMPH: Getting tapped to write and direct Star Wars: Episode

VANI T Y FA I R

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IX, the last film in the franchise sequel’s trilogy. (See below.)

A ge: 6 4 Last year ’s rank: 37

KATHLEEN KENNEDY Lucasfilm Ë C R OW N I N G AC H I E V E M E N T: In her five years at the helm of Lucasfilm, Kennedy has somehow simultaneously managed to delight both her Disney overlords and indefatigable Star Wars fanboys. R A R E D I S P L AY O F M O RTA L I T Y:

A ge: 4 0 Last year ’s rank : 69

JACK DORSEY Twitter, Square Ë R A R E E V I D E N C E O F M O RTA L I T Y: While most people in Dorsey’s position would have kicked Trump off Twitter long ago, the C.E.O. of the most volatile social network on the planet has stood his ground and let the “short-fingered vulgarian” continue to publish his 140-character missives, often sent early in the morning or late at night. E M BA R R AS S I N G T R U M P M O M E N T:

This year she fired directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller (Han Solo spin-off), and Colin Trevorrow (Episode IX ).

Trump may love Twitter, but the White House did not invite the C.E.O. of the president’s favorite social network to its tech advisory meeting after Trump won the election.

LOWELL MCADAM

JEFFREY GUNDLACH

Verizon

DoubleLine Capital

Ë LATEST TRIUMPH: Closing Verizon’s purchase of Yahoo, which was delayed by the revelations of data breaches at the Internet company.

Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: Predicting that Donald Trump would win the election and create a “pretty scary” new world order. Gundlach’s flagship fund is up 3 percent, ahead of the vast majority of his peers. RARE DISPLAY OF MORTALITY: Gundlach missed Brexit and took a haircut—like much of the British economy.

A ge: 6 3 L a st ye a r ’s ra n k : 3 6

A ge: 57 Not ranked l ast year

Writer, producer, director

Ë EVIDENCE OF VULCAN CHESS MASTERY: Successfully mining

NOAH HAWLEY

A ge: 51 Last year ’s rank : 38

RYAN MURPHY the 90s (The People v. O. J. Simpson and forthcoming shows on the murder of Gianni Versace and the Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky scandal) for his American Crime Story anthology series.

A ge: 50 Not ranked l ast year

Writer and producer Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT : Hawley has two critically acclaimed shows on FX, Fargo and Legion, and

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P HOTO GRA P HS BY CHR IS P I ZZE L LO / I NVI SI O N /A .P. IM AG ES ( 4 9) ; BY J A S ON L A VER I S/ F IL M MAGI C (52); BY DAVI D PAUL MO RRI S (41), DAVI D RYDE R (42), BOTH FRO M BLO O MBE RG/GE TT Y I MAGE S; BY DR EW A N GE RE R ( 48 ) , A DA M J E F F E RY /C NB C/N B CU PHOTO B A NK ( 51) , BOTH F RO M GETT Y I MAGE S; BY DREW ALTI ZER/DA5/WENN/NE WSCO M (45); BY LO RE NZO C I NI GLI O / P OL A R I S ( 43) ; BY L UCA S J ACKS O N/ RE UT ER S ( 44 ) ; BY CH RI S PAV LI CH/N EW S PI X ( 50 ) , E R IK P END ZI CH (47), BOTH FRO M REX/SHUTTERSTO CK; BY JO HN L AMPARSKI /WI REI MAGE (46)

T H E

NEW ESTABLISHMENT

he’s developing a crime drama for the network with Captain America directors Joe and Anthony Russo.

Age: 4 8 L ast ye a r ’s ra n k : 61

SHANE SMITH Vice Ë LATEST TRIUMPH: The Vice co-founder and C.E.O., who owns about a fifth of the media company, is now a member of the three-comma club, thanks to a $450 million investment by TPG that makes Vice worth $5.7 billion. VIRAL MOMENT: Vice News Tonight’s “Charlottesville: Race and Terror” has been viewed more than 50 million times.

Age: 5 0 L ast ye a r ’s ra n k : 65

BIG NUMBER: $277 million, the gross box-office returns worldwide for Blumhouse’s Split, directed by M. Night Shyamalan.

February, two for Manchester by the Sea (best actor, best original screenplay) and one for The Salesman (best foreign-language film).

A ge s: 4 6, 4 4 La st ye a r ’s ra nk : 5 1

A ge: 38 Not ranked l ast year

LACHLAN & JAMES MURDOCH

JORDAN PEELE

21st Century Fox, News Corp. Ë ADMIRABLE DISPLAY OF HUMANITY: Days after President Trump’s widely panned response to Charlottesville, James Murdoch denounced “bigotry and hate” in an e-mail message to friends and pledged $1 million to the Anti-Defamation League.

A ge : 5 4 La st ye a r ’s ra nk : 5 0

SATYA NADELLA

BOBBY KOTICK

Microsoft

Activision Blizzard

Comedian, director Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: Peele’s directorial debut, Get Out, was both a critical success (with a 99 percent Rotten Tomatoes score) and a box-office smash ($252.4 million grossed worldwide). It’s even generating Oscar buzz. SHOW CURRENTLY BINGE-WATCHING: RuPaul’s Drag Race. WHAT WILL BE GONE IN FIVE YEARS? “Fidget spinners.”

A ge: 3 3 Last year ’s rank : 82

KEVIN SYSTROM Instagram

Ë EVIDENCE OF VULCAN CHESS MASTERY: Took Microsoft’s market valuation to an all-time high, above $500 billion, thanks to a prescient bet on cloud computing. RARE DISPLAY OF MORTALITY: Infuriated Windows diehards by announcing that Microsoft would no longer develop the Paint app.

Age: 4 8 L ast ye a r ’s ra n k : 7 1

JASON BLUM Blumhouse Productions

Ë LATEST TRIUMPH: Launching a new, post-millennial-friendly “e-sports” league—the stars would be gamers, not jocks—with pals Bob Kraft, of the New England Patriots, and Jeff Wilpon, of the New York Mets, as team owners. BIG NUMBER: 70 percent, the increase in Activision Blizzard’s stock price this year.

A ge : 5 0 N ot ra nke d l a st ye a r

ROY PRICE Amazon Studios

Ë LASTEST TRIUMPH: Blum’s company helped usher in the “social thriller,” a new horror genre, with Jordan Peele’s (No. 59) Get Out.

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Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: Amazon made streaming history by taking home three Oscars in

Peaks: The Return, by auteur David Lynch. RARE DISPLAY OF MORTALITY: There was nothing funny about Showtime’s Election Night special with Stephen Colbert (No. 40), which turned awkward and painful as the results poured in.

A ge: 55 Not ranked l ast year

FRANÇOIS-HENRI PINAULT Kering Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: Turning luxury house Kering, parent of Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, and Stella McCartney, into a leader in sustainability. Among his goals: using 100 percent sustainable cotton by 2025.

A ge: 52 Last year ’s rank : 4 6

MICHAEL RAPINO Live Nation

Ë EVIDENCE OF VULCAN CHESS MASTERY: Instagram Stories, Systrom’s unabashed knockoff of Snapchat, hit 250 million daily active users this summer, dealing a major blow to Evan Spiegel’s Snap, which last reported about 166 million daily users. (Snap’s stock subsequently fell about 25 percent.)

Ë LATEST TRIUMPH: Since the start of the year, Live Nation has acquired the majority stake in at least three music festivals and aggressively expanded its global footprint with a series of high-profile international partnerships and acquisitions.

DAVID NEVINS

JAMES SIMONS

Showtime Networks

Renaissance Technologies

Ë LATEST TRIUMPH: Nevins helped midwife the much-anticipated Twin

Ë LATEST TRIUMPH: The former N.S.A. code breaker turned

A ge: 51 Last year ’s rank : 6 8

A ge: 7 9 Not ranked l ast year

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P HOTO GRA P HS BY PAUL A . HE B E RT /I NVI S IO N /A . P. I M AGE S ( 63 ) ; BY J A SO N L A VER I S/ F IL M MAGI C (59); BY PHI LLI P FARAO NE (55), RO BI N MARCHANT (53), ALESSI A PI E RDO ME NI CO /BLO O MBE RG ( 5 6, RI GHT ) , A L L F RO M GET T Y I MAGE S ; BY IA N C . B AT E S (5 4 ), F R E D R . CO NR A D (6 4 ), M ATT E DGE (60), ALL FRO M T HE NE W YOR K T IM E S /REDUX; BY BENO I T TE SSI E R/REUTERS (62); BY E RI C CHA R BO NN E AU ( 61 ), RO B L ATO UR ( 5 6, LE F T ) , BOTH F ROM R EX /S HUT T ER STOCK; BY PAUL Z I MM E RMAN/WI RE I MAGE (58); © JAVI ER RO JAS/PRE NSA I N TERNAC I O NAL/ZUMA WI RE (57)

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quantitative investor topped Institutional Investor’s Alpha’s 2017 hedge-fund “The Rich List” with earnings of $1.6 billion in 2016—not bad for a guy who is officially retired from Renaissance Technologies, which he founded in 1982.

A ge : 5 8 La st ye a r ’s ra nk : 5 7

A ge: 55 Last year ’s rank : 52

CHRIS MELEDANDRI

MARY BARRA

Illumination Entertainment

Age: 67 L ast ye a r ’s ra n k : 75

BONNIE HAMMER NBCUniversal Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: Hammer signed a multi-year contract that will ensure her job running NBCU’s cable entertainment operations into her 70s, which would make her one of the longest-reigning women executives in TV history.

Ë LATEST CONQUEST: This summer, Illumination’s Despicable Me became the world’s highestgrossing animated-film franchise, surpassing the Shrek movies and pulling in more than $3 billion at the box office.

A ge : 4 4 La st ye a r ’s ra nk : 49

EGON DURBAN Silverlake

BILL MCGLASHAN TPG Growth Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: Co-founding the Rise Fund, a $2 billion impact-investing initiative, which counts Laurene Powell Jobs (No. 44), and Reid Hoffman (No. 90) among its board members.

Ë LATEST TRIUMPH: Helping to goose the valuation of Ari Emanuel’s talent agency, WME-IMG, by securing an additional $1.1 billion in outside investments. Durban’s Silverlake is one of WME-IMG’s biggest shareholders. RARE DISPLAY OF MORTALITY: Silverlake, WME-IMG, and other investors spent $4 billion to buy the Ultimate Fighting Championship in 2016, only to see viewership wane in 2017.

Age: 49 Not ra n ke d l a st ye a r

DONNA LANGLEY

A ge : 31 N ot ra nke d l a st ye a r

MEGAN ELLISON Annapurna Pictures

Universal Pictures Ë LATEST TRIUMPH: This spring, The Fate of the Furious, the umpteenth movie in Universal’s Fast and the Furious franchise, grossed a record $532 million in its opening weekend.

VANI T Y FA I R

General Motors Ë LATEST TRIUMPH: Barra continues to invest in technology and software (G.M. has a stake in Lyft and last year acquired self-driving-car company Cruise Automation), and recently pledged to deliver over-the-air software updates to G.M. cars the way Tesla does. MOST ADDICTIVE TELEVISION SHOW? “Die-hard fan of Grey’s Anatomy, but intrigued by Game of Thrones.”

A ge: 61 Last year ’s rank : 5 3

STEVEN COHEN Point72

Age: 5 3 Not ra n ke d l a st ye a r

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Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: In just seven years as a film producer, Ellison has turned Annapurna (named after the famous Himalayan circuit she hiked in Nepal in 2006) into Hollywood’s go-to indie studio.

Ë LATEST TRIUMPH: Everyone’s talking about Cohen’s hedge fund— and it hasn’t even launched. An S.E.C.-imposed temporary ban that prevents him from supervising a registered fund lifts on January 1, 2018, and he’s rumored to be raising $20 billion.

A ge: 52 Last year ’s rank : 5 4

EDDY CUE

programming under Cue, “feels like something that was developed at a cocktail party,” according to one review.

A ge: 4 6 Not ranked l ast year

PATTY JENKINS Director Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: Directing Wonder Woman, the best-performing movie of the summer. BIG NUMBER: $813 million, the worldwide box-office returns for Wonder Woman.

A ge: 32 Last year ’s rank : 6 0

PRISCILLA CHAN Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has in less than two years become one of the most well-funded philanthropies in the world.

A ge: 32 Last year ’s rank : 12

LEBRON JAMES Cleveland Cavaliers

Apple Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: Launching HomePod, Apple’s voice-activated virtual assistant. The product, a competitor to Amazon’s Echo, may be the new hit Apple so desperately needs as interest in the iPhone wanes. RARE DISPLAY OF MORTALITY: Planet of the Apps, Apple’s foray into original

Ë LATEST CONQUEST: Recently named Sports Illustrated’s No. 1 basketball player in the N.B.A. for the fifth year in a row. MEDIA MOGUL IN THE MAKING? James, his business partner Maverick Carter, and rapper Drake teamed up to produce a documentary on Vince Carter that debuted at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

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P HOTO GRA P HS F RO M F ORTU NE B RA I N STO RM T ECH ( 69) ; BY RO NDA CHURCH I LL / BL O O MB ERG ( 72), GRE G DO HERT Y/PATRI CK M C MULL AN (70), DAVI D PAUL MO RRI S/BLO O MBE RG ( 6 6) , MI CH A EL N AGL E /B L OO M BE RG ( 75 ) , A LL F RO M GE TT Y I M AGE S; BY P IE RO O L I OS I ( 68 ) , A NDREA RE NAULT (65), BOTH FRO M PO L ARI S; FRO M A.P. I MAGE S (76), BY MI CHAE L B UCKNE R/ VAR IE T Y ( 67 ) , GI A N E HRE N ZE L L ER /E PA ( 71) , A N DRE W GO M BE RT /E PA ( 7 3) , A L L F RO M REX/SHUTTERSTO CK; BY GARY GERSHO FF/WI REI MAGE (74)

T H E

NEW ESTABLISHMENT

A ge : 3 6 L ast ye a r ’s ra n k : 10

A ge : 41 N ot ra nke d l a st ye a r

BEYONCÉ KNOWLES REESE WITHERSPOON

Musician

Ë LATEST TRIUMPH: Despite staying out of the spotlight for several months this year during her pregnancy, Queen Bey still managed to break the Internet with a July Instagram post of twins Sir and Rumi Carter. (Likes: 10 million.)

Age: 47 L ast ye a r ’s ra n k : 98

YASIR AL RUMAYYAN Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund Ë EVIDENCE OF VULCAN CHESS MASTERY: An Uber board member, courtesy of his fund’s $3.5 billion investment in the company, Al Rumayyan has managed to keep a low profile amid the upheaval roiling the business.

Age: 26 Not ra n ke d l a st ye a r

SUSAN FOWLER Uber whistle-blower Ë P OW E R O F T H E P E N : With a single blog post chronicling allegations of harassment and retaliation during her employment at Uber, Fowler set into motion a series of events that contributed to the resignation of Uber C.E.O. Travis Kalanick (No. 23) and started a broader conversation about sexism in Silicon Valley. M O ST

A D D I CT I V E T E L E V I S I O N S H OW ?

“Seinfeld. I re-watch the entire series once each year.”

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Viacom languished under former C.E.O. Philippe Dauman, but the company’s stock price has fallen under new chief Robert Bakish.

Actress and producer

A ge: 47 Last year ’s rank : 58

Ë LATEST TRIUMPH: Big Little Lies, the HBO mini-series that Witherspoon championed and starred in, earned 16 prime-time Emmy nominations and won for outstanding limited series. LITTLE MISS TYPE A: Witherspoon has formed Hello Sunshine, a crossplatform media company, and her southern-lifestyle company, Draper James, is four years old.

SHONDA RHIMES

A ge : 49 La st ye a r ’s ra nk : 6 6

SUSAN WOJCICKI YouTube Ë LATEST TRIUMPH: Wojcicki launched almost 40 original series and movies on YouTube Red, her $9.99-a-month subscription service. BIG NUMBER: One billion, the number of hours of YouTube content viewed every day.

A ge : 6 3 N ot ra nke d l a st ye a r

SHARI REDSTONE National Amusements Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: Becoming a bona fide media mogul. Redstone, whose National Amusements controls Viacom and CBS, spoke at the Code Conference and networked at the Allen & Co. media retreat at Sun Valley in May. TO BE CONTINUED: Redstone felt

Shondaland Ë EVIDENCE OF VULCAN CHESS MASTERY: Rhimes secured an early release from her four-year deal with Disney’s ABC Studios to start developing programs for rival Netflix. RARE DISPLAY OF MORTALITY: ABC canceled two Shondaland shows, Still Star-Crossed and The Catch, in 2017.

A ges: 2 9, 27 Not ranked l ast year

PATRICK & JOHN COLLISON Stripe Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: In just seven years, the brothers’ software has become the go-to payment platform for Silicon Valley start-ups and stalwarts. BIG NUMBER: $9.2 billion, the company’s valuation.

A ge: 24 Not ranked l ast year

BRYCE HARPER Washington Nationals Ë BIG NUMBER: $400 million—the expected size of Harper’s new contract when the outfielder comes up for free agency after next season.

A ge: 5 4 Not ranked l ast year

ROBERT F. SMITH Vista Equity Partners Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: Thanks to a majority stake in Vista, a private-equity company, Smith is reportedly worth $2.5 billion. That makes him the second-richest African-American in the U.S., behind Oprah Winfrey. BIG NUMBER: $20 million, the amount Smith donated to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, a donation topped by only one other private donor: Oprah Winfrey.

A ge: 24 Not ranked l ast year

CHANCE THE RAPPER Musician Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: Becoming the first streaming-only artist to win a Grammy, for his hip-hop album Coloring Book. He has not signed with a record label. MAN-OFTHE-PEOPLE MOVE: Pledging $1 million to Chicago’s struggling and cash-strapped public-school system.

A ge: 4 8 Last year ’s rank : 7 9

NANCY DUBUC A&E Networks Ë EVIDENCE OF VULCAN CHESS MASTERY: Dubuc took on the Church of Scientology with the Emmynominated Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath. It turned into one of cable’s biggest reality hits.

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P HOTO GRA P HS BY CHA R LE S SY KE S /I NVI S IO N /A . P. I M AGE S ( 88 ) ; BY J ON KOPA L O F F /F I L MM AGI C (80); BY BANDAR ALGALO UD/ANADO LU AGE NC Y (78), SI MO N DAWSO N/BLO O MBERG (86), A KI O KO N/ BL O O MB ERG ( 84 , R IGH T) , CHRI STO PHE MO R IN /I P3 (8 4 , L E F T) , R ICH SCHULTZ ( 8 5 ), A LL FRO M GETT Y I MAGE S; BY KATHY HUTCHI NS/HUTCHI NS PHOTO (87), DO UG PETERS/ZUMA PRE SS (77), M ATE US Z W L ODA RCZY K/ NU RPH OTO /S IPA ( 81 ) , A L L F RO M N EW SCO M; BY RO B I N PL AT ZE R / T W I N I MAGE S (82); BY SHAWN VAN TI NE (79); © TO NY LOWE/GLO BE PHOTO S/ZUMA WI RE (83)

T H E

A ge : 52 La st ye a r ’s ra nk : 89

A ges: 5 3, 4 6 Not ranked l ast year

STEWART BUTTERFIELD

JILL SOLOWAY

MIKE ALLEN & JIM VANDEHEI

Age : 4 4 Last ye a r ’s ra n k : 72

Slack

P HOTO GRA P HS BY R I CHA R D SHOT W E LL ( 97) , COL I N YO UNG -WO LF F ( 95 , L EF T ) , B OT H F RO M I N VI SI O N/A.P. I MAGES; BY GABRI E L O LSE N/FI LMMAGI C (92); BY JERRI TT C L ARK ( 9 3) , NOA M GA L A I ( 98) , MI CHA E L KOVAC ( 100 ) , DAVI D PAU L M OR RI S /B LO O MB E RG ( 99) , CI N DY O RD (89), PRE SLE Y ANN SL ACK /PATRI CK M C MULL AN (96), ANDRE W TOTH ( 91) , KI MB E RLY WHI T E ( 90 ), A L L F RO M GE TT Y I MAGE S; BY NAOM I M C CO LL O CH ( 94 ) ; BY T. J . KI R KPATRI CK/ T HE NE W YOR K T IM E S /REDUX (95, RI GHT)

Ë L AT E ST T R I U M P H : Butterfield’s workplace-messaging company hit a valuation of $5 billion, following a $250 million funding round led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund. RARE DISPLAY OF MORTALITY: The $5 billion valuation falls far short of the $9 billion price tag floated amid rumored acquisition interest from Amazon and others.

Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: Back-to-back directing Emmys for Transparent, the revolutionary Amazon series that the gender-nonconforming Soloway created about a transgender woman and her family.

A ge : 4 3 N ot ra nke d l a st ye a r

Age : 5 0 Last ye a r ’s ra n k : 8 1

REID HOFFMAN Greylock Partners, LinkedIn Ë RARE DISPLAY OF MORTALITY: Win the Future (W.T.F.), the platform he co-founded for crowd-sourcing ideas to rejuvenate the Democratic Party, has been dismissed as being aloof.

CASEY WASSERMAN Wasserman Media Group Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: Bringing the Olympics to Los Angeles in 2028 as chairman of the city’s bid committee. BIG NUMBER: $325 million, the value of the 13-year contract Wasserman’s company negotiated for standout Miami Marlins outfielder Giancarlo Stanton.

A ge : 3 3 N ot ra nke d l a st ye a r

Age : 45 Not ra n ke d l a st ye a r

KIRSTEN GREEN Forerunner Ventures Ë L AT E ST T R I U M P H S : After the 2016 acquisitions of Forerunnerportfolio companies Dollar Shave Club (by Unilever, for $1 billion) and Jet.com (by Walmart, for $3.3 billion), Green this year made her debut on the Time 100, the Forbes Midas List, and Vanity Fair’s International Best-Dressed List.

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Transparent, I Love Dick

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J. D. VANCE Author and venture capitalist Ë C R O W N I N G A C H I E V E M E N T: Writing a compassionate memoir of his working-class upbringing, which provided compelling and uncondescending context for the rise of Donald Trump. M O S T ADDICTIVE TELEVISION SHOW?

Game of Thrones. “Westeros is the one place in popular culture where an honest-to-God nerd like me can feel hip.”

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Axios Media Ë C R O W N I N G A C H I E V E M E N T: The same crew that turned Politico into a Washington must-read has done it again, this time with a site that also features daily scoops on venture capital, energy, and more. Allen’s morning newsletter has become a new front page for the political-media elite. And the site’s fly-on-the-wall reporting on the West Wing is fitting for an office with its own insect problem.

A ge: 4 4 Last year ’s rank : 93

ANNE WOJCICKI 23andMe Ë LATEST TRIUMPH: After a four-year ban, the F.D.A. announced in April that it would let Wojcicki’s at-home-genetic-testing company sell directly to consumers.

A ge: 4 3 Not ranked l ast year

KENYA BARRIS Black-ish Ë L AT E S T T R I U M P H : The creator of the ABC sitcom Black-ish, Barris is also riding high on the success of Girls Trip (box-office gross: $130 million worldwide to date), the buddy movie he wrote with Tracy Oliver. M O S T ADDICTIVE TELEVISION SHOW?

Big Little Lies.

Age: 35 Not ranked l ast year

MEGAN QUINN Spark Capital Ë FOLLOW THE MONEY: Quinn has parlayed a stint at Jack Dorsey’s (No. 50) payment company, Square, to invest in so-called fintech start-ups.

A ge: 3 4 Not ranked l ast year

KATRINA LAKE Stitch Fix Ë EVIDENCE OF VULCAN CHESS MASTERY: Lake’s online subscription clothing company, which brought in $730 million in 2016, has confidentially filed for an I.P.O.

100

A ge: 6 0 Not ranked l ast year

JULIE WAINWRIGHT The RealReal Ë CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: Surviving the reputation hit of being C.E.O. of Pets.com to launch the consignment site the RealReal. EVIDENCE OF VULCAN CHESS MASTERY: In a feat of marketing

genius, Wainwright has deftly positioned her luxury-goods-resale company as “sustainable.” Nick Bilton, William D. Cohan, Marley Coyne, Josh Duboff, Sarah Ellison, Emily Jane Fox, Maya Kosoff, Bess Levin, Julie Miller, Tina Nguyen, Dan Primack, Joanna Robinson, Kevin Roose, and Abigail Tracy. R E P O RT I N G BY:

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VAN IT Y

FAIR

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N THE MACHINE By W A L T E R I S A A C S O N

Todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s great innovators share a fundamental trait with one another, and with those who came before them, from Leonardo da Vinci to Steve Jobs. Even in the midst of a digital revolution, they understand itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not about technology

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I L L U STR ATIO N

TIM LAHAN

hen Vanity Fair created the New Establishment, in 1994, it reflected the shift in power from a genteel Wasp establishment led by East Coast bankers and statesmen to a swashbuckling set of media-age moguls more comfortable in Hollywood than in mahogany-paneled clubs. By the end of the 1990s, as the Internet ushered in a new Information Age, there was another shift: the list began gravitating more to the technologists of Silicon Valley. In its latest evolution, the list is now becoming increasingly populated by a new wave of innovators and rebellious entrepreneurs who are less interested in stewarding great industries than in overturning them. N OVEMB ER

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P HOTO GR A PH FRO M SOVF OTO/ UI G/ GE TT Y I MAGE S

E SO

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JOBS UNDERSTOOD A PROFOUND PRINCIPLE: BEAUTY MATTERS. For all of their differences, there are a few attributes that distinguish today’s great disrupters and connect them to the influential innovators of previous lists and generations. They tend to be relentless and headstrong, fueled by a passion for their vision. Just as that was true of Cornelius Vanderbilt and Thomas Edison, it is a trait shared by Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Brian Chesky, Elon Musk and (yes, to a fault) Travis Kalanick. But there is a more fundamental trait that connects many of today’s disrupters to most of the great innovators of the past. It’s the understanding that it’s not about the technology. It’s about connecting people to the technology and using the technology to connect humans to other humans. That requires an intuitive feel for emotions. Despite all the proselytizing by STEM-education advocates, the best innovators have historically been the ones who embrace art as well as science, who have a feel for poetry, in addition to processors. At his final product launch, Steve Jobs ended, as he had often done, with a slide of a street sign showing the corner of Technology Street and Liberal Arts Street. “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough,” he said, “that it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.” Jobs studied calligraphy and dance before he dropped out of Reed College. His love of the arts helped him understand a simple but profound principle of humanity: beauty matters. It was a creed reflected in everything from the fonts on the original Macintosh to the simplicity of the first iPod, to the intuitive swiping on the iPhone.

began to sense the importance of combining the arts and humanities and sciences when I wrote about Benjamin Franklin, America’s founding innovator. He had no formal education, but he taught himself to become an imaginative polymath who was arguably Enlightenment America’s best scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer, and business strategist. He devised bifocal glasses, enchanting musical instruments, clean-burning stoves, a federal system of government, and America’s unique style of homespun humor. The ultimate example of such a universal mind was Leonardo da Vinci, the patron saint of all great innovators. He created the two most memorable paintings in history, The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, but he thought of himself as equally a man of science and engineering. With a passion that was both playful and obsessive, he pursued innovative studies of anatomy, fossils, birds, the heart, flying NOV E M BE R

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machines, optics, water flows, and weaponry. His ability to transcend disciplines made him history’s most creative genius. With his wide-ranging interests and passions—space travel, storytelling, digital assistants, robotics, movies, books, video, journalism—Jeff Bezos is an example of an innovator whose success comes not just from understanding technology but also from understanding people. When I was at Time, we decided to make him Person of the Year in 1999, but as we were readying the issue the Internet stock bubble started deflating. I asked Don Logan, then Time Inc.’s C.E.O., whether we would look silly in a year. No, he said, Bezos is not in the Internet business, he is in the customer business. Logan turned out to be right. By being relentlessly focused on the customer and attuned to human wants and whims, and by rebelling against the typical Wall Street pressure to focus on short-term financials and quarterly earnings reports rather than user happiness, Bezos built a transformative company. Mark Zuckerberg likewise transformed our world with his understanding of human connections, not just electronic ones. Yes, he was a programming prodigy at Harvard, but he built Facebook around the focused mission of making people more connected, and his travels across America over the past year have refined both his business and his philanthropy. (Each year Zuckerberg takes on a personal challenge—one year he learned Mandarin, and for 2017 he pledged to visit people in every state.) Along with YouTube, Twitter, and other social-networking services, Facebook ushered in an era of user-generated and shared digital content.

hat led to the latest wave of innovation: user-generated and shared physical content, such as apartments and cars and tasks. Companies like Uber and Airbnb have upended industries, and they’ve put forth a new way to work (“the gig economy”) that can be both liberating and exploitative. These businesses also can be humanizing. Stepping into a stranger’s car or apartment, or sharing ideas with a virtual friend, initiates a bond of trust. When it works, which it usually does, a disconnected and alienated world becomes just a little less so. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that two of Airbnb’s founders, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, were artists before they were tech executives. They loved drawing and music when they were young, and they met at the Rhode Island School of Design. Many before them had launched apartment-sharing services, but Airbnb succeeded because its founders had a passionate drive and a desire to create personal connections. So, what of the next wave, which, we are promised and warned, will usher in a new generation of innovations based on machine learning and artificial intelligence? Who knows? A robot may make it to the top of this list in a decade or so. But I’m not so sure. Despite Alan Turing’s prediction almost 70 years ago that machines would soon think like man, the quest to create artificial intelligence has not been nearly as successful as using technology to enhance human capabilities. That is the triumph of most of the people on this year’s list, both veterans and newcomers. With a feel for the arts as well as for technology, they find new ways to allow the expression of creativity, to augment our imagination, and to make us more connected and empowered—and more human. www.vanityfair.com

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With a resurgent Saturday Night Live providing weekly catharsis for a politically obsessed America, Emmy-winning Kate McKinnon has hit a new level of fame. Cracking open the usual dance of interviewer and star, LILI ANOLIK discovers how deeply McKinnon has become entwined with her Hillary Clinton character, creating something beyond satire 112

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LIFE’S A CIRCUS Kate McKinnon, photographed in Old Brookville, New York. McKinnon wears clothing by Tommy Hilfiger; shoes by Stella Luna; hat by Lock & Co.; bow tie by Alexander Olch; tights by Fogal; boutonniere by L’Atelier Rouge.

