HOW IS THE VIRUS CHANGING US?
20 PERSPECTIVES ACROSS AMERICA
U NTO L D TO LD
Inside Pop Music’s Most Famous All-Nighter
HAVING A MOMENT? IS THE MUSTACHE
“AM I ON DRUGS?”
UNTO L D TO LD UNTO L D TO LD
It is in the spirit of togetherness that we will rise.
TA B L E OF C ON T E N T S S U M M E R 2020
“That’s when it hit me: ‘Okay, if I mess this up, my career is basically over.’ The pressure hit for a moment, for those two hours, and then I was back. I was okay after.” E TH
E WERV
08 EDITOR’S LETTER
C O U R T E S Y A LT E A ( T I E - DY E S W E AT E R ) . C O U R T E S Y LO R O P I A N A ( K N I T P O LO ) . E V E R E T T ( G E R E ) . G E T T Y I M A G E S ( T Y L E R , T H E C R E ATO R ) .
THE SHORT STORIES
An easygoing shoe that works hard all summer; entering the golden age of the TV rewatch and the YouTube concert; bags that can carry it all; an interview with Marisa Tomei, master of playing the carefree yet complex sidekick; can a mustache make you feel better?; Esquire’s 2020 Dubious Achievement Awards; what the pandemic has taught us about why we love restaurants. 31
R S
QQ群: 970508760 11
SUM ME
—JOHN DAVID WASHINGTON, PAGE 44
Now’s the time for a style switchup. From a suit like peak Richard Gere’s to a Tyler, the Creator– approved sweater vest (yes, even in the warmer months), we’ll show you how to keep things interesting.
THE BEST BARS IN AMERICA, 2020
Twenty-seven drinking experiences for when we’ll really need them.
QQ群: 970508760 F E AT U R E S
44 MASTER OF THE 42 STATE OF UNREALITY
by Charles P. Pierce In this year of plague and monumental disruption, a collective sense of dissociation is settling in. Just in time for the election.
72 FULL SPEED AHEAD
by Bruce Schoenfeld Justin Gatlin won Olympic gold in the 100-meter dash—16 years ago. Despite setbacks caused by the pandemic, he’s still a contender.
MOMENT
by Kate Storey He’s Spike Lee’s leading man. He’s the star of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. John David Washington is here to stay. 54 WHAT WE’RE LEARN-
ON THE COVER
JOHN DAVID WASHINGTON PHOTOGRAPHED BY DOMINIC MILLER. STYLING BY NICK SULLIVAN. STYLING ASSISTANCE BY SAMANTHA MCMILLEN. JACKET, SHIRT, AND BOOTS BY LOUIS VUITTON MEN’S. TROUSERS AND JEWELRY, WASHINGTON’S OWN.
76 A STILL LIFE
Skip the logos. These simply luxurious accessories are the last words in your summer look.
ING FROM THE VIRUS
20 lives, 20 perspectives. (Turn the page for a preview.) 66 ESCAPOLOGY
82 THE SONG
by Ryan D’Agostino On a night 35 years ago, during another
Fashion’s best summer offerings are a ticket to everywhere.
3
world health crisis, 45 artists gathered for one of the most extraordinary recording sessions in music history. 88 HOW ESSENTIAL IS MY FACIAL FEMINIZATION SURGERY?
by Harron Walker I had one procedure left before my transition would be complete. Then COVID-19 happened. 96 ESQUIRE ENDORSES
Older sisters.
20 LIVES, 20 PERSPECTIVES
THE CUSTODIAN EUGENIO MESA ENVIRONMENTAL-SERVICES WORKER, NEWYORKPRESBYTERIAN MORGAN STANLEY CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL
W H A T
New York City
W E ’ R E
I’M FROM THE neighborhood, so
I live about two minutes from the work site. I’d been applying to this hospital for years. I went to the interview—it was on my birthday. I got my job.
LEARNING
W E W E R E C A L L E D into the office
F R O M
T H E
VIRUS
THAT
C H A N G E D EVERYTHING
by our supervisor. It was a Saturday morning. They call me by my last name. “Hey, Mesa, can I speak to you?” In my mind I’m thinking, Am I in trouble? She was like, “I’m not sure how comfortable you feel about going inside each room with COVID-19. Can you go in if I asked you to?” And I said, “Of course.” I didn’t hesitate.
I ’ M N O T S C A R E D of anything. I’m brave. It takes a lot of courage to do things that you’re not normally doing. W H I L E T H E PAT I E N T is there in the room, we try to move as quietly as we can. We’re not trying to wake them up, because they’re trying to recover. They’re not trying to hear anything they don’t want to hear. I T ’ S SA D. Just working in the hospital normally is sad. I WA S B O R N in the Dominican Republic. I came here when I was about eight years old, in 2000. This August is gonna be my twentieth year in the United States. I already have twenty years here. I WOULD NOT like to see somebody else get sick just because I’m in the middle of this. That’s just my biggest fear. I take care of myself before I’m able to interact with others at home, because I live with my mom and my brother.
W E WAT C H T V, we talk a lot, she cooks for me. She’ll be like, How’s it going? Is everything okay? I tell her everything is fine, everything is cool, everything is good. She cooks my meal every day, so I’m very happy. I FEEL GOOD. Not just because they require me to do what I have to do. I’m doing this out of love. I want to see everything go back to normal. I want to be able to contribute to it. I MISS SPORTS. I’m a baseball player. O N E DAY I could be able to tell my kids like, Yeah, I was in this. I was helping out, making sure that these rooms were clean and that [doctors and nurses] had a clean environment so they could work. And I could consider myself part of the team. IF SOMEBODY’S GOING through a tough time, I want to put a smile on your face. I’m that person that you can count on. —As told to Brady Langmann
Turn to page 54 for the other nineteen perspectives that constitute “What We’re Learning,” a collection of first-person accounts of
humanity’s
stand
against the coronavirus.
Mesa was photographed as part of a portfolio on the frontline workers of the NewYork-Presbyterian hospital network, taken at the height of the COVID-19 outbreak in New York. Seventeen people participated in the project; their portraits, by Benedict Evans, ran across several Hearst magazines.
4
P H OTO G R A P H S B Y B E N E D I CT E VA N S
GIORGIO ARMANI FALL/WINTER 1990 COLLECTION
ALDO FALLAI
“The calmness that this image inspires is what I hope we can go back to in fashion”
MICHAEL SEBASTIAN
JACK ESSIG
EDITOR IN CHIEF
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6
T H I S WAY I N A L E T T E R F ROM T H E E DI TOR
TWO WEEKS INTO THE QUAR-
antine, I lost it. Early one evening, as I was doing the dishes, “Night Moves” came on the radio. I have heard that song, by Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band, one million times, and I’ve enjoyed it each time. But on the one million and first, I cried. Not the sort of eye misting that’s easy to explain away. I openly wept. My wife walked into the kitchen to find that her husband had become the real-world avatar of the Crying Michael Jordan meme. I wrapped my arms around her and let my body go heavy. I know what you’re thinking, and I agree: “Night Moves” is a terrific song. But it had never moved me to tears until that day. Not even close. This was grief. I was mourning the one million times I’d heard “Night Moves” before the virus came and
changed everything. The song reminded me of when things felt normal, and I longed for that. But this was also catharsis. I was letting go of a bygone world so that I could start moving toward whatever comes next. Most forecasts for the “new normal” depict a world of masks and Plexiglas, six feet of separation and vigilant handwashing. I’m ready for that, but I’m not looking forward to it. Instead, since the night I sobbed over “Night Moves,” I’ve focused on the moments of joy that I hope will evolve into new traditions. Before the pandemic, not once did I eat a weeknight dinner with my two young daughters, because I returned from the office too late. Now we eat together every night. I want this to continue. Every weekend for the past several weeks, I’ve joined my
college friends on a Zoom call. We’d never done this previously. Now I can’t imagine a world without it. I find strength in the mere thought of observing these rituals after the quarantine lifts, and after the virus is subdued. The way we make a magazine has also changed. This issue’s cover subject, John David Washington—who stars in the summer’s most anticipated blockbuster, Christopher Nolan’s Tenet—was photographed at home in Los Angeles by family friend Dominic Miller (while observing all the necessary safety protocols, of course). In the absence of a full crew, Dominic captured John David with a unique intimacy, which you can see on page 44. Elsewhere in the issue, you’ll find pure escapism—like the behindthe-scenes, hour-by-hour ac-
count on page 82 of the night in January 1985 when the decade’s greatest singers gathered to record “We Are the World.” (Most of them, anyway. Prince wasn’t there. Nor was Bob Seger.) On page 54, we’ve revived and updated a classic Esquire feature, “What I’ve Learned.” This time it’s “What We’re Learning”: twenty perspectives from across the country on how the virus has changed people. Participants include Washington governor Jay Inslee, Jimmy Fallon, an ER physician in Georgia, a wildlife veterinarian at the Bronx Zoo, and a funeral director outside Detroit. Perhaps the most resonant words come from an eight-year-old from Indiana named Katie. “Mostly, I’ve been sad,” she said, “but then I get really happy.” —Michael Sebastian
K R I S TO 7 4 / I S TO C K / G E T T Y I M A G E S
THE QUARANTINE CRACK-UP
8
During this unprecedented time in history we wish you and your beloved ones good health and safety: It is in times like these where we are all reminded of what truly matters.
We are with you We stand Together
THE
An Easygoing Shoe That Works Hard All Summer
SUEDE ESPADRILLES ($495) AND PONY-HAIR ESPADRILLES ($650) BY GIUSEPPE ZANOTTI.
THE ESPADRILLE IS THE MOST EGALITAR-
ian summer shoe. It eschews elitism, and it doesn’t differentiate between tax brackets, much less genders. It doesn’t even discriminate between your left and right feet. (Really; with old-school versions, you can switch it up.) You can buy espadrilles in fancy boutiques and online, but these are quintessentially simple shoes, and best when you don’t muck about with them. In their native Basque and Catalan regions (straddling the border of France and Spain) and all of southern France—where I stock P H OTO G R A P H B Y J OA N N A M C C LU R E
by DAVID BURTON
up—you can pick them up for a song at supermarkets and gas stations. But for me, the Côte d’Azur is their true stomping (or maybe shuffling) ground. They’re ideal for lolling about at home or hitting the market or the beach, yet ironically—for something traditionally made of braided rope and canvas—espadrilles are not for sailing. A lot of water is the death of them, though a little does help the fitting process, as the rope soles will swell and mold better to your feet. Still, their natural habitat is heat and dust. I prefer mine in marine-striped cotton rather
11
than plain, and because these are idlers’ shoes, I always wear them with the backs folded flat under my heels like mules. Espadrilles are by nature work-shy, and yet, paradoxically, they are efficient multitaskers. In the summer, they do an admirable job of being all-day slippers (perfect with all-day pajamas), they make a great nonslip alternative to flip-flops, and they won’t overheat in the sun. Dressed up a bit, they even double as loafers—as long as your ankles have seen enough sun. Which reminds me: No socks, please.
BACK IN THE 1980 S , THE R&B STATION IN ST. LOUIS
used to play a track from Fatback called “Backstrokin’,” whose lyrics—pretty much in their entirety—said, “Lookin’ for the good stuff? Why don’t ya tighten up on your backstroke?” When I was a young boy, the words struck me as deeply melancholy: No matter where you are in life, the song seemed to say, the best things will always be in your rearview mirror. As my life stretched out ahead of me, this funk band told me I’d spend it straining to turn backward, to the way things were.
Quarantine Time Machine T H E S HORT S TOR I E S B I NG E TO T H E F U T U R E
Social distancing provides safety and existential dread in equal doses. It has also provided a golden age of the TV rewatch. by DAVE HOLMES
12
D E S I G N S S TO C K / S H U T T E R S TO C K ( I C E C R E A M ) . E Y E E M / G E T T Y I M A G E S ( R E M OT E ) .
Rule No. 287 NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE MENTAL-HEALTH BENEFIT OF A BOWL OF CAP’N CRUNCH.
Forever grasping at the past as life sped into the future. Now that I’m older, I realize the song is almost definitely about anal. But my youthful interpretation of it has proved to be true: In times of stress, when the pressures of the present are too much to bear, I do find myself lookin’ for the good stuff, which requires a little backstrokin’ to the television, movies, and music of the 1970s and ’80s, a time when things were, if not less complicated, then at least complicated for someone else. And now that we’re living with the trauma of a pandemic, I see that we’re reaching back to old comforts, via Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube. We’ve been spending these endless days and nights in the Quarantine Time Machine, and though I have no idea what the world is going to look like when this issue comes out, I’d bet dollars to grocery-store-brand doughnuts that the future you is still time-traveling. It didn’t start this way. As COVID-19 spread through the country, we lost access to our go-to self-soothing tool of “being outside of our homes” and wound up craving a shared cultural escape. So we turned to Netflix’s Tiger King, in numbers that eclipsed the viewership for even Stranger Things. It was good for about one week, before we understood there was nobody to root for, and that animal cruelty is hard to watch even if the guy doing it is wearing sequins in the daytime. We crazy cats and kittens said, “No, thank you.” The Golden Age of Television has been studded with antiheroes: Frank Underwood, Walter White, the nameless character at the heart of Fleabag. But this was a time for . . . pro-heroes. A time for comfort and stability. We needed an escape to a simpler place, and since we couldn’t move our bodies anywhere, in my house, that place was Cheers. Its familiar multicamera rhythms gave our nights some stability, the peerless writing brought laughter back into our lives, and it was uplifting to watch people perform an idealized version of what we were all doing, i.e., slowly drinking ourselves to death in a single room. We didn’t have any answers about our basic safety, but we knew the problem of the week would be wrapped up for Sam and Diane within 22 commercial-free minutes, and in the moment, that was enough. The movies of 2020 are sitting on shelves and will be for who knows how long, but in the meantime, there are hundreds of hours of old sitcoms waiting to be rediscovered: Taxi, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show. Living in the past is generally frowned upon, but when the present is this rotten, it’s pretty much your only option. Given the choice between it and another information-deficient press briefing, I will throw myself into the Quarantine Time Machine any day. I know this, because I have. Media-research company Magid found that media consumption has increased in the past few months— findings that were published in the trade journal Yeah, No Kidding—but also that the kind of media we’ve been looking for has changed. At the beginning of the year, we sought out shows that were new and thrilling: a Jack Ryan, an Ozark. But the dawn of the COVID-19 era saw an increase in searches for con-
tent that was fun and familiar. More than a third of us reported watching things we’d already seen. We wanted a laugh, but more than anything, we needed to be sure of an ending. As the weeks stretched on, some of us found ourselves digging a little deeper. In my experience, when you’ve been in the same sweatpants for three days, things like “following a story arc” become an unnecessary strain. I programmed the destination coordinates on my Quarantine Time Machine to a more remote time and space: old game shows. There is a network called Buzzr that has immediately become indispensable; it offers a 24/7 stream of game shows from throughout TV history, particularly the ’70s through the ’90s. It’s a freer, more day-drunk world on Buzzr, as Brett Somers and Charles Nelson Reilly smoke and spar on Match Game. It’s a more joyous place to spend your time, as couples in matching sweatshirts sprint toward the fish sticks on Supermarket Sweep. It calls to mind the more pleasant aspects of being home sick from school, and the stakes are low enough to keep your blood pressure from spiking; the dollar amounts are small but still larger than a government stimulus check. I don’t know when I’ll be able to go to a concert again, but in the meantime, I’ve let the Quarantine Time Machine book me tickets to some great ones. In the Before Times, the quickest way to make an enemy of me was to go to any rock show I was at, be anywhere in my eyeline, pull out your iPhone, and start capturing video. For more than a decade, I have quietly stewed at these people. “When are you going to watch this?” I would scream—internally. It took a safer-at-home order to make me see the truth: These kind strangers were filming it for me. Do as I have done: Search YouTube for your favorite artists, scroll on past the official videos, and there
WE NEEDED AN ESCAPE TO A SIMPLER PLACE. IN MY HOUSE, THAT PLACE WAS CHEERS. they are—videos of shows you missed because you didn’t happen to live in Kansas City in 2011. Thanks to being homebound, I’ve been to a Frank Turner festival show in Holland in 2019 and a Jason Falkner gig in a Tokyo basement restaurant in 2016, all from the comfort of the home I am forbidden to leave. The world is in chaos. I don’t know who I’m going to be when you read this. But I do know this: The past—as packaged into sitcoms, game shows, and bootlegged concerts—is exactly as it was, and it feels much better. Tighten up on your backstroke. The water’s warm.
Young Again Back in 1974, Neil Young recorded what his label was absolutely sure would be an album stacked with hits. Young was certainly in the market for a few— Time Fades Away and On the Beach, his two previous LPs, hadn’t fared well with fans. But Homegrown, a de facto musical companion to 1972’s behemoth Harvest written in the wake of his breakup with girlfriend Carrie Snodgress, was never released—until now. “It was a little too personal,” Young said in 1975 of the decision in an interview with Rolling Stone. “It scared me.” He echoed the sentiment recently as he announced the plan for the legendary work to emerge: “It’s the sad side of a love affair. The damage done. The heartache. I just couldn’t listen to it. I wanted to move on.” Seven of the 12 songs had never been released before in any studio album, including “Separate Ways,” a pedal-steel-laden lament for the lonely, and the devastating “Try,” which adapts some of Snodgress’s actual phrases into lyrics. And as has long been rumored, the record features both the Band’s Levon Helm and Dr. John acolyte Karl T. Himmel on drums, plus Emmylou Harris on backing vocals. All the tracks were painstakingly mastered to vinyl from the original analog tapes. To listen to them is to finally hear one of the necessary building blocks of one of American music’s finest catalogs. —Madison Vain
13
You’ll Need a Bag
T H E S HORT S TOR I E S I N T H E BAG
Fro
14
m si
for That
(AND NOW THAT, TOO)
AS I WRITE THIS, I DON’T
know what summer will look like. Will we be heading to sandy shores, cracking open a cold one, and re-upping our vitamin-D supply? (With six feet between blankets, of course.) Maybe! But it’s equally possible we’ll be socially distancing in a deserted lot behind the 7-Eleven while
x-pac
ks to san
itizer, th e se
rry i bags can ca
t all
b
A yD
NIE
L
M DU
blasting Don Henley from a single earbud. And while summer has always been a time when you’ve had to haul around a lot of gear—sunglasses, sandals, sunscreen, six-packs—a post-pandemic world means we’re going to be lugging a ro u n d a l o t m o re . Fa c e masks, hand sanitizer, and latex gloves are all getting promoted to everyday-carry items. That means you need a bag. One that’s simple, because these times are not. One that’s hardy, because we all need an extra helping of that these days. And one that just plain looks good, because dammit, at least our commitment to that doesn’t have to change. Cue these totes: With classic shapes and cavernous capacities, they’ll hold what you need, no matter the destination. The world has c h a n ge d , a n d t h e re a re certain things—like handshaking!—that might be gone f o r go o d . B u t t h row i n g your essentials into a stylish carryall and taking a break from your normal routine shouldn’t be one of them. Even if it’s just behind a 7-Eleven.
AS
P H OTO G R A P H S B Y J OA N N A M c C LU R E
SWER
the
T I E -DY E S W E AT E R
T
VE
HE SU MMER
C O U R T E S Y B R A N D ( S W E AT E R )
Clockwise from top left: Bag ($450) by Coach; bag ($75) by Filson; towel ($120) by Onia; bag ($1,100), Celine by Hedi Slimane; bag ($135) by Onia. Opposite: Bag ($690) by Mark Cross.
Brisk nights. Chilly early mornings. Over-air-conditioned offices. (Remember those?) Sweaters have always had a place during the summer. But if you really want to drive home the vibe, there’s an easy way to do it: Tie-dye them. Simple as that. SWEATER ($810) BY ALTEA.
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T H E S HORT S TOR I E S ROYA L FA M I LY
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The big question I had going into this interview with Tomei, after a marathon quarantine screening of the majority of her films, was: Is she as nurturing as the characters she plays? Mona Lisa Vito, Cassidy in The Wrestler, Aunt May in Spider-Man: Homecoming—these are all the kinds of people you’d want in your life as lifters of broken spirits, wells of empathy. Without even asking it, I had my answer. The King of Staten Island, which Universal has decided to release to video on demand on June 12, is classic Apatow—a comedy with fun, raucous improv energy layered with heart. It is very much about what can happen to the stability of individuals within a family after a tragedy of incredible magnitude. It’s about wanting to move on but not being able to when a loved one is taken away from you, and your friends, the government, and the universe can’t offer any real closure. Pete’s character, Scott, still lives with his mom and can’t seem to realize any of his dreams. Margie hasn’t been able to have a romantic relationship for more than a decade. But change happens. Scott gets kicked out of the house; his mom starts dating; hilarity (and much personal growth!) ensues. That Tomei would choose to be in a comedy that’s filled with smart tenderness is no surprise. She is a kind of avatar of integrity. She could have easily taken a more superficial route in a career that spans more than sixty films, but she didn’t. Her acting has remained thoroughly superb, and her taste in movies has skewed buoyantly indie, no matter the budget—that even includes Spider-Man: Homecoming. “I’m a ham if nothing else,” she says of her taste in roles. “We want things to be entertaining. But is it something that’s worth talking about? Is there some kind of dialogue around it that’s worth thinking about? That’s what’s kept me there.” She even has a pretty existential take on how The King of Staten Island may be read in the context of our current crisis. “I feel like what Pete goes through as a character and as a person in real life
QUEEN OF HEARTS Over a three-decade career, Marisa Tomei has continually transformed the role of the carefree yet complex sidekick. This summer she does it again in Judd Apatow’s The King of Staten Island. by KEVIN SINTUMUANG NEW YORK IS ON MARISA TOMEI’S MIND. ¶ YES, SHE IS ONE OF the quintessential Actors from NYC™ who are, for better or worse, inseparable from the charming grit of the town that helped shape them: Jennifer Lopez, Steve Buscemi, Rosie Perez, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci—with whom she starred in the 1992 comedy classic My Cousin Vinny, winning herself an Oscar for her portrayal of Mona Lisa Vito. She’s at home in L. A. but just wrapped up starring in Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo on Broadway before the pandemic struck. And she can’t stop thinking about the people at the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in the U. S. She is thinking of her parents, who live in downtown Manhattan. Her aunts and uncles and cousins. She’s even thinking of me. “I’m glad you’re safe. It must be hard to write now,” she says when I tell her I’m sheltering in place with my wife and daughters, not too far from the Brooklyn neighborhood where she grew up. But mostly, in this conversation we’re having over Zoom about her role in the film The King of Staten Island, she is thinking of Amy Davidson, a nurse and the mother of Pete Davidson. Tomei plays Margie, a character based on Amy, in the new Judd Apatow comedy about a mom and her man-boy son (it’s loosely based on Pete’s pre-SNL years) who are still trying to move forward, years after their husband/father died fighting a fire. “I think about how much Amy gives and how my character gives in the movie. Pete’s dad was a firefighter on 9/11. And after that, the firefighters were not treated well by the government’s administration. I’m just noticing what’s happening in the world now, and hopefully these people that we know are essential aren’t going to be treated that way after this.”
is a lot of pain and struggle dealing with the loss of 9/11. Trying to understand how the world works. A generational thing of not quite feeling at home in the world. The challenge of growing up in a world that’s geared not to people but to corporations. There’s not a coherence to that for a lot of younger people. And it’s all been laid bare now during this crisis. It’s all under the black light.” She sweeps her hand dramatically in front of her. “And you can see all of it.” Tomei does not shy away from politics and social justice. She spoke at President Obama’s inauguration concert in 2009, publicly supported Christine Blasey Ford, and is very involved in Time’s Up, the Hollywood organization that raises awareness about workplace inequality for women. She tells me RULE NO. 288 UNDER NO SCENARIO DOES about the significance of finally getAN ITALIAN AMERICAN ting together with other actresses at ENJOY YOUR FAKE ITALIANTime’s Up meetings. “Usually you’re AMERICAN ACCENT. SAME the only one on the set. You’re ‘the GOES FOR NEW YORKERS. girl,’ in quotes. So these gatherings really fostered a sense of sisterhood—and intergenerational sisterhood.” I mention how a lot of her roles lately have been matriarchal figures. Does she wish there were more parts for women her age in Hollywood? “Clearly,” she says. So was she happy with the role of Aunt May in the Marvel franchise? “I was behind the curve understanding that this is where the movie industry was going, and luckily I had people advise me . . . who pushed me to do it. And I got lucky because I love [director] Jon Watts. But I think a lot more could have been done with the Aunt May character and what I was promised at the same time. She is his surrogate mom, right? And she has a lot of wisdom, she is his guide, but she doesn’t seem quite to be his guide, you know?” She tells me she would love to portray more important women in history, the pioneering Italian actress Eleonora Duse in particular. I wouldn’t mind seeing an Aunt May spin-off in the meantime, I tell her. She laughs. “I don’t believe you! I don’t think that’s in the cards.” She delivers that last part in a hammy Brooklyn accent. “Oh, I loved them. They’re great films. Besides,” she adds, “girls like them now!”
M AT T H E W F R O S T / T R U N K A R C H I V E . C O M
T H E S HORT S TOR I E S L I K E C A R P E T S A N D DRA P E S
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match THIS PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: SHIRT ($128) AND SHORTS ($78) BY TOMBOLO; SHIRT ($198) AND SHORTS ($168) BY TODD SNYDER; SHIRT ($115), SHORTS ($115), AND HAT ($45) BY 18 EAST. OPPOSITE: SWEATSHIRT ($165) AND SHORTS ($165) BY AIMÉ LEON DORE.
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LOAFERS ($268) BY ARTEMIS DESIGN CO. E
SUM R S
They shout “summer,” sure. But they also say something about you: that you’re fearless. If you’re not one to drape yourself in lines, tigers, or squares, not to worry. The move is just as effective within the leisurely luxury of Entireworld’s sweat sets, or in the comfortable cool of Aimé Leon Dore’s uniform collection. Making them into a statement is as simple as turning up the color and turning down the accessories. (Let Roy G. Biv do the talking.) Summer is when we give ourselves a break, and the source of the matching set’s power is its effortlessness. It’s the dressin’ man’s equivalent of killing two birds with one stone. So no matter where you find me this summer—even if it’s through the 16x9 video-conference window—just know: Yes, the shorts do match the shirt.
