Ldldldldlwldwldlw

POP ROCKS THE ARTISTS MAKING

THE BEST, MOST ADDICTIVE MUSIC OF OUR TIME LOOK SHARP + LIVE SMART

DANIEL DAY-LEWIS’S FINAL MOVIE AND THE GENIUS BEHIND IT THE NEW STATUS SYMBOLS

KIMMEL IS KILLING IT

FEBRUARY 2018

Departments

Features

9

56

Manual

Quincy Jones Has a Story About That

96

Backstory

Michael Jackson. Frank Sinatra. Oprah. C H R I S H E A T H stays up all night with the man who has a tale to go with every hit song

Let’s give it up for Jim Moore

64

GQ Intelligence

Get a Room: When the Destination Is the Hotel Itself

20

The Dark Optimism of P.T. Anderson

In the age of Airbnb, planning a trip around a single hotel seems counterintuitive—but these eight places prove the exception

Paul Thomas Anderson has a reputation for being a reclusive genius.

He’s actually just another suburban dad at school drop-off—moonlighting as the best filmmaker alive

80

BY Z AC H BA R O N

34

The New Status Symbols: How to Be Better Than Everyone Else in 2018 All the old signifiers of wealth are flipped on their head. It’s about experiences now, man.

And getting lots of sleep.

And authenticity. Just make sure you remember to post about it on Instagram

Fashion 38

Cover: Jimmy Kimmel He spoke up during the health-care debate. And now America’s looking to him to be its serious— and funny—voice of reason

BY SA M S C H U B E & B E N J Y H A N S E N - B U N DY

BY M I C H A E L PAT E R N I T I

46

Pop Art In the past year, pop has become music’s most vibrant genre. These are the artists behind the elevation

THE COVER

74

Your Sharpest Night Out Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana fix up a select few GQ readers who needed a nudge in the right direction B Y N I C K M A R I N O

Eric Ray Davidson Coat, $4,180, sweater, $840, and shirt, $510, by Prada.

Grooming by Stephanie Fowler for MCH. Skin by Hee Soo Kwon using La Mer. Props by Ward Robinson for Wooden Ladder. Produced by Allison Elioff for Sunny 16 Productions.

86

Baby, It’s Bold Outside This winter, we’re keeping warm with extra-loud ’70s-inspired ski gear. We took a trip to the French Alps

Where to buy it Where are the items in this issue available? Go to the fashion directories on GQ.com to find out. All prices quoted are approximate and subject to change.

6

GQ.COM

FEBRUARY

↑ Find Dua Lipa dominating the UK charts.

2018

ERIK MADIGAN HECK

S H I R T ( M E N ’ S ) : G I V E N C H Y. PA N T S ( M E N ’ S ) : S T E L L A M CC A R T N E Y. LO N G N EC K L AC E : R E N V I . A L L OT H E R J E W E L RY: H E R OW N .

Sacred Cows Red meat is all CO2 emissions and heart attacks.

But it’s so tasty! M A R K B I T T M A N helps reconcile our principles with our appetites

®

With its available Entune™ 3.0 Premium Audio with JBL w/ Clari-Fi, you’ve got a front row seat.

Prototype shown with options. Production model may vary. 2018 Camry available Fall 2017. ©2017 Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc.

Switch to GEICO and save money for the things you love.

Maybe it’s the vintage submariner you’ve always wanted. Or those designer aviators. They’re what you love – and they don’t come cheap. So switch to GEICO, because you could save 15% or more on car insurance. And that would help make the things you love that much easier to get.

Auto • Home • Rent • Cycle • Boat geico.com | 1-800-947-AUTO (2886) | local office Some discounts, coverages, payment plans and features are not available in all states or all GEICO companies. Homeowners and renters coverages are written through non-affiliated insurance companies and are secured through the GEICO Insurance Agency, Inc. Boat and PWC coverages are underwritten by GEICO Marine Insurance Company. Motorcycle and ATV coverages are underwritten by GEICO Indemnity Company.

GEICO is a registered service mark of Government Employees Insurance Company, Washington, D.C. 20076; a Berkshire Hathaway Inc. subsidiary. © 2017 GEICO

ESCAPE THE GYM: YOUR 2018 TRAINING PLAN

1 of 6 →

PHASE

1

S T Y L I S T : M I C H A E L C I O F F O L E T T I AT A R T D E PA R T M E N T. B A R B E R : T O M Á S F I G U E R O A . G R O O M I N G : S H A K E L A K . L E W I S .

Burn Your Old Gym Clothes

GQ’s ROOKIE OF THE YEAR De’Aaron Fox

• Forget jumping jacks. Here’s a new first step in your workout routine: Get a fire going in a metal trash can and incinerate your ratty shorts and tees. This may sound counter-intuitive, but you might need to cancel your gym membership, too.

Because gyms—and the weight-lifting circuits they’re built around—perpetuate an outdated fitness model. We don’t want inflated beach muscles; we want a full-body workout. In the following pages, NBA rookie De’Aaron Fox carves out a new path for sweatin’ it out. Let him show you what to wear, eat, lift, carry along, and charge up for the quietly revolutionary anti-gym workout.

Because the best fitness inspiration we can think of ?

The thought of never stepping on an elliptical again.

Jacket, $425, and sweatpants, $345, by Dyne. Sneakers, $185, and basketball by Nike.

Where to buy it? Go to the fashion directories on GQ.com PHOTOGRAPHS BY ERIC RAY DAVIDSON

FEBRUARY

2018

GQ.COM

9

2 of 6 →

ESCAPE THE GYM

A PH SE

2

DRESS LIKE YOU HATE THE GYM (BECAUSE YOU DO)

• No need to choose between performance and aesthetics anymore—good news: A brand like Dyne can do both. In 2018 apparel is evolving, and the best-looking gym clothes shouldn’t be so…gym-y. No more neon or mesh or neon mesh. A forwardthinking company like Fourlaps knows there is life outside the weight room.

Or you can take Fox’s approach. Back in his college days at Kentucky, he often played in tights under his shorts. The sleek new apparel line STLR

proves that snug gear actually helps you move—and might help kill off the baggy look that’s been popular since the Fab Five were freshmen. Oh, and the brand is pronounced exactly the way its clothes look: stellar.

Right: Shirt, $54, and shorts, $64, by Fourlaps. Sneakers

by Nike x Riccardo Tisci. Below: Tank top, $92, shorts, $108, and tights, $124, by STLR. Sneakers, $110, by Nike. Where to buy it?

Go to the fashion directories on GQ.com

The new wave of gym gear demands to be worn outside the gym.

Introducing De’Aaron Fox, Point Guard, Six Three, 175 Pounds, Exciting Hair • Cruising down I-5 in his matte black Tesla—his phone resting in his lap and his GPS chattering in the background—unflappable 20-year-old Sacramento rookie De’Aaron Fox is talking about his hair as if he’s chilling in the barber’s chair. “It’s the first thing people look at,” he says. “And I look good with it. I haven’t cut it since my junior year of high school.” That signature twist-out hairstyle was the first sign, even as a one-and-done college freshman for John Calipari at Kentucky, that the kid cared about fashion. The next indication: He wore a burgundy suit and

red-bottom Louboutins to the draft lottery. But for him, a little extravagance goes a long way.

“I’ve actually done nothing with my first NBA check. I got my parents a house, but I did that with Nike endorsement money.

I have my car. I have a place to stay. There’s nothing huge that I really need.” Instead, he’s taking his slashing game straight to NBA defenses (it’s been more than a decade since Sacramento took anything to anyone). And when you’re trying to resurrect a cellar-dwelling franchise, the last thing you can do is slow down.

—NICK MARINO

It’s time to do away with the term ‘athleisure.’ Let’s hear it for the return of athletic clothes made for...doing athletic stuff.”— J I M M O O R E , G Q C R E A T I V E D I R E C T O R 10

GQ.COM

PAY B AC K YO U R S H A R E WITH TIME TO S PA R E LO O K F O R Z E LLE ® I N YO U R B A N K I N G A P P O R V I S I T Z E LLE PAY.CO M

Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at zellepay.com. Zelle and the Zelle marks are property of Early Warning Services, LLC.

3 of 6 →

ESCAPE THE GYM

PHASE

3

The Hot New Trend in Fitness: “Sports” Here’s a theory: Cardio should actually be fun—not something you dread with every ounce of your body fat. The best workouts should remind us why we love working out. So we sent GQ staffers to pick up new sports and, aside from a scrape or two, it seems like we’re onto something GET S PRY LIKE A GEEZER

H U M I LI AT I O N C A N B E H E A LT HY • The first time I tried Brazilian jujitsu, the mat itself submitted me: I sloughed off skin from one knee and the tops of both big toes, leaving shiny red patches. I bandaged myself up and took a week off. When I returned, I was promptly thrown to the wolves, as is standard practice at Vitor Shaolin’s BJJ Academy.

In my second week, a bowl-cut kid, 19 at the oldest, proceeded to submit me with a series of spinning, twisting throws and choke holds while I held on for dear life.

Beyond the horrible teen, there were plenty of other challenges: the general frequency with which men and women leaned on my windpipe or manipulated my joints or hyperextended my elbows. And then, hovering in the background, was my gaping lack of knowledge.

When I managed, by luck or by minor athleticism, to gain an advantageous position, I…just

C LI NG F O R YO U R L I F E

• First: Don’t panic.

Because if there’s something deliciously primal about climbing a rock (or a rock wall), it’s also a reliable way to trigger some vertigo.

Expect your cortisol levels to spike—after all, the only tools standing between being on a rock wall and falling away from a rock wall are your fingers and toes (so prepare for them to hurt).

But it’s precisely this mind-body tandem 12

GQ.COM

that will keep you coming back. “Solving” a boulder “problem”— the route to the top, which, on an indoor wall, will be a series of color-coded handand footholds—is like a physical math proof: You need to envision the steps (the “beta” in climber parlance) before you begin, and then you need to use your full body to execute.

Climbing, surprisingly, is as much about the legs as the arms.

FEBRUARY

2018

But it also requires a very specific poise, akin to the meditative Zen focus found in yoga—only while scaling a rock, you’re just one greasy finger or one panicked lapse in focus away from experiencing free fall. Make it to the top, drunk on relief, and you’re a tick less beholden to the doubtful little voice in the back of your mind—which is useful even if you aren’t clinging to a sheer rock face.— C L A Y S K I P P E R

didn’t know what to do. And that, really, is the point. BJJ is about submission, in all its forms: finding ways to make your opponent tap out. And “picking up” Brazilian jujitsu is all about submitting.

Why do this for exercise?

Running is free, and also no one tries to choke you unconscious. But if you’re like me—in search of a workout that is difficult and a little bit sadistic—BJJ is the ticket.

Navy SEALs are known to be fans. So is Anthony Bourdain.

After a month of training, I can’t say that I’ve experienced an “aha” moment yet. But I’d like to think I’ve learned something: that there is value in confusion, in being a white belt, in turning beet red as a 140-pound buddy cranks my neck in a guillotine hold. Mastery isn’t cheap, and fluency is hard-earned.

Sometimes, I’m realizing, flailing madly is exactly what the body needs.— S A M S C H U B E

• People who play squash love to hold forth on its virtues.

It’s “a life sport!”

It’s “the thinking man’s racquetball!”

It “works the tush!”

Once you start playing squash you, too, will begin to sound like an aged New England liberal-arts professor when you talk about it.

The game itself is easy to play but very difficult to win. As a beginner, one loses often and dramatically.

Soothe your ego by knowing that an hour of play will burn close to a thousand calories.

The game is so mathematical and stressful that there’s no room for surplus off-court anxieties. You and your opponent race around, slamming a tiny ball at an unforgiving wall.

The ball is a living thing—it literally warms up as you play—and you get to take its life with every swipe of the racket. Sure, court fees can add up, but squash is no more expensive than less dignified activities like spin class. And you learn a sport that, judging by my lithe 90-year-old opponents, keeps you looking good well past retirement.

—LAUREN LARSON

ILLUSTRATIONS BY RAMI NIEMI

4 of 6 →

ESCAPE THE GYM

PROP STYLIST: LISA GWILLIAM

Heart rate, sleep, and steps—all tracked by this tiny ring.

• After subjecting the latest gym gear to various “tests”— i.e., sweating heavily onto it and seeing if it still works—we found that our favorites are multitalented. Take this rubberized Lacoste bag ($98): built for gym-going and long weekends. Or the Motiv Ring ($199), a fitness tracker that says “I’m committed to my health”—and,

in a pinch, “I’m committed to my spouse.” Also surviving rigorous trial runs, a.k.a. quarter-mile jogs to Shake Shack: the Bose SoundSport Free headphones ($250). Use these Björn Borg–ian Fila wristbands ($6)

PHOTOGRAPH BY VICTOR PRADO

while jumping a leather rope from Kalon Studios ($96).

The Tretorn slides ($85) are designed

by André 3000, making them the most stylish shower shoes ever created.

Complete the kit with this S’well water bottle ($35), which insulates your water against that hotyoga session you’re already regretting.

—ANDREW GOBLE

PHASE

4

Thy Gym Bag Shalt Not Stink FEBRUARY

2018

GQ.COM

15

5 of 6 →

ESCAPE THE GYM

PHASE

5 Can I Avoid People and Become Incredibly Fit? • At some point a few years ago, having dragged myself to another overpriced New York City gym, I watched an exhausted woman try to exorcise her demons on the elliptical with a crazed glint in her eye, and I thought, This is bad juju. In desperate need of something new, I tried CrossFit, which, I soon learned, is actually more insu≠erable than my old bougie gym—as in: inducing physical su≠ering.

It turns out I have no existential need to be able to lift 150 pounds over my head six times.

Then a friend told me about the Nike Training Club app, which is basically a personal trainer without the overenthusiastic small talk.

You can choose from a Library of Alexandria for workouts—sorted by how much time you’re in for (max 30 minutes for this guy), how much equipment you have (none), and how hard you want to sweat (7 out of 10, unless I’m

A PH SE

6

of nutrient-rich

16

GQ.COM

FEBRUARY

just sweated out. Heat the eggs and water until boiling, turn o≠, cover pot for ten minutes. Done.

(They can go a few hours unrefrigerated.)

2018

—BENJY HANSEN-BUNDY

EASIEST, ALMOST TOO INTERESTING

• Sprinkle flaky

Three Ways to Refuel— From Familiar to Freaky

feeling extra carby). Clean mini videos of attractive fit people with expert technique play as an unimpressed female voice commands your every move. And it’s free!

All you need is a flat piece of ground and a kernel of midwinter body shame.

Then there’s Strava, which tracks your running and cycling with obsessive precision. Part social network, it lets you share your masochism in various digital competitions within the “Strava community.”

The beauty of app-based exercise is that you get all the health benefits of a trip to the weight room without the fees or the commute. It’s stripped down—no bells and zero whistles—just you panting while doing something called a “lateral bound” 15 times. And you’ll feel virtuous after half an hour, which at a normal gym is about how long it takes me to do warm-up cardio and check Instagram.

GNC. Our recipe: Blend almond milk, a banana, a spoonful of peanut butter, and a corner broken o≠ a dark-chocolate bar.

• Insects are nature’s most sustainable, protein-packed creatures—so a brand called Exo has started making protein bars from pulverized crickets. Gross? Nah, the texture is normal.

Blueberry Vanilla tastes...good. (Just don’t think about it.)

S T Y L I S T : M I C H A E L C I O F F O L E T T I AT A R T D E PA R T M E N T. B A R B E R : T O M Á S F I G U E R O A . G R O O M I N G : S H A K E L A K . L E W I S .

Yes, and you can skip the gym altogether.

The only downside? You’ll need to spend a little more time on your phone

EVENTS || PROMOTIONS || EXCLUSIVES

Twitter is a registered trademark of Twitter, Inc. Facebook ® is a registered trademark of Facebook, Inc. All Instagram logos and trademarks are property of Instagram, LLC.

VISIT REPORT.GQ.COM FOR MORE

CELEBRATING IN STYLE On October 25, GQ and Rémy Martin toasted the Next Generation of Athletes with a Special Portfolio Exhibit from GQ’s November issue.

Hosted by GQ’s Style Editor, Mark Anthony Green, the exclusive event featured photos from the November issue, a performance by DJ Kitty Cash, and Rémy Martin cognac and cocktails.

Show us your courtside style for a chance to celebrate with the game’s greatest players. Visit RemyMVP.com to learn more.

HOW TO CUSTOMIZE YOUR SOCK AND UNDERWEAR DRAWER Sure, there are lots of sock and underwear brands, but only Nice Laundry allows you to build a custom box of socks and underwear, and send back your old ones (from any brand) to be recycled for free.

Best of all, they offer a 100% Game-changer Guarantee: Love your first pair, or it’s on them. Nice Laundry also offers a “Personal Edition” monogramming service—something only they do. Each pair is made exclusively for you using 2,000 stitches, available in three styles. ?KNA = OLA?E=HƄA@EPEKJΘ>KJQO L=EN =J@ΘBNAA Ż Ż ODELLEJCΘSEPD UKQN first order at nicelaundry.com/GQ.

6 of 6 →

ESCAPE THE GYM PHASE

8

PHASE

7 Don’t Shave (Anything) in the Gym Bathroom

Let Christian Bale Psych You Up: Three Awesome (and Weird) Workout Montages

The locker room of an average American gym is a place you want to be in for no more than five minutes. Let grooming director Garrett Munce guide you through the most efficient post-workout routine ever devised

0 0 : 2 0 → F U L L B O DY

Get in!

We know it’s a little strange to watch a YouTube clip before or during a workout. But certain classic Hollywood montages will get you extra fired up for the squat rack. Or the…squash court.

Here, GQ editors select their favorite inspirational scenes.

G.I. JANE → 1997

• Rip open one of these individually wrapped Ursa Major Face Wipes ($24 for 20 pack)—disposable towelettes that cool you down and cleanse and de-oil your face in one step.

• Hit the showers after a workout with a monomaniacal sense of purpose.

Otherwise you’ll stand around waiting for hours as a menagerie of vanity-impaled gym stereotypes hog the sinks, blow-dry their chest hair, and trim their pubes.

It’s a human safari you did not sign up for.

Sadly, most locker rooms offer a paltry selection of personal-grooming products. Even the fancy gyms don’t dole out matte face moisturizers (matte being the opposite of pizza face). That’s why we’ve endorsed a BYO policy. Because top-shelf multi-use products—once relegated to dandruff two-in-ones but now churned out by leading brands—are the key to minimizing your time in halfdressed purgatory.

So take a deep breath (through your mouth) and move quickly.

18

GQ.COM

3:15 → FACE STUFF

• American Crew 3-in-1 Shampoo, Conditioner and Body Wash ($24 for 33.8 oz.) in less time than it takes to find the right shower temp.

WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER → 2 001

3:00 → PIT STOP

• Dermalogica Oil Free Matte Moisturizer with SPF 30 ($52) bu≠ers your skin against dryness and sun damage.

• The quick-dry formula of Degree Men Dry Spray Anti-perspirant ($5) won’t rub o≠ on your clothes, which you’ll be putting on in T minus one minute.

BATMAN BEGINS → 2 005

5:00 → VICTORY! 4:00 →

• Rub a dimesized amount of Bumble and bumble Styling Creme ($26) into towel-dried hair and let it air-dry.

Now get dressed.

FEBRUARY

• Congratulations: You’re the Usain Bolt of semi-public grooming. Take a self-congratulatory victory lap in the parking lot.

Get out!

2018

F R O M T O P : B U E N A V I S TA P I C T U R E S / E V E R E T T C O L L E C T I O N ; U S A F I L M S / E V E R E T T C O L L E C T I O N ; D AV I D J A M E S / WA R N E R B R O S . / P H O T O F E S T

00:00 → DE-GRIMING

EVENTS || PROMOTIONS || EXCLUSIVES

VISIT REPORT.GQ.COM FOR MORE

Twitter is a registered trademark of Twitter, Inc. Facebook ® is a registered trademark of Facebook, Inc. All Instagram logos and trademarks are property of Instagram, LLC.

Photos: Debbie-Jean Lemonte

Photo credit: Elizabeth Dooley

CELEBRATING TIMELESS STYLE GQ and Grand Seiko co hosted a cocktail L=NPU ?AHA>N=PEJCΘ EIAHAOO PUHAΘ=P GQ’s LNER=PA LAJPDKQOAż DA AJPŻ QAOPO CKP =J AT?HQOERA HKKG =P PDA H=PAOP N=J@ AEGK ?KHHA?PEKJ =J@ AJFKUA@ LANOKJ=HEVA@

=L=JAOA ?=HHECN=LDU >U =J KJƄOEPA =NPEOPŻ As a nod to GQ’s 60 years, attendees had PDAEN LDKPK P=GAJ EJ = ?QOPKI LKNPN=EP OPQ@EK inspired by GQ’s ?PK>AN ?KRANŻ Explore the latest collection at grand-seiko.us.com.