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Cat Class, Cat Style

f journalists played it straight with movie stars, they’d call it an interrogation not an interview. It’d be conducted at a police station—some grimy, windowless room at the back, cramped and full of the hot stink of fear and funk. After bouncing the star off a wall or two, ignoring the pitiful pleas for a phone call, a lawyer, a mommy, the journalist would shine a light in those pretty, pretty eyes, and start grilling. What did you have to do to get your big break? How long do you think you can turn the trick, keep the public interested, huh? Who are you sleeping with? Who are you sleeping with? Who are you sleeping with? O.K., maybe I’m overstating the case. I’m not, however, mis-stating it. Encounters between movie stars and the journalists who cover them are edgy, deeply. They are, by their very nature, transactional: the journalist offers the star, usually with a new project or venture to promote, exposure; the star offers the journalist revelation, a couple of juicy details with which to titillate readers. Use and be used, give and take, a mutual hustle and the way of the world. Couldn’t be clearer, right? Where things get murky is in the trappings. The interview is made to look like the opposite of what it is: a friendly social interaction. The star and I always meet at a restaurant— the garden terrace at the Chateau Marmont or the Clement at the Peninsula—almost always for lunch. There’s conversation (one-sided, but still) and an attentive waiter and imported mineral water and a salad of wild arugula, locally grown, and it’s easy to forget that our interests are at odds and that the relationship is, at heart, antagonistic. Only I couldn’t forget with Kate McKinnon, the Emmy-winning Saturday Night Live mainstay (S.N.L. is the venture she’s currently promoting, Season 43, set to premiere on September 30), perhaps the most 114

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THE STATE OF KATE McKinnon, on West Island in Glen Cove, New York. Opposite, at the Piano Exchange, in Glen Cove. McKinnon wears a coat by the Row; slip by Olivia von Halle. Opposite, suit by Anderson & Sheppard; shirt by Marol; shoes by Ralph Lauren Collection.

et me set the scene: it’s a Friday afternoon, hot, every face, every object, with that sweaty, New-York-in-the-summer shine to it. Kate and I are meeting for lunch, naturally, and she’s suggested a place in the East Village. I can’t say the name because I promised Kate I wouldn’t. (It’s a best-kept secret, only it wouldn’t be if I blabbed, is the idea.) Technically it’s a restaurant, though “restaurant” seems like too highfalutin a term to convey its essence. “Hole-in-the-wall” might be nearer the mark, “dump” nearer still: linoleum floor, laminated menus, Asian-y pop music on the speakers (“Asian-y” is as close as I’ll get to giving away its identity—see, Kate, I didn’t break my word), ceiling fan moving the thick, soupy air around some without cooling it any. Yet the food is as good as the ambience is bad, as I will soon discover when a guy, a waiter I assume though he’s in street clothes, flings on the table first Kate’s dish and then, following a discreet dick adjustment, mine. Kate arrives on time to the minute. I’m early, so I have a chance to observe her as she enters. She’s dressed down. Movie stars are typically dressed down for these occasions. (Another reason they’re deceptive: people come costumed as though it’s playtime, not work.) But Kate isn’t dressed movie-star down, i.e., the kind of down that’s flattering to the figure and still involves the application of a not inconsiderable amount of makeup, i.e., a stylist-approved, camera-ready kind of down. Kate’s dressed real-person down, i.e., badly: oversize T-shirt and pants that aren’t quite sweat but close enough; sneakered feet; face cosmetics-free; hair in a ponytail, or, rather, what would be a ponytail if she hadn’t failed to tug the hair all the way through the elastic, leaving it in a sort of ponytail-bun limbo. As quickly as I’m struck by how un-vain she is, I’m struck by how much she has to be vain about. She’s very pretty: small-bodied and full-lipped with cat eyes—pale blue and almond-shaped and slanting— tawny skin and hair, dimples she can twitch into existence without even smiling. She’s 33 but appears younger, a few years out of college. I’d watched hours of footage of her in preparation for this encounter yet had somehow missed her great good looks. Not that she photographs poorly. It’s just that in most scenes she’s impersonating a womN OVEMB ER

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gifted of a gifted generation of young comics, her flair for mimicry and slapstick allowing her to create characters and impressions that are both spookily exact and totally off the wall. Mind you, I’m not proposing that Kate herself is antagonistic. She isn’t. In fact, her niceness is as pronounced, extreme, and undeniable as her talent—it’s the quality of hers you’re struck by first. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

On Hillary Clinton: “I admire [her] so much, I started to feel very close to her, just trying to imagine her inner life.”

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an far, far older than she (Debette GolTRUE BLUE dry, legend of the silver screen, a fictional McKinnon, creation) or a woman far older (the allphotographed in too-real Betsy DeVos) or a man (Robert Old Brookville. Durst) or a boy-man (Justin Bieber). And McKinnon wears her face is rarely in repose. She’s often clothing by AG; stretching it in some crazy, rubbery way, boots by Belstaff; thrusting out her jaw, baring her teeth. hair products by R & Co.; makeup And it isn’t only Kate’s eyes that are by YSL; nail feline; it’s her manner as well. I don’t enamel by Deborah Lippmann. mean to suggest that she’s aloof or selfregarding in that cat style. Quite the contrary, in fact. As we sit down, she asks me questions and, after it’s revealed that I have two small boys, requests a picture, and actually looks when I produce it. But she has a cat’s sensitivity and suspiciousness, is nerved up as a cat is nerved up. It’s almost as if she’s equipped with a pair of invisible whiskers, and the moment those whiskers come into contact with something wrong—the tape recorder I slide onto the table, for example, the felt-tip pen I uncap and place at a diagonal on a stenographer’s notebook—she starts to back away on soft, padded paws. And it’s immediately apparent to me that I’m going to have to approach her slowly, carefully, no false moves, and that even the slowest, most careful and false-move-free approach might not work. She could still get spooked, run off. And as I’m having this thought, and as my stomach is twisting in response to it, another one occurs to me: how newly famous she is. Or not newly famous, exactly. She became a featured player on S.N.L. in 2012, a full cast member in 2013, and was an audience favorite straightaway. But newly super-famous. The reason, Donald Trump. Kate is, of course, the show’s Hillary Clinton, Trump’s once and future nemesis, though the loathing between Kate’s Hillary and @vf.com Alec Baldwin’s Trump is so intense, instinctive, To watch New Yorkers and visceral it’s almost arousing, it’s almost interview KATE McKINNON, visit love—you just know the two never stop thinking VF.COM. about each other. She’s his hate interest. (Question: Were we too freaked out and pissed off to notice that the 2016 presidential election was the greatest battle-of-the-sexes screwball farce of the modern era, the blackest romantic comedy of them all? That Clinton and Trump were a surreal, gonzo version of Hepburn and Tracy? Hepburn and Tracy as re-interpreted by David Lynch or Quentin Tarantino? Trump’s nearing the end of his first year as our El Número Uno Commander in Chief and he still can’t shut up about the woman he defeated back in November, gets this wistful look in his eye whenever he calls her by her pet name, Crooked Hillary. It’s as if the old Rodgers and Hart tune were running in his head on a loop. The sleepless nights / The daily fights … I wish I were in love again.)

Hillary

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ate is not S.N.L.’s only Hillary. Jan Hooks took the initial shot, memorably playing the then First Lady as a simmering cauldron of barely suppressed resentment (“I happen to be the copresident of the United States”). There was also Amy Poehler’s Hillary: Obama’s rival, a brittle, chilly bluestocking whose will to power had been thwarted one too many times and whose smile had become so wooden you could rap your knuckles on it for luck. Kate’s Hillary, however, blows them all away. Kate’s Hillary has her hard-driving bitch side to be sure, but mostly she’s the world’s worst combination—half schoolmarm, half princess—who knows she’s the world’s worst combination, keenly feels her lack of flash and charisma, of the C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 6 8 NOVEMBE R

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Frenemy of the State

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Donald Trump, then president-elect, with Peter Thiel in a meeting with technology executives at Trump Tower in December 2016.

Is Peter Thiel, the elusive tech billionaire, Silicon Valley’s Steve Bannon? His controversial career—from bankrolling Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker Media to supporting Donald Trump early on—reveals distrust of the state and disdain for convention. Yet Thiel has reportedly been offered the job to head the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, which monitors America’s spy agencies. Talking to former and current White House insiders, and to Thiel’s friends and foes, ADAM CIRALSKY examines his business, his motives, and possible conflicts between them NOVEM BE R

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t was one of the worst days in the short life of Donald Trump’s administration—an administration that has not known many good days. But, as it turned out, the afternoon of July 12 was the time I’d scheduled an appointment with Steve Bannon, the man who, a month later, would leave his post as the president’s chief strategist. And as I walked through the West Wing, the simmering distress was unmistakable. In an alcove, National-Security Adviser H. R. McMaster huddled with Reince Priebus, the soon-to-be-ex chief of staff. Jay Sekulow, the public face of President Trump’s legal team, furiously checked his cell phone. While aides conferred on an outdoor patio, brows furrowed, a top White House adviser took me aside and gravely confided, “The situation is even worse than you can imagine.” But I was not there to discuss the latest bombshell: the revelation that Donald Trump Jr. had hosted a previously undisclosed meeting with some shadowy Russians. No, every other reporter in the nation’s capital was already pursuing that story. Instead, I had come to discuss another subject entirely. And Bannon, seeing me lingering in a hallway, popped out of a conference room and shepherded me into his of-

fice—at the time a virtual command center for the Trump Revolution, just steps from the Oval. To some, Bannon—intense, brooding, and sardonic—was the intellectual architect of a stunning election upset; to others, he was a persistent dog whistle who riled up Trump’s base and America’s basest instincts. But in the White House that week, few cast a longer shadow. “Can you believe this?!” he said, pointing to a wall of TVs with breaking-news alerts about the Russian rendezvous. Another wall served as a sort of mood board, papered with startling policy goals: “Begin removing more than 2 million criminal illegal immigrants,” “Cancel [Obama’s] unconstitutional executive action[s],” “Impose term limits on all members of Congress.” Bannon, despite the prevailing angst of the day, was engaged, gregarious, and happy to speak on the record. The reason? I was interested in a man who, in some ways, was his ideological soulmate: Peter Thiel, the elusive tech billionaire, who, far from public view, has wielded outsize clout within the new administration. “I cannot overstate his impact on the transition,” Bannon began, describing Thiel as a hidden hand in shaping Team Trump. “You will see in the near term that Peter will be taking on new responsibilities, like intelligence.” While Trump and his communications squad may rail about Washington’s permanent bureaucracy, especially those in national-security positions, Bannon talked about having been in the trenches alongside Thiel as part of an offensive against the so-called Deep State (a term used in certain quarters, recently on the far right, to describe what they see as a force within the government, including the intelligence agencies, that consistently asserts its power in order to maintain the status quo). Indeed, as Bannon and others avowed, Thiel—a man most Americans could not pick out of a lineup—was apparently poised to assume some serious, and seriously controversial, responsibilities. Who, then, is Peter Thiel? What are his goals? And what has he been doing sub rosa

for Donald J. Trump? In search of answers, I met with an array of Thiel confidants from Washington, D.C., to New York, to San Francisco. And throughout, I kept coming back to a single scene that I had watched on TV last December.

The Early Adopter

he setting was a sunlit conference room in Trump Tower. The timing was pivotal: five weeks before Trump would assume the presidency. Around the table sat many of Silicon Valley’s most powerful entrepreneurs, who had gathered for what the president-elect’s team had labeled a tech summit. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Apple’s Tim Cook were there. And Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Alphabet/Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Intel’s Brian Krzanich, and Elon Musk, of Tesla and SpaceX. Trump opened the session by paying homage to Peter Thiel, who sat to his left, in a gray pin-striped suit. A tech-investing savant, data-mining wizard, and enthusiastic Trump supporter, Thiel—thin, pale, and invariably serious—was credited with coaxing some of the heavyweights, several of whom had publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton, to make an appearance. “I want to start by thanking Peter,” Trump said, “because he saw something very early, maybe before we saw it, and of course he’s known for that in a different way. He’s ahead of the curve.” Then he warmly grabbed Thiel’s hand with two of his own, adding, “I want to thank you. You’re a very special guy.” Special indeed. For the previous year, Thiel had been seeing a lot of things very early. In the spring of 2016, he became what his peers might call an early adopter when, after backing former Hewlett-Packard C.E.O. Carly Fiorina’s presidential run, he switched his allegiance to Trump. “[Peter] took a lot of flak for his support,” Michael Anton told me over coffee in Washington. Anton, whom Thiel had lobbied to place on the National Security Council (N.S.C.),

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had gained a measure of Thiel in the lobby notoriety for his widely of Trump Tower, read and contentious esa week after Trump’s say comparing the 2016 election victory. presidential election to United 93—the hijacked 9/11 flight on which heroic passengers stormed the cockpit. (Trump, in Anton’s view, was the only candidate who could save an imperiled nation.) “I think Peter took a brave stance in going against the grain. But that’s who he is.” Another senior White House official, who considers Thiel a friend and mentor, observed, “As a successful gay man, Peter thinks Donald Trump plays an important moderating influence on the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which is out of step with Peter’s libertarian instincts and his lifestyle.” Thiel drove home A Contrarian Libertarian the point, in this official’s view, when he was rewarded with a prime speaking slot at the y now, the ascension of Republican National Convention in July Peter Andreas Thiel, 50, 2016 and famously asserted, “I am proud to is Silicon Valley lore. Born be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But in Frankfurt, Germany, he most of all I am proud to be an American.” immigrated to the U.S. as a Three months later, Trump’s fortunes child, attended college and appeared to dip when a video surfaced in law school at Stanford, and worked at the which he was heard making misogynistic white-shoe law firm Sullivan & Cromwell remarks to Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush. and at a unit of Credit Suisse as a derivatives But Thiel stood firm. Within days, he do- trader. In 1998, he co-founded the company nated $1.25 million to the Trump cause, and which would become PayPal with some felThiel’s bullishness—doubling down during low over-achievers, among them Elon Musk, one of Trump’s darkest hours—gave the can- the electric-car innovator. In time, Thiel and didate a much-needed boost. other PayPal alumni, including LinkedIn’s The wager paid off. Trump defeated Clin- Reid Hoffman and Yelp’s Russel Simmons, ton in an Electoral College upset, and a few became known as the PayPal Mafia. days later Thiel was named to the executive By 2004, Thiel had entered the ranks of committee of the president-elect’s transi- history’s shrewdest investors when he wation team (chaired by Mike Pence), along gered a relatively modest sum—$500,000— with several insiders who would come to on a 10.2 percent stake in Facebook. inherit the West Wing. Thiel, working with Though he has since sold many of those a close-knit group of Silicon Valley imports shares for more than $1 billion, he remains at Trump Tower and his own pied-à-terre on on Facebook’s board. With some of his Union Square, according to two administra- PayPal pals, he launched Founders Fund, tion officials, advised the incoming senior a venture-capital operation that presciently staff on science, technology, security, and in- invested in a host of big-name start-ups, intelligence matters—and helped fill jobs in the cluding Airbnb, Lyft, SpaceX, and Spotify. Plum Book, which lists thousands of politi- Thiel’s net worth, over time, would grow to cally appointed positions within the federal $2.7 billion. (His portfolio has also included government. Bannon discussed that transi- Thrive Capital and Oscar Health, two firms tion period wistfully, as though recalling started by Joshua Kushner, Jared’s younger simpler times: “After Jared [Kushner], who brother, and Cadre, a real-estate tech comlooked after foreign affairs, [ex–national- pany, which Jared co-founded.) security adviser Michael] Flynn, Reince Thiel’s powers of prediction, however, [Priebus, the former chief of staff], who failed him for a time while he was running made the trains run on time, and myself, Pe- Clarium Capital, a $7 billion hedge fund ter had the biggest impact.” Moreover, Ban- that lost 90 percent of its value in three non and two Thiel allies in the White House years, following the global economic implohave claimed that Thiel, as recently as Sep- sion a decade ago. But he had also helped tember, has remained actively engaged in found and direct influential ventures such advising the administration. as Palantir Technologies, the $20 billion

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data-analysis outfit. What’s more, his science incubator, Breakout Labs, bankrolls biotech start-ups. He co-hosts exclusive conferences that bring together thought leaders with divergent views. His 2014 book, Zero to One—part manifesto, part how-to manual for entrepreneurs—topped The New York Times best-seller list. His name has even been floated as a possible candidate for governor of California—and ambassador to Germany. Thiel’s purview is as vast as his ambitions. He has homes or properties in San Francisco, the Hollywood Hills, New York, Hawaii, and New Zealand, where he acquired citizenship a few years back. (He is a keen fan of The Lord of the Rings, which was filmed there.) According to one of his friends, “Thiel has said to me directly and repeatedly that he wanted to have his own country”—even placing a dollar value on “owning” a sovereign state: $100 billion. Through it all, Thiel, who guards his privacy, has become known for challenging conventions, including those as seemingly immutable as death, taxes—and tuition. To wit: he takes daily doses of human growth hormone to stave off the effects of aging. He has supported the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build floating cities beyond the reach of traditional governance. And his Thiel Fellowship hands out $100,000 grants to budding entrepreneurs who agree not to go to college. Such maverick ideas make Thiel “something of a revered figure for his successes in the tech and venture-capital worlds,” claimed author and biotech journalist David Ewing Duncan. “And despite what many see as his controversial backing of Trump, if you’re a young entrepreneur you don’t want to cross him C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 7 0 www.vanityfair.com

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Chadwick Boseman, photographed in Studio City, California. Boseman wears clothing by Gucci; shoes by Bally; socks by Pantherella; ring from Beladora; hair products by Roller Coaster Waves; grooming products by Cole Skincare for Men. 122

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HIS MARSHALL PLAN

hadwick Boseman’s first big break came when he landed the role of baseball hero Jackie Robinson in the 2013 film 42. His performance as soul-music legend James Brown the following year in Get On Up cemented his reputation as one of Hollywood’s most soughtafter leading men. Indeed, fans are already buzzing about Black Panther, Marvel Studios’ first stand-alone black-superhero movie, com-

ing out in 2018, with Boseman in the title role. (This is the second in a five-picture deal with Marvel. Boseman has also appeared as Black Panther in Captain America: Civil War.) This month he takes on another real-life giant, playing an early-career Thurgood Marshall in director Reginald Hudlin’s Marshall. “As a young man he was very skinny and wiry,” Boseman says of the lawyer who would eventually become America’s first African-American Supreme Court justice. To transform himself, the actor shed some of his muscular frame. He watched clips of Marshall speaking, to capture his cadence, and immersed himself in research on the jurist. The film focuses on Marshall’s work during the 1940s, as he was becoming a star attorney with the N.A.A.C.P. The drama unfolds

in suburban Connecticut, following the littleknown story of a black chauffeur, played by Sterling K. Brown, accused of raping his wealthy white employer (Kate Hudson). “I liked the script for what it was, separate from the historical relevance,” Boseman tells me. After diving into a number of heavily iconic roles in a relatively short time, Boseman confesses that “there is so much happening I think this is my moment to sort of slow down.” But, he assures me with a laugh, “it’s just to catch my breath.” —KRISTA SMITH

@vf.com For more photos of CHADWICK BOSEMAN, visit VF.COM.

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THE SILENT OBSERVER Jared Kushner and Donald Trump in a meeting at the White House in January.

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kin Prince When his powerful father went to prison, in 2005, 24-year-old Jared Kushner suddenly found himself with the keys to the family real-estate kingdom, amid a cloud of disgrace. His next moves—the purchases of The New York Observer and 666 Fifth Avenue, marriage to Ivanka Trump, taking a plum office in his father-in-law’s White House—were all about trading money for status and getting back what his father had lost. RICH COHEN reports

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here’s a primal scene. It takes place in neither green Eden, where the snake spoke sweetly, nor the master bedroom of your first house, the one by the railroad tracks, where, spying from a closet, you watched your parents in flagrante delicto, but at the Fontainebleau, on Miami Beach, where Sam Giancana talked Castro with the C.I.A., Jerry Lewis got into all kinds of mischief in The Bellboy, and Tony Montana scoped bikinis on the pool deck. If you’re a Jew of a certain vintage, the Fontainebleau means swank. It’s the fantasy showroom of the American Dream.

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assover, 2000. Jared Kushner’s father, Charlie, a New Jersey real-estate tycoon, had gathered at the Fontainebleau with extended family to recall the story of the exodus—the flight of the ancient Hebrews from Egypt, hard labor and plagues, the Golden Calf, the tablets broken, the spirit of the Lord always before them, a column of smoke in the daytime, a column of fire at night. Kushner, dapper with steel-gray hair, had turned up angry, mostly at his brother, Murray, the Ivy Leaguer, wise in everything but the street. Charlie had gone into business with his father in 1985. When the old man died, Charlie took over. He gave stakes in the business to his siblings, then built it into a behemoth. At the time of the Seder, the Kushner Companies were worth about a billion dollars. (Who’s pharaoh now?) He’d put up apartment buildings and commercial properties

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in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, engaging in all the behavior typical of big-time developers. Charlie was gutsy and took chances; Murray was cautious—that was the problem. “In 1999,” according to Gabriel Sherman, in New York magazine, where much of the reporting on the family feud comes from, “Murray backed out of Charlie’s bid to acquire Berkshire Realty, a firm with 24,000 apartments, which would have vaulted the Kushners into the first rank of privately held real-estate firms.” At the Seder, Charlie told Murray they shouldn’t work together anymore. It was Murray’s response—“If we can’t be partners, we can’t be brothers”—that set off the mêlée. Murray’s wife, Lee, rose to her husband’s defense. Charlie fired back: Hey, Lee, do you think your son really got into Penn? I hate to break it to you, but it was me. I got him in. We’re out of here, said Lee. The most important observer of the feud was Charlie’s older son, Jared Kushner, who, at 19, was tall and handsome, though somewhat generic. You could imagine him slotted into any sort of life, but, as an heir of the tycoon, his future was planned. A main job for the son of a man like Charlie is being Charlie’s son. The Kushners assembled for another Fontainebleau Seder in 2001, minus Murray, Lee, and their children—that’s how families fall apart. Charlie was in an even uglier mood, according to Sherman. He’d come to believe his sister Esther and her husband, Billy Schulder, were siding with Murray. The tension was high even before Charlie thought he spotted Billy and his son Jacob whispering, laughing. Are they laughing at me? Charlie shouted down the table, over the shank bone and salt water that is the bitter tears of our people: “You’re so pious? Go on, Billy, and tell your kids how pious you are.” Everyone knew what Charlie meant— he’d discovered his brother-in-law was

having an office affair a few years before. Esther begged: “Don’t say any more.” “You’re a fucking putz!” Charlie shouted at Billy. To Jared, his father was a good man embattled by free-riders, “siblings that he literally made wealthy for doing nothing.” It was just another battle at just another Seder— Jews at play—but would have consequences. We all live in the world created by that feud.

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ared Kushner’s Grandma Rae hid with Jewish partisans in Poland during World War II—that’s where she met Joseph Kushner, a carpenter. When they reached New York, in 1949, they had as little as people can have—they’d lost their money and possessions, language, everything. Joseph worked construction in New Jersey, which was booming. When he’d saved money, he purchased and developed land with partners. He was one of several developers who came to be collectively known as the Holocaust Builders. By the time of his death, he’d built 4,000 apartments. That’s the dream. Start at zero, make a fortune. In the next generation, that very success would destroy the family. Joseph and Rae had four children—two girls, two boys. Murray was older and did better in school, but it was Charlie, the daredevil who loved risk, who went into business with the old man. In this way, Charlie became the Kushner that mattered—the story would run not through Murray but through Charlie, then raising his family in Livingston, New Jersey. He brought his children up as observant Jews, Modern Orthodox. There was Dara, Jared, Joshua, and Nicole. Dara is the low-profile Kushner. Nicole, now Nicole Kushner Meyer, is the Kushner who created a stir in China for seeming to offer “golden visas” in return for an

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From New Jersey to 666 Fifth Avenue. No Manhattan position, no Ivanka. No Ivanka, no Air Force One. investment in a Kushner tower in Jersey City. Joshua, who runs an investment firm and a health-insurance company, is the Kushner who dates the model Karlie Kloss. Jared, the older boy, is the Kushner who became the public face. He was a good son, attended religious schools, obeyed the Sabbath. Outside his Manhattan office, a book sat on a pedestal: Pirkei Avot, a compilation of Jewish sayings, ethical teachings. In other words, Jared Kushner is kosher of mind—but there is kosher, then kosherstyle. Kosher means, if it’s trayf, you don’t eat it. Kosher-style means, if it’s trayf, you don’t eat it unless it’s something you really like a lot. Charlie trained his children in business, too. Because there’s the wisdom of the Book, then the wisdom of the street. “My father never really believed in summer camp, so we’d come with him to the office,” Jared Kushner told Forbes. “We’d go look at jobs, work

on construction sites. It taught us real work.” “Sundays, my friends would be at football games with their fathers,” Kushner told George Gurley in The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots, as Seen by The New York Observer. “I’d be in back of my dad’s car with my mini pair of construction boots, walking job sites.” Business, as practiced by big-time developers, means politics. The Kushner house was an occasional stop for Democratic politicians. Charlie gave a million dollars to the D.N.C. in 2002. Jared gave 60,000 of his own dollars, whatever that means. One night, after Hillary Clinton’s Senate victory, she showed up at the Kushners’ Jersey Shore house for Shabbat. Jared made his first serious public speech, in 2000, from a stage on the Kushner lawn. The street had been closed off, Secret Service

FAMILY AFFAIR From far left: Jared’s father, Charles Kushner (with his wife and Jared’s mother, Seryl), on his way to court in Newark, 2004; 666 Fifth Avenue, N.Y.C.; Observer owner Jared Kushner in his New York office, 2008.

swarmed. He was introducing presidential candidate Al Gore. Jared later said it was hard when the newspaper he owned, The New York Observer, endorsed Barack Obama—“because I really like Hillary a lot and respect her, and she’s as stand-up as they come as a person.”

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nce, when I was talking to the movie producer Jerry Weintraub about the importance of education, he cut me off, saying, “What, a diploma? You want a diploma from Harvard? Give me 24 hours. I’ll have a Harvard diploma with your name on it.” (5)

n the book The Price of Admission, Daniel Golden uses Jared Kushner as an example of how colleges operate. Jared got whatever grades he got in high school, but it wasn’t Jared that mattered when his application went to Harvard. It was Charlie. “In 1998, when Jared was attending the Frisch School and starting to look at C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 7 3

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he great art director Bea Feitler taught me the value of stopping from time to time and looking back at one’s work. She said that you learn the most from your own work, and by looking back you find how you need to go forward. That advice made a lot of sense to me. I published a book that covered the first 20 years I worked—1970 to 1990—and later I made A Photographer’s Life: 1990–2005.

I realized recently that I have produced a great deal of work since 2005. History takes over when you do this for so long. I wanted to stop and take a look and make a new book, and I knew what the end of the book would be: a portrait of Hillary Clinton in the White House. I planned my shoot with her and spent a lot of time imagining which desk Hillary would choose for the Oval Office. Was one of Eleanor Roosevelt’s desks available? Then Hillary lost. My imagined ending, which was really an extension of something, or a beginning, had belonged to a view of the world that was rather dramatically shattered. The years 2005–16, which this book covers, now seem like a discrete era. They were the

years when Barack Obama held public office, as a senator and then as president. And I guess you could say they were years when the culture was shifting in ways we didn’t quite take in. Of course, I wasn’t thinking about any of that when I decided to do this book. I just wanted to assess what my work looked like. — ANNIE LEIBOVITZ

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Bruce Springsteen on tour, Clichy, France, 2016.

Nicole Kidman and Baz Luhrmann, New York City, 2008.

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David Hockney and former companion John Fitzherbert, Bridlington, East Yorkshire, England, 2013.

President Barack Obama in the Oval Office, January 19, 2017.

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IT GIRL

GOOD GOLLY, MISS MARLEY!

Selah Marley, photographed in New York City.

ST Y LE D BY SA RA H COB B; H AI R BY OW E N G OU LD ; MA K E U P BY A LI C E L A N E ; MANICURE BY NATALIE PAVLOSKI; FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS

Marley wears a dress by Gucci; jewelry by Bulgari; hair products by Living Proof; makeup by MAC; nail enamel by Chanel.