ME
COURTESY SAEED FERGUSON (18 EAST). COURTESY BRANDS (REMAINING).
I WA S B O R E D , S T U C K O N A B U S T H AT H A D
already gone an hour in the wrong direction, when inspiration struck. As I mindlessly scrolled through Instagram, a vintage photo of John McEnroe snapped me out of my daze. His white Sergio Tacchini polo flowed seamlessly into a pair of (very short) white shorts. There wasn’t much to it. It was just . . . white. But it was loud, and it was brazen, just like McEnroe himself. Then I remembered: I had a terry-cloth polo-andshorts set in my closet. From Tacchini, no less. I hadn’t worn it yet. I think I was afraid of it. Nevertheless, I had nothing to do except make grand plans, so fuck it—this summer, I’d make it happen. Better yet, I’d do it with blue, and gray, and maybe even green. It was at that moment I finally embraced the matching set. If you’re an adventurous dresser, you probably know the deal. Todd Snyder, Tombolo, and 18 East all carry matching, boldly printed shirt-and-shorts sets made to be worn in places where palm trees grow.
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The closest thing to a getaway in your near future may be a Sunday stroll down the block. But dressing like you’re on vacation? It’s never been more necessary. Mix it up. Throw together elements of your “travel wardrobe”—kilim loafers, ikatpatterned trousers, a linen shirt—and dress like you’re anywhere but here. Though it won’t change up your routine, that’s not the point. The point is feeling like you’re adventuring. Hiking a volcano it is not, yet busting out those ikat trousers might feel just as good. Make yourself a mai tai. Crack open a cold one. Lean all the way in. Your passport can gather dust. Your clothes, however, don’t have to. Let your summer style be a ticket to somewhere bright and bold. Even if it’s your living room. —Alfonso Fernández Navas
KNIT POLO
bold summer state
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GO AHEAD: DRESS LIKE YOU’RE ON VACATION
There are polos, and there are polos. When you want a luxe-but-louche touch to your summer look, opt for the latter. It’s knitted, and perfect under a sport coat or over shorts. Different—and just a bit daring. POLO ($1,695) BY LORO PIANA.
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MUSTACHES ARE . . . SEXY? OR . . . NOT? YOU DON’T KNOW UNTIL
things
you grow. That’s why, though many are ’stache-curious, they haven’t had the guts to go all in. Then social isolation changed the landscape entirely. Now mustaches are flourishing. Here’s the thing: Being cooped up inside during a pandemic isn’t exactly empowering. But growing a mustache? That’s a brazen act of self-determination. It’s looking at your face and saying, “I’m going to put a mustache on here because, dammit, I can.” When the world feels rudderless, growing some upperlip fuzz is one way of exerting control—at least over your face. For some, it’s also a practical concern. “I thought if it became necessary to wear masks, I wouldn’t want to shave my whole beard,” says home lifestyle blogger Matt Armato (pictured, center right). For others, going for the grow was helped along by sheer curiosity. “I was tired of looking at my face and wondering how I’d look with a mustache,” says Esquire’s own style e-commerce editor, Avidan Grossman (far left), who’s sporting one with a bit of an Errol Flynn vibe. And for a few, it was a way to do some good. Lawyer Darren Grady (far right) is part of a group of guys all growing a ’stache and donating $5 a day throughout lockdown to Chicago Hospi-
are
T H E S HORT S TOR I E S S T I F F U P P E R L I P
getting
Can a mustache make you feel better? For these men who let theirs grow in isolation, the answer is yes.
a little
tality United, which supports service-industry workers. “We not only have a sense of community,” he says, “but we’ve got an opportunity to see our friends differently. It brings positivity.” For charity or not, isolation is an ideal time to grow. “Both the safety and novelty of isolation lend themselves to new aesthetics,” says Esquire deputy editor Ben Boskovich (center left). A mustache is low-risk: You can change it, unlike so many other things. And experimenting can lead to unexpected places. “My dad told me I look like he did at my age, and my grandfather wore a mustache, too,” he continues. “It’s a nice connection to them. I didn’t realize it would bring me there, but it did.” Beyond being a link to the past, mustachioed faces might become a signifier of a new world order—one in which personal confidence trumps old social norms. “Maybe I come out of this with a new perspective,” says Grady, who is imagining a postisolation party with in-person ’stache reveals. “I do anticipate wanting to keep it,” he says. “The question is, will I?”
hairy
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the B O L D -A S -H E L L S W E AT E R V E S T Up for another well-advised style risk? Try a sweater vest that goes a bit wild. Like the ’stache, it seems to be a possible pratfall. But if you rock it the same way—with an abundance of confidence—it doesn’t get much cooler.
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G E T T Y I M A G E S ( T Y L E R , T H E C R E ATO R ; E G G ) . C O U R T E S Y S U B J E C T S ( R E M A I N I N G ) .
by GARRETT MUNCE
IT’S A PECULIARITY OF DRESS WATCHES—
especially the smaller ones, and especially in gold—that in summer they stick out on a naked forearm like stilettos on a vicar. Which makes them an ideal go-to for the man who has the nous to wear them in untraditional ways. Cartier’s legendary watches, for example, have a surprising history of popping up on the most undressy wrists. Muhammad Ali wore a Tank. So did Andy Warhol. For years, the indestructible Keith Richards wore a Panthère de Cartier with his faded denim and threadbare T-shirts with a nonchalance that could not have been imagined by Louis Cartier when he created its forebears, first the Santos in 1904 and then its tiny cousin, the Tank, in 1916.
Cartier first developed the Santos (in an edition of one) for Alberto Santos-Dumont, a dapper Brazilian socialite and daredevil who in 1901 was the first to fly around the Eiffel Tower in a dirigible he had built himself. The controls were primitive, and flying it was, he said, like “pushing a candle through a brick wall.” Santos-Dumont begged Louis Cartier to come up with something that would allow him not to have to take a hand off the joystick to look at his pocket watch. The solution was arguably one of the first men’s wristwatches and the perfect marriage of form and function. The Santos’s then-revolutionary square shape was a stylized view of the Eiffel Tower from directly
AMERICAN ADVE
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E V E R E T T C O L L E C T I O N ( S A N TO S - D U M O N T ) . C O U R T E S Y C A R T I E R ( W ATC H ) .
HE COMPANY IS STIL L O FFE RIN G
AN SW ER S. B
N IVA LL SU SANTOS-DUMONT WATCH ($15,600) BY CARTIER.
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THE FACE BEHIND THE FACE
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above (the world viewed from above being something of an obsession in the dawn of aviation). The screws that held the bezel in place were an homage to the industrial age and echoed the feet of the giant Erector Set monument. The form of the current range of Santos watches retains all the detail of that very first watch, but the scale—after it redebuted in 2018 in small and midsize— has just been beefed up by Cartier to a modern XL. The new size, launching this spring, comes in steel, rose gold, or steel and rose gold combined. For maverick wrist appeal, however, our money’s still on the rose gold—and we have a feeling Alberto would agree.
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Kim Kardashian West tweeted and then deleted a list of fun new things to try with your family during quarantine, which included items like “try fun new things” and “looking at apps.” Our Screen Time reports say, “Been there.”
ADDING “TRY FUN NEW THINGS” TO A SHORT LIST
North Carolina lab.
and the Unknown,
WAS HOME SICK
OAN’S CONSPIRACY-THE
e wide pandemic
renton, Missouri, posted a video in which he asked, “Who’s scared of coronavirus?” then licked a row of deodorant sticks on a Walmart shelf. Pfister was later charged with a felony terrorist threat in the second degree.
“I wasn’t aware of the severity of my actions and comments,” Ohio spring breaker Brady Sluder said on Instagram on March 22. “I’d like to take this time to own up to the mistakes I’ve made.”
BRADY SLUDER 1
h M Re ker B u rad i o s iami pr yS I g ters, in lu “I et of t coro f I ge der to g t co he na ld .A day let t t rona , par i t s t I’m n he e , nd ot g op tyi ng. m e onn ” a f ro m
YO U ACT UA L RES LY H PEC AV E T SO TO WH ME OC ON A E DR NG UN ET THI KO Ou S NM ts ILL B e ide a E ac RL b h ar ITE bre , in a O
T H E S HORT S TOR I E S R EVOLT I NG DEV E LOP M E N T S
E S QU I R E’ S
DUBIOUS The year—and perhaps our lifetime—has been officially
G E T T Y I M A G E S ( R I O N , G A D OT, B O L S O N A R O, K U S H N E R , N I X O N , C R O Z I E R , M O D LY, H A R R E L S O N )
C O N T R I B U TO R S : D AV E H O L M E S , B E N B O S K O V I C H
An anonymous guest at Twinks4Trump founder Lucian Wintrich’s Corona Potluck party said: “We have completely handed over our civil liberties . . . and anyone who wants to go out and live a normal life is semi-ostracized.”
WHO LEFT THE JOB OF OSTRACIZING THIS GUY HALF DONE?
erse of h ideo v atalie N a , d den s oste r a p ther t M o nd o mes Gad ith Ja Ferrell, a nnon’s w g l Le alon , Wil John mes. It man ging n i ho Port s r s i the ritie ned. from ’d imagi celeb ” e e in g w a n “Im e tha wors was
T SI N G LE
TO R A IS E OT L GAD OR GA NESS F E R S A D AW R IE N AND F lf A B E N E FI
ose O o th RR t I r , la EP red imi IN ic s nswe AN m a E e J nd naro TO o f pa IN s o r Bols l G e N lev Jai t PI t c n e M de exp BU use esi M uld es, Pr beca o O h R ially t s c a F l e t i p S z E , es ID Bra nited oint A S ed if U hat p t e h k c h s t A l rea n in t wil t anysee ink i don’t ge h t t ’ d. They n ie o d d tu s I “ to be ns have Brazilia y jumping into the thing. You see the gu sewer there . . . right? And nothing happens to him.”
Contradicting the CDC, the WHO, and Governor Andrew Cuomo, New York City mayor
WE THOUGHT IT WAS THAT YOU SMOTHER PERFECTLY GOOD RELATIONSHIPS BY MOVING IN TOGETHER ALMOST IMMEDIATELY TO SAVE ON RENT
Days after the firing of Captain Brett Crozier, Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly spoke to Crozier’s crew on the USS Theodore Roosevelt, saying, “If he didn’t think that information was going to get out into the public, in this information age that we live in, then he was, A, too naive, or too stupid to be the commanding officer of a ship like this.”
A STATEMENT THAT GOT OUT INTO THE PUBLIC, IN THIS INFORMATION AGE THAT WE LIVE IN
AWARDS 2020
re id th re v e co ss brie flaw ealing ed m som ronavir fing, Ja r o u a wh f the v nagem e state s outb ed en reak o te e g n o y t rs ve o sk abo ut w u elec are se ills. “W rnors t so ’ ein ho age h m g w rd now at a lot i ebo Tru uring ll be a d i y . . st th c mp stoo e time ompet . think hat ent d to of c ma r his nleft isis.” D . ona ld
W E ’L L H AV E TO H A RET V E IR O IREM N Y ’S In a ENT PA R Wh TY O ite H Kus N ZO hne ous OM ep r sa is
Pennsylvania evangelist Jonathan Shuttlesworth announced that he would be ignoring social distancing and holding a massive Easter celebration. “We’re gonna hold an outdoor Easter blowout service. Not online. A national gathering. You come from all over, like Woodstock, and we’re gonna gather and lift up Jesus Christ.” The endless war between Christ and Darwin rages on.
AND MUCUS
THREE DAYS OF PEACE
EVEMENT
23
Because Donald Trump actually fucking said that about disinfectant.
WHY IS THIS MAN LAUGHING?
Woody Harrelson posted a theory that 5G cell networks are exacerbating the coronavirus contagion. “My friend camilla seems [sic] this to me today,” he said on Instagram, “and though I haven’t fully vetted it I find it very interesting.” And . . . exhale.
THAT QUARANTINE KUSH JUST HITS DIFFERENT
Right-wing conspiracy theorist Liz Crokin posted a video in which she claimed celebrities like Tom Hanks and Idris Elba may have contracted COVID-19 from drinking a tainted batch of pituitarygland extracts from tortured children, “a drug that the elites love.”
THAT’S WHAT THE GAL GADOT VIDEO WAS LACKING
Bill de Blasio said “the New York City understanding” was that the coronavirus could last on a surface for only a few minutes.
by NICK SULLIVAN
SW
i
Saman Amel’s low-key suits and knitwear blend Scandinavian subtlety with impeccable tailoring
IS
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T H E S HORT S TOR I E S B E S T OF B OT H WOR L D S
E,
JACKET ($1,605), KNIT POLO ($330), AND TROUSERS ($545) BY SAMAN AMEL. LEFT: ALL CLOTHING BY SAMAN AMEL.
E
SUM R S
Still got it in your head that a suit is stuffy, not sexy? Look at Richard Gere here, photographed in peak-Gere louche tailoring, and disabuse yourself of that notion. Wear a suit like he does—in attitude, if nothing else—and you’ll be thriving all summer long.
GETTY IMAGES (GERE). COURTESY BRAND (REMAINING).
TA K E I T from THIS GU Y
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Swedish designers Dag Granath (top) and Saman Amel (bottom).
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B E SP OK E TA I L OR I N G C A N A PPE A R A L I T T L E DUST Y T H E SE DAYS.
It takes a long time, it costs a lot—and it requires showing up to multiple in-person appointments. When Swedes Saman Amel and Dag Granath first set up the brand Saman Amel as a custom clothier, however, they brought a modern attitude, appealing prices, and a Scandinavian sense of minimalism to the old-school way of making clothes. Their bespoke options require just one visit, for one thing. And now, with a growing collection of even more accessibly priced ready-towear offerings available exclusively at online-shopping specialist Mr Porter, they’re bringing that same mentality out of the showroom and into reach for those of us who prefer shopping off the (digital) rack. Speaking of the showroom: It’s in Stockholm and supplemented by temporary trunk shows in New York, London, and Seoul, but the clothes are made in Italy. The Napoli jacket (around $2,900) is fully handmade in Naples. In Florence, the Toscana jacket is made by machine and finished by hand; it starts around $1,700. Saman Amel works because it blends the handmade with the consistent aesthetic of a designer. The brand’s determination to use only the best cloths and a tight, northern color palette means that the offer never feels stodgy. The duo’s capsule with Mr Porter is now on its third iteration and made in the same Italian factories used for their custom clothing. The prices drop considerably—a suit is $1,800, with knitwear at $300 to $660—but the precision and style that make Saman Amel’s offerings so attractive in the first place remain very much intact.
T H E S HORT S TOR I E S W E’ R E D ON E BA K I NG OU R OW N B R E A D
We
out again If this pandemic has taught us anything about restaurants, it’s the real reason we love them so much by JEFF GORDINIER 26
if that dish was decent enough to serve in a restaurant, that only amplified the melancholia that I feel about missing these places where I have spent thousands of hours of my life, and it only deepened my anxiety that many of them will never recover from being shut down. But what is it I’m hungering for? Lydia Denworth, the author of a book called Friendship, recently contributed a piece to Scientific American about a groundbreaking study of loneliness. “Psychologists theorize it hurts so much because, like hunger and thirst, loneliness acts as a biological alarm bell,” she wrote. “The ache of it drives us to seek out social connection just as hunger pangs urge us to eat.” A few days back, during these monastic quarantine weeks, I flipped open a book to a poem by Liu Tsungyuan, a Chinese bureaucrat who was sent off into political exile during the Tang dynasty and passed the time by writing. The poem that struck me—apt as ever, centuries later—was called “Feeling Decrepit.” In it, Liu suggests that there is only one antidote to the slow rot of his banishment: “all I want is good wine / and a few friends to share it with.” When I think about that alien world in which I got to linger over dinner at Verōnika, it’s actually not the chicken Kiev that makes me want to race back. What I remember most vividly is leaving the dining room with my wife and passing through the crowded bar, which happened to be filled with friends of ours. We ran into Simon, and Yolanda, and David, all of them waiting for tables and basking in that singular metropolitan electricity that made a lot of us want to plant our flags in New York City in the first place. It took my wife and me about 20 minutes to grab our coats at Verōnika because we wanted to catch up with everyone. And I now realize that it is this—that feeling of personalities colliding and conspiring in the serendipity of a moment—that makes a restaurant so essential to the hum of a community. It is this that I am craving. People. People savoring a moment together. We don’t need restaurants because we are hungry. We need restaurants because we are lonely.
I LYA A K I N S H I N / S H U T T E R S TO C K
WITH THE FLICK OF A KNIFE,
I felt transported back to my childhood. Melted butter, flecked with fresh herbs, poured out of a cut in a breaded chicken breast and formed an amber pool on my plate. I was in a new restaurant in New York City, Verōnika, which occupies the second floor of a cool new photography museum, Fotografiska, but I had ordered a dish that I first encountered at some moment in the 1970s when my parents took me to a fancy restaurant that probably specialized in the same sort of European grandeur that Verōnika aims to revive: chicken Kiev. I remember falling in love with chicken Kiev back then. What kid wouldn’t? It’s basically a supersize chicken tender magically stuffed with butter. But I also remember falling in love with restaurants. My parents took me along to a lot of restaurants over the years—Chinese banquet halls, taco stands with cult followings, dim chophouses where women in vaguely medieval garb carved prime rib from roving carts. My parents did this because they loved food but also because they saw restaurants as vehicles for a young person’s cultural education, and with me the lesson stuck. If relishing restaurants—and parsing them with the same finicky attention that other critics apply to art, music, movies, and Broadway shows—didn’t happen to be my job, I would do it anyway. Except that right now I can’t. I went to Verōnika for dinner with my wife on February 25, 2020, and it would turn out to be one of my last experiences dining out for a long time. Within a few weeks, the coronavirus pandemic had forced millions of us to sequester in our homes with tins of sardines and bags of dried beans. I am writing this column at a kitchen table in a small house north of New York City while the morning news programs tell us about rising death rates. I spend much of each day in this same kitchen cooking breakfast, lunch, and dinner for my wife and my four children. There have been a few culinary triumphs. I improvised a sort of ad hoc cassoulet with fat Judion beans from Spain and chunks of bistro ham from D’Artagnan. Even
Social distancing is the most effective tool we have for slowing the spread of the coronavirus. And that means staying home, if you can. Work from home. Play at home. Stay at home. If you must go out, keep your social distance—six feet, or two arm-lengths apart. Young. Elderly. In between. It’s going to take every one of us. If home really is where the heart is, listen to yours and do the life-saving thing.
Visit coronavirus.gov for the latest tips and information from the CDC.
#AloneTogether TOGETHER, WE CAN HELP SLOW THE SPREAD.
ESQUIRE STUDIO X CLARKS “The desert boot is like a reliable friend,” says Bellentani. “It gains value with time like a pair of jeans. They will continue to influence different personalities and different subcultures in the future, I’m sure about that.”
THE NEW 221
REBOOT OF A CLASSIC The Clarks Original Desert Boot is one of the most legendary pieces of footwear. “You have a masterpiece in your hands,” says Matteo Bellentani, the head of product for Clarks Originals. So why mess with it? Toying with an icon is dangerous business but, if you’re going to do it, why hold back? With their striking, whiter-than-white new Desert Boot 221, Clarks spins a bold, fresh variation on their enduring classic. Head of product Matteo Bellentani and his design team were well aware of the pressure and responsibility that come with tinkering with a legend, but they embraced a technical hurdle—how to update the proportions and improve the fit using a slightly updated shoelast able to incorporate a thicker OrthoLite® footbed for added comfort. Let’s start at the source: suede. Working with their longtime tannery partner, Charles F. Stead, the 221 uses a chrome-free suede which accounts for the noticeable brightness of their white. This chrome-free suede is also treated with a water repellent to keep the boots from getting stained in the rain. “The decision to use chrome-free was aesthetic and environmental,” says Bellentani. “The sustainability, durability and friendly approach to the environment is our main objective.” Inside, the 221 features an OrthoLite footbed cushion support—made with a 20% recycled mixture of OrthoLite foam waste and rubber waste. This footbed is covered by a thin leather lining, a nice touch. “It’s a cost,” Bellentani concedes, “but we believe the leather lining provides a benefit and you can really see and feel the difference.” The only aesthetic modification, to keep the boot properly balanced, is a slightly thicker crepe sole. After months of testing, the calibrations paid off—and the OG desert boot offerings (desert sand, black suede and seasonal colors) are available in the new 221 style.
The new 221 comes with various pastel laces and fobs so you can curate your own look.
SHOP CLARKS AT CLARKSUSA.COM.
“The desert boot is so simple but easy to overcomplicate,” says Bellentani. “They are like a pair of jeans—they get better the more you wear them. You can wear them for 30 years. So when we apply our new designs, we never want to lose this authenticity. You have to think about the future generation of consumers without forgetting the past.” Clarks is a 200-year-old family business founded on the principles of caring for employees and partners. They practiced sustainability before it was ever called sustainability, and the proof is in the durability of the desert boot, the perfect marriage of form and function, bound by tradition but ever-ready for reinvention.
Looking forward to things is half the pleasure of them. — L. M . M O NT G O M ERY
A HIGH-OCTANE, HIGH-STYLE DRIVING ADVENTURE THROUGH CALIFORNIA WINE COUNTRY New date:
MARCH 3 -6, 2 021 N ORTH ERN CAL IF O RNIA Rescheduled from June 17-20, 2020
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THE BEST BARS IN AMERICA, 2020
Twenty-seven drinking experiences to be had when we’ll really need them
“WHAT MAKES A BAR AN ESQUIRE BEST BAR?”
It’s a question I get asked a lot, and I tend to dodge it, mainly because it’s so hard to answer in a satisfying and meaningful way. My canned reply is something like: a place that you love so much you can’t wait to experience it all over again. If I’m being honest, I found that answer cliché—like a Yelp review presented by the Hallmark Channel. I masked a cringe every time I said it. But fuck if this pandemic hasn’t made that sentiment so true. A trade secret: While we spend most of the year going to bars to compile this list, a flurry of reporting happens in the spring, right before our deadline, because (a) it’s a great time to travel and drink and (b) writers never turn in stories early. But this March, as the trees began to bloom and the country started to hibernate, I squeezed in one last reporting trip to Los Angeles and had one final drink at a bar before the Great Quarantine. It was at the Prince in L. A.’s Koreatown, a place that made this year’s list not only because of its horseshoe bar, red banquettes, and cocktails and Korean fried chicken—what
P H OTO G R A P H B Y C H R I STO P H E R G R I F F I T H
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CARDINAL
There are two kinds of people: those who plan for the full moon and those who are only reminded of its existence after its arrival. Kathryn DiMenichi and Holli Medley are the former. They’re the owners of Cardinal. And it’s closed for full moons. Juxtapose the idiosyncratic operators and the “speakeasy in a food court” vibe, and for ATLiens it’s all part of the beautiful cacophony that imbues the city, a quality that’s hard to articulate but easy to feel. 1039 Grant Street SE, Suite B40 —Stephen Satterfield BROOKLYN PUBLIC RECORDS
Follow the music to the middle of an industrial
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block and you’ll find an unlikely pebbled courtyard, with metal chairs and tables, shaded by a few large trees. People are on dates, or working on laptops, sipping coffee or beer or a black manhattan, all depending on the time of day. Public Records is a bar/ café, record store, and music venue, with a killer sound system in each, but it all seems like one cohesive space designed to make
you feel a bit cooler and more creative than when you first walked in. 233 Butler Street —K. S. & SONS
& Sons is almost stubborn in the singularity of its vision—that American ham is every bit as worthwhile as the more globally revered prosciuttos and pata negras. Yes, it is a wine-andAmerican-ham bar. Coowner André Hueston Mack
ESTEBAN
By Sondre Kasin of Undercote, New York City 1 oz mezcal 1 oz umeshu plum wine 1 oz Cocchi Rosa Mix all ingredients with ice. Stir and strain into a glass with ice. Garnish with a grapefruit twist.
is one of the best sommeliers of his generation and the first African American to win the title of Best Young Sommelier in America. The wine list is also all American and full of exquisite vintages. The result is a twentyperson cocktail hour with a seriously consummate host. 447 Rogers Avenue —S. S. CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA GRAFT
Rarely does a wine bar successfully mix casual comfort with a nerdy passion for fermented grapes and a bumping soundtrack. But Graft, the uptown Charleston wineshop-meets-bar by Femi Oyediran and Miles White, achieves that righteous blend. All the good vibes are here, inspired by Man Night, a living-room hang the buddies hosted with their friends. You can jam to Talking Heads while chatting with the co-owners about their favorite big, bad Sangiovese. 700 King Street, Suite B —Osayi Endolyn CHICAGO THE BAMBOO ROOM
If tiki bars are fantasy, then the Bamboo Room, tucked within Three Dots and a Dash, is the fantasy within the fantasy—a rarefied, rum-fueled fever dream presided over by barman Kevin Beary. When you order a daiquiri, a coupe filled with shaved ice arrives and in goes the cocktail, dissolving the fluff like magic. All nights should end with a meander through a rum list of funky finds. 435 North Clark Street —K. S.
C O U R T E S Y B R A N D S ( D R I N K S ) . C H R I S TO P H E R G R I F F I T H ( B OT T L E C A P S ) .
ATLANTA
For ATLiens, Cardinal is part of the beautiful cacophony that imbues the city, a quality that’s hard to articulate but easy to feel.
from left: The Sea Flower at Chicago’s Kumiko; the music is as important as the cocktails at Public Records in Brooklyn.