THE GENT - SOHO, NYC GQ’s invitation-only penthouse serves as =J AT?HQOERA D=JCKQP BKN OKIA KB PDA IKOP EJBHQAJPE=H J=IAO EJ B=ODEKJż BKK@ż =J@ IQOE?Ż Inspired by the pages of GQ, the three-story HQTQNU =L=NPIAJP BA=PQNAO D=J@ƄOAHA?PA@ furnishings, archival GQ photography, and ?QOPKI EJPANEKN @AOECJ >U KIA CAŻ DA AJPƛO IK@ANJ =AOPDAPE? =J@ OHAAG BEJEODAO NABHA?P PDA LANBA?P ?KI>EJ=PEKJ KB A?HA?PE? =J@ ?KKHŻ @GQTHEGENT

Photos: Debbie-Jean Lemonte

CELEBRATING HERNO’S NEW SOHO STORE J KRAI>AN jmż GQ PA=IA@ QL SEPD Herno PK ?AHA>N=PA PDA KLAJEJC KB EPƛO BENOPƄARAN Ż Ż OPKNA EJ KDKż AS KNGŻ OPUHEOD ?NKS@ KB B=ODEKJ EJBHQAJ?ANO ?=IA KQP PK LNAREAS PDA OPKNEA@ P=HE=J ?KIL=JUƛO JAS ?KHHA?PEKJ KB OKLDEOPE?=PA@ QN>=J KQPANSA=N HEJEJC PDA S=HHO KB PDA OHAAG JAS OL=?AŻ QAOPO AJFKUA@

ANJKƛO OECJ=PQNA SEJA =J@ HECDP B=NA SDEHA GQ TA?QPERA PUHEOPż NAPP =DHCNAJż S=O KJ D=J@ PK KBBAN PELO =J@ LANOKJ=HEVA@ OPUHEJC PK PDKOA HKKGEJC PK OP=U S=NI =J@ HKKG OD=NL PDEO SEJPANŻ Explore Herno at www.herno.it Ż

GQINTELLIGENCE

FILMMAKER

His parables about cruel and powerful men have made him the most admired filmmaker alive, but they’ve had the side effect of making PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON

> The Dark Optimism of P.T. Anderson 20

GQ.COM

FEBRUARY

2018

AMANDA DEMME

S T Y L I S T : A N D R E W T. V O T T E R O

seem a little down on the state of humanity.

And he is! He definitely is.

But, as he told Z A C H B A R O N on a sunny afternoon in the San Fernando Valley, his new movie—a romance about an uncompromising man who meets his comeuppance—gives away what he really believes: There just might be hope for us yet

Introducing the...

GQ Best Stuff Box Our quarterly subscription box features our favorite products—all rigorously tested and loved by GQ editors—including electronics, grooming products, and accessories.

THE FIRST BOX FEATURES BRANDS LIKE:

ACQUA DI PARMA BAXTER OF CALIFORNIA JLAB

$215 VALUE FOR ONLY $49

JASON MARKK NICE LAUNDRY

Get yours now at GQ.COM/BESTSTUFFBOX

AVAILABLE WHILE SUPPLIES LAST

RUDY’S BARBERSHOP

GQINTELLIGENCE

down the hallway of the house he was renting in Encino, California, this summer, past his o∞ce, where a lamp illuminated a hardback of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day and a pack of American Spirits, and then he turned right, into the room he’d been using to edit his newest film, Phantom Thread. A blue exercise ball rested against one wall. At 47, Anderson is probably the greatest filmmaker of his generation.

He also has a bad back. The atmosphere on Anderson’s sets has varied over the years depending on the actors involved—Adam Sandler, the star of Punch-Drunk Love, liked to rehearse; Daniel Day-Lewis, the star of Phantom Thread and There Will Be Blood, and Joaquin Phoenix (The Master, Inherent Vice) decidedly did not—but he maintains a universal rule: no sitting. He likes to get close to his actors. “There’s no chairs when we work,” he said.

PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON WANDERED

That’s hell on the lower back, though, and Anderson would just su≠er through it, until recently, when he discovered Pilates.

Friends had been telling him about it for years. “The lesson there,” he said, “is shut up and listen to people when they give you free advice about things to help you with your lower back. Especially if you have a 22

GQ.COM

FEBRUARY

2018

natural blocker, which I do, and I think a lot of people do, for any phrase that starts with You know what you should do? Which instantly turns into, like, the internal voice going, What you should do is go fuck yourself. ” He smiled—ironic, crooked, a bit sad.

“Free advice is so easy to come by, if you can just kinda get out of your own way.”

FILMMAKER

Anderson is better at getting out of his own way than he used to be. As an ambitious, emotional, sometimes paranoid young man, he made ambitious, emotional, sometimes paranoid films: 1997’s Boogie Nights, about an adoptive misfit family set in the burgeoning world of late-’70s and early-’80s pornography in the San Fernando Valley, where Anderson himself grew up; 1999’s Magnolia, a three-hour ensemble film about heartbreak and loneliness that includes a literal rain of frogs in the third act. It often seemed as if he was at war with the studios backing his films, whom he would publicly castigate for not doing enough, or with the very notion that a film, no matter how personal, eventually has to end. But as Anderson’s movies have segued from the raw, confessional material of his earliest work and become more oblique, mysterious, and farther reaching, their director has accumulated a di≠erent kind of mythology. He has a reputation as a recluse, or at least as a reticent and often elusive interview subject, perhaps because his films depict reticent and elusive people.

It’s true that Anderson does not love conversations that are about Paul Thomas Anderson—“I don’t want to talk about myself any fucking more,” he said at one point. But his reputation as a recluse, he said, is “definitely overstated.” He is happy enough to talk about his movies. But there’s also only so much he’ll say before insisting that the movies should speak for themselves. As with many of Anderson’s latter-day films, the plot of Phantom Thread is deceptively simple: It’s about a 1950s London fashion designer, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, in roughly the same way that There Will Be Blood was about an oil prospector (also Day-Lewis), or The Master was about a cult leader (Philip Seymour Ho≠man), or Inherent Vice was about a private investigator (Phoenix). Which is another way of saying that Phantom Thread is about an obsessive, di∞cult man. Or, more accurately, it’s about why a man might be obsessive, or di∞cult—what societal forces, what broken internal thing, might make him that way.

Phantom Thread is a portrait of a demanding, creative, often cruel person who organizes his life, and the lives of others, around his work. The potential parallels to, say, a film director are not hard to notice—something Anderson acknowledges and disavows at the same time. “The reality of me being able to live a life that self-consumed or selfish, it just—it’s impossible,” he said. “But it’s easy to kind of place yourself, to think, God, what would it be like?” Anderson’s own experience with creative life—at least after Magnolia, which took 90 days to shoot, an eternity for a film that doesn’t end in a climactic battle

F R O M TO P : C O U R T E S Y O F L A U R I E S PA R H A M / F O C U S F E AT U R E S ; W I L S O N W E B B / WA R N E R B R O S . / E V E R E T T C O L L E C T I O N

FILMMAKER

GQINTELLIGENCE

against Magneto or Ultron, and nearly a year to edit—has been decidedly calmer than the version he depicts in Phantom Thread. “I would like to think that you can live a generous life to your family and your friends and still be self-consumed with your work,” he said. “That they’re not mutually exclusive.”

He gestured at the bright space around us, with its green hedge and white picket fence, and at the driveway outside, where he’d parked his sporty black BMW with the satellite radio tuned to the Tom Petty station. He described an average day in his average life: four kids and a beautiful partner named Maya Rudolph and a house in Tarzana that he drives in from each morning, dropping o≠ the children at school before showing up to the o∞ce.

Pilates. Green juice. A California boy born and raised, who feels about Los Angeles exactly the same way he felt about it 20 years ago, when he made Boogie Nights, as sweet and desolate a love letter ever written to the north side of the city. “What’s scary is how I continue to love this place and be so comfortable here and still get a kind of giddy appreciation for even the ugliest corners of it,” he said.

Anderson set and shot Phantom Thread in London, in part because of his a≠ection for that city. “But you know, the second I hit the ground here, it was like that Californian kicked back in. I mean, I had my shorts on and my flip-flops within seconds.” He laughed. “And I was driving down—you know, going from the center of London, the most beautiful, oldest, greatest city on the planet, and then here I was just sort of running down like Jimmy Stewart, like, Hello, Subway! You know, Hello, Chili’s! So full of gratitude to be back here. Hello, IHOP!”

• From top: Daniel Day-Lewis and Vicky Krieps in Phantom Thread; Anderson with Joaquin Phoenix on the Inherent Vice set.

For most of the year, even the basic details of the plot of Phantom Thread and who was starring in it had been closely guarded—the impression, a familiar one with Anderson, was of a man trying until the last moment I N ‘ P H A N T O M T H R E A D , ’ Daniel Dayto keep a secret. But Anderson described the Lewis’s character is named Reynolds mystery around his projects as more like the Woodcock—Day-Lewis’s idea, Anderson said. product of a prolonged enchantment. At the Only an actor with three Academy Award beginning, when he’s sitting down to write wins could get away with “Woodcock.” “We whatever he’s going to make next, “You’re were texting back and forth trying to come like, This is gonna be a long time of my life,” up with names, and he came up with that he said. “But before you actually really have one, and I fucking choked on my cornflakes,” a choice, it’s too late. It should be too late.

Anderson said. “I thought, That is so funny.

You should be a goner.” Goner is a word that I think I wrote, like, Can we do that?” Yes, as Anderson is fond of. Though his films are as it turned out. The name was stern, dignified, technically astonishing and skillfully conyet darkly comic, like the character himself. trolled as any being made now, in person he They could do that. often describes his role in the process with words that make it seem almost involuntary, almost inevitable: goner, sucker, overcome.

“I had such a terrible time on my Fashion, like prospecting for first film that it made me overly oil, was not an obvious subject for Anderson, who’s been wearprotective of myself,” said Anderson. ing the same rumpled white “I’m sure that that equaled a lot of dress shirt since the ’90s. But, behavior that I wouldn’t repeat.” he said, “you just gotta start listening to the airwaves a little

bit.” On a trip to India, he saw a photo of the Spanish designer Cristóbal Balenciaga in an airport. “That coincided with a conversation I had had a couple weeks before about Beau Brummell,” the 19th-century Englishman who is credited with inventing the modern men’s suit. “And I had had in my pocket a story between a man and a woman where the dynamic was about power—the power shift between a strong-willed man and a woman.” Day-Lewis would play the man. Vicky Krieps, a relatively unknown actress from Luxembourg, would play the woman, Alma. Anderson began reading more about Balenciaga, who, he said, had “taste, skill, talent. The full package.

He could sew a button on a dress. He could make the most complicated dress. He had that level of skill.” Most important for the character of Woodcock, Anderson said, “he was protective of his work.”

Anderson pictured a man like that: complicated, unyielding, fanatical. What might happen if that man, who’d spent his life meeting and discarding women, met one who turned out, however improbably, to be his match? He was thinking about Hitchcock’s Rebecca, in which Joan Fontaine FEBRUARY

2018

GQ.COM

25

enters into a marriage with a domineering man, played by Laurence Olivier, that is not what it seems. Anderson wondered: “What if halfway through Rebecca, Joan Fontaine said, You know, I’ve had enough of your shit?” Anderson cast the steely British actress Lesley Manville as Woodcock’s sister, a character who provides another echo of Rebecca, in which traces of the man’s past life and old loves keep bursting ominously through.

The result is something between a love story and a horror film. Phantom Thread is visually lush, like a Vermeer—you can watch a red blush spread across Krieps’s cheek like oncoming doom—and surprisingly funny, in the morbid, dark way that Anderson is often funny. Woodcock is so full of himself and his work that he’s preposterous; but he is also, the film reminds you, dangerous to those around him. For the role, Day-Lewis learned how to sew and loitered around the set in full self-important Woodcock intensity. In November, the actor told an audience in New York that the cast and crew were like termites on the set: “It was a nightmare, and we were living on top of each other.”

After finishing the film, he announced his retirement from acting. Krieps, who is a

revelation, as softly lethal as a gun with a silencer, said she had a panic attack on the crowded set, and described her di∞cult dynamic with Day-Lewis: “If you want to work with Daniel, you can only follow.”

Phantom Thread shines with careful polish, but Anderson admitted that the e≠ect did not come easily. “If anybody looked behind the scenes at just how chaotic and disorganized it was to get it to feel this controlled,” he said ruefully. “This is not false humility. There’s a level of kind of amateurishness around it all”—around every film Anderson’s made, he said—“that’s just kind of hilarious to look back at and think about the way that it did turn out.” After Day-Lewis’s termites line in New York, Anderson was quick to reassure the audience: “We’re all okay now.”

Phantom Thread is in some ways the least complicated, most straightforward story Anderson has told in years—a throwback to the more intimate films he began his career with. He made his first film, Sydney, about some earnestly lost people trying to get it together around a casino in Reno, when he was only 24; the studio he was working with took the film away, tried to re-cut it, and

retitled it Hard Eight. Anderson decided nothing like that would ever happen to him again. This was the period—of publicly raging against studio bosses and demanding final cut, which he received on Magnolia— when the phrase “enfant terrible” started showing up in profiles of him. “I think I had such a terrible time on my first film that it made me so overly protective of myself and the film that going into the next couple of films, I felt a strong need to box the world out or box anybody out who wasn’t directly involved,” he said. “And being probably very scared of getting hurt or of failing or having anybody hurt me or my film. So I’m sure that that equaled a lot of… behavior that I wouldn’t repeat—hopefully not repeat, for sure. But at the time it was probably the only way to survive.”

Anderson has long acknowledged that Boogie Nights is somewhat autobiographical, and not just because it takes place in the San Fernando Valley. Like the members of the improvised but close-knit porn clan in the film, Anderson grew up in a large blended family, son to a voice-over actor and TV host named Ernie Anderson and a woman named Edwina, whom he’s never said much

THREE MORE RIGHT TWIX TO CRAVE & THREE MORE ®

LEFT TWIX® TO DETEST.

GQINTELLIGENCE

about and with whom he has a sometimes complicated relationship. (The porn part he only witnessed from afar, in a neighborhood house he was fascinated with but didn’t dare enter.) Today, Anderson sometimes jokes that he found out what Boogie Nights was about when the studio, New Line Cinema, came up with a marketing plan for the film.

“I remember them saying: Oh, this is about family. And I understood what they meant.

It was: Now we have to tell the world this isn’t about porn. I couldn’t tell you at this point whether, at any point during the writing of it, I thought, This is a story about family. I think those kinds of things, those kinds of phrases, those kinds of sayings, are not something that genuinely occur to anybody that is sitting down to write a story.”

But he’ ll more or less concede that Magnolia, which includes a subplot about the death by cancer of a quiz-show producer played by Jason Robards, is partly a memorial for his father, who died in a similar way, and partly a tribute to Fiona Apple, whom he was dating at the time and whose ambivalent stories about being a young musical prodigy find an echo in the character of a washed-up former child game-show champion.

Punch-Drunk Love depicts a badly damaged individual who gets back on his feet by falling in love, and it came out not long after Rudolph and Anderson got together.

After Punch-Drunk Love, Anderson didn’t make a film for five years. When he did, the frame had widened: Suddenly, for reasons that are not entirely clear even to Anderson, the films became about way more than the emotional lives of people living in the outskirts of Los Angeles. There Will Be Blood, released in 2007, tells the story of American capitalism’s rise through the lens of an oil prospector and his broken relationship with his son. That film is one of the two or three best to be made in this century, and Anderson followed it with a series of widescreen epics that, like There Will Be Blood, tell stories about America and all the weird sad twisted stu≠ that birthed us. The Master (2012) was about two lost men searching for meaning and freedom via a cult-like religious sect in the aftermath of World War II; Inherent Vice (2014), like the Thomas Pynchon novel from which it was closely adapted, is

FILMMAKER

about the bummer sellout of the idealistic ’60s dream by the forces of greed and evil.

According to Anderson, this was basically an accident, him becoming maybe our best and most clear-eyed chronicler of America’s myriad demons and self-betrayals. It’s certainly not what he set out to do. He cited Warren Beatty’s epic Reds, a love story set during the Russian Revolution: “I was thinking about how great a film that is, but how deeply confusing and uninteresting all the facts about the Russian Revolution are. You know? I’m not smart enough for it. It’s over my head. But boy—and this is fucking really kind of a simple thing to say—but when he finds her and they hug and they kiss and, you know, you’re like, tears

“I think movies will be just fine without him around,” Anderson said of Harvey Weinstein. “He just met the right Quentin Tarantino, that’s all.”

MORE FLAVORS. SAME SIDES.

GQINTELLIGENCE

FILMMAKER

streaming down, cue the music, cue the two-shot where they find each other and hug, and I’m a goner. You know?”

There is not a lot of hugging in There Will Be Blood, and not a lot of happy reunions in The Master, but Phantom Thread has what might be described as a happy—or at least optimistic—ending, in the same sense that Inherent Vice, his previous film, has a happy ending: Things may still be dark and weird, but both films ultimately allow for the possibility of connection, even love. At the house in Encino, I asked him if he thought he was softening, whether age had made him more positive.

“I think I’ve always been pretty optimistic,” he said. “I think I’m an, a, an, over—I think overall, I have an optimistic personality.

Which may come as a surprise, I guess.”

He grinned his uneven grin. “Let’s go outside,” he said. “It’s getting dark and depressing in here.”

I N N O V E M B E R , on the day after Thanks-

giving, Anderson finally began screening Phantom Thread for audiences. For the film’s premiere showing, he’d chosen the Ahrya Fine Arts Theater, a lovely, recently restored cinema on Wilshire, in Beverly Hills, with red seats, a red ceiling, and gilded light fixtures. This is the point in the process when Anderson is as nervous as he ever gets about his work. “It’s really good to get the first one over with,” he said. He’d finished the print only three days before, and he had no idea what to make of the final product. Sitting in the theater, watching it with an audience for the first time, was “kind of strange,” he said. “Everything moves like molasses.” To him, his own film felt like it dragged: “It’s too quiet, it’s too loud, it’s too cold, it’s too hot.” But as the 28

GQ.COM

FEBRUARY

2018

has personally been nominated six times movie went on, he felt the adrenaline start to come. People were laughing in the right and has never won, attempted to maintain spots; the film was casting the spell that a smile in the audience. Anderson doesn’t exactly mind not winning, but participathe’d hoped it would. After a second screening takes its toll. “It takes a lot to put on ing that night, followed by a Q&A with Krieps and Manville, he’d gone home, from a tuxedo,” he said. “It’s very, uh, surprising the nervy glitz of a Hollywood premiere to the amount of time to put one leg into…” He the domestic chaos of Tarzana. “My niece started giggling. “That’s all right. It’s fine. had babysat and my house was wrecked,” It’s fine. Yeah. Just get home fast and get to he said. There was cold pizza everywhere. bed fast. It’s all fine.”

He ate a slice in the afterglow.

These screenings were part of a publicity campaign for “I can have that feeling Phantom Thread that the stusometimes of real joy in sadness,” dio behind it, Focus Features, hoped might become an Oscar Anderson said, “that kind of joy campaign. Not for the first time, that you get from a sad song that’s Anderson was trying to psych got you crying your eyes out.” himself up for a run of public appearances. The idea, he said, was to “do it so that they’re happy and you don’t drop too much selfThe Master, which was ultimately bought respect or self-esteem on the floor behind and distributed by the Weinstein Company, you. You just, you just…you polish your shoes garnered nominations for its three leading and go do it.” Anderson, despite himself—or actors but no wins. Like everyone else in Hollywood this fall, Anderson was still maybe because he is who he is—tends to work with leading men who can’t or won’t processing the allegations against Harvey sell his films: “Adam Sandler doesn’t do press Weinstein. On The Master, he said, he was interviews. Or Daniel Day. You know? For mostly just concerned about Weinstein’s that matter, I have made a few movies with reputation for ruthlessly re-cutting other Joaquin, who is absolutely the worst person people’s films. “I didn’t have the experience that a lot of other people have had, to go promote your film.” So it was up to him.