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@vf.com To see more from Selah Marley’s PHOTO SHOOT, visit VF.COM.

he name “Selah” is pronounced like the first two syllables of “C’est la vie,” though it’s not French. “It means ‘meditational pause,’” says Selah Marley, the 18-year-old model and daughter of musician Lauryn Hill and Rohan Marley (Bob’s son), referring to a Hebrew translation. And who wouldn’t benefit from more of those? “Hey, man, all you gotta do is ask!” If this face looks familiar, it’s because Selah is the spitting image of her mother. In 1999, she was less than a year old when Hill took home five Grammys, including for best R&B album and album of the year, for The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. As a young teen, Selah NOV E M B E R

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wanted to model and did some test shoots, but Hill kept her in school. Then, last year, the floodgates opened and she took a leave of absence from N.Y.U. in March. “I got handed all of these amazing opportunities, especially travel opportunities. College takes serious dedication—you can’t just half-ass it. Honestly, I don’t think I was ready for that.” What she was ready for were Kanye West and Karl Lagerfeld, having appeared in the last two Yeezy shows and on Chanel’s catwalk at the Hôtel Ritz in Paris. (She’s also been in campaigns for Calvin Klein, Rag & Bone, and Ivy Park, Beyoncé’s activewear brand.) Growing up next to her mother’s spotlight

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didn’t seem to prep her for meeting her fashion idols. “There’s only a few people, like Karl and Kanye, that will leave me legitimately starstruck,” she says. “I’m sure [Kanye] and my mom have met, but I’d never met him. The last show, my heart felt like it was about to fall out of my chest, but I just had to tell him, ‘Yo, honestly, you’re one of my biggest inspirations!’” Hill’s her “best friend,” and her mother’s career advice has been simple: “Remain tactful.” But her greatest gift to a career in fashion? Genetics. “People have told me my whole life I look just like her. That’s great news because she still looks good. Not a wrinkle in sight!” — DEREK BL ASBERG

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Still reeling from the Sandusky scandal, Penn State has a new outrage on its hands: members of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity have been charged after the February death of sophomore pledge Tim Piazza. As 14 frat brothers face trial for the horrifying events of that night, BENJAMIN WALLACE investigates the circumstances that led to the tragedy, and its aftermath, yet another black mark for Penn State

STATE OF DISGRACE The Beta Theta Pi fraternity house at Penn State University. Tim Piazza, opposite (with girlfriend Kaitlyn Tempalsky), died after a pledge-night incident in February.

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he night leading to his death, Tim Piazza spent the early evening trying to shrink two obstacles standing in his way—a bunch of math homework and a pile of laundry. The mechanical-engineering major was tackling them at the apartment he shared with four friends near the State College campus of Penn State University. A good-looking, flamehaired kid, six feet two inches and 205 gym-honed pounds, Tim had been a football player at Hunterdon Central Regional High School, in New Jersey, where he’d also shown an interest in service to others. He’d worked with Hunterdon Outreach, promoting sports for children with special needs, and it was through his school’s Teen Prevention Education Program, which focused on responsible sexual decision-making, that he’d met Kaitlyn Tempalsky, his high-school sweetheart. For a prom-posal senior year, Tim stood on the roof of his Jeep in front of Kaitlyn’s house, danced to “Shining Star,” ripped open his shirt to reveal PROM? markered on his chest, and handed her a bouquet of pink flowers. Kaitlyn’s dad, a cop, laughed and advised Tim that the stripping better stop at the waist. When Tim started as a freshman at football-dominant Penn State, in the fall of 2015, his own (average) football playing necessarily came to an end, but he became a regular in the bleachers at Nittany Lions home games, at Beaver Stadium. Even though Kaitlyn was now a student at Susquehanna University, 60 miles away, they FaceTimed regularly and were already talking about marriage, and children, and future shore houses. Tim remained public-spirited. He spent much of his free time on Ayuda, part of P.S.U.’s 15,000-student-strong Thon organization, which raises money for children with cancer. And he already knew what he wanted to do after graduation: having been exposed to 3-D printing, he had decided he wanted to make prosthetic limbs for children and soldiers. But Tim still yearned for another level of male camaraderie. Two of his roommates were in fraternities, and by spring semester of his sophomore year, Tim had decided he wanted to join one, too. He rushed a bunch of frats this past January and received two “bids,” or offers. Beta Theta Pi told him he was among their top 10 picks, and he liked Beta because a lot of its brothers were engineering and biology majors. “School came first,” Kaitlyn recalls, “and he felt that if these guys could be in a frat and still have good grades, he could do it, too.” Thursday, February 2, was bid-acceptance night, when Tim was to be initiated into Beta, and he was told to be at the fraternity house 136

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at 220 North Burrowes Road at 9:07 P.M., wearing a jacket. A brother named Kordel Davis sent a text that read: “hello pledge … get ready to get fucked up and get ready for a long semester.” When Tim’s roommate Alex Park left the apartment in the late afternoon, Tim “seemed excited to be going,” Alex recalls. “I can’t imagine he’d have that same enthusiasm if he’d read that” (the getfucked-up text). “It wasn’t like he was the wild kid at a party. He drank a little bit below average, to be honest.” When Tim set off for Beta, a few hours later, his homework was still on the countertop. The next morning, Tim’s roommates noticed that he’d never come home. Bennet Brooks thought maybe Tim had just ended up crashing at the Beta house. Alex texted Tim several times that morning to see where he was. By 11, the roommates were worried. Then Kwaku Owusu texted a Beta brother he knew, and he received an alarming response: Tim was at the hospital. The roommates alerted Tim’s older brother, Mike, who was also at P.S.U., and he Uber’d to Mount Nittany Medical Center, where Tim was about to be helivac’d to Hershey Medical Center. As the Piazza family assembled at the hospital in Hershey, they learned just how serious Tim’s injuries were. A surgeon had found four liters of blood, or about 80 percent of a body’s total supply, in Tim’s abdomen. His spleen was shattered. Nearly half of his skull had been removed to accommodate brain swelling. When Kaitlyn arrived at the hospital at 7:30 P.M., she was crying, and Tim’s parents, Jim and Evelyn, were crying, too. The first thing Jim said to Kaitlyn was that Tim had sustained “unsurvivable brain damage.” When she went in to see him, bandaged and intubated and wired to machines, he was unconscious and “barely recognizable,” says Kaitlyn, who is studying for a career in medicine. “I could have walked past the room. They were pumping so much fluid that everything was swollen. He was wrapped up. He had bruises. It did not look like him at all.” She held his hand as she told him, “between the crying, just I love you’s, and I kept saying, ‘Please open your eyes. Just please open your eyes.’ As much as I said, Please open your eyes, I knew that wasn’t going to happen.” Tim was pronounced dead on Saturday morning. He was registered as an organ donor, but his body was so badly damaged that doctors were able to harvest only one kidney. “Then they start talking about skin and bones, and you’re like, Whoa,” Evelyn Piazza told me several months later. “Suddenly it was all too much. Now you’re asking me to chop up my baby. I couldn’t even handle it.” Even then, his family and friends nursed growing suspicions. According to Tim’s other roommates, when Kwaku had texted the Beta brother with follow-up questions, he didn’t hear back from him. On Saturday, Onward State, an independent, student-run P.S.U. news site, published an article alleging that Tim’s injuries were related to a fall, and police told the Piazzas that the fall had occurred some 12 hours before a call was placed to 911. “For someone to get hurt this bad, or look like he did,” Kaitlyn says, “it just made sense that there was foul play. We just didn’t know to what extent.”

Men of Principle

reek pride has long been a centerpiece, alongside the football program, of Penn State’s marketing efforts. Though only 17 percent of the 40,000 students at the university’s main campus in State College belong to a fraternity or sorority, Greek organizations have played an outsize role as an intergenerational ark for the school’s social life (i.e., drinking culture; Penn State routinely is a top-ranked party school). “You don’t necessarily have to be part of Greek life there, but you have to have N OVEMB ER

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“We’re never going to bring Tim back,” says Jim Piazza, “so all we have is the ability to try to make a difference for other people.” friends in it,” Tim’s roommate Bennet Brooks told me. Jane Arcidiacono, who lived next door to Tim, says, “People will ask what sorority you’re in, and if you say ‘None,’ they look at you weird.” To all appearances, before Tim died, Beta Theta Pi was the antithesis of Animal House. In a Greek system that is among the largest in the country (Penn State has 51 fraternities, 30 sororities, and three coed organizations), the local Beta chapter, called Alpha Upsilon, was the second-oldest frat at the university (dating to 1888) and owned one of the most handsome properties, with manicured hedges, an immaculate structure, and an elegant, subdued metal plate announcing its three-letter Greek identity. Unlike most other P.S.U. frats, which are embedded in a residential neighborhood, Beta was one of only a handful of houses seen as being “on campus.” (Technically, it stood on private property across the street from Penn State’s Deike geosciences building, a point the university would repeatedly stress after Tim’s death.) Alpha Upsilon was considered exemplary in other ways. With Beta’s much-touted brotherhood of Men of Principle, “it was al-

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ways noted for attracting the best and brightest that you’d find in the Greek system,” Damon Sims, vice president for student affairs, told me. A decade earlier, it had deteriorated into a house plagued by alcohol and hazing, to the point of being disbanded in 2008 and reconstituted with new members as a dry frat. Afterward, Alpha Upsilon made a point of working closely with both the university’s academically elite Schreyer Honors College and with Campus Crusade for Christ, reaching out to students who were serious about studies and willing to live in an alcohol-free house. A wealthy alumnus provided more than $8 million to physically refurbish the property. In the past five years, Alpha Upsilon had won two Chapter of Excellence GRIEF AND LOSS awards, and it was on track to win a Tim’s parents, third this year. A Penn State spokesman Evelyn and Jim Piazza, told me he’d recently met with State photographed College police about Beta, and “this in Spring Lake, New Jersey. was not a chapter they viewed as problematic, so clearly they did a good job

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of disguising a set of behaviors.” (State College police did not respond to a request for comment.) Binge drinking and hazing are hardly unique to Penn State, but the university’s response to Tim Piazza’s death, and the community’s reaction to that response, would be complicated by the university’s recent past. Following the Jerry Sandusky sex-abuse scandal and its fallout— with the firing of Joe Paterno and removal of his statue from Beaver Stadium—everything from the insular nature of Happy Valley to the cultic spirit of a place where everyone knows that the only way to respond to the call “WE ARE” is with “PENN STATE” was called into question. “Penn State has become one of the most self-examining educational cultures in the country,” Jason Whitney, who runs a recovery program for P.S.U. students, told me. “We had a Stage 5 hurricane, a full-on assault on our values in every way, and we had to analyze and figure out if we were the university that claims to stand for honor.” The coroner had ruled Tim Piazza’s death “accidental,” but police shared some of their early investigative findings with Sims, and within two weeks of Tim’s death, Penn State revoked its recognition of Beta Theta Pi for “no less than five years.” At the end of March, after at least nine fraternities and sororities violated rules of the student-run Interfraternity Council (IFC) during Parents Weekend, the university announced a series of further actions: it was permanently banning Beta, disallowing kegs and liquor at parties, deferring recruitment until the spring semester, reducing the number of alcoholic social events each chapter was allowed to host in a semester from 45 to 10, and, in April, suspending another frat for two years. Defenders of the status quo, seeing a wholesale attack on fraternities and sororities, immediately pushed back. One student organized a Peaceful Protest Against the Restrictions on Greek Life. Mark Bernlohr, a Beta alumnus and lawyer for the nonprofit that owned the Alpha Upsilon house, wrote a letter to fellow Beta alumni suggesting a lawsuit against Penn State and attached a draft for that proposed complaint, which read, in part: “The rush to judgment against Alpha Upsilon for the tragic accidental death of Mr. Piazza was spearheaded by Sims and was an effort by Sims and Penn State to cover up their prior negligence in failing to adequately address the Penn State drinking culture.” A university spokesman disagreed with that characterization. A leader of the IFC e-mailed its member frats suggesting they bypass the “social checkers,” private security professionals hired by the IFC, ostensibly to police under-age drinking, by keeping booze on upper floors. Jason Whitney likens the reaction at Penn State to the debates that follow mass shootings. “There’s this almost hackneyed, empty rehearsing of the same discourse—after each school shooting you can expect certain gun-rights activists to lead with, ‘They’ll use this to try to ban guns.’ ” But if one contingent felt that the university was over-reacting, another set of critics saw Tim Piazza’s death as further evidence of a deeply warped culture that put fund-raising above morality. The Penn State administration, in this view, was well aware that the

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DEFENSIVE LINES From top: P.S.U. head athletic trainer Tim Bream; Centre County district attorney Stacy Parks Miller; Beta Theta Pi chapter president Brendan Young.

school’s Greek system had a hazing problem. In 2015, a former student named James Vivenzio had sued the university over his experience pledging Kappa Delta Rho in 2012, when, he alleged, he had been forced to drink liquor mixed with vomit, urine, and hot sauce and burned with a cigarette. Also in 2015, the father of a student named Marquise Braham, who’d committed suicide the previous year, filed a wrongful-death suit against the university, arguing that it had known his son was in a precarious mental state after his own experience with hazing, by Phi Sigma Kappa, which allegedly included having to choose between snorting cocaine or being sodomized on video. While Vivenzio’s hazing claims were dismissed by a Pennsylvania judge, a claim made in each lawsuit, and recently cleared to go forward by a Pennsylvania judge hearing both cases, was that the university was liable for fraud, because it had whitewashed the Greek experience, failing to disclose misconduct incidents, pooh-poohing the “many myths” about Greek life, and stating on its Web site that “the reality is that men and women in fraternities and sororities are committed to their academics, volunteer their time in the community, develop and strengthen their leadership skills.” “In a free market, people are entitled to know the risks of sending their kid to a university,” says Braham-family lawyer Douglas Fierberg, a leading attorney in frat cases. “Why should a university be holding hands with a badacting frat by not revealing allegations against it? Penn State has held the hands of the frats forever” by not disclosing the information and “in the same breath telling everyone it’s all a myth.” “These are self-governing organizations,” a P.S.U. spokesman says in response. “[They’re] privately owned, managed by external parties, and sanctioned by national organizations and not under the jurisdiction of University Police. The autonomous inter-fraternity councils have had responsibility for monitoring, adjudicating, and sanctioning chapter safety violations. We have decided to take over that responsibility, in addition to our oversight of student conduct cases.” Fierberg’s “myth” was forever exploded when, on May 5, a grand jury in Centre County, tasked with investigating Tim Piazza’s death, indicted 18 members of Beta Theta Pi on charges ranging from tampering with evidence to involuntary manslaughter, and issued an 81page presentment that laid out in repugnant detail the events that led to his fatal injuries in the frat house that night. It was able to do so because when Beta was resurrected after its dissolution the fraternity had installed more than a dozen motion-activated video cameras.

A Permissive Atmosphere

he events of that night and the morning after, as detailed in the grand-jury presentment, were both horrific and disturbing. The heart of the bidacceptance event for Tim Piazza’s pledge class was a drinking gauntlet, a series of stations—including a Crown Russe vodka handle swig, a Natty Lite beer shotgun, a Franzia bag-wine chug, and a round of beer pong—each pledge had to complete, cheered on like runners rounding bases by the frat brothers, who occasionally poured beer on them. According to the presentment, Tim Piazza entered the gauntlet at 9:21 P.M., camera time (which was in fact 37 minutes behind actual time). By 10:31, a number of the pledges were visibly drunk. A social with a female group named Trilogy (an underground remnant of the Tri Delta sorority, which had been banned in 2009 for hazing violations) commenced. At 10:40 P.M., a brother named Lars Kenyon walked Tim, visibly impaired, to a couch in the Great Hall, the fraternity’s main public room. Soon after, another brother walked Tim to another room. He was staggering with great difficulty. Around 10:45 P.M., when Tim moved out of camera range, he fell down the stairs to the NOV E M B E R

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basement. Less than a minute later, a brother was seen on-camera gesturing toward the steps, and a minute after that he and three other brothers were seen retrieving Tim’s limp and apparently unconscious body and putting him on a couch in the Great Hall. A bruise had bloomed on his left abdomen.

art of the horror of the presentment is its sheer length and specificity, the relentless accretion of shocking, time-stamped moments a summary can only partially convey. There was the seemingly callous handling of Tim Piazza’s body, as when a brother lifted Tim’s arm and it thudded back onto his chest, or when another brother poured liquid on his face, or when a brother slapped his face three times, or when a brother tackled someone onto him, or when Tim kept rolling off the couch but his body showed no reflex reactions, or when another brother struck his discolored abdomen with an open hand. Then there was the response to his condition: Beta brothers strapped a heavy book bag on Tim’s unconscious body to keep him from rolling onto his back and aspirating on his own vomit, a phenomenon with which they were sufficiently familiar to have a name for it: “backpacking.” There were intermittent signs of animation: Tim twitching, Tim vomiting, Tim bare-chested and moving his legs, the backpack affixed to his body. There was the brothers’ disconcerting failure to seek help. When brother Kordel Davis arrived, 28 minutes after Tim’s fall, he looked at Tim’s head and began pointing at it agitatedly and arguing to his fellow Betas, according to interviews conducted by police, that they needed to call 911. A brother was then seen on the video shoving Davis across the room. After Beta’s brothers and pledges had headed off, Tim Piazza was seen alone in the video, at times on all fours and clutching his abdomen, at times managing to stand and stagger, only to fall again, repeatedly, sometimes face-first onto the hard floor or into sharp objects (a table corner, a banister finial). At 6:49 A.M., a pledge named Qobi Quainoo sat on a sofa opposite Tim and watched him groan, fall off the sofa, and get to his knees and bend forward, rocking and clutching his head. Quainoo began to record a video of this on his cell phone, according to the presentment, and left the house at 7:12 A.M. (Quainoo did not respond to a request for comment.) Around 10 A.M., two brothers found Tim’s shoes and started looking for him. They found him in the basement, breathing heavily, bare-chested, his hands clenched, his skin cold, blood on his face, his eyes half open. They took him upstairs. For the next 42 minutes, a shifting assortment of brothers stood around, shaking Tim, attempting to put a shirt on him, trying to prop him up on the couch. Police recovered browser histories from various brothers’ cell phones during this period, including searches for “falling asleep after head injury” and “cold extremities in drunk person.” Finally, at 10:48 brother Ryan McCann called 911 to say “a friend” was unresponsive; he acknowledged that alcohol was involved. Before the paramedics arrived, frat president Brendan Young walked in. Young, according to the presentment, immediately put his head in his hands and sat down on an adjacent couch. Later that day, Young would text his girlfriend: “I don’t think you fully comprehend the situation; he looked fucking dead. At the end of the day, I’m accountable for it all, I’ll be the one going to court, paying for attorney, and maybe put in jail.” Police recovered voluminous evidence of what prosecutors claim is a concerted cover-up, including a text from Young to pledge master Daniel Casey to “make sure the pledges clean the basement and get rid of any evidence of alcohol,” and one from Casey to Kenyon to “end that groupme so there’s no evidence on tims phone.” (Legal representawww.vanityfair.com

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tives for Brendan Young, Daniel Casey, and Lars Kenyon did not respond to a request for comment.) The presentment also included an instruction, near the end, that Penn State itself should perhaps be investigated for fostering within the university’s Interfraternity Council a “permissive atmosphere,” and the release of the report caused a shift in the conversation at the school. On June 2, P.S.U. announced more planned changes, the broadest of which was a shift from the self-governance model to one where the university would exercise more oversight. Critics were unimpressed. “The university has always managed and supervised and monitored Greek life on campus,” says Aaron Freiwald, the lawyer representing James Vivenzio. “They just did a terrible job of it. And then someone died. And they step forward and say, ‘We have to get involved.’ ” Penn State calls Freiwald’s accusation “untrue and irresponsible,” pointing both to the complexities of frat oversight, such as privately owned houses not under the jurisdiction of University Police, and the university’s past support for self-governance. “After all, our students are adults and must accept responsibilities for their actions.”

“Live Like Tim”

n June 12, a preliminary hearing began in the Centre County Court of Common Pleas, in Bellefonte, a picturesque river town that earns its name. A small media encampment—TV vans and satellite dishes and interview tents—had been erected in front of the courthouse. District Attorney Stacy Parks Miller, pursuing an accomplice theory of liability—the idea that everything that happened to Tim Piazza was the collective and individual responsibility of any brother who’d played any role in the evening—had chosen to group all 18 cases together, resulting in a lopsided spectacle inside the second-floor courtroom: Miller and a few deputies on one side, 18 youthful defendants and at least two dozen defense lawyers on the other. The public pews had a similar asymmetry: Jim and Evelyn Piazza sat in the front row beside Tom Kline, a Philadelphia plaintiff’s lawyer with a towering frame and a sweep of pewter hair, who will represent them in a civil suit that will almost certainly target Penn State, among others. (He had previously represented a victim of Jerry Sandusky’s and was already deeming Tim Piazza’s death “the next Penn State tragedy.”) They were greatly outnumbered by the defendants’ families, who filled many of the other benches in the room. The core of the prosecution’s case was the video, which Miller described to the judge in excruciating detail. At 11:05 A.M., as Miller prepared to show the video, Tim Piazza’s parents, both wearing blue rubber “Live Like Tim” bracelets, left the room. “We were advised never to see it by Tom [Kline] and the counselor we’ve been seeing,” Evelyn Piazza told me later, “because that would definitely trigger PTSD. How do you unburn those images from your mind?” Out of roughly 13 hours of footage, the prosecution screened around 3 hours for the court. As Miller walked her lead witness, Detective David Scicchitano, through the maddening 42 minutes of dithering, when the frat brothers failed to seek help, she kept asking questions to which she knew the answers: “Has anyone tried to do CPR? Has anyone checked his pulse? Has anyone called 911?” “No,” the detective replied. “No. No.” Around the ninth time Miller asked the detective, “What about now? Has anyone called 911?,” a defendant’s mother, sitting behind me, exclaimed, “God, this is ridiculous!” Preliminary hearings typically take hours, but this one would last eight days, spread out over four months, and as each defendant’s lawyer began to cross-examine Detective Scicchitano, the broad outlines of a defense hove into view. If the commonwealth’s argument

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was that each defendant shared in a collective guilt, the defense case was the obverse: that this was a tragedy of the commons. While a terrible thing had happened, no one defendant had caused it, so no one defendant could be responsible. A widely held belief on the defense side was that Miller had overplayed her hand. Given that, according to the presentment, 50 other pledges had gone through a similar gauntlet over the past three semesters, and none of them had been seriously harmed, a charge like “reckless endangerment,” which requires proof of conduct “which places or may place another person in danger of death or serious bodily injury,” was a high standard to meet. William Brennan, one of the defense lawyers, told me—echoing a common defense refrain—that the brothers were acting on the assumption that Tim was just really drunk, not fatally injured. “Knowing now that Mr. Piazza was in mortal distress, it’s offensive to toss shoes on the sofa, but in real time he looked like any other drunken frat kid, and the shoes were tossed on the sofa, I’d think, so they stuck with him and didn’t disappear.” “Really what this case is about is a civil wrongful-death case that’s masquerading as a criminal prosecution,” echoes another lawyer involved in the case. Ultimately, the magistrate did throw out the most serious charges—involuntary manslaughter and aggravated assault—and dismissed charges against four of the defendants altogether. Miller announced that she’d refile the involuntary-manslaughter charges, at a minimum. But several defense lawyers tried to suggest, in and out of the courtroom, that the buck really ought to stop with Tim Bream, a 58-year-old former head trainer for the Chicago Bears and Penn State’s head of athletic training as well as a Beta alumnus, who lived in the Beta house and served as its resident adviser. According to the presentment, a text between two Beta brothers after Tim Piazza’s death had read, referring to Tim Bream, that they should delete a GroupMe thread “so people don’t get screen shots or anything that could leak to the media. Tim’s idea, as a precaution.” By implication, this argument targeted the university itself. “Penn State has taken so much shit because of the Paterno-Sandusky debacle,” Leonard Ambrose, a lawyer for one of the defendants, Joseph Sala, told me. “Penn State is going to do anything to protect their flank. They know what’s coming.”

Gone but Not Forgotten

n a Friday afternoon in July, a few weeks after the first day of the preliminary hearing, I visited the Piazzas at their beach house in Spring Lake, New Jersey. Tim had loved coming down with his friends and going to the local trampoline park. “What I’m going to miss,” Jim Piazza said, his eyes misting and his voice husky, “is he used to play catch with me with the football a lot. That’s like the one thing when I go on the beach now that I think about. I just miss that. He liked that.” The Piazzas have been unimpressed with Penn State’s response. First, no one representing the university had attended Tim’s funeral. (The administrator designated to do so had needed to back out due to a personal emergency, and no one attended in his place.) “Just like the preliminary hearing,” Jim Piazza said, sitting on a couch beside his wife. “You can’t tell me President Barron had something more important to do that day than be at that hearing.” Penn State says that university representatives were present at the hearing. That morning, Jim had spoken with Eric Barron. “The university needs to lead,” Jim said. “I told Barron that again today: ‘You guys need to lead—other universities will follow.’ ” While Beta had been banned, none of the individual students C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 6 2 N OVEMB ER

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I N SP IR E D BY A P HOTOG R A PH OF TH E FA LL O F SA IG O N, I N 197 5, BY HU GH VA N E S

Envisioning the embattled White House, where defections, firings, and internecine sniping have become routine, one may well conjure up an image of a chaotic, wholesale exodus. Women and children last?

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ST Y L E D BY DAVI D N OL A N ; HA IR A ND MA KE UP BY G IN A KA N E ( H A ); M A KE UP DE SI G N BY J U DY CH I N; G RO O MI NG BY PE T RA N. SE L LG E; PRO DUCE D ON L O CAT I O N BY J A M E S WA RD ; F O R D ETA I L S, GO TO V F.COM / CR EDI TS

he succès de scandale of the 1988–89 Broadway season, David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly tells of a French diplomat whose politically illadvised affair with an androgynous performer in the Chinese opera takes him places he never imagined, including prison. Deftly exploring Western stereotyping of Asians, M. Butterfly won the 1988 Tony Award for best play and ran for an astonishing 777 performances. In the years since, Hwang has declined requests to revive it on Broadway because “I was waiting for the right creative team to come together,” he says. He’s finally found that team, headed by director Julie Taymor (The Lion King, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark) and starring Clive Owen as Gallimard, the French diplomat. The revival opens this month. The play was originally inspired by a two-paragraph news item in The New York Times. At the time, Hwang did no further research, preferring to let his imagination fill in the blanks. (“Remember: we didn’t have Google and the Internet back then,” he somewhat ruefully notes.) For the revival Taymor urged him to go back and learn more about the true story in order to further develop the romance and human tragedy. “While Julie is celebrated for her spectacular stagecraft, she is equally good with story and character,” observes Hwang, who still prefers to talk about the social and political themes in the play. But Owen says he was attracted to the controversial role of Gallimard because, at bottom, “this is the story of a couple.” Taymor has not ignored the possibilities for spectacle. She describes an intriguing scenic design to replace the original production’s sweeping, curved wooden ramp. Now there will be Chinese boxes inside Chinese boxes, revealing truths — DOUG STUMPF within truths.

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M. Butterfly co-stars Clive Owen and Jin Ha, photographed in London. Owen wears clothing by Giorgio Armani. Ha wears a robe from Cosprop; shirt by Favourbrook. Hair products by Bumble and Bumble. Makeup by MAC. Grooming products by Anthony. NOVEM BE R

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Between t The first time Jann Wenner put John Lennon and Yoko Ono on the cover The second time, in 1981, he was sealing Lennonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s legend. In an adaptation JOE HAGAN chronicles the relationship between Wenner and Lennon:

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he Covers of Rolling Stone, in 1968, he was propping up his fledgling publication. from a biography of Rolling Stone’s founder, with the magazine up for sale, a decade of ambition, betrayal, and worship that made rock ’n’ roll history NOVEM BE R

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ohn Lennon was in a movie theater, crying. The image of Paul, singing from the rooftop in the final 10 minutes, had set him off. Jann Wenner shifted in his seat. In the darkness of a tiny movie house in San Francisco, the Beatle, Wenner’s hero, whose iconic spectacles and nose adorned the first issue of his rock ’n’ roll newspaper, Rolling Stone, had tears running down his cheeks as light flickered off his glasses. And next to him was Yoko Ono, the bête noire of Beatledom, raven hair shrouding her porcelain face, also weeping. It was a Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1970, and John and Yoko and Jann and his wife, Jane Wenner, were watching the final scenes of Let It Be, the documentary about the Beatles’ acrimonious recording session for their last album. John and Yoko were deep into primal-scream therapy, their emotions raw and close to the surface, and the image of a bearded Paul McCartney singing from the rooftop of Apple Records, against a cold London wind, was too much to bear. For Wenner, the 24-year-old boy wonder of the new rock press, who worshipped the Beatles as passionately as any kid in America, this was a dream, sitting here in the dark, wiping away his own tears at the twilight of the greatest band of all time, elbow-to-elbow with “the most famous person in the world, for God’s sake. And it’s just the four of us in the center of an empty theater,” marveled Wenner, “all kind of huddled together, and John is crying his eyes out.” Adapted from Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine, by Joe Hagan, to be published October 24, 2017, by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC; © 2017 by the author.