BEST BAR COCKTAILS AT HOME
T H E B E S T BA R S I N A M E R IC A , 2020
a killer combo!—but also because I just had to share this old-school, slightly weird, still sort of under-the-radar experience with my friend Amanda. Even though she’s lived in L. A. for years, she’d never been. Best Bars are places you need your best pals to know about. When I returned home to New York, my favorite places had started to close, with messages like “Stay Safe, See You Soon!” hastily taped to their doors. Many transitioned into makeshift to-go operations, and that’s where my saccharine “What makes a bar a Best Bar?” reasoning became honest fact. Could I make a semi-decent daiquiri at home? Yes, but it wouldn’t be as transcendent as the one I picked up from the window at Brooklyn’s Leyenda (Best Bars, 2016). Do I like martinis at home? Yes, but not as much as I like martinis at home delivered by Mister Paradise (Best Bars, 2019). Even though these establishments weren’t open in the traditional, save-me-a-stool sense, I still had to experience them. I craved their effort. Their hospitality. The love they put into operating during a pandemic just to help their employees get by. (And it felt good to send a little love their way, too.) So my canned answer to what makes a bar an Esquire Best Bar? A place you just can’t wait to experience again? It’s still my answer. Except now I really mean it. Whether they’re open or not so open, we hope you’ll fall in love with this year’s best bars, and all past (and future) places in our ever-growing hall of fame, when you can. —Kevin Sintumuang
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Rule No. 289 REMEMBER TO REMOVE ANY FACE MASKS BEFORE YOUR FIRST SIP.
To drink at Kumiko is to witness a personal journey into bartender Julia Momose’s Japanese heritage. One cocktail explores the sweet potato; another is a nod to curry rice. All are revelatory, but none so much as the spirit-free drinks—you won’t miss the booze. 630 West Lake Street —K. S. CINCINNATI
T H E B E S T BA R S I N A M E R IC A , 2020
As you sit in a round, red banquette or sip an ice-cold Hite at the horseshoe bar, you will wonder: Where have you been all of my life?
WÓDKA BAR
The very existence of a bar devoted to vodka feels like a rebuke to all the bartenders who’ve scoffed at the spirit. But this spot takes the defiance a step further, offering shots of vodka infused with (among other things) mangoes and peanut brittle. Owner Sarah Dworak made her mark selling pierogies out of an actual hole in the wall, and then expanded that enterprise into Wódka Bar, whose food menu abounds with drinking snacks like kielbasa and smoked herring. 1200 Main Street —Jeff Gordinier CLEVELAND HAPPY DOG
That’s Elvis Costello, kid, and that’s Joe Strummer. Willie Nelson’s over there. We’re talking about pictures of these musical renegades, but their spirits imbue every inch of the place. Happy Dog is a rock ’n’ roll bar to its bones, with Christmas lights and a no-bullshit beer list. You can order hot dogs topped with SpaghettiOs and Froot Loops. We’d steer you toward the “alien” relish, which glows green. 5801 Detroit Avenue —J. G. THE SPOTTED OWL
from top: Go genuine old-school at the Prince in L.A., or wonderfully weird with the Purrrfect
cocktail at New York’s Undercote—it has catnip-infused vodka.
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I was staring at a paper wheel that looked like a scrap of Ouija board. The wheel had words on it: bit-
ter, potent, fruity, tropical, etc. Instead of ordering from a cocktail menu, I was instructed to select my desired mood (I went with relax) and a range of flavors (I went with umami and ginger) from this wheel. The bartender would then conjure something for me to drink. I figured this was all some sort of gimmick until I tasted my cocktail, which had been made with gin, lime, and a pho syrup—yes, the Vietnamese soup. It was absurdly delicious, and it was then I decided this is a next-wave mystic temple of cocktailing. 710 Jefferson Avenue —J. G. COLUMBUS, OHIO LAW BIRD
The first words I saw on the menu when I took my seat at Law Bird over the winter: “Start with a $5 Mini Martini.” I instantly felt at home. But there aren’t many homes in which you’ll find a five-buck martini better than this one, deftly balanced in 50/50 style with Roku gin, two white vermouths (Comoz and Miro), and olive and lemon bitters. The cocktail list slowly reveals itself to be one of the most creative in the country, but the bartenders are modest and Midwestern about it. Home, sweet home. 740 South High Street —J. G. DISNEY WORLD OGA’S CANTINA
For many, the first memory of a bar is likely Episode
C H R I S TO P H E R G R I F F I T H ( B OT T L E C A P S ) . G A R Y H E ( D R I N K ) . L I Z K U B A L L ( T H E P R I N C E ) .
KUMIKO
“I loafe and invite my soul,” Walt Whitman once wrote. “I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.” You could describe the hazy, lazy vibe at the Spotty Dog the same way, only the customers are likely to be leaning and loafing with Whitman himself: The wooden bar runs right alongside the shelves of a bookstore. If you enjoy nursing a beer with no other company than a novel, this is your place. 440 Warren Street —J. G. INDIANAPOLIS BAR ONE FOURTEEN
JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI THE APOTHECARY AT BRENT’S DRUGS
The 1946 soda fountain Brent’s Drugs radiates a
PRESIDENTE
Martha Hoover is a force of nature in the Midwestern
Bottlehouse in Seattle feels like home, only better.
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cheerful Happy Days energy during the day, but those who prefer manhattans to milkshakes show up at night, when the stools are stacked and the lights low. First-timers will have to trust the rumors—that if they let themselves in the unlocked door and tiptoe back, past the booths, and push aside a heavy curtain, they’ll find a speakeasy in full swing. 655 Duling Avenue —Beth Ann Fennelly
By Julio Cabrera of Cafe La Trova, Miami 1½ oz blended aged rum ¾ oz blanc vermouth ½ oz dry curaçao 1 barspoon grenadine orange peel GARNISH: morello cherry Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass over ice and stir until chilled. Strain into a chilled coupe. Express the orange peel and discard. Add garnish.
IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING
It’s easy to lose time at this DTLA hi-fi joint. Dropping in at 3:00 p.m. on a Friday, I ordered coffee and kombucha, only to be captivated by the turntables and Line Magnetic tube amp power. What esoteric ’80s electronica album will come on next? Afternoon soon melted into evening and I downshifted into cocktails and wine and Japanese rice whiskey. Tokyo has known the potency of the combination of a hushed room, whiskey, and a killer sound system for years now. We’re thrilled the concept has finally arrived stateside. 710 East Fourth Place —K. S. THE PRINCE
In a town that has no shortage of hidden time warps, the Prince feels like a genuinely cool secret, even though it’s been around since 1927 and has operated in its current iteration since 1991: a late-night Koreatown haunt where you can get killer Korean fried chicken and deftly made cocktails. As you sit in one of the round, red banquettes, or sip an ice-cold Hite at the horseshoe bar, you will wonder: Where have you been all of my life? 3198 West Seventh Street —K. S. MADISON, TENNESSEE DEE’S COUNTRY COCKTAIL LOUNGE
As I left Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge, which just happens to be located behind a purple adult emporium, a man said to me, “Don’t you love this place? They welcome drunks and hipsters.” Not that the two are mutually exclusive, but proprietor Amy Dee Richardson’s honky-tonk is that special kind of bar where you can get a Frito Pie and a High Life at noon, but also a damn good old-fashioned
C H R I S TO P H E R G R I F F I T H ( B OT T L E C A P S ) . C O U R T E S Y B R A N D S ( D R I N K , B OT T L E H O U S E ) .
T H E B E S T BA R S I N A M E R IC A , 2020
THE SPOTTY DOG
LOS ANGELES
“I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass,” Walt Whitman once wrote. You could describe the hazy vibe at the Spotty Dog the same way.
HUDSON, NEW YORK
food movement, but her larkish, low-lit Bar One Fourteen feels more like a lyric poem than a mission statement. Conceived with the help of indie rocker Vess Ruhtenberg, a veteran of bands like the Lemonheads, this bar is essentially a state-of-the-art listening sanctuary. The record collection (vinyl only) is the stuff of High Fidelity fever dreams, and a recent cocktail list took its inspiration from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Some bars help you shut off your brain, but this bar feeds it. 114 East Fortyninth Street —J. G.
BEST BAR COCKTAILS AT HOME
IV’s cantina scene—who didn’t want to hang out there? That would explain the constant lines outside Oga’s Cantina, a part of the Star Wars theme park, Galaxy’s Edge. But it is worth the wait to have that proto– bar fantasy fulfilled. There are smoking drinks in neon colors, a starship pilot turned DJ, and—who knows?—Han Solo might just slide in next to you. 351 South Studio Drive, Lake Buena Vista, Florida —Adrienne Westenfeld
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SHAPE YOUR GUIDE TO LOSING WEIGHT BY CHRIS HANSEN
B
eing a trainer, bodybuilder, and nutrition expert means that companies frequently send me their products and ask for my stamp of approval. Most of the time I dive into research, test the product out, and send the company honest feedback. Sometimes, however, I refuse to give the product a try, because frankly, the ingredients inside aren’t real food. And I’d rather drink diesel fuel than torture my body with a chemical concoction. Like my father always said, “What you put inside your body always shows up on the outside.” One protein shake that I received, that will remain nameless, was touted as ‘the next big shake’ but really had a list of gut destroying ingredients. Everywhere I read I saw harmful artificial ingredients, added sugars, synthetic dyes, preservatives and cheap proteins; the kind of proteins that keep you fat no matter how hard you hit the gym, sap your energy and do nothing for your muscles.
Disappointed after reviewing this “new” shake, I hit the gym and bumped into my favorite bodybuilding coach. This guy is pushing 50, has the energy of a college kid, and is ripped. So are his clients. While I firmly believe that the gym is a notalk focus zone, I had to ask, “Hey Zee, what protein shake are you recommending to your clients these days?” Zee looked at me, and shook his head. “Protein shakes are old news and loaded with junk. I don’t recommend protein shakes, I tell my clients to drink INVIGOR8 Superfood Shake because it’s the only all natural meal replacement that works and has a taste so good that it’s addicting.” Being skeptical of what Zee told me, I decided to investigate this superfood shake called INVIGOR8. Turns out INVIGOR8 Superfood Shake has a near 5-star rating on Amazon. The creators are actual scientists and personal trainers who
set out to create a complete meal replacement shake chocked full of superfoods that—get this—actually accelerate how quickly and easily you lose belly fat and builds even more lean, calorie burning muscle. We all know that the more muscle you build, the more calories you burn. The more fat you melt away the more definition you get in your arms, pecs and abs. The makers of INVIGOR8 were determined to make the first complete, natural, non-GMO superfood shake that helps you lose fat and build lean muscle. The result is a shake that contains 100% grass-fed whey that has a superior nutrient profile to the grain-fed whey found in most shakes, metabolism boosting raw coconut oil, hormone free colostrum to promote a healthy immune system, Omega 3, 6, 9-rich chia and flaxseeds, superfood greens like kale, spinach, broccoli, alfalfa, and chlorella, and clinically tested cognitive enhancers for improved mood and brain function. The company even went a step further by including a balance of pre and probiotics for regularity in optimal digestive health, and digestive enzymes so your body absorbs the high-caliber nutrition you get from INVIGOR8. While there are over 1000 testimonials on Amazon about how INVIGOR8 “gave me more energy and stamina” and “melts away abdominal fat like butter on a hot sidewalk”, what really impressed me was how many customers raved about the taste. So I had to give it a try. When it arrived I gave it the sniff test. Unlike most meal replacement shakes it smelled like whole food, not a chemical factory. So far so good. Still INVIGOR8 had to pass the most important test, the taste test. And INVIGOR8 was good. Better than good. I could see what Zee meant when he said his clients found the taste addicting. I also wanted to see if Invigor8 would help me burn that body fat I’d tried to shave off for years to achieve total definition. Just a few weeks later I’m pleased to say, shaving that last abdominal fat from my midsection wasn’t just easy. It was delicious. Considering all the shakes I’ve tried I can honestly say that the results I’ve experienced from INVIGOR8 are nothing short of astonishing. A company spokesperson confirmed an exclusive offer for Esquire’s readers: if you order INVIGOR8 this month, you’ll receive $10 off your first order by using promo code “ESQ10” at checkout. If you’re in a rush to burn fat, restore lean muscle and boost your stamina and energy you can order INVIGOR8 today at www.drinkInvigor8.com or by calling 1-800-958-3392.
T H E B E S T BA R S I N A M E R IC A , 2020
CAFE LA TROVA
Deep in Little Havana is chef Michelle Bernstein and barman Julio Cabrera’s homage to 1950s Santiago de Cuba. Cabrera is the keeper of the cantinero tradition, the hospitable, well-groomed style of bartending that originated in Cuba. It’s the real deal here, with focused drinks that go beyond the mojito (although they make an excellent one). Try the Presidente; it will put in doubt your loyalty to the manhattan. 971 SW Eighth Street —K. S.
With a wrap-around bar, starlight ceiling, and mod furniture, Mama Tried is like an idealized ’70s Las Vegas bar that crash-landed in downtown Miami. While manufactured dives can drip in irony, this place gets the delightful scuzzy details just right. Bonus to the cheap beers and cigarette machine: excellent cocktails. 207 NE First Street —K. S.
vodka made with a homemade energy drink and Champagne. 16 West Twentysecond Street —K. S.
NEW YORK
701WEST
UNDERCOTE
Sometimes you need to be discreet. In fact, sometimes you want to meet someone in a dark, plush corner of an Ian Schrager hotel bar that’s eleven floors above Times Square. That kind of discreet. You want the rendezvous to feel as dressed up and hassle-free as a Roxy Music song, so you decide
The design? Luxe terrarium bunker. The location? Tucked beneath Korean steakhouse Cote. The vibe? Exotic, classy, and unabashedly fun. And the cocktails match, thanks to the creative effort of head bartender Sondre Kasin. Try the artisanal Red Bull
Rule No. 290 SORRY. A MARTINI SIPPED THROUGH A CRAZY STRAW IS NO LONGER A MARTINI.
Miami‘s Mama Tried is the disco dive bar of your dreams.
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on 701West, where Michelinstarred chef John Fraser is cooking the bar snacks and where sips like the Jasmine French sound as if they could be James Bond characters. Don’t ask and we won’t tell. 701 Seventh Avenue, Eleventh Floor —J. G. BAR PISELLINO
Rita Sodi and Jody Williams, the partners behind the beloved Via Carota, know that details matter, and Bar Pisellino is a veritable shrine to those details. Amberhued and humming all day long, it is not an Italian bar as much as it is an eccentrically romantic fantasia of what you imagine a bar in Italy could be. If Sophia Loren suddenly walked in, you would not be shocked. 52 Grove Street —J. G. OJAI, CALIFORNIA TIPPLE & RAMBLE
If I were to design the perfect central-California wine bar, I would put it outside, so that drinkers could soak in the West Coast sunshine, swing in a hammock, order some empanadas and a platter of mezes and a bottle of Grüner Veltliner, and drink and eat at tiled picnic tables under an awning in the backyard. I don’t have to dream that up, though, because Tipple & Ramble already exists. 315 North Montgomery Street —J. G. PHILADELPHIA FIUME
Fiume feels like a studioapartment punk-rock pop-up even though it has been in operation for two decades. Last call comes
C H R I S TO P H E R G R I F F I T H ( B OT T L E C A P S ) . A D A M D E LG I U D I C E ( M A M A T R I E D ) .
MIAMI
MAMA TRIED
You want the rendezvous to feel as dressed up and hassle-free as a Roxy Music song, so you decide on 701West.
served on a big rock, and take in a stellar musical lineup at night that rivals those of spots in downtown Nashville. Yep, I love this place. 102 East Palestine Avenue —K. S.
when the bartender bangs a cymbal hanging from the ceiling. (“I’ve got a mallet for it,” he’ll tell you.) But watch how that bartender peels fresh citrus, grabs you a chilled glass, painstakingly eyeballs the ingredients in your Ortolan. This is a bar where people care—even if they act like they don’t. 229 South Forty-fifth Street —J. G.
glass draws you in for one thing: a martini—large, strong, ice-cold gin or vodka? Lemon twist or olive? Dirty or extra dirty? You won’t be judged for your preference. Stay for the piano bar in the back, which on any given night is packed with locals singing loudly, joyfully in unison. 4 Valencia Street —Omar Mamoon
FRIDAY SATURDAY SUNDAY
SAN FRANCISCO MARTUNI’S
5 BOTTLES WE FELL IN LOVE WITH WHILE HOME BARTENDING
C H R I S TO P H E R G R I F F I T H ( B OT T L E C A P S ) . C O U R T E S Y B R A N D S ( B A R , D R I N K , G I N B OT T L E ) .
The dark, dim bar Martuni’s is a San Francisco institution where everyone is welcome. The green neon outline of a familiar cocktail
SEATTLE BOTTLEHOUSE
If you have ever daydreamed about converting your place of habitation into a drinking establishment, consider Bottlehouse, the incarnation of your wish. It’s an actual house in the middle of the yoga-mom magnet that is Seattle’s Madrona neighborhood. Sit by the window, or out on the patio when the sun deigns to show up. The beverage list goes beyond wine and ventures knowingly into ciders, vermouths, sherries, and Pacific Northwest beers. You live here now, so you have time to try them all. 1416 Thirtyfourth Avenue —J. G.
T H E B E S T BA R S I N A M E R IC A , 2020
To get an idea of the ambition of the drinks at Friday Saturday Sunday, ask bartender Paul MacDonald to explain the cocktails he makes based on the Fibonacci sequence. They are mysteriously round yet angular. And delicious. But this place is far from precious—it’s always friendly, and hopping. You’ll run into someone you know any second now. 261 South Twenty-first Street —K. S.
NOLET’S GIN
A martini made with Nolet’s and its big, flowery notes will remind you of an eternal spring, even when you’re stuck inside. —K.S. THRASHER’S COCONUT RUM
Todd Thrasher sent me this coconut rum the week I would have been on an island vacation. It was a very good substitute. —K.S. 361667513
JAMESON COLD BREW
Ten hours after waking up to a cup of black coffee I wish I could season with whiskey, I get to close my laptop and drink something richer, sweeter, smoother, stronger: this, on ice, made all the better because I held out. —Sarah Rense TEMPUS FUGIT CRÈME DE BANANE
We made banana boats in Girl Scouts—bananas with all the fixings, wrapped in foil, then stuck in the coals of a campfire to melt into caramelized dessert goo. Sweet as sin, crème de banane over ice hits the same. —S.R. FIVE WIVES VODKA
The name makes it sound like a dad joke about polygamists (it’s made in Utah—get it?), but it tastes just like the air and water in its home state: pure. Swilling directly from a frozen bottle has never felt so virtuous. —J.G.
from top: Serious drink-making happens at Friday Saturday Sunday in
Philadelphia; Chicago’s Bamboo Room knows fancy daiquiris.
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State of Unreality
In this year of plague and quarantine and monumental disruption, a COLLECTIVE SENSE OF DISSOCIATION is settling in. Just in time for the election.
THIS ISN’T THE 2020 I ANTICIPATED IN DECEMBER. AS ONE
decade prepared to lap over into another, I planned to split time between Washington, where the president was being impeached, and Iowa, where the Democratic candidates seeking to pry his hands off the national executive would face their first real contest. I would have some happy holidays—I was a new grandfather— and get right into another campaign, with the third impeachment of a U. S. president as a kind of constitutional lagniappe. Then I got hit by a car. I cracked two lumbar vertebrae and got twenty staples in my head and spent Christmas and New Year’s flat on my back. I watched the deliberations of the House Judiciary Committee from
42
my hospital bed, doped to the gills and wondering whether Congressman Louie Gohmert was a hallucinatory event. I sat through much of the run-up to the Iowa caucuses and didn’t return to actual reporting until I went to Washington to cover the impeachment trial in the Senate, gimping around the Capitol at the conclusion of an exercise that was as fixed and foregone as any professional-wrestling match. Then it was on to Iowa for the last weekend before the caucuses. This got me there just in time for the entire process to eat its own entrails. The whole operation was so badly designed and poorly run that it never was clear whether Pete Buttigieg or Bernie Sanders had won the damn thing. But one bit was certain:
I S TO C K P H OTO / G E T T Y I M A G E S
by CHARLES P. PIERCE
NEW ELECTION, NEW YOU
One bit was certain: Joe Biden was as dead as Kelsey’s nuts and nobody could deny it.
Joe Biden was as dead as Kelsey’s nuts and nobody could deny it. What I did not know was that, on January 23, 2020, as I listened to the House managers present the impeachment case in the Senate chamber, this country’s very first diagnosis of a new virus had been made in Washington state. On that same day, the city of Wuhan, China, was locked down. The intelligence community had been warning the president about a potential pandemic for almost a month. On the morning of January 22, as his trial in the Senate opened, the president said, “We have it totally under control . . . . It’s going to be just fine.” A week later, on January 29, I was in the press gallery as senators questioned the managers on both sides. But at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, White House trade advisor Peter Navarro was informing the president that this virus had the potential to kill five hundred thousand Americans. The next day, the Senate was debating whether to subpoena witnesses. The president was dismissing the warnings of an impending pandemic from his secretary of health and human services as alarmist. On February 5, the president was acquitted, one day after he gave the State of the Union address. The mess in Iowa was gradually sorting itself out, and I was headed to New Hampshire. What I did not know was that there had been a briefing with White House officials on the coronavirus, and that the administration had declined to ask for any emergency funding whatsoever. On February 11, Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire primary. Joe Biden finished fifth, with a little more than 8 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, the National Security Council prepared a memo on February 14 discussing the logistics for a possible program of quarantine and isolation measures. The meeting to brief the president was later canceled. The last political moment I attended in the 2020 Democratic primary campaign came on February 27 in South Carolina. Already you could feel the improbable Joe Biden surge coming. That day, Senator Richard Burr, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told a gathering of donors that, according to briefings he’d received, the coronavirus could produce a pandemic as
huge and as lethal as the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed more than fifty million people worldwide. Burr had also recently made some stock trades. Joe Biden swept the South Carolina primary, and that momentum carried him on through Super Tuesday and beyond until finally, with the country on lockdown and tens of thousands of Americans dead from the virus, Biden clinched the nomination. By then, the campaign was an afterthought, and the impeachment of Donald Trump might as well have happened on the moon. The American people were hunkered down in their houses, looking out at their neighborhoods like fish in an aquarium. It was Zoomworld. The body count kept climbing. The president made daily appearances on the television, where he lied, and he whined, and he deflected all blame and responsibility onto whoever was handy. Joe Biden was largely absent. A shadow-play campaign, evanescent figures across an abandoned landscape, faceless and soundless, moved steadily toward a conclusion like a river that had gone underground. No, this wasn’t the 2020 I was expecting at all. THERE IS NO POSSIBLE WAY TO DETERMINE
how this election will play out. Long before the virus came ashore, it was going to be a grimy, grinding campaign, because that’s the only kind the incumbent president and his party know how to wage anymore. There was already disinformation, foreign and domestic, and an entire architecture of votersuppression tactics, ratfucking under the color of law, more widespread than at any time since the height of Jim Crow, thanks to the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act. These are the things that were already there, the existing mold and rot in the system, before the Republican Party saw fit to nominate Donald Trump, and before enough Americans saw fit to elevate him to the presidency. As a political creature, he exists in that mold and rot, feeds on it, and tells his voters that it’s all fine dining. It was the case in 2016; it’s still the case in 2020: Forty years of conservative ideology and Republican politics made someone like Donald Trump not only possible but inevitable. And that was
before the pandemic’s arrival threw everything into palpable unreality. Recently, in trying to get a grip on what the context of the upcoming national election might be, I came upon a psychological phenomenon called “derealization,” a dissociative disorder the symptoms of which include: • Distorted perception of time, space, and size of things around you. • Feeling of unreality from the world around you, as if in a dream or trance. • Feeling as if everything is foggy, fuzzy, or warped. • Sense of being disconnected from those around you as if you’re trapped in a bubble. • Thoughts of going crazy or being very ill. And it struck me that not only did that describe my own general feeling during this time of plague and quarantine, but also it fairly describes the political condition within which the president has succeeded politically, because it also fairly describes the world that he has created around himself his entire life. He creates derealized situations, milks them for every dime, mines them for every possible advantage, and then moves along to his next one, leaving his victims stuck in the fog of disbelief, both of what they have experienced and of how the president keeps getting away with it. There is no telling what the campaign will be like, except that its heart will be dark and ominous. There is even less telling what the election itself will be like, except that it will be foul and furious. The pandemic has sounded El Degüello for all of us. No quarter given. Your ballot or your life. We’ve already had a dry run of that in Wisconsin, where the state’s Republicans forced an in-person election in the teeth of the virus, only to lose it to an enraged Democratic turnout. However, about two weeks later, right on schedule, people in Wisconsin began to get sick. In this unprecedented time of plague and fear, we are asked to be separate and together and choose a president, to be together while we are separate in order to judge the fitness of a man whose demonstrable unfitness has helped create the derealized country that will somehow hold an election. No, this is not the 2020 I had anticipated. It is not at all that.
The past is prologue in Masha Gessen’s Surviving Autocracy. The Russian-born writer peers through her unique lens on autocrats to catalog the Trump administration’s assaults on American institutions. But we can’t just blame the Russians. For decades, as the book chronicles, we’ve fallen away from our identity as a nation of immigrants and invited the wolf in through xenophobia and an unholy marriage of politics and money. We can never return to who we were, Gessen argues; rather, we must aspire to a new national identity, centered on “dignity rather than power, equality rather than wealth, and solidarity rather than competition.” Now go check your voter registration. —Adrienne Westenfeld
John David Washington isn’t just “Denzel’s son.” He’s Spike Lee’s leading man. He’s the star of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. He’s John David Washington, dammit. And he’s here to stay. BY KATE STOREY PHOTOGRAPHS BY DOMINIC MILLER
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MASTER OF THE MOMENT
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SHIRT BY GIORGIO ARMANI; NECKLACE AND EARRING, WASHINGTON’S OWN.
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It took Washington decades to start acting.
JACKET AND SWEATPANTS BY BRUNELLO CUCINELLI.