Anderson’s films have been nomat least from a filmmaker’s point of view,” inated for 19 Academy Awards, and he said. “But I wasn’t making a film with Day-Lewis won for There Will Be Blood, Harvey. He was just releasing the film.” but mostly Anderson’s experience at And though Anderson came up in the ’90s, in the supercharged independent-cinema the Oscars has been losing. In 2008, There Will Be Blood had the misfortune world Weinstein helped create, the two of going up against the Coen brothers’ men rarely crossed paths before or since, he said. “I think movies will be just fine No Country for Old Men, which ended up winning Best Picture, Director, and without him around. He just met the right Adapted Screenplay while Anderson, who Quentin Tarantino, that’s all.”

FROM LEFT: THEODORE WOOD/CAMERA PRESS/REDUX; KEVIN MAZUR/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES

• From left: Anderson with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Madisen Beaty at the premiere of The Master; with Maya Rudolph.

FILMMAKER

GQINTELLIGENCE

A F T E R W E F I R S T M E T , Anderson and

I began exchanging e-mails. In one backand-forth, we discussed how certain things in his work recur. Like nearly every other Anderson film, Phantom Thread is at heart about a blended family who can barely stand each other, but at the same time need one another—Woodcock and Alma are in love, or they hate each other; Manville’s character, Woodcock’s sister, Cyril, is in some ways even more unforgiving than either, but she’s also the one who teaches them how to survive. Like Boogie Nights’ Dirk Diggler, Woodcock’s character is shaped by a now absent mother and blessed with one special talent that leads him toward both doom and salvation; like Punch-Drunk Love’s Barry Egan, Woodcock wants to be loved but has no idea how to ask. At its center, Phantom Thread is about a wounded man who finds it nearly impossible to bridge the gap between himself and everyone else. “It’s what flows out of me,” Anderson said, by way of explanation, or lack of one. “Turn on the faucet and that’s what comes out.”

In Punch-Drunk Love, there’s a scene in which the main character, played by Sandler, smashes a series of windows in his sister’s house, the result of a dinner party gone wrong. Afterward, he pleads with his brother-in-law for help with…well, he’s not really sure. His brother-in-law asks what’s wrong, exactly. Egan responds: “I don’t know if there is anything wrong, because I don’t know how other people are.”

That sentiment—that we are locked into ourselves in some fundamentally tragicomic way, that we’re all trying to find out whether or not we’re in it alone, is the big idea that knits all of Anderson’s films together, from the young lovers played

by Gwyneth Paltrow and John C. Reilly in Hard Eight to the questing bundles of id that Phoenix plays in both The Master and Inherent Vice, all the way to Phantom Thread’s Reynolds Woodcock.

In an e-mail, I asked Anderson if he remembered writing that specific line in Punch-Drunk Love.

He replied that he did. “I was sitting at my desk,” he recalled, in that thunderstruck way of his. “It was one of those lines you’re real happy fell into your lap. It’s a good idea, well said, by a character who would say it.”

He went on: “When we’re isolated, it becomes very di∞cult to know how much of your pain is specific to you—how low or high your threshold is for feeling sad or melancholy or just plain blue compared to other people.”

Like Egan, Anderson wrote, “I bet loads of people walk around with stones in their shoes thinking My feet hurt without ever looking inside their shoe to see why.”

This—Anderson’s deep empathy for the type of guy who can’t go on a date without trying to rip a soap dispenser o≠ a wall, or for a character like Woodcock, whose genius manifests itself in a selfregard so total as to be hilarious—is

The Wider World of Paul Thomas Anderson

FROM LEFT: BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES; JANETTE BECKMAN/REDFERNS/ GETTY IMAGES; DMITRI KESSEL/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES; MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES

With cameos from legendary filmmakers, writers, and, oh yeah, Tom Petty

Thomas Pynchon The reclusive novelist, who hasn’t made a public appearance in more than 60 years, was reportedly present during the filming of Inherent Vice.

Anderson has hinted that Pynchon might have had an onscreen role as well.

David Foster Wallace In the early ’90s, Anderson was a student in Wallace’s English class at Emerson College in Boston. Wallace later said he was a fan of Boogie Nights and wished he had written a book about the porn industry.

Stanley Kubrick Tom Cruise invited Anderson to visit Kubrick on the set of Eyes Wide Shut in London. When Anderson asked Kubrick if he always worked with such a small crew, Kubrick replied, “Why? How many people do you need?”

Tom Petty When The Last DJ came out, Petty asked Anderson to direct one of the videos, but the director had to finish Punch-Drunk Love instead. Anderson now calls it one of his “great regrets,” though the two later became friends.

one of the most endearing things about Anderson’s films. It’s what redeems them, even in their darkest moments.

O N T H E L A S T Saturday in November, I met Anderson again, outside the Ahrya, where he’d just done his fourth screening in two days. The next morning, at 5 a.m., he was scheduled to fly to New York, to host yet another screening of Phantom Thread with Daniel Day-Lewis. The spell of working on the movie had mostly broken, and now all that remained back at the house, he said, was the aftermath: wiping o≠ the blackboard with everyone’s In-N-Out orders from July; reviewing the DVD screeners, which would be sent out to Academy Award voters too indi≠erent to see the film projected in theaters; packing up the pumpkin and the bowl of candy that still lingered from Halloween.

Press—“I could show you the press schedule, and you’d be like, ‘Fucking hell!’ ” He smoked a cigarette by his car in the gathering Los Angeles twilight, cleaner-shaven than when I’d seen him last, fatigue just starting to gather around his eyes. His 12-year-old daughter was at a friend’s house, just down the street, and it was time to go pick her up. “I was laughing the other day about something I said to you,” he said. “I was like, I’m optimistic, I’m optimistic, I’m optimistic! Nobody who’s optimistic says they’re optimistic three times in a row like that. It’s like when someone you meet says they’re a free spirit.”

At the house in Encino, as lawn mowers buzzed away outside, he’d actually gone on, tried to explain what he meant when he said optimistic. His movies often show the worst of human behavior; they don’t always end well. There is a kind of yearning for the type of connection with another person that most people never get to have. But he said he found a kind of joy—a hopefulness—in the incomplete, inchoate condition of his characters. “Some love stories work out, some don’t,” he said. “I always like the feeling of, you know… Here’s looking at you, kid.

I mean, that doesn’t work out, does it?”

He continued: “I can have that feeling sometimes of real joy in sadness. Or that kind of joy that you get from a sad song that’s got you crying your eyes out, that’s just making you feel so deeply. It just kind of overcomes you with—whether it’s melancholy, or just sadness, and it allows you to kind of open the floodgates and to sit in that for three or four minutes in the song.

That can be so great. It’s just as therapeutic as hearing an up-tempo dance number that makes you want to jump around the house. I mean, those things can have the same e≠ect.

And sometimes it’s nice. I think I’ve always been a sucker for those kinds of things.”

zach baron is gq’s sta≠ writer.

FEBRUARY

2018

GQ.COM

33

GQINTELLIGENCE

> The New

FIELDGUIDE

How to Be Better Than Everyone Else in 2018

We’re not exactly sure when it happened, but sometime in the past few years, all the old signifiers of wealth and prosperity got flipped on their head. Uber replaced the sports car, and running a bootstrapped start-up is cooler than heading a Fortune 500 company. Now status is all about experiences, man.

And getting lots of sleep. To help you make sense of the newfangled yet still hyper-competitive world of being better than other people, we drew up a field guide. Just remember: It doesn’t count if you don’t post about it on social media ✒ SAM SCHUBE & B E N J Y H A N S E N - B U N DY

No problem in life can’t be solved through meditation or, in trying times, a fresh bowl of acai.

Goop empress, purveyor of jade yoni eggs, conscious uncoupler, goldfoil facial masker, juice innovator.

A sound bath in New Zealand run by a jet-setting shaman.

PAT R O N S A I N T

L O C AT I O N O F L A S T

Gwyneth Paltrow—

TRANCE VISION

Overpaying for sacredgeometry tattoos.

CORE BELIEF

Practice Gratuitous Wellness

34

GQ.COM

FEBRUARY

2018

FIRST OF MANY FINANCIAL INDULGENCES

2018 RESOLUTION

Finally get that fecal transplant that was recommended by your nutritionist, Celerie. It’s the key to rejuvenating your microbiome.

DAN WOODGER

Travel Harder Than Anyone Else Core belief:

You can’t truly experience a foreign city until you’ve taken and posted a number of selfies of you experiencing it. #nofilter

DJ’ing is a valid form of artistic expression.

PAT R O N S A I N T

Virgil Abloh— creative director, human ampersand, vibe curator, air-quote innovator.

Latest Yeezys, Apple Watch, limitededition graphic tee (“My friend made this”), tattoo by Kendall Jenner’s favorite needle artist.

UNIFORM

Destination of choice:

Tulum, Iceland, Portugal.

Living avatar:

Drug of choice:

Anthony Bourdain— high priest of authenticity, trotter of globes, slurper of noodles, big Twitter personality.

Ayahuasca, but only with a week to properly fast beforehand.

Favorite possession:

Petrified of:

Creative-Direct Your Whole Life CORE BELIEF

It’s not about possessions, man. (But if I had to pick?

My Leica M240.)

P L AC E O F WO R S H I P

Late-night party, followed by early-morning Equinox, followed

by Hillsong.

N AT U R A L H A B I TAT

Airport, 300 days a year.

Natural habitat:

Air-conditioned yurt with Wi-Fi at Burning Man. Waiting in line.

Eat Your Way to Heaven L I V I N G AVATA R

Blue Hill chef (and food-waste advocate) Dan Barber.

FAVO R I T E L I N E AT C O C K TA I L PA R T I E S

“Prebiotic is the new probiotic.”

G O -T O APPETIZER

Your Existential Value L I V I N G AVATA R

The Rock—fitness enthusiast, leg-day observer, last true movie star, triceps god.

N AT U R A L H A B I TAT

Barry’s Bootcamp (double floor!).

S PA R R I N G PA R T N E R

Next year’s breakout Victoria’s Secret

supermodel, who has a mean right cross.

S U P P L E M E N TA L I N C O M E Hawking supplements also found on InfoWars.

SUPERPOWER

Turning wholesome family photos into thirst traps.

Fried crickets: the protein of the future.

It’s time to get over the squeamishness, people.

WILL SPLURGE

Iranian beluga caviar.

ON

2018 RESOLUTION

Adopting a total alt-diet: dairy alternatives, meat substitutes, gluten-free wheat.

GQINTELLIGENCE

FIELDGUIDE

Disrupt It All! CORE BELIEF

Modern life is a bunch of nails. My start-up is a hammer.

PAT R O N S A I N T

Evan Spiegel— Snapchat don, billionaire.

H A B I TAT Treadmill desk (with an exercise-ball chair for backup).

DREAM JOB

Running the fourthmost-disruptive mattress company in the Valley.

SECRET BEDTIME

That awful Google memo. (“He makes some good points.”)

READING

2018 RESOLUTION

All-liquid diet.

Chewing is inefficient.

Worship in the Church of Supreme WOULDN’T BE CAUGHT DEAD IN

An REI, except if buying camping supplies to stay overnight on the sidewalk outside Kith.

L AT E S T FA S H I O N

A fanny pack diagonally across the torso.

CHOICE

LITMUS TEST FOR NEW FRIENDS

Proper pronunciation of “Vetements.”

CHILDISH KEEPSAKE KEPT AROUND F O R S E N T I M E N TA L REASONS

Homemade Kanye West Fan Club membership card.

Resist Tyranny While Amassing Followers

Embrace Your Inner Caveman

Core belief:

CORE BELIEF

Socialism is not incompatible with owning that Balenciaga jacket with the Bernie Sanders logo.

Favorite celebrity couple:

Maggie Haberman and President Trump.

Pastime:

local elections.

Recommending Hillbilly Elegy to acquaintances before having read it.

Aspiration:

2018 resolution:

To get blocked

by Trump on Twitter.

Gonna get to the bottom of this Russia stu≠.

Makes a fuss about: Voting in

If masculinity is so toxic, why does it feel so good?

MOST RELAXED W H E N Sitting motionless in a deer blind, peering through a militarygrade scope.

PROOF OF G R E AT N E S S

Daily Instagram posts of your watch at 4:30 a.m.

WET DREAM

Jet-skiing with

human atrocity Dan Bilzerian.

N AT U R A L H A B I TAT

The mirrors by the Olympicweight-lifting area at the local Gold’s Gym. SAD REALITY

Majority of Texas Hold ’Em played online—not in Vegas—while avoiding spouse late at night.

Usually for a $5 buy-in.

Over the past year, J I M M Y K I M M E L has emerged as something like the most sane and rational voice in an increasingly insane and irrational America. When a health scare with his baby son thrust him to the red-hot center of the health-care debate last spring, Kimmel stepped into the previously no-personal-politics zone of his show and articulated a position that wasn’t exactly liberal or conservative so much as universally sensible and decent. It was precisely the voice we longed to hear. And in so finding it, Jimmy Kimmel emerged as that rare type we don’t see on TV, or anywhere in the country, enough these days: a good old-fashioned grown-up M I C H A E L PAT E R N I T I

E R I C R AY DAV I D S O N 02.2018 GQ 39

Jimmy Kimmel doesn’t want to cry. Not tonight, in front of millions. This is something he really, really, really would like to avoid. Jesus.

On this December Monday, as the clock ticks closer to showtime, he can already envision it: Out he’ll come, in a perfectly fitted dark suit and a light blue tie, to amped-up applause, cymbals, and flatulent horn flourishes, and everything will putter down to silence, and he’ll be standing there alone and heave a deep breath, and right there in front of a studio audience of 177 previously whooping vacationers, his eyes 40 GQ 02.2018

might start tearing up and, in place of a joke, he’ll have to say something about Billy, his 7-month-old son, who just went for his second surgery on a faulty heart, because Jimmy had to take the week o≠, and he and his wife, Molly, who is also a head writer on the show, traded o≠ nights at the hospital not sleeping, and CNN reported the results, which were good—the operation was a success!—and Billy went from panting a lot to suddenly having a bunch of energy, even if he was a little constipated. And because America cares, and because his in-box got flooded yet again beyond the normal 300 e-mails a day, Jimmy, the father, and Jimmy Kimmel, the entertainer, both-of-them-at-once are going to have to say something, and he already knows what he wants to say, that’s the easy part—he always knows what he wants to say.

It’s the emotional part he can’t trust.

His co–executive producer, Erin Irwin, says, “I think he gets really stressed when he knows he’s going to cry on-air.” And Jimmy says, “I get really stressed when I know I’m going to cry on-air.”

There’s been a lot of deep sighing while he’s been sitting at the computer, writing his monologue today. In it, he wants to make a point: that our government has failed to extend funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which protects one in eight kids in this country who need coverage for catastrophic care of some sort.

The fact is that an otherwise bipartisan piece of legislation that protects sick kids has been turned into what Jimmy calls a “bargaining chip” in Congress, and it makes him mad.

When Jimmy returned to the show last spring after Billy had his first heart surgery, at birth, he used his monologue to talk about all those other kids in the hospital, and all those parents, going through their own miseries, and all those caring doctors, and our crummy government trying to take health care from millions of people, and he just couldn’t help getting emotional. The tears came again when his uncle Frank died, and Don Rickles died, because he so loved them.

The tears came, too, right as he opened his mouth—he couldn’t help himself—after the mass shooting in Las Vegas, his hometown, with 59 dead, because he was angry and destroyed like the rest of us, saying that “it’s the kind of thing that, it makes you want to throw up or give up.… It feels like someone has opened a window into hell.”

That one was, in some ways, the Gettysburg Address of late-night monologues, now viewed nearly 10 million times on YouTube, having become a lightning rod. As politicians o≠ered empty condolences and prayers, Jimmy Kimmel was the one who talked common sense to us, and protested, and asked for us to protest with him, who seemed the only Voice of Reason occupying any sort of pulpit.

It was as real as realness gets. Like the screen

split open and the late-night talk-show host became your neighbor at the door, in distress. It was this guy Jimmy saying, Enough is enough, this is madness. Please.

Of course, he’s taken some heat for the tears. Howard Stern, one of his closest friends, razzed him on his radio show with a song called “Jimmy Kimmel Cries,” featuring samples of Jimmy blubbering on-air. In another case, a so-called guerrilla artist put up posters around Los Angeles, including on the backs of bus-stop waiting benches, mocking him, calling his show The Jimmy Kimmel Estrogen Hour. (Jimmy’s response was to be photographed on one such bench, flipping the bird.) And the testy right, seeing how powerful he’s become in the debates over gun control and health care, would like America to see him as a lightweight liberal-elite crybaby.

But still—the shows of emotion have given him an authenticity that the other late-night hosts just don’t have.

“I know, I know,” he says. “I understand the but. My wife always says, ‘It’s beautiful.’

And yet, I still wish I could keep it together. I see others keeping it together, and it makes me wonder if I’m emotionally unstable. My dad is the same way. He’s definitely the same way. We don’t express a great deal of emotion, but when we do, it really comes pouring out.”

This Monday in December, though, he has an idea. The idea is to bring Billy out in his arms at the top of the show. It seems right to have Billy there after what they’ve been through, and to share him with the world, and to talk about health care. Billy’s wearing an outfit that Kim and James Taylor sent as a baby gift, and the odds are Billy will start crying, and Jimmy will be so busy doing the comforting that he won’t have time to cry himself. This could really work.

Mid-afternoon, Molly arrives with the kids: curly-haired Jane, who is 3, and Billy.

It’s a family day at the show. Downstairs, Santa Claus and the Chanucorn—a made-up Chanukah unicorn with a menorah for a horn that has starred on the show before—are taking wishes and handing out candy.

“I’m really afraid Billy’s going to cry,” says Molly.

“We gotta get a hand-o≠ plan,” says Jimmy.

“Maybe we give him a zwieback.”

“What’s a zwieback?” asks Molly.

“You know, a cracker thing,” says Jimmy.

“But it can’t get mushy,” says Molly. Jimmy and Molly, being comedians, will say anything to each other—anything at all—to get a laugh. But now Jimmy looks serious, like he has something really serious to say after the week they just had. “When you come out, I want you dressed like a whore,” says Jimmy, and Molly bursts out laughing.

“Wouldn’t that be great?” she says. “All whorish! See you later!” And then she’s gone, o≠ with the kids so Jimmy can go back to his

←← OPENING PAGE

suit $2,750 Gucci sweater $835 Louis Vuitton ← THIS PAGE

coat $4,680 Prada track jacket $248 Todd Snyder t-shirt $78 Hiro Clark pants $225 Mr P.

← coat $595 sweatshirt $145 jeans $165 Polo Ralph Lauren

computer, to the flood of jokes tape the show up in Hollywood, and fact-checks he must sift near his other house, four nights a through as go-time approaches. week—Jimmy favors jeans and the boots $395 At five minutes before five, collared, multi-pocketed shortTo Boot New York the writers assemble in Jimmy’s sleeve shirt you might wear flyfishing. Because of his role hosto∞ce. They’ve been doing this for 15 years now—from the awkward first days of ing The Man Show in the early aughts, a show the show when they went on live and it might meant to lampoon men, people mistook have been a little too loose to the juggernaut Jimmy Kimmel for the boorish man-child he they’ve become—a group chant before Jimmy played, egged on by the frat-boy audience. goes out. A little slip of paper gets handed to But in fact he’s been boringly grown-up since everyone but Jimmy. They like to surprise him. college. “I would never join a fraternity,” he “BILLY SAYS HE WON’T CRY IF YOU says. (And for what it’s worth, he also cried PROMISE NOT TO, EITHER!” they yell in on the last episode of The Man Show.) “I haven’t changed at all, really. I don’t think unison. “BEST SHOW EVER!” And minutes later, there’s Jimmy, appearI’ve been on a casual date before in my life. ing before the cheering audience, holding I have no interest in a superficial relationBilly. Billy is wide-eyed, ogling the crowd, craship. None. I don’t even know if I could get a boner in that situation.” dled in his father’s arms in his James Taylor outfit, seemingly the most even-keeled kid Instead, he characterizes himself as a workaholic narcoleptic with a dash of OCD you’ve ever seen in the bright lights.