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Lennon and Ono had driven up from Los Angeles to meet the San Francisco fanboy who had bottled the counterculture and now commanded 200,000 readers. Wenner received the couple like visiting royalty to Rolling Stone’s spanking-new offices on Third Street, the clatter of typewriters going silent as they walked through the cubbies of writers and editors, bushy-haired men in ties and Levi’s who paused from parsing Captain Beefheart and Pete Townshend to gawk. Wenner’s unabashed idol worship had so often embarrassed them—star-fucker, they grumbled behind his back—but now here he was with an actual Beatle. And Yoko! Who could deny this? The hirsute supercouple were smaller than anybody imagined, but John Lennon still towered over Jann Wenner, who at five six so often found himself gazing up at his heroes like a boy vampire. “I mean, it’s everything you ever worshipped or cherished from afar,” said Wenner. “You try and be as natural as possible because I don’t think people want the worship and the ‘gee whiz.’ And you’re just mainly curious and fascinated and hanging on to every word but also trying to be sociable, entertaining, and good company and not be groupie-ish and slavish.” Wenner guided them to his office in the back, past the plastic marijuana plant and the picture of Mickey Mouse shooting heroin, laboring to project the air of a self-possessed press baron inured to celebrity. He looked every bit the modish publisher, plump in his buttondown oxford and blue jeans, shoulder-length hair fashionably styled, a True cigarette smoking in his fingers. Wenner personally moved the couple from the Hilton to the more upscale Huntington Hotel, in Nob Hill, and then took them sightseeing in Wenner’s convertible Porsche, hoping to impress. “People like John Lennon,” Wenner would say, “want to feel they are dealing with somebody important.” It worked, but maybe not for the reason he imagined: Yoko Ono’s memory of the weekend would be Jane Wenner, Jann’s wife, a chicly dressed waif with sculpted cheekbones and an insolent gaze. “I thought, How lucky is this man!” said Ono. “What did he do to get her?” Over lunch, Wenner watched with awe and a certain satisfaction as Lennon savaged fans who approached him. “People would come up and ask him for an autograph, and he would just snarl, ‘Go away!’ ” Wenner said. When they got out to stretch their legs on Polk Street at four in the afternoon—the skies overcast, not a soul on the sidewalk—they chanced upon a little movie house showing a matinee of the Beatles film. Wenner figured

John Lennon of all people had seen it, but he hadn’t. Just as surprising, the woman selling tickets didn’t recognize Lennon—another bearded hippie in San Francisco who looked like John Lennon—and none of the half a dozen people in the theater noticed that John and Yoko themselves had ducked in. “It was so emotional to see Paul up on the roof and singing,” recounted Jane Wenner. “First of all, it was hard to believe John had never seen it before. And he was so taken aback.” An hour later, blinking in the evening light, Jann and Jane Wenner were crying, too. They began to hug, all four of them, on the sidewalk. “He’s crying, she’s crying, and we’re just trying to hold on to ourselves,” Jann Wenner said. “You’re there helping come to the emotional rescue of the Beatles.” But if this was the end of the Beatles, it was only the beginning for Jann Wenner. He was, after all, courting John Lennon for an exclusive interview in Rolling Stone. And before the weekend was over, Lennon would give Wenner a kind of promissory note in the form of an inscription inside a copy of Arthur Janov’s book The Primal Scream: Primal Therapy, the Cure for Neurosis: Dear Jann, After many years of “searching”—tobacco, pot, acid, meditation, brown rice, you name it—I am finally on the road to freedom, i.e., being REAL + STRAIGHT. I hope this book helps you as much as [it did] for Yoko + me. I’ll tell you the “True Story” when we’re finished. Love, John + Yoko

olling Stone has struggled in the past few years, with the new economics of publishing, as well as the damaging scandal involving a story about a purported gang rape at the University of Virginia. In mid-September, approaching the magazine’s 50th anniversary, Wenner put Rolling Stone up for sale. But it’s hard to overestimate Rolling Stone’s cultural influence over the past decades—and Wenner’s youthful obsession with John Lennon was at its core. The timing of the Wenners’ relationship with Lennon had been fortuitous from the start. Lennon met Yoko Ono during an art exhibition at Indica Books and Gallery in London, precisely one year, to the week, before Rolling Stone published its first issue. The emergence of a credible and well-read American rock ’n’ roll newspaper (highly coveted copies of which were already being passed around in London by early 1968) tracked precisely with the erosion of the Beatles. Lennon N OVEMB ER

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“That was one of the biggest mistakes I made,” said Wenner. “I chose the money over the friendship.”

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wanted to wrest control of his media image from the tyranny of the mop-top machine, and he saw Rolling Stone as an opportunity; indeed, in his famous petulance, Lennon felt Rolling Stone owed him something. He was rankled, said Ono, that Wenner had evidently named his magazine after the rival Rolling Stones. “Rolling Stone decided that they were going to call the magazine Rolling Stone because of their respect for Mick Jagger, which didn’t make John happy,” said Ono. “Because of that, John wanted to get something.” It wasn’t exactly true—the Bob Dylan song was the actual inspiration—but Wenner was only too happy to serve. “We were a full forum for John and Yoko,” he said. “Anything they said, we printed.” NOV E M B E R

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It began when Capitol Records rejected John and Yoko’s infamous Two Virgins album cover of the couple naked and holding hands against a white background. Encouraged by Ralph Gleason, jazz critic and Rolling Stone co-founder, Wenner sent a telegram to Derek Taylor, the Beatles’ press secretary in London, asking to publish it for the one-year anniversary of Rolling Stone. Wenner led Lennon to believe it would save his publication from financial ruin, and Lennon liked being the savior. Wenner underscored the likeness to Adam and Eve with a quotation from the Bible: “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.” The impact on Rolling Stone’s fortunes was immediate: The “Two Virgins” cover made

national news and doubled Wenner’s sales. “This was our first experience with controversy,” Wenner said. “We sold out and we reprinted the issue for another, like, 20,000 copies.” “The point is this,” Wenner wrote in his next editorial, “print a famous foreskin and the world will beat a path to your door.” For Wenner, controversy was the point of any story. And Lennon got the intended results, too: the other Beatles were pissed off by the “Two Virgins” cover, which put the band on notice that Lennon was carving out a new www.vanityfair.com

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1 PHOTOG R APHS BY T IMOT HY A. CL ARY / AF P/ G ET T Y IMAG ES (7 ), RON GALELL A/WIREIMAGE (3), F RO M KEYSTONE/GETT Y IMAGES (6), BY ANNIE LEIBOVITZ/TRUNK ARCHIVE (5), CO URTESY OF ROLLING STONE MAG AZ INE (1), BY MAR K SELIG ER (4), ART Z ELLIN/ G ET T Y IMAG ES (2)

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“Once John got murdered, he became the martyr, the Buddy Holly, the James Dean character,” said Paul McCartney. 4

path with his girlfriend. “George [Harrison] was going, ‘What is this thing?’ ” recalled Ono. “Paul was very forward. He said, ‘Don’t do this!’ … And John loved it.” Before long, Wenner was invited to Lennon’s British country estate, in Ascot, though Lennon was too paranoid to come downstairs and meet him. Ono assured Wenner over a cup of tea that Lennon would meet him someday. Jonathan Cott, Rolling Stone’s London correspondent, befriended Ono and mailed Wenner the latest doodles and poetry from the couple, plus regular reports on their activities. Ono appeared to be managing Lennon’s affairs, filing regular demands of Wenner. “Yoko certainly seems to be anxious to make as much money and publicity as possible in the current situation,” Wenner replied. And so was Wenner. Throughout the early years of Rolling Stone, he was happy to run Lennon’s unedited missives on macrobiotics and rock-festival controversies, and he worked hand in glove with Derek Taylor to make Apple Records a de facto bureau for Rolling Stone, offering to publish the P.R. man’s own stories on the Beatles, who in turn gave Rolling Stone intimate previews of Beatles albums and supplied Wenner with advertising dollars. Rolling Stone would become a convenient partner for John and Yoko to create their own narrative—and a formula for Wenner’s success.

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ineteen seventy was a hinge year in the history of Rolling Stone, the precarious leap from the revolutionary 1960s to the commercialized 1970s. After Altamont and Kent State, the rock ’n’ roll industry that powered Rolling Stone had begun decoupling from the counterculture. After the bloodletting of 1970, the magazine nearly went bankrupt and Wenner purged his staff. He needed a major victory, an editorial coup to reclaim the high ground for Rolling Stone. The exclusive John Lennon interview offered one. Photographer Annie Leibovitz, who had begun freelancing a few months earlier, saw a chance for her own coup and appealed to Wenner’s newfound interest in pinching pennies by offering to fly to New York on a student fare and sleep on couches— if she could photograph John Lennon for the cover. “I knew it was really important to him,” said Leibovitz. “I knew he was nervous. I knew he was really nervous.” Wenner agreed, as long as he could own the negatives. The John Lennon interview took place at the Midtown Manhattan offices of the Beatles’ then business manager, Allen www.vanityfair.com

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Klein. McCartney had broken with Klein (for whom he wrote the couplet “You never give me your money / You only give me your funny paper”) and was about to sue his bandmates to get out of his Beatles contract. Wenner had previously suggested in a letter that Lennon fire Klein for malpractice: “Your Libra balance can’t make up your mind and [you] place trust in untrustworthy people.” Gruff and controlling, Klein insisted on making his own recording for insurance as Yoko sat by Lennon’s side. At the start of the recording, you hear Lennon tell Wenner, “Don’t be shy,” to which Wenner replies with tentative, simplistic questions. (“How do you rate yourself as a guitarist?”) Lennon raced past him, unloading personal demons, revising Beatles history, settling scores, trashing the Beatles as “nothing” and Paul McCartney’s first solo album as “rubbish.” Being in the Beatles, he told Wenner, “was awful, it was a fuckin’ humiliation. One has to completely humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were, and that’s what I resent.” This was Lennon’s way of divorcing himself from the Beatles while working through the emotions that primal screaming had unearthed and defending Yoko Ono against his bandmates. The other Beatles “despised her,” he said, and Capitol Records had dismissed Lennon’s work with Yoko because “they thought that I was just an idiot pissing about with a Japanese broad.” “Why should she take that kind of shit from those people?” he told Wenner. “They were writing about her looking miserable in the Let It Be film, but you sit through 60 sessions with the most bigheaded, uptight people on earth and see what it’s fuckin’ like, and be insulted.” And now he was in a face-off with McCartney and determined to win. When Wenner asked why he had hired Allen Klein against McCartney’s wishes, Lennon said, “That’s what leaders do… Maneuvering is what it is, let’s not be coy about it,” he went on. “It is a deliberate and thought-out maneuver of how to get a situation the way we want it. That’s how life’s about, isn’t it, is it not?” Sitting by his side, Ono offered corrections and amplifications. When Lennon proclaimed Sgt. Pepper’s a “peak” of the Beatles’ output, Ono chimed in: Yoko: But this new album of John’s is a real peak, that’s higher than any other thing he has done. John: Thank you, dear. Wenner: Do you think it is? John: Yeah, sure. I think it’s “Sergeant Lennon.” 150

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Being in the Beatles, Ono added, “was like cutting [Lennon] down to a smaller size than he is.”

he “Lennon Remembers” interview buoyed Rolling Stone’s national presence like nothing before it. Wenner was delighted by his coup and his new friendship. But characteristically, he didn’t stop there, and it cost him dearly. Before the Lennon interview was published, Wenner told his publishing partner, Alan Rinzler, that “Lennon Remembers” might make a great book and that Rinzler should “put it up for bids” once the interview was published. But there was one little problem: John Lennon had specifically said he didn’t want the interview published anywhere but Rolling Stone. And Wenner had agreed. Rinzler waved away the promise, unmoved by Wenner’s handshake deal. He told Wenner that the book was a surefire moneymaker for the 1971 holiday season, mentioning a publisher that would offer big money for the book rights. When Wenner tested the bounds of the partnership by forwarding Rinzler’s letter about a publishing advance, Lennon chided him for “jumpin’ da gun.” “I don’t think you should have approached publishers,” he wrote to him. But Wenner kept pressing. In April 1971, he flew to England and drove to Lennon’s estate to try developing the book idea with Lennon. But when he arrived, he discovered that the couple had flown to Spain, evading him. Lennon quickly made clear that he wouldn’t do the book, writing on the stationery of a Spanish hotel that he was “not interested at all really, so that’s that.” Wenner saw it as a sign of Lennon’s second thoughts about his bridge burning. “At the time it was a big triumph and he was happy he did it,” he said, “but then he expressed his regrets by not wanting to see it circulate further.” Wenner’s interests, however, now diverged from his idol’s. He went ahead and published Lennon Remembers in the fall of 1971, collecting $40,000 from a publisher. The interview, he reasoned to Lennon’s angry lawyer, was “a traditional journalistic property,” and Rolling Stone was a journalistic enterprise—so that’s that. Lennon was apoplectic. “By then, we felt that Jann was our ally, and we could trust him, so John had a big surprise,” said Yoko Ono. “There was a phone call from Jann to our hotel room. He said something like ‘We’re putting out this book, and I’m gonna

send you six copies.’ So John just hung up on him. He was furious.” (Wenner sent Lennon a copy inscribed, “Without you, this book could never have been done.”) In a letter to Lennon, Wenner described a phone exchange of “some fairly harsh words and bad thoughts of each other,” which Wenner said were “probably an inevitable result of the various karma that went with the interview.” Hoping to smooth things out, Wenner invited Lennon to a “quiet dinner at my house” with Ralph Gleason and Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. To which Lennon responded with a scorching letter to the editor in late November 1971: As your company was failing (again), and as a special favor (Two Virgins was the first), I gave you an interview, which was to run one time only, with all rights belonging to me. You saw fit to publish a book of my work, without my consent—in fact, against my wishes, having told you many times on the phone, and in writing, that I did not want a book, an album or anything else made from it.

Wenner sent Lennon a telegram asking if they could discuss the matter further. “Print the letter,” replied Lennon, “then we’ll talk.” Wenner never printed the letter, and Jann and John Lennon never saw each other again. “I remember just feeling sick to the stomach,” Wenner said. “Kind of feeling, ‘You’ve betrayed him.’ You feel guilty. Someone you cherish, enormously, and revere, tells you you’re an asshole. I felt terrible about it for months.” “That was one of the biggest mistakes I made,” Wenner said. “I chose the money over the friendship.”

n 1974, Wenner received a mysterious cream-colored envelope in the mail, care of “Johann Weiner” and postmarked Los Angeles, California. Inside was a single Polaroid picture of John Lennon and Paul McCartney hanging out on a garden patio with friends: Linda McCartney, hoisting a pool stick; Keith Moon, in shorts and Roman sandals; and May Pang, Lennon’s then lover, holding McCartney’s daughter Mary on her lap. On the white strip below the image, dated “Palm Sunday 1974,” was the message “How do you sleep???!!!” This was a reference to the John Lennon song from 1971’s Imagine, a notorious attack on McCartney in which Lennon snipes, “The only thing you done was yesterday.” Now the message was being re-purposed to attack Jann Wenner. Wenner C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 6 6 N OVEMB ER

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Paul Alexander Nolan, photographed with a 1957 Lincoln Premiere at Essanay Studio, in Chicago.

ST Y L E D BY LE SL I E PACE ; GROO MI N G BY RA N DY W IL DE R ; SE T DE SI GN BY A N GE L A F I N NE Y; PRO DUCE D O N L OCATI O N BY ZACK SA B I N; F O R DE TA I L S, GO TO VF.CO M/C RE DI TS

Nolan’s hair products by Aquage; grooming products by Armani Men.

bout 10 months ago, I was in New York casting the role of Tully Mars, the lead in my upcoming musical, Escape to Margaritaville. It debuts this month in New Orleans, where I started my singing career nearly 50 years ago, and heads to Broadway next March. While the show is not based on my life, it is chock-full of songs I wrote in the early years, when I was a singer playing in Key West bars and all along the Overseas Highway. Once in a while in the audition process there will be a performer who, by his or her entrance into the room, tells you that this is the one you are looking for. Enter Paul Alexander Nolan wearing a Hawaiian shirt, a pair of flip-flops, and a guitar strung across his back. NOV E M B E R

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Once Paul had the part, he was full of questions about how to approach the songs and how to play Tully. My answer was simple: “You need to become him.” So we decided to send Paul to “barsinger boot camp” in the Florida Keys. Stage performers are used to a silence in their workspace, while bar singers thrive in a cacophonous racket. Performing in a funky, loud Keys bar was something I felt Paul needed to experience. So off we went to the Green Turtle Inn, in Islamorada, a place that was on my song line from past years. On March 7, 2017, along with about 150 bar patrons, we all came together to witness Paul Nolan’s debut as a bar singer, including a few duets with yours truly. I’m proud to say that Paul was a quick learner and graduated from “boot camp” with — JIMMY BUFFE T T flying colors. Now we just need to work on his tan. SANDRO MILLER

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1963: The civil-rights march on J.F.K.—and the gruesome on Manhattan’s Upper East 152

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Washington, the Birmingham church bombing, the assassination of murders of two “career girls,” Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert, Side. JAMES ELLROY channels a vengeful, feverish hunt for the killer NOVEM BE R

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e solved it and put it all right in the end. The Brooklyn snag caused an everlasting stink. We deep-sixed an innocent man. We succumbed to a poisoned consensus. The crime horrified us, the milieu baffled us, the country went batshit crazy in concurrence. Janice and Emily were just one small part of the deal. But they were ours. They were fully ours to mourn and avenge. It’s like that film Laura. A woman is killed by a shotgun blast that obliterates her features. A police detective swoons for a portrait of her. She turns up alive. It’s a flesh-and-blood union then. The Wylie-Hoffert job was that film transmogrified. There was no portrait. We made do with crime-scene pix and old snapshots. They fueled our massive crush. This does not justify our misconduct. This does not absolve us for what we did to George Whitmore. This account cites love as the primary reason that it got so fucked up.

Our Girls

he time and place threw us. Broad daylight in highend Manhattan. It wasn’t bumfuck Queens. Feature the Alvin “the Monster” Mitchell job. It occurred the previous month. Feature the Daily News: TEENER CONFESSES BEDROOM SLAYING OF QUEENS GIRL. The Monster was a young-gang putz. He was at Friday-nite loose ends. A rumble failed to materialize. Cherchez la femme. He went on a cooze run and tapped out. He got drunk with a pal. They broke into P.S. 177. They stole volleyballs, footballs, and scissors.

3. She unlocked the 3-C door. The pad was quiet. It was working-toward-dusk/nobody’shome/ambient-lit. A kitchen service door stood ajar. She’d bolted said door this A.M. Two bedrooms stood off a central hallway. One was Emily’s. It had twin beds. Pat shared the other bedroom with Janice. Emily’s bathroom spilled light. Pat entered Emily’s bedroom. Pat saw this: Clothes, books, papers, and letters— dumped on the floor. Two open suitcases on the by-the-hallway bed. No sheets on the bed by the window. Open dresser drawers, the contents dumped—coins, cigarette packs, hair curlers. Pat backed out. Pat entered the bathroom straight across the hall. Pat saw this: A knife on the sink ledge. Wooden handle/12-inch blade/single blood streak. Pat ran into the kitchen. She called her boyfriend and reported what she saw. The young man said he’d head over. Pat hung up and dialed the 23rd Precinct. The call roused Detective Martin Zinkand. Pat reported what she saw. Zinkand said detectives would respond now. Pat called the Wylies then. Pat laid it on Mr. Wylie. Mr. Wylie said he’d shoot right over. Pat hung up and ran downstairs. She waited outside the building. She got antsy and ran back in. She waited outside Apartment 3-C. The Wylies arrived. Max Wylie took charge. He was that kind of guy. He went through Emily’s bedroom. He never flinched. We should have got there first. We could have body-blocked the door. Max Wylie killed himself 12 years later. We could have abridged his memory at the start.

e converged. A wideband broadcast announced it. Unit 3-C went S.R.O. Patrol cops arrived. Marty Zinkand and John Lynch arrived. Chief of Detectives Larry McKearney showed. Ranking cops showed en masse. Photo cops and print technicians showed. Emily’s bedroom was ground zero. Detective Lynch inventoried it. He noted this: The two beds, the dumped clothes, the dumped books and papers. The suitcases

PHOTO I L LUST RATI O N BY SE A N M C C A BE ; PHOTO GRA P HS F RO M THE NE W YO RK DAILY NE WS/GE TT Y I MAGE S

The pal stole a ’61 Chevy. The Monster was hip to a two-girl sleepover. 140 Avenue. Barbara Kralik and some other 15-year-old chick. He removed a porch screen and walked upstairs. Barbara woke up and screamed. The Monster stabbed her to death with the scissors and fled. Stupid and predictable. No 88th and Park. No safe doorman building. No bluechip victims. Janice and Emily were pedigreed. Ditto the surviving roommate, Pat Tolles. Janice worked the clip desk at Newsweek. Pat did research at Time-Life. Emily had a teaching gig set for the fall. Janice was 21. Pat and Emily were 23. “Career girls”—yeah, for now. Pedigree is destiny. They’d sure as shit marry soon and marry upscale. Wednesday, August 28, 1963. The date was a memory mark. Mark it: the civil-rights wingding/Washington, D.C. “Freedom now!” and “We shall overcome!” D.C. jammed with do-gooders. All-day TV coverage. 50,000 Manhattanites went down. The Big Town went Ghost Town. The career girls stayed home. Pat schlepped down to Time-Life. Emily ran errands. Janice swapped shifts with a coworker. Her clock-in: set for 11 A.M. She failed to show. It caused a stir. An assistant called the Wylie/Hoffert/Tolles pad and got no answer. The assistant buzzed Janice’s mother. Mrs. Wylie and her husband Max lived pad-adjacent. Mrs. Wylie was baffled. She didn’t know where Janice was. She gave the assistant Pat Tolles’s work number and called Pat herself. Pat was baffled. She thought of Emily and called Emily’s friend Susan Rothenberg. Emily and Miss Rothenberg had lunch plans. Miss Rothenberg said that Emily noshowed. Pat said she was looking for Janice Wylie. Have Emily call if she had any news. The day: all vexed phone calls and botched connections. Pat Tolles subwayed home and arrived at 6:25. She’d be frontpage stuff on Friday. Feature the Daily News: HUNT MADMAN AS GIRLS’ KILLER. There’s a distraught Pat—right below the fold. She’s sharing page space with Alvin “the Monster” Mitchell. The Monster is lit chiaroscuro. He emits Teenage Sex Fiend vibes. Pat entered the building and elevatored to

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SUDDEN DEATH Murder victims Janice Wylie, left, and Emily Hoffert.

on Emily’s bed. Open dresser drawers and spilled contents. Just what Pat saw. Now, add this to that: The narrow space between the far bed and the outside wall. Two bodies covered by a blue wool blanket. Max Wylie draped Janice and Emily and forgot that he did it. Detective Lynch removed the blanket. Janice was nude, Emily was clothed. Janice was supine. Her ankles were white-cloth cinched. Her thighs were covered with dried blood. She’d been disemboweled. Her intestines spilled across her abdomen. Janice’s wrists were cloth-bound. Her face and neck were blood-smeared. Her chest bore one stab wound. Emily wore a green skirt. Her upper-body garments were blood-soaked. Her head and neck were blood-smeared. She sideways-faced Janice. Her wrists and ankles were white-cloth bound. The two were lashed together by bluegreen bedspread strips. The ligatures were knotted at their forearms and wrists.

A radiator, close by. Placed atop it: two large carving knives, both blades snapped off. On the floor, adjacent: One knife-blade tip. An open jar of Noxzema skin cream. The lid of the jar, a few feet away. Add this to that: The neck off a broken Pepsi bottle. A green bedspread. A sanitary napkin. A pair of black underpants. Blood-soaked bedsheet strips. Emily’s blood-smeared glasses. A second knife-blade piece. Glass slivers. A disconnected clock radio. Said clock stopped at 10:37. The assistant M.E. arrived. He studied the bodies. He noted this: Seven knife thrusts to Janice’s heart. Noxzema slathered on her genitalia. Emily’s slashed jugular. Cuts on her wrists and palms. Indicative of knife attack and subsequent struggle.

The M.E. wrote it up. The print men dusted surfaces. The photo men snapped pictures. Max Wylie called Emily’s parents in Edina, Minnesota. An ambulance arrived. Four men loaded the bodies and drove them to the morgue. It’s now 1:30 A.M./Thursday/8-29-63.

he Post jumped on it. The Thursday headline: QUIZ FRIENDS IN GIRLS’ SLAYING. Page 3 featured two fluff bios. Janice got more ink. Emily was your plain Jane, Janice was your dish. Emily’s “dream was to teach.” Janice was the arty chick with the cool Newsweek gig. Janice notched double the print. It set the all-time tone. Max Wylie and sister Pamela praised Janice. She possessed pizzazz. She starred in school plays and summer stock. She did little theater up the ying-yang. It’s the Wylie arts imprimatur. Max Wylie—

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Pat entered the bathroom straight across the novelist, playwright, adman. Brother of Philip—lit crit and author of Generation of Vipers. Max Wylie came off grief-struck and disingenuous. One statement played true. He said, “She never got tired—nothing could wear her out, she kept going, all the time, going.” TILT—

hat was US in pursuit of Janice and the evil cocksucker who killed her. Janice felt like the primary victim. Emily felt like a secondary casualty. It vibed trace job. Hold the girls close and work backward. Check friends, rivals, grudge holders, lovers, and would-be paramours. We initiated a canvass. We started with the building itself. We combed 57 East 88th Street and door-knocked nine floors’ worth of tenants. No good leads accrued. The rear courtyard flanked buildings on 89th. A few jive leads popped. The net result: nobody there saw or heard shit. We studied the building. Detective Lynch walked the premises. Pat Tolles locked the kitchen service door that morning. She found said door ajar that night. Adjacent service stairs led down to the lobby and basement. The lobby service door was dead-knobbed and forestalled upstairs access. Two basement doors led out to the courtyard. Both were unlocked. The 3-C kitchen to ground level: a 40-foot drop. Said drop nixed the kitchen window as an entry or exit route. That left front-door egress. Janice and/or Emily let the killer in. Or a burglar picked the front-door lock. We had that lock examined. A safe and loft squad detective dialed a microscope in close. He found scratch marks on the upper and lower edges of the spring latch. Still— It didn’t read burglary. It read FURIOUS PASSION SNUFFS. Doormen worked the building. The shifts ran early morning to 10 P.M. We braced the early and late-shift guys and got zero. We braced delivery boys and handymen employed by the building. Maybe some guy did piecework in 3-C. He cased the pad and got perved on the girls. He gained legal or illegal access and tried to promote some woof-woof. It went waaaaay bad then.

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Pat Tolles gave us a workmen list. We braced them all. The result: more zero. The M.E. autopsied Emily and Janice. The girls sustained head trauma and died from stab wounds. That broken Pepsi bottle. Blows to the skull. The bedsheet and bedspread ligatures. Repeated knife thrusts. The snapped-blade carving knives. Makeshift weapons at hand. Emily died a virgin. The M.E. stated that. He kept mum per Janice. That statement and omission fueled our outrage and our one massive crush.

riday. Big noise at the 2-3. We hogged the detectives’ squad room. Chief McKearney presided. Deputy Chief Inspector Coyle showed. D.I. Tom Reneghan dished out assignments. Sergeant Bill Brent showed. He was temp boss of the 2-3 Squad. Captain Frank Weldon showed. He ran squads division-wide. John Lynch and Martin Zinkand showed. They caught the job at the gate. McKearney ordered this: Re-canvass the neighborhood. Excavate the DIRT. Check B.C.I. for humps with sexfiend/burglar M.O.’s. Check the Bellevue psycho ward for late releases. Check traffic tickets issued on 88th and the blocks adjoining. Check taxi logs. Brace the T.A. cops per blood-soaked subway riders. The print techs lifted nine sets at the pad. Seven were ID’d as family and friends. Two sets remain unknown. Roust local burglars. Roust local junkies. Print-check every snake you brace. Check the girls’ friends. Jump on the girls’ love lives. Don’t forget psycho women. Maybe there’s a lezbo motive here. Big-Case Fever/Holy Grail/License to Hunt. Hunters’ resolve. Absolution for bounds overstepped. The briefing proclaimed Sacred Cause. Vindictive glory and sinful temptation beckoned us en masse. We rumbled. We deployed the 2-3 Squad. We brought in Manhattan North Homicide and Burglary. We got transfers from Bronx Homicide and Brooklyn South. From Brooklyn North: Strong-arm Eddie Bulger.