THE INJURY THAT SET EVERYTHING IN MOTION
started with a violent pop. To demonstrate the noise, John David Washington juts his two front teeth toward his iPad and balances the screen with one hand. He scrapes the bottom of his teeth with the nail of his thumb. Fliiiiick. I’ve spent the past week talking with a dozen or so of the actor’s family members, friends, and colleagues. Under normal circumstances, I would spend many hours with Washington, over the course of days, soaking up as much as possible about this thirty-five-year-old who’s gone from NFL running-back hopeful to the world’s next great action star in just seven years. Because we’re both stuck inside weeks into the COVID-19 quarantine, we talk over Zoom. And I didn’t think I could tell the complete story of a man after just a couple video chats, so I reached out to everyone I could to help me understand him. But no one has told me this story yet. The story of the tendon. It was 2013, and he was training outside L. A., getting ready for a workout with the New York Giants. After two years on the practice team for the St. Louis Rams and a stint in Germany with the NFL European league during the off-season, he was in the U. S. doing explosion drills when he felt that pop. He looked down to see something resembling a worm wriggling beneath the thin skin of his calf. He knew it was his Achilles. And he knew his football days were over. He’d worked so hard, through so many injuries, and now he was terrified about what would come next. As a kid, he’d harbored dreams of acting, and despite his dogged pursuit of a football career, the idea of becoming an actor was always in the background. It was a constant push and pull. Now that he could no longer play professionally, there was nothing stopping him. “A part of me felt like it got shot and killed, it got assassinated. All of that was fear based, of not knowing if what I thought was my destiny, if I’m even worthy enough to claim it,” he says. “It was time to go up onstage.” THOSE EARLY YEARS IN A CAREER ARE RAW
and painful and embarrassing and thrilling and magical as we begin to figure out what we’re good at. We fail and falter, and then, if we’re lucky, we start to succeed. But if you’re going into the family business, the success comes with secondguessing and constant comparisons—there’s an imaginary bar set before you even get started. Most of us would run like hell to avoid the shadow of our parents—and most of us don’t have Denzel Washington as a father. Or Pauletta Washington, actress, singer, and pianist, as our mom.
Washington had heard stories about his parents meeting on the set of the TV movie Wilma and of his mom performing on the soundtrack of Philadelphia. And he remembers his dad coming home with a horn from the set of Mo’ Better Blues, “playing all the time, all the time.” There was the time his father dyed his black hair a deep red and studied Islam to get into the character of Malcolm X for Spike Lee’s eponymous 1992 film. Washington (father) and Washington (son) walked down the streets of New York City in the summer of 1990 as the former rehearsed scenes from Richard III for a Shakespeare festival. The younger Washington sat in the theater in Central Park along with hundreds of others watching his dad recite those same lines onstage, hanging on his every word. There was no one cooler than his father. No one who could perform this magic trick, acting, quite like him. It took Washington decades to start acting. And when he started, he did it in secret. Most of his family didn’t even know he was auditioning—until he’d already landed Ballers, which went on to become one of HBO’s most watched comedies. Somewhere along the way, he realized what it meant to be the son of an acting legend, to have those hundreds of strangers in Central Park and millions around the world idolizing your father. It meant making new friends, only to have them ask for your dad’s autograph. It meant having people listen for your dad’s voice when you spoke, look for his face in yours. So he pushed it down, focused on football, where a helmet covered his face and where nobody could accuse him of getting anything because of his last name. And yet Washington, John David—the Washington we’re here to talk about today—will star in the most anticipated movie of the summer: Christopher Nolan’s top-secret and most ambitious project yet, Tenet. He’ll be playing a James Bond/Jason Bourne–type character. The men who lead Nolan’s films are superstars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman, Matthew McConaughey. And Washington is coming off a Golden Globe nomination for Lee’s BlacKkKlansman. He is now poised to become a household name, someone instantly recognizable, Hollywood’s next great leading man. This is John David Washington’s moment. When we talk over Zoom in mid-April, he’s styled himself in gym shorts, a bandanna with white stars wrapped around his hair, and a long-sleeved black shirt with a sepia photo of his maternal greatgrandmother silk-screened onto it. The entertainment industry, along with the rest of the world, has ground to a halt. I ask if he’s working on anything in self-isolation, and he holds a red notebook up to the camera. That’s where he writes his lines, or motivations for whatever character he’s play-
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And when he started,
he did it in secret.
ing at the moment. He rewrites the same words over and over and over. He has filled notebooks all over the house. Sometimes he writes horizontally, in a circle, or in different colors. It helps with his dyslexia. Sometimes he writes out his prayers. Though we’re two strangers in different time zones staring at screens, it’s impossible not to notice that Washington is one hell of a storyteller. When he really gets into a memory, his iPad slips and I stare at the collar of his shirt and scruffy chin, not wanting to interrupt. “Oh, sorry!” he says when he notices, then he keeps talking. He learned to spin a yarn from his grandparents, sitting around a fire in their North Carolina yard. It’s storytelling that makes him love acting. But when I ask him about his dad, he sounds ever so slightly different. Rehearsed. People have been asking him the same questions about his dad his whole life. But now, this time, he’s telling John David’s story.
CHAPTER ONE
Those who know Washington know his movie marathons. They’ve sat for hours, watching three, four, five films back to back. They’ve seen him study each movement onscreen and then recite back dialogue, practice accents. Within minutes of the start of our first conversation, he is giving me his take on The Sopranos and Sex and the City—both shows that we missed the first time around because we were in college. I’m a season into The Sopranos, watching it for the first time during quarantine. He got into SATC when he was in the NFL, buying the pink book with the full series on DVD. He tells me all about how that era of HBO made him fall in love with TV. “Charlotte [from SATC], that was my girl. I love her,” he says. “I love what they do with Carmela, Edie Falco’s [Sopranos] character, in the later seasons. I love what they allow her to do and where she goes, especially when . . . I don’t want to give it away, but I just think it’s some of the most brilliant acting I’ve ever seen.” Like everyone else, he’s been watching Tiger King lately: “I’m really curious about what happened to old girl’s husband . . . . Honestly, I don’t know if I should say this, but I want to know more information. They should reopen the case is what I think. Coincidence? I don’t think so.” Washington has been analyzing—really studying— filmmaking since he was a kid. Perched with his mom in the video village, where key crew members sit on a movie set, he saw characters come to life on the small monitors, little snippets of the stories being created just feet away. When he was on set for Malcolm X, Spike Lee asked his parents if their six-yearold son could be part of the final scene, a flash-forward to decades after the civil-rights activist’s death, in which schoolchildren shout, “I am Malcolm X.” (“I didn’t have to be an Einstein to grab [Denzel’s] kid and put him in the movie,” Lee tells me. “That’s a good film to have as a first film on your résumé.”)
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Washington went by JD in school—except to his three younger siblings. “He never let us call him that when we were kids, only his friends . . . . We weren’t cool enough, lol,” his younger sister Olivia says in an email. If you ask those who knew him best then, they’ll tell you JD was a sports fanatic. They’ll say they barely remember him mentioning acting at all. “He would literally have a football in his hand, just waiting for all the kids to show up, and then we’d start playing football every single morning,” says photographer and longtime friend Dominic Miller, who shot Washington for this story. “That was his love: sports.” When he began playing football at the end of elementary school, he fell in love with the competition and the attention. Football felt like his own domain, though his father coached his teams, sometimes borrowing, at least in Washington’s mind, from his most famous monologues for inspiration. It was Washington’s second year of tackle football, in seventh grade, when he started to hesitate before contact. His dad took him into the backyard of the house and had him hit a punching bag again and again. It felt like all night, even if it was probably only a few minutes. It was like a scene straight out of He Got Game, in which his dad played the father of a star basketball prospect. And when it came time to play, and his dad gathered the team around on the sidelines to give them an impassioned speech to take them through the end of the game, the words sounded familiar. This is from the Malcolm X speech, right? Washington thought. That Malcolm X role was the one that propelled his dad into bona fide stardom. Washington was only a kid when it came out, so all he saw was the change in how people treated his dad. He was no longer the only one idolizing Denzel. As a child,
Washington memorized every line in the 1989 film Glory so that he could act out the parts Morgan Freeman, Matthew Broderick, and his father played. One Christmas, his dad had his Glory costume, a Union Army Civil War uniform, recut to fit his young son. Washington almost never took it off. Now the whole damn world seemed to love his dad. By the time he got to high school, Washington had become something of a “smart-ass” (his word). Nothing serious. He made jokes in class and got a little disruptive—enough that his high school art teacher, Elizabeth Tremante, sought the advice of another teacher, a friend of the Washingtons’. The friend recommended she try to connect with the teen over his family’s art collection. Didn’t go over well. “When I suggested that he write about a favorite piece from this collection for a class assignment, he responded acidly, ‘Sure, maybe you can just come to my house so my father can give you a tour,’ ” Tremante remembers. “Even though it was hard to hear him say that, I felt like he was telling me something important.” In that moment, she had tremendous compassion for him; how is the teenage son of a great craftsman to carve out an identity for himself? “He was raw, smart, and idiosyncratic; he had a lot to say as an artist, and I urged him to continue painting in college,” Tremante says. “JD was a star athlete in high school, but I always referred to him as a painter.” As a high school art student, he focused on challenging stereotypes of young black men through his work. One piece—inspired by his own driver’s license but featuring a character with a full Afro, a gold tooth, a gold chain, and a big earring— stands out in his mind still. In the painting, Washington’s name is listed as “D’wan Nigg.” Race: “Negro,” and in the place of CALIFORNIA across the top it read AFRICALIFORNIAN. “I said every time we get pulled over, this is what the cop sees,” Washington says. “They don’t see an actual name; they don’t care that I’m a student or any of that. They see a D’wan Nigg. That’s not my name; my name is John David Washington.”
CHAPTER TWO
His colleagues said it was a worthless mission: No way was Morehouse athletic director Andre Pattillo going to get Washington to come play for the school. It wasn’t known as a football powerhouse, and Washington, a standout running back, had just played in the high school All-American game and was considering San Jose State, Grambling, maybe even a spot at UC Berkeley. But Pattillo was confident, flying to Los Angeles from Atlanta to meet Washington and watch him play. When Pattillo offered him a football scholarship,
Washington took it; his cousin Rick, his “hero,” was at Morehouse, so that’s where he went. It turned out Washington loved being at a historically black college. “I saw quite a bit of AfricanAmerican prestige and upper-class elements mixed in with some people that really got lucky and worked hard and got out of their situations to try to make a better living for themselves by going to this school. So I got a well-balanced meal of experience and people from all different places of the United States that looked like me.” And it was a place where people didn’t know who he was. At football camp the summer before his first semester, he made a pact with his new teammates: Don’t tell anyone who my dad is. “I just wanted to blend in. I would lie about my name sometimes. And we’d have this alias of Mikey that my teammates called me.” It worked for a while. But after one of his first games, he woke up in his slim dorm-room bed to find his friends from the team howling with laughter. He opened his eyes to see a newspaper inches from his face. The headline began with his father’s name. “You done got found out, bruh,” a friend shouted. “They found you; you ain’t never going to be yourself.” As his senior year approached, the NFL was starting to seem out of reach. Washington hadn’t quite given up on that childhood acting dream, and he thought, This could be the time. He could give up football and switch to acting. He called his mom to confide that he didn’t think he was good enough to become a pro football player. Nope. “She said, ‘No, you can’t act. Don’t quit football,’ ” he remembers, adding quickly, “Now she swears she didn’t say it like that. She wanted me to see [football] through. And I’m glad she did. I’m glad she did.” So he stuck with it, and by his last season, he’d set a career rushing record at the school. Pattillo began getting calls from pro scouts. Just before graduation, in the spring of 2006, came the NFL draft. Washington was back home with his family in Los Angeles. His mom nervously cooked for two days straight: macaroni and cheese, ham, fried chicken, turkey, collard greens. Every kind of cake you could imagine. The draft came and went, and his name was never called. The next day, however, he heard from his agent: He’d been invited to the St. Louis Rams camp as an undrafted free agent. “You might as well have thought we were celebrating like I was the firstround draft pick. We went berserk,” he says. “We were all yelling, screaming, crazy, crazy, crazy.” He’d made it on his own merits. But unlike in those early weeks at Morehouse, he couldn’t escape his last name. When his teammates were getting ready for practice, they’d request that Washington recite Training Day quotes in his dad’s voice. He was
used to it, though, and he played his heart out. But Washington never made it off the practice team and kept getting hurt knocking into the enormous defensive players. He spent Tuesday nights watching movies in his teammate Steven Jackson’s home theater. “I will tell you this . . . . I’ve seen The Godfather several times,” Jackson says, “but he’s the one that actually got me to see the beauty in the storytelling of it.” In between seasons, Washington accompanied his father to a meeting for the 2010 film The Book of Eli. Codirector Allen Hughes was struck by the young football player’s input and asked his father if he would mind if Washington joined the project. Denzel said he didn’t mind, and Washington gave it a shot. It was a chance to get back onto a movie set and to remain safely behind the camera. While being the child of a star has its drawbacks, an undeniable advantage is access. Getting onto that set was a first step into the business that most people could only dream of. But once he was there, he had to prove his worth. “I always say, what I got out of the Denzel relationship was John David. I could care less if I ever work with Denzel again. I love Denzel, though—I don’t want that to sound like whatever, I love Denzel— but what I got out of that relationship, that movie, was John David,” Hughes says. “When we were doing the sound mixing, he was onstage for like two weeks, and he became quickly, just with those wily industry veterans in the sound department, everyone’s favorite person in the building. He has a really impeccable sense of a moment, and when something is happening, when something magical is happening . . . I call him a moment master.” Then, in the summer of 2013, he tore his Achilles tendon. Pop. “One night I get home from work, and he’s sitting in complete darkness at our kitchen table with crutches by his side, his head slumped,” says Washington’s younger brother, Malcolm, who’d just moved back home from college. “I’d watched my brother play football for twenty years: I’ve seen him win, I’ve seen him lose, I’ve seen him hurt, but never defeated. I walked over and saw medical information on the counter: He’d completely ruptured his Achilles. We sat there in silence, both thinking the same thing: It’s over. I’d never see my brother play football again.”
CHAPTER THREE
It was Washington’s twenty-ninth birthday. July 28, 2013. He’d just had surgery to repair his Achilles. He wouldn’t say he was depressed, but he was as down as he could be. He’d talked to his uncle, who told him he didn’t have to go into acting. There were plenty of other things he could do. He could
“That’s when it hit me: ‘Okay, if I mess this up, my career is basically over.’ ”
SHIRT BY DIOR MEN; TROUSERS, WASHINGTON’S OWN.
use his sociology degree from Morehouse. He could coach. He’d be great! “What he told me . . . it scared the hell out of me,” Washington says, tugging on the gold chain around his neck. It’s the same one his uncle wore before he died. “He was right. I could be a coach, I could be a teacher, I could do that. But it scared me because that means you’ve been running from this. You use football as an excuse. You really wanted to do this even before football. It just so happened football kept working for you. But if you go and be a teacher, or work in the business field, you will forever regret this. That’s what was scaring me.” On his birthday, he’d been sending most of his calls to voicemail. But a family friend, agent Andrew Finkelstein, kept calling. Finkelstein had heard from casting director Sheila Jaffe, who remembered reading somewhere that one of Denzel’s sons played football, and she was wondering if he was still playing—or if just maybe he’d be interested in talking about this role she had on an HBO show about pro football players? The show was Ballers, and Jaffe had seen more than a hundred men for the role of Ricky Jerret— former college ballplayers, actors. He was envisioned as a linebacker, but at this point, she’d broadened her search: Anyone who could understand this character, that balance of cocky and obnoxious and vulnerable, would do. Calling Finkelstein was a Hail Mary. “Now, granted, I’m on a heavy medication,” Washington says. “I’m feeling very, very looseygoosey, if you will. I don’t feel the most confident. I’m pretty flammable at this point. I just felt very exposed. And he sends the script and I read it, and I’m like, well, ‘This is cool.’ ” If he was going to do acting, though, he wanted to do it right—take acting classes, learn the craft. Finkelstein had a different idea: Just go to the audition. Get used to rejection. Then start your classes. Washington told only his mom he was going out for the role, and the two of them got to work. They went over lines, and she quizzed him over meals. “I was just so pleased that he had something that would take his mind off his injury,” Pauletta says. She couldn’t help but recognize how happy it made him. Washington couldn’t drive because of the boot on his foot, so Pauletta dropped him off at the audition and he hobbled up the steps, still loopy from pain meds. Nearly a dozen auditions later, Washington got the role. It wasn’t until then that he told his dad he was going to be an actor. “There was disbelief,” Washington says. The reaction couldn’t have been further from that celebration when he was signed by the NFL years earlier. His dad “kept asking questions like ‘For HBO? Like Home Box Office Entertainment? Who? Really? But what’s it called? The Rock?’ He just kept asking ques-
tions like ‘Is this real?’ I guess he had to check it with his agents to make sure it was real, and he was happy for me, and then he said exactly what I was going to do anyway, but ‘As soon as this is over, you gotta go learn. You gotta go learn how to do this.’ ” Washington flew back and forth between filming in Miami and New York, where he took a scenestudy class on Thursday nights at HB Studio in downtown Manhattan. When he was assigned a scene from the Amiri Baraka play Dutchman, he called another family friend for guidance. That summer, veteran actor Stephen McKinley Henderson was on Broadway with Washington’s father in A Raisin in the Sun, a few dozen blocks up from his acting class. Henderson was friends with Baraka and had both starred in and directed the play, so a couple times a week, he’d head downtown to help Washington and his scene partner with the class assignment. When Henderson went back up to Broadway, Denzel wanted updates. “‘ Well, how’s it going, man? How’s it going? Does the guy got any chops? . . . I don’t want to encourage him if he . . . ’ ” Henderson remembers Denzel wanting to know. “And I said, ‘Well, man, I’ve got to tell you, he’s got some chops. He does. He definitely does.’ John David understood acting is not so much pretending as really doing and really being there with the other person. When he got it philosophically, he was off to the races. That was it. He was off to the races.”
CHAPTER FOUR
He was in a hotel room when the phone buzzed. “Yo, this is Spike, call me.” Spike Lee has known Washington since he was born. But it’s not as if they were on texting terms when Washington got that message while in Cincinnati filming the 2018 movie The Old Man & the Gun. Anyway, Lee said there was this book he wanted Washington to read. It was the true story of Ron Stallworth, an African-American police officer who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s. Washington read the book, not quite understanding why. Did Lee just want his opinion on it? A couple days later, he called the director back. Washington: “This is incredible.” Lee: “So, you do like it?” Washington: “Yes!” Lee: “All right, see you this summer.” Lee told Washington he couldn’t tell anyone— not even his agent—until the script was done. But just like with Ballers, Washington told his mom. In one of the first table reads, in Lee’s office, he sat with costars Adam Driver and Topher Grace to his left. Behind him hung an oversize poster for Mo’ Better Blues, of all movies. The fictional story of a jazz trumpeter had a certain mystique to Wash-
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ington as a kid. It came out when he was a first grader, but his parents didn’t let him watch it until he was twelve. And now here he was: a man in his thirties sitting in the seat his dad had sat in, a seat he’d avoided for decades, with his father staring down his neck. “That’s when it hit me: ‘Okay, if I mess this up, my career is basically over,’ ” he says with a hint of a smile at the memory of it. “It hit there a little bit, I got to say. The pressure hit for a moment, for those two hours, and then I was back. I was okay after.” When Washington talks about his first steps into the industry, it’s clear how heavily it all weighed on him then. But you get the sense he’s come out on the other side. There’s a distance in his voice and a sense of pride—almost like he’s discussing another person. “Every year that I see him, he’s more and more comfortable with himself and he’s just excited for what’s to come . . . . He’s just blossomed, honestly, in the last five years,” says Zoë Kravitz, who has been friends with Washington for years. Each New Year’s Eve, their families travel together for a vacation, and as someone who knows what it’s like to be the child of icons (her mother is Lisa Bonet, and her father is Lenny Kravitz) and to find her own success, she says, “I always say it kind of evens itself out. You know what I mean? I wouldn’t say it’s harder. You get into a room earlier, easier; you get an agent easier; there are things about it that are definitely easier. But then you have people saying, ‘This person doesn’t deserve to be here,’ which just doesn’t feel good and can’t help your confidence. And then you have someone saying, ‘Oh, this person isn’t as good as their parent.’ ” Fellow actor and friend Regina King says, “I won’t name any particular actors, but sometimes you’ll see a career take off quickly and it feels like it’s taking off quickly because of hype. With John David, it’s taken off quickly because he’s really good, and because he studies the art form, and because he really is submerging himself into the character.” 2018 saw the release of BlacKkKlansman, along with Monsters and Men, in which Washington plays a police officer whose colleague shoots and kills a black man. Both characters are big departures from the sitcommy Ricky Jerret. Washington’s BlacKkKlansman character, Stallworth, is at turns earnest and snarky as he sits for long phone conversations with Topher Grace’s David Duke. In Monsters and Men, his Dennis Williams is a serious family man who is trying as hard as he can to turn a blind eye to the racism of his fellow cops out of selfpreservation. Watching himself up there, seeing his character lie about his colleagues to protect his son and wife, Washington was disturbed. He remembered that his acting teacher at HB Studio had taught him never to judge the actions of your character. And here he was, furious at Williams as
he watched himself inhabit the man onscreen. He left the screening and cried for days. Then he called his old teacher Rochelle Oliver. “I was pacing around my apartment in the dark. Why didn’t he do something? Why did he make that decision? Why did I make the decision as an actor? Was I supposed to do something else?” he says. “It makes me cry to talk about it,” Oliver tells me. “I said, ‘What happened to you is a testament to how beautifully and how deeply you work. It was about your child, protecting him, and it was so personal to you, and that’s what you were crying about.’ ” Right around that time, BlacKkKlansman premiered at Cannes. Spike Lee sat behind Christopher Nolan. Every so often, Lee snuck a glance at the writer-director to see how he was reacting to his film and his star. Lee recounts this story and then tells me to take down a note to read to Nolan when I talk to him later in the week. “Ask him, say, ‘Dear Chris, this is your cinema brother, Spike Lee. I’m looking forward to seeing Tenet, starring the great, great John David Washington. Thank you for casting him and making yourself look good. Thank you for casting him, for hoisting him into the stratosphere. My question for you is: Did you decide that you’re going to cast John David Washington at the world premiere of BlacKkKlansman?’ ” So I ask. Nolan laughs. “Oh, very much,” he says. “By the way, it was a pretty intense experience to sit in front of Spike Lee at the premiere. And no, it very much sort of felt like destiny to me. That was an extraordinary screening, and the audience response to Spike’s movie was really electric in that room at Cannes; it was quite something. And I just felt a sort of magnetism there. It really was an important thing for me in terms of feeling like it was meant to be somehow.” Nolan had first seen Washington in Ballers years before. He had no idea who he was—didn’t know his name or who his dad was. He was just struck by his charisma onscreen. Nolan, who writes many of his films, including Tenet, generally tries not to think about casting while he’s writing his scripts. But with Tenet, he simply couldn’t get Washington out of his head. So he called the actor, who was still filming Ballers at the time, into a meeting. “In my first conversation with him, he just felt like somebody on the cusp of really great things. And so from a selfish point of view as a filmmaker, you immediately think, I’d like to be a part of that actor’s journey. I’d like to harness that energy that he has,” Nolan says. The role Washington has taken on is that of a pragmatic secret agent with a genuine warmth and humanity. Washington’s history as an athlete helped convince Nolan as well. “The film has more action than any film I’ve ever done. It has a plethora of action sequences
that he’s taken the lead in. So he gets to do all kinds of different things. That athleticism also puts itself into the way he walks down the street and the way he talks and the way he moves,” Nolan says. “I remember years ago reading an account of when [Bond franchise producer] Cubby Broccoli first saw Sean Connery and considered him to play James Bond. He looked out the window and watched him walk away at the end of the meeting and said, ‘He moves like a panther, he moves like a cat, like a catlike grace,’ and I think John David has his own version of that. In every move, there’s this extraordinary athleticism and energy. This kind of controlled energy just fits this type of character so well. He’s just extraordinarily graceful.” Washington stars opposite Robert Pattinson, and the success of the film rides on the chemistry between the two, Nolan says. The actors met shortly before filming, when Pattinson invited his new castmates to his thirty-third-birthday party in L. A. “He turned up late, and by that point I was very much in a convivial spirit, and then it was him and Aaron Taylor-Johnson turned up, and I think I was just screaming and shouting at them for like an hour, and I suddenly regretted everything I said afterward, and so I thought maybe we’re off to a really bad start, but he was very sweet about it,” Pattinson says. “He’s so positive and not positive in a really annoying way, like he’s definitely . . . you can definitely push him a little bit to be naughty. He doesn’t mind when other people are naughty.” The cast traveled to seven countries over several months to film the movie, which Nolan has called his most ambitious yet. As with all of his films, the public knows nearly nothing about the premise of Tenet, beyond the fact that it’s an espionage thriller. “It’s an incredibly complicated movie, like all of Chris’s movies. I mean, you have to watch them when they’re completely finished and edited three or four times to understand what the true meaning is,” Pattinson says. He pauses for a moment, then continues with a self-deprecating laugh. “When you’re doing them, I mean, there were months at a time where I’m like, ‘Am I . . . I actually, honestly, have no idea if I’m even vaguely understanding what’s happening.’ And yeah, I would definitely say that to John David. On the last day, I asked him a question about what was happening in a scene, and it was just so profoundly the wrong take on the character. And it was like, ‘Have you been thinking this the entire time?’ . . . There’s definitely a bond in the end in kind of hiding the fact that maybe neither one of us knew exactly what was going on. But then I thought, Ah, but John David actually did know. He had to know what was going on." Nolan’s films often have a complex action scene that fans end up obsessively dissecting. In Tenet, the action is relentless. After wrapping, Washing-
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ton was physically wrecked, unable to run for more than a month. “There were some times I couldn’t get up out of bed. A couple weeks in, I was worried, very concerned I wasn’t going to be able to finish this thing, and I didn’t want to tell anybody because I was like, ‘Oh, I will die for this,’ ” Washington says. “It was like, in the NFL, I felt like I needed to be there every day to keep my job, and I felt the same way about this. This film deserves it. Even if I break something, I am not going to say nothing to nobody until this thing gets done.”