“I was out last week because this guy had tossed in. He’s known for, and exhibits, laser heart surgery,” says Jimmy, his voice catching focus, especially sitting at the middle of the a little, “but, look, he’s fine, everybody! He maelstrom at work each day, with writers and producers, friends and family, coming may have pooped, but he’s fine!” Laughter. He and going as he bangs out the monologues thanks the guest hosts who filled in during his absence, looks down at Billy again, and and jokes. (While I spent the day on a nearby seems to enter a wordless freeze looking at couch, he never made it ten feet from his him, which of course is when he tears up. computer before he got drawn back in, writIt’s rare on network TV to have a second of ing new ideas, re-writing sentences, unable absolute silence, no bells or whistles, buzzers to let anything go until the time came for or boings. And Jimmy: It’s not a gusher, but makeup, in a closet-sized room just outside a surge of emotion, a father and baby son on his o∞ce door where he re-read it all while national TV, in a real moment. By bringing his makeup artist plied her craft on him.) He him out here, by discussing the failure of keeps lists out the wazoo. His Christmas list Congress to pass CHIP and posting a number alone includes hundreds of people he buys for, doling out well over $100,000 on gifts for people to call, Jimmy the father speaks through Jimmy Kimmel the entertainer: This and everything else. His Christmas Eve dinmatters. This really, really fucking matters. ner file includes the menu, with little notes of And then he delivers the laugh line of the castigation from each past year, next year get night: “Daddy cries on TV, but Billy doesn’t!

30 pounds of crab legs, for instance, put the crudo out earlier. He makes the traditional It’s unbelievable.”

Italian Feast of the Seven Fishes, but with somewhere between 20 and 25 fishes.

“For somebody who does nothing but fuck J I M M Y K I M M E L H A S a place in the South Bay around,” he says, “I don’t fuck around.” where he spends weekends. He bought it more His mother claims her son tested as a genius in the delivery room, growing up than ten years ago, nothing overly fancy, set back a couple blocks from the water. If you Catholic in a tight German-Italian-Irish fampassed it, you’d never suspect Jimmy Kimmel ily in Brooklyn’s Mill Basin neighborhood. lives there, with its garage full of kid stu≠, Little Jimmy was smart, funny, shy, and loyal just another house in the row. Over lunch at as hell as a friend. He moved to Las Vegas when he was 9. The first time his boyhood an “old people’s joint” nearby, he’s telling me buddy (and now sax-playing bandleader) something that would surprise most people.

Cleto Escobedo laid eyes on him, Jimmy “I’ve been the same exact guy since I was 20 years old,” he says. When he’s not on TV—they was riding his bike down the street, wearing

boxing gloves, on his way to beat someone up.

“People made fun of my Brooklyn accent,” he says. “I was a little squirt of a kid, but I was quick to fight. I had to calm down and learn the ways of the West Coast.”

His shyness was almost a disability, one he carries to this day. (In fact, an advantage to celebrity, he says, is that people sort of know you, so he doesn’t have to break the ice anymore.) As a teenager, he couldn’t bring himself to accept a sandwich, or even a glass of water, from a friend’s mother. He remembers getting an F on a test while at Arizona State because sitting in a class among hundreds taking the same test, he couldn’t muster the courage to ask someone if he could borrow a pencil, having forgotten his. When he found his first girlfriend, he married her, at 20—he wasn’t legal to drink at his own wedding— and they soon had two kids together, Katie and Kevin. “I thought that’s what you did,” he says. “It didn’t seem unusual to me because my mother was 20 when she had me.”

All the while, he was absolutely driven to do what he loved most: make people laugh.

Sure, his family was funny, his grandfather in particular, who for no discernible reason once wore a women’s wig to a wedding, acting as if it were his normal hair. But Jimmy’s shtick, his jokes for a wider audience, started in the classroom, and making prank phone calls with friends, and grew from there. “I always knew I could make people laugh,” he says. The pranks grew more elaborate—he called in to the local radio station and did bits. He became a minor high school celebrity, but he wanted more.

“I remember being a little disappointed in myself when I was 17 and I wasn’t famous,” he says. “My definition of famous wasn’t necessarily being on the cover of this magazine. My definition of famous was being a character on a local radio station, because I liked the attention of being a jokester in class.”

After marrying, he got his first paying radio job, in Seattle. And others in Tampa, Palm Springs, Tucson, and eventually in L.A., at the legendary rock station KROQ, where he wrote jokes and did sports. For the most part, he wasn’t climbing the ladder, exactly; he was quailing sideways. “Oh, I was fired many, many times,” he says. “I was not very diplomatic. I rubbed almost every one of my bosses the wrong way. The rest of the sta≠ loved me, but the bosses… In Seattle my partner Kent and I would secretly tape our meetings when

I’VE BEEN THE EXACT SAME GUY SINCE I WAS 20 YEARS OLD,” JIMMY KIMMEL SAYS. “I HAVEN’T CHANGED AT ALL, REALLY. FOR SOMEBODY WHO DOES NOTHING BUT F——CK AROUND, I DON’T F——CK AROUND.” 02.2018 GQ 43

I DO REMEMBER MY EX-WIFE ASKING ME, ‘WHAT’S THE PLAN B IF THIS DOESN’T WORK OUT?’ AND I SAID, ‘JUST TO BE VERY CLEAR, THERE IS NO PLAN B. THERE’S PLAN A, AND THAT’S WHERE THE ALPHABET ENDS.’ ” our program director was yelling at us, and we’d play them back on the air the next day.

And then I genuinely could not understand why he’d be angry about it. I was like, ‘Isn’t this what’s best for the show, what’s best for all of us here?’ I was oblivious. I was not reading other people well.”

It took a long time for him to calibrate, it turns out. The unfettered, uncensored impulse that makes great humor was both the thing he kept chasing and the thing that kept dooming him. The “on” switch was always on, until he got canned and bounced o≠ the air again. Meanwhile, a friend and former intern of his along the way, Carson Daly, hit it big, and then so did another guy he’d befriended, Adam Carolla. He kept waiting, and waiting, for his day, too, all the while juggling young kids and the jobs du jour.

Remembering those days, Jimmy gets a little riled up. In fact, it’s the only time I see a flash of not quite anger but something close: “One of the things that really burns my ass, when people describe me as a member of ‘the Hollywood elite,’ is the 12 years of eating shit and making no money and going to the ATM and hoping that you have more than $20 so that you can eat lunch. That’s the thing that really gets under my skin. Because, you know, I was raised in a middle- to lower-middle-class family, in a very humble neighborhood in Las Vegas, and I am not under the impression that I deserve to make millions of dollars. It just so happens that the job I was fortunate enough to get pays very well. But as far as paying dues goes, I definitely paid them. I had two little kids. I would get fired from job after job, making $20,000 a year, $25,000 a year.

I’d have to move across the country. Just the cost of moving would wipe me out.” At the bottom, he moved back in with his parents, interviewing for a job as a car salesman, for which he was rejected. “I think I wasn’t wearing enough cologne,” he jokes.

“I do remember my ex-wife asking me, ‘What’s the Plan B?’ and I said, ‘Just to be very clear, there is no Plan B. There’s Plan A, and that’s where the alphabet ends.’ ”

A N O T H E R S U N N Y Los Angeles afternoon, fires burning somewhere in close proximity up the coast, and we’re at the other house now, talking about penises, as all the Christmas loot keeps piling inside the gate.

It’s obviously a bad time for penises, a very bad time, so we’re drinking a whisper

of scotch. “The penis has always been danThough he’s careful not to take cheap gerous,” says Jimmy. “It’s the most dangershots, he says. “If Donald Trump is clearly joking about something, I feel like it’s the ous part of our bodies. The penis makes you do strange things. That said, I would never wrong thing to jump on. Even if it was in poor give mine up.” One of his great heroes— taste or a bad joke, it has to be...maybe that’s besides David Letterman and Don Rickles— just because I’m a comedian. It has to come is Howard Stern, with whom he vacations from that point of view. I think we need to in the Hamptons, and Jimmy says one of just stay focused on what’s really important. the most valuable lessons he learned from What’s really important is taking care of each Howard was his willingness to be funny, to other in various ways.” make himself vulnerable, to sacrifice himself When he gets a Twitter rise out of a tarfor comedy: “I think Howard was the first get, his armpits soak with sweat from joy, the person to say he has a small penis. It was so feistier the exchange the better: “I live for moments like that. When I got in a Twitter unbelievably outrageous and disarming, you battle with Kanye, I was so happy. My wife know? For me, it was a light bulb. It’s like, ‘Okay, being funny is more important than makes fun of me. She’s like, ‘You are so happy being cool,’ I guess. Every guy wants peoright now.’ I’m absolutely beaming. I feel very ple to think you have a big penis. Not just confident in a situation like that.” women, but for some reason your friends, Part of Jimmy’s authority is that he himtoo. It makes no sense at all! For him to just self doesn’t live a louche life. He tries to live come out and talk about how small his penis a good one. He believes we should love one is, it had to have been unprecedented. I don’t another. His sta≠ makes fun of him for being think Steve Allen was talking about that.” an awkward hugger, hugs you could drive a truck through. He admits he never even It reminds Jimmy of being at a party years had the guts to ask someone to the prom. ago, where a drummer from a very popular ’90s band—who will remain nameless— Even his romance with Molly, the origins of decided to get completely naked and hang which she’s shared publicly, seems to have upside down from a rope or something. “He taken years to unfold. (She says he clinched had a very small penis, and I remember being the deal when he finally invited her over for so, almost proud of him, because if he had a dinner, having remembered and prepared all big dick and he got naked at a party, I would her favorite foods at once: crab claws, pizza, have thought he was an asshole. But because gnocchi, a cheeseburger, and a BLT.) he had such a small one, I really had nothing “I’ll never be afraid of Jimmy making but admiration for him.” headlines for the wrong reason,” says Erin, When a subject like this comes up, Jimmy his co–executive producer. “He doesn’t want seems to hold it in his hand like a piece of people to know about all the good things he fruit, rotating it, checking its luster and does, but he’s really one of the good ones.” bruises for both its humor and its topicality.

Which might explain the source of his own The more taboo, the more charged, the better. freedom in comedy, what allows him to stand Judge Roy Moore, Donald Trump, the NRA, comfortably in the most uncomfortable our U.S. senators. He steps into the fray of spaces in our culture, nervy, poking, holding the day with a calm smile, but behind the the serious and the antic both in hand. As the eyes, you can hear the switchblade of a star Oscars approach—what perhaps will be the debater, the mind already having located Oscars of our time, as Hollywood confronts a plague of harassment that has given rise to the flaw that Jimmy e∞ciently shows us with regular reasonableness. No one’s betaccusations against Harvey Weinstein, Kevin ter at casually, almost dispassionately, disSpacey, James Toback, Brett Ratner, Je≠rey arming someone by simply pointing out Tambor, et al.—Jimmy, as host, will go wadtheir hypocrisy or letting them slide in their ing into the mess once again, in front of more own bullshit. And no one’s quite as fearless, than 30 million worldwide viewers. “I’m sureither. If the o≠ense is particularly egregious, prisingly not nervous,” he says. “I think there as was Moore’s alleged penchant are certain groups of people who for teenage girls—“Target-wise,” think I shouldn’t make any jokes → says Jimmy, “he’s topped only about that situation. And there coat $4,180

by Jared from Subway, maybe are groups of people who will be shirt $510 not even that”—he will double, mad if I don’t make jokes about Prada triple, quadruple down, returnthat situation. So you just kind of where to buy it? ing again and again to the scene have to figure it out. Whatever I go to the fashion of the crime. do will be (continued on page 95) directories on gq.com

44 GQ 02.2018

art By definition, pop is supposed to be catchy, even frivolous. But over the past year, it’s become music’s most vibrant genre—the place of invention and constant re-invention.

TH ESE A R E T H E A RTI STS ELEVATING P O P TO N EW H EI GHT S

Erik Madigan Heck

46 GQ 02.2018

←

suit $6,395 Ermenegildo Zegna polo shirt $152 No.21 →

blazer $1,390 shirt $550 pants $850 Calvin Klein 205W39NYC ring 203

Khalid How you know him: From the 19-yearold’s platinum-selling American Teen, with its hit R&B single “Location.”

On fan inspiration: “I went one day to get cupcakes, and in the middle of the street, someone hops out of their car, and they said, ‘I feel like you’re my little brother. I’m so proud of you for expressing yourself the way you do.’ ” On the surreality of performing abroad: “When I was just in Australia, having them sing ‘American Teen’ and scream the words about being proud to be an American— even though America is…whatever it is right now.”

What is America right now? “I wouldn’t say I’m proud of America, but I’m proud of my own individuality.

Everyone I’ve talked to does not like the place America is in right now. If [Trump’s] still in office in four years, it’s the youth’s job to not ever let anything like that happen again.”

On the election inspiring new music: “I’m more self-aware—I have to be. I have to learn how to love myself and to process so much hatred in the world. There’s so many people who don’t love themselves.

I gotta spread that positivity—it’s gonna change at least one person’s day.”

—IRA MADISON III

Metro Boomin How you know him: Ten words uttered

by Future on “Jumpman” and later sampled on Kanye West’s “Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1” turned the 24-yearold producer into a pop-culture fixture: If Young Metro don’t trust you, I’m gon’ shoot you. He makes certified bangers.

Ask Drake, Nicki Minaj, and Migos.

What’s the difference between a producer and a beatmaker?

“The main thing about being a producer and not a beatmaker, the difference is the ear. A lot of times I know from the beginning [if a song’s a hit], because that’s part of the job.”

A hit he called right away: “I knew it was gonna be ‘Bad and Boujee’ as soon as we did it.”

Did he work harder before success or now? “I feel more hunger now because you maintain— gotta do better than maintain, gotta always beat your last work.”

Does he want to have a signature sound?

Not really. “I want to keep people guessing.

With some songs, I don’t even put the tag on it. People just gotta find shit out, look shit up, like we did back in the day.”

—BENÉ VIERA

←

suit $280 Topman shirt $425 Burberry jewelry, his own →

trench coat (men’s) Burberry skirt Topshop ring Renvi 48 GQ 02.2018

Julia Michaels How you know her: She’s the hitmaking songwriter behind some of 2017’s biggest bops, who pens with effortless speed.

How long did it take to write Selena Gomez’s “Bad Liars”?

“Two hours.”

Her collaboration with Clean Bandit, “I Miss You”? “Fortyseven minutes.”

Justin Bieber’s chart topper “Sorry”?

Just 30 minutes. (“Haha! Yep!”) And her own music?

This year she released her own mini-album, Nervous System, featuring veritable hits “Uh Huh” and “Issues.”

Her biggest fear?

Performing. “My hands still sweat; my body shakes.

Sometimes I wanna sneak to the bathroom and just fucking jet.” Nonetheless, she’s evolving into a full-fledged pop star. “I’m 82 percent there. I still get coffee in my Mickey Mouse slippers.”

Does she ever stop?

“When I take long showers. I put the water on really hot, sit on the floor, and think: Okay, when I performed I looked left, but I need to look right.…

In that interview, I fucked up that sentence.… I should change the chorus on that song.…” So she’s a workaholic?

“I am!”— E V E B A R L O W

←

jacket $4,200 Gucci sweater vest $695 Burberry t-shirt $50 Velva Sheen →

jacket $795 shirt $250 Coach pants $395 Rag & Bone shoes $545 MSGM

Jack Antonoff How you know him: You might not, but you’ve heard his work. The 33-year-old was behind gigantic hits for the likes of Lorde, Taylor Swift, and St. Vincent.

Plus there’s the Springsteen-inflected arena jams of his own band, Bleachers, and the pop anthems of Fun. In praise of happy accidents: “I’ve written songs where literal random things have happened in the studio and sounded cool. The Bleachers song ‘I Wanna Get Better’ happened because something fell off my piano and just banged on this note.”

What did superproducer Max Martin mean when he called Lorde’s “Green Light” “incorrect songwriting”?

“He means it as a compliment. He said that to me, too, about [Fun’s] ‘We Are Young’ a while ago. And I loved it. It’s really exciting to find confusing things that are also satisfying.”

How does Antonoff make such massive, intimate music? “It’s not, like, lighting candles and smoking a joint. I wouldn’t go as cliché as saying it’s not glamorous, but what I would say is that it’s perilous.

You’re praying toward something. It’s a sacred process.”

But plenty of songwriters don’t think of it as sacred, right?

“Yeah. I don’t know if you like their music.”

—SAM SCHUBE

02.2018 GQ 51

Post Malone How you know him: He moves from classic-rock-inflected 808 bangers to straight R&B and ends on Saddle Creek–esque indie.

Where inspiration strikes him: His creative process begins in an intimate setting. “You go home and you take a shit and you’re like, OH. Oh. Okay.

Just a lot of shittaking. It’s the toilet and the shower.

I got a guitar in the bathroom ready to rock.”

Who needs a genre, anyway? “I wanna make music that people can relate to.

Another inspiration is eliminating the genre. It should just be music, you know?

Because I’ve met so many people that’ll say, ‘I listen to everything except for this, or this,’ you know? That’s stupid.

If you like it, you should listen to it.”

Making music is a battle of metaphors: “I finished an album— I have to make sure that it’s not a piece of shit. I just wanna kick its ass and wrangle it like a fuckin’ demon snake and fucking…take charge.

And punch it in the teeth. And I just wanna make the best shit that I can.”

—BIJAN STEPHEN →

jacket $445 Ami tank top American Apparel necklace Renvi bracelets (from top) Renvi Love Adorned Vintage →→

jumpsuit Miu Miu long necklace Renvi all other jewelry, her own

52 GQ 02.2018

Dua Lipa Where you’ve seen her: Her tightly choreographed Miami-sun-soaked video for “New Rules”—currently with nearly 800 million views on YouTube.

What inspired the video: “I had seen this ’90s Versace campaign on Instagram of Naomi Campbell on the back of another model. They both looked beautiful, and the colors were amazing, and the dresses and the aesthetic of it all was lovely, but I really loved the message of girls looking after each other and friends holding one another up.”

The last time she heard “New Rules” on the radio: “I was on my way to the airport in London.

I was like, ‘I fucking love this song.’

Everybody in the car was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ” Who interrupted our interview?

Jack Antonoff.

What’d he say? “I’m such a fan of yours.”

How’d she take that? “I had no idea that he even knew who I was.”

Up next? Album two. “[I’ll be] in Jamaica. My phone’s gonna be turned off; I’m just gonna write songs.

And get a tan.”

How success changed her life: “I’m really allowed to do whatever the fuck I want.”

—BRENNAN CARLEY

�

shirt $920 Louis Vuitton pants $6,395 (for suit) Ermenegildo Zegna Couture sneakers $60 Vault by Vans →

jacket $432 pants $416 Palm Angels trench coat $1,995 Burberry jewelry, his own for additional credits, see page 95. where to buy it? go to the fashion directories on gq.com 54 GQ 02.2018

A$AP Ferg How you know him: As A$AP Rocky’s stylish running mate and the force behind “Cocaine Castle” and “Hood Pope.” His song with Future, “New Level,” destroys whole skylines.

What he’s working on now: Being honest. “I feel like every rapper killed a million people in their raps. I’ve never killed anybody.”

Can you define pop music, exactly?

“When I think about pop music, I think about hip-hop music. I feel like Young Thug is the new pop star.

Lil Uzi is definitely the new pop star.

Like, he’s definitely the new Blink-182.

And I don’t think it’s weird! It’s just the progression of hip-hop. We embraced all types of music, so it’s no wonder that we’re the new pop stars. And the new rock stars.”

Are you a pop artist?

“I’m a pop artist.

I always wanted to be a pop artist. I feel like Kanye was a pop artist. I feel like Pharrell’s a pop artist.

Pop, meaning pop culture. They’re part of other discussions.

They’re part of the teenagers-thatlive-in-the-Hamptonsand-Calabasas conversation. And I want to be part of that conversation.

If I’m making art, it’s for the world.”

Do you get inspired by other rappers?

Nope. “Rappers can’t teach me nothing.

Only rapper that can teach me something is probably Jay-Z. But I’m not pressed to be around no rappers.

I don’t think J. Cole is hanging out with a bunch of rappers, or Kendrick Lamar is hanging out with a bunch of rappers, because they’re not going to learn anything from them.”

—Z A C H B A R O N

ROBERT MAXWELL

Quincy Jones Has a Story About That

Frank Sinatra. Michael Jackson. Ray Charles. Malcolm X. Elon Musk. Truman Capote. Buzz Aldrin. Prince. Tupac. Even Leni Riefenstahl.

Quincy Jones has run with them all. CHRIS HEATH stays up late with the 84-year-old music legend who has a tale to go with every famous name

02.2018 GQ 57

“I feel like I’m just starting,” Quincy Jones explains as he slowly takes a seat in the grand living room of his hilltop Bel-Air mansion, a wide arc of nighttime Los Angeles visible through the windows in front of him.