More cops mustered on. We went to 150 total. Big-Case Fever/Big Dragnet/Blitzkrieg. The re-canvass revealed shit. We installed a tipline. The Daily News published it. “Can You Help Cops?”—Phone SA 2-4448 with rat-out information. Above the box: “Hunt Mystery Caller as Girls’ Killer.” A breather laid some phone calls on Janice. He dialed her work number and made with the Fuck me, baby. The Daily News called Janice a “green-eyed, blonde beauty.” We spent boocoo man-hours on the breather lead and got zilch. The tipline proffered bum snitch-outs. Newsweek offered a ten-grand reward. A Newsweek woman snitched an ass-pinching colleague. The man pinched her ass. The man pinched Janice’s ass. We print-checked and polygraphed the ass man. The result: zero. Max Wylie evinced weird behavior. He went on a series of radio shows and spieled theories. He proposed the formation of a citizens’ army manned by business execs. A lesbian angle surfaced. Max Wylie reported it. Dig: a dental receptionist made a pass at Janice. A beauty-parlor lez, ditto. Both lez leads fizzled. A third lead laid on laffs. Janice knew a rumored butch. The woman dressed her pet monkeys in baby clothes and squired them around in a pram. Detective Zinkand caught her act. That lead went pffft. Six headshrinkers practiced in the WylieHoffert building. We reviewed their patient files and got zero. We perused the main pervert file. It listed sex weirdos and detailed their perversions. We braced sink-shitters and whip-out men. We braced subway gropers and K-Y cowboys. Likewise: Drag-queen burglars, fruit rollers, psycho muff-divers. Males with slather-the-skincream M.O.’s. Net result: ZERO. The P.D. kept 3-C vacant and locked. Detectives walked through and re-studied the crime scene. The crib remained intact. Dust settled. Bugs gnawed at old bloodstains. The gore stench held in. Tick, tick, tick. That’s the Big Case time clock. It’s telling us to nail this fucker FAST. We checked out local B&E men and hypes. “Local” placed the death pad in context. East 88th was the ritzy Upper East Side. Yorkville was due north and east. It was N OVEMB ER

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hall. Pat saw this: a knife on the sink ledge. hardscrabble German and Irish. Due north of there: Spanish Harlem. Mucho Puerto Ricans, lots of B&E men and hypes. We compiled a roust list. We hit Ricky Robles that way. He lived on 93rd between First and Second. A print check turned up negative. We braced Ricky anyway. We read his file first. 1/28/60: popped for receiving stolen goods and needle tracks. Ricky’s 17. He admits 100 B&Es. His chief turf: the Upper East Side. Let’s backtrack. It’s now 9/23/59. Ricky pistol-whips a woman on East 66th. 4/28/60: Ricky gets sentenced. He’s schlepped up to Elmira. He’s paroled 6/3/63. He’s currently 20 years old. We braced Ricky at the 2-3. He brought two parole officers. For N.Y.P.D.: Detectives Zinkand and Lynch, Lieutenants Frank Sullivan and Tom Cavanaugh. Also present: Detectives Walter Donlin and David Downes. They popped Ricky back in ’60. Ricky was a cute little shit. Slight build, nice features. He showed off his arms. See? No needle tracks. His P.O.’s ballyhooed him. Model inmate at Elmira. Finished high school inside. Good lathe-operator gig in the Bronx right now. Well liked at work. Lived at home with his mom. Zinkand zoomed in per his whereabouts on 8/28/63. Ricky said the factory was closed that week. His mom got a cleaning bug. She put his ass to work Wednesday. He scrubbed the stairs after breakfast. He helped paint their crib that afternoon. His mom and her friend Dolly watched him work. The interview wound down. Zinkand and Lynch quizzed Ricky’s mom later that day. Mama’s parlor was packed with neighbor ladies. They gave Zinkand and Lynch the fisheye. Mama confirmed Ricky’s story. She recalled that Wednesday. The big civil-rights march was on TV. The neighbor ladies reconfirmed Ricky. They remembered him mopping them stairs. The group alibi cleared Ricky Robles. Ricky waltzed out of the case. The fall of ’63 crushed by. We worked Wylie-Hoffert and fisheyed Max Wylie and his crazy grief. The outside world perplexed and saddened us. The colored girls blown up in that Birmingham church. November 22 and Jack Kennedy dead. Jack the K was ours. Transpose him to Cardinal Hayes High and Fordham U. Give NOV E M B E R

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him a shield and a squad-room desk. Jack the K made us laugh. He was good scotch and cigars. We remembered him at Mass. We forgave his permissive views. He was ours by dint of imagination.

he Wylie-Hoffert job slogged by. We got stuck in the girls’ love lives. “The Girls” meant Janice here. Emily was a wallflower. She dated infrequently. She transposed to ravaged kid sister. The Hoffert family grieved quietly as the Wylies besieged us. We were postmortem headshrinkers, with Janice on the couch. Anecdote, perception, analysis. The Wylies ventriloquize Janice and reveal her dear and reckless self. Coffee klatches at the Wylie apartment. Friends interviewed and re-interviewed. We craft an Etch a Sketch portrait. We study Janice’s address book. We note many male names. Film noir. Janice Wylie was the dead woman captured in oil. But she’d never turn up alive. Film noir. The black-clad woman has the answers. The amnesiac man has to know. We were that man. We communicated our shared status telepathically. We were surely crusaders and prone to sin in pursuit of higher cause. The question “Who were you?” drove us. Mass vindictiveness quivered a half-step away. We were religious and chivalrous and sold on love-as-fulfilled-duty and love-as-faith-expressed. We were preordained for this big massive crush. Our girls granted us all rights of possession and a commensurate license to pry. Emily ceded the starring role. The crime scene determined that. Janice was nude and Emily was clothed. All our reconstructions featured Janice as the primary victim. That meant SEX as the dominant motive. That meant tracking every sexual rumor and bracing every man in her life. Her desperate romantic urge. Her fatuous flair for the spotlight. Her penchant for selfdestructive men. The Wylies supplied names. Ditto friends, co-workers, drama-school chums. Ditto the address book. Janet liked “interesting” men. Read that as volatile. Read that as artistically inclined and unfulfilled.

A beef magnate’s son—short-tempered and booze-addled. A “reformed” purse snatcher and armed robber. A conniving pseudo-journalist. Three misanthropic wouldbe writers sharing a pad. Janice met men at the Madison Pub. Janice met men at the Stanhope Hotel bar. Janice met men at the Stork Club and the Right Bank. Janice had hundreds of dates. Max Wylie said that Janice went to thousands of parties. Janice, the self-dramatist. Janice and summer stock. Janice gobbles Sominex in a cryfor-help performance. The green-eyed dish runs amok. Some piece-of-shit killer contravened her shot to outgrow her foolish antics. We didn’t deem her a roundheels or a whore. Janice fell prey to La Belle New York and the Wylie-family doctrine: Secular Panache and God Subsumed by Art. Janice and Emily converge in death. Janice and Emily diverge along simple lines of faith. Emily put trust in the efficacy of who she was and who she might become. Max Wylie best described the difference. Per Janice, he said, “She kept going, all the time, going.” Like the 100-plus New York City detectives. Like the men of the one massive crush. 1963 went pffft. Every single lead tapped out. Purgatory. Our girls off somewhere unreachably high. Their killer out of reach below. Transubstantiation. Their souls had merged for us. Janice’s flamboyance and Emily’s rectitude had become indistinguishable. Exhaustion now undermined our faithful resolve. Bitterness now informed our devotion. Here comes that poisoned consensus.

Brother George

etour: Brownsville, out in Brooklyn. A Jewish-gangster hotbed then, a Negro slum now. Ragmen with pushcarts then, punks with switchblades now. Home of the 7-3 Precinct. Geared for trouble then, geared for riots now. Tuesday, 4/14/64, about 2:00 A.M. Minnie Edmonds is slashed and raped in an alley. She’s middle-aged, she’s Negro, she’s a boozehound. Her windpipe is severed, her skirt is hiked, her panties are under her body. A neighbor calls the 7-3 and reports it. Detective Dick Aidala responds. He www.vanityfair.com

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5 PHOTOGR A PHS BY DA N FAR R ELL/ NEW YOR K DAILY NEWS / G ET T Y IMAG ES (6 ), JACK K ANT HAL/ A.P. IMAG ES (3), JIM MOONEY / NE W YORK DA ILY N EW S/ G ET T Y IMAG ES (4), F ROM T HE NEW YOR K DAILY NEWS / G ET T Y IMAG ES (1), BY ART Y POMER ANT Z / N E W YO RK PO ST ARCHI VE S/ G ET T Y IMAG ES (2, 5); D IG ITAL COLOR IZ AT ION BY SEAN M C CABE (3, 4)

The M.E. autopsied Emily and Janice. The girls

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CRIME SCENES (1) Wylie’s body is removed. (2) Wylie’s father, Max. (3) George Whitmore Jr. is charged with a 1964 murder in Brooklyn. (4) Pat Tolles, roommate of the victims, who was away at the time of the murders. (5) The bloody aftermath. (6) Evidence, including the murder weapons.

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makes it for a neighborhood job. He braces the men in Minnie Edmonds’s life and gets nowhere. The Edmonds snuff got zero ink and TV play. Fuck Minnie Edmonds. She was a colored juicehead. Dick Aidala worked the Edmonds job. Detective Joe DiPrima backed him up. The job was dead-stalled. Detour: Thursday, 4/23/64, about 12:30 A.M. Brownsville again. Elba Borrero walks down Bristol Street. She’s a hospital nurse. She’s trekking home from her subway stop. A man stalks her. He closes the gap. Elba Borrero screams. Foot-beat cop Frank Isola hears it. He responds. He sees a man and woman walking down the middle of Bristol. The man has an arm around the woman. Maybe it’s an embrace, maybe it’s an abduction. Isola follows them. The two duck down an alley. Isola follows them and turns on his flashlight. He sees this: The woman’s up against a brick wall. The man’s got her pocketbook. They’re 25 feet away. The woman screams. The man gasps and sprints off. Isola yells a warning. The man ignores it. Isola fires one shot. It goes wide. Isola chases the man and falls behind. Full-speed foot chase. The suspect’s out front. Isola’s 100 feet back. He fires three more shots. The suspect breaks stride and keeps running. Isola loses more ground. The suspect escapes. Isola figured he wounded the guy. He looked for a bloodstain trail and found bubkes. He went back to Elba Borrero and got her statement. She described her assailant: Male Negro/20 to 25/5'9"/160. It jibed with Isola’s occurrence memo: 5'9"/165/ dark pants, three-quarter tan jacket. Miss Borrero said the man threatened to kill her. She pulled a button off his coat. Isola grabbed the button and bagged it. He went back to the 7-3. He reported to Detective John Grace. Detective Grace split for the follow-up with Elba Borrero. Isola schlepped back to his beat. He searched for those fucking blood trails and failed again. It was 6:00 A.M. now. Isola saw a Negro kid huddled in a laundromat doorway. It was one block from the pursesnatch brouhaha. 160

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Isola broadened his bloodstain search and passed the laundromat again. It was 7:00 A.M. now. The kid was still there. Isola braced him. Enter George Whitmore Jr. George said he was waiting for his brother. They were looking for swamper work at a salt-shipping place. Isola pressed on last night’s ruckus. George said he heard shooting at Amboy and Sutter. A guy cut around the corner and almost knocked him down. The guy begged him: Hide me from the fuzz! George declined. Isola solicited a description. George described the guy: Negro/tall/heavy/dark-skinned/23 to 26 years old. George’s brother Shelly and two other cats arrived. Isola told all four cats to beat it. They split for Schoenfield Salt. Isola split for some street-crossing duty. He crossed little kids for a half-hour and went back to the 7-3. He filled Detective Grace in on George Whitmore. The kid caught the aftermath of last night’s fracas. Grace wrote it up and opened a case file. He dropped the coat button in the envelope. He left it for his day-watch relief: Detective Dick Aidala. TILT— Aidala worked the Minnie Edmonds rapesnuff. Elba Borrero was assaulted one block away. Aidala zeroed in on George Whitmore. He briefed Detective Joe DiPrima. They hit Schoenfield Salt and braced the boss. The man said he’d never heard of this Whitmore. Aidala contacted Frank Isola. Could you ID this Whitmore kid? Isola said sure. They convened the next morning. They sat in Aidala’s car and eyeballed the laundromat. George Whitmore materialized.

e was slow-witted. He had bad eyesight. He lost his glasses back home and had no scratch for new ones. He was acne-scarred. He ran 5'6"/140. He did not match the Borrero and Isola suspect descriptions. He was one month short of 20. He looked frail and vibed dim bulb. He migrated from Wildwood, down the Jersey Shore. His old man boozed and ran a junkyard, and his old lady went to church.

Wildwood was a snazzy resort town. It swelled in the summer and thinned out in the cold. Wildwood was O.K., but you got bored. He never finished school. He got itchy and had family in Brownsville. They supplied a roof until he got underfoot. He had a girl he stayed with sometimes. She lived with her folks. They let him stay sometimes. The girl snuck him in sometimes. He was currently out in the cold. His new crib was the 7-3 squad room. Elba Borrero had come and gone. She spent five hours scanning mug books. She did not see her assailant. Dick Aidala brought her back. He installed her in a room affixed with a door peek. He stationed George on the other side of the door. Miss Borrero studied George and ID’d him. She asked to hear him speak. Aidala fed George his cue. George said, “Shut up or I’ll kill you. I think I’ll kill you first, then I’ll rape you.” Miss Borrero confirmed her ID. Aidala placed George under arrest. He circumvented procedure. He did not place George in a lineup. He relied on a one-off ID. George did not resemble Miss Borrero’s at-the-scene description. Aidala searched George. He sifted pocket debris and hit two photos of white girls. One pic showed two chicks in a Pontiac ragtop. A bitchin’ blonde posed atop the backseat. Aidala asked George who she was. George said she was a Wildwood girl. Her dad owned a riding school. They used to go horseback riding. Aidala let it go. He didn’t deride it as poor-colored-boy fantasia. Aidala briefly worked the Wylie-Hoffert job. The boss blonde rang no bells. He placed George in an interrogation room. Detective DiPrima showed. Frank Isola went out and brought back buttered bread and coffee. DiPrima schmoozed George and got him bopping loose. 8:30 A.M., Friday, 4/24/64. George denied the attempt rape. He said he’d never seen the woman before. DiPrima re-applied the schmooze. He drew George out with tender patience. Aidala and Isola sat in. This runty kid’s sponging up loooooove. The schmooze came with a price. George was susceptible. DiPrima dropped the price N OVEMB ER

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Ricky Robles remains imprisoned. He admitted the

murders at his second parole hearing. He’s 74 now. tag. Maybe we’ll bust you, maybe we won’t. You must tell the truth. So, George confessed. It’s all he said/no, he said/conflicting statements now. There’s George Whitmore’s initial statement. There’s Aidala’s and DiPrima’s notes. There’s no tape-recorded transcript. Aidala flashed the button that Elba Borrero ripped off the rape man’s coat. George said it was his. Miss Borrero found a mechanical pencil in the alley. She said the rape man held it to her throat. It wasn’t a knife, as she first stated. George confirmed this inconsistency. Yeah, that’s my pencil. George confessed. George recanted later. He said Aidala hit him in the stomach and Isola slugged his back and shoulders. Detective DiPrima was on his side. He thought Daddy Joe would square this shit up. Two kibitzers showed. Detectives Charles Fazio and Eddie Bulger, Brooklyn Homicide North. DiPrima segued to the Minnie Edmonds

job. It was Rape/Murder One. Proximity/ approach/execution. DiPrima worked proximity. Chester Street: on Elba Borrero’s route home. Chester Street: the Minnie Edmonds crime scene. George got confused. DiPrima stressed a woman hurt there. George saw what Daddy Joe wanted and said he hurt her. So, George confessed. It’s all he said/no, he said/two detectives’ notes. It’s all leading questions or George’s uncoerced and truthful answers. It’s George’s big urge to please Joe DiPrima and his later denial of guilt. He stalked Minnie Edmonds and grabbed her. They struggled. He rifled her purse and found no money. He pulled his knife. He cut her on the face and stabbed her in the chest. Then he pulled off her panties. Then he unzipped his fly and tried to do it to her. Then he heard a noise and scrammed. DiPrima fixed on the murder knife. George described it: smooth blade, black handle, panther emblem. Frank Isola flashed his similar knife. George said it was just like his knife. George later said this: The cops quit beating him when he promised to help them.

o, George, where’s the knife now? George said he put it under the steps of some house. Aidala set up a cop caravan. Among said cops: Charles Fazio and Eddie Bulger. Eddie B. was hot off Wylie-Hoffert. Eddie B. had a collar on death row right now. David Coleman/male Negro/set to fry 8/10/64. Coleman confessed to Eddie B. Coleman, said he got kicked in the shins and beat upside the head. The caravan stopped at two Amboy Street houses. They found no knife under the steps. Back to the 7-3. Lunch in the sweat room: George, Dick Aidala, Joe DiPrima. George riffs on his nite prowls. He goes around looking at women. He goes up on roofs and peeps. Back to biz. Aidala calls the Brooklyn D.A.’s Office. Send an assistant D.A. over. We’ve got a rape-o/killer here. The cops take George to 215 Chester. George walks them through the Edmonds snuff. Back to the 7-3. Here’s that big hinge-offate moment. Fazio and Bulger C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 6 2

Robles (center) in 1965. Inset, the front page of the Daily News, January 27, 1965.

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Penn State

C O N T I N U E D F R O M P A G E 1 4 0 have, as yet, been expelled. (The university notes it put the graduations of the handful of seniors in the frat on hold, that 35 students have gone through initial disciplinary hearings, and that “many” of them “have taken disciplinary withdrawals from Penn State.”) And then there was Bream, the 58-year-old university

“Career Girl” Murders

C O N T I N U E D F R O M P A G E 1 6 1 sift through George’s shit. They examine his wallet. There’s the snapshot. Dig the boss blonde in the Pontiac. Bulger thinks she looks like Janice Wylie.

onsensus creates agenda and the will to identical ends. Collusion mandates one consciousness tuned to one wavelength. Cops are empiricist hardheads prone to mystical hunch. We all know it when we see it and most of us see the same things. George Whitmore. Friday, 4/24/64. The Gold-Shield/One-Day Trifecta. Elba Borrero: Purse Snatch/Attempt Rape. Minnie Edmonds: Rape/Murder One. On deck: Wylie-Hoffert. A.D.A. Edward Alfano arrived. We turned him back, pronto. We’d just caught a hot one across the river. Dick Aidala spieled which one. Alfano almost shit. Those snapshots. The snapshot. Janice Wylie, sure. On the back: “To George from Louise.” A phone number beside it. Eddie Bulger crunched George. Joe DiPrima, Dick Aidala, and Frank Isola watched. Bulger asked George where he got the pix. George said he found them at the Wildwood

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employee living among frat boys. Beta was a supposedly dry house where pallets of alcohol had been delivered and which had two bars. “That’s one of the most incredibly offensive things,” Jim said, “that he is still employed. He lived in the house, and if he’d have reported them to the university just one time, Tim would be alive right now. I brought it up to the president today. He said, ‘I can’t discuss employment matters.’ ” (The university argues that it doesn’t control or monitor the non-criminal outside activities of its employees.) Bream, who declined to be interviewed for this article, and who hasn’t been charged in any crimes in connection with Tim’s death, was eventually compelled to testify at the preliminary hearing and told the court that he was a teetotaler who “wasn’t in charge of discipline” at the frat house, but “would in no way, shape, or form give permission” for alcohol abuse or hazing. Evelyn Piazza, who was wearing a necklace

with Tim’s thumbprint and another with an EKG of his heartbeat, said, “They can’t hide behind ‘They’re off-site, we don’t have a say.’ No, they’re your students. You should have a say.” Jim added, “ ‘You want your fraternity to be sanctioned by the university, here’s the rule book. You break it, you’re out.’ ” The Piazzas were planning a golf fundraiser for a foundation they’d started in Tim’s memory, to help people who need prosthetic limbs and to provide academic scholarships. “Obviously we’re never going to bring Tim back,” Jim said, “so all we have is the ability to try to make a difference for other people. Tim was the kind of person who wanted to help people. He just did. I personally believe, if he is in fact looking down on us—if that’s reality or not I don’t know, but if he is looking down on us, he’s sad that he left us, but I also know he’s glad that we’re trying to carry this cause, because that’s what he would want.”

town dump. Bulger asked him who wrote on the back. George said it was him. It was all brag. He wanted to pass the chicks off as his girlfriends. Bulger scoffed. DiPrima told George to tell the truth. George changed his story. He told a heartbreaking lie. The blonde girl in Jersey. Her dad owned a horse ranch. He let him ride for free. Bulger expressed disbelief. George changed his story again. He said he stole the picture. He was in the girl’s house. The girl and her dad were outside. He snatched the picture off a table. Bulger expressed disbelief. George changed his story again. There’s two versions here. The official one: he stole it from an apartment house. Where? On 88th Street. From George Whitmore’s recanting statement: Joe DiPrima hectored him. Joe DiPrima fucked with his head and SUGGESTED THIS: You got it from a crib on 88th Street. George capitulated. George said, Yes, I did. Bulger and DiPrima worked George. Dick Aidala watched and kibitzed. Memory lane, George. Last summer, late August, that last Wednesday. WHERE WERE YOU? George said, Wildwood. The Ivy Hotel. He spent lots of time there. That answer didn’t fly. Bulger and DiPrima fed him Brooklyn. You felt like going for a train ride, George. You hopped a train and got off at 42nd and Eighth. That’s in Manhattan, George. You walked uptown and east to 88th Street. You saw a building. You went up to the third floor. You went in the half-cracked kitchen door.

You picked up three empty pop bottles. You searched the bedroom. A girl came out of the bathroom. She had a towel around her hips. She was naked otherwise. The girl screamed. You grabbed her. You hit her. She fell between the bed and the window. You got all excited. You pulled the cloth from her body and tore it into strips. Whoa—George said “cloth” when he’d just said “towel.” O.K., George—you bound her hands and feet. You ran into another girl. She said, “Who the hell are you?,” and screamed. You hit her with a pop bottle and knocked her out. You tied her with bedsheet strips. “Towel,” “cloth,” “sheet.” Which one, George? The girls were knocked out. He tied them together. Girl No. 2 woke up and shouted. He ran to the kitchen and grabbed some knives. He ran back to the bedroom and cut Girl No. 2. He cut Girl No. 1 in the stomach. He cleaned up in the bathroom. He washed his hands and the bloody knife. He swiped the picture of Girl No. 1. Whoa, now. What about Girl No. 1 and the Noxzema skin cream? He ran down the stairs. He booked through the lobby and hit East 88th. He walked to Park and cut south. He hit 42nd Street and trained back to Brooklyn. So, George copped to Wylie-Hoffert. He later claimed the cops walked him through it. You’d bind the girls, right? Yeah, sure, O.K. You’d cut them, right? Yeah, sure, O.K. Listen, I don’t care. You’ve been on me all day and I’m tired. The squad room filled up. Word leaked somehow. That consensus percolated. We all showed up. We watched. Bulger and DiPrima worked George. They got him to lay down details and N OVEMB ER

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fill in gaps. He’d been booked for Edmonds and Borrero. The trifecta loomed. Radio calls went out. We fucking SHOWED. Deputy Chief Inspector Carey. Assistant Chief Inspector Coyle. Detective John Lynch. George drew a picture of the death crib. He later said the cops told him how. Chief McKearney showed. Ditto Lieutenant Cy Regan. Ditto Lieutenant John Currie. Bulger displayed the Janice pic. Lynch checked it out and voiced doubt. McKearney called for a powwow. We huddled up. Bulger read from his notes. Lynch voiced more doubt—details didn’t jibe. McKearney said, Smooth this shit out. Bulger and DiPrima slammed back on George. Smooth this shit out. Make the consensus cohere. We’re ALL close now. The fuck copped to it, he’s a rape-o fuck, let’s make this fly. Doubts got flatlined, doubts got subsumed, doubts flickered nonetheless. The photograph was evidence. McKearney wanted it refuted or confirmed. Bulger and DiPrima hard-nosed George. They harped on the sex shit. George copped to the Noxzema. George said this later: Bulger threatened to kick him in the balls. John Lynch drove to Manhattan. He showed the snapshot to Mr. and Mrs. Wylie. They said, No, that’s not Janice. Two A.D.A.’s hit the 7-3. Saul Postal/Brooklyn, Peter Koste/Manhattan. Bulger and DiPrima briefed them. Postal ran the Brooklyn Q&A. He took George through Edmonds and Borrero. George was exhausted. He forgot what he’d said before. DiPrima helped him out. The Manhattan Q&A kicked off at 2:00 A.M. Pete Koste read George his rights. A stenographer sat poised. Detectives Aidala, DiPrima, and Bulger observed. Koste led George to the death pad. Koste helped George smooth out discrepancies en route. Koste helped George craft his account. George ID’d Emily Hoffert as Janice Wylie’s mother. George described the murders. He described nonexistent stab wounds. Koste asked him why he pulled down the bedroom-window shade. George said, “If they came to, they would get up.” George said he’d stabbed both girls repeatedly. Dead girls don’t get up. The Q&A concluded. John Lynch returned. He found Eddie Bulger. He said he’d shown the photo to the Wylies and their surviving daughter. Emily’s friend Susan Rothenberg viewed the photo. It was unanimous: that’s not Janice Wylie.

e wanted it, so we got it. It was our massive crush reduced to a frat-house gang

bang. We failed to resurrect our girls with tender thoughts and prayers. Our devoted study of their lives provided no solution. The horror and pathos of George Whitmore thrilled us at first and finally left us numb. NOV E M B E R

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He felt like an inadequate solution. He lacked the plain malevolence to explicate the crime. None of that came to matter. We came to know him in a different guise. He indicted our bigotry and callousness. He called us out on the sin of indifference and rebuked us in a voice straight to God.

eorge was arraigned in Brooklyn Criminal Court. Zinkand and Aidala brought him in. Borrero and Edmonds—four felony counts total. The judge fixed George up with a public defender. Lawyer and client conferred. Jerome Leftow showed George a newspaper. Headlines screamed that he’d copped to the Wylie-Hoffert snuffs. George repudiated this. Lawyer and client conferred. Leftow told the judge that George recanted all his confessions. Said admissions were made under duress. George was placed in the Brooklyn House of Detention for Youth. The Brooklyn grand jury indicted him. This question loomed: Who prosecutes first, Brooklyn or Manhattan? The Manhattan grand jury indicted on May 6. George was sent to Bellevue May 8. He was to undergo psych testing. George was front-page news. Big stories excoriated him. Max Wylie wrote a big piece: 25 POINTS FOR GIRLS ALONE IN NEW YORK. Enter Melvin Glass. Mr. Glass was a Manhattan A.D.A. A detective there at the 7-3 told him that something felt unkosher. George seemed gentle and pliable. Bulger and DiPrima steamrolled him. Glass read George’s confession. He saw that it revealed no new information. It felt spoon-fed. Glass conferred with the D.A.’s Homicide Bureau. Detectives read the confession and concurred. Further work was decreed. Here’s where you start. Was the photo of the blonde girl ever in the Wylie-Hoffert apartment? George underwent psych testing. The U.S. Supreme Court did him a Hail Mary solid. June 22: the Court rules on Escobedo. The gist: you’re entitled to a lawyer at jump street. Detectives Zinkand, Lynch, and Connolly chased clear-George leads. George had spieled a third version of that boss blonde in the picture. He said he found it at the Wildwood town dump. Zinkand, Lynch, and Connolly studied the photo. They got botanists and forest rangers to help nail the locale. They finally ID’d the Belleplain State Forest. They studied high-school yearbooks and tried to ID the blonde. They succeeded. She was a young Wildwood housewife. Zinkand, Lynch, and a Wildwood cop door-knocked her. She recognized the photo—and herself. It was right after the senior prom, 1956. She and some friends went to Belleplain. George was judged sane and sent back to Brooklyn. The Borrero trial was set for early November.