EPILOGUE
We wrap up our Zoom call, an awkward thing to do with someone with whom you’ve spent hours discussing every detail of their life but whom you may never talk to again. He says he’s got to get ready for dinner; it’s his twin siblings’ birthday, and he’s getting dressed up in a suit and tie (and bare feet) to eat with them—they’re quarantined together—and they’ll be having Pauletta’s famous mac and cheese. As he heads off to his family dinner, I think about movie stars. Not celebrities, who seem to pop up every day, but Movie Stars. The kinds of actors who draw people to theaters in droves, who inspire directors, whose names we shorten as if we know them personally: Newman, Eddie, Cruise, Denzel, Brad, J-Law. And I think about Washington, the Washington we’re talking about today. I get the distinct feeling from him, and dozens of people who know him, that he’s about to break into this stratosphere. There’s a quiet confidence that appears to show he knows it, too. What will we call him when he reaches this level of renown, when the rest of the world feel like they know him in the way all the people I interviewed do? John David? JD? JDW? When we talked about the start of his second career, Washington described “chopping wood.” Yes, there would be headlines invoking his dad. Yes, he booked a flashy HBO show after his first time auditioning. Yes, he could have coasted from there. But he continued to chop wood, flying back and forth to the acting studio, spending his off time studying with veteran actor Henderson. It’s built up to this moment. A moment on pause. Tenet posters with Washington’s image are hanging in theaters that are still and empty, time capsules reminding us what we looked forward to before the pandemic struck. All of us are waiting for it to end, for something that resembles normalcy to return, when we can walk into a movie theater and allow a Movie Star to transport us elsewhere for a couple hours. When this does happen, there will be Washington, our new movie star— John David, JD, JDW—filling the screen.
SWEATSHIRT BY LOUIS VUITTON MEN’S; JEANS BY LEVI’S.
20 LIVES, 20 PERSPECTIVES
W H A T W E ’ R E F
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truths, but they don’t provide much comfort. With 3.9 million confirmed cases and 270,000 deaths* in 187 countries on every continent but Antarctica, the coronavirus pandemic has already altered daily life beyond recognition. It will shape our lives for years to come, mostly in ways that are impossible to predict, let alone understand. ¶ Yet faced with the biggest public-health crisis of the cen-
tury, we need all the comfort and understanding we can get. So Esquire turned to the best source we know of: the stories of others. We asked twenty people—from an eight-year-old in Indiana to the governor of Washington—to share their experiences in the first few months of the outbreak. Each of their stories is a reassurance that none of us are facing this alone. Here are their first-person accounts of humanity’s stand against the virus.
* STATISTICS, HERE AND THROUGHOUT, ARE AS OF PRESS TIME.
Background: A fluorescent photomicrograph of a monkey cell infected with a candidate vaccine for COVID-19. Red staining shows the cell’s structural scaffolding, blue marks its DNA, and green reveals the “spike” protein it produces when infected with SARSCoV-2, as the novel coronavirus is known. Foreground: We asked participants to submit photographs of the world right now through their eyes—plus a selfie.
THE BIG-STATE LEADER JAY INSLEE GOVERNOR OF WASHINGTON
Olympia, Washington State population Date of the first confirmed COVID-19 case in the U. S., a thirty-five-year-old man in Snohomish County 7.6 MILLION: JANUARY 21:
A F T E R OX YG E N , the most important thing
is human contact. N OW W E ’ R E P H Y S I C A L LY disconnected from one another. The only weapon against this virus at the moment cuts against ten thousand generations of human society. That’s why it’s such a devious beast. W E ’ V E H A D considerable success in our early efforts with social distancing. There’s been massive support for these efforts, even though they’re extremely difficult. We have shown grit and resilience and a commitment to one another. And we’ve shown a very strong commitment to science, to making decisions based on data, not ideology. T H E R E S E E M S T O be no bottom with
Donald Trump.
20 PERSPECTIVES
W H A T W E ’ R E LEARNING
YO U A LWAY S T H I N K he’s reached it—violating every concept of humanity, empathy, and truthfulness—and there’s just no bottom. He continues to astound us with his acceptance of outright deception. L E T M E G I V E you an example. Larry Hogan is the Republican governor of Maryland. He’s been doing some good work for his state. He’s chairman of the National Governors Association. He’s been trying to get Trump to understand that we need more test kits so we can do more testing. Trump in his press conference yesterday said that Larry didn’t know how to get testing going in his state, that Maryland has a whole bunch of labs that Larry didn’t know about. Larry knows about those labs. Nobody can do the tests because we don’t have kits. Larry’s been telling Trump for weeks, and instead of listening to him, Trump goes out and lies. About a Republican governor! N O W, T H AT S H O W S you the depths of depravity and deceitfulness and outright inhumanity of this person in the White House.
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Top: “Fire Brigade,” which Inslee, a doodler, drew on planning documents before his April 21 announcement about mass testing and contact tracing, a process that he’s compared to a fire brigade. Bottom: “Grandson,” a portrait of the governor’s grandson Chase. The whole family keeps in touch via daily video chats.
L O O K , T H E R E ’ S E N O R M O U S frustration and economic dislocation. Every Washingtonian feels it. But let me do the math here, hold on just a second—okay. About one in three thousand citizens has joined Trump’s crusade on science. T H E O T H E R 9 9 . 8 percent want to save their families from dying of COVID-19.
—As told to Eric Sullivan
COURTESY SUBJECTS
20 LIVES,
THE SMALL-TOWN LEADER JUDITH NISSULA MAYOR
Cascade, Idaho 1,000:
The town’s population
“IDAHO’S YEAR-ROUND PLAYGROUND”:
Shortly before the pandemic, Nissula applied for Cascade to appear on a new HGTV show called Home Town Takeover. The premise: to renovate an entire community in need.
Early on, we had people driving up from Boise and Meridian to buy toilet paper. That caused a lot of friction. People were upset. I’m sure that not one of the out-of-towners was worried about whether someone else might have needed the toilet paper. People are like, “Oh, it’ll never happen here.” Well, who’d have thought we’d have an earthquake? And then, a week and a
The town’s tagline
half ago, we had an earthquake. 6.5 magnitude. City Hall suffered damage. We are a very small city staff: one part-time and six full-time employees. We have a ten-bed hospital. It won’t take much to overwhelm our town. My worry, as a citizen and as the mayor of Cascade, is if we have anybody pass away as a result of the coronavirus. I will proba-
bly know who that is, and I’ll probably know a lot more. As I’ve looked at the faces of the city employees and the people around town, the thought has crossed my mind. Conceivably, they could not be here as a result of this virus. And what can I do? What can the city do? Some people wonder why we can’t just roadblock the state highway coming into town. They get wrapped up into wanting the city to have more power than
it does. But we can’t do that. We can’t just stop people. I hope people come out of this thinking, when they buy toilet paper, Who else am I impacting here? —As told to Justin Kirkland
“IT WASN’T CLEAR THAT THIS WOULD BECOME A PANDEMIC. PEOPLE WHO SAY THAT—THAT’S REVISIONIST THINKING.” THE ONE WHO CALLED IT HELEN BRANSWELL INFECTIOUS-DISEASES REPORTER, STAT
Boston DECEMBER 31: Date she first publicly mentioned the virus, on Twitter HER TWEET: “Hopefully this is nothing out of the ordinary. But a @ProMED_mail posting about ‘unexplained pneumonias’ in China is giving me #SARS flashbacks.” 41: Number of COVID-19 stories she’d written by the time Trump declared a national emergency, on March 13
I W R OT E A STO R Y today about Ebola. It’s
the first time since January 7 that I’ve written about anything that wasn’t COVID-related, if that gives you any indication. I U S E D TO B E based in Toronto, and I covered the SARS outbreak there, in 2003. Even now, I can remember the points at which things happened in that outbreak. To the date. While on a walk one evening in April, Branswell photographed the figures that make up the Boston Women’s Memorial, which includes this sculpture of Lucy Stone, a nineteenth-century suffragist and abolitionist. “They were all wearing masks,” Branswell tweeted. “Which is more than I can say for a lot of the Bostonians.”
W I T H T H I S O N E , I struggle to remember if
something happened in like January or February; it just all seems like one long month. It’s been a bit of a blur. Time has melted. AT T H E B E G I N N I N G of the emergence of a
new disease, there’s good reason to think that
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it might take time for it to adapt to efficiently infect people. The thinking would be that if you saw something early enough—and it looked like the Chinese had seen it pretty early—that you might be able to get a handle on it if you got rid of the source. LATER, IT BECAME apparent that by the time
people thought this thing had zero problem moving from animals to humans, it was already a human pathogen. I T W A S N ’ T I M M E D I AT E LY clear that this was going to be a pandemic. People who say that—that’s revisionist thinking. YO U M I G H T S AY, “Well, everybody should have been focused on being ready.” Before then, probably. I do think people moved too slowly. I also think there was some denial involved. IT BECAME CLEAR when China locked down Wuhan [on January 23]. They were effectively crippling their economy. Nobody does that if you can avoid it. —As told to Dave Holmes
THE TEACHER AKELA LEACH FIFTH-GRADE TEACHER, LANIER ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
Tulsa 39,105: Number of students enrolled in Tulsa public schools 83%: Percentage who are economically disadvantaged
THE EIGHTYEAR-OLD KATIE H. SECOND GRADER
Winona Lake, Indiana 124,000: Number of U. S. public and private schools closed for the remainder of the school year 55.1 MILLION: Number of K-through-12 students now being homeschooled
Katie named her new pet guinea pig Pepper.
I ’ M G E T T I N G M O R E time with my family and especially with my dad. He finally has some days off. M O S T LY, I ’ V E B E E N sad, but then I
get really happy. It’s just weird not being close to people that I really want to be by. That’s the sad part. The happy part is that we get to do a bunch of fun stuff. I play outside. I ride my bike. We haven’t done that in a long time because of school. So I’m happy to be home.
20 LIVES, 20 PERSPECTIVES
W E ’ V E B E E N D O I N G surprises. Like, my parents will take me and my sister somewhere we don’t know about. When we got my guinea pig, they made it something like, “We’re going to Dad’s work to feed the fish.” But we didn’t. We went to the pet store and got my guinea pig. I M O S T LY L I K E holding my guinea pig. That’s kind of my comfort animal. S O M E T I M E S I D O N ’ T know if people are going to be sick, or if they’ll bring it into our family, or if the guinea pig’s going to be sick, or if something’s going to happen that we don’t expect. —As told to Adrienne Westenfeld
“I MOSTLY LIKE HOLDING MY GUI W H A T
THE EXOTIC-ANIMAL VETERINARIAN CHRISTIAN WALZER
W E ’ R E
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, HEALTH, WILDLIFE CONSERVATION SOCIETY
Bronx, New York
LEARNING
NADIA: Name of the tiger that first contracted COVID-19 at WCS’s flagship park, the Bronx Zoo EIGHT: The number of big cats at the zoo that have tested positive ( five tigers and three lions)
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There is no “I’m at work” and “I’m at home” anymore. The day just blends together. When I speak with other teachers, we’re like, “We would be doing this right now.” Or a calendar alert will pop up about a field trip that was supposed to happen. There are all these reminders that these things aren’t happening. We’re grieving for the end of the school year
that will not happen. Kids can sense when you’re not being real, so because they have a lot of faith in you, you also have to show some sense of vulnerability. They do expect you to have the answers, but they also
feel some comfort when you say, “You know what? I don’t know this, either.” They know you’re being honest. Putting on a brave face doesn’t mean acting like everything is normal. —As told to A. W.
THE VIROLOGIST PAUL DUPREX DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR VACCINE RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
Pittsburgh 95: Number of vaccine efforts worldwide 10 TO 15 YEARS: Typical timeline for vaccine development 12 TO 18 MONTHS: Goal for COVID-19
Leach documented the shutdown in spring of the Tulsa public elementary school where she teaches.
VIRUSES ARE BEAUTIFUL.
Viruses are biologically intriguing. Viruses will always surprise us. I love viruses. I respect viruses. A L L T H E G R O U P S pursuing a
vaccine stay in touch via weekly calls run by the World Health Organization. It’s wonderful. And you know what? Good luck to every one of them. I LOVE THE FACT that it’s a race,
Duprex holds a culture plate containing the Oropuche virus, from Trinidad and Tobago, against an image on his office wall of the poliovirus.
but I don’t care about winning. I care about participating. Because things that I learn along the way might help something else get across the finish line. IT’ S NOT A VACCIN E until it’s a product. If someone says they have a vaccine right now, they don’t. They have a vaccine candidate. H O P E I S A R E A L LY important
word, actually. Overpromising and not being honest about where you’re at is one of the most reprehensible things a person can do. B U T A L S O , W E hope that humanity will solve this problem. Hope drives us to be creative, collaborative, energetic, hardwork-
COURTESY SUBJECTS. ©WCS (MARKET). SOURCES FOR DATA POINTS: EDUCATION WEEK, THE NEW YORK TIMES, TULSA PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
NEA PIG. THAT’S KIND OF MY COMFORT ANIMAL.” We’ve been studying the wildlife trade for more than a decade. We recently found that as you follow a rat from the field to a market and then into a restaurant, there’s an increase in coronaviruses. Our hypothesis is that as the rat moves along, it gets
very stressed, which compromises its immune system. It starts shedding viruses as it meets other animals along the trade chain. Such interactions reassort these viruses, create new ones. Then the person who slaughters the animal is exposed.
“The commercial wildlife trade is quite a good system to create new virus,” Walzer says.
The first tiger at the Bronx Zoo tested positive a couple of weeks after the release of this Netflix series Tiger King. So the news got a lot of traction. I haven’t seen the show. I’m European, so that it’s possible to privately own tigers, or any kind of wildlife—that’s just appalling. At the moment, all research indicates that while cats— domesticated or otherwise—
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are able to contract the virus, they develop a very mild sickness. There’s no indication right now that cats, or dogs, can transmit it back to us. My father sent me a message when the news broke about Nadia: “I thought social distancing from big cats was the norm.” And that’s the point. In the wild, if you’re closer than six feet to a tiger, the last of your worries will be the coronavirus. —As told to E. S.
ing. And humanity has done it before. We’ve eradicated diseases, such as smallpox. We have diseases under control, such as measles and polio. I A M CO N F I D E N T that the scientific community will come up with a solution. B U T I W O N ’ T give false hope.
—As told to E. S.
I do not feel like I’m on the front lines. I’m in the medic tent that’s away from the front lines, a safe haven for those who are. I try to help move my clients from anxiety to fear. Lots of people have said, “I’m really anxious.” But almost no one says, “I’m scared.” It’s such a vulnerable experience. Saying that takes a lot of courage. The way I practice, and how I see the world, anxiety is not an emotion. Anxiety is a cognitive process—thoughts, thoughts, thoughts—that keeps us out of touch with our emotions. Down
here [gestures at chest] is where we can get grounded, stabilize. Up here [gestures at head], we tend to stay in the storm. During the first week of true social distancing, most of my clients were saying, “I’m not worried about me. I’ll be fine.” There was tons of anxiety, but it was outwardly focused. “I’m worried for all of those people.” I was so surprised. No one came to my virtual office saying, “I need to talk about my fear of mortality.” They were running from it. When I would press, as uncomfortable as that
was, it was such a huge relief. Anxiety is not a problem that needs solving; it’s a voice that needs to be heard. Do I take my own advice? I try to, and I fail all the time. I am a human being. I suffer from the humanity of myself, just like my clients do. This is a reminder that neither of us has the answers
and that there isn’t anything that will rescue either one of us from this. But also, we’re together in this moment. I’m learning a new level of . . . not self-reliance, but resilience. There’s not a sense of “I got this.” It’s more like “I don’t got this, and I will still be okay.” —As told to Sarah Rense
Conducting telehealth sessions with clients has “forced me to notice what I’m seeing on their face,” Loudon says, “and to ask them much more directly about what’s happening right now.”
THE THERAPIST MARY LOUDON COFOUNDER, THE SEATTLE CLINIC
Seattle 45%: Percentage of Americans who say the pandemic has impacted their mental health
THE 24/7 SUPPORT RICH HAM 20 LIVES, 20 PERSPECTIVES
ADVOCATE MANAGER, NATIONAL DOMESTIC VIOLENCE ABUSE HOTLINE
Austin 250%: Percentage increase of violence in couples experiencing high levels of financial stress as compared with that of couples with low levels
W H A T W E ’ R E
T H E WAY W E talk to victims and survivors has changed, particularly in places where resources have been affected by the virus. Staying with a family member may not be an option because of social distancing. Some safe shelters are not able to take people in.
A L O T OF contacts are really showing up for that validation. By just being there, by listening to their stories, we’re letting them know that we understand what they’re going through. We try to instill some semblance of hope in their situation.
S O WE G E T creative. Can we help with hotel vouchers? Are there safe places nearby to park their car while they search for that next step?
T H E WO R K that we do—as with any trauma work—definitely takes a toll. I’ve been amazed by our team’s resilience and how well we’ve stayed connected virtually. Having others around who can support you, who can be there for you, who can encourage you and lift you up, is very powerful. That’s always important, but even more so now. —As told to S. R.
WOR ST - C A SE S C E NA R IO,
if a contact is unable to get out, we talk about ways to stay safe while at home. “Is there a place in the house that you can go every day? Just to have five minutes to yourself, to think about all the things that you’ve done to get to this point. How strong you are, how resilient you are.”
LEARNING
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C O U R T E S Y S U B J E C T S . S O U R C E S F O R D ATA P O I N T S : K A I S E R FA M I LY F O U N D AT I O N , N AT I O N A L I N S T I T U T E O F J U S T I C E , T H E W A S H I N GTO N P O S T.
“I MAY DIE, BUT AT LEAST I’LL KNOW THAT I DID ALL I COULD TO CONTRIBUTE, AND TO MAKE MY FAMILY PROUD.”
THE ER PHYSICIAN ENRIQUE LOPEZ CRITICAL-CARE PHYSICIAN, PHOEBE PUTNEY MEMORIAL HOSPITAL
Albany, Georgia $118 BILLION: Amount the federal government spent from 2011 until 2017 on protecting the nation from health threats $6 BILLION: Amount that went to assisting the country’s network of more than six thousand hospitals
L A ST W E E K , A L BA N Y, Georgia, was in the top five for cases per capita on the planet. We’re not New York. We’re a small town filled with farmers, and doctors and nurses from the hospital, and it’s a much simpler life. We got knocked down, and as a community we’re picking each other back up and continuing to fight. T H E O T H E R DAY, I stood in front of fourteen monitors. I looked at those monitors, and I realized that all of those patients were going to die and there was nothing I could do. It was this overwhelming feeling of powerlessness. W E H U G E AC H other. We’re not supposed to, but we hug each other. I T R I E D T O SAV E a patient today. I was walk-
ing down the hall to check on somebody’s ven-
“I’m in my truck, looking at my daughter, and all I want to do is hug her,” Lopez, a father of three, told Esquire. He’d just returned home from work. “But I don’t want her to touch me.”
Chaplain Gerne leads nurses through a body-scan meditation held in a serenity space, one of several throughout Mass General.
COURTESY SUBJECTS
THE HOSPITAL CHAPLAIN KATE GERNE CHAPLAIN, MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL
Boston
What’s so hard is that no one with COVID can have visitors. I find that I’m doing a lot of calls to family members of COVID patients, because they’re not allowed to come in. That’s very emotionally draining on me, too. There’s sorrow. There’s grief. My skills for doing a spiritual assessment over the phone have definitely improved. I have
had some really amazing conversations with patients. I called this young guy, in his twenties, who had COVID. Toward the end of our conversation, he was like, “I was not expecting this today. This was really good. Thank you so much.” We prayed together, and it was really meaningful for him—for someone to reach out and acknowledge his suffering and ask if he wanted to pray. I had a situation where a gentleman who’d been married for over fifty years was only allowed to stay with his wife for an hour. [She didn’t have COVID-19.] I blessed her with holy water and said the Prayer of Commendation and provided spiritual support. He was at risk just by being in the hospital, but he had to say goodbye. We were on the elevator walking out of the hospital together, and he was like,
61 S U M M E R 2020
tilator, and a nurse came out from another patient’s room and said their ventilator broke. I went in. The machine was spewing the patient’s ventilatory gases around the room. I could feel it blowing in my face. I didn’t have the time to put on my biohazard suit, so I just put on my N95 mask. But I could smell it. I could taste it. And I was like, I’m going to die. It’s all you can think about as you’re troubleshooting to save this person. So do I have it now? T H E O T H E R DAY, we had a patient with the same thing—their ventilator broke, and the virus was spilling into the room. I put on my biohazard suit, so I was safe. I told the three nurses, “Don’t go in there. I’ll take care of this.” Doing it alone would’ve been very difficult, but I wasn’t going to risk their lives. So I walked in, and I didn’t hear the door close, because the nurses walked in behind me. All of them. They said, “We’re not leaving. Let’s do this.” M Y W I F E M A D E me a little office, where I have posters of my dad. He did free heart surgery on babies in Mexico. I look at those posters and I’m filled with pride, because I know that he made a difference. I want my children to feel the same way. I may get the virus and die, and that would be tragic, but at least I’ll know that I did all I could to contribute, to make a difference, and to make my family proud. In our greatest time of need, I was there. —As told to Brady Langmann
“We were just having coffee this morning.” I’m really disappointed in the church. I just feel like more priests need to be here in the trenches. Because that’s what the church has told people their whole lives. And then you have an eighty-year-old patient who thinks these sacraments are so important, and they aren’t available because of the virus. The church talks about presence. You can’t do confession over the telephone. You can’t do the sacrament of the sick over the telephone. We are an embodied faith. You need to be there with the person, holding their hands, anointing them with the oils, hearing their confessions. There’s something so healing about touch. I just—I will never take being in a hospital for granted. —As told to D. H.
THE CLIMATE SCIENTIST
THE PRISON REFORMER
GAVIN SCHMIDT
ALEXA VAN BRUNT
DIRECTOR, NASA GODDARD INSTITUTE FOR SPACE STUDIES
New York City
DIRECTOR, MACARTHUR JUSTICE CENTER CLINIC, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
GLOBAL CHANGES CAUSED BY COVID-19:
Chicago
GREENHOUSE-GAS EMISSIONS:
–8%
THE REASON we haven’t done a good job preparing for climate change is the same as why we weren’t prepared for a pandemic: People don’t see things unless it’s under their nose.
IF YOU BREAK YOUR ARM, you rush to the ER. That’s an acute problem in need of immediate attention. Climate change is more like high cholesterol. “I’ll start that
The concentration of nitrogen dioxide, a by-product of burning fossil fuels, over New York City in March 2019 (top) and in March 2020 (bottom). The remarkable drop in emissions reflects human inactivity because of quarantine.
diet on Monday.” We’re less attuned to the chronic problems that are just as serious. THE PANDEMIC HAS BLOWN that
theory to pieces. When it came down to this really acute problem, people hesitated. SOME STILL CLAIM it isn’t as bad as they say, or that the silver bullet will arrive soon. PEOPLE ARE SO comfortable with
the status quo. They can’t even imagine deviating from it until it’s too late. —As told to D. H.
4,500: Approximate number of inmates in Cook County Jail 919: Number of confirmed cases at the jail, including staff WHICH MAKES IT: One of the nation’s largest known clusters of COVID-19 infections
driver of the pandemic in this city, so we all need to pay attention to what’s happening there. We heard from many, many people inside. They were crammed into cells or packed into dorms. The jail lacked sanitation and cleaning supplies. There were no masks. There was no social distancing. There was a lot of fear. The only way we can move on from this is to address some of the underlying injustices that this crisis has laid bare. The vast majority of the people locked up there are pretrial, many
“FOR SOMEONE WHO’S ‘NOT I SURE MANAGED TO BRING You want to call us “essential,” you’ve got to think about our health. Our health is just as essential. Just like this country is playing catch-up now because we weren’t prepared—the same thing happened at the warehouse. In the middle of March, we actually had a party with a DJ and a popcorn machine. I was like, “Where’s the caution?” There was none. There was no safety. It was business as usual. On March 24, my colleague tested positive. We were both supervisors, process assistants. There was no transparency. Management was told not to tell our employees, but I couldn’t stand for that. I’d built relationships with these people. I saw them more than I saw my own kids, so for me not to say anything was just insanity. So my coworker and I came back to the building off the clock, on our own free will, and we sat in the cafeteria break room and told the truth. And that’s when we started to form a coalition. The front-liners, the first responders—we see that there needs to be a change in the balance of power. Capitalism profits off of lower- and middle-class people, especially during this time, when it’s life or death. And these billionaires, they’re still
making money, yet they can’t protect their workforce. I have no respect, man. They should be ashamed of themselves. We can’t have this happen again. We cannot. I heard that I’m “not smart, or articulate.” That was funny to me. For someone who’s not smart or articulate, I sure managed to bring the world to my home. For someone who makes twentyfive dollars an hour to be talking to the richest man in the world, that means that I’m speaking the truth. It cost me my career, but it was worth it. —As told to S. R.
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THE WHISTLEBLOWER CHRISTIAN SMALLS FORMER PROCESS ASSISTANT, AMAZON FULFILLMENT CENTER
Staten Island, New York “HE’S NOT SMART, OR ARTICULATE”: Amazon general counsel David Zapolsky on Smalls, in leaked notes from a meeting of senior leadership that included Jeff Bezos “DISGRACEFUL,” “IMMORAL AND INHUMANE”: How New York attorney general Letitia James described Smalls’s firing
After a coworker at JFK8, an Amazon Fulfillment Center on Staten Island, tested positive for COVID-19, Smalls led a protest on March 30 for stronger safety measures. He was fired the same day.
R E D U X / B R YA N A N S E L M ( S M A L L S ) . J E E N A H M O O N / R E U T E R S / N E W S C O M ( S M A L L S ) . S A R A H - J I ( P R OT E S T S I G N ) . C O U R T E S Y S U B J E C T S ( S C H M I DT, B R U N T, F O S S I L F U E L S , FA L LO N ) . S O U R C E S F O R D ATA P O I N T S : T H E N E W Y O R K T I M E S , C O O K C O U N T Y S H E R I F F ’ S O F F I C E .