“It seems like at 84 all the things you used to wonder about come clear to you.”

So he begins. He begins talking about his life. It’s a life punctuated by so many disparate encounters and achievements and circumstances that it is hard to believe they are the experiences of a single man. There is a lot of talking to do.

There is the career, of course: the jazz musician, the arranger, the record executive, the soundtrack composer, the solo artist, the producer of the biggest pop album in history, the entrepreneur, the media magnate, the film and TV producer, the philanthropist…and on and on. Jones is one of just a handful of people who have accomplished the EGOT—winner of at least one Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony.1 But these seem almost trivial and incidental alongside the actual life he’s lived.

For one thing, he seems to know, or have known, everybody. When Jones says that he “lost 66 friends last year” and begins to list recent departures—“David Bowie, George Martin…”—it’s more than an acknowledgment of some recent rough years. It’s also a testament to his unique gift for not just 58 GQ 02.2018

knowing people but also sharing unforgettable moments with them. Someone once compared his omnipresence to Forrest Gump’s; Jones has heard this one, but he prefers a further twist on it: “the Ghetto Gump.” And because each sentence from his mouth comes out sounding like a benediction, it takes a while to register that the word the 84-yearold Quincy Jones uses more than any other, as a term of both endearment and opprobrium, is motherfucker. In fact, he will say it in my presence 89 times.

Mostly we talk about the past, naturally, and we get there soon enough. But it’s characteristic of his spirit that as he sits down he is already telling me about his present and his future: “I never been this busy in my life. We’re doing ten movies, six albums, four Broadway shows, two networks, business with the president of China, intellectual property. It’s unbelievable, man.” He tells me about all the celebrations planned for his 85th year: a Netflix documentary, a prospective ten-part TV biopic he hopes will star Donald Glover, a star-studded TV event on CBS that he tells me Oprah will host.

I guess you’re supposed to be the one to slow it down.

“Never. ’Cause I don’t think like that.…

I stopped drinking two years ago. Because I had diabetes 2. And it’s the best thing I ever did. My mind’s so clear now, you know. And the curiosity’s at an all-time high.”

Do you wish you’d done it sooner?

“Yeah, but I came up with Ray Charles and Frank Sinatra, man.2 I didn’t have a chance.

Seven double Jack Daniel’s an hour. Get out of here. Ray Charles, Frank—those guys could party. Sinatra and Ray Charles, them motherfuckers invented partying.” Jones shows me the ring on his little finger. Sinatra, he went on, “wore that for 40 years. When he died, he left it to me. This is his family crest from Sicily.”

You wear it every day?

“I can’t take it o≠.”

And you think of him?

“Yes sir. I love him. He was bipolar, you know. He had no gray. He either loved you with all of his heart or else he’d roll over your ass in a Mack truck in reverse. He was tough, man. I saw all of it. You know, I’d see him try to fight—he couldn’t fight worth a shit. He’d get drunk, and Jilly, his right-hand guy, stone gangster, would get behind him and break the guy’s ribs. Man. What memories. We had a good time, though. We’d do one-nighters, I’d fly with him on his Learjet, he said, ‘Let’s get on the plane before Basie’s drummer’s cymbal stops ringing.…’ Six Playboy bunnies on that.”

Should I ask what happened next?

“No. It was fun, man. Always been fun. You gotta enjoy life.”

You and Frank Sinatra had the first song played on the moon,3 didn’t you?

“Yeah, 1969. Buzz Aldrin. Frank knew first and he called me up, and he was like a little

kid: ‘We got the first music on the moon, man!’ He said, ‘We’re putting it back in the show!’ ” 4 When Quincy Jones talks—wandering from subject to subject as he does—the next famous name is rarely more than a few seconds away, but it doesn’t seem like name-dropping or showing o≠. It’s as if this just happens to be the interesting world he occupies. So he’ll refer to the time Nelson Mandela tried to get him to touch a cheetah—“I couldn’t do it”—and then he’ll mention that Colin Powell called a couple of days ago because Powell was annoyed at how Tyler Perry appeared to be portraying him in a forthcoming movie. (Jones helped connect them.) Or he’ll refer to the time Steven Spielberg showed him the first abandoned prototype for E.T.: “They made that little monster, and he looked too much like a brother. That’s why the second one had blue eyes.”

Then he’ll gesture to the Space X model rocket across the room, over toward the library. “Elon Musk was my neighbor for ten years. Great guy, man. He’s a fearless motherfucker. Every week we’d have two or three dinners with Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin and all those cats.

Je≠rey Bezos.” Jones makes a kind of exhalation noise.

“Bezos—the richest motherfucker in the world now.”

He raises his eyes to the ceiling. “Look where we’ve come,” he says. “From wanting to be a gangster to…all the other stu≠.”

O P E N I N G PA G E , G R O O M I N G : N I C O L E A R T M O N T. P H O T O G R A P H S , T H E S E PA G E S , F R O M L E F T : F R A N Z H U B M A N N / I M A G N O / G E T T Y I M A G E S ; C H R I S WA LT E R / W I R E I M A G E / G E T T Y I M A G E S .

JONES SPENT HIS

early years on the South Side of Chicago. His mother was taken away when he was 7—“to a mental home,” he says, “for dementia praecox.” His father, also called Quincy Jones, worked as a carpenter 5 for, as his son now puts it, “the most notorious gangsters on the planet, the Jones boys.” It was rough and scary, and the only promising option that a young boy living within it could envision was becoming a gangster himself: “The ’30s in Chicago, man. Whew. No joke. If you think today’s bad… As a young kid, after my mother was taken away, my brother and I, we saw dead bodies every day. Guys hanging o≠ of telephone poles with ice picks in their necks, man. Tommy guns and stogies, stacks of wine and liquor, big piles of money in back rooms, that’s all I ever saw. Just wanted to be that.”

How old would you have been when you first saw a dead body?

“Seven or 8 years old. Fucking South Side of Chicago, they don’t play, man. Harlem and Compton don’t mean shit after Chicago in the ’30s—they look like Boys Town to me. Chicago is tough. There’s something in the water, man.”

And you assumed you’d become a gangster, too?

“Hell yeah. I wanted just to have a comfortable life, man. Because it was frightening, and every day you never knew what was happening. That’s what you wanted to do so you could protect yourself. Or that’s what you believed.

It’s bullshit. It was a terrible way to live, you know. Seven years old, I went to the wrong neighborhood, I didn’t know the codes and stu≠. Big gangs on every street.”

And what happened?

“Oh, they grabbed me, and they took a switchblade knife and nailed my hand to the fence right there.”

• Quincy Jones with Michael Jackson at the 1984 Grammy Awards, where Thriller won Album of the Year.

O P P O S I T E , with his big band in Vienna, 1960.

He points to a scar he’s had on his hand for 77 years.

“And they stuck an ice pick”—he points to his left temple—“in here, the same time.”

Did it hurt?

“Did it hurt? Fucking right it did! A switchblade in your hand nailed to a fence. Shit, man. And an ice pick here. Fuck, man, I thought I was gonna die. I was terrified. Because you feel helpless. And then Daddy came out finally and hit ’em in a head with a hammer.”

WE ARE INTERRUPTED

by a man named Michael who earlier had welcomed me into the house. “You need anything?” he asks. “I’m gonna send up some stu≠. You need a drink or anything?”

“Some girls,” Jones replies.

“Will do,” says Michael, clearly joking. He disappears, and Jones’s attention returns to me.

“You married?”

Yes. “I’m not.” He laughs. “I got 22 girlfriends.”

You serious?

“I was married three times, man. Was told not to marry actresses or singers. I ended up with two actresses, Peggy Lipton and Nastassja Kinski,6 and a superstar model. I didn’t listen to all the advice.” He laughs again.

You really have 22 girlfriends?

“Hell yeah. Everywhere. Cape Town. Cairo. Stockholm—she’s coming in next week. Brazil—Belo Horizonte, São Paulo, and Rio. Shanghai—got a great girl over there from Shanghai, man. Cairo, whew.”

They all know about each other?

“Yeah, I don’t lie. And it’s amazing—women get it, man.

Don’t you ever forget they’re 13 years smarter than we are.

Don’t you ever forget it.”

Can I ask how old the youngest one is, and the oldest one?

“Well, my daughters gave me new numbers, because they kept saying, ‘Dad, you can’t go out with girls younger than us.’ I said, ‘Y’all are not young anymore.…’ So the new numbers are 28 to 42. They gave them to me.” 7

1. The Oscar was awarded in 1994 for his humanitarian work.

He won the Emmy for the soundtrack to Roots and the Tony for the revival of the musical The Color Purple. He has won 28 Grammy Awards.

2. Jones met Charles in Seattle when Jones was 14 and Charles was 16; he was 25 when he met Sinatra, and worked as arranger on some of his most famous records.

They remained friends until Sinatra’s death.

3. The song was “Fly Me to the Moon.”

4. Buzz Aldrin took the song with him on a portable cassette. In more recent times, Jones has hung out with Aldrin: “He’s a wild motherfucker.”

5. Framed on a wall of his son’s mansion is the saw that the senior Quincy Jones first used in 1928.

6. Jones didn’t actually marry Kinski, mother of his youngest child.

(He has six girls and one boy.) His second and third marriages were to actresses: Ulla Andersson and Lipton. He met his first wife, Jeri Caldwell, in high school.

7. He makes clear he is mainly talking about his daughters with Lipton, Kidada and Rashida, who are 43 and 41, respectively.

Would you ever go out with anyone your own age?

“Hell no!” Jones gives me a look, a kind of incredulity that is some mixture of horror and bewilderment. “You see me with an 84-year-old woman? Are you crazy?”

And why not?

“Why not??? Why? For what, man? There’s nothing…there’s no upside. You gotta be kidding. I got me some technology out there”—he gestures to the mansion’s perimeter—“that keep fat and old away from here.

Buzzes if they’re too old. But you’d be surprised.… These women, the young ones, are aggressive now. Oh my God, they’re fearless, man. All over the world.”

Now, as you know, some people say that at a certain age the desire just evaporates.…

“Not to me. Hell no. Never.”

No sign at all?

He shakes his head. “Uh-uh.”

A few minutes later he shows me photos of some of his children: “When you’ve been a dog all your life, God gives you beautiful daughters and you have to su≠er. I love ’em so much. They’re here all the time.”

How come you think you’ve been a dog all your life?

“I don’t know. Probably because I didn’t have a mother. And the big bands, that’s like the school of the dogs. Traveling bands?

Every fucking night it was like the girls coming through Neiman Marcus: ‘Oh, I like trumpet players,’ ‘I like sax players,’ ‘I like guitar players’… Rita Hayworth, all of them. It was unbelievable, man. Frank was always trying to hook me up with Marilyn Monroe, but Marilyn Monroe had a chest that looked like pears, man.”

So you turned down Marilyn Monroe?

“Let’s not talk about it. Come on, man.

We killed it. You know, I came up with the two wildest motherfuckers on the planet.

Ray Charles and Frank Sinatra. Come on.

They were good-looking guys, they had

all the girls they wanted, and they showed you how to deal with it.”

Do you ever wish you’d been a di≠erent way?

“Je ne regrette rien de tout. I don’t regret shit.”

OVER THE YEARS,

Jones’s explanation for why he is the way he is, and for all he has done in his life, has very often narrowed down to one single circumstance: growing up without a mother.

“For a son,” Jones tells me, “the worst thing that can happen to you is not to have a mother, man.”

His mother was a well-educated woman: “Boston University. Twelve languages, everything. She was amazing.” But she was not well. Much later in Jones’s life, there would be a diagnosis of what was wrong with her and she would find some kind of a cure, at least for her most extreme symptoms, and live until she was 94. But for a young boy, there was only the sense that something was very much not as it should be. In the past, Jones has spoken of an incident on his fifth or sixth birthday, when his mother took his coconut birthday cake and threw it, for no discernible reason, onto the back porch.

Did you have any happy memories of your mother before things went wrong?

“No. No, not one.”

When did you realize that she was troubled?

“Well, at that age it’s not so easily identifiable exactly what the hell’s wrong. But you can tell something’s wrong. My brother and I, we were 6 and 7 years old, we watched her taken away in a straitjacket. That’s tough, man. And we went out there to see her, Manteno State Hospital. Boy, that was heavy.

When we first went in, there was a little blonde lady there, standing up with no shoes on, in her underwear, and she had a bowl of feces and she says, ‘You shall have no pie!’ I said, ‘God, let me out of there.’ ” I read that your mother did something awful, too.

“She went down and did number two.”

And then ate it?

He nods. “We were, you know, 7 years old. It doesn’t hit you that way it should hit you. On the way home, Lloyd said to me, ‘My brother, you shall have no pie!’ ” • Jones with three of his daughters, Kidada, Jolie, and Rashida, 1997. O P P O S I T E , on a soundstage with Frank Sinatra, 1964.

Even though, later, your mother recovered, you never really formed a bond with her?

“No. No, because you couldn’t trust her emotionally. Nothing you ever did was right.”

Was she proud of you?

“Yeah, but she was always sabotaging it. Always. She didn’t like me being in pop music. The first record I did with Dinah Washington—I was 20 years old or something—was ‘I Love My Trombone-Playing Daddy with His Big Long Slidin’ Thing.’ She didn’t like that. She didn’t want to know about that shit.” He laughs. “I don’t blame her.”

EVEN SETTING ASIDE

the improbability of a man rising out of his background to achieve all that he has achieved, there have been at least three specific moments in Quincy Jones’s life when it seems almost miraculous that fate allowed him to continue.

The first of these took place when he was 14 years old. The family had moved to Washington State four years earlier, and this change was the making of him: He discovered music, and he threw himself into learning it. Even if, at home, he was facing new challenges: “My stepmother was like Precious. Crazy bitch. And she didn’t call me by my name until I was 57. Said ‘Jones’s kids.’

‘He’s upstairs playing that goddamn flute.’ It was a trumpet! She was a bitch, man. And she was illiterate. She beat the shit out of us every day. Every day.”

But he now had music to show him a path forward, a way out. He had learned the trumpet, taught himself arranging, and played with every band he could. One of these was part of the National Guard— Jones lied and said that he was 18 so that he could join. His friends did the same. “We used to go to Fort Lewis and Fort Lawton in the summertime,” he says, “and you’d smell the racism.”

That was how, one day, the five of them found themselves driving together in a car on their way to play at a rodeo in Yakima.

“A little raggedy-ass car. Two up front, and three in the back. I’m in the center. Trailways bus hit us. Everybody in the car died except for me. Reached up and pulled my friend, and his head fell o≠. That’s fucked-up for 14.

It was very traumatic.”

Were you hurt?

“Little bit. I mean, the other guys were dead.”

A couple of years later, Jones tried driving lessons. “I just couldn’t do it,” he says.

Some days he was okay, but others he was all over the place. He says that his teacher eventually told him, “I don’t need another maniac out there,” and gave Jones his money back.

He hasn’t driven since.

T H E S E PA G E S , F R O M L E F T : A L B A N E N AV I Z E T/ K I PA / S YG M A / G E T T Y I M A G E S ; JOHN DOMINIS/TIME & LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES

A S J O N E S T A L K S , a woman brings some food and puts it on the table. There’s various raw vegetables and dips and crackers.

There’s also a bowl of sorbet, and that’s all that Jones touches.

When I arrived here this evening, Jones had just woken up. This is his normal schedule: Rise around four or five in the afternoon, and then ride through the night, his mind racing. At one point, he asks for a laptop so that he can show me some of his young jazz protégés on YouTube, and spends about 20 minutes playing videos. “These motherfuckers are so talented. I just love seeing young people who got their shit together, man. They’re taking music back where it belongs. Because it’s not going anywhere right now. It’s champagne-selling noise.”

Do you like any of the people who are big right now?

“Yeah, I love Kendrick Lamar, I love Bruno Mars, I love Drake, I love Ludacris, I love Common. Mary J. Blige. Jennifer Hudson.”

But, say, Taylor Swift, I guess, is the biggest pop star on the planet in terms of sales right now and this week is about to sell over a million copies of her new album. Do you like her?

Jones makes a face, somewhere between disapproval and disdain.

What’s wrong with it?

“We need more songs, man. Fucking songs, not hooks.”

Some people consider her the great songwriter of our age.

He laughs. “Whatever crumbles your cookie.”

What’s missing?

“Knowing what you’re doing.”

Swift is far from the first white pop star to underwhelm him. Here are some reflections on the early days of rock ’n’ roll: “I was with Tommy Dorsey when Presley showed up at 17 years old.… And Dorsey said, ‘Fuck him—I won’t play with him.’ He wouldn’t let his band play with him.”

Did you think Dorsey was right?

“Yeah! Yeah, motherfucker couldn’t sing.”

WHEN YOU WERE YOUNGER,

there were a lot of firsts: the first black man to do this, the first black man to do that.

“Yeah. Which means ‘only.’ ” Were you very conscious of that?

“Yeah. Of course.”

One example was when you started doing film soundtracks.

“Well, I wanted to do that since I was 15.

But they didn’t use brothers. They only used three-syllable Eastern European composers— Bronislaw Kaper, Dimitri Tiomkin.”

And then in the first proper meeting you had in Hollywood, the producer walked in, saw you, and walked out again?

“Yes, he did. And he went back into the other room and said, ‘I didn’t know Quincy Jones was a Negro.’ Truman Capote, that motherfucker, he called [director] Richard Brooks up on In Cold Blood and said, ‘Richard, I don’t understand why you’ve got a Negro doing the music for a film with no people of

color in it.’ And Richard Brooks said, ‘Fuck you, he’s doing the music.’ Richard was tough.”

When you heard that someone like Truman Capote had said something like that, what did you think?

“What is there to think, man? He’s racist like a motherfucker.”

Truman Capote eventually apologized, didn’t he?

“He sure did. After I get an Oscar nomination and he sees the film, he calls up: ‘Oh, Quincy, I’m so sorry’ and on and dun dun dun dun… That pisses me o≠, too.”

Is it true that he was crying?

“Yeah. Emotionally, it must have got to him. You know, that he made that kind of judgmental thing so quick. A person’s either like that or they’re not, man.”

It was shocking to me to learn that about him.

“You know, because it’s somebody you admire, and you see that they got this little old ragged-ass convention of racism going. But come on, man, ain’t nothing new. I’ve never turned my antennae o≠. I can’t.… You think racism is bad now, you should try the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, ’60s. Vegas in ’64 was fucked-up.

That was why Frank had Mafia bodyguards for everybody in Basie’s band and me. Lena, Belafonte, Fats Domino, they used to play the main theater for $17,000 a week, used to have to eat in the kitchen. Couldn’t go in the casino.

Had to go to a black hotel across town.”

And when you were in the middle of that craziness, what were you thinking? Are you angry, or just ba±ed?

02.2018 GQ 61

“I fell down five flights of stairs, brother.

I didn’t need any more inspiration than that. Shit, it’s the last time I did it. Because I can stop like a motherfucker. Anything.

Cigarettes. Alcohol. I just stop, man.”

Obviously, Ray Charles carried on for a long time.

“Oh, please—he went 30 years with heroin, and then the police told him he couldn’t get his license to play clubs unless he stops. And he did, and the 32 clubs gave him the licenses back. And then he started on black co≠ee and Dutch Bols gin for 25 years.” 8 When he was still using, would you talk to him about it?

“No, I wouldn’t talk. Talk about what?

I’ve seen him shooting in his testicles, man.

Because heroin’s a strange drug. Ray, all of his veins were dried up and black, and he’s shooting himself in the testicles, man.”

And you’d see that?

“Yeah, he had a guy do it. It was horrible.”

“Well, listen, anger doesn’t get anything done, so you have to find out: How do you make it work? That’s why I was always maniacal about transforming every problem into a puzzle which I can solve. I can solve a puzzle—a problem just stresses me out.”

JONES’S FIRST PROPER,

sustained job as a professional musician came when he went on the road, playing trumpet with the band leader Lionel Hampton, when Jones was 18. Hampton first invited Jones to join his touring band when Jones was 15, and Jones had even gotten on the bus, ready to leave, but Hampton’s wife and business manager threw him o≠ because he was too young. At 18, he was ready—or as ready as one could be: “The band bus with Lionel Hampton got 33 people on it. The front half of the right side, we call them the holy rollers. The weed smokers behind them, that’s us. The boozers here and the junkies there. Every time we’d go to Detroit, at the Majestic hotel, standing in front, with his Italian shit on and amber glasses: Malcolm X. Detroit Red. That’s where we bought our dope. It was before he went to prison.”