A rumor spread. Manhattan’s got a weak case. The Whitmore kid plays weak for Wylie-Hoffert. Zinkand, Lynch, and Connolly combed Wildwood. They turned up three kids. Said kids alibied George. He spent 8/28/63 at the Ivy Hotel. Everybody recalled that day. The big freedom march was on TV. George was glued to the lobby TV. George was there all day. Wildwood was mucho miles from uptown Manhattan. The kids cleared George on Wylie-Hoffert. Not so Edmonds and Borrero. And Edmonds was an electric-chair bounce. Ricky Redux

etour: Fall ’64. The Wylie-Hoffert job zigzags. George Whitmore gets cleared. Kudos to Melvin Glass, John Lynch, Marty Zinkand. The Manhattan D.A.’s cautious. Brooklyn’s still got George by the nuts. A WylieHoffert dismissal would make George look gooooood there. But—the Manhattan D.A.’s a fucking nutless wonder. A shitstink hits N.Y.P.D. Melvin Glass and Pete Koste grill Strong-arm Eddie Bulger. Eddie’s bum foto ID caused the whole Whitmore snafu. He’s got a Negro kid on death row. That’s yet more stink. The kid’s dim-witted, like George. The kid said Eddie thumped him. He got a stay of execution and might waltz. Shitstink. You pay for your sins in this life. Our time was now. We’re into October. A dope famine hits New York. Big “H” becomes very scarce. October 8: a shitbird dope peddler snuffs a shitbird dope fiend on East 100th Street. The victim: Roberto Cruz Del Valle. The killer: Nathan Delaney. Cruz was Puerto Rican. Delaney was Negro. Delaney stabbed Cruz in the head. It all pertained to dope intrigue. The case was open-and-shut. We collared Delaney and brought him to the 2-3. Detective Patrick Lappin babysat him. Delaney said he had hot news and demanded a D.A. Slice this. That Whitmore chump didn’t slice the career girls. He knew who did. Detective Lappin passed the word. Ten days went by. Nathan Delaney held his hole card tight. October 19: the sit-down at Pete Koste’s office. Present: Koste, Delaney, Melvin Glass. Detective Lappin, Marty Zinkand. Delaney demanded full immunity. Get it?—a walk on Roberto Cruz Del Valle. Koste said he’d try. Delaney laid out the story and held back the name. 8/28/63. Sometime before noon. This dope-fiend pal barges into his crib. He says he just “iced two dames.” He has blood on his shirt and trousers. He gives Delaney some bread to score dope. Delaney does it and returns. The guy asks if the fuzz can www.vanityfair.com

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“Career Girl” Murders trace sperm in a girl’s body. Delaney says he doubts it. The guy says he made one of the girls give him head. It was a B&E. He found one girl in bed. Then the girl with the glasses showed up. He tried to grab her glasses. The girl resisted and said she wanted to see him and ID him. He knew he had to kill them. He smashed their heads with pop bottles and stabbed them dead. Koste pressed for the name. Delaney pressed for the deal. Koste called the D.A.’s office and got it. Delaney gave up Ricky Robles. Marty Zinkand wasn’t surprised. Robles’ alibi was shaky 13 months back. Delaney was credible. His dope-fiend wife was hauled in and confirmed his story. We popped Robles that night. We brought him to Pete Koste’s office. Nathan Delaney was there. Delaney repeated his story. Shouts and epithets ensued. Robles denied everything. We had to cut him loose. It was all hearsay. Our informant was a dope peddler/killer. Delaney gave Koste a 23-page statement. He got his walk on the Cruz snuff. The grand jury agreed not to indict. Richard Robles—credibly nailed for our girls. He was almost 23. He had a high I.Q. He went back to ’56 with the Delaneys. Nathan turned him on to horse. He went on that rampage, ’59–’60.

ey details: He hot-prowled a crib on East 90th and found a woman sleeping. She woke up. He talked to her and almost touched her. He boogied in a pre-rape panic. More hotprowls ensued. He pistol-whipped a woman. He held a couple captive. He perved on the woman, got rejected, and split. He got popped at his parents’ pad, 2/4/60. He confessed to 100 burglaries and got indicted for 9. He did his Elmira jolt. He got released, 6/3/63. Wylie-Hoffert: 8/28/63. 12/19/63: Ricky gets violated for dope tracks. He’s sent back to Elmira for eight months. August ’64—the hot-prowl man’s back in town. George swung for Elba Borrero. The trial concluded 11/18/64. The jury bought Detective Aidala’s version. Bam!—guilty as charged. Now pending: the Edmonds trial. Zigzag: Whitmore/Robles, Whitmore/ Robles, Whitmore/Robles. Ricky OD’d on goofballs at a party. He did nine hospital days. We bugged his pad and his mother’s pad while Ricky convalesced. It got down to the nitty-gritty then. The Delaneys agreed to entrap Ricky. It gets dicey here. It’s like we learned zilch

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from Brooklyn and Brother George. We hotwired the Delaney pad. We got Nathan D.’s formal consent on Christmas Eve. That made it courtroom legal. Yeah—but we gave that vicious fuck a slide on Murder One. Someone kept the Delaneys dope-flush. It was sub rosa and reeked of back-channel N.Y.P.D. We encouraged the Delaneys to supply Ricky. Why mince words—we demanded it. Tweak him/torque him/wheedle him/cajole him. Shoot Ricky up judiciously. Get him to admit the Wylie-Hoffert job. We brought in Detective David Downes. He’d popped Ricky for his 1960 crime spree and achieved rapport with him. Ricky engaged his circa-’60 lawyer, Jack Hoffinger. We rigged a listening post in the Delaneys’ building. It ran around-the-clock. Tape rigs, wall mikes, eavesdropping gear. We logged shitloads of dope-fiend hoo-haw. It bore semi-fecund fruit on 1/14/65. Ricky visits the Delaneys at 11:55 P.M. The hoo-haw continues. Ricky senses and/or knows he’s being bugged. It’s an open secret. The cocksucker blabs anyway. Dope-fiend bull session. The Delaneys provoke, Ricky responds. It’s dope-addled and explicit. Noxzema, Tampax, blow job. Those words get tossed. Nathan concocts a tale to explain why he ratted Ricky. See, it’s all a lie. It’s his ace in the hole. It’s his bargain chip to ride out serious beefs. More chat. How to beat the lie detector. Plus this: we’ll frame this geek Bobby Diaz for the snuffs. Ricky implicitly states that Emily removed her glasses. Plus, Ricky says this: “If I could only plant it in my mind that you made this up and it didn’t really happen, like I would take that test.” The bull session continued. Ricky’s last statement electrified. It was courtroomgoooooooood. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick— The press goaded us. The Daily News got half-ass explicit on 1/24. They blasted the Manhattan D.A. Dump the Whitmore indictment now!!! They implied that we knew the killer’s name and let him roam free. They called the killer “Dickie.” He was a “wan-faced dope addict.” Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick— The press watchdogged Manhattan/Robles and Brooklyn/Whitmore. A Post reporter got a tip from a Borrero-case juror. The man said his fellow jurors discussed the Edmonds and Wylie-Hoffert cases routinely. This violated Judge David Malabe’s instructions. Plus this: Several jurors made racially vile remarks and defamed George Whitmore. Concurrent to this: George’s lawyers shoot Judge Malabe a memo. They allege racial animus per the jurors. Malabe orders a public hearing and queries the jurors. Newsmen chime in. Judge Malabe states that he will issue a formal opin-

ion. He states that the defendant should get a new trial. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick— 1/26/65. Ricky Robles goes down. Lieutenant Tom Cavanaugh punched the green light. Marty Zinkand grabbed Ricky outside his girlfriend’s apartment. A faux taxicab pulled up. Zinkand patted Ricky down and tossed him in the backseat. Two plainclothes cops sat up front. They drove north on Third Avenue. John Lynch jumped in en route. Lieutenant Cavanaugh and Sergeant Tom Brent jumped on at 93rd. The plainclothesmen jumped out and made for the 2-3.

etour: They took Ricky by the Delaney crib and showed him the hot-wires. Ricky boohooed and bleated for his lawyer. We badgered him. Ricky evinced dope-withdrawal signs and puked. We urged him to confess. Nathan and Marge Delaney appeared and urged him anew. Recording tape spun next door. Mel Glass and Pete Koste listened in and then joined us. Ricky wept and begged for his lawyer. We berated him and commanded him to CONFESS. The tape ran out at 6:11 P.M. Ricky was dope-deprived and sick like a muthafuckin’ dog. We took him to the 2-3 and tossed him in a squad-room cage. Fuck Ricky and his legal rights. We knew he did it. This was for Janice and Emily. This was for George. Mel Glass schmoozed up Ricky. Ricky bleated for his lawyer. Mel sidestepped his bleats. Maybe Mel abridged Ricky’s rights, maybe he didn’t. Mel sparkplugged George Whitmore’s exoneration. Nobody gave a rat’s fucking ass what Mel did or did not do. A newsman tipped off Jack Hoffinger. Big Jack hit the 2-3 and buttonholed his client. Hoffinger conferred with Glass then. It gets murky here. Hoffinger called the boss at D.A.’s Homicide. He protested Ricky’s arrest and made more phone calls. Lawyer and client sat in separate rooms. Ricky purportedly confessed to David Downes. The botched B&E. The inadvertent hotprowl. The bottles, the knives, the Noxzema. Janice said, PLEASE DON’T HURT ME. Ricky decided to hump her. That didn’t work. He coerced some head. Emily’s there now. He wields the bottles. He wields the knives. One blade breaks in Emily’s back. Please don’t hurt me. Please don’t hurt me. Please don’t hurt me. The Q&A concluded. Downes took no notes. Other cops walked up and threw questions. Jack Hoffinger finished his phone calls. Ricky had or had not spilled his guts by then. Downes and Zinkand booked Ricky. It was 11:45 P.M. Ricky was strung out and N OVEMB ER

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unstrung. The press was there, flashbulbs popped, hurled questions overlapped. It’s the tabloid money shot.

he Manhattan D.A. cut George loose. Bam!—no Wylie-Hoffert true bill. George had new Brooklyn lawyers. Judge Malabe issued his opinion re Borrero. To wit: “The Court concludes that the conviction cannot stand.” From the Daily News: ADDICT BOOKED IN GIRL MURDERS. The Borrero re-trial got pushed back. It was set for who-knows-when/if-at-all. Edmonds loomed for April. George remained in stir. The press ripped N.Y.P.D. for the whole Whitmore boondoggle. We deserved it. The Robles bust was one year and five months overdue. Some Assembly geek introduced a bill to kill the state death penalty. It was precipitous and reactive. Mea culpa—it was our George’s true bill. Our George. Our Janice and Emily. Ricky Robles nailed for all of them clean. We were dead-dog fatigued. George haunted us en masse. He inspired our kick-the-door-down resolve and then smothered it flat. Mass nostalgia set in. We wanted Summer ’63 back. Jack the K was still prez. George was safe. Our girls were dead—but we lit candles for them and vowed to burn their killer. Jack Hoffinger prepped his Robles defense. The Edmonds trial kicked off with a hearing. The judge wanted this question answered: Did George Whitmore confess under duress? George took the witness stand. He wore a suit and tie and his new glasses. Dick Aidala and Joe DiPrima took the stand in his wake. George described that hellish night last April. He was persuasive. Aidala and DiPrima refuted him. The judge found them more persuasive. He ruled that George confessed voluntarily. He said he would leave the final ruling to the trial jury. Thus: the Edmonds and Wylie-Hoffert confessions would stand trial. George on trial, rogue cops on trial, bad symbiotic juju. The trial was bitterly protracted. The barrage of facts and picayune contention deadened the room. Two jury votes preceded the verdict. They ran 10 to 2 and 8 to 4 for acquittal. The jury deadlocked in the end. George remained in stir. Chief Larry McKearney resigned. D.A. Aaron Koota issued an appellate-court petition: dismiss the Edmonds-case indictment. That death-penalty bill passed the State Senate. Bam!—47 to 9. Governor Rockefeller signed it into law. The Police Commission announced an internal probe. L’affaire Whitmore would draw electric-chair heat. A slew of resignations and retirements followed. Jack Hoffinger prepped Ricky Robles’ case. He worked under duress. Ricky’s mother was dying of cancer. Ricky’s trial was set for the fall, nonetheless. NOV E M B E R

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Ricky was summering at Bellevue. Ricky now owed George Whitmore his life. George got the death penalty shit-canned. Ricky couldn’t burn for Wylie-Hoffert. He would have let George burn. Evil Ricky deserved to burn. The enormity of his crime mandated DEATH. Mrs. Robles was on her way out. She endured two hospital interviews. Doctors and lawyers hovered. Prosecutors Glass and Koste. Defense man Hoffinger. Evil Ricky and his brother. Trial judge Irwin Davidson. Deathbed statements. Geared to alibi Ricky. Modest ceremonies. The first statement backfired. The woman’s mind wandered. She fared better the second time. She repeated the alibi she first provided. Ricky spent that Wednesday cleaning their building, over and out. The trial convened 10/1/65. A psychiatric report was read. Richard Robles was decreed sane. Detectives testified per Ricky’s confession. David Downes, John Lynch, George Brent. Lieutenants Sullivan and Cavanaugh, Marty Zinkand. Zinkand said that Ricky begged for his lawyer. Hoffinger pounced on this statement. Judge Davidson rejected his argument. The judge was on our side. He rejected all suggestion of police impropriety at the gate. The trial proceeded. A jury was selected. Hoffinger was up against it. The judge favored the cops. The prosecution would shred the deathbed statements. Come on, she’s his mother. We turned up no hard suspects preWhitmore. Hoffinger had no viable witness to create reasonable doubt. George Whitmore was Hoffinger’s sole shot at reasonable doubt. Nathan Delaney testified. Hoffinger crossexamined him. Delaney testified per Ricky’s admissions on 8/28/63. It was sordid. Hoffinger cut into him. Delaney copped to his sordid life. Sordidness slimed up the courtroom. Hoffinger failed to get the bug tapes excluded. Courtroom speakers were set up. The jury heard the most damning tape excerpts. Marge Delaney testified. Pffft—more slime— So what? George Whitmore testified. Hoffinger questioned him. He denied killing Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert. He said he did not confess. Everything was “suggested” to him. Fucking George. He was magnificent and half-ass grown-up now. Jack Hoffinger was overmatched. His client was a putrid junkie/ rape-o. It was 1965. Civil rights, Freedom now!, Martin Luther King. George was Emmett Till and the Scottsboro Boys resurrected. Hoffinger had to prove George guilty. Pete Koste and co-counsel John Keenan had to restate his innocence. It came down to George’s confession. Hoffinger called now retired Strong-arm Eddie Bulger. He lobbed softballs. Did you threaten

George Whitmore? No, I did not. He was not coerced—he confessed voluntarily. John Keenan tore into Bulger then. He slammed Bulger’s methods. You don’t feed suspects information? You didn’t “help” George Whitmore diagram the Wylie-Hoffert apartment? You didn’t lead him, feed him answers, make promises, make threats? No, I didn’t/No, I didn’t/I don’t recall. Keenan was ruthless. Bulger was every biblical coward called to account for his sins. He was the quivering voice of official expediency. He took the oath cocky and walked off deep-sixed. He left the witness stand blotting his wet hands. The trial fizzled then. It was snoresville in the wake of the George and Eddie Show. Hoffinger read George’s confession. Yawn. Cops testified per George in Brooklyn. Yawn. Here’s the part that all cops love and very few of us admit. We paid for our sins. The media ratified them. We confessed our brutal misconduct and acceded to George Whitmore’s canonization. After expiation, redemption—with George at our side. We’d earned our right to trash the law in our war against Ricky Robles. Hoffinger’s closing statement was a dry fuck. He rebuilt that summer day in mindmauling detail and lame extrapolation. John Keenan closed the show with Ricky’s tape admissions. The jury convened for just six hours. Guilty as charged. Judge Davidson imposed sentence. Ricky got life and shipped out for Dannemora.

e solved it and put it all right in the end. One could tally the cost and dispute this statement. Reconstituted love was the path that led us through. This memoir is a very old detective’s logbook. It is a work of memory burned bright by the nearness of death. It is my personal recollection and my dogged perusal of a great muckraking text. Two outraged journalists breathed these events and reported them passionately. I am indebted to them—however they interpret this Christian vision of justice gone right and wrong. God will determine and finally judge the probity of my perceptions and gauge their worth from His all-knowing perspective. The act of faith entails both rigid belief and reckless imagination. These traits define the detectives whose one voice I have assumed. Wylie-Hoffert was the great adventure of our lives. It was where our faith raged most imperiously and where our imaginations most flourished. My role as the last surviving detective grants me the prerogatives of rank and the duty to ascribe epitaph. George Whitmore’s ordeal informed the landmark Miranda decision. It was passed into law in June of ’66. George was released on bond one month later. Janice Wylie’s mother, Isobel, died in ’68. Her sister Pamela died of pneumowww.vanityfair.com

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“Career Girl” Murders nia one year later. Max Wylie killed himself in September ’75. Pat Tolles died at 71 in 2011.

eorge’s release bond was revoked in February ’72. He returned to jail and was permanently released over a year later. He died in 2012. He was 68. “Friends, I owe more tears to this dead man than you shall see me pay.”

Jann Wenner

C O N T I N U E D F R O M P A G E 1 5 0 said he never understood the precise meaning of the picture, but it was obvious it was a bitter joke from the Beatle he had betrayed. At the time, Paul and Linda McCartney had just appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone, while Lennon’s latest album, Mind Games, was torched by Jon Landau in the magazine for having “his worst writing yet.” What Wenner didn’t know was that the Polaroid captured a pivotal moment in the history of the Beatles—the period when John and Paul managed a degree of détente after the acrimony of the breakup. It was also a portent of John Lennon’s return to New York City. For a while, neither Beatle was talking to Rolling Stone, a fact Wenner admitted to a group of students in Colorado in 1973: in the past, Wenner had gotten to Paul through Linda, but the couple kept their distance from him. “We didn’t really wanna hang with him,” said McCartney. “We’d make fun of him.” McCartney had no idea that Wenner had alienated Lennon with the book and presumed he remained Lennon’s top groupie. “I didn’t feel like he was independent,” McCartney said. “When he was talking to me, I was sort of talking to someone who would report back to John. No doubt about it.” McCartney eventually came around. After the first lineup of Wings dissolved, in 1973, he needed critical applause for his new group, Paul McCartney and Wings, and Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone was at the peak of its powers, the industry turnstile through which one passed to sell records in America. McCartney’s manager negotiated a deal for McCartney to talk to writer Paul Gambaccini in London. McCartney finally cleared the air about

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The New York State death penalty was restored in ’94. It was once again rescinded in ’05. Ricky Robles remains imprisoned. He asserted his innocence up to ’86. He admitted the murders at his second parole hearing. He’s 74 now. He still draws blasphemous breath. Memory. God’s unfathomable love. Faith and imagination. George on the witness stand. Bright-eyed behind new glasses. His awareness that he might yet prevail.

Wenner’s interview with Lennon, expressing the intense pain Lennon’s words caused him. “Oh, I hated it,” he told Gambaccini. “I sat down and really thought, I’m just nothin’. But then, well, kind of people who dug me like Linda said, ‘Now, you know that’s not true, you’re joking. He’s got a grudge, man; the guy’s trying to polish you off.’ Gradually I started to think, great, that’s not true … but at the time, I tell you, it hurt me. Whew. Deep.” McCartney said he hadn’t sent the “Palm Sunday” Polaroid, but he recognized the moment. Not long before it was taken, Yoko Ono had come to see him at his farmhouse to ask for help repairing her then failing marriage to John. “She sat at our kitchen table, and she said, ‘I’d like you to do me a favor,’ ” recalled McCartney. “ ‘I’d like you to be the gobetween between me and John. John’s out in L.A., going crazy, and I will have him back. And I want you to tell him.’ ” Lennon was in his “Lost Weekend” period, carousing with songwriter Harry Nilsson and famously getting evicted from the Troubadour for heckling the Smothers Brothers. He showed up at an Ann Peebles concert with a sanitary napkin taped to his forehead—an incident reported in Rolling Stone in February 1974: [He] didn’t leave the waitress a tip, and in response to her scowl, he said, “Do you know who I am?” “Yes,” she said. “You’re some asshole with a Kotex on your head.” … Meanwhile, Yoko was consulting an astrologer almost every day.

To keep a leash on Lennon, Ono gave her blessing for him to sleep with their personal assistant, May Pang, until he got through his period of wilding. Pang was referred to in Rolling Stone as a “friend” of Lennon’s, but she was much more: McCartney called her “the voice of reason” who helped bring about a truce between Paul and John. (In the liner notes of Lennon’s 1975 album, Rock ’n’ Roll, he would refer to her as “Mother Superior.”) When the McCartneys showed up in Los Angeles, they were greeted by Nilsson and Keith Moon, who were hanging out in Lennon’s house doing drugs. “John wasn’t up yet, so I sat in the garden,” said McCartney. “Harry Nilsson’s opposite to me on this table in the sunshine. Harry says, ‘Do

My prayers for Janice. The ardent thoughts that blinded me then that I can’t recall now. Emily. The time I saw that woman at the Plaza Hotel and thought it was you. Your fond rebuke: silly paintings don’t come to life. The three of you. You’re the first ones I’ll find on the other side. The author would like to acknowledge the great 1969 book The Victims, by Bernard Lefkowitz and Kenneth G. Gross. It was the primary research source for this piece.

you want any angel dust?’ I said, ‘I don’t know; what is it?’ He said, ‘Well, it’s an elephant tranquilizer.’ I said, ‘Is it fun?’ He looks, and thinks, and says, ‘No.’ I said, ‘O.K., I won’t do it. Thanks for the offer.’ That’s how it was!” When Lennon emerged, McCartney delivered Ono’s message. “She’s willing to have you back, if you want to go back,” he recounted. “But you’ve got to go to New York, you’ve got to get your own place, you’ve got to court her, you’ve got to send flowers. You’ve got to do it all right, and then she’ll take you back. And he did. That’s how they got back together.”

n a mild evening in December, Jann Wenner sat at his desk on East 66th Street, satisfied with his place in the universe. He could see just over the horizon of the 1980s. Ronald Reagan promised to lower his taxes; that wasn’t too bad. But sometime around midnight, his wife, Jane, in the bedroom upstairs, casually peered up and saw a breaking-news alert the TV screen. She pressed a button to call downstairs. “Jann,” came her disembodied voice through the apartment intercom, “put the TV on and see what’s happening.” He flicked on the television. John Lennon was dead. At the time of his death, Lennon had been on a new trajectory. After five years in the wilderness, he had finally been coaxed out of hiding by David Geffen, who after selling Asylum Records and trying to become a Hollywood producer had decided to start another label. When John and Yoko released Double Fantasy, it was Geffen who arranged for them to sit down with Rolling Stone. “I convinced Yoko that it was a good thing for Double Fantasy,” said Geffen. “She wanted the album to be No. 1.” This was Lennon’s fourth interview for the release of Double Fantasy, and Jann Wenner wasn’t happy that he had given Playboy an exclusive. In an unpublished portion of the interview, Lennon explained to the interviewer, Jonathan Cott, “We would have done it in Rolling Stone, only [Wenner] shit on me with Lennon Remembers and put a book out after I asked him not to, but you know—so Playboy got it.” Lennon still remembered. But he was more sanguine now: this was strictly a transaction for N OVEMB ER

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selling records, with no pretense of friendship. “We have a product to sell, just as you’ve got a Rolling Stone to sell,” he told Cott. “I know Jann is always looking for an angle, and when you listen to this, Jann, don’t be dumb, because life goes on.” Wenner assigned Annie Leibovitz to photograph Lennon, an homage to their original photo shoot, almost 10 years to the day since the 1970 interview. At the Dakota, in New York, Lennon received her with warmth. “It seems like old times,” he told her. Jann Wenner had wanted only John Lennon on the cover, but Lennon insisted Yoko be in the image or he wouldn’t do it. “We’re not selling Christ; we’re selling our own product,” he told Cott. “If they don’t want the two of us, we’re not interested.” When Leibovitz returned for a second session on December 8, 1980, Lennon virtually guaranteed that Wenner would go for it by taking his clothes off and lying down with his body wrapped like a baby around Yoko Ono. Leibovitz had brought a drawing of this pose to show the couple—based “on a relaxed position that I’d had with someone,” she said—and after she showed them a Polaroid of what they looked like, Lennon said, “You captured our relationship exactly.” After Leibovitz left the Dakota, Lennon went to the Record Plant recording studio to listen to playbacks of a new Yoko Ono single, a disco track he wanted Geffen to promote called “Walking on Thin Ice.” When John and Yoko returned home that evening, they were shadowed by a fan named Mark David Chapman, who had solicited an autograph from Lennon earlier that day, and shook hands with five-year-old Sean. Chapman was a chubby fanboy obsessed with J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and struggling with an overpowering desire to kill John Lennon. As Lennon entered the Dakota at 10:50 that Monday night, Chapman approached him from behind with a .38 pistol in his fist. Expressionless, he crouched down, pointed the gun at Lennon’s back, and snapped off five bullets. Lennon lurched around, a horror-stricken look on his face, then crumpled to the ground, blood pooling around his body.

BA RO N WOL M A N

en years, six months, and 272 issues of Rolling Stone separated Jann Wenner and John Lennon from the movie theater in San Francisco, the day Lennon wept seeing Paul McCartney sing from the roof of Apple Records. In the death of Lennon, the two irreconcilable halves of Jann Wenner met. Having drifted so far from the origins of his newspaper, he collapsed back into himself—back through the long, strange 1970s, back to the lotus flower of 1967, the nose and glasses that adorned the first issue of his young rock ’n’ roll newspaper. Shocked and grief-stricken, Wenner stayed up all night making phone calls to friends, trying to make sense of it like everyone else. He called David Geffen. He called the Rolling Stone journalist Greil Marcus. In the early hours of the

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AMBITION AT HOME Jann and Jane Wenner in San Francisco, 1967.

next morning, he had his driver take him to the west side of Central Park, where he got out and mingled with other fans singing “Give Peace a Chance.” According to Wenner, a reporter for the Daily News approached him and asked who he was. Wenner said he replied, “Just a fan.” The magazine still planned to use Leibovitz’s photo. But the next day, Ono called Rolling Stone saying she wanted to see the image before it was published. When Leibovitz arrived at the Dakota, Ono was lying in bed, alone in the dark. “I brought it into her room,” said Leibovitz. “And she said, ‘Annie, just take this picture, just do what you want with it, and go buy yourself a loft or a photo studio or something.’ And I said, ‘Thank you, but no, I’m not going to do that,’ and we just made it the cover of Rolling Stone. Life magazine wanted to make it the cover, and I wouldn’t sell it to them.” Afterward, Ono’s lawyers tried to stop the release of the photo, but Ono intervened. Rolling Stone could use it, but only in the magazine. That week, Wenner was a sought-after interview, and he gave only one, to Jane Pauley, co-host of NBC’s Today show. Wenner insisted on taping the interview in his office at Rolling Stone. He looked pasty and haggard, shirt open at the collar, eyes darting around nervously as he drank a Diet Sunkist. “The only way I can draw a parallel is when John Kennedy was shot

in the same senseless fashion,” Wenner told Pauley. “The Beatles and Jack Kennedy were intimately connected… Part of the reason the Beatles were so big is that after John Kennedy was shot, I mean, people’s hopes were destroyed and the Beatles came along and replaced John Kennedy for young people in this country and around the world.” Pauley: You knew him personally, what was he like? Wenner: He was warm. He was very witty. Very funny. He had it all, he was a lot of contradictions, but one thing he never was, he never hurt anybody. He wasn’t a mean person in any way. He may have carried on, but he was never mean. He was basically full of hope.

It was this interview, according to Wenner, that inspired Ono to reach out to him a few days after Leibovitz’s visit. It was the first time they’d spoken since 1971. “Yoko called me,” recalled Wenner, “and said she wanted to see me.” Wenner took a town car to the Dakota, where a police line still ringed the sidewalks. He took the elevator to the seventh floor and found Ono sitting alone with Sean. “We start talking it all through,” Wenner recalled. “She’s telling me the story of what happened that night, constantly repeating it, reliving it. And she was talking about her and John and what they were planning to do. There’s nothwww.vanityfair.com

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Jann Wenner ing to do except listen and be her friend.” The meeting, said Wenner, “had a huge impact on me. Huge.” During his visit, Wenner promised Ono he would take care of her from there on out. And he would do it in the pages of Rolling Stone. For the first issue of the Reagan presidency, Wenner put the image of Lennon wrapped around Ono on the cover without any text other than the logo. Every page was dedicated to Lennon, with essays and remembrances from people like Mick Jagger and Greil Marcus. In the correspondence column was a reproduction of a letter from Yoko, in all caps, saying she had shown Leibovitz’s photo to Sean the very moment she told him that his father had been killed. “I took Sean to the spot where John lay after he was shot,” she wrote. “Sean wanted to know why the person shot John if he liked John. I explained that he was probably a confused person.” “Now Daddy is part of God,” she quoted Sean as saying. “I guess when you die you become much more bigger because you’re part of everything.” The back page of Rolling Stone featured a letter from Wenner, who wrote, “I feel older now. Something of being young has been ripped out of me—something I thought was far behind me.” But Wenner’s tribute to Lennon didn’t end on the last page. Inside the seam

Kate McKinnon

C O N T I N U E D F R O M P A G E 1 1 6 common touch, the qualities possessed in such abundance by her mate and Obama, even by Trump, yet is steady and decent and true, and wants to do good—oh, how she wants to do good!—though is stymied in her attempts because regular folk plain don’t cotton to her, are looking for any excuse to go in another direction. There’s pathos in Kate’s Hillary. You laugh at her, but you feel for her, too. And the sketch that Kate and Hillary did together, Kate as Hillary, Hillary as a seen-it-all barkeep named Val, was, I thought, Hillary’s best moment of the entire election, certainly her warmest. As Val she was relaxed, loose, funny, natural—everything she wasn’t and perhaps couldn’t be on the campaign trail. Last season’s co–head writer Chris Kelly: “The real Hillary was very game. We showed

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of two million copies of the magazine, hidden in the binding where the pages were stapled together, Wenner published a private message to John Lennon reproduced from his own handwriting. His original words, written by Wenner in blue ink, were scrawled on an envelope for Jann S. Wenner Motion Pictures. I love you. I miss you. You’re with god. I’ll do what I said. “Yoko, hold on”—I’ll make sure, I promise. XXX

he message could be read only with a magnifying glass. When Ono read it, she cried. But she also had to decide if Wenner’s sentiment was genuine. They’d been down this road before. “That little writing did help,” she said. “And I think you can take it in two ways. He’s a very sharp, clever guy. He might have wanted to say that so I could notice it, or he really meant it. And I think he really meant it.” The January 22, 1981, issue of Rolling Stone was Jann Wenner’s single greatest triumph as a magazine editor and a sculptor of rock legend. It was an homage to a man but also to a time and to a generation. As a cultural marker, it was not only the official end of the Beatles, or even the possibility of the Beatles, but also the end of the first life of Rolling Stone. Leibovitz said the cover image was the photograph she would be remembered for—“the photograph of my life,” she called it. And Ono said Lennon’s

her the script, and we assumed that she, or any presidential candidate, would have notes or try to be open but still secretly have a bunch of things they didn’t want to make fun of. She read it and laughed and was like, ‘O.K.’ ” Says Kate, “Hillary has great timing.” Kate actually says very little else about Hillary, not because she has little else to say but because she gets too overwhelmed to say it. She tears up when she recalls tearing up when she viewed the presidential debates with Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider, another co–head writer from last season, in preparation for devising those weeks’ cold opens. Schneider: “Kate and Chris and I would meet at the 30 Rock offices or we’d pick one of our apartments. I watched as a writer of a satire comedy show, and so I saw everything through the lens of, Can I make fun of that? But I also watched as a woman and I was concerned. I saw some of the attitudes taken towards Hillary—the nastywoman comment. And I can understand why Kate would get emotional about that.” Though Kate’s Hillary is, obviously, not Hillary Hillary, there is a kind of fusion going on between impersonator and the human being whose skin, soul, and mind the impersonator is inhabiting. To do her job as well as she does, empathy is essential, which means she must stay open and raw where the rest of us—we nonperformers— are hard and self-protective. Psychologically it’s

legend survived in part because of that issue of Rolling Stone. “I think that thing Rolling Stone did about John was rather truthful and daring,” Ono said. “It was at the edge of whether it’s going to be bad for him or good for him. But at the same time, it was good. “There was no other magazine that did that,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons John’s image survived. The strength of his image was the fact that he had both sides.” Another side, of course, was Yoko Ono. After the memorial issue, Wenner began policing the image of John Lennon in Rolling Stone like a zealous guardian. This promise did not go unobserved. “Once John got murdered, he became the martyr, the Buddy Holly, the James Dean character,” said Paul McCartney. “A revisionism started to go on, and Yoko certainly helped it. Now John was it. He was it in the Beatles. He was the force behind the Beatles; he’d done it all. I just booked the studio. “Because of that climate,” he said, “Jann was not sort of the favorite.” The death of John Lennon was the end of the Beatles, but it was the beginning of Jann Wenner as keeper of the rock ’n’ roll myth. The Rolling Stone version of history—in biweekly issues and Rolling Stone–branded picture books, anthologies, and televised anniversary specials—was carefully shaped by Jann Wenner. He’d been the fame-maker. After Lennon’s death, he became the flame keeper.