–50% AIR TRAFFIC: –60% ROAD TRANSPORT:
My colleagues and I filed a lawsuit against the sheriff of Cook County to protect the well-being of those locked up in Cook County Jail, one of the biggest COVID hot spots in the country. It’s not for money. We’re trying to change the way things are on the ground. Because Cook County Jail is in the middle of Chicago, it’s a part of the community. It’s not just the people in the jail who are at risk. It’s the jail staff, who go home to their families, who in turn go into the community. The jail is a huge
An inmate at Cook County Jail, in Chicago, sends a message to the outside world.
because they can’t afford bail. They haven’t been convicted of anything, and they haven’t had their day in court. They’re presumed innocent. Why do they have to fight for soap? I’ve been working at a card table set up in the bedroom. My husband and I switch off using it. We have a one-year-old and a four-year-old. There’s a bit of chaos—say, asking a judge to hear our request for release with a baby screaming in the background. Judge is like, “Counsel, what is that noise?” “A leaf
blower outside!” It can be hard to have gravitas. I’m very worried about my children. At the same time, I’m incredibly worried about the forty-five-hundred-plus people in the jail. Switching between those two viewpoints is very . . . I feel unbalanced sometimes.
20 LIVES, 20 PERSPECTIVES
—As told to B. L.
W H A T
SMART, OR ARTICULATE,’ THE WORLD TO MY HOME.”
W E ’ R E LEARNING
THE ENTERTAINER JIMMY FALLON THE TONIGHT SHOW HOST, The Hamptons, New York MARCH 13: Date The Tonight Show suspended production MARCH 17: Date The Tonight Show: At Home Edition premiered on YouTube MARCH 23: Date At Home Edition premiered on NBC, alongside previously aired segments
I H A D T O D O something. You have to be there for the people—they were there for me for twenty years. I just didn’t know what I was going to do. But sometimes that’s the start of the best ideas. You just have to make a decision to do it. A F T E R D O I N G T H E show for ten years, you just keep adding more stuff, getting slicker. The production value heightens. When I’m wearing a suit and makeup and all that stuff, I really feel like there’s a lot of phoniness, or stuff that can come across as phoniness. The audience is laughing, but maybe they’re just being polite. Maybe what I just said wasn’t funny, I don’t know. And maybe you tense up. I’m not really a stand-up comedian. I don’t want to tell funny stories. B U T W H E N YO U peel it all back, it’s like,
All right, who are you? It forces your brain to be creative in ways that I haven’t done in years. I have no crew, I have no staff here, I have no lighting. My wife is my director and
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my camera operator. I don’t know if it’s fight-or-flight, but your instinct takes over. It shows who you really are. It shows your character. F O R M E , T H E C L O S E S T thing to this experience was New York after 9/11. I was on Saturday Night Live and I didn’t know what to do, where to turn, or whom to talk to. I remember going to the late-night hosts— I’d watch Conan, Jay Leno, David Letterman—to hear what they were saying. And I remember David Letterman had a great line about courage: that sometimes pretending to be courageous is just as good. T H AT ’ S W H AT I ’ V E learned through this: My role is to be there for people in some way. I’m lucky to be in a position to maybe help someone get through this by giving their brain a little balance with all of the awful out there. W E ’ L L S E E W H AT we end up with when this is over. The show will look different. Then again, it might feel just right. I D O N ’ T K N OW if I can put on a suit again. I would feel odd coming out in a suit. —As told to Matt Miller
THE CLASS OF 2020 GRAD DACAVIEN REEVES MOREHOUSE COLLEGE
Memphis 19.5%: Percentage of employers who have rescinded full-time job offers or are considering it
ALICE WONG FOUNDER, DISABILITY VISIBILITY PROJECT
San Francisco 66 CENTS: The amount a worker with a disability earns for every dollar a person without a disability earns.
W H E N T H E PA N D E M I C
began in this country, it was like, “Don’t worry, it’s only life-threatening for those who are high-risk. It’s just a bad flu for the rest of us.” In this critical time, when scarcity is a reality, you see the hierarchy. Certain groups are valued over others. This is the world that so many disabled and chronically ill people already live in. Our lives are still seen as expendable. Now the magnitude is much greater. THIS
PA N D E M I C
advocating for forever. You see artists streaming performances. You see people working remotely. When disabled people asked for those very reasonable accommodations, we’ve been told, “You can’t do that. It’s too hard.” Twice I was invited to be on a panel at South by Southwest, and each time I said, “I don’t travel. I want to do this via Skype.” Both times I was told no. “There are too many issues.” That was the excuse! M Y H O PE for coming out of this pandemic is that we don’t return to the status quo. Many don’t realize that “normal” was actually not great for a lot of people. Just because all of the nondisabled people go back to work—or to Burning Man, or to Coachella—that doesn’t mean we should stop thinking about accessibility. —As told to Madison Vain
HAS
brought about changes to accessibility for things that disabled people have been
6 4 S U M M E R 2020
“WE MUST TALK TO LIVES WILL BE SAVED THE AUTOCRAT WHISPERER FIONNUALA NÍ AOLÁIN UN SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR ON COUNTERTERRORISM & HUMAN RIGHTS
Minneapolis 70 TO 90%: Percentage of Americans willing to yield certain freedoms to support public measures to slow the virus
E D D I E H E R N A N D E Z P H OTO G R A P H Y ( W O N G ) . C O U R TESY SUBJECTS (REEVES X2, NÍ AOLÁIN).
THE DISABILITYRIGHTS ACTIVIST
As a resident advisor, I had to come back to campus after spring break to pack up and help out the dorm. Most of my friends were gone. I cried on my last day, when I moved out, because I was like, I can’t say goodbye to my friends. This is the last time I will ever see this campus as a student. I won’t get this chance ever
THE FUNERAL DIRECTOR
again. My senior year ended abruptly, and what I learned was to never take for granted the time you have for people. A lot of us come from unstable homes. So the difficult part was finding somewhere that’s stable so we could finish out the school year. Some of my peers are living in one-bedroom apartments, and they go into the bathroom for class. Or people don’t have the Internet. Some are homeless right now. I’m starting at JPMorgan in the fall. I’ll be in Plano, Texas, with the global finance and business management analysis program. I’m not really concerned about whether I’ll still get hired. I’m wondering, When will I be able to start? —As told to J. K.
Reeves didn’t get to say goodbye in person to many of his friends, shown here before the pandemic.
STEPHEN KEMP OWNER, KEMP FUNERAL HOME & CREMATION SERVICES
Southfield, Michigan AFRICAN-AMERICANS MAKE UP:
14 percent of Michigan’s population 41 percent of its coronavirus-related deaths Kemp at his funeral home, outside Detroit, with a refrigerated truck storing the remains of people waiting for cremation. County authorities have been overwhelmed, which has delayed the issuance of death certificates.
20 LIVES, 20 PERSPECTIVES
W H A T W E ’ R E LEARNING
RYAN GARZA/DETROIT FREE PRESS/ZUMA PRESS (KEMP) SOURCES FOR DATA POINTS: CENSUS BUREAU, NAT’L. ASSOC. OF COLLEGES AND EMPLOYERS, PBS, CBS NEWS.
EACH OTHER. A LOT MORE IF WE KNOW OUR NEIGHBOR.” One of my big concerns is the potential for the abuse of power by authoritarians that rises in parallel with the pandemic under the guise of responding to a global health crisis. Historically, when a nation augments its arsenal of emergency powers, it’s very hard to put them back in the box. So there is grave danger that this repurposing isn’t short-term, and that the costs are going to be extremely high on fundamental rights, like the freedom of movement, speech, assembly, participation in elections.
When people are afraid for their own health and that of their family members, we tend not to balance that immediate fear with the long-term harm to our freedoms and rights. That’s precisely the sort of imbalance that many states are counting on right now—that individuals will give up the idea that there is a realm of privacy that is rightly theirs, that individuals will give away the most intimate of their health and biometric data to the government. There isn’t a tension between rights and security. They’re
absolutely necessary to one another. A life in which your physical health is guaranteed but every other right has been taken away—that would be meaningless. —As told to Gabrielle Bruney
F U N E R A L D I R E C TO R S A R E community peo-
ple. We’ve always been that way, especially in the African-American community. I always say the leaders in the community are the doctor, the lawyer, the minister, and the funeral director. I T S E E M S S O impersonal now that we can’t see each other, we can’t touch one another, we can’t hug each other. We can’t even have a church service. If we do, there’s only ten people, and they’ve got to sit apart. You know, I’m afraid that if people get used to this, when their loved one dies, they’ll say, “Oh, just cremate them and we’ll call you later.” I tell families: Whether it be in your backyard or at the bar or at the funeral home—anywhere—celebrate their life in some way. R I G H T N O W T H E political environment that we have—us versus them, and it’s happening to them so it won’t happen to us—has to change. I mean all over the world. I’m not trying to be profound here. I’m just trying to be real. My issues are your issues; your issues are my issues, especially when it comes to communicable disease. Y E ST E R DAY, T H E R E WA S a big protest in Lansing against Governor Whitmer by people who said that she’d taken away their freedoms. “Don’t tread on me” and all this kind of thing. They have no conception of my community, our lives in the city. All they know is “I live out here on five acres, and I can’t mow it. You’re stepping on my freedom!” Meanwhile, our people are dying because they have no choice. There may be ten members in one house. How do you tell somebody they’ve got to self-isolate when there’s multiple family members in one house? W E M U ST TA L K to each other instead of being
DON’T MISS THE TWENTIETH PERSPECTIVE ON WHAT WE’RE LEARNING: THAT OF EUGENIO MESA, AN ENVIRONMENTALSERVICES WORKER AT ONE OF NEW YORK CITY’S BUSIEST HOSPITALS. TURN TO PAGE 4.
6 5 S U M M E R 2020
so separated, but that’s the political environment we’re in. We don’t even know our own neighbor, so we can’t detect if he or she is sick. Or you never noticed that they’re not out of the house. I think we need to get back to that. A lot more lives will be saved if we know our neighbor. —As told to D. H.
W O R L D T R AV E L E R
Nothing inspires wanderlust like being cooped up at home. Luckily, you don’t need to rack up the frequent-flier miles to indulge in the coolest patterns and fabrics from far and wide. Designers are doing it for you. Take Etro, which this summer returns to its first love: paisley, a centuries-old motif with roots in the Middle East but design traditions from pretty much everywhere on earth.
THIS PAGE, LEFT: SUIT, SHIRT, SANDALS ($470), AND NECKTIE BY ETRO. RIGHT: JACKET ($3,570), SHIRT ($670), TROUSERS ($690), SANDALS ($470), NECKTIE, AND BELT BY ETRO. OPPOSITE: JACKET ($6,350), TANK ($710), TROUSERS ($920), AND SANDALS ($930) BY HERMÈS; SHIRT ($650), SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO; BAG ($11,700) BY FENDI.
6 6 S U M M E R 2020
Fashion’s best
PHOTOGRAPHS AND ARTWORK BY BELA BORSODI
escapology
summer offerings are a ticket to everywhere (even if you stay in one place)
e s c a p o l o g y
E S C A P O L O G Y
EASY NOW
Dressing up doesn’t mean anything close to what it did a few years ago. So why should dressing down? Suddenly, going too casual feels a bit below the bar. Upgraded warmweather tailoring in whites and neutrals from the likes of Giorgio Armani lets you embrace a little elegance but be comfortable (in both mind and body) as you do it. Whoever said relaxing meant relinquishing your sense of style?
THIS PAGE: JACKET ($3,595), TROUSERS ($2,295), SNEAKERS ($975), AND SUNGLASSES ($353) BY GIORGIO ARMANI; SNEAKERS ($550) BY SANTONI. OPPOSITE: HAT ($730), CELINE BY HEDI SLIMANE; JACKET ($4,600), PAJAMA SET ($1,800), T-SHIRT ($650), AND POCKET SQUARE ($90) BY BRIONI; SLIDES ($695) BY DOLCE & GABBANA; BAG ($1,890) BY AMIRI.
E S THIS PAGE: SWEATSHIRT ($890), SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO; JACKET ($1,345), SWEATER ($4,845), TROUSERS ($975), AND KERCHIEF ($295) BY DOLCE & GABBANA. OPPOSITE: JACKET ($2,620), SHIRT ($920), TROUSERS ($640), BAG, KERCHIEF ($240), SANDALS, AND SOCKS ($210) BY PRADA; SNEAKERS ($775) BY DOLCE & GABBANA.
TURN IT UP
Logos may be on the wane in fashion, but some designers are still making strong statements with color and pattern, from over-the-top heraldry and multicolor sneakers at Dolce & Gabbana to high-tech color blocking at Prada. It’s a different breed of bold, designed to catch the eye but not
F O R S TO R E I N F O R M AT I O N S E E PA G E 9 4 . J E A N - F R A N Ç O I S J O S É ( H E R M È S LO O K ) .
screaming for the wrong kind of attention. If you know, you know.
a
FULL
s f
American sprinter Justin Gatlin won age, thirty-eight, a failed doping test
BY BRUCE SCHOENFELD
SPEED
AHEAD
the Olympic gold in the 100-meter dash—sixteen years ago. Despite his in his past, and setbacks caused by the pandemic, he’s still a contender.
P HO T O G RA P HS BY EV E E DE L H E I T
O
O N A B R I G H T M O R N I N G I N F E B RUA RY,
when we still gathered without fear, the sprinter Justin Gatlin steered his BMW into a parking lot at Montverde Academy, a private preparatory school west of Orlando. He walked uphill to a rubbertopped track. Until shelter-in-place restrictions made it impossible, Gatlin and around a dozen other runners, all Olympians or Olympic hopefuls, trained here five days a week under Dennis Mitchell, himself a former Olympian. “If they train with me,” Mitchell said, “they’re at least hopeful.” Gatlin stretched in the sunshine. He joined a conversation about shows some of the runners were watching. He was familiar with most, but not all, of the references. “I’m from another generation,” he said sheepishly. Gatlin, thirty-eight, has a patch of cotton-ball white hair. Nobody has seen white hair on an Olympic sprinter, and nobody his age has ever run as fast. He is ranked second in the world at 100 meters, behind Atlanta native Christian Coleman, who is fourteen years younger. After warming up, the sprinters gathered at one end of the track to practice their starts, those first five or six strides that often determine the outcome of a race. From the grass infield, Mitchell shouted when to get ready and when to go. The runners left the blocks and ran hard a third of the way down the straightaway, then eased to a stop and walked back. Even among these elite runners, Gatlin’s grace stood out. He ran as if he could go on forever. But as he shuffled back to the starting blocks, he looked geriatric, as if every joint ached. The transformation was so striking that I asked another sprinter, Sha’Carri Richardson, if Gatlin was injured. Richardson, who is twenty, laughed. “He just needs a little more time than the rest of us.” Gatlin and Richardson acted like siblings. She poked him and jabbered at him. He swatted her away, pretending that it bothered him. She told me later that she considers him a role model. “Before knowing him personally, I thought, It’s a little crazy that he’s still running. Doesn’t he want to retire? Now that I’m out here, seeing him run, it’s inspiring.” Sprinting is a sport for young legs, at least a decade younger than Gatlin’s. Sixteen years ago, at the Athens Olympics, he won the gold medal in
run in the finals of that event five Olympics apart. If he merely gets to the starting line next summer,
pic history.
the sport for four years. Gatlin denies the findings, but suspicion has followed him ever since. No numbronze in the 100 meters in 2012, the silver in 2016, pionships—can change that. In fact, the medals ger Gatlin defies the odds and stays competitive, the more suspect he seems.
race from here to there. There are no sticks or gloves,
later, one of them reaches the finish line first. last can be as little as a quarter of a second. Usain Bolt,
100 meters in his last Olympics by less than a tenth of a second. From reaction time and running technique to nutrition and sleep habits, each difference between runners has enormous consequences. One of those differences is age. Into their twenties, sprinters can build power, which increases speed. By the time they reach thirty, their bodies have started to decline. Testosterone levels drop. Muscle growth slows. Fast-twitch fibers can begin to atrophy. In most sports, those changes can be mitigated by a mastery of technique. Tom Brady isn’t going to be a starting quarterback at forty-three because he has the strongest arm or the quickest step. But sprinters can’t train their way to young musculature, or strategize around its absence. In 1986, the International Olympic Committee changed its rules to allow professional athletes to compete. From then on, winning an Olympic gold medal came with substantial tangible value, in the form of bigger sponsorships and appearance fees. That enabled many top Olympians, track stars included, to make real money. When Bolt retired, in 2017, his estimated worth was nearly $100 million. With so much at stake, it was inevitable that competitors would seek advantages, licit or otherwise. In 1988, at the first summer Olympics held under the new rules, the Canadian Ben Johnson ran the 100-meter dash in 9.79 seconds, a world record. Three days later, he was disqualified for a post-race urine sample that included traces of a steroid. Of the
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in a doping scandal at some point in their careers. In 2001, while at the University of Tennessee, Gatlin tested positive for amphetamines. He was banned from competition for two years. He was reinstated after one year, once he proved he’d taken Adderall since he was a boy. Nevertheless, when elevated levels of testosterone were detected in his urine in 2006, Gatlin—then the reigning Olympic champion—was considered a repeat offender. He faced a lifetime ban. He agreed to cooperate in another case, against his coach, Trevor Graham, which helped reduce his suspension to eight years, and eventually to four. Gatlin went to what he described as “that dark place.” He moved back into his parents’ home in Pensacola, Florida. He gained twenty-five pounds. He tried out for two NFL teams and made neither. He felt his career slipping away. “I know what it feels like to wake up and not be able to run,” he said. “You don’t feel whole.” When the ban ended, in 2010, Gatlin was twentyeight and far from fit. But he had more to prove. “I wanted to finish the book,” he said. “To get to the end.” He moved to Orlando, where several top coaches are based, and started to run again. T H E E V E N I N G A F T E R P R AC T I C E AT
Montverde, at a Caribbean restaurant in Orlando, Gatlin was talking about sprinting technique. At
With Florida under quarantine and group practices on hiatus, Justin Gatlin has been training on his own, in the suburbs outside Orlando. The Olympic sprinter, thirty-eight, still hopes to compete at the Summer Games in Tokyo, which have been postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic.
one point, he stood up from his goat stew to demonstrate how he’d learned to run. The place was closing, so only a few diners were around to see him positioned between the Formica tables. “If you watch old videos, from 2004, 2005, I used to run like this,” he said. He lifted one knee above his waistline, then kicked his foot forward, as if he were trying to toe-tap the adjacent table. “Doesn’t look bad, right? But every time I stepped that far, I had to wait for my center of mass to cross my body to get to the next step,” he said. “Time wasted!” Still, with that approach, Gatlin held the world record for 100 meters—though for less than a week.
At a meet in Doha in 2006, his reported time was 9.76, one hundredth of a second faster than the existing record. Then the IAAF, track and field’s international governing body, announced that his time to the thousandth place had been 9.766, which rounded up. Instead of breaking the record, Gatlin had to share it. By the time he returned to competition, the distinction was irrelevant. Usain Bolt, five days before his twenty-third birthday, had run 9.58. And it wasn’t only Bolt. As many as five sprinters were regularly running as fast as Gatlin ever had. “There are always these revolutions in sports,” Gatlin said.
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“It just happened that one of them took place in my event during the time that I was away.” A handful of coaches had started using highspeed video and analytic measurements to help fine-tune race techniques. “It was a paradigm shift in sprinting,” says Ralph Mann, the former hurdler and Olympic silver medalist hired by USA Track & Field to teach the methodology. In 2003, Michael Lewis published Moneyball, which explored the use of nontraditional statistics in Major League Baseball to gauge player value. “That showed us that there were ways to find a little bit of difference that actually made a big difference,” Mann says. As made clear by video analysis, a sprinter optimizes propulsion not by pushing off the back foot but by anchoring the front foot and pulling the body forward. A foot in front of one’s body, Mann notes, generates a force that can be “three, four times your bodyweight. That’s about 25 percent more than when your foot is behind. If we ran at the same level but you pushed from the back and I attacked the ground from the front, I’d beat you every time.” Mitchell embraced the methodology. An Olympic medalist, he was banned from the sport from 1998 to 2000 for failing a urine test. Unlike many elite coaches, he wasn’t an educator, nor did he have a science background. “But he accepted that science could help him,” Mann says. Mitchell taught Gatlin about “air time,” and “ground-contact time,” and how to sense the best angle at which to land his foot on the track. Gatlin was a willing pupil. “He feels things better than any athlete I’ve worked with,” Mann says. “As a sprinter, Justin is the perfect example of an artist. That’s his great advantage. With something like this, it helps to be more of an artist than a technician.” Day after day, Mitchell and Gatlin would remain at the track long after everyone else had left. “It was like The Karate Kid,” Gatlin says. “Dennis would put me in the blocks, and I’d take a couple of steps out. And he’d say, ‘No, wrong, do it again.’ I’d try again and he’d say, ‘No, wrong, do it again.’ And we would do it again and again until I’d get it right.” Before long, Gatlin was running as fast as he’d ever run. In 2015, he set his personal best time in the 100: 9.74 seconds. That he was thirty-three contradicted the common assumptions about the relationship between age and speed. Many in the track world remained suspicious. It didn’t help that Mitchell would be caught up in a scandal involving an agent who offered to procure testosterone and HGH for Daily Telegraph reporters posing as movie producers. (An investigation would later find that Mitchell and Gatlin were not involved.) Mitchell was still his coach when Gatlin competed at the 2017 Worlds, in London. It was Usain Bolt’s last competitive race. The retiring champion had never failed a drug test, and the crowd cast Gatlin as his foil. “Everyone there, Usain included, wanted a fairy-tale ending,” Gatlin said. “Being perceived as a villain gave me energy.” The sprint ended in (continued on page 94)
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the
ON A NIGHT THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, DURING ANOTHER WORLD HEALTH CRISIS, FORTY-FIVE ARTISTS
ONG
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GATHERED FOR ONE OF THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY RECORDING SESSIONS IN MUSIC HISTORY
BY RYAN D’AGOSTINO
January 28, 1985. Clockwise from top: Turner and Joel harmonize; three legends—Smokey Robinson, Charles, Dylan—and Sheila E.; Warwick/Nelson/ Jarreau, an inspired trio; Bruce, a linchpin of the night; Wonder, Richie, and Simon; MJ, cowriter and quiet guru; Ross. Center: Jones conducts “the heavenly choir.”
PHOTOGRAPHS BY HARRY BENSON
(SHEET MUSIC, SPRINGSTEEN)
1959 LITTLE JOHN OATES LAY ON THE LIVING-ROOM FLOOR
MONDAY, JANUARY 28, 1985 7:30 a.m. IT WAS EARLY, FOR A MUSICIAN. FOR ANY MUSI-
cian, and certainly for Lionel Richie, who in January 1985 was one of the top pop stars in the world. His signature hit of the past twelve months, for crying out loud—number one on the Billboard charts— was called “All Night Long (All Night).” He’d spent much of the past year on the road—New York, Hartford, Detroit, Vegas, Kansas City, Vancouver, Oakland, freaking Boise . . . it was a blur. The record company kept rolling out singles. Two went all the way to number one, three more to the top ten. Then there was “We Are the World,” the song he wrote with Michael Jackson to raise money for famine relief in Africa. (In Ethiopia alone, more than a million people had starved to death since 1983.) There had been a lot of late nights in Encino lately, at Jackson’s house, writing, rewriting, arranging, second-guessing. And the other night they were here at Richie’s house until it must’ve been 3:00 in the morning, sitting on the floor—Jackson, Quincy Jones, Jones’s arranger Tom Bahler, and Richie’s manager, Ken Kragen, the guy who put “We Are
As Wonder (seated) played piano and Jones (in stripes) coached, soloists learned their parts around 3:00 a.m.: Warwick, Perry, Nelson, Richie, Hall, Loggins, and Simon.
the World” together—writing on index cards the names of everyone they hoped would join the recording session, figuring out who was going to stand where and who would sing what part. Now, tonight, they would actually record it. But before that were the American Music Awards, televised on ABC, one of the biggest nights of the year. Kragen’s masterstroke in scheduling the recording session was doing it on the night of the awards, when so many artists would be in town. Richie not only was nominated for eight awards; he was hosting the thing, too. He was supposed to be over at the Shrine Auditorium by 10:00 this morning for rehearsals. It was 7:30. Early. They would run through the whole show, starting with a long opening dance number choreographed to Richie’s big hit “Running with the Night,” which he would perform wearing a gold lamé suit, surrounded by a dozen dancers. The drive to the Shrine, from Richie’s house up on Funchal Road near the Bel-Air Country Club, was about a half hour. Thirty-five years later, when he’s asked about that day, this is the first thing Richie will say: “Let us first trace the meaning of the words delirium and exhaustion.” TWENTY-FIVE HUNDRED MILES AWAY, BRUCE
Springsteen was getting on a plane. You talk about exhausted. The night before, he played the final show of the latest leg of the Born in the USA tour at the fifty-thousand-seat Carrier Dome in Syracuse, New York. It was his fifteenth show that month, and it was epic. Twenty-nine songs, over four hours, ending with a killer cover of John Fogerty’s “Rockin’ All Over the World,” reserved for special occasions.