You’d buy o≠ him?

“Yeah! He was the dope dealer. That’s how he went to prison.”

So you would personally buy drugs o≠ Malcolm X? “Personally?” He nods. “Shit, everybody in the band bought it! The junkies used to call cocaine ‘girl’ and heroin ‘boy.’ That’s because they said cocaine would take you from your woman.”

So why was heroin ‘boy’?

“Because it’s masculine. It’s a strong drug.

And it won’t bother you as long as you give it everything it wants. But it wants more and more all the time.”

Did you try everything over the years?

“I’ve tried everything. Amyl nitrate.

Methedrine. Benzedrine. Everything. Ray had me on heroin for five months.”

How old were you then?

“Fifteen.”

Did it get bad for you?

“Yeah, I started shooting. And then I fell down five flights of stairs, and I said, ‘That ain’t gonna work.’ And it’s the best thing that ever happened to me, because when I was in New York, I was hanging out with Howard McGhee and Earl Coleman and Charlie Parker and shit—I would have been a junkie for life.”

Was it easy to stop?

At Michael Jackson’s house with Prince: “He saw the chimpanzee and the snake, [and] he said, ‘Now, that’s interesting.’”

T H E S E C O N D T I M E Quincy Jones sidestepped fate came in 1974, when he was 41.

One day he felt a pain in his head, and then he collapsed. A brain aneurysm.

“It was scary,” he says. “Like somebody blew my brains out. The main artery to your brain explodes, you know.”

He had brain surgery, after which he was told that he had a second aneurysm ready to blow. And so, once he was strong enough, he had a second operation. Later he was told that he’d had a one-in-a-hundred chance of surviving.

By this point, Jones was already very successful—as an arranger, as a solo artist, as a composer for movies and TV—but he’d first made his name as a trumpet player.

Now he was told that he had a clip on a blood vessel in his brain, and that if he blew a trumpet in the ways that a trumpet player must, the clip would come free and he would die. He could never play the trumpet again.

And so he never has.

That’s how this story is usually told, anyway. But it’s not quite true. Jones was indeed given that advice, but shortly after he recovered he went on tour in Japan. And he took his trumpet with him. One day, as he blew, he felt a new pain in his head, and he was subsequently told that the clip had nearly come loose. “I couldn’t get away with it, man,” he concedes. This time he listened.

Isn’t it crazy that you even tried?

“Yeah. Yeah. Well, I missed the trumpet.”

His collection of trumpets, including Dizzy Gillespie’s, is mounted on the wall of his living room, behind the bar, and he describes the instruments with evident love.

Does any part of you still miss it?

“Very much, man. Very much. I finger all the time. But I can’t touch it.”

There’s something very beautiful and haunting about this that stays with me: the trumpet player fingering notes on an invisible trumpet that he knows he can never dare hear.

T H E S E PA G E S , F R O M L E F T : L I P N I T Z K I / R O G E R V I O L L E T/ G E T T Y I M A G E S ; D AV I D R E D F E R N / R E D F E R N S / G E T T Y I M A G E S

A C O N V E R S AT I O N A B O U T

Charlie Parker, Tupac, Michael Jackson, and Prince: When people think about Quincy Jones, what do you think they misunderstand about you?

“Oh, that I only like blondes. How stupid can that be, when you’re in South Africa and Cairo and Brazil and China—looking for a fucking blonde?”

I didn’t know that was a perception of you.

“Well, because I had three wives, white wives, and they stereotype, you know. But they wrong like a motherfucker, man. You ever see Black Orpheus? That was my old lady, Marpessa Dawn. Gorgeous lady, man.”

You did get some criticism for having white wives, didn’t you?

“I don’t give a fuck. Because they think that’s all you like, but that’s stupid, man. Here’s what you’ve got to understand: The interracial thing was part of a revolution, too, because back in the ’40s and stu≠, they would say, ‘You can’t mess with a white man’s money.…

Don’t mess with his women.’ We weren’t going to take that shit. Charlie Parker, everybody there, was married to a white wife.”

And it felt like there was some sense of liberation in that?

“Yeah! It was freedom, man. Do what you want to do, and nobody can tell you what to do.”

One of his most famous critics was the newly famous Tupac Shakur, who said in a 1993 interview with The Source, “Quincy Jones is disgusting. All he does is stick his dick in white bitches and make fucked-up kids.”

That was a terrible thing that Tupac said about you.

“Yeah. And my daughter kicked his ass, boy. Rashida, she was in Harvard then: ‘Motherfucker, you wouldn’t be where you are if they hadn’t done what they did.’ ” 9 Still, it was an awful thing to say.

“I know, but people, you know. The haters everywhere.

You know, we became good friends after that. We came almost in love with each other. I was going to do a film with him and Snoop Dogg, Pimp, [about] Iceberg Slim.”

You met him at a deli, right?

“That’s when he first met Kidada.10 He was hitting on her—he changed his mind now, you know? And I went over the back of the seat and did like that on his shoulders: ‘Pac!’ ” Jones acts out grabbing hold of Tupac from behind. “And then I said, ‘Come here, motherfucker, I’ve got to talk to you.’ And we went and talked, and after that we hugged and made up.”

Did he apologize straightaway?

“Yes, he did. Yeah. He said, ‘I’m sorry I said it.’ ” Did he explain why he said it?

“No, it wasn’t that kind of relationship. Just trying to be a rapper, man. Like the swagger that’s part of their game, you know. I know those motherfuckers backwards.”

How could you forgive someone who could say that?

“I forgive everybody. Forgiveness is what it’s all about. Forgive us our trespasses and forgive those who

trespass against us. It’s imperative. It was no problems after that. And I know his mother, Afeni, who was a pain in the ass. She’s dead now. They want us to take over the estate now, my son and I. Three or four estates they want us to take over. In fact the Jacksons are coming to us now, even after the court thing we had.11 Jermaine was here last week with his 21-year-old son, and I want to do a Broadway show with him on Michael. Julie Taymor to direct—that’s my baby, biggest in history, Lion King. And use Jermaine’s son, who sings and dances just like Michael.”

You first met Michael when he was 12, right?

“Yeah. Aretha, 12. Michael and Stevie [too]. That’s heavy, isn’t it? It means if you’ve got it at 12, you know you’re going all the way.”

What do you think Michael’s greatness was?

“He had a perspective on details that was unmatched.

His idols are Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, James Brown, all of that. And he paid attention, and that’s what you’re supposed to do. That’s the only way you can be great, you know, is pay attention to the best guys who ever did it.”

Prince appeared in the studio, right, back when you and Michael were recording ‘O≠ the Wall’?

“Yeah, he showed up in the back of a car with a brother who was managing him, and he was like a deer in the headlights. He didn’t have a top on. Did you ever see that thing with James Brown?”

Oh yeah.

Jones is referring to the legendary evening—August 20, 1983—when both Michael Jackson and Prince attended a James Brown show at the Beverly Theater in Los Angeles.

“That’s heavy. He made a damn fool out of himself, didn’t he?” says Jones, and the star he is referring to is Prince. Jackson had film of what happened that night.

“Prince told Michael he’d kill him if he showed it to anybody,” Jones explains, but one way or another, time-coded raw footage of what took place that night eventually surfaced. First Brown invites Jackson to the stage. Jackson sings a few phrases, spins, moonwalks, then embraces Brown and can be seen whispering to him. Brown then calls for Prince. After a delay, Prince gets onstage, takes a guitar, jams a little, then strips o≠ his shirt. He does some mic-stand tomfoolery, dances a little more, then nearly tumbles into the audience trying to pull down an oversize streetlamp prop. It was a superstar face-o≠ that has often been seen as a triumph for Michael Jackson, and a rare humiliation for Prince. (continued on page 94)

8. It was actually called Bols Genever, and Charles reportedly drank a bottle every day. Jones says Charles was “the most independent blind man you could ever witness— he’d go cross the lights, go to the supermarket, shop, count his change no help. No goddamn canes and no cups, nothing like that—his mother wouldn’t let him do it. And the only time he got blind was when the girls were around, and he’d start walking into the walls and shit so they’d feel sorry for him and help him.” (Jones adds that Stevie Wonder also uses this technique.)

9. Rashida, then 17, wrote a letter defending her father, which ends: Tupac, if you learn one lesson, let it be that at least my father took the time to look at how fucked up life would be if he didn’t get his shit together early on. Where the hell would you be if Black people like him hadn’t paved the way for you to even have the opportunity to express yourself ? I don’t see you fighting for your race. In my opinion, you’re destroying it and shitting all over your people.

10. Tupac and Kidada subsequently dated.

She was with him in Las Vegas when he died.

11. Quincy Jones sued the Michael Jackson estate for underpaid royalties and other financial irregularities.

In July he was awarded $9.42 million. Appeals are ongoing. Meanwhile, there appear to be no firm plans for Jones to have a formal role in the Jackson estate or the Shakur estate.

• Jones and Ray Charles rehearsing for a televised tribute to Duke Ellington, 1973. O P P O S I T E , Jones in Paris, 1960.

02.2018 GQ 63

WHEN THE DESTINATION IS THE HOTEL ITSELF

GET A ROOM

Iceland’s Ion Adventure Hotel, clinging to the rugged landscape outside Reykjavík, is so dream-like, so singular, so…sustaining that you could plan a whole vacation around it.

02.2018 GQ 65

WILDEST HOTEL IN AFRICA

Where the Safari Comes to You

by C A I T Y W E A V E R > A NICE HOTEL should

leave you feeling grateful you lead a life where you are privileged to spend a few days surrounded by splendor.

But a truly nice hotel shouldn’t leave you feeling grateful. Instead, it should anticipate your whims so far in advance that it doesn’t even occur to you to feel grateful; it should recalibrate your barometers of entitlement and warp your sense of self so 66 GQ 02.2018

completely it’s as if “sumptuous repose” is the only condition you have ever known. I’m talking about a class of hotel so luxurious it soars beyond opulence into an alternate dimension where magnificence is casual, where a breezy sta≠ (more like your loving family who work for you) renders your daily tasks so indescribably easy the previous days of your life feel like a poorly remembered bad

dream, where the skinsoftening bath crystals are gratis, unlimited, and silently replenished.

Singita Lebombo is one such establishment, and they also have archery lessons.

Hidden among volcanic mountains inside South Africa’s Kruger National Park, Lebombo is a classic safari camp with an exhilarating design. Your room, built into cli≠s and running on hushed solar power, is an airy, glass-walled cube that floats over the N’wanetsi River. By day, roaming elephants treat the waterway as an open bar; after sundown, they’re replaced by hippos that bellow into the black night. Don’t want to hear hippos bellowing into the black

night? Shut yourself up inside your glass palace.

Otherwise, slip under the crisp sheets of your outdoor bed.

Your schedule at Lebombo is that of a better person who leads a more rewarding life. By 6:30 a.m., you’re inside an open-air Land Rover. Your guide drives you alongside zebras and wildebeests and herd after herd of impalas, the hotsupermodel versions of deer. You’re watching the BBC program Planet Earth in real time—plus, you can interrupt the narrator with inane questions. You return to the lodge in time for a monkey to steal your bread at lunch.

“Stop!” you say. “I love bread!!!” the monkey does not say while

managing voraciously to convey that message.

(More warm focaccia appears at your table.)

Afterward, try a midday soak in your bathtub, which is wide, deep, and shaped like an eggshell that has been inspired by the concept of peace.

(Don’t worry about stripping; each glass suite is located clear of other guests. You might make eye contact with a nude gira≠e, as the tub faces the river.)

By mid-afternoon, you’re back in the Rover, hustling to locate a she-leopard, and even though you’ve been here only a day, your mind is so warped that you feel like you really deserve to see her. Great news: You do see her!

Everything here is easy and perfect. After

O P E N I N G PAG E S : C O U R T E SY O F I O N H OT E L S . T H I S PAG E , C LO C KW I S E F R O M TO P L E F T: C O U R T E S Y O F S I N G I TA ; P H OTO G R A P H Y B Y E L S A YO U N G / F R A N K F E AT U R E S A N D P R O D U C T I O N B Y K E R R Y N F I S C H E R / F R A N K F E AT U R E S ( 2 ) .

• Your room looks out on the bush—in fact, it might be frightening. But you’re up high enough, right?

F R O M TO P : J E R E M Y L I E B M A N / T R U N K A R C H I V E ; A D R I A N G A U T/ T R U N K A R C H I V E

U.S. dinner under the stars, a friendly sta≠ member escorts you back to your room, not because you are tipsy (you are; the free-flowing wine is included in your rate) but because an elephant is lumbering around your wooden walkway.

While you were out, your suite has been filled with flickering candles—just another way for the sta≠ to show that they love you and trust you with fire. You collapse into the bed (festooned, in your absence, with silk cobwebs of mosquito netting) to recover from your hectic day, although in fact all you accomplished was gorging yourself on an impressive number of gourmet dishes and being driven around in an exciting way.

Tomorrow, you’ll wake with the birds and do it again. For a supernatural few days, you’ll forget that living so well isn’t normal—the magic trick of a luxurious vacation.

H OT E L T R AV E S W O R T H L IN G F OR

T H E I T- E S T I T H OT E L

All the Mammoth Appetites of Miami, Now Under One Roof

by S T A N P A R I S H gold-plated mammoth skeleton standing guard between the Faena’s plush, perfumed lobby and the pool.

Think of that sculpture by ultra-fancy artist Damien Hirst as the hotel’s spirit animal. It’s the perfect symbol for a place that feels—for those of us without bodyguards or diplomatic immunity—like a different, more gilded dimension. The crowd looks sleek, exotic, possibly dangerous.

Which is not to say that the Faena is uninviting. Service here is unparalleled in Miami. Jose the Doorman—part cruise director, part special-ops commando, full local legend—clocks your arrival and determines exactly what degree of the Faena’s expert hospitality you require. The pool staff offers complimentary shots of silky sunscreen. The restaurant, by fire-whispering Argentine chef Francis Mallmann, turns out perfectly grilled everything. And each room feels like the party-ready Buenos Aires pied-à-terre you’ll never own.

> Y E S , T H AT ’ S A

• Standing next to Damien Hirst’s Gone But Not Forgotten (2014) is like being on acid.

LONDON’S COOLEST BAR HAS ROOMS UPSTAIRS

U.K

.

H ORT L S WG FO R E T HO ELIN V TRA

by M A R K B Y R N E

THE SAND CASTLE

Outside It’s Hot as Hell— Which Makes This Spot Heaven

by N I C K M A R I N O > S TAY I N G I N A H OT E L is like renting a little piece of real estate in the community, a buy-in to a sense of place.

To belonging. To instant cred. Nowhere is this more true than at the Chiltern Firehouse in London’s swanky Marylebone neighborhood. The bar off the lobby is a clubhouse almost without equal—burning fireplaces, a big bar in the center, a list of solid, inventive drinks, and comfy dark corners in which to enjoy them. And unlike the rest of this town, it stays open as long and late as guests are drinking. It’s also the hardest door in the city to slip by, reserved as it is exclusively for guests at the hotel—unless you’re a friend of the house. (I was there in April. David Beckham and five of his mates were there, too.)

If, like us, you’re not that famous, there’s one move guaranteed to grant you entry: Book a room upstairs (months ahead of time). It’s the easiest way in. And it’s a damn good room. Yeah, it’ll be a lot more expensive than secreting a wad of 20s to the host. But that’s not going to work here regardless. Plus, this way you get to keep your dignity. And a place to sleep to boot.

want to go outside in Dubai—it’s too sweltering—but you don’t have to. Everything is indoors. Spend a night at the Armani Hotel, which conveniently makes up the first eight floors of the world’s tallest building, and you never have to breathe hot air.

Wake up with a morning swim in the Armani pool, discreetly shaped like a capital A. Take the elevator up to the At.mosphere bar on the 122nd floor. Wander down a passageway to the Dubai Mall, so vast that it has taxis inside to shuttle you from the diving tank with real sharks to the indoor skating rink. > YO U W O N ’ T

ASK A HOTEL GOD

Liz Lambert, founder, the Bunkhouse Group

“Il San Pietro di Positano is a time capsule tucked into the hillside of the Amalfi Coast. To get down to the sea, you take a James Bond elevator that cuts through the rock. Walk out onto the beach, and there’s a waiter ready with a spritz. You just never want to leave.”

T H I S PAG E , P H OTO G R A P H S , C LO C KW I S E F R O M TO P L E F T: J O H A N N E S H E U C K E R OT H /G A L L E RYS TO C K ; CO U R T E SY O F P E D E N + M U N K /CO N D E N A S T A R C H I V E S ; P E D E N + M U N K / T R U N K A R C H I V E . I L L U S T R AT I O N : A N D R E W C O L I N B E C K . O P P O S I T E P A G E , C L O C K W I S E F R O M L E F T : M A I S A N T L U D O V I C /A L A M Y ; C O U R T E S Y O F B O R G O E G N A Z I A ( 2 ) .

THE DRINKING HOTEL

IT TAKES A VILLA

I Love This Place So Much, I Forgot I Brought My Kids

by D E V I N F R I E D M A N > RE SO RTS A RE terrible, culture-less, dead places. They don’t even count as “travel.” It’s impossible to go to a resort without feeling like an asshole, eating your “authentic” jerk chicken inside a walled compound served by imprisoned hospitality

workers with cheerful tunics and sad, haunted eyes—while a tenth of a mile away people are eating at an actual jerkchicken restaurant that charges one-hundredth the price. I am not a resort person. But at the same time: I am guilty of loving a resort.

And let’s be straightup here. Borgo Egnazia—located in beautiful Puglia, the Italian region where it’s sunny as shit, dry as a bone, and covered with ancient olive trees (and vacationing British people)—is a resort.

It’s true that it never

feels like a resort. It looks like a real Italian village—with its stone palazzi and its quiet, car-less streets. But no matter how beautiful it is, no matter how un-tacky, no matter how much you feel like Justin Timberlake (he got married there) or how impressive the stonework is or how authentic the spaghetti vongole or how real the little vicoli feel when you’re wandering down them at night and the wind is blowing o≠ the Adriatic—it’s a resort.

And I have to admit that part of what I love is the resortness. And that is because I have children.

At Borgo Egnazia, you can book a babysitter at night and take your wife to the piazza to drink rosé and eat pasta that’s actually every bit as good as the pasta you’d find just down the road. Nothing is an imposition to the sta≠, either: Please allow one of our perfectly tanned Ronaldo look-alikes to reposition the umbrella because the sun has so rudely moved into your eyes! Yes, certainly, we will make scrambled eggs for your son even though you ordered the continental breakfast and he just spilled orange juice on the

wealthy linen-shirted financiers of Europe seated at the next table!

They have an actual summer camp inside the hotel. And not one of those child-prison things I’ve heard about where they ditch your children inside a bouncy castle manned by teenagers who feed them string cheese and episodes of Dora the Explorer. At this one they make cookies!

Italian cookies. At this one there are little Italian boys and girls who may not share a language with, but will still hold hands with, your children! All while you sunbathe like a vacationing footballer married to a pop star.

The narrative of so much of parenthood is about “giving up.” Like, we used to travel to culturally interesting places, but then we had kids, gave up, and went to a resort. Mostly I’m just looking for a place to give up in style.

02.2018 GQ 69

The Once-in-a-Lifetime Hotel You Get to Experience Five Times

by J I M N E L S O N a hotel could be said to be “transporting,” it is the Amankora in Bhutan.

It literally moves with you.

It is a kind of caravansary, like history’s first inns, where weary travelers along the Silk Road, or on some endless desert trek through Persia, could stop and recuperate for a spell.

The Amankora updates this conceit by way of wanderlust: It is really five lodges strung throughout this remote Himalayan country, and a proper stay involves wending your way to each of them. In so doing, you see more of a landscape that you could never get enough of.

Transporting, too, because the experience of being in Bhutan is not so much otherworldly as othermindly, a clearing of the brain and a lifting of the spirit that make home

> IF EVER

70 GQ 02.2018

feel like the samsara you left behind. Everything here points to the skies, from the monasteries that cling impossibly and sometimes impassably to the mountains, to the brightly colored prayer flags that locals string throughout the hills and forests, wishing for something but never quite desiring it. (Your Buddhist tour guide will quietly inform you that desire is the source of all suffering.)

Aiding in the brainclearing: Bhutan remains almost defiantly analog— you will see occasional cell phones, but no one cares what your new Galaxy S9 can do. The country was virtually closed to international travel until 1974, and even now severely limits tourist visas. This law is a gift from the Buddha himself.