a dangerous place to be. Kate: “I love doing impressions of politicians because the task is always to imagine the private lives of these people whose job it is to project an image of staunch, unflinching leadership and grace, and that’s just not how human beings, in their heart of hearts, work. In doing that for Hillary Clinton, who I admire so much, I started to feel very close to her, just trying to imagine her inner life.” She necessarily takes it personally. Hillary, et al.

et’s talk now about Kate’s other impressions. (An F.Y.I.: Kate’s speaking voice is soft, very. The only times I don’t have to lean in to catch it are when she’s doing an impression, at which point self-consciousness disappears because she is no longer herself and thus unthinkingly turns up the volume, and when she’s telling me something she regards as important, and to both make me laugh and to make sure I don’t fuck it up, she yells the words directly into my recorder’s ear. To me, sotto voce, “My most frequent collaborators at S.N.L. are the incredibly gifted writers,” and then to my recorder, in stereophonic sound, “CHRIS KELLY AND SARAH SCHNEIDER!”) A touchstone for Kate is Molly Shannon’s Mary Katherine Gallagher, the Catholic schoolgirl who’s rough on décor and who sniffs her armpit-dipped fingers when she’s nervous: “Mary Katherine is crashN OVEMB ER

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ing into tables and doing a little dance, and yet she’s so real at the same time. You have to love her so much because she’s a person who’s trying to connect, but is thwarted by everything about who she is. I can relate to that.” It’s the generosity of spirit Shannon brought to the character that Kate responded to, and she brings that same spirit to whomever she’s representing. Says Lorne Michaels, “Kate can embody a character and bring it to life and make it funny. But there’s also always something empathetic about her characters. And although the writing might not be kind, she is. That’s her genius. You can’t make the audience fall in love with a character you don’t like.” Kate has begun appearing in big roles in major feature films, most notably in last year’s all-female Ghostbusters reboot, which if it did nothing else served to remind us how weird people can still be about women (the outrage on social media that Columbia Pictures had the gall to remake this towering achievement of cinematic expression with cootie-ridden girls— e-e-e-e-e-u-u-u-u-w!—was as amusing as it was depressing), and this year’s bachelorette-partygone-bad comedy Rough Night. Kate shines in both, but the movies feel slightly beside the point. Maybe because what she’s doing on S.N.L. feels so essential. There’s the pure political theater of her Hillary, of course. Yet there’s also her Elizabeth Warren, her Kellyanne Conway, her Jeff Sessions. Season 42 of S.N.L. had more eyeballs fastened on it than any season since Season 19 (1993–94), and received more Emmy nominations than any season ever, including for Kate and Baldwin, both of whom would win. Election years can often mean a ratings bounce for the show, only this time that bounce went sky-high and didn’t come back to earth, even after the contest was decided. Somehow S.N.L. has managed to locate the center of a culture that’s without one, that’s increasingly fractured. Over the last 18 months or so, politics has become the national obsession, what’s pushing us together as a country even as it’s driving us apart. And to end each week with S.N.L., releasing the pent-up anger and frustration and fear and anxiety with laughter, is cathartic. This, too: the eerily symbiotic relationship that has developed between S.N.L. and the White House. S.N.L. watches the White House in order to satirize it; the White House watches the satirization and then offers notes. Trump tweeted after the October 15, 2016, episode, “Alec Baldwin portrayal stinks.” And yet Trump seems beyond influenced by it, seems haunted. Am I nuts or has Trump, since Baldwin debuted his Trump, squinted harder, pooched out his bottom lip farther? (Observes Baldwin, “He makes this face like he’s snarling and about to leap at you, like he’s in a production of Cats.”) And though purists will argue that Anthony Atamanuik’s Trump or John Di Domenico’s are the more nuanced and artful, it’s Baldwin’s that’s captured the public imagination. Scrambled the imagination, as well. NOV E M B E R

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In February, El Nacional, a newspaper in the Dominican Republic, printed a photograph of Baldwin as Trump believing it was Trump. Says Baldwin, “My thought was that if I did a good impression of Trump it would be dull. So I ran towards this idea that I’m going to do a horrific caricature. When you’re doing an impression, you can suggest the voice, or the way the guy looks, but you’ve really got to think of who he is, and get that right, and I think I did. In terms of the media, I’m Trump now. He’s not even Trump anymore—I am.” Baldwin has considered running for office in the future. I want to propose the ultimate comedic reversal of fortune: Trump, driven so crazy by Baldwin’s Trump, forfeits the presidency to escape it (other contributing factors include the Russia thing, the special-counsel thing, the wee-wee tape thing); Baldwin, having played POTUS on TV, is elected to play POTUS in life, Kate’s Hillary his V.P.; Trump, a two-time S.N.L. host, is recruited by that shrewd barnstormer Lorne Michaels to become the show’s Baldwin. We’re in a world now where such a scenario is, if not plausible, possible. For Public Consumption

ate and I start with her professional life, and we stay there for a long time, and we’re doing all right, are cooking with gas, in fact, even if we do encounter the occasional bump in the road. For instance, when I ask her about a dinner she had with Hillary at Orso in late winter (Peter Biskind, a Vanity Fair contributing editor, just happened to be at the restaurant that night: “Most of the diners stood up and there was gaping and scattered applause. And there were lots of what I assume were Secret Service men and they followed Hillary when she went downstairs to the john”), her eyes begin to skitter and jump. I immediately cast around for a less sensitive topic, though I hadn’t realized that one was sensitive. And we continue to do O.K. when I jolt the conversation onto another track, inquire about her family and early career. She grew up on Long Island, Mom a social worker, Dad an architect. Kate was, to her parents’ delight, an arty kid, and a natural cutup. Mel Brooks was a household god. “We watched The Producers once a week.” So was Christopher Guest. (Kate is, with the exception of Kristen Wiig, the biggest female star to come out of S.N.L. since Tina Fey, and the comparisons between her and her predecessor are both legion and inevitable. They are also, in my opinion, inaccurate. Fey, a former S.N.L. head writer, is brilliant, incisive, withheld, in charge; whether or not she’s technically running the show, she’s running the show; and she’s always Tina Fey, even when she’s, say, Sarah Palin. Kate, though equally brilliant, is brilliant in an entirely different way. She’s a softer, sweeter comic presence, and more anarchic, open to a manic impulse or the zigzagging energy coming off the performers around her, and she disappears into the identity she’s assum-

ing at that moment. And it’s Guest repertory player Catherine O’Hara, she of the elastic face and bugaboo stare and oddball characters who believe they’re perfectly normal, to whom Kate bears the strongest resemblance.) Kate attended Columbia University, where she was part of the Varsity Show, a satirical look at campus life, and whose alumni, incidentally, include Rodgers and Hart. Senior year she went on an audition for a sketch series on Logo and got the job, which gave her the misimpression that breaking into showbiz was easy. “I learned quickly that that was a major fluke and then didn’t get paid again for a long time.” Eventually she landed at the Upright Citizens Brigade, and from there it was on to S.N.L. Not for Public Consumption

save the personal-life questions for last, as I always do. (This, by the way, is the portion of the interview that should be held at the Parker Center or 1 Police Plaza.) I’ve devised my own set of ethics and practices for this type of situation. For example, I’ll only use evidence legally admissible in court, i.e., details or items that the subject has let slip in other interviews, or that have appeared in other reputable publications or forums, i.e., no innuendo or gossip. In the case of Kate, who doesn’t have a Facebook page, doesn’t have a Twitter or Instagram account, I scanned her IMDB entry and saw that she spent three seasons on Logo’s The Big Gay Sketch Show. And then I bopped on over to YouTube, watched her already referenced S.N.L. pas de deux with Hillary, Hillary-as-Valthe-bartender congratulating Kate-as-Hillary on supporting same-sex marriage for so long, and Kate-as-Hillary shooting Hillary-as-Val a sharp glance and saying, “I could’ve supported it sooner,” the line getting a huge laugh because, as Wikipedia will tell you, Kate is S.N.L.’s first out lesbian cast member. Also on YouTube: a clip of her as the Celesbian guest of comic Julie Goldman, discussing her first kiss, with a girl— “[We] made out for eight hours… I wore my retainer the entire time”—and her first crush, on Gillian Anderson: “[She’s] still my queen.” Kate brought girlfriend Jackie Abbott as her date to this year’s Emmys. All this information is but a Google search away. Which means her sexuality is in the public domain. Which means it’s fair game for the likes of me. (An aside: is the movie-star profile a relic from a sweeter, more innocent time? The days of gossip columnists like Hedda Hopper acting as the sole conduit between dreamed-of icon and dreaming fan are long since over. Thanks to social media, celebrities are available now in a way they never were before. Why our celebrity president gives us access to seemingly every thought he has as he has it with the stream-ofconsciousness monologue-orgy that is his Twitter feed. And the most modern of modern movie stars—as if the movie star can be modern, isn’t as much a relic as the profile of which he or she is the subject, the movie star a dinosaur comwww.vanityfair.com

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Kate McKinnon pared to the reality star, a dinosaur with a walker compared to the YouTube star—is Jennifer Lawrence, who photobombs and trolls and takes selfies and says funny dumb shit in interviews and has Greta Garbo’s mystique except turned inside out. And then there’s TMZ, founded by Harvey Levin, “a festering boil on the anus of American media,” according to Baldwin, a fa-

Peter Thiel

C O N T I N U E D F R O M P A G E 1 2 1 because he has the power to invest in your next big dream. There is a case to be made that renegades should be defended.” It was Thiel, after all, who secretly funded the invasion-of-privacy lawsuit that pro wrestler Hulk Hogan brought against Gawker Media, resulting in a $140 million verdict for Hogan (since negotiated downward) and bankrupting the gossip-and-news franchise, whose blog (Valleywag) had earlier “outed” Thiel. Regarded warily for his stealth, singlemindedness, and tenacity, he is, in a way, a Silicon Valley Steve Bannon.

till, Thiel stands out in an industry that seems to mint large lives. It is not hard to find peers—even those with divergent political beliefs—who speak of him glowingly. Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, told me, “People say we don’t have enough heroes, enough courageous people. Well, here’s one. Here’s a guy who has had an impact.” Though Schmidt had been on the Hillary Clinton bandwagon, he was quick to acknowledge that Thiel’s support for, and now access to, Donald Trump gave the tech sector a strong advocate in Washington— an important role now that some of the biggest social-media and search firms are under the microscope regarding their susceptibility to foreign manipulation, overseas collection of private users’ data, security safeguards, possible monopolistic practices, lack of regulatory oversight, and tolerance of hate speech. “He took a controversial position that no one else in the Valley did”—namely, backing Trump—“and he stuck to it,” insisted Schmidt, who conceded that had the election gone the other way he might well

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vorite target of the Web site. And what about the hackers posting nude pictures of Scarlett Johansson, Kristen Stewart, Blake Lively? Can a reader be expected to forget all this when he or she opens a cover story in Vanity Fair or any other magazine? Pretend not to notice that the star is being shot with the linguistic equivalent of a filtered lens? As a society we’ve stepped through the Looking Glass and there’s no turning back.) I clear my throat to signal a change in subject, and, as I do, I glance at Kate, see her face

tense up as if she senses where I’m going. Instead of going there, asking her to tell me her coming-out story, which she already told Julie Goldman in their interview—conducted, admittedly, in 2008, well before she was famous, when anonymity guaranteed her privacy—I say, “You don’t want to talk about your personal life?” She gives a fast, nervous shake of the head. And, since I’m no cop and Kate’s certainly no criminal, I nod back. Then I lean across the table and switch off the tape recorder.

have been occupying Thiel’s catbird seat as an unpaid but immensely powerful adviser to the president of the United States. (BuzzFeed reported that Thiel, as recently as May, had privately expressed reservations about Trump—at a time when three current administration sources told me Thiel was firmly in the president’s fold.) And yet a number of people who describe themselves as either Thiel’s friends or longtime associates would speak with me only on the condition of anonymity, citing a variety of reasons: non-disclosure agreements they had signed with one or more of Thiel’s entities, fear of retribution from Trump-administration officials, or reluctance to alienate Thiel or the PayPal Mafia. These individuals—including several in his inner circle—would only arrange a meeting or a conversation using tradecraft worthy of C.I.A. case officers. They communicated via encrypted apps (ones that do not register on a cell phone’s call log). Two of them, to check my bona fides before agreeing to sit down with me, requested screenshots of Google searches about me—explaining that if they were to run the searches themselves, and someone combed through their search histories, they might be identified as a source for this article. Some of these individuals insisted that there is a perplexing duality to the man. Said one friend and colleague who has known Thiel for nearly 20 years, “He exempts himself from the rules he applies to others. He’s a hard-core libertarian who rails against state surveillance except when he’s profiting off of it. He’s a strong believer in personal privacy but is happy to kick-start and sit on the board of Facebook, which monetizes every ounce of Americans’ data.” He described three prime movers in Thiel’s life: achieving immortality, resisting state control over his actions, and acquiring the money necessary to pull it off. Paradoxically, he added, Thiel distrusts authority: “That’s [partly] what motivated him years ago to run headlong into the intelligence field. He understood that, in a technological world, power is wielded by the intelligence community. You can only trust that community if you trust—or better yet, if you are—the person at the switch.” And as three senior White House sources confirmed, he has already been invited to be that person. According to two of those officials, Thiel has been in discussions to become the

chair of the lofty P.I.A.B.—the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board. This high-level intelligence post (previously held by Establishment figures such as Brent Scowcroft, Les Aspin, and Warren Rudman) independently monitors America’s spy agencies and was established in 1956 to counsel the president. These two sources recounted that Thiel and the administration had been in the process of firming up the details of his role and staffing; then, in August, one of them texted me to say the offer to Thiel was now in limbo. Another White House source, however, told me in September that Thiel remains the president’s choice to lead the P.I.A.B., and when asked why Thiel has not distanced himself from the administration as many business leaders have, the official replied, “Peter is not a fair-weather fan… He’s on board.” If the position were ever to come through, however, Peter Thiel, a man who is already well versed in intelligence gathering for profit, might be “spying” on the spies in the U.S. government. Said one of those White House insiders, “[The] P.I.A.B. [job] is one of the most significant [advisory] positions that any American can hold… President Trump wants a fresh set of eyes on this.” Another senior official had this to say: “What Peter has been offered”— the P.I.A.B. role—“is a hugely important position. It’s the only meaningful executive-branch oversight of the intelligence community. This P.I.A.B. will have more authority than it did under Obama… [Peter] is not going to just sit back. As a libertarian, he is interested in the oversteps the intelligence community has made in the past… Once”—or if—“he gets in there, he’s going to ensure that there isn’t inappropriate collection of [data on] U.S. persons.” (Trump, to be sure, hasn’t masked his skepticism of the intelligence community, sometimes criticizing the value of its activities and findings. He has fired the head of the F.B.I. He has pared back the President’s Daily Brief. And he has consistently downplayed the spy agencies’ conclusion that Russian agents attempted to interfere with the 2016 election to benefit Trump.) Disruption, Washington-Style

ith his résumé and Rolodex, Peter Thiel was eminently qualified to help Trump build out his latest large-scale acquisition—the United States government. N OVEMB ER

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“Of all of the issues we were looking at in preparation for assuming power, 25 to 30 percent were part of Peter’s portfolio,” Bannon explained. Thiel, according to three administration sources, has weighed in on, and suggested candidates to handle, among other things, anti-trust policy, the drug-approval process, cyber-security, and intelligence. Said one top Trump adviser, “When we have conventionally-minded people putting forward conventional approaches, Peter will come up with something radically different.” “Radical” may be soft-pedaling it. According to Bannon, “Peter’s whole mandate was to be disruptive and put forward people who could shake up the system.” Early on, a cluster of Thiel associates, including Anton, joined Team Trump—comprising a group that one senior administration official referred to as “Peter’s embeds.” Some landed at the White House, including Michael Kratsios, the former chief of staff at Thiel Capital, who was named deputy chief technology officer, and Kevin Harrington, a veteran of the Thiel Macro hedge fund, who came aboard the N.S.C. as deputy assistant to the president for strategic planning. For the F.D.A., the name of Jim O’Neill, a managing director of Thiel’s Mithril Capital Management and cofounder of the Thiel Fellowship, was floated as a candidate for commissioner. Although that idea was nixed (O’Neill lacks a medical degree and, along with Thiel, has advocated shortening the drug-approval process), sources said he may still be named to a White House position, which could make him a Trump ambassador to Silicon Valley. At the Pentagon, Justin Mikolay, chief lobbyist for Thiel’s company Palantir, was named special assistant to Secretary of Defense James Mattis. “It’s not unheard of for an outsider to be given a portfolio of jobs to fill or candidates to present,” observed an expert to whom Thiel’s team turned for help because of his years advising different administrations on new hires. “In my conversations, they made it clear that they want young, aggressive disrupters, not experienced, government-savvy people.” But this insider was baffled by how Thiel’s team was trying to fill vacancies. “They were not working off a short list. They literally had one name for each job. It was as if somebody had said to them, ‘Just give us somebody.’ ” A senior White House official close to Thiel had a different take: “Washington is afraid of Peter Thiel. He defies the rules… He has put forward candidates that have his innovative mind-set, and they’re either stuck in limbo [awaiting approval] or are losing out to people who are lobbying types or are financially connected. For a guy from Silicon Valley, he expected things to move faster. He expected that we would beat back and drain the swamp, but the swamp is winning.” In fact, Steve Bannon, a man who could hardly be characterized as an ideological milquetoast, maintained that NOV E M B E R

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UNCONVENTIONAL Thiel addresses the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, July 2016.

some of Thiel’s candidates “were perhaps too disruptive to the system,” and he recalled how during the transition he and Thiel had a standing Saturday lunch at the latter’s New York apartment, where, to hear Bannon tell it, Bannon was the moderating influence. “I’ve been accused of being the internal mastermind of disruption, but at the end of the day I still [had] to make sure we balance[d] disruption with running the country.” Even so, as Bannon conceded, “there is no doubt that the travel ban was written [and first issued in January] to disrupt and shake up the system so that people in government understood that when Donald Trump talked about ‘extreme vetting,’ he meant it… We were trying to break the administrative state. The travel ban was done to disrupt a failing system and to drain the swamp.” Sources in the administration contend that more disruption is coming. For starters, according to one senior White House adviser, there has been serious thought given to whether Amazon, Google, and Facebook are, in fact, “public utilities.” Said this senior official, “Maybe not Amazon, but certainly Facebook and Google. They’re virtually monopolistic. And ‘anti-trust’ ought to take a hard look at them… Is [their] data a public trust? Is information now a common good? You are going to see a big drumbeat on this. I’m not saying anything’s going to happen, but it’s certainly going to be looked at. That will be an airburst over Brother Zuckerberg.” And how does such talk sit with Thiel, who has long-standing interests in Facebook? Said another senior administration aide, “Peter has indicated that if he takes the P.I.A.B. position he intends to take a comprehensive look at the U.S. intelligence community’s informationtechnology architecture. He is super-concerned

about Amazon and Google”—and Facebook, less so. “He feels they have become New Age global fascists in terms of how they’re controlling the media, how they’re controlling information flows to the public, even how they’re purging people from think tanks. He’s concerned about the monopolistic tendencies of [all three] companies and how they deny economic well-being to people they disagree with.” When I asked this source how likely it is that Thiel will assume the post, he answered, “He’s heavily leaning toward it. He feels there’s a lot of good he can do and it’s worth putting up with all the bullshit and scrutiny that will accompany his appointment.” Private Eyes

hiel is invested in a number of companies that operate in the intelligence arena. But such connections may raise potential conflict-of-interest concerns should Thiel ever assume a position overseeing the activities of the U.S. intelligence community. One company is Palantir, the data-mining giant. Another is Spaceflight Industries, whose BlackSky subsidiary provides high-resolution images from a constellation of private low earth satellites. Both Palantir and Spaceflight received key financing from In-Q-Tel, which is often described as the C.I.A.’s investment arm. Thiel has a sizable stake in both entities through Founders Fund and Mithril Capital, a global technology investment firm which he launched with longtime business partner Ajay Royan in 2012 and for which they have raised $1.39 billion. According to a high-ranking intelligence analyst, Royan has described Mithril as “an intelligence agency meets a think tank meets a highly disciplined underwriting company.” Born in India and raised in the United www.vanityfair.com

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Peter Thiel Arab Emirates and Canada before coming to the U.S. in his teens, Royan graduated from Yale at age 20. He got his start with Thiel in 2003 at Clarium Capital, where he served as managing director and senior investor. He has been involved in various endeavors with Thiel ever since. On the face of it, Palantir seems like another Thiel success story. The 13-year-old company has a roster of intelligence and lawenforcement clients. (A year ago, for example, the firm won a $222 million contract from the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command.) Palantir’s secret sauce is collating and analyzing vast and unwieldy streams of data to pinpoint patterns and anomalies, a process that has been effective in battling everything from terrorism to Medicare fraud. The company is positioned for a role in the Trump administration’s immigration-related efforts too: under contracts with the Department of Homeland Security, approved on President Obama’s watch and together worth more than $76 million, according to the Intercept, Palantir enables Immigration and Customs Enforcement to tap into biometric and geo-spatial data and records held by government agencies, to help identify and deport illegal aliens. (The New York Times has also reported that Thiel plans to invest in a start-up led by Oculus VR cofounder Palmer Luckey that seeks to employ high-tech sensors as part of a “virtual border wall” designed to detect illegal crossings along the Mexican border.) Palantir’s co-founder and C.E.O., Alex Karp, in fact, was among the elite group invited to Trump’s tech summit—and to a similar meeting at the White House in June, which I attended as a member of the press pool. But despite Karp’s seat at the table, things might be bumpy back at the office in Palo Alto. Key clients have cut ties; some, like the N.Y.P.D., contentiously. Law-enforcement and intelligence agencies have gotten much better at doing what Palantir does. And concerns have been aired about a private company having access to so much sensitive information. (Palantir says it does not retain client data.) “Palantir operates behind the veil,” in the opinion of Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst for the A.C.L.U. “To what extent are they doing the government’s bidding? To what extent are they doing their own?” With the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency beset by leaks and hackers, he worries that private companies like Palantir could be “used as a way to launder activities for which the government wants to avoid public scrutiny. At the end of the day, Palantir is a for-profit company, and there’s an opportunity for abuse.” Stanley has noted that deploying Palantir’s software could be “anything between a good, efficient use of government resources and a true totalitarian 172

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nightmare, monitoring the activities of innocent Americans on a mass scale.” A company spokesperson responded to this assertion directly: “We recognize that there are real risks of abuse of most information-technology platforms, including Palantir’s.” The company carefully evaluates the assignments it will accept, she said, and “invest[s] heavily in making privacy and civilliberties-enhancing capabilities core features of our software architectures.” Palantir, though, was caught red-handed in 2011, seeming to conspire with two other defense contractors to offer their services in waging a dubious cyber-and-disinformation campaign to discredit Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks and pressure American journalist Glenn Greenwald. The scheme was exposed when a PowerPoint presentation outlining its proposed tactics—and prominently displaying the Palantir logo—came to light (ironically, through a cyber-attack on the proposal’s main organizer). The plan boasted that Palantir’s clients could “leverage the same all-source intelligence platform used throughout the US national security and law enforcement communities.” When I asked Greenwald about the incident, he said, “Palantir literally took part in planning how they could destroy my journalism career by forcing me to make some [James] Bond–like choice between ongoing advocacy of WikiLeaks or having my career destroyed… Imagine if the F.B.I. or C.I.A. had been caught doing this. It would have been a huge scandal. But because it fell into this gray zone of private companies performing intelligence functions—where there isn’t the kind of oversight or accountability reserved for government agencies—it was ignored.” When the slide presentation surfaced, Palantir C.E.O. Alex Karp appeared genuinely mortified and quickly apologized. “Palantir Technologies does not build software that is designed to … engage in socalled ‘cyber attacks’ or take other offensive measures,” Karp said in a statement. “On behalf of the entire company, I want to publicly apologize to progressive organizations in general, and Mr. Greenwald in particular, for any involvement that we may have had in these matters.” After the controversy, the company set up an advisory panel to help enforce its “core commitment” to “protecting privacy and civil liberties.” Even so, Greenwald remains suspicious of Peter Thiel’s motives. “As someone who was literally targeted by his company for exercising my civil liberties, I find it hard to think of a less trustworthy person.” Greenwald’s reporting on Edward Snowden—which helped The Guardian win a 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service—remains politically problematic to some, but Greenwald’s take on Palantir is shared even by people I spoke to who regard Snowden as a traitor.

ike others I canvassed on the subject, one well-placed American spook said of Palantir, “People in the intelligence community resent the hell out of them because they don’t adhere to the same standards of conduct”—they are not reined in by government oversight. “It’s a big problem.” This source brought up a troubling question: what stops Palantir—or those holding its purse strings— from training its sights on individual Americans, whether as part of an outsourced intelligence program or simply to boost its bottom line, by vacuuming up data from Facebook (and its other services, such as WhatsApp), Twitter, Internet providers (which log users’ Web histories), insurance and credit-scoring companies, health and location-based apps, or even information from those long-sacrosanct voter rolls, which the Trump administration has requested that the states hand over to the feds? (“Palantir is not in the data-collection or surveillance business,” counters the company’s spokesperson. “We support customers in integration and use of data assets to which they have legitimate and lawful access.”) Above and beyond Palantir, concerns have been raised about how data analysis could have factored into Team Trump’s 2016 victory. Two tech C.E.O.’s insisted that Thiel’s mastery of the dark arts of data, paired with his wealth and ideology, could explain the president’s deep respect for a man who is in many ways his polar opposite (cerebral, introverted, press-averse). “The person who understands Facebook better than anyone [besides Mark Zuckerberg] is Peter,” said one. “He’s been on the board the entire time.” (Trump, admittedly, had help from the data firm Cambridge Analytica, on whose board Steve Bannon has sat. The company is bankrolled by Trump patron Robert Mercer, the hedge-fund mogul, and has been credited with identifying potential Trump voters in several swing states so the campaign’s social-media team could push pro-Trump or anti–Hillary Clinton stories to their newsfeeds.) Palantir, for its part, insisted the company played no role in the Trump campaign’s datamining efforts. A Palantir representative told me that Karp, in fact, had openly supported Hillary Clinton. When I asked Bannon about whether Thiel had some part in the data operation leading up to the election, he said, “When I joined the campaign, we were 16 points down and 85 days out. So I wasn’t working closely with Peter at that point.” He paused for a moment and then added, “Jared was interfacing with him pretty regularly.” On data?, I asked. “Data and other things. Ask Jared.” A source close to Kushner, however, denied that Thiel “worked with Jared on the campaign’s data operation.” The role that data played in Trump’s victory appears to be of particular interest to legislators and prosecutors delving into the campaign’s interactions with Russian associates. As has been widely reported, sepaN OVEMB ER

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rate probes, in the words of the McClatchy news service, have been “examining whether the Trump campaign’s digital operation—overseen by Jared Kushner—helped guide Russia’s sophisticated voter targeting and fake news attacks on Hillary Clinton in 2016.” The Peter Principle

hiel has declined repeated requests to participate in this article or to address questions about Palantir or his role in the Trump administration. But Bannon—in his

Jared Kushner

White House office and in other conversations—spoke in detail about Mr. Thiel’s Washington sojourn. At one point I inquired about murmurs I’d heard regarding a possible move by the Trump administration to discard one of President Obama’s orders, known as Presidential Policy Directive 28 (P.P.D.-28). Bannon grabbed his BlackBerry (yes, he’s a holdout) and looked up the specifics of the edict, which was intended to help safeguard civil liberties without actually rolling back the surveillance capabilities of the country’s intelligence

agencies. “Oh yes,” he said, smiling, “Peter is all over this. This is one of his babies.” And then, as if to reinforce the point, he continued, “Peter has a working group on this.” In sum, said a senior White House official, “Peter is going after the Deep State.” Peter Thiel, the contrarian, prognosticator, and strategic thinker, plays to win. But whatever his endgame is, his knack for forecasting—and disruption—has already proved to be one of the powerful, unseen forces shaping how Donald Trump governs America.

about real estate,’ ” he said in The Kingdom of New York. “ ‘I’ve been exposed to it all my life.’ Truth is, I didn’t know anything.” He did this in the way of a hobby, as another kid might work on the Lampoon, if that kid was dealing in millions. When Jared graduated, in 2003, he went on to get a joint business/law degree at N.Y.U.—Charlie had pledged $3 million to the school. His future seemed certain. But, as Kushner’s great-grandparents would’ve said, kicking it in the shtetl, Der mentsh trakht un Got lakht. Man plans, God laughs.

consider your entire life in such a place, take a nap, or do something so wrong it changes not just your future but that of everyone you love. (8)