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His manager, Jon Landau, had originally told Kragen that Springsteen was a long shot for this “We Are the World” thing. He’d been touring for so long, and he had a break before picking it up again overseas, and, well . . . Landau would see what he could do. Then Landau called Kragen back a couple weeks before to tell him Springsteen was in, and the dominoes began to fall. Instead of Kragen calling managers and agents all day to recruit artists for this project, everybody started calling him. Bruce was in. Everybody wanted in. 10:30 a.m. THERE WAS A WHALE WATCH IN THE MORNING,
off Redondo Beach. Henry Diltz, forty-six years old, already one of the great rock ’n’ roll photographers, woke up to get his nine-year-old daughter, Zoë, ready for her field trip. They made it to the boat on time, and the kids even saw a few gray whale backs off the coast. Kragen had worked with Diltz a few times, and he hired him to take pictures of the recording session at A&M Studios that evening. Diltz didn’t even know the name of the song. In his journal that day, he wrote, “USA Africa recording for Ethiopia food.” 6:30 p.m. RICHIE GOT THROUGH THE OPENING DANCE
number and the monologue, in which he announced that the “key word” for the night was outrageous. He shouted the word from the stage throughout the evening. “Outrageous!” He glittered. He cracked jokes. About an hour into the show, Huey Lewis (who would join the “We Are the World” session later) and Madonna (who wasn’t invited) announced the winner in the “favorite black album” category. Prince’s Purple Rain beat out Jackson’s Thriller and Richie’s Can’t Slow Down. Prince was invited to the recording session, and
P H OTO G R A P H S B Y H A R RY B E N S O N
P R E C E D I N G PA G E : S A M E M E R S O N / P O L A R I S ( A L L E X C E P T S P R I N G S T E E N )
at his friend’s house, propped up on his elbows, his chin in his hands, staring at the blind man on the record cover, listening to him sing. John was in sixth grade in North Wales, Pennsylvania, a nice workaday suburb of Philadelphia. He lived on Tenth Street, a straight line between Prospect and Walnut, and he could walk to the house of this one friend whose parents had a console stereo. The turntable was built into a handsome wood cabinet, and the sound that fuzzed out of the big speakers just wrapped itself around little John Oates. Not many people in North Wales had console stereos, so John used to love going to this one friend’s house and listening to records for hours. The record he listened to the most was The Genius of Ray Charles. It started with a bang of horns on the very first track, “Let the Good Times Roll.” The fifth song, “When Your Lover Has Gone,” was a beauty, all about love and sadness: “When you’re alone, who cares for starlit skies / When you’re alone, the magic moonlight dies.” By the time Ray got to “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Cryin’,” John was far, far away from this room, this little town. He knew every inch of the record cover: Ray’s name in the red banner above the photograph of him in the studio, suit jacket hanging from his shoulders, silver microphone hanging down, delivering Ray’s voice to the sound booth and then to the phonograph record and eventually to the console stereo in the living room of a house in North Wales, where a kid who would grow up to be an international pop superstar sometimes singing about love and sadness—this little kid would sit for hours, listening to Ray Charles. He knew the songs by heart and sang them as he ran up Tenth Street to get home in time for dinner.
ing? Am I on drugs?” And Smelly let out a good laugh in the middle of the line he was singing. 9:00 p.m. HARRIET STERNBERG WORKED FOR KRAGEN
Lauper, Springsteen, Jackson, and Joel. The Bud was Bruce’s; Jackson was photographed with it as a stunt soon after this photo was taken.
Quincy Jones, the song’s producer, had a solo picked out for him. There had been talk of tension between Prince and Jackson, and Kragen loved the idea of them overcoming their differences to join forces for a great cause. Things were still coming together. “We were still pulling in people during the awards show,” Richie says. “We were still trying to get Cyndi Lauper to show up. And at the very last minute, Cyndi said she would show up.” And Jackson, who was nominated for three awards? Smelly wasn’t there. Smelly—that’s what Jones called Jackson, as a joke, because he was so polite—was already across town at A&M Studios, standing alone in the middle of the parquet floor in Studio A. He wore tight black pants and his signature black jacket—part military, part Sgt. Pepper, with the shoulder pads and the ornate gold embroidering. He wore his jewelencrusted white socks, the ones that sparkled when he moonwalked. And black aviator sunglasses. Tommy Trbovich, a veteran director who was making the music video and documentary of the session for the charity established by the project, stood with a Norelco video camera on his shoulder, filming Jackson as he sang the chorus. Trbovich and his crew of about fifty had been there since early afternoon, running cables, rigging lights. Right now he and Jackson were the only two people in Studio A. “Quincy, do you think—” Jackson had his right thumb hooked in his pants pocket, his left hip sticking out, his high-water pants revealing those socks. Jones sat in the control booth, and they looked at each other through the glass, hearing each other through headsets. “I’m saying ‘you’—should I say ‘you and me’ or ‘you and I’?” “We Are the World” was the first of its kind. It
wasn’t like Oh, here’s another one of these charity things, as it would be today, where all the artists Instagram it and their publicists make sure everyone knows. There was only one precedent, a song that was still on the charts: “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” cowritten by Bob Geldof and recorded just a couple months earlier, in November, by a crowd of UK pop and rock artists. They had some big names—Sting, Bono (although U2 wasn’t so huge yet), some Duran Duran guys. Spandau Ballet. And it was raising serious money for the famine. But when Kragen called music managers in L. A. and New York, recruiting singers for “We Are the World,” he still had to explain it. It was all a little haphazard. And so with forty-five huge stars due to arrive in an hour to record the song, Jackson was there, laying down the chorus, doing his own backing vocals, and still trying to decide on the words. “I like ‘you and me,’ ” Jones said. “’Kay,” Michael said, shifting his weight. “It’s much more soul.” “Yeah, it’s more soulful. Country.” Jackson shifted his slight frame from foot to foot. “Country,” he said in his high voice. And he sang. We are the world, we are the children. We are the ones who make a brighter day, so let’s start giving . . . Every so often, Jones asked him to take a few steps back, farther from the microphone, and Smelly had to look around his famous feet to make sure he didn’t trip over Trbovich’s red sandbags holding down the lighting tripods. . . . It’s true we make a better day, just you and me. As Jackson sang in solitude, Steve Perry of Journey was already in the control booth with Jones, wearing a pair of headphones over his great hair, listening to Michael Jackson singing. Perry looked at Jones, and out at Jackson, and said, “Am I dream-
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as his head of creative services, which just meant she did everything Ken didn’t. She’d had a lot of duties leading up to tonight, including mailing out forty-five numbered cassettes of a demo that Richie and Jackson recorded so that the artists could hear the song ahead of time. She had called Fred Smith, the CEO of Federal Express— he answered!—and asked if his company would ship the tapes at no charge, as a donation. He agreed. She offered to credit Federal Express on the album— but he said, No, please don’t do that. Then everybody will be calling. To get into A&M Studios, you pulled off La Brea Avenue through a manned gate. This put you in a plaza in the center of the small campus of low-slung buildings. A&M was built as a movie lot by Charlie Chaplin in 1917. “It’s like a little mini movie studio,” singer Kim Carnes says. “A magical place.” It’s a tight layout, and one of Sternberg’s jobs was to figure out parking. She had a plan: A lot of people wanted to be there, but you couldn’t just come, no matter how big a honcho you were. One of her friends, Ron Oberman, a senior A&R man at Columbia Records—a big-deal guy—wanted in. Sternberg figured out a way to get Oberman on the premises: He could park cars. And so he stood inside the gate, waiting for people to arrive, at which time he would park their cars. 9:30 p.m. ONCE THE AMERICAN MUSIC AWARDS LET OUT,
the stars were lining up to get through the A&M gate. Behind a small ring of shade trees were two entrances. One, to the left and up three steps, was the thick wooden door that led to the anteroom outside Studio A. The other entrance, under an outdoor staircase to the right, led to what was known as the Chaplin Stage—a room more than half a football field long where they filmed movies and television shows. This was where the several hundred people who were not singing “We Are the World” would be hanging out. There was a strict rule: No one except the artists would be allowed in Studio A. No wives, boyfriends, managers, or publicists. No old bandmates from the Commodores. There was no red carpet. “Separating everyone from their families was the toughest part, because everyone wanted to walk their wives and mothers and fathers and everyone, the family members, into the recording studio,” Richie says. “And we had to go, No, the families are over to the right. The artists will be over to the left.” People shrugged. Okay! Daryl Hall and John Oates rolled in with their manager. Billy Joel, still wearing a scarf over his winter coat—he flew in from New York, where it was 28 degrees that morning—and his fiancée,
Christie Brinkley, arrived and gave each other a quick peck, then she was shown to the Chaplin Stage while he ambled over to the big wooden door. Dionne Warwick was doing a residency at the Wynn Las Vegas and recalls that Steve Wynn had given her the night off to participate—flying her to Los Angeles for the night in his jet. “I was ordered by Mr. Quincy Jones to be there,” Warwick says. “When Quincy speaks, everyone listens.” Bette Midler. Cyndi Lauper. Kenny Loggins. Willie Nelson. It was like a record store come to life. Everyone looked a little mystified. Smiling, yes, but . . . maybe not quite sure what was happening. At one point, the gate opened for a man on foot: Springsteen. Jeans, black leather jacket, gloves with the fingers cut off. Twenty-four hours ago, he was on a stage in Syracuse. He drove himself to the studio in a rental car, and he told Kragen, “I got a great parking spot right on La Brea!” Stepping from the parking area into the anteroom and finally into Studio A was like leaving the natural world. “Everybody usually walks around with their assistant, or their entourage,” Hall says. “But you had to walk in the door yourself, just you, and be in this room with a lot of people like you, with your peers, many of whom I had never met, and vice versa—they had never met me. It was— what’s the word?—slightly disconcerting. I’m a pretty self-sufficient guy, but I’m used to walking into a situation having some support around me.” Inside, a simple sign hung over the entrance to the studio, taped to the wall. This sign would become famous, a piece of “We Are the World” lore. But it was real. Jones hung it himself: chick your igos at thi door. Rock stars don’t all know one another, and some of the most famous humans on the planet were meeting for the first time. But in a strange and spontaneous instinct, many of them hugged. Joel hugged Jackson. Loggins hugged Springsteen. Diana Ross hugged Sheila E. while Bob Dylan stood behind them, not hugging anybody. Black risers had been set up at the far end of the studio, facing the control booth. Jones and Bahler had put down tape with everyone’s name on it. Jackson, who had basically grown up with Ross, had looked at the layout earlier and said, “Diana doesn’t like where she’s standing.” Jones just nodded—he got it—and Ross ended up in a prime spot in the front row, between Jackson and Stevie Wonder. This was for the first task of the evening, which Richie wanted to get to right away: the chorus. “My job was to kind of make sure everybody stays on point,” Richie says. “Quincy was gonna hold down the recording session. And Michael was going to be—I laugh at this—he was going to help me keep order, but of course Michael at that particular time didn’t do a lot of talking. And I was exhausted from the TV show, and then we go right into ‘We Are the World.’ Well, it was . . . a bloody train wreck.” After the giggly hour of greeting and hugging and awkward but endearing introductions, Jones and
Richie began to ask people to get in their places. “Everybody was sort of left-footed,” Hall says. “We were all like, Whoa, what are we doing? Everybody had to figure out how to relate to each other. So everybody started to act like they were in the eighth-grade chorus. It was the weirdest thing I’d ever experienced. All these superstars, whatever you want to call them, we all turned into juniorhigh kids in chorus, and Quincy became Mr. Jones. That’s how it shook out. Laughing like kids.” Jones stood at a blond-wood podium on a wheeled platform—the kind you’d see in a middle school music room. With everyone in their places, Jones introduced Bob Geldof, referring to him as “the inspiration for this whole thing.” (Ross, in the first row, clapped and shouted, “Yay, Bob!”) A few months before, in October 1984, a British journalist named Michael Buerk traveled to Ethiopia to report on the famine. He brought with him Mohamed Amin, a Kenyan photojournalist, who filmed footage of gaunt children with ribs exposed from hunger and flies on their faces. Their report aired on the BBC, where Geldof saw it and quickly wrote “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” The song was popular during the holiday season that year and would raise about $10 million
to help fight the famine. Harry Belafonte saw the report and had an idea to organize a concert of all African-American musicians to raise money for the cause. He called Kragen for help. “Harry,” Kragen said. “The thing about a concert is it’s next to impossible.” Kragen used to manage Harry Chapin, the superstar free spirit of the seventies, until the day Chapin died in a car accident in 1981. Chapin was always raising money to fight hunger and homelessness. Kragen had been trying to put together a blockbuster concert to support Chapin’s legacy, and the logistics were hell. But he had another idea. Not a concert. “A song! Geldof has shown us the way,” Kragen told Belafonte. “And we’ve got bigger stars here. Let’s go right from the Billboard charts. Who’s big? We want to sell records.” Belafonte now stood on the top row of the risers, next to one of the guys from Ghostbusters (Dan Aykroyd, Blues Brother), watching his old friend Jones introduce the Irish punk with the big heart. “Bob just came back from Ethiopia, and he’d like to talk to you,” Jones told everyone. Geldof stepped forward, his collar turned up, his
“We all turned into junior-high kids in chorus, and Quincy became Mr. Jones,” Hall says. “That’s how it shook out.”
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P H OTO G R A P H B Y H A R RY B E N S O N
hair carefully mussed. He let out a little laugh and said, pretending to be modest, “Oh, would I?” 10:30 p.m. RAY CHARLES WAS IN THE FRONT ROW.
He had ridden the wave through the door from the anteroom into the studio, holding a Styrofoam coffee cup, suit jacket hanging from his shoulders, a guide at his elbow. Shuffling in like everyone else. But in a room full of stars, including a half dozen legends, Charles was of a higher order. Many of the participants didn’t know ahead of time that he would be there. They didn’t know who would be there—but they certainly didn’t know Brother Ray would be there. Lionel Richie: “When Ray came in and opened his mouth, we just kinda all fell over in the corner and said, ‘Wow, did you hear that? That’s Ray Charles.’ It was just brilliant.” And then there was Oates—little John Oates from North Wales, Pennsylvania, in the middle of this pack of pop stars and rock legends, standing on the piece of tape on the risers that had his name on it. He could have reached out with his left hand—right across Bob Dylan’s head—and touched Ray Charles on his right shoulder, the one closest to the camera in the pho-
tograph on the cover of The Genius of Ray Charles. “I said to myself, This is a good place to be in my life right at this moment,” Oates says. Jones pointed to more strips of tape on the floor with names written on them in blue. He told everyone these were for the solos, which would be recorded later, after they laid down the chorus. This was a little awkward. Anyone who didn’t see their name now understood that he or she had not been given a solo. One piece of tape said, daryl hall, with stefe perry and michael jacksln on either side. The name of John Oates, Hall’s other half, was not written on a piece of tape on the floor. “I can’t say I wasn’t a little disappointed,” Oates says. “I was obviously not worthy. But at the same time it was cool. When Daryl and I perform together, Daryl’s the lead singer—he’s the guy. And he’s got an amazing voice, and of course he deserved it. Quincy and Lionel and Michael knew exactly what they were doing. You’re dealing with those three guys, you’re dealing with guys who really know how to make a record.” Jones just kept talking, laying out the plan for the night. After the chorus, the risers would be dismantled and they’d do the solos. He turned and raised his hand to the control booth. “Can I hear it, Hum?” Humberto Gatica, the engineer, played the demo that Jackson, Richie, and Wonder had recorded—just those guys singing the chorus, plus every solo part. Some of the artists hadn’t listened to the tape Sternberg had sent, so they were hearing the tune for the first time. And a few of them weren’t that into it. Maybe more than a few. “I don’t think anybody liked it,” Joel says. “There was a lot of, like, side-eye. There was a lot of looking at the other person, and I remember Cyndi Lauper saying, ‘It sounds like a Pepsi commercial.’ There was a couple of chuckles and a few grunts. That was pretty much the consensus, I think. But nobody was gonna say, ‘I’m not doing that.’ ” 11:45 p.m. THE LYRICS, AS WRITTEN, READ, “WE ARE THE
ones that make a better day, so let’s start giving . . .” But a lot of people seemed to be saying brighter instead of better. Someone asked, “Is it brighter or better?” “Whichever one feels good,” Richie said. “Better or brighter? Brighter’s the one everybody’s leaning to, right?” Everyone looked at their sheet music. Paul Simon, wearing a blazer over a checkered shirt buttoned to the neck, conferred with Tina Turner and Billy Joel. “Seems like they’re making a change,” he said. “I think it should be brighter, all the way,” Joel said. “Me too. It felt like everyone was singing brighter.” Springsteen was looking at his music. “This is brighter?” Huey Lewis leaned over his shoulder. “No—better, yeah, that’s gonna be brighter now.” Springsteen: “Do I ever sing this?”
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“No,” Lewis said. “It’s gonna be brighter. [Singing to Springsteen] ‘It’s true, we make a brighter day.’ ” Wonder seemed to be the lone holdout. “Better has more bite,” he said. Jackson had an idea for another change. He proposed adding some African-sounding lyrics to the chorus: We are the world . . . Sha-lum! We are the children . . . Sha-lingay! Jackson stood before his peers and sang it himself, a cappella. Jones kind of nodded. The ensemble tried it, with and without the instrumental track. Then Wonder presented the idea of singing a few lines in Swahili. A few people later said they could feel the energy getting sucked out of the room. Finally, Ray Charles, still holding a Styrofoam coffee cup, his headphones around his neck, jerked his head up and said to his old friend, loud enough for all to hear, “Ring the bell, Quincy. Ring the bell!” The genius had spoken. The sha-lum and Swahili ideas were put to rest. (The episode was chronicled in great detail by journalist David Breskin for his excellent booklet We Are the World, published as a fundraiser soon after.) They took breaks, but the recording dragged on. “There was a table piled up with cold cuts—sandwiches and stuff. Bruce and I kept wandering over to the deli table, hitting on a beer or a sandwich,” Joel says. “It wasn’t like church, you know?” But it must be said: When the group sang together, hitting every note of the chorus Jackson and Richie had written, full volume, it felt like a new sound, something human ears had never experienced. Henry Diltz was standing next to Jones, seeing it through his camera but hearing it with his whole body. “The heavenly choir,” he calls it. 2:00 a.m. PRINCE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE THERE.
He was invited, and although he never quite confirmed, he did perform at the American Music Awards, and it was Jones’s understanding that he was coming to the session. The great producer chose a solo line for Prince, right after Jackson’s line—a clever juxtaposition of two artists who were reputed to detest each other. “There was a spot being held for him,” says Sternberg, master of the attendance list. “Sheila E. was trying to get him there.” But Prince didn’t show. The next day, it was reported that he’d been hanging out at a restaurant, Carlos ’N Charlie’s, and that two of his bodyguards had been arrested after getting in a fight with some photographers. “I think I got Prince’s line,” Huey Lewis says. After the chorus, Jones called Lewis over to where Jackson was standing and said, “Smelly, sing him the line.” And Jackson sang: “But if we just believe, there’s no way we can faaalll.” Lewis sang it back perfectly, Jackson laughed—a tiny, Jacksonian laugh—and Lewis smiled, raised his eyebrows, and said, “Can I go now?” (continued on page 92)
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I had one procedure left before my transition would be complete. Everything was in place. Then COVID-19 happened. BY HARRON WALKER _________PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTOPHER GRIFFITH
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Mayor de Blasio had canceled all elective surgeries in New York, and my surgery, which had been medically necessary just days before, had suddenly become “elective.” The procedure would still happen, the coordinator on the phone assured me. She postponed my surgery to August, along with whatever visions I had of that better next chapter. I told myself I’d handle it, but within an hour I was on the Williamsburg Bridge with a half-empty handle of vodka in my bag, the other half poured into a Hal’s seltzer. I was upset and out of it, desperately searching for something—somewhere I could walk to that would numb all the things I was feeling. Getting blackout drunk at a bar was out of the question. I’d been avoiding them for almost a week at that point in an effort to sidestep the virus. Besides, New York City’s bars had all been ordered to shut down by 8:00 p.m. that night. The safest and most available option would be a liquor store and a vodka soda to-go, after I relieved myself at a nearby upscale pizzeria. “Hi, ma’am, how can I help you?” a man working at the deserted establishment said. I asked if I could use the restroom, modulating my voice, as I often do with strangers, to sound more like what I thought he thought I’d sound like. He said it was okay and pointed toward the back. I felt stupid as I walked to the bathroom. Why did I want to get this surgery anyway? The guy had already ma’am’d me. Did I want to get extra ma’am’d or something? T H E WOR L D OF F E R S T RA N S
women many fantasies, my friend Joan once said, but very few within our reach. We might dream of romantic love or adequate health care without ever having the chance to experience either. As a result, we might risk believing that our value lies not within ourselves but within whatever good thing we happen to be given, and should that good thing disappear, so too would whatever value it had granted us by proxy. I wasn’t mourning my womanhood but the woman I thought I would be four days later and forever after that. I was mourning the satisfaction that I’d no longer feel, now that all those years
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facial feminization surgery, I read reports that New York’s governor might cancel elective surgeries on account of the mounting COVID-19 pandemic. The logic made sense to me: Hospitals in the state had
a limited amount of personal protective equipment and hospital beds, both of which would become even more limited with each surgery. Canceling elective surgeries to keep people away from the hospital made sense, I thought. Not that it would affect me. My surgery wasn’t elective—it was medically necessary. It said so right there in all three of the letters I had to get from various health professionals in order to argue my case for insurance coverage. Like this one, from my psychiatrist: “Ms. Walker meets criteria for the medical necessity of gender affirmation surgery (Coleman et al., 2011). In line with [the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s] position statement on the medical necessity of surgical interventions for transgender persons, facial feminization surgery (FFS) is not an elective procedure for Ms. Walker insofar as the purpose is not solely to improve her physical appearance, but also to treat her persistent and well-documented gender incongruence.” I emailed the hospital just to confirm what I thought to be true. “Your surgery is not elective,” they wrote back. “It is medically necessary.” I’d planned for this not just for months but for years. After what seemed like ages of strategizing and job hopping, countless hours on the phone with a seemingly endless array of gatekeepers, I was finally there. I was nineteen days away from having facial feminization surgery. All I had to do was sit back and let it happen. I had a three-week aftercare schedule all filled out with more than three dozen friends and family members penciled in to watch over me. HR had approved my time-off request of three and a half weeks, cobbled together using all of my vacation days and what remained of my sick days, plus a little unpaid time to pad out the end. My insurance, which I got through the full-time writing job I now worked, had confirmed that I was approved for coverage, lowering what would have been a mid-fivefigure out-of-pocket cost to a significantly more manageable $1,500 deductible. I had become fixated on my surgery date in the months leading up to it, cluttering a corkboard beside my computer monitor with Post-it notes counting down the days from 95 to 78, 61, and so on. I had Googled “how many days until march 31” so often that it had become my phone’s top autofill. I’d hung so much of myself on that date and what my life might finally look like in the days and years that followed. I imagined that this procedure would have marked the end of a painful, tumultuous yearslong period in which everything felt in flux, including my body itself. I would be done with the process of transitioning, give or take a few legal documents that I still wanted to change, and would at last be able to live my life. It was a fantasy but one that I clung to harder the closer it got to becoming real. Then, on March 13, my surgeon’s office called to see if I would be interested in doing my surgery a week earlier, on March 20. I said yes. On March 16, my surgeon’s office called again.
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I TOOK A SELFIE IN THE BACK OF THE KITCHEN
of the hotel where I worked during the first year of my transition. My face bathed in fuchsia light, I stared into the camera at 45 degrees, my preferred angle, still, because it makes my jaw and my chin look smaller. I typed out, “Once I cut off half my face it’s over for you bitches” in the caption and hit post. I look very different from the girl in that selfie now. I no longer wear turtlenecks, nor do I part my hair to the side. Only rarely do I put on eyeliner or eye shadow these days. The forty or so milliliters of estrogen that I’ve injected into my thighs since posting it have softened some of the harder edges of my now-thirty-one-year-old face. My jawline and the shape of my chin, though, remain. They would have looked different if things had gone according to plan. I was supposed to have facial feminization surgery on March 20 (FFS, for efficiency’s sake), a medically necessary procedure that would have reshaped my jaw and chin, along with other bones and soft tissue in my face. Wanting to “cut off half my face” is a flip way of leaning into the full extremity of my want, one that I try to save for when I’m talking to other trans people about it. With them, I might joke that I can’t wait for my jawless victory. Chopped and screwed. A wordless “Cut it out!” hand swipe thudding dully at my mandible. But when I’m talking about it with cis people, as perhaps I am right now, I like to choose my words more carefully. There’s a lot of loaded shorthand one might think to use when describing this procedure—or, rather, this set of procedures performed simultaneously with the end goal of changing how one is perceived, by both oneself and others. I would try, for example, to circumvent saying something about wanting to look more feminine, much less wanting to look like a woman, to avoid giving whomever I was talking to license to think they know what a woman should look like. True, the surgery literally has the phrase “facial feminization” in the name, but what does that mean? What does a feminine woman look like? Whom do you picture when I ask you that question? Is she fat? Is she white? Do you want to fuck her? Do you want to be her? How do you feel about your answers? Would you want to share them with the rest of us? These implied questions are why I prefer to say that I still want to look like me but just . . . a different me. A me who lived another life. A me from another timeline, one where I might “get drinks with the ladies” or hear a coworker whine about “wedding season” and know what she meant. One where I might think, It’s just a face-lift, or pity the poor girl who had hers delayed.