There isn’t anything to do except visit glorious monasteries (the interiors as vivid as a Hockney painting), hike over the mountains, and mutter “Holy crap—that’s beautiful” again and again. That, and to keep coming back to the Amankora, where they like to organize: Would you like a white-waterriver-rafting expedition?

A Bhutanese barbecue?

A plunge in an outdoor hotstone bath? You will do all three, ending up under the stars in that bath, somehow motionless and transported at the same time. Because this is the place just beyond the desire you knew.

AMANKORA THIMPHU

AMANKORA PUNAKHA

AMANKORA BUMTHANG AMANKORA PARO

AMANKORA GANGTEY

T H I S PA G E , P H O T O G R A P H S , C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P L E F T : C O U R T E S Y O F A M A N ; K E V I N M I YA Z A K I / R E D U X ( 2 ) ; C O U R T E S Y O F A M A N . I L L U S T R AT I O N : A N D R E W C O L I N B E C K . O P P O S I T E PA G E : C O U R T E S Y O F A M A N .

A S FA R A W AY A S P O S S I B L E

The Tiger’s Nest Monastery perches on a cliffside, a few hours’ hike from the first of five Aman lodges in Bhutan. When you’re ready to move on, just follow that map to the left.

LA ICE

ND

> E V E RYON E EM E RG IN G

BASE CAMP

The Roughest Paradise Imaginable

by G E O F F DY E R 72 GQ 02.2018

from Reykjavík airport was dressed as though life were a permanent hiking expedition. Either that or a vegan-punk festival where the weather forecast was unpromising. It was late July. I’d vaguely

wanted to go to Iceland for years. Then, more recently, whenever I saw a photograph of a striking landscape, it turned out to be of somewhere in Iceland.

But it was Henrik Saxgren: Unintended Sculptures that really

did it: photographs of man-made objects and bits of nature that looked like art installations—and the most impressive of these seemed to be from Iceland, whose roads we were now navigating in our little rental car. It was like Scotland: Dreary, hulking mountain shapes loomed from the cloudgloom. The gloom was not uniform; in places it glowed, and then the glow gave way to tattered blue— ruined bits of sky that disappeared before breaking out again. It felt like winter with an injection of daylight saving thrown in.

We headed inland to the Ion Adventure Hotel. The land is ancient, primal, brooding; the hotel is modern and therefore at odds with the landscape—and at one with it. Black and gray, luxurious and basic, it juts out over a low plain, but not in the concrete-and-steel way we associate with modernism at its most gleaming. This is a kind of DIY, hunkereddown modernism.

Our room faced a barren expanse of gray land and sky that would then flare into green and blue as the sun emerged. It was the size of a small room in a Manhattan hotel—with a big window. That window was the whole point of the room. Even better were the ones in the Northern Lights

T H E S E PAG E S , F R O M L E F T: A DA M M O R A N ; CO U R T E SY O F I O N H OT E L S ( 2 )

H ORT L S WG FO R E T HO ELIN V TRA

Bar, which is at the end of a cantilevered overhang. You can drink here and contemplate a scene that would lend itself well to the re-enactment of an atrocious battle. The land looked as if it hadn’t changed in millions of years, but the light was shifting all the time.

Wind raced through the grass. There were no trees—why would there be, when they could put down roots in more welcoming climes? It was a tribute to the windflattened grass that it had made a home here, on such inhospitable foundations.

The hotel used to be the dormitory where workers at a nearby geothermal power plant lived. It’s been thoroughly tricked out but still bears traces of these utilitarian origins. The restaurant has the feel of a refectory,

but the dinners are great.

From the Relaxation Room the view is of the concrete legs supporting the Northern Lights Bar: a high-end version of living beneath an overpass. Back upstairs, we looked at pictures of the hotel in a book. We were staying in the hotel, looking at pictures of where we were staying, living the life aspired to. The experience was complete, sealed.

But the hotel, remember, is called the Ion Adventure Hotel, so it’s also a base camp from which to explore.

Exploring, for us, meant driving, as in a car ad or in a time-lapse film made over the span of thousands of years.

Blue sky, gray, drizzle.

Nothing, everything.

You’re cruising through a hemmed-in landscape, and then it bursts into life and you see

glaciers, mountains, boulder-strewn moraines, volcanoes.

If you’re lucky and the weather clears for a day or two, it is like being in the roughest paradise imaginable.

In the course of a vast afternoon you can be enveloped in five or six di≠erent landscapes, some of them not rough at all but lyrical with lush meadows and yellow flowers.

For lunch one day we ate at a restaurant where they served only tomatoes. The sun was scalding; it was like being in Italy.

On the south coast we came to a place that was not marked; we’d only stopped because, like the sheep we’d seen grazing, a flock of other people had done so. We joined the pilgrims walking out on a huge and

desolate black beach toward a gray promise of sea. It would have been the perfect spot to film scenes from Macbeth or King Lear or the last stage of some doomed expedition to space. The sea never seemed to get any

nearer. We plodded on for 40 minutes without knowing why.

And then we came to the crashed plane: wrecked and stripped bare by time and the elements, of which there were both many and few. People were clambering all over the fuselage so it felt like a memorial and a piece of junk in a godforsaken playground. No sign explained what had happened, but I read later that it was a U.S. Navy cargo aircraft that had crash-landed in November 1973 with no loss of life. Taking pictures with my phone, I began to feel that there was something familiar about the site—and then it came to me.

This was the very plane I’d seen in a Saxgren photograph—without registering that it had been taken in Iceland. It had been a very long walk.

We began trudging back to the car. The sky was capable of anything.

• The dining room at the Ion Adventure Hotel is where you refuel at midday for another round of existential wandering.

Before

Business casual meets laundry day

Project Upgrade: Dolce & Gabbana

NICK MARINO JASON KIM

↞ blazer $2,275 shirt $675 pants $545 loafers $1,375 bow tie $215 pocket square $155 watch (price available upon request) Dolce & Gabbana

Your shirt should fit like a second skin.

The jacket is your first skin: You shouldn’t even feel like you’re wearing a jacket.

—Domenico Dolce

After

PRASHAN JOSEPH AG E 21 P RO F E S S I O N

Has his dry cleaner on speed dial

Electronics technician D R E S S F RO M T H E G RO U N D U P

If you’d walked into a black-tie event wearing velvet a few years ago, you would’ve been greeted with a bunch of Hugh Hefner jokes. But nowadays velvet slippers are as dressy as lace-ups, and a bottle-green blazer gives a thoughtful and considerate zillionaire vibe.

02.2018 GQ 75

I love when people understand the clothes and play with the clothes. You are not a victim of the clothes.

↧

—Domenico Dolce

sQ U I R E D

AWAY in the private library of their palatial Milan headquarters, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana are holding a little master class on how to dress for evening.

“Night is the part of the day with more possibilities,” Gabbana says, curled up on a couch with a pack of smokes. “When you dress up to go out at night, you can enjoy dinner, the club, music, meeting friends. It’s a free time.

For Dolce & Gabbana, it’s the time to be more sexy.” In an age when most high-fashion designers are pivoting into streetwear and athletic wear, these guys—the dons of highend Italian peacocking— are doubling down on tailoring. Look through these pages and you’ll see their sartorial philosophy: that suits should be daring but not quite louche. (About that: Don’t describe your look as “louche.”) Formalwear no longer means a sad, baggy, possibly soupstained tux you rented at the mall. It means clothes that ratchet up your charisma and that make you want to strut—or at least stride a little more confidently. Their secret?

Don’t dress for anyone else. “When you dress for a special occasion,” Dolce says, “it’s a seduction moment. For us, the first seduction is yourself.”

76 GQ 02.2018

Before

Where’s the rest of his suit?

After

Forget the suit— it’s cloak season

CHEIKH BARA KA AG E 22 P RO F E S S I O N Souvenir vendor HALF THE TUX, D O U B L E T H E S WAG

One of the joys of owning a tux is the option of wearing the jacket and pants as separates.

And this time of year, you can even trade your jacket for a coat with seriously regal vibes.

You’ll breeze right past the coat-check station and move into the “being mistaken for a count” portion of the evening.

Before

His style is in contempt of court

After

Dressed with conviction

FRANCO PAPAGNO AG E 52 P RO F E S S I O N Lawyer T H ROW ’ E M A C U RV E

Notice how Franco’s original jacket is shaped like a perfect rectangle? That’s what D&G might call non bene. The bene?

A black turtleneck, which has quietly become even dressier than your sharpest shirt and tie, worn with a suit intended to bring the party.

He looks like 007.

—Stefano Gabbana

↞ coat $3,375 shirt $675 pants $675 shoes $975 tie $175 Dolce & Gabbana ↠ suit $2,995 turtleneck $945 boots $975 Dolce & Gabbana

You don’t talk just with your mouth. You talk, too, with your body. And clothes talk with your audience.

—Domenico Dolce

Before

Hiding behind the reservations desk

After

Walking in like he owns the place

AIYU WAKA AG E 27 P RO F E S S I O N Hotel receptionist T H I N K WAY D I F F E R E N T

“I would like to try something different,” Aiyu told us when we met him. So we ditched his seen-it-all moto pants, got his hair out of his face, and put him in the kind of metallic suit that’s a little wild for work but just right for a night out. “It’s a texture and a color that I’ve never seen in my life,” Aiyu said, “but I would definitely wear it.” ↞

↠

suit $2,995 shirt $345 tie $175 watch (price available upon request) Dolce & Gabbana

blazer $2,595 (for suit) pants $545 shoes $645 watch (price available upon request) Dolce & Gabbana

grooming by thomas dunkin for r&co. production by soloprod. where to buy it? go to the fashion directories on gq.com 78 GQ 02.2018

Before

The kid who just rolled out of bed

MICHELE INCERTO AG E 24 P RO F E S S I O N Student YO U ’ R E M O R E ST Y L I S H T H A N YO U T H I N K

“My style is not very elegant,” Michele told us when he walked into our photo studio.

We’ll bet he’d never worn a white dinner jacket, which is no longer just for your Bogartin-Casablanca costume.

After

The gentleman who just rolled into a 12-star restaurant Dolce (standing) and Gabbana behold their masterpiece.

We’ve heard the same things you have about red meat: that it’s cruel and unsustainable, and that it’ll destroy the environment if it doesn’t give us all heart attacks first. To which we say: But it’s so delicious! That’s why we begged GQ’s favorite food authority,

The rib eye is always the best cut for simply grilling over a fire or in a pan. But a pasture-raised rib eye? Unbeatable tenderness, flavor, and texture.

MARK BITTMAN,

to reconcile our principles with our appetites and show us the way forward Nigel Cox

Sacred

Guide

to

Tenderloin doesn’t have a ton of flavor, but it’s among the tenderest cuts. Chop it and add bold seasonings to make an unbelievable steak tartare.

Cows

02.2018 GQ 81

2. Expand Your Vocabulary • Just about anything is better than the industrially produced grain-fed feedlot beef. The best alternative, and I’m being very specific here, is “grass-fed, pasture-raised,” especially if it’s raised locally (to reduce the carbon footprint) and organically (to prevent the widespread use of pesticides that harm the environment).

There are other good alternatives that play with those variables, but the bottom line is that most of what you find for sale isn’t cutting it.

Under natural conditions, cattle are an almost perfectly beneficial part of a regenerative agricultural system. Their waste feeds the fields on which they’re pastured; carbon is sequestered in that grass; and their meat, in limited quantities, is good for us, good for the land, and good for the community of farmers, ranchers, butchers, and the variety of small businesses that raise, butcher, and sell it.

Take the cattle o≠ those fields, multiply their numbers by thousands, feed them industrially produced grain encouraged by subsidies, damage some of the world’s best farmland to grow that grain using a destructive assortment of chemicals, pump the cows full of antibiotics (to prevent illness in the unnatural conditions), scale and intensify this process so that almost anyone in the world can a≠ord to eat meat daily, and... that’s not good for us. Or the farmland. Or the planet.

Or, needless to say, the cattle. And yet beef raised 82 GQ 02.2018

this way is what almost everyone in this country has eaten exclusively for the past 50 years.

Fortunately, a growing cadre of ethical ranchers and butchers have started turning this system around. They’re pasture-raising cows on grass and mother’s milk—which gives the meat a wonderfully complex flavor, pleasantly minerally and deliciously beefy—and they’re using whole animals, minimizing waste and expanding our palates.

Here’s how to find, buy, and order beef that’s not only better for the planet but tastes better, too.

• The price for pasture-raised beef does vary, but it’s expensive.

Beef finished in a feedlot should be somewhat cheaper, but it’s still going to be steep. Ground beef—which constitutes about a third of the yield from every animal— should be $5 to $10 a pound; less is suspect, and more is, well, high.

The premium cuts, like rib eye and filet mignon, are likely to be around $30 a pound; more is common.

F O O D S T Y L I S T : J A M I E K I M M . P R O P S T Y L I S T : E M I LY M U L L I N A T H E L L O A R T I S T S .

1. Start Beefing with (Most) Beef

3. OPEN YOUR WALLET

the ones you want are going to be very high.” Here’s what else Garwin says any good butcher should love to talk about.

4. Learn from Your Butcher

Flank steak is great for grilling but even better as ropa vieja (“old clothes”), the slow-cooked stew that reduces the meat to a forktender marvel.

• If you’re able to speak to a human who’s willing to engage you in conversation about the meat they’re selling, then you’ve already overcome a huge hurdle, says Samantha “Sam” Garwin, butcher and CEO of Fleishers Craft Butchery. “The odds that the answers are

WEIRD CUTS The last time I was at Fleishers, I saw two cuts that you almost never see.

One was deckle, the succulent part of the prime rib that always tastes so good, even when it’s well-done, and the other was boned lamb neck, which, simply roasted, is incomparable.

THE COW’S AGE Cows sold in shops like Fleishers are usually slaughtered at a more mature age (just around 24 months) because

a grass-fed cow simply takes longer to get to slaughter weight. (Which is yet another factor leading to more expensive prices.)

THE COW’S BREED The meat you see at Fleishers—a lot of Angus and Hereford—is similar to what you’d see at MegaFoodVille.

It’s the practices that are so di≠erent.

PARTNERS A company like Fleishers can’t do everything itself, says Garwin. It often has many partners— from farmers to slaughterhouses to packing. “You want a company that owns the supply chain from start to finish? That looks like Perdue.”

CHEAP STUFF Don’t use purveyors of pasture-raised meat just for special occasions. “Our ground beef is more flavorful than any ground beef you’ve ever had!” says Garwin. (And it’s relatively cheap.)

Short ribs can be braised forever—like the Korean galbi jjim— or simply marinated and grilled.

They’re fantastic either way.

5. Seek Out These Meat Stands • More and more butchers are opening in conjunction with restaurants (an excellent way to use the entire animal) or becoming creative and o≠ering value-added products—like pet food made with o≠al—along with raw meat. All of these butchers sell pasture-raised beef, and they know their farmers. That’s what matters.

84 GQ 02.2018

Salt & Time, Austin An epic charcuterie list—and ground Wagyu for the best burger you’ve ever made.

Parts & Labor, Baltimore Toast to the cows at this joint’s full bar.

The Local Butcher Shop, Berkeley The famed Sando of the Day could be roast beef with pickled beans and Havarti.

Publican Quality Meats, Chicago It’s Chicago, and that means sausage. Grab its gorgeous new cookbook while you’re there.

Porter Road Butcher, Nashville Cooking soup?

Use its pre-made beef stocks or buy a bag of bones and make your own.

Fleishers Craft Butchery, N.Y.C. The shop’s two-hour Beef Butchery 101 class teaches you how to cook and cut your meat.

6. OR LET THE MEAT COME TO YOU

• Have it shipped to you by one of these three mailorder butchers.

I’ve known Seth Nitschke of Mariposa Ranch for seven years; he’s a real, honest cattleman, operating out of central California.

When I first met him, in the middle of the drought, he was driving cattle to Nevada for water, while everyone else in the grass-fed business was feeding their cattle dried grass from elsewhere. His ethics

are impeccable and his beef is fantastic.

But like most good things in life, it’ll cost ya: Filet mignon runs nearly $30 per pound. mariposaranch meats.com Butcher Box is a subscription model, and it’s the most economical option, a kind of Blue Apron–style meal kit—but instead of all those pesky vegetables, you get about ten pounds of meat. It’s early days, but I do believe

these people are principled and trying to do things right. butcherbox.com Now, this is interesting: Crowd Cow purchases a cow, tells you about the farm and the animal, and offers you a share. If you think the meat’s from too far away, if you don’t like something about its story, or if the cuts you want aren’t available, you simply try again another day. If your needs are met, you buy. crowdcow.com

7. FIND A BUTCHER COUNTER THAT LOOKS LIKE THIS

Unusual Shapes, Colors, and Textures Cuts may be irregularly sized. Or redder. Others might have more marbling or be dry-looking.

Diversity gives you what you should always demand: real choice.

• A sustainable meat shop is almost guaranteed to be no more than a few years old and run by people not much older. Here’s what to look for.

Big Cuts Slabs of meat mean your butchers are actually butchering. By contrast, supermarket “butchers” buy pre-cut meat. Custom-cut beef is a minor but telltale benefit of real beef handled by real butchers.

I L L U S T R AT I O N : M I C H A E L H O E W E L E R

8. Killer Meat Demands Killer Technique RIB EYE Use a lot of salt, a lot of pepper, and some rosemary. Get your grill as hot as it’ll go, but when you’re ready to cook, shut o≠ the gas under one part of the grill or bank the coals over to one side. Grill the meat, covered, over the less hot part of the grill but as close to the hot part as you can get it without the meat catching fire.

BEEF TARTARE The one pictured on page 81 is made with shallots, sherry vinegar, Worcestershire, Tabasco, and cornichons, but you can spice it as you like. Parmesan and anchovies are nice. That egg? Quail.

ROPA VIEJA The only thing even remotely challenging about this Cuban

classic is shredding the steaks into the ropy strands that give the dish its name.

GALBI JJIM A lot of ingredients (soy sauce, ginger, sesame seeds, sake, chiles, and on and on), a lot of time (overnight marinade plus two-hour cook time)—and the result is one of the world’s great beef braises.

MO R E • The full recipes • GQ.C O M

Offal Beef hearts, livers, kidneys, sweetbreads, and marrow bones for sale is another sign your butcher is taking apart whole animals.

Small Quantities Most butchers who rely on pasture-raised beef go through only an animal or two a week. How many tenderloins does a cow have? Two. How many skirt steaks? One. There are only 16 rib eyes, and those sell fast!

9. Buy a Ton and Freeze It • Unless you’re going direct to the farmer within a couple weeks of slaughter, freezing your beef (or buying it frozen) is not just an adequate choice but probably the ideal choice. Just thaw it in the fridge the night before you want to cook it and (as with any meat) bring it to room temperature before applying heat.

10. FINALLY, GO TO WHERE THE COWS ARE

• In a congested dining scene like New York’s or San Francisco’s, there’s not enough pasture-raised beef to go around. You’re better off finding a small-town restaurant that has direct relationships with its farming neighbors.

This summer, I was blown away to discover a restaurant called Prairie Whale, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where they serve an Irish breed of cow called Dexter— the porterhouse I had was sensational. And I’m dying to get down to White Oak Pastures, in little Bluffton, Georgia, which makes its employee canteen open to the public, so everyone can enjoy the burgers and tongue tacos from cows humanely raised on the premises.

jacket $1,095 turtleneck $445 Z Zegna helmet HMR

jacket $780 Herno sweater $690 Moncler Grenoble pants $450 Moncler boots $200 Danner glasses $600 Vuarnet ON HER

jacket and pants Tory Sport sweater Lacoste beanie Moncler glasses Vuarnet

86 GQ 02.2018

ARNAUD PY VK A

A dominoes strategy not seen since the late 1970s.

sweater $720 Neil Barrett jeans $188 Citizens of Humanity boots $239 L.L.Bean watch $495 Victorinox Swiss Army ON HER

ski suit Fusalp boots Tory Sport

JOIN THE

Ski TEAM

happening in the world of winter wear: Fashion labels are making technical gear to hit the slopes in, and outdoor brands are turning out mountain-ready staples we want to wear everywhere else. The idea is less “I winter in Gstaad” than “I have definitely heard of Gstaad.”

So keep things bright, embrace the stripe, and pile on the layers— especially if it’s a turtleneck, which is now your go-to base. We’ll see you on the mountain, and in line for bagels on Sunday.