Kushner family friend told New York’s Sherman: “[Charlie] loved being the Don Corleone of the community. He loved that when he walks into a synagogue the rabbis run over to him. Charlie saw himself as the Jewish Kennedy.” (9)

colleges, his father had pledged $2.5 million to Harvard, to be paid in annual installments of $250,000,” Golden writes. “There was no way anybody in the administrative office of the school thought he would on the merits get into Harvard,” a former official at the Frisch School told Golden. “His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it. We thought for sure, there was no way this was going to happen. Then, lo and behold, Jared was accepted. It was a little bit disappointing because there were at the time other kids we thought should really get in on the merits, and they did not.” In this way, Kushner set up his son, put him on the inside lane, credentialed and connected. Charlie was telling the world something about himself—connections, clout. Any idiot can get a genius into Harvard. It takes a macher to get a middling white kid admitted. Jared entered Harvard in 1999. Classmates remember him as bland—one of those freshmen who turn up in a fancy button-down shirt and jeans, with a side part, carrying Crain’s New York Business. Some probably took his earnestness as a put-on, an ironic pose, but soon learned he was in fact what he seemed: a deadly serious scion, prince of a kingdom that would soon be in flames. According to Lizzie Widdicombe of The New Yorker, Jared called his father every day—that kind of kid— drove an expensive car, talked markets. Friday nights at Chabad or Hillel. Shomer Shabbos. He dabbled in real estate, getting money from his father and his father’s friends to buy property in Somerville, Massachusetts. “I figured, ‘Well, I know everything there is to know

(6)

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ared Kushner is six feet three and thin— rangy if you like him, reedy if you don’t. He has dark eyes and brown hair, a broad smile, and a facial expression, captured in newspapers, that goes from surprised to amused to flat. Something about him remains opaque, unknowable. Something held in reserve. He’s a beautiful new house made to look old, a beautiful new house with fogged windows. You lean close and stare inside and still see nothing. The rooms may be filled with antique furniture. Or maybe it’s Ikea. Or maybe the house is empty. We have facts and figures—36 years old, multimillionaire—yet he remains a mystery. What’s he really want? What’s he really like? He’s either canny and shrewd, dumb and lucky, or dumb and unlucky. He’s either in the engine room or just along for the ride. Trump has put him in charge of everything—Middle East peace, opioid crisis—yet he seemingly knows nothing. He was in the meeting but only for a few minutes. He received the e-mail but did not read the chain. (7)

he Red Bull Inn sat on a nondescript stretch of Route 22 in Bridgewater, New Jersey. It was a motor court, with a bull painted on the side. Forty-five miles from the Holland Tunnel this way, 120 miles from Atlantic City that. Walking distance from a Houlihan’s. It was the sort of place where you get a room with two queens, though you only need one, shut the drapes, crank the A/C to max, and lie in the dark at midday, staring at the ceiling, listening to the traffic. You can re-

harlie was still angry when he got back from the Fontainebleau—at his brother, sister, brother-in-law, the world. He had everything yet was embittered, embattled. The closer you get to what you want, the farther away it seems. That’s the rub. He was now being sued by his brother, Murray, accused of mismanagement. In 2002, he was also sued by a former Kushner Companies accountant named Bob Yontef, who had made allegations about all those political contributions—Yontef said they had been made with company money. It was a second Yontef lawsuit, filed in federal court in 2003, that got the attention of New Jersey U.S. attorney Chris Christie, a Republican with ambitions of his own. Christie opened an investigation into Yontef’s claims, which meant the F.B.I. poking around. Charlie was convinced his sister Esther and brother-in-law Billy were cooperating. Charlie wanted revenge—wanted to make his sister feel as bad as he did. He enlisted the help of a private detective, whom you could hire in the way that, in Chinatown, the redhead hired Jake Gittes to skunk the works. The detective was named Tommy. Though at first reluctant, he eventually agreed to help. Tommy reserved adjoining rooms at the Red Bull Inn, hid a video camera in an alarm clock—aimed at the bed—then handed the keys to a girl Charlie had hired, a prostitute who approached Esther’s husband, Billy, at the Time to Eat Diner. She said her car had broken down. Billy gave her a ride back to the motel. She asked him inside. He refused but took her number. They met the next day. Tommy handed Charlie the videotape soon after. Charlie waited a few months www.vanityfair.com

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Jared Kushner before passing it on to his sister. She then did something Charlie did not count on—called the feds. The private detective and prostitute ended up in the U.S. attorney’s office, spilling. Now, instead of just a case of political malfeasance, you had a scandal made for the New York tabloids. Charlie Kushner pleaded guilty to 18 felony counts—tax fraud, election violations, witness tampering. Chris Christie described Kushner’s crimes as crimes of “greed, power, and excess.” In a letter to his sister—written with “shattered heart and tears in my eyes”—Charlie confessed. “What I did as an act of revenge was wrong in every way,” he wrote. “I only ask that you forgive me for resorting to such despicable behavior, which is disgraceful. I was wrong and I committed a terrible sin. How did I let hatred invade my heart and guide my actions?” Charlie was sentenced to two years in a federal penitentiary. He lost his reputation, status, freedom—everything. When the story hit the papers, students at the Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy—named for the patriarch— covered the family name on their uniforms with black tape. ( 10 )

he Montgomery Federal Prison Camp, in Alabama, is minimum-security, the sort of place people call Club Fed. It sprawls like a college campus and holds just under 900 inmates. Former Enron C.E.O. Jeffrey Skilling served time there, as did Jesse Jackson Jr. and Watergate conspirators Chuck Colson and John Mitchell. Jared visited his father every week. In the great room, families and children around, men in prison garb. What did they talk about? In The Godfather, after turning the business over to his son, Don Corleone says, “So, Barzini will move against you first. He’ll set up a meeting with someone you absolutely trust, guaranteeing your safety. And at that meeting you’ll be assassinated.” In the book of Kings, King David tells his son Solomon, “I go the way of all the earth; be thou strong, therefore, and show thyself a man.” Then, “Thou knowest also what Joab the son of Zeruiah did to me, and what he did to the two captains of the hosts of Israel… Do therefore according to thy wisdom, and let not his hoar head go down to the grave in peace.” Charlie spent around 18 months in prison, then was transferred to a halfway house in Newark. Jews are unsure of the form and intentions of God. Maybe there is an afterlife, maybe not. Maybe there is hope, maybe not. Judgment is reserved for the Almighty. “I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious,” God tells Moses in Exodus. “And will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.” The master plan and purpose remain hidden—to everyone but

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Charlie. “I believe that God and my parents in heaven forgive me for what I did, which was wrong,” he told The Real Deal, a real-estate trade publication. “I don’t believe God and my parents will ever forgive my brother and sister for instigating a criminal investigation and being cheerleaders for the government and putting their brother in jail because of jealousy, hatred and spite.” In short, Charlie goes to heaven; the rest go to hell. ( 11 )

he Kushner Companies, powerful as it became, remained provincial. It grew and lived in New Jersey, among the sprawl, the subdivisions, factories, and swamps. Forced to take command of that company, Jared, at age 24, was like a kid who has been handed the keys to his father’s Porsche. What will a young man do in such a situation? Drive to the city. ( 12 )

he New York Observer was a kind of magic kingdom. Founded by Arthur Carter in 1987, it became a tribune for a rarefied segment of Manhattan, with its spotlight on the bigwigs of media and publishing, real estate, advertising. It was a font, a source of sensibility and talent, small but mighty—never really read by more than 50,000, say, but those 50,000 deciding whom you would love and whom you would mock. “The Observer couldn’t have been spawned a minute earlier than it was,” Observer editor Peter Kaplan wrote in The Kingdom of New York. “The rise of the money culture created a lovely narcissism, which made the 1990s the screwball decade it became.” Graydon Carter, no relation to Arthur, served as its editor in chief, followed by Susan Morrison, then Kaplan. I worked there for about a year. It got me going. Not just the experience but how it trained you to look at the city. It was about being wised-up, smart—knowing the guy but also the guy behind the guy and the guy behind that guy. It fed on just the sort of scandals that engulfed the Kushners. Because a story like that has everything. It’s unclear if Jared Kushner ever really read the Observer before he bought it. He first noticed the paper while waiting for the Boston shuttle at La Guardia, his attention caught not by the articles or reviews but by a list: New York’s power Seders. He later told Gabriel Sherman he considered reading the paper— something an owner probably should do—to be unpleasant homework, a chore. “The articles were way too long,” Kushner told Gurley. “It wasn’t visually stimulating, and I thought that people today are more responsive to shorter, easier pieces like they get on the Internet. When you want to do something long, deliberately do that, but for the most part, stay within the mold and give the reader what they

are looking for with minimum effort. Reading shouldn’t be hard.” What probably made the Observer attractive as an investment was the price. Ten million dollars! For a newspaper in New York! What a cheap way to move into the city, change the meaning of Kushner from private dick and Jersey motel to pink broadsheet. Arthur Carter, who was losing about $2 million a year on the paper, told Kushner it wasn’t really for sale. After all, who was Jared Kushner? A 25-year-old N.Y.U. grad student, an intern at private-equity firm Square Mile Capital, a child. Jared persisted; Carter relented. Jared made his pitch in Carter’s apartment, explained how he intended not merely to keep the Observer going but to make it profitable. “I’d brought Clive Cummis, one of my father’s lawyers, who is well respected and wears a bow tie and has gray hair,” Kushner says in The Kingdom of New York. “I figured he’d give me some sense of credibility with Arthur. We sat down, and I put down on the table a check with the full purchase price and a signed contract, and I said, ‘Listen, I’m ready to go.’ ” Owning the Observer made Jared interesting, powerful, a figure of fascination—I don’t know what it is, but something about you has changed. He was written up in society and gossip columns, discussed in a giggly tone as if he were a Kennedy or a member of a boy band, as if he had that kind of hair that covers one eye. In a single move—no one is sure if he planned it this way—Kushner had gotten into the big action. He found himself in a new crowd, at a new kind of party. Men’s Vogue. Vanity Fair. He stood in back, raising a glass, greeting men and women who dominated the dream life of the city. Bloomberg, Giuliani, Trump. Rupert Murdoch took the young publisher under his wing, becoming a kind of adviser. In this way, Jared Kushner swam into a previously unreachable stratum, a strange sea filled with exotic creatures, moguls, magnates, models. Not long after the purchase, he started dating Ivanka. They met at a business lunch. It became serious—because it made sense. Young, good-looking people, offspring of madly driven fathers, inheritors of gaudy real-estate traditions. It was an old story. A debased nobleman courting the daughter of a wealthy factory owner—each gives, each gets. He brings money, hustle. She brings beauty and the famous name, nothing in old America but aristocratic in the age of reality TV. Jared met the patriarch, got the look-over. Imagine it. Kushner and Trump in the morning of a great partnership, Table 1 at Trump Grill, regarding each other like rat and terrier in one of the pits of the old Five Points. Religion was the only obstacle. In earlier times, it would’ve been the Protestants who could not countenance the Jew. (And vice versa.) Now it was mainly the Jews—not just Jared but his parents—who resisted the interN OVEMB ER

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marriage, the shattering of tradition. At some point—monumental days for America; your father and mother almost split before you were born—Jared and Ivanka took a break. According to The New Yorker, Wendi Deng, then Rupert Murdoch’s wife, deputized herself to put the train back on the rails. (Some people just love love.) She called Jared. “You’re working so hard. Come with Rupert and me on the boat for the weekend.” When Jared arrived, Ivanka was already there. Jared gave Ivanka the ring soon after—a 5.22-carat, cushion-cut diamond set by Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry. Ivanka, who agreed to convert, studied Torah with Haskel Lookstein, then leader of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, on the Upper East Side, capo di tutti capi of Modern Orthodox New York rabbis. She sat “before a three-judge religious panel known as a beth din, and [took] a trip to a mikvah, the ritual bath,” The New Yorker reported. She went down as Ivanka, goyish princess, daughter of Trump Tower and the Trump National Golf Club, duchess of Palm Beach and Mar-a-Lago, mistress of openings and golf courses, but came up as Yael—Ivanka’s Hebrew name; it means ibex, a type of mountain goat—future mother of the president’s three Jewish grandchildren. The wedding was held in Bedminster, less than 10 miles from the Red Bull Inn. ( 13 )

A L DR AGO

id Jared Kushner ruin the Observer? Did he run it into the ground? Did he extract the sweet elixir, a bee sucking nectar, leaving the flower itself to wither? To be fair, it’s not been a great time for print. Retrenchment, collapse. The Observer was losing millions when Kushner bought it—it seems unfair to expect him to succeed where so many media veterans have failed. And yet. His tenure started on a sanguine note. Peter Kaplan looked at Kushner the way a lot of people later looked at Trump—as an empty vessel, something he could re-purpose for good. “His 25-ness is a huge asset,” Kaplan told The New York Times when the sale was announced. “He is not weighed down by the debris of conventional wisdom.” That moment did not last—it was all front anyway. In addition to the nice things said in public, Kaplan shared other sentiments with colleagues. This was done in a melancholy way, in the nature of “I have seen what’s coming, and don’t like it.” In other words, not only did Kushner have money, he had ideas—proclivities, tastes. Less than a year after he took over, he began agitating. He did not seem to like the paper, as if he had not known what he was buying. He was like a man who does not like baseball realizing he owns a baseball team. What’s he gonna do? The New York Observer was a broadsheet— that’s part of what made it unusual. Broad-

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PHONING IT IN Donald Trump and Jared Kushner in the Oval Office in January.

sheet means New York Times, Wall Street Journal. These tend to be stately and serious, just the opposite of tabloid, which is blood and gossip, New York Post. The Observer was a hybrid—tabloid heart, broadsheet brain. A funny man in a serious mood, a serious man with a sense of humor. A goofball in a tux is dangerous. Kushner either did not get this or did not care. Millennials have a thing about broadsheets. They’ve grown up reading on phones, that smooth path of entry. They can’t stand unwieldiness—following a piece from front page to jump, and all that folding, and the ink stains your fingers. In 2007, Kushner redesigned the Observer, took it tabloid. The first issue hit the streets in February. There are pictures of Kushner handing out copies outside Grand Central— he wears an overcoat, is red-cheeked and smiling, but looks cold. Kaplan tried to put the best face on it, but, for a lot of us, the moment the paper went tabloid, The New York Observer ceased to exist. Things got worse. The paper stopped reviewing books, then quit high culture altogether. Because … boring! In-depth articles gave way to pithy pieces; pithy pieces gave way to lists—“If You Want to Radically Change Your Life, You Need to Take This First Step”— which gave way to listicles, graphics. We watched that cool, gimlet-eyed paper turn into Internet, bubbles melting into bubbles. Though Kushner has come to mean Trump, who is the oldest person the world has ever known, he is in fact a pure product of this moment, as modern as we get. He has climbed out of the World Wide Web, created by the medium that went on to remake the culture. Long stories became short because who can

stare at one object for that length of time? You have to check Twitter and Instagram and e-mail and texts, and while checking all that you lose your place and end up reading the same sentence three times, and what’s this story about anyway? The Observer, like a lot of papers, remade itself from stately old town into Potemkin village. The buildings look colorful and grand, but as soon as you step through the door, you’re back outside. There is no interior to any of them, no back. Peter Kaplan resigned in 2009, plunging the staff into blue gloom. “Kaplan is a classy guy, but he’s old-school,” Kushner told staff, as reported in New York magazine. “If we were doing our jobs right, Gawker wouldn’t have a reason to exist.” After that, Kushner was like Steinbrenner in the 1980s, running through editor after editor: Tom McGeveran, Kyle Pope, Elizabeth Spiers, Ken Kurson. “When I worked for him, I didn’t think he had a realistic view of his own capabilities,” Spiers wrote in The Washington Post, “since, like his father-in-law, he seemed to view his wealth and its concomitant accoutrements as rewards for his personal success in business, and not something he would have had in any case. To me, he appeared to view his position and net worth as the products of an essentially meritocratic process.” In March 2013, Observer staff and alumni gathered in the Pool Room of the Four Seasons restaurant to celebrate the paper’s 25th anniversary. A Russian novelist would open with the arrival of each guest. Bloomberg with his fleet of town cars. Ivanka in a plain black dress. Donald in a dark suit with a placid blue tie—you read his tie as you read a mood ring. Blue is good. Jamie Tisch and Wendi Deng www.vanityfair.com

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Jared Kushner Murdoch. Katie Couric. Cory Booker. Harvey Weinstein. Spike Lee in a green cap and big coat with shiny sleeves. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who, standing at the carving board, says, “Just some meatballs.” (Vogue covered the party in great detail on its Web site.) Peter Kaplan looked skinny, diminished. He’d come to celebrate the paper—his life’s work— but was not well. He would die of cancer the following November at age 59. Mayor Bloomberg stood to speak. Taking the mic, he smiled and said, “When I first heard about this 25th-birthday party I thought, Wow, Jared, you’re growing up so fast! … I can’t wait to see what your father-inlaw is going to tweet about tonight.” There was birthday cake and sparklers. When you read the words Jared said to the crowd, they do not seem terrible, but Observer hands were offended, hurt. Kushner did not give proper credit to Kaplan—that was the general sentiment. He spoke of the paper as if it had been small and struggling before he—Kushner—saved it, whereas in fact, these same people will tell you, the paper began to spiral soon after Jared took over. The Observer stopped publishing a print edition in November 2016. It continues on as a Web site, deadheading down a ghost road. At this writing, the home page carries the following stories: “Five Proven Ways to Make a Living Traveling the World”; “When the Sun Goes Dark: Five Questions Answered About the Solar Eclipse”; “True Love Is Dead as Chris Pratt and Anna Faris Announce Separation.” ( 14 )

he 41-story office tower on Fifth Avenue between 52nd and 53rd Streets in Manhattan was built in 1957. Because the address is 666 Fifth, the penthouse restaurant was named Top of the Sixes. Sophistication spiked with menace. In Revelation, 666 is identified as the Number of the Beast. (“Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.”) The Kushner Companies purchased the building in January 2007, paying $1.8 billion, a record in Manhattan. The Kushners put up $500 million and borrowed the rest from banks and partner Vornado Realty Trust, a publicly traded company run by Steve Roth. This meant a $1.2 billion mortgage—a super jumbo—with interest-only payments for the first several years. It was considered a vast overpayment, one of the most puzzling deals ever made in New York, even before the market crashed. When it did, the rents at 666, meant to cover interest payments and building costs, plummeted or else vanished. To this day, the tower is 30 percent vacant.

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Just like that, 666 was underwater, the asset worth far less than the loan. The Kushner company lost perhaps 10 million a year on the building—it’s not animate, yet it bleeds. Kushner sold pieces of the tower to cover the losses—this bit to the Carlyle Group, that bit to Vornado. “But the bleeding continued,” Observer alum Charles Bagli wrote in the Times. “[In 2009], with the tower’s reserve funds nearly exhausted and the owner losing as much as $30 million, the mortgage holder appointed a ‘special servicer’ to oversee 666 Fifth Avenue. Such a company manages a property loan when the borrower is in danger of falling into default.” The company, under the leadership of Jared’s father and sister Nicole—Jared sold his stake to a family trust when he went to work in Washington—is in desperate need of a new investor, a fat cat who will refinance and infuse capital. The big play is a teardown: raise billions, then replace the existing structure with a 1,400-foot tower dreamed up by the late architect Zaha Hadid: gleaming glass, condos, mall. For a time, it seemed the Kushner company would enlist Chinese financial conglomerate Anbang in the project, but Anbang, with its tangled network of shell companies, is closely tied to Beijing’s elite. That plus Trump drew tremendous scrutiny. The deal fell apart last March, leaving the Kushners to scramble for new partners. The mortgage comes due on 666 in less than two years. If the Kushners don’t figure out something, they could lose their investment. Simply put, this Spruce Goose of a deal must be considered among the worst in the history of Manhattan real estate. Think about it: before entering the White House, Jared had made just two significant business plays—both less than stellar. He bought the Observer a moment before the newspaper industry collapsed. He bought 666 Fifth a moment before the real-estate bubble burst. Was this just a case of a neophyte reaching for a shiny object, or was there something else in play? Maybe Charlie Kushner’s experience taught Jared there is something more important than balance sheets. Charlie had all the money in the world and still went to prison. By acquiring 666, Jared gave up capital but acquired status, a place in the city. From New Jersey to 666 Fifth Avenue. No Manhattan position, no Ivanka. No Ivanka, no Air Force One. ( 15 )

called several current and former Observer employees and asked them to be interviewed for this story. Just about all agreed to talk, but none would talk on the record. A couple of people insisted that our communication move to encoded app. I asked a friend why everyone seemed so spooked. “People are freaked about Trump,” he said. “Trump is all about loyalty and is vindictive; Jared is his de facto favorite

son; the Kushners are also all about loyalty … so people are also freaked about Jared. They project a lot onto him. He’s like the heir apparent in a Mob family that happens to run the whole country. So there’s the big question: Is he Sonny or is he Michael?” Here’s what I asked: What about Fredo? ( 16 )

here was a sign on the Henry Hudson Parkway, astride a row of Trump towers. It was meant to thank Donald for his donation, paid to maintain this stretch of road, but someone had tinkered with the letters. Instead of thanking Donald Trump it thanked Donald Rump. ( 17 )

ared Kushner showed no particular interest in working for the campaign, nor was he closer to his father-in-law than an average young husband. He’d been a lifelong Democrat and would’ve supported Hillary in normal circumstances. This changed on November 9, 2015, a Monday, when Donald took Jared to a political event in Springfield, Illinois. You remember those rallies: the angry crowds, the private plane, TRUMP in huge letters on the side. “The candidate entered to the music of Twisted Sister: ‘We’re not going to take it,’ ” Time reported. Jared going to that rally is a fun-house version of Siddhartha Gautama, the cosseted prince who would become Buddha, leaving the palace for the first time. He’d never seen an old, poor, or sick person before. It was like that with Jared. He was overwhelmed by this trip into the hinterland—by the passion of the crowd, anger and need, the connection with Trump. “People really saw hope in his message,” Kushner said in a 2016 Forbes interview. “They wanted the things that wouldn’t have been obvious to a lot of people I would meet in the New York media world, the Upper East Side, or at Robin Hood [Foundation] dinners.” As Trump’s jet winged east, the enlightened prince buzzed with excitement. He’d gone out comatose but come back awake. He believed in his father-in-law now, believed he could and should win. He believed he’d seen something hardly ever seen by people in the urban centers. While you’d been at a cocktail party, he’d been exploring the river bottom. “As Kushner has told it, the young scion glimpsed a world outside his own Upper East Side bubble, a country roiled by grievance and frustration, looking for the champion Trump was eager to become,” Time explained. ( 18 )

ared ran the Trump campaign’s Internet operation. Some say that his work was crucial to victory—the boy-genius thesis. Others say Kushner was essentially ballast. “We’re talking about a guy who isn’t particularly bright or hard-working, doesn’t actually know N OVEMB ER

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anything,” Harleen Kahlon, the digital maven who worked for Kushner at the Observer, wrote on Facebook. She said he “has bought his way into everything ever (with money he got from his criminal father)” and that he is “deeply insecure and obsessed with fame (you don’t buy the N.Y.O., marry Ivanka Trump, or constantly talk about the phone calls you get from celebrities if it’s in your nature to ‘shun the spotlight’).” Kushner, she concluded, is “basically a shithead.” ( 19 )

rump’s language and that of his followers was now and then tainted by antiSemitism—that’s what some believed. All the talk of evil bankers and urban elites, the tweet that pictured a pile of money beneath a Jewish star. People protested because people were afraid. Kushner’s participation was especially galling. The hovering presence of this Orthodox Jew seemed to stamp this unholy operation “Kosher.” On July 5, 2016, Kushner was called out in his own newspaper—“An Open Letter to Jared Kushner, from One of Your Jewish Employees”—by a writer named Dana Schwartz. “You went to Harvard, and hold two graduate degrees,” she wrote. “Please do not condescend to me and pretend you don’t understand the imagery of a six-sided star when juxtaposed with money and accusations of financial dishonesty. I’m asking you, not as a ‘gotcha’ journalist or as a liberal but as a human being: how do you allow this? Because, Mr. Kushner, you are allowing this. Your father-in-law’s repeated accidental winks to the white supremacist community is perhaps a savvy political strategy if the neo-Nazis are considered a sizable voting block—I confess, I haven’t done my research on that front. But when you stand silent and smiling in the background, his Jewish son-in-law, you’re giving his most hateful supporters tacit approval.” “My father-in-law is not an anti-Semite,” Kushner responded the next day in the Observer. “It’s that simple, really. Donald Trump is not anti-Semitic and he’s not a racist. Despite the best efforts of his political opponents and a large swath of the media to hold Donald Trump accountable for the utterances of even the most fringe of his supporters—a standard to which no other candidate is ever

held—the worst that his detractors can fairly say about him is that he has been careless in retweeting imagery that can be interpreted as offensive… This is not idle philosophy to me. I am the grandson of Holocaust survivors. On December 7, 1941—Pearl Harbor Day—the Nazis surrounded the ghetto of Novogroduk, and sorted the residents into two lines: those selected to die were put on the right; those who would live were put on the left. My grandmother’s sister, Esther, raced into a building to hide. A boy who had seen her running dragged her out and she was one of about 5100 Jews to be killed during this first slaughter of the Jews in Novogroduk… It doesn’t take a ton of courage to join a mob. It’s actually the easiest thing to do. What’s a little harder is to weigh carefully a person’s actions over the course of a long and exceptionally distinguished career. The best lesson I have learned from watching this election from the front row is that we are all better off when we challenge what we believe to be truths and seek the people who disagree with us to try and understand their point of view.” ( 20 )

eter Beinart, former editor of The New Republic and author of The Crisis of Zionism, went after Kushner in the spirit of the Passover Seder. “Slavery … was meant to ensure that Jews would remember powerlessness once they gained power,” Beinart wrote in The Forward, perhaps the most prominent Jewish publication in the country. “Jared Kushner is what happens when that memory fails.” He suggested that Kushner’s alma mater the Frisch School “conduct the kind of after-action report that the military conducts when its operations go awry. Every synagogue where Kushner prayed regularly should ask itself whether it bears some of the blame for having failed to instill in him the obligations of Jewish memory. Even if it is too late to influence Kushner, Modern Orthodox leaders still can work to ensure that they do not produce more like him in the years to come.” ( 21 )

ared Kushner moved into the White House shortly after the inauguration, landing one of the best staff offices in the West Wing. Previously occupied by Obama advis-

ers David Axelrod and David Plouffe, it’s just feet from the Oval Office. Here are some of the tasks Kushner has taken on while in D.C.: solving the opioid crisis; upgrading technology in all federal agencies; overhauling Veteran Affairs and workforce training; developing infrastructure, including broadband Internet access for all Americans; bringing peace to the Middle East. Here are the tasks he’s accomplished: ( 22 )

ccording to The Wall Street Journal, members of Trump’s legal team recently suggested Kushner give up that choice office and return to private life. Because, of all the inner-circle advisers, Jared had taken the most meetings and seemingly had the most entanglements with all varieties of Russian. Also at issue “was Mr. Kushner’s initial omission of any contacts with foreign officials from the form required to obtain a security clearance,” the article explained. “[Kushner] later updated the form several times to include what he has said were more than 100 contacts with foreign officials.” A statement was drafted to spin Kushner’s would-be resignation—it went that far, according to the Journal. It must remain in some executive-branch file, a suggestion of the future that did not happen but may happen still. The statement expressed regret for a political eco-system so poisonous it can make even a naive sit-down with some helpful Russians seem sinister. Of course, anyone who has studied Trump knows he’d never send Kushner into the outer dark. It’s hard enough to dump a golf pro. How do you exile a son-in-law? ( 23 )

ared Kushner’s life can be seen as a lark, an inheritance, a goof. Or it can be seen more grandly as an attempt to get back what was lost, to undo the series of disasters set in train at the Fontainebleau. Charlie went to prison. Jared might be in trouble of his own. He has been named as a person of interest in the Russia investigation. His father lost everything. In three moves, Jared got everything back. In three more, he could lose it all again. No one knows where it will end.

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PROUST QUESTIONNAIRE

Shonda

RHIMES

The executive producer of the TV series Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and How to Get Away with Murder is now embarking on a new adventure with Netflix. Here, she explains why she has no regrets, and promises that her greatest achievement is still to come

hat is your idea of perfect happiness? Warm chocolate cake, a gorgeous fire, and Idris Elba. Also, world peace. Which historical figure do you most identify with? I don’t identify with her, but I highly admire Eleanor Roosevelt. Which living person do you most admire? Obama. He is a man of integrity and nobody seems to have integrity these days. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself ? My ability to make everything about me. What is the trait you most deplore in others? People who feed off of their misery. The whiners and complainers. What is your greatest extravagance? Sleep. What is your favorite journey? The car ride home. On what occasion do you lie? When any pregnant woman asks me if motherhood is easy. It’s too late to tell her the truth. What do you dislike most about your appearance? Why should I dislike anything about my appearance? I came off the factory 178

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line this way. I am perfect. What is your greatest regret? I can’t change the past. It made me what I am. What or who is the greatest love of your life? My children. Also, my laptop. When and where were you happiest? Anytime I’m on vacation. Which talent would you most like to have? I want to be able to sing like Whitney Houston did. What is your current state of mind? Content. If you could change one I L L U ST RAT IO N

RISKO

thing about yourself, what would it be? I would be more patient. What do you consider your greatest achievement? I don’t know. I haven’t done it yet. What is your most treasured possession? My laptop. The backup drive for my laptop. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? Any time you spend wanting something you don’t have. Where would you like to live? Vermont. What is your favorite occupation? Queen of England. What is your most marked characteristic? I tell people what I think. What do you most value in your friends? Fearlessness. Who is your favorite hero of fiction? Jo March, in Little Women. Who are your heroes in real life? My parents. Mainly because they put up with me and supported every crazy idea I ever had. What is it that you most dislike? Pretentiousness that allows people to pretend they like nothing. How would you like to die? Why? Are you planning to kill me?! What is your motto? “Everyone has a story.” N OVEMB ER

2017