I CAN’ T SAY FOR SURE WHY I TOOK THAT
fuchsia-drenched selfie a few years ago, or why I felt the need to post it. My surroundings weren’t all that notable; I walked through that kitchen at least once per shift on the way to the hotel’s trash room. I also didn’t particularly like being there, thanks to an early encounter with two of the guys who worked in the kitchen. I waved hello as we passed in the hallway. They took one look at my baby trans heels and too much makeup, then burst out laughing. One of them asked the other, “What the fuck is that?” I’d like to say I posted the selfie as a show of self-acceptance, to overcome the hurt that the encounter had left me with, but that’s not quite it. More likely, I just wanted to take a selfie under lighting so flattering that it begged me to whip out the front-facing camera. It was a time in my life of great insecurity and unprec-
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edented alienation, one that I hoped would not last forever. The future would be different from this, the caption declared; not only would I get FFS someday, but once I did, everything would be different. I wasn’t sure how, but it would be. In this timeline, the one I’m actually living through, I now worry about getting laid off before my new surgery date and losing the health care I get through my employer. At least I could still apply for Medicaid, which covers FFS in New York, but I worry about having to start the thirteen-month process over from square one. I worry that state-run insurance could disappear in the next five months. I watch my friends get laid off and the relief funds and GoFundMes roll in. I wonder if I’m watching the last gasps of capitalism, as all of its contingent institutions crumble. Those institutions, as much as I loathe them and wish their end, have made my FFS possible: the aforementioned insurance plan, the advertising and venture capital that fund the newsroom I work in, the forprofit hospital where my surgeon planned to operate, the American health-care system and all that it demands to simply access care. If the United States falls, so too would this particular model of medicalized transition that has shaped so many years of my life. So too would my transition as I’d planned it. When I catch myself wallowing about that prospect, of the end of trans medical care as we know it, I remind myself that this age has been anything but golden. If the system we have in place has failed to serve even me—a white, feminine trans woman who’s extremely into men, the very individual these institutions were built for—then who is it even serving? Why shouldn’t it be replaced with something new and better? Should our current system of trans care collapse, I can know at least that I’ve prepared somewhat for the possibility. One of the major reasons I got that procedure last year was to destroy my body’s ability to produce testosterone, as a safeguard against losing access to injectable estrogen someday. I wanted to be ready for whatever crisis lay ahead. “I will not live through the apocalypse like every day is the first year of transition,” I’ve told myself, insisting on being ma’am’d even as the world burns. Now, in quarantine, I find that I’m not in a hell so much as a purgatory: a forced stasis throwing all of our lives off track. In all my crisis planning, I never planned for a crisis like this. It doesn’t feel like the end of anything, or the beginning of something new, at least not yet. It just is, and it will continue to be until someday it’s not. I feel similarly matter-of-fact about my surgery some three weeks into sheltering in place; the hours I’ve spent on Zoom and FaceTime have given me plenty of opportunities to consider this face I thought I’d never see again. I find that my surgery now feels incidental rather than auxiliary, something that will simply happen or not happen rather than a catalyst unto itself. I haven’t Googled the number of days. I trust that they’ll dwindle without my concern.
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I IMAGINED THAT THIS PROCEDURE WOULD HAVE MARKED THE END OF A PAINFUL, TUMULTUOUS YEARS-LONG PERIOD IN WHICH EVERYTHING FELT IN FLUX, INCLUDING MY BODY ITSELF. I WOULD BE DONE WITH THE PROCESS OF TRANSITIONING, GIVE OR TAKE A FEW LEGAL DOCUMENTS THAT I STILL WANTED TO CHANGE, AND WOULD AT LAST BE ABLE TO LIVE MY LIFE. IT WAS A FANTASY BUT ONE THAT I CLUNG TO HARDER THE CLOSER IT GOT TO BECOMING REAL.
of work and preparation would no longer pay off. Like many other people, I thought I finally had my life together. Then the pandemic happened, and it turned out I did not. I’m not the only trans woman with an affinity for Cassandra, that mythological Trojan princess found in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Homer’s Iliad. Cursed with visions of the future that no one will believe, Cassandra is existentially gaslit and, thus, a figure ripe for all sorts of transsexual projection. I’ve felt cursed with visions of my own in the weeks since my surgery was delayed, only mine are of a present that has failed to come to pass. In this other timeline, I imagine that the worst of the swelling would have gone down by now, except for maybe my lip and my cheeks. That’s what my friend Macy told me, that the fat grafts from her stomach took a while to relax and settle into their new home. I’d probably still be bruised at this point, some three weeks out, with violet half moons floating underneath my eyes. My mom used to say that I bruise like a banana. That’s still the case, if the little purple circles dotting my legs are any indication, a baffling body of evidence I have no memory of collecting, pointing to all of the countertops and bed frames I’ve bumped into over the past few days. My penchant for bruising would have put me at risk for developing a hematoma, possibly under my eyes, where all the blood displaced by my rhinoplasty, brow-bone reduction, forehead contouring, and frontal sinus setback would have pooled. It’s a rare complication that’s easy enough to resolve, though unpleasant all the same. After a procedure last year, I developed a hematoma, and I feared that such a complication might repeat itself on my face. I’d like to imagine that it did not, though my visions of that other timeline also feature dozens of friends rotating in and out of the small Brooklyn apartment I now find myself quarantined in, bringing me food and watching all the movies on my aftercare watch list. My visions fail to account for social-distancing measures, much less the greater pandemic, making them as inaccurate as they are useless. Still, I hold them close sometimes and torture myself with “What if?”
THE SONG (continued from page 87) SOME TIME PASSED BETWEEN THE END OF THE
chorus and the solos. At one point, Springsteen sat alone on the risers, nursing a Budweiser. Jackson and his personal photographer, Sam Emerson, were sitting nearby. Springsteen got up and left the beer can. Emerson said to Michael, “Hey, Mike, let me take your picture with the beer can.” Jackson said, “No, no, I can’t do that.” Emerson said, “Come on! Who will ever see it?” They did the photo, Jackson sitting straightfaced, holding the Boss’s beer. The next week, Emerson says, it showed up in the New York Post. Emerson’s agent called him and said, We’ve got big trouble. Emerson just about fell to the floor. Who had leaked it? His agent said he would investigate and call him back. Turns out Jackson had had his publicist, Norman Winter, plant it. As a joke. Later, Trbovich saw a chance to approach Dylan. Almost twenty years before this night, Trbovich was working for Johnny Cash in Nashville. One night, Cash invited him over for dinner at his house along the Cumberland River. Trbovich showed up to find Joni Mitchell, Graham Nash, Dylan, and a few others. After dinner, a guitar was passed around, and Nash played a new song he was working on, “Marrakesh Express.” So Trbovich went up to Dylan before the solos got under way and said, “You don’t remember me . . . .” He reminded Dylan about that night back in the late sixties. Dylan looked at him, nodded, and almost smiled. “That was a lovely night,” he said. “You were there?” 4:00 a.m. RICHIE CLAIMS HE GAVE HIMSELF THE FIRST
line of the song so he could get out of the way. “I looked at the talent that was coming that night, and I wanted to get out of the way early, because when you start thinking Ray Charles is coming in that lineup, there’s Springsteen sitting over in the corner, and there’s every major power singer in the world coming down that pipe—you know what? I wanted to get out of that barrage as soon as possible,” he says. Still, he got the first line. The soloists stood in a semicircle, each taking a line, with the next person coming in on harmony, then doing their own line, and so on. After Richie and Stevie Wonder opened the song, the next duo was Kenny Rogers and Paul Simon. Rogers was a big guy, six feet tall. The way he moved around was big, his hands were big, his beard was big. Simon was five-foot-two. Their voices, together, created perhaps the greatest unexpected alchemy on the recording: Simon’s avian, pitch-perfect smoothness cut with Rogers’s drawl, rising from somewhere down under the floor, was the aural manifestation of whatever genius lived inside the head of Quincy Jones.
The progression went left to right. Sometimes people messed up and Jones had them start over. This meant that Richie sang his line more than anyone, and the people way down on the right—Kenny Loggins, Steve Perry, Daryl Hall, Jackson, Huey Lewis, Cyndi Lauper, and Kim Carnes—got the fewest takes. Hall says that it didn’t matter: “I hate to say it, but I did my part, and that was the end of it. Some of these people had to stick around and overdub themselves a number of times, because they couldn’t pull it off. I wasn’t nervous at all. I opened my mouth and sang. Plenty of people were nervous, and that sort of separates the proverbial men from the boys. I’m just a person who can do things. I open my mouth and sing. I left early. A lot of these people had to stick around to get their stuff right.” But some of the soloists took the multiple takes as opportunities to experiment with their line. After all, you got only one little line, and zero rehearsal time, and you were likely singing harmony with someone you not only had never performed with but had never even met. So the only time to play with the delivery was live, on take after take. Dionne Warwick was ninth in the line of soloists. After the first chorus, she came in with “Send them your heart, so they know that someone cares.” The first few times through, she sang it dreamily, the Warwick of “Then Came You.” “Won’t you send them your heart . . .” But about the seventh time it was her turn to sing, she belted out the line like a burst of gunfire: “Welllll, send ’em your heart!” The lyrics Joel was given to sing did not move him in the same way. Jones was handing out solos— “Quincy was culling the herd”—and Joel felt honored to be pulled aside. He studied his line on the sheet music. Tina Turner would sing, “We are all a part of God’s great big family.” “Then me: ‘And the truth, ya know, love is all we need.’ I looked at those lyrics, and I went, That’s what I get? ‘The truth, ya know’? And it was kind of a low part, too. I think a lot of people were trying to be virtuosos when it came to their part. I know Cyndi did—Cyndi jumped into this whole other octave. Ya yay ah-ya! But she can do that. She’s a great singer. I think everybody wanted to put a little filigree on it, so they jumped out. I looked at my part, and I thought, Don’t even try. Just hit the mark and shut up. It wasn’t a time to show off, for me.” Joel and Turner were chatting, looking at their parts, and Turner put her hand on Joel’s shoulder and told him she had a headache. He happened to have an aspirin in his pocket, which he offered to Turner. “She said, No, I don’t take that! I only use homeopathic,” Joel says. “I told her, I don’t know what that means, but I ain’t got any.” THERE WAS ONE BATHROOM, OUT IN THE HALL
toward the anteroom. Hall had to take a leak and found Jackson in there, too. “Michael was in the bathroom, and he asked me if I minded that he had ripped off ‘No Can Do’ and made it into ‘Billie Jean,’ ” Hall says. “Which, I don’t
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believe it was a ripoff. He says, I hope you don’t mind that I stole it. And I was like, What? You did a good job of stealing it, because I didn’t notice. I guess he was referring to the intro, kind of a pumping bass line, like my bass line. That was in the bathroom. There weren’t that many places to go.” Joel saw Jackson wandering off frequently to “a remote part of the studio, with this makeup cosmetic kit. And he kept, like, putting his nose on. Because I think the tip of his nose was kind of falling off, and he kept dabbing at it with makeup or smearing it with something.” Winter, Jackson’s publicist, a legendary guy who had worked with Elton John and Dylan, was on the soundstage, with all the other peripheral people. But Winter didn’t like being a peripheral person. He kept hounding Harriet Sternberg, asking to be let into the recording studio, saying Michael wanted him in there. And then he started going around loudly telling anyone who would listen that Jackson had written the whole song himself, and that Richie—her boss’s client—had nothing to do with it. Sternberg alerted security that Winter was no longer welcome, and he was escorted out. “He was out of line,” Sternberg says. “That was the one person I kicked off the soundstage.” HARRY BENSON, THE PHOTOGRAPHER WHO
chronicled the session for Life magazine, was wearing his sport coat and looking for moments. Diltz was also hustling. Benson kept scowling at him, but Diltz kept shooting. There was also Emerson, whom Jackson had brought. “I’m sure Benson didn’t know what these other couple of dudes were doing there with their cameras, but he didn’t like it,” Diltz says. By the time the solos got down to the end of the row, Kim Carnes—“When weeee stand together as oooooone!”—was worried whether she could even sing her part. She had a sinus infection—there was no way she was telling anyone that—and the part she was given, the end of the bridge leading back into the chorus, climaxed on a soaring note that would have been high in her vocal range even without a sinus infection. Plus, Lewis was harmonizing on the line, while Lauper backed them up with an aria of “yeah, yeah, yeah!” Lauper, who was next to her, worked with Carnes on her line until Carnes could nail it even through her cold. “Cyndi was incredible. She knew. I said, Oh my gosh, this is high for me, and I’ve got such a cold. And she said, Let’s figure it out,” Carnes says. 4:30 a.m. SUDDENLY THERE WERE HAMBURGERS.
Trbovich didn’t get many breaks throughout the night. He and his crew had to capture everything. Nobody knew what time it was. Trbovich was filming away, and then through the blur of activity, Diana Ross—whose reputation was more diva than cuddly—walked over in her bare feet and said, “You haven’t eaten!” She was wearing one of the white cotton usa for africa sweatshirts that were
handed out at the beginning of the night but that only she, Kenny Rogers, Ruth Pointer of the Pointer Sisters, and Al Jarreau wore. She tore her burger in half and gave half to Trbovich. “She said, Come here, come here. You haven’t eaten,” he says, one of his clearest memories of the night and one of the few he didn’t see through a lens. “I don’t wanna say she was—let’s just say she had been difficult other times I had worked with her,” he says. But this was a different kind of moment, a different Diana Ross. 1965 Before he walked down to one of the CYO dances on Friday nights in Freehold, New Jersey, the awkward kid who played guitar would first smear some Clearasil on his acne. He didn’t have a lot of friends, unless you counted the hardscrabble dudes he played music with. The kid’s father, who worked at the Nescafé plant in town, would be sitting at the kitchen table, starting on a beer. They lived next door to a gas station. After the dance, the kid would usually come home and stay up late—for a sixteen-year-old—playing his Kent guitar, single pickup, sunburst design, up in his room, unplugged so he didn’t keep anybody awake. When his father got pissed off, you could see the darkness behind his eyes, and the darkness sometimes kept the boy up for hours. It could be a lonely town, Freehold. That was like any town, of course. But Doug and Adele Springsteen’s only son didn’t just live in a lonely town; he lived in a lonely house. When he wasn’t playing his guitar, he listened to records. (He had sold his little pool table to pay for the guitar, so that was out.) And in late 1965, he was usually listening to one of the two albums that had been released that year by Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home. “How does it feel to be on your own?” Bruce knew how it felt. And when he heard those songs, over and over, he knew Dylan knew how it felt, to need to get out of some place. Dylan, this kid Bruce would write in his life story more than fifty years later, “is the father of my country.” 5:00 a.m. “IT CAN BE LIKE HALF SINGING, HALF TALKING.”
Jones was talking to Dylan. The producer was reassuring him that he could do his solo. The unusual nasal sound of Dylan’s voice was what made him Dylan, but in that room of recognizable voices, he appeared nervous and unsure. Even as Jones talked him through his solo, encouraging him, James Ingram, the supersmooth soul voice who was presently wearing a really cool tracksuit, strolled behind them. Warwick, whose vocal cords were made of honey, sat on the risers nearby. Dylan crinkled his eyes at Jones. “Did somebody else sing it already, on the track?” “Huh?” “So I can hear it?” Trbovich was filming all of this. And yeah, he says, Dylan was nervous. “But can I tell you some-
thing? I swear: Most. People. Do. Get nervous in front of a camera. I don’t care who they are. I remember, the first Academy Awards I did, I was a stage manager. And I remember Katharine Hepburn digging her nails into my hand before she walked out there to this live audience.” “Tell you what, Bob,” Jones said. “Stevie!” He and Dylan met Wonder over at a piano, and Wonder played the chords of the song. All three of them tried to sing like Dylan, in unison. Even Wonder was doing his best Dylan impression, right there, to Dylan, to show Dylan how to sing this part like Dylan. “There’s a choice wehr makin’, wehr see-vin ah own lives. Iss choo we make a brightah dee, jes yooo and meee.” Dylan was rocking back and forth by now, singing along with himself. Starting to feel it. Behind this little work session, the other players milled around. Ingram, Jarreau, Joel, Springsteen, Richie. But when it came time for Dylan to record his part, Jones gave a little nod, and the room pretty much cleared. Only Wonder remained, at the piano, as a kind of comfort. And Trbovich, camera ever on his shoulder. Dylan stood, black leather jacket zipped up, one thumb hooked in a belt loop, holding the sheet music up to his face, and sang it three or four times. “Is that sorta it? Sorta like that?” Dylan asked, barely looking up. Jones walked out and embraced him, and for the first time that night Dylan’s face spread into a smile. He took a deep breath and walked back over to where the risers were. Springsteen stepped forward. Headphones on, Springsteen moved his hips in a workingman’s dance, hearing the track as he waited to come in with his part. Jones later said Springsteen was “one of the hardest-working cats I’ve ever met before in my life. I kept waiting for him to get tired and sit down and rest. He kept saying, ‘Want me to do it again?’ ” He sang the words as if a child were dying in his arms right then and there, his sandpaper rasp trailing into something like grief at the end of each line. When he’d finished, he opened his eyes and shuffled away from the mic. His peers broke into applause, especially Diana Ross, sitting cross-legged on the piano bench behind him. Springsteen, a ham, flapped his hands, as if telling the crowd, “More! More!” Then, “Thank you, thank you!” Jones said, “Well, that takes care of that.” 8:20 a.m. “ I T ’ S O N LY T W E N T Y A F T E R E I G H T,” PAU L
Simon said, laughing, to Jones, who had arranged the strings on his 1973 song “Something So Right.” People began filing out, reuniting with what few of their family and friends remained. Carnes cracked the door open to catch a ride with a friend of hers who had been there all night. “I just remember being shocked that it was so light outside, that the sun was up,” she says. Jackson, meanwhile, stood clear across the stu-
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dio, against the back wall. He asked Kragen if he could review the video footage before the first bits of it were edited and released to the press in the coming days as a one-minute clip. Sternberg turned to Jackson and said of course, and that she would send it to his home. “What’s your address?” Sternberg asked. He looked at her for a second, then said, “I just know how to get there through the back streets.” IN MARCH OF THIS YEAR, RICHIE WAS BEING
interviewed about the death of his friend and collaborator Kenny Rogers (who was also managed by Kragen) when he mused briefly about re-creating “We Are the World” to raise money to fight COVID-19. “I must admit,” he said, “every once in a while, God has to do something to get us back on track.” But he knew organizing something like that was unlikely. Certainly not in the sudden, haphazard, Sure, let’s-do-it, call-Quincy-and-Bruce way they’d done it in 1985. No, it’s a different world. “We came in like little kids on their first day of kindergarten,” Richie says, “and we were all kind of looking at each other, but we didn’t quite—‘Oh my God, there’s that kid over there, and there’s that other kid over there.’ Everyone was kind of freaked out standing next to each other for a brief moment, and then all of a sudden we realized: It’s not about us! We’re actually using our voice and our celebrity to save some people, and it’s about us giving everything we have to save their lives. So I think the brilliance of that evening was, we started out as forty-five artists looking at each other and going, ‘Yeah, I’m famous, and you’re famous . . . .’ We left as a family.” Sternberg that night had one last concern: phone calls to the press. She had reporters lined up at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. From among the few people left in Studio A, she asked for volunteers. Richie could barely keep his eyes open. Ross declined. Steve Perry, who had been the first one to arrive the night before, said, “Okay!” And he and Sternberg rode over to the offices of Kragen and Company in West Hollywood. Kragen looked around at the empty studio. Cords snaked across the floor. Empty Budweisers and Styrofoam cups and crumpled papers littered tables. He adjusted his big glasses and put on his sport coat over his white usa for africa sweatshirt. He walked out into the chilly light. It felt almost strange to be outside again, after being in the studio for so many eventful hours. He unlocked the door of his Jaguar and the alarm system began blaring into the otherwise quiet air—and he had no idea how to turn it off. He got in the car and tried everything—the key, the alarm button, nothing worked. And the engine wouldn’t start unless he left the door open. He lived just a few miles away, in the Holmby Hills neighborhood, way down Sunset. Screw it. He started the engine, put it in gear, and drove the whole way with his door open, the car’s lights flashing, and the alarm blaring.
FULL SPEED AHEAD (continued from page 75)
a finish too close to call with the naked eye. It took almost as long to announce the decision as it had to run the race. The results were posted. Gatlin had won. Bolt embraced Gatlin and congratulated him. Gatlin could barely hear him, the booing was so loud. A F T E R D I N N E R , I N T H E PA R K I N G L O T
outside the restaurant, Gatlin’s wife, Jeneice, told me about the time they brought their puppy to obedience training. At one point, she looked around the class and realized that all of the owners were standing beside their dogs except for the two seated on folding chairs. The first was an elderly woman. “She must have been in her eighties,” Jeneice said. The other was her husband. As she told the story, Gatlin leaned against their car. When Jeneice called attention to it, he nodded. “I always need to find somewhere to sit, or something to lean on,” he explained. “I think it’s because I’m so in tune with my body.” Jeneice rolled her eyes. In the past few years, Gatlin has become consumed with doing nothing. After training at Montverde, he’ll usually eat lunch, nap, then watch television. Some days, he’ll watch television, then nap. “Outside of running, he’s pretty much on power-saving mode,” Jeneice said. “Like the phone.” Partly, that’s just who he is. As a child, he was never in a rush. When he told his mother he wanted to be a sprinter, she dismissed him with a laugh. These days, minimizing motion is a strategy. A sedentary lifestyle reduces the chance of injury; one tweaked muscle can impede a thirty-eight-yearold’s mobility for months. Inactivity might also prolong his career. Thomas Haugen, of Oslo’s Kristiana University College, who studies the relationship between age and athletic performance, believes that the less energy Gatlin expends off the track, the more he’ll have to devote to sprinting. “Look at cheetahs,” Haugen says. “They hunt. They eat. Otherwise, they rest. That’s how the sprinter should live.” Especially older sprinters. At Gatlin’s age, “you work out or you’re on the couch.” The four years Gatlin spent not competing spared him the pulls and strains that start to accumulate in athletes as they approach thirty—and often cause complications when their bodies attempt to compensate. “That time not running helped him,” says Ato Boldon, a former Olympic sprinter and four-time medalist from Trinidad who now commentates for NBC. “It can’t be overstated. During those four years, Gatlin’s odometer barely moved.” If he hadn’t been forced to stop, Boldon is certain, Gatlin would be retired by now. When I asked Gatlin, he acknowledged that Boldon was probably right. “I’d be too beat up,” he said. Coleman, the top-ranked 100-meter sprinter, will surely be favored to win in Tokyo. But Gatlin may emerge as the sentimental favorite. With Bolt
retired, he’s the best-known sprinter in the world. By next summer, four years will have passed since he was booed in London. Yet he is still here, still competing, still striving for one more Olympic medal. Whatever he might have done in the past, it’s hard not to root for someone who, if he qualifies, will be stepping into the starting blocks against competitors who are younger by a decade or more. The pandemic has lengthened the odds against Gatlin. His season had been choreographed for maximum efficiency, so that he’d be in peak condition from the U. S. track and field trials, in June, through the 100-meter final in Tokyo, in early August. Then in March, the Olympics were postponed and the spring season was canceled. “We were about to get on a plane,” Gatlin said, “and then everything fell apart within a week.” He knew that his parents, who are in their seventies, would have come to watch him, whatever the circumstances. When he heard of the postponement, Gatlin felt relieved. “I couldn’t imagine being there, running, knowing that they and everyone else were putting themselves at risk,” he said. But the rescheduling created new questions. “In 2020, we’re not going to have races now,” he said. Could he be prepared next summer? Would he remain healthy? Would he be too old? He turns thirty-nine in February. “But I’ll still feel like I’m thirty-eight,” he said, sounding confident, at least for now. “Or maybe like I’m thirtyseven, with all the rest I’m getting.” THE MORNING AFTER OUR DINNER,
Gatlin headed to Montverde under a sky of unbroken gray. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees from the day before. Rain was forecast. He was moving even slower than usual. On days like this, he said, his teammates helped motivate him to keep going. When he first started practicing there, “they treated me special,” he said. “Like ‘Justin Gatlin.’ But now I’m just Justin.” Mitchell gathered the sprinters. That morning, he told them, they’d run three 60-meter dashes, followed by three 100-meter dashes. It was a heavy load, designed to build strength and stamina. One by one, the runners flew down the track. As Gatlin ran his third 60, Mitchell shouted, “Rhythm! Rhythm! Rhythm! Rhythm! Rhythm!” Gatlin shuffled back to the starting line to prepare for his hundreds. He took his time. Then he took off again, arms pumping. Mitchell encouraged him: “Get those hips up!” He yelled out Gatlin’s time: 10.5 seconds. Gatlin didn’t react. He stood at the far end of the track, hunched over, hands on his thighs. Sha’Carri Richardson ran next. She stepped to the line, ran the 100, and turned to walk back in an unused lane. Gatlin still hadn’t moved. As she passed him, she extended her arm to give him a playful slap, then decided against it. She bounced away. He raised his head to watch. Then he followed, one deliberate step at a time, so he could get to where he’d started and run again.
94 S U M M E R 2020
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T H I S WAY OU T DEC LA RAT IONS
T H E E S Q U I R E E D I T O R I A L B O A R D E N D O R S E S ___________________________
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Did you ever hear the one about the boy’s Yeah, big sister / His best friend yeah, we heard it. But it come along, he tried to kiss her made no sense. Why the hell would he want —The Wallflowers to kiss her? Our big sister? Her? She was totally obnoxious. She’d whisper things in our ear, like “You’re being an asshole.” She was nothing like our friend’s big sister—our friend’s sister was cool. ¶ Annoying as they were, our older sisters weren’t even in the back forty of the mine-filled battlefield we lived in growing up: There were bullies and cliques and the first four chapters of The Catcher in the Rye to read by tomorrow and sex and changing for gym, and if we were going to make it out alive, we were going to need some help. Recon, if action movies taught us anything. We needed a scout. ¶ Whom could we turn to? Parents were either traitors or collaborators, usually both. Younger siblings were looking to us for guidance. Maybe an older brother? Head-punching, fart-generating, self-entitled big brother? No, that wouldn’t work. There was only one person we could turn to. We knew who it was, even though it killed us: that girl who whispered shit in our ear but whom our friends liked. ¶ Then a curious thing happened. As we matured, so did she. And when we were ready to step up out of the trenches, there she was, up ahead. She didn’t want us tagging along, but still we followed. She brought us with her to hang with that stoner, the one our parents warned us about, who played the guitar. Maybe she even taught us chords herself. We followed her to the garage when she went looking for a baseball bat after we told her we got jumped. We called her to pick us up when the party got ugly and our friends wouldn’t leave. We played the mix CD she made, the one with our new favorite bands. She never called us out when we pretended we’d discovered them ourselves. We followed her to that bar, the one our friends weren’t so sure about, that opened our eyes. We believed her when she told us, after meeting our date, to just be ourselves. ¶ Maybe she wasn’t so bad after all. So if you haven’t lately, give your big sister a call. Buy her a beer. If she attempts to apologize for all the truly horrible things she might have said or done, tell her it’s all right. Because you’ve come to know that an older sister is a gift. Tell her—and she’ll love this—that the family member Germany’s infamous dictator was closest to throughout his life was his older sister. Her name was Angela. (Angela Hitler!) Tell her that sometimes older sisters are right when they call their brothers assholes.
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