And if this cryptocurrency thing works out, sure: We’ll see you in Gstaad.

sweater $355 BOSS by Hugo Boss pants $725 Aztech Mountain beanie $75 Paul Smith glasses $600 Vuarnet 02.2018 GQ 89

Fondue: behind borderlineillegal banking techniques and ultra-luxe watches, perhaps the ďŹ nest Swiss innovation of all time.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT

jacket $780 Herno sweater $690 Moncler Grenoble glasses $600 Vuarnet -shirt $145 ATM vest $130 Armani Exchange ON HER

sweater Moncler -jacket $885 sweater $360 ski goggles $230 Fusalp gloves $595 Moncler -turtleneck $445 Z Zegna sweater $910 Moncler pants $725 Aztech Mountain glasses $600 Vuarnet watch $325 Emporio Armani -jacket $299 Tommy x Rossignol shirt $10 Uniqlo

02.2018 GQ 91

Trust us: You wanna ask the chalet about the bed situation before check-in. shirt $138 Hanro ON HER

shirt and long johns Hanro

Despite all evidence to the contrary, this photo was taken in 2017. jacket $998 Michael Kors sweater $195 Uri Minkoff pants $725 Aztech Mountain glasses $600 Vuarnet ON HER

jacket Fusalp pants Moncler styled by madeline weeks. hair and makeup by gilles ketir. produced on location by ragi dholakia productions. special thanks to hotel le blizzard, val d’isère, and the oxford ski company. where to buy it? go to the fashion directories on gq.com

02.2018 GQ 93

QU INCY JONES

C O N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 6 3

He spoke to Michael after the show?

“Oh yeah, he spoke to him. He waited in the limousine to try and run over him and La Toya and his mother.”

How do you know Prince was trying to run him over?

“He knew. Michael knows shit. He was there. He said that was his intention.”

Michael told you that?

“Yeah.”

What did he think of what Prince had done onstage that night?

“It was just very obvious what the hell happened—made a damn fool out of himself.

Michael went up there, in 40 seconds, sang I love you I love you. Then they went up-tempo and he did a little dance and did the moonwalk and whispered in [James Brown’s] ear, ‘Call Prince up—I dare him to follow me.’ ” A further landmark in their uneasy rivalry came when Jones suggested to Jackson that Prince duet with him on the title track of his Bad album. “So we invited [Prince] over to Michael’s house at Hayvenhurst. He came in and he had an overcoat on, and he had a big white box labeled camille. He called Michael ‘Camille.’ ” Prince, it seems, had brought a gift for his host. “The box had all kinds of stu≠—some cu≠ links with Tootsie Rolls on them. Michael was scared to death— he thought there was some voodoo in there. I wanted to take it, because I knew Michael was gonna throw it away.”

What happened to it?

“He threw it away. In the garbage.”

How did the conversation about doing the song together go?

“Well, we sat at a table that held 24 people, at his house, family table, I said, ‘Michael…

Smelly,12 you sit over there so he doesn’t feel like we’re ganging up on him.’ It started o≠ funny.

Michael said, ‘I never been to Minnenapolis.’

[Prince] said”—snapping angrily—“ ‘It’s Minneapolis!’ Oh God…man, this is not going too well. Then Janet went by. [Prince] said, ‘Relax your lips, girl.’ And it was not going well, that’s for sure. Then we went upstairs, and he saw the chimpanzee and the snake, he said, 12. Smelly was the name Jones used for Michael Jackson; he took it from Jackson’s habit of saying “smelly jelly” instead of “funky.”

13. Riefenstahl was a German film director whose work has long been stained by her close association with the Nazi movement.

14. Jones composed the theme to Cosby’s first sitcom. Sitting with me, flicking through a book of photographs, Jones comes across one of the two of them together. “Cosby…

Jesus,” he says, and moves on without further comment.

15. The most famous of the murders committed by the Manson family under Charles Manson’s instructions, though this fact wouldn’t become clear for some time.

16. Tate was eight and a half months pregnant.

94

GQ.COM

FEBRUARY

2018

‘Now, that’s interesting.’ And then he says to me, ‘He doesn’t need me on this—it’s going to be a hit anyway.’ Which is true.”

You were around in the era when the animals started appearing, weren’t you?

“Yeah. Muscles”—Jackson’s boa constrictor—“and Bubbles.” The chimp. “Muscles used to come and wrap around me, my leg, around the chair, and crawl across the console. That was a big motherfucker, man.”

What did you think?

“Oh, it scared me to death, man. I ain’t gonna lie. And the chimpanzee, whatever the fuck it was, he was a pain in the ass. He bit Rashida. My poor baby.”

If that was my daughter, I’d be kind of angry.

“Yeah, I was angry.”

What did you say?

“Well, what do you say? Shit. After it’s already happened, what the fuck can you do?”

• • • L E T M E A S K Y O U about someone completely

di≠erent. You really met Leni Riefenstahl? 13 “Yes! I wouldn’t make it up. I’ve been a fan of hers since Triumph of the Will. I mean, that woman was one of the greatest filmmakers that ever lived.”

How did you come to meet her?

“She knew I was a fan, and I was over there [in Berlin]. Nastassja was doing a film with Wim Wenders. Came to the hotel one day and there was an invitation—she wanted me to have lunch with her. And that’s the most incredible meeting I’ve ever had in my life. Because I knew all about her. She was Goebbels’s girlfriend—he was like the publicist for the Third Reich, you know. She looked like Hedy Lamarr when she was young.

She said she used 211 cameras. I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘We were doing a recruitment film for Hitler—think I’m going to tell Hitler, “One more time, Adolf!”?’ And then she told me something that really hit home. She told me everybody in the Third Reich was on cocaine.

See, I worked for pimps when I was 11, and they used to do that, too—they’d take cocaine because it raised the propensity for violence, from the primate brain. That’s the primate in us, the four F’s: Fright, Fight, Flight, and Fuck. I never understood why sex and violence were so commercial—it’s the primate brain, the animal brain. Heavy.”

She saw Hitler using cocaine?

“Of course, man! She was Goebbels’s girlfriend.”

So how does she think it a≠ected Hitler?

“Well, shit, the history proves how it a≠ected him. He killed every motherfucker he could see.”

You think a huge part of the horror of Nazism was just down to cocaine?

“I think it had a lot to do with it. When she said that, it opened up a door for me. Because I’ve been around that shit all my life.”

Some people would be judgmental about having lunch with someone who was so closely involved with the Nazi Party.

“Oh, give me a fucking break, man, please.

This is a human being, man. And a very special human being. It was never political. It was about her passion for her profession.”

Still, I wonder if she regretted being in all of that.

“No, because she never got involved—she never got passionate about what the Third

Reich was doing. She wasn’t into it. I could tell. You have to read between the lines, too.”

• • • A T H I R D T I M E Quincy Jones’s life might have

come to a premature halt: Barely a few hundred yards away from where we sit tonight, on a nearby hillside, is a house with a troubled history. In the late 1960s, Jones nearly bought the house, but the owner at the time said he would only rent it, so Jones bought a house from the actress Janet Leigh on Deep Canyon Drive instead. Some people he knew moved into the other house.

In early 1969, Steve McQueen called Jones and asked him to go and see a rough cut of Bullitt. Jones brought along his hairdresser, a man named Jay Sebring, and after the movie, they made plans for later that evening.

“He said, ‘I’ll meet you at Sharon’s, because I’ve got some stu≠ for your hair,’ ” Jones remembers. “I was losing my hair.”

But Jones didn’t go. “I forgot about it,” he says.

The next morning his friend Bill Cosby14 called from London.

“He said, ‘Man, did you hear about Jay?’ Because we all used to hang out together.

He said, ‘Did you see that he’s dead?’ I said, ‘Impossible, man, I was with him last night.’ ” At the dinner party Jones had missed, at Sharon Tate’s house, all five guests had been brutally murdered.15 What did you think when you realized how close you’d been?

“Oh my God, it was freaky. Because they hung him up, man, and cut his nuts o≠ and everything—Jay Sebring. And they cut her belly open with the baby, you know.”16 When something like that happens—nearly being at this terrible event—what does it make you think?

“Man, it’s been happening to me all my life.

It’s just unbelievable, man. You feel blessed that somehow you forgot, or whatever. Jesus Christ.

Ain’t never forget that. That’s the Ghetto Gump shit. Life is a trip, man. Life is a trip.”

• • • A F T E R I L E A V E — it’s shortly before mid-

night—Quincy Jones will do some Sudoku.

“Keeps dementia and Parkinson’s away,” he says. “I’m fighting that like a warrior. Got to challenge the brain. Use it or lose it.”

And, all his life, Jones has relished that moment around midnight when something new begins. “The muses come out at midnight,” he says. “No e-mails, no faxes, no calls.”

And when the rest of the city is fully asleep, that’s when Quincy Jones, three months short of his 85th birthday, will really get to work.

“I’ll write music,” he says. “I’m writing a street opera—for my album.”

Finally, at around ten in the morning, Jones will allow himself to rest.

“Life’s an amazing journey, isn’t it, man?” he says. “Every day I think about it. It’s just something else. I love every step. I appreciate all of it. Every drop.…”

He talks again about all the birthday tributes in the works: the biopic, the Netflix doc, the TV special.

“Fucking insane,” he says. “They be thinking I’m 84 and retired and all that shit. They wrong, man. Oh baby! I am never retiring!” chris heath is a gq correspondent.

JIM M Y KIM M EL

C O N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 4 4

criticized by someone. Like, ‘You didn’t make enough jokes about Harvey Weinstein.’ ” It’s something that plays out in the show every night, too. “One news article can write that I didn’t say anything about Harvey Weinstein, and then that becomes fact. Wait a minute.… We didn’t have a show that night, so I don’t know how that applies. It’s like I’m protecting someone I don’t even know. I reject that.

That is not my job. It’s the same case with a tragedy. Something terrible happens every day. If you mentioned this and you don’t mention that, then you don’t care about these people. You do have to remind people that ultimately it is a comedy show. Even though we may from time to time talk about serious subjects, if people are not laughing at least three nights out of the week, they’re not going to watch it anymore.”

The nature of that laughter really matters to Jimmy. “You take a risk when you make a comment that is dark,” he continues. “In a way, it’s you saying, ‘I trust you. I trust your sense of humor, and I trust that you will not use this against me.’ It’s a little gift, I think. When somebody makes a truly offensive joke to me, I love them a little bit more. If it’s just offensive, it’s no good. But there’s nothing better than when something emotional or serious is going on, maybe it’s a wedding toast, and somebody funny leans over and whispers something terrible into your ear. I live for those moments. I live for being the one who does the whispering.”

And so he has, mixing emotions and punch lines, pointing out the foibles of those in power.

As someone who’s always featured his family in the show—his pugnacious aunt Chippy has regular hilarious cameos, his cousin Sal is in charge of pranks, his uncle Frank was a beloved character, his son Kevin does social media— it’s natural that his family concerns have made their way into his monologues. But with the Las Vegas shooting, Jimmy veered into territory that even he wasn’t quite ready for, unwittingly positioning himself at the center of a deadly serious debate, and in so doing, made himself a target for weird right-wing threats. Someone called an old interior decorator of his, trying to dig up dirt. There were a lot of unhinged tweets—calling him a “fucking lib-tard,” etc.— but only one possibly credible death threat.

“You might want to turn your tape recorder on for this one,” he says, already tickled. There’s apparently a guy who dresses as Batman for tourist photos, in front of the studio on Hollywood Boulevard, who Jimmy had to ban from the studio for using a racial slur. “So, the Incredible Hulk came to our o∞ce and told one of our producers that the guy who dressed as Batman had bought a gun to shoot me. Our crack security team posted pictures of the guy, but in his Batman costume. I don’t think he knew the Hulk ratted him out, so he showed

up on the boulevard, and the cops arrested him and took him to jail.”

Suddenly, the stakes are high, so high even Batman’s after him. “Because here’s the thing about it,” says Jimmy. “The late-night talk show has turned into a court of sorts.” In these insane times, we, the powerless, go there to work out our complicated feelings about any given moment, to figure out how to feel about our lack of hope. “Nowadays, we have to pick a side, I guess. People now demand that you lead a public flogging. And if you do it for some and you don’t do it for others, you’re wrong.”

We come for clarity, or at least for a chance to laugh it out at 11:35 p.m. Which is its own sort of power. Still, it’s a lot to ask of our latenight host. Especially from a guy who describes his most dreaded interview question as “anything with the words ‘late-night landscape’ in it.” But such is the new reality. Viewers arrive each night for saving, to have their equilibrium restored, to acquire verbal revenge.

Forget the two houses, at the beach, in the hills: That moment each night at the top of the show, that’s where Jimmy Kimmel lives now.

• • • A F T E R T H E M O N O L O G U E , on the night he

cries with Billy in his arms, the show follows with Jack Black, the ESPN College GameDay guys, a bit with George Clooney, and then, on the outside stage, the band Walk the Moon. For the long day of work, it’s amazing how quickly it all disappears. Jimmy introduces the band to raucous cheers, and as they kick into gear, he re-appears backstage and begins speedwalking back into the building, fist-bumping and high-fiving, bounding up the stairs to the top floor and into his office, where he throws off his suit jacket and tie.

He cried. So what. It was beautiful. And he feels lighter, this long week of Billy’s operation, the recovery, the sleepless hospital nights, the other suffering kids, the monologue, the obligation he felt to talk about Billy and CHIP and those families with little kids who aren’t gonna get the care they need if Congress can’t stop looking at itself in the mirror and vote the damn thing through. Over! He’s said his piece—and a weight has lifted. He can go back to being all funny tomorrow. “It feels like vacation just began,” he says.

I’m reminded of something else Jimmy had said when we were Ubering somewhere. Our driver was a bit of a wild card, the kind who might compel you to say a little prayer if you’re the praying sort, and I asked Jimmy whether he regularly goes to church anymore. He said for him it was all about the sermon, and he hadn’t found anyone inspiring locally. I was wondering why people assume that comedians, digging around in the dark corners of our id, must all be atheists. He agreed, and objected: “I think that’s complete nonsense. If you believe the Bible, Jesus’s friend was a prostitute. I want to imagine that Jesus had a sense of humor. There had to be one disciple that everyone made fun of, you know? Probably Judas. I don’t think making a joke is unholy. I don’t think curse words are against the teachings of the church.

When you tell a joke, you’re honoring people, telling them you know them, that you’re paying attention to them and that you have some understanding of who they are. It’s a compliment because you’re noticing them. I bristle at the notion that there’s anything sinful about

telling a joke or about certain subject matter.

I feel like it’s the opposite of that.”

Now someone brings Billy into the room, and Jimmy takes him in his arms and sits on the couch, holding his hands as Billy squawks.

Jimmy keeps looking at him, with almost stunned wonder: “He thinks we understand exactly what he’s saying. He thinks he’s in this conversation.” And then Jimmy laughs, the purest laugh of the day.

The scariest part, Jimmy admitted to Molly afterward, was that before the operation he’d been subconsciously telling himself “Don’t get too attached to this child,” in case something went really wrong. And Molly had admitted to Jimmy that inside she’d felt the same. And then Billy came through.

When Jimmy brought Billy out that night, when he brought him into the stage lights like that, he was also telling the world something about love and perseverance, fear and what it feels like to give your heart away to a kid with a hole in his. How our attachments to one another are forever.

Put it on Jimmy Kimmel’s tombstone: For someone who did nothing but fuck around, he didn’t fuck around.

It was beautiful. michael paterniti is a gq correspondent.

A D D IT IO N A L C R E D IT S Pages 46–47, 49 & 52. Prop stylist: Chime Serra at Walter Schupfer Management. Makeup: Kathy Jeung at Forward Artists. Manicure: Chelsea King at Celestine Agency. Khalid, barber: Daronn Carr. Michaels and Malone, hair: David Cox using R+Co. Pages 48, 50–51, 53 & 54–55. Prop stylist: Juliet Jernigan at CLM. Manicure: Rachel Shim using Dior Vernis. Boomin, Antonoff, and Lipa, hair: Jordan M at Susan Price NYC. Boomin, Antonoff, and Ferg, makeup: Carrie LaMarca using Kiehl’s. Lipa, makeup: Francesca Brazzo. Ferg, barber: Elias Sacaza.

gq is a registered trademark of advance magazine publishers inc. copyright © 2018 condé nast. all rights reserved. printed in the u.s.a.

VOLUME 88, NO. 1. GQ (ISSN 0016-6979) is published monthly by Condé Nast, which is a division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. PRINCIPAL OFFICE: Condé Nast, One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. S. I. Newhouse, Jr., Chairman Emeritus; Robert A. Sauerberg, Jr., President & Chief Executive O∞cer; David E. Geithner, Chief Financial O∞cer; Pamela Drucker Mann, Chief Revenue & Marketing O∞cer.

Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing o∞ces. Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement No. 40644503.

Canadian Goods and Services Tax Registration No. 123242885-RT0001.

POSTMASTER: SEND ALL UAA TO CFS (SEE DMM 507.1.5.2); NONPOSTAL AND MILITARY FACILITIES: Send address corrections to GQ, P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0717. FOR SUBSCRIPTIONS, ADDRESS CHANGES, ADJUSTMENTS, OR BACK ISSUE INQUIRIES: Please write to GQ, P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0717, call 800-289-9330, or e-mail subscriptions@gq.com. Please give both new and old addresses as printed on most recent label. First copy of new subscription will be mailed within four weeks after receipt of order. Address all editorial, business, and production correspondence to GQ Magazine, One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. For reprints, please e-mail reprints@condenast.com or call Wright’s Media, 877-652-5295. For re-use permissions, please e-mail contentlicensing@condenast.com or call 800-897-8666. Visit us online at www.gq.com. To subscribe to other Condé Nast magazines on the World Wide Web, visit www.condenastdigital.com. Occasionally, we make our subscriber list available to carefully screened companies that o≠er products and services that we believe would interest our readers. If you do not want to receive these o≠ers and/or information, please advise us at P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0717 or call 800-289-9330.

GQ IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE RETURN OR LOSS OF, OR FOR DAMAGE OR ANY OTHER INJURY TO, UNSOLICITED MANUSCRIPTS, UNSOLICITED ARTWORK (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, DRAWINGS, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND TRANSPARENCIES), OR ANY OTHER UNSOLICITED MATERIALS. THOSE SUBMITTING MANUSCRIPTS, PHOTOGRAPHS, ARTWORK, OR OTHER MATERIALS FOR CONSIDERATION SHOULD NOT SEND ORIGINALS, UNLESS SPECIFICALLY REQUESTED TO DO SO BY GQ IN WRITING. MANUSCRIPTS, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND OTHER MATERIALS SUBMITTED MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY A SELF-ADDRESSED STAMPED ENVELOPE.

FEBRUARY

2018

GQ.COM

95

• Jim Moore being feted, greeted, hugged, and shouted out loud by the likes of (clockwise from top left) Kanye and Kid Cudi, the former POTUS, Channing Tatum, LeBron James and Jim Nelson, and Amy Schumer.

> Next Move 96

GQ.COM

FEBRUARY

2018

changing, let’s talk about what’s been constant. For almost four decades, GQ’s creative director, Jim Moore, has been this magazine’s lodestar. Starting here as an intern in the fashion closet in 1979, he worked his way up to, oh, let’s call it Grand Guru of the Fashion World. Along the way, in these pages, and as the humble authority of style, he has translated the entire concept of “fashion” for American men; helped (more than!) a generation of guys navigate that world, to figure out and define their sense of style; and helped them, in the figurative and literal senses, get dressed in the morning.

Can any other living human say that? No, they cannot.

It’s not just the fashion pages that he has shaped, directed, and continually evolved. It’s not just the legions of brilliant photographers and designers he’s championed and collaborated with to make this beautiful magazine month in and month out.

It’s the way his influence has seeped into the culture.

That thing when people stop and say, “Hey, that man looks so GQ”? He did that.

And so while I’m sad to report that Jim will be stepping away from his full-time gig at the magazine to pursue a zillion brilliant options, I’m delighted to tell you that he’ll continue in his new role as creative director–at–large.

Long may his influence over GQ—and men’s style—reign!

— J I M NE L SO N, E D I TO R

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: DIMITRIOS KAMBOURIS/GETTY IMAGES FOR GQ; COURTESY OF PETE SOUZA; COURTESY OF JIM MOORE; DIMITRIOS KAMBOURIS/GETTY IMAGES FOR GQ (2)

B E F O R E W E tell you what